Collage of Memorial Gathering for Mom's Close Friends and Family

Right side of Mom's Memorial Collage

Angel Dining at the Ritz

I've been very busy today, so I'll let the picture do most of the talking--or singing.  I was making a thank you note for a friend who took me to dinner last Friday.  She also gave me the CD of Andrea Marcovicci singing "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square," which we listened to at the gathering for Mom, who used to play that song on the piano and say that on her 90th birthday she and friends were going to go to London and sing that song there in Berkeley Square.   I wondered about the lyrics "Angels dining at the Ritz," which seemed elitist to me, which Mom didn't.  But now I've made peace with the idea, and heeeeeeeere's Mom!

(Dana found the angel doll, which she said looked like Mom, years ago, and I've used it on the top of the Christmas tree ever since.)

How Park 51 in Lower Manhattan Affected My Sabbatical

How the “Monster Mosque Monument to Terror at Ground Zero” Became Park 51:

Reflections on Islamophobia and How an Islamic Center in Lower Manhattan

Affected My Sabbatical Course Study at City College of San Francisco

            “Have you heard about the mosque they want to build at Ground Zero?” a friend asked me on August 4, 2010.  She went on to tell me how insensitive and provocative she thought that was, and when I asked her why, she said, “Well, it’s like a monument to terror.  A victory mosque to murder.  They killed three thousand innocent people.  And the man who’s in charge is always saying he hates America.”

            I didn’t know what she was talking about, and, it turns out, neither did she. 

            I was in New York three days later, and my friend sent me a follow-up message with a link to Pat Condell, “a Brit who often speaks his mind about the rise of Islam in the West.”  This tirade “took on” the building of the Mosque at Ground Zero. 

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/06/pat-condell-on-ground-zero-mosque-is-it-possible-to-be-astonished-but-not-surprised.html

            I watched the video on a screen underneath the heading Jihad Watch.  It was vitriolic.  The friend who sent it to me is one of the kindest, warmest people I know.  The idea that she could watch this and pass it on as something rational and persuasive startled me.  I sent the link to my son, whose computer I was using while he was working downtown in Manhattan.  I’d already told him about my friend's earlier comments about Ground Zero.  He sent me a link to a refutation of the fear-mongers’ message.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/08/16/100816taco_talk_hertzberg

            This article, part of The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, was entitled "Zero Grounds" as in there are zero grounds for all the fear about the building of the mosque at Ground Zero.  Hertzberg said, "Well, for a start, it won't be at Ground Zero.  It'll be on Park Place, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site (from which it won't be visible), in a neighborhood ajumble with restaurants, shops, (electronics, porn, you name it), churches, office cubes, and the rest of the New York mishmash."  So there went one of the fears.  It wasn't a monument to terrorism towering and taunting at Ground Zero.  What about the information that the man in charge was always saying he hates America?  Feisal Abdul Rauf turned out to be the author of a book called What's Right with Islam Is What's Right with America, and he didn't mean Far Right.  Hertzberg reported that Rauf was the vice-chair of Interfaith Center of New York and quoted him from an article in The Daily News as saying, "My colleagues and I are the anti-terrorists."  He denounced terrorism in general and denounced the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 in a lengthy statement.  He was chosen by the FBI to conduct sensitivity training for FBI agents and police officers.  His wife Daisy Khan runs American Society for Muslim Advancement, which she co-founded with Rauf, and promotes "cultural and religious harmony through interfaith collaboration, youth and women's empowerment, and arts and cultural exchange."  How did my friend get the idea that the co-founders “hate America”?

            I now had the facts, but I decided to see the location for myself, so I took the subway to the site and looked around.  What I saw was hardly remarkable.  How could people feel so threatened?  Was it just a lack of information or was it an ingrained fear of The Other?  I think it was both plus a concerted effort to make people fearful.  It concerned me so much that right there on the spot, which is not quite at Ground Zero, I decided to change the focus of my study sabbatical from Sustainability Issues to Islam and the Middle East. I would see what my school, City College of San Francisco, offers and I'd also adapt material to use it with my ESL students.   

