AustLit

'Oh, you're going to have an advantage over me,' the white woman says with a wide smile. We're the first two to arrive for Arabic 101. I make a sound and the sound dies between us. I would describe it but I don't know what it was, having never made it before nor since. If I were to imagine what it was most like sonically, I would say shame. I am the 29-year-old son of Lebanese and Turkish migrants, my father and mother were born in Turkey and Lebanon respectively, so they learned English in addition to their own languages, and yet I have only one tongue today. One tongue resting on slivers of everything my family have said and that I never understood as clearly or as deeply as I understood Josephine, the white woman in class that day. Our teacher, a Palestinian author and academic who grew up in Beirut, agreed with her, saying in the thick accent I know better than any other, 'Yes, colloquially, he will have advantage.' Though they used largely the same words, they were saying different things, and they were both wrong.' (Introduction)