            On August 11, 2010, the day I left New York City to return to San Francisco, there was another article in the New York Times.  “For Muslim Center Sponsors, Hopes and Clear Oversights” by Anne Barnard reported on the advice Joy Levitt, the executive director of the Jewish Community Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, had given Daisy Khan when Khan had consulted her about the proposed Cordoba House (the first name for Park 51).  Far from thinking that there would be a national protest against the Islamic center, Levitt advised Khan that running a community center involved practical matters like attending to 500 strollers down in the lobby.  “Clearly, the idea that Ms. Khan and her partners would one day be accused of building a victory monument to terrorism did not come up.”

            When I got back to San Francisco, I saw a paragraph on “Ground zero mosque” in the San Francisco Chronicle’s News across the Nation section, reporting on how President Obama had weighed in for the first time on the controversy.  “As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.”  This was the statement Jon Stewart showed on The Daily Show, followed by another clip of Obama seeming to backtrack on his statement. 

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-august-16-2010/mosque-erade

            The same week Maureen Dowd’s column in the New York Times also expressed disappointment in Obama and the nation.  In “Going Mad in Herds” on August 21, she reminded readers that Obama, during his hope-and-change (and hope for change) campaign, had inspired comparisons between him and the noble Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, a book he’d been seen buying for his daughter at the same book store that gave him Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which Maureen Dowd said was apt because it’s about a dysfunctional family and “Obama is the head of the dysfunctional family of America—a rational man running a most irrational nation, a high-minded man in a low-minded age.”  She went on to say that the dispute over the Cordoba Islamic Center “has tripped some deep national lunacy” and that “many people still have a confused view of Muslims, and the president seems unable to help navigate the country through its Islamophobia.”

            In late August Time Magazine came out with a cover story “Is America Islamophobic?” by Bobby Ghosh, and the answer appeared to be yes. 

            Soon after I returned from Park Place 51 to San Francisco, I filled out my sabbatical request for courses in Demystifying the Middle East, Politics and Government of the Middle East, Intro to Islam, Comparative Religions, and--just so the CCSF Board of Directors would know I was still part of mainstream USA--Western Culture and Values.  Then I wrote a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, which was starting to print articles and opinions on the Cordoba House/911 Monster Mosque Memorial Monument to Terrorism.

Dear Editors:

The SF Chronicle does a fact check on what politicians say.  Maybe the newspaper should take on all the distortions pertaining to the “mosque at Ground Zero.” 

Feisal Abdul Raif and Daisy Khan, the couple in charge of Park 51, the Muslim center modeled after a Jewish Community Center and the YMCA, are Muslims who have always spoken out against terrorism.  Feisal Abdul Rauf is the author of What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America and vice-chair of the Interfaith Council of New York. 

How interesting that some of those protesting against the building of the Muslim center seem to want the U.S. to imitate Saudi Arabia in its exclusion of other faiths. 

We should also remember that Muslims were among the innocent victims when the World Trade Center was attacked.

 In addition to the classrooms, auditorium galleries, restaurant, swimming pool, gym, and –yes, a prayer room that will be at Park 51 {as there was at the World Trade Center before the attach},  there will be a memorial to the victims of September 11, 2001.  Daisy Khan,  who runs the American Society for Muslim Advancement, promoting “ cultural and religious harmony through interfaith collaboration, youth and women’s empowerment, and arts and cultural exchange, ”  consulted the director of the YMCA on 92^nd Street to get advice on how to set up the center.  Neither of them anticipated that the building would be seen as a “victory monument to terrorism.   I think that the people who choose to see it that way should do some soul-searching of their own.

            Chris Rovzar’s report “News Corps. Remains Silent on Daily Show’s Accusations of Hypocrisy Park 51 Fearmongering” reported on Jon Stewart’s accusing Fox News of “glaring hypocrisy” in stirring up controversy about the Cordoba House when one of its founders, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, owned 2.3 billion in stock with News Corps, Fox’s parent company. 

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/08/news_corp_remains_silent_on_da.html

            This prompted me to start looking into the origin of all the fuss and misrepresentation, and I soon found the article “How the ‘ground zero mosque’ fear mongering began” by Justin Elliott, writing for Salon.  He goes back to December 8, 2009, when the Times published a long front-page article on what was then called the Cordoba project.  In the article, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the lead organizer along with his wife Daisy Khan, the one advised to consider strollers, mentioned the center as a way to combat extremists.  Two Jewish leaders and two city officials as well as the mother of a man killed on 9/11 said they supported the idea of having the center.    Justin said that “besides a few third-tier right-wing blogs, including Pamela Geller’s Atlas Shrugs site,” no one paid much attention to the Times story.

            On December 21, 2009, Daisy Khan appeared on the O’Reilly Factor on Fox while a conservative media personality Laura Ingraham was co-hosting, and Ingraham told Khan, “I like what you’re trying to do.”  But for the first time the  Cordoba project was misidentified on the TV screen as the “ground zero mosque.”

            Nothing much happened between December and May, when there was a unanimous vote by a New York City community board committee to approve the project.   The Associated Press ran a story about it, with differing opinions from relatives of 9/11 victims, and the New York Post also had an article with the inaccurate headline “Panel Approves ‘WTC’ Mosque.”  This is when Geller, the right-wing blogger, posted “Monster Mosque Pushes ahead in Shadow of World Trade Center Islamic Death and Destruction,” giving the Cordoba project as an example of “Islamic domination and expansionism.”  She likened the location of the mosque to Al-Aqsa, which was built on top of the Temple in Jerusalem. 

            The next day, May 7, 2010, Geller’s group, Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) began “Campaign Offensive:  Stop the 911 Mosque.”  Robert Spencer, the associate director of this group, is a writer who maligns Islam in any way he can and has been cited  by Karen Armstrong and other commentators on comparative religions for his determinedly distorted way of presenting Islam.    The organization SIOA provided names and people to call to complain about the “911 Monster Mosque,” and the board chair reported getting hundreds of calls. 

            On May, 2010, Geller announced that May 29 would  be the SIOA’s first protest against the “911 monster mosque.”  She may have chosen May 29 because on that day in 1453, the Ottoman forces were victorious at Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, bringing to an end 1500 years of the Roman Empire, which had made Christianity its official religion. 

            A few days later on May 13, 2010, the New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser wrote a column calling the proposal “Mosque Madness at Ground Zero,” referring to Geller and Spencer’s Stop Islamization of America group as a human rights group (!), and saying falsely that the proposed Cordoba House would open on September 11, 2011.  The media madness had begun.

            This was when Giuliani, so strongly associated with Ground Zero, had his say—much of it not based on fact—on the Jeff Katz Radio Show, and his comments sounded like those my friend when she told me about the Terrorists’ Victory Mosque and the evil Imam behind it.  Giuliani said the imam behind the “mosque”  was sympathetic to terrorism.  This was Rauf, the imam chosen by the FBI to give workshops to police officers and the FBI agents.  This was the Rauf chosen as a spokesperson by our government. 

            “Come on! We're gonna allow that at ground zero?”  Giuliani asked.  "This is a desecration.”

            As for Muslims feeling discriminated against by the opposition to the mosque, Giuliani said the opposition “will not and should not insult any decent Muslim because decent Muslims should be as opposed to Islamic extremism as you and I are."  An Islamic Cultural Center was “Islamic extremism”?

            This same month on August 27, 2010, the article “Show spotlights innovation of ancient Muslims” by Christopher Rorchia of the Associated Press reported on an international exhibit showing innovations of the ancient Muslims and beginning its tour—in Istanbul.  These innovations included the Golden Age of Islam’s advances in engineering, medicine and architecture, “laying the foundation for Western progress from the Renaissance until now.”  Among the giants of innovation were the Al-Jazari, a Muslim engineer who designed the “elephant” clock 800 years ago, physician Al-Zahrawi, who led the way for European surgery, Fatima Al-Fihri, who set the foundation for the modern university—with no gender restrictions, and Abbas Ibn Firnas, who constructed a winged contraption near Cordoba in Spain and flew briefly centuries before Leonardo da Vinci worked on the flying designs with which the West credits him.  A visitor at the show was quoted as saying, “The West has a phobia about Islam.”  She credited the exhibit for trying to build better ties between the East and the West.

            But that was in Istanbul, and back in the USA we were following the news of a pastor in Florida, Terry Jones,  and his “Burn a Koran Day” to commemorate the ninth anniversary of 911.  Human Rights First made an online effort to combat this.  Its director Tad Stahnke sent out an e-mail message on August 30, 2010, saying, “This misguided and violent rhetoric only harms us by alienating the communities whose cooperation is essential to effectively combat terrorism.”  Human Rights First was starting its own campaign to counteract the one by Jones to burn the Koran.  In a Leah Garchik column, “Lessons from a destroyed mosque,” September 8, 2010, there was a report on the thirty-minute movie “An American Mosque” by David Washburn about a mosque in Yuba City that was destroyed by arson in 1994.  Would Cordoba House/Park 51 be set on fire along with the Koran and the discourse, already quite incendiary?

                Just at the point of losing hope, I noticed that my binder of articles pertaining to the protest against—and distortions about—the Park 51/the Cordoba House was growing thinner.  After the ninth anniversary of 9/11 and even up to and around the time of the tenth anniversary of it, the furor was dying down.  The Cordoba Project, once so named “to invoke 8^th-11^th century Cordoba, Spain, considered by historians a model of peaceful coexistence between Muslims, Christians, and Jews,” (Wikipedia), was to people like Newt Gingrich “a deliberately insulting term” because it symbolized the Muslim conquerors’ victory over Christian Spaniards.  Gingrich noted that Muslims had converted a Cordoba church into the third largest mosque in the world.  Never mind that this was originally a pagan temple, then a Visigoth Christian church before the Umayyad converted it into a mosque and then build a new mosque on the site—a mosque regarded as the one of the most accomplished monuments of Islamic architecture.  Or maybe that is precisely what they do mind.  To the Islamophobes Muslim Spain represented only conquest and victory over Western religion.  The name Cordoba House was changed to the very neutral Park 51, and instead of billing itself as an Islamic Center, it opened its doors on September 22, 2011 as Park 51 Community Center.    Its opening featured Danny Goldfield’s New York Children project, photographs of children from 169 nations—all now living in New York City.  Goldfield attended the opening night, as did Rana Sodhi, a Sikh whose brother was killed in a hate crime four days after the attack on September 11, 2001.  It was Sodhi’s efforts to fight prejudice that inspired Goldfield’s project.  Sodhi said that Park51 was opening in lower Manhattan to replace the hatred of “that day” with a message of tolerance. 

            “It’s time to start demystifying what we’re trying to do,” Sharif El-Gamal, the developer of Park 51, said, reminding me of how this controversy changed my plans for my study sabbatical.  Demystifying the Middle East is one of the courses I’m taking along with Politics and Government of the Middle East, Intro to Islam, Comparative Religions, and Western Culture and Values.  It’s worth noting that in Western Culture and Values, we’re now studying The Song of Roland, which totally distorts both history and Islam.  As is clear from Robert Harrison’s introduction in his 1970 translation, it has the French fighting the King Marsilla Caliph of Saragossa, who, being a Muslim, “does not love God,  but worships Mohammad and Apollo."  This is absolutely Apolling (pun, Spelling Check) because the basic tenet of Islam is "There is no God but God, and Mohammad is his prophet."  In our Comparative Religion class as well as in Intro to Islam, we've learned that Mohammad is the most important prophet, but he is NOT God, and it's a sin in Islam, (a shirk—idolatry or polytheism)  to worship him.  Only God, one God, is to be worshipped.  How could it be that the writers of Song of Roland (passed on through oral tradition before being written around the 1098) didn't know this?  After all, the Muslims knew back in the 600’s (and in Cordoba in the Golden Age) that the Jews and Christians were "people of the book," those who believed in one God, and Muslims respected them accordingly.  So why does the Song of Roland get Islam so wrong?  Was this intentional mis-representation to rouse the killer instinct in the French?  It was put into written form around 1098, and the First Crusade was between 1096 and 1099, with the capture of  Jerusalem by the Christians. Let’s hope that the distortion of Islam found in the West’s Song of Roland and on Fox News will end at last. 

            A year after my friend, a victim of hate-mongers like Geller, first warned me of the “victory Mosque to terrorism,” I read “U.S. Muslims most optimistic of faith groups,” by Tara Bahrampour and Michelle Boorstein, reporting on the Gallup Poll for the Washington Post.  Let’s hope their optimism will be strengthened, not diminished, by future events.

Still Life After Life--Memories of Mom

Mom After Life Still Life

            Three weeks after Mom’s death I got the bag I kept in the trunk for her and brought it up.

It sat up for a week.

            Then, Thanksgiving Day I needed it for transport of two salads, the dressing, pine nuts, avocadoes—the last minute things—and La Crema Chardonnay.  So I dumped out the bag I kept for visits to see her.

            The Creek Alzheimer’s & Dementia Care big bag we got on the “Walk to End Alzheimer’s Funding” just weeks before Alzheimer’s ended in Mom’s brain, which didn’t get the oxygen it needed to go on after she choked on her dinner.

            Inside it was a black and orange Giants bag.

            Some Mom’s (brand) Iced Lemonade cookies that weren’t all that good.  Better were the Magic Cookie Bars and other things I made for her.  So there!

            A paper plate and napkins to serve her and “friends,” the other residents in Aegis care.

            Two small boxes of facial tissues, the kind to fit the system that she had--one to use for new, one for the used.

            The purple “Walk to End Alzheimer’s water bottle (stainless steel, not plastic)

            Women’s Wit the 16-month calendar that turned out to contain her final days.

            (“It takes a long time to grow an old friend” on the cover.)

One day I tried to read aloud quotations from this Women’s Wit collected here, but Mom protested, “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve read these?”A little short with long-term memory, she.

            A mini Whitman’s Assorted Chocolates box I got her in memory for the Whitman Sampler that made me dream back in Blackfoot, Idaho—Someday I’d have one! (Some day I did, but See’s was better then.)

            The Sunday paper from September 25^th because I thought she’d like to read an article or two, and she could underline and make margin notes the way we like to do.

            Was the 49 mile SF Food Tour just for me?

            The October issue of the Funny Times (with How to Make a Satan Sandwich:  debt ceiling, fiscal pickle, supply-side baloney, devil in the details. cold cuts to college grants, colder cuts to seniors,) 

            A flyer for The Daisy Field by Amy Sutton about a little foster girl caring for an urban flower garden and the old woman in the senior care facility across the way—that would be Mom?

            A to-do plastic folder with some things I never did the to-do for.
An Aegis Living business card for the LVN who interviewed Mom in the hospital between her home and Aegis Living, when Mom identified the demons on the ward for me but still knew that she would never hurt a soul and another Aegis Living business card for the LVN, the Wellness Nurse, who found Mom choking in the dining room and gave her CPR, called 9-1-1, and after Mom was gone called Kathy, me.

A picture of a daughter and a mom who back in July were the newest ones; we took their picture and the daughter took ours too

            And then Unlikely Friendships:  47 Remarkable Stories from the Animal Kingdom, from which we read occasionally until the last few weeks when lying down on the bed together seemed better.

            Lying there and singing show tunes she could play on the piano, “Bali Hai May Call You.”

Park51 Mosque at Ground Zero

Yesterday I left off on the Park 51 controversy with a consideration of how it changed my focus for my sabbatical.  Instead of focusing on Sustainability courses, I switched to the Middle East and wound up learning from Western Values and Culture how Western Culture misrepresented Islam in pieces like The Song of Roland, where they were portrayed as pagans.  I also wrote about visiting the spot of the proposed Islamic Center and  I started looking for news on the topic.

           Now back to August, 2010

          On August 11, 2010, the day I left New York City to return to San Francisco, there was another article in the New York Times.  “For Muslim Center Sponsors, Hopes and Clear Oversights” by Anne Barnard reported on how Daisy Khan contacted Joy Levitt, the executive director of the Jewish Community Center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for advice, and far from thinking that there would be a national protest against the Islamic center, Joy Levitt gave her advice on strollers.  Saying that there were more toddlers than ever in Manhattan, Joy Levitt said that she was down in the lobby dealing with 500 strollers, so that was what Daisy Khan and the other planners needed to think about:  practical matters.  “Clearly, the idea that Ms. Khan and her partners would one day be accused of building a victory monument to terrorism did not come up.”

                When I got back to San Francisco, I saw a paragraph on “Ground zero mosque” in the News across the Nation section of the San Francisco Chronicle, reporting on how President Obama had weighed in for the first time on the controversy.  “As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country.”  This was the statement Jon Stewart showed on The Daily Show, followed by another clip of Obama almost reneging on his statement. 

http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-august-16-2010/mosque-erade

                Time Magazine came out with a cover story “Is America Islamophobic”” by Bobby Ghosh. The answer seemed to be yes.

Tomorrow:  How the “ground Zero Mosque” fer mongering began.

Web Site Story and A Day in the Life of a Teacher at Lycee Bencheneb

I'm between outings but checked my e-mail between returning from Oakland and lunch at an Indian Restaurant with Suzy, Karl and David  and my next-to-the-last birthday outing, this one with Leslie at 6:00.  Linda sent me a link she said I would love, and she was right!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HnS_W2zA4E

I sent the link to Steve, who took me to see the Natalie Wood version in 1961 or whenever it made it to Columbia, South Carolina, and to Jim, who looks like the guy singing to Maria.  ("eVITE, eVITE!")

Shehla also told me she'd read Dana's comments in the Memories of Mother book she brought to the family gathering with Mom's close friends, and she wants to know who those men in the basement were.

But now I need to get back to my essay, due after this weekend.

Before I go, though, I want to post something pertaining to another essay--one on me in Medea, Algeria, 1974-76.  Was I an Orientalist?    Before I post the day in my life that IVS published in 1975, two thoughts come to my mind.  One is that in Peace Corps Training they taught us the concept, "It's a valid expression of human existence."  The example we were given in Cross Cultural Training was of money neither for either your student's education OR  his father's trip to Mecca.  If the decision is a trip to Mecca, that's a valid expression of human existence.  My other thought is that I was going to Algeria to learn French, and there was some question about that.  Here were people finally free of the French colonialists, and I was going to their country to learn the colonialists' language.

A Day in the Life of a Teacher of English

at Lycee Bencheneb in Medea, Algeria

By Tina Martin 1975

            You wake up to the Call to Prayer that come to you just before dawn, and that’s kind of a nice way to wake up.  But you don’t get out of bed and pray.  You’re ware that, these days, most of your praying is done under your breath in the classroom.  And so you stay in bed and plan your strategy.

            It’s cold, but you’ve got to get up and turn on the petrol burner because that takes time to get going.  And you’ve got to put a pail under the only faucet that drips even when the water pressure is low, so that at the end of fifteen minutes you’ll have enough water for your kettle, which you’ll heat for water for your bath.  After thinking about this for a while, you—in one heroic moment—get out from under the covers and do it.  When the water has finished dripping, then boiling, you take your morning bath.  Ingredients:  1 plastic basin, 1 quart hot water mixed with 2 quarts cold water, 1 bar Maya soap, a wash cloth.  Procedure:  Soap yourself, then pour the plastic basin of water over you to rinse.  That’s the recipe for an instant (if not pre-packaged) bath.

            After you’ve gotten dressed and skipped breakfast, you gather together your papers, notebooks, visual aids and culturally insensitive textbooks and slip into your winter coat, which is such an important part of your image, reaching almost to your ankles and having a hood that conceals most of your face and cuts off most of your vision.  Since the men in Medea wear coats with hoods, you could pass as just one of the guys, and certainly no one would mistake you for an American girl or any other kind.  Just the same, as you walk to school, you hear an occasional comment directed towards you: “Ah, la belle” or “Comme elle est mignonne,” said in varying tones of simulated (not stimulated) lust, obligatory machismo, and total indifference.

            You love mornings in Medea.  Once you get out of your apartment, the weather’s not bad—rather “crisp_--and everything smells nice.  You see children on their way to get milk with their little tin containers or sometimes with a tray of little cakes ready to be baked in the public ovens.  Later you’ll see them in the bread shops holding out their arms while the boulanger piles on several loaves of bread.  Some of the shops are still closed, but most of the fruit stands are open and you see all those oranges, tangerines, lemons, limes, and dates displayed in rates along the sidewalk.  Less beautiful as “still life” are the butcher shops where all sorts of things formerly unknown to you hang on hooks.  Shriveled up skin, testacies of sheep, intestines, brains, eyeballs, lots of severed hooves.  Lots of things you recognize, too, but that are displayed in a manner you may find in Europe but not in American supermarkets, where the consumer is protected from everything (except fraud).  The chickens are lined up in neat little rows, with their broken necks hanging down to their little chests, and you see several heads of cattle, but this time that’s literal—just the heads.  And of course, lots of mutton hanging there in the form of the original sheep.  Due to the dietary laws of Islam, you do not see pork.

            On the road you see a couple of horses with cars, and a man carrying a cart on his own back.  Of course, you see cars, too, and Medea’s new electric stoplights, but traffic’s not very heavy at this time of day.  Or ever.  You pass a newsstand where you buy a copy of El Moudjahid, the daily newspaper in French.  Then you cross Medea’s square, where you glance at the posters announcing this week’s movies:  Yves Montand in Le Fils:  Demand pardon a Dieu, pas a moi—a western about revenge that won’t stop until God Himself intervenes; and something written all in Arabic (which you haven’t…uh…mastered yet) that shows a masked surgeon and some dancing girls—a musical General Hospital?  You cross the street, look at the baubles, bangles, and beads in a jewelry shop window (the Kabylie jewelry is especially beautiful), and finally reach Lycee Bencheneb.

            You’re the first to arrive, so you ask for the key to the teacher’s room, where you take off your coat and put on a white over-blouse similar to the model some teachers wear to make them look more serious than they really are.  Yours has been newly mended by our students in 1 ASSA, whose sewing skills are much more impressive than their occasional stabs at English.  One day, when you wore a blouse they didn’t like, they asked you (not in English) to wear the other one because it was much more becoming.  You explained that the purpose of the blouse wasn’t to be stylish but, in fact, to conceal any style you might have; and that this was not on the subject of English, so the topic would have to be dropped.

            They are ice girls, always ready to give you their favorite recipes and opinions, solicited or un, but determined not to speak a word of English.  If you’re lucky, they’ll speak French, but they don’t care for French either so most of the time they speak in Arabic.  You’ve tried to explain that you’re all for the Arabic language and hope it wins in Algeria, but not as the sole language spoken in English class. You’d love to be able to say “Good morning” without hearing the class translators whisper “Bonjour” and “Sbah el khayr” for the benefit of those for whom “good morning” is too difficult to fathom.

            Just yesterday, Marie Josie, who tries to teach them French (and has—in desperation—walked out on them at times) told them off in no uncertain terms, after one of the students had interrupted her with “All right, all right, be quiet, you’ve talked enough”—not the story of comment most teachers would find respectful.  Marie Josie accused this student of being rude, arrogant, and pretentious, and, while she was at it, that went for the rest of them too.  The rest of them gasped, but the student singled out became hysterical, began screaming, and was led away to the nurse’s room to continue her crise de nerfs.  You wonder if this drama will in any way affect the students’ behavior today.

            The first bell rings and the girls enter the school and take off their veils and long robes, under which they’re wearing slacks and platform shoes and even an occasional love T-shirt.  All of them seem to be chewing gum, the very symbol of Western Imperialism.  Why can’t they rebel against that instead of against the English language?

            The second bell rings and you’re on your way, but Wednesday is a gentle day and breaks you in gradually.  You begin with an exceptionally good class, a teacher’s dream, where there’s a genuine rapport, where the students like English, have a good background in it, and are polite and attentive without losing any of the “spontaneity” for which all your students are well-known.  From this dream you go to a real class—not bad, but a little rowdier than you wish it were; and then to a nightmare class that stimulates every teacher to the brink of nervous collapse.

            Today in 2 ASMB you ask the students about their weekend, and they tell you that they went to the public baths or to a friend’s house or to Algiers, or that they went nowhere at all because they’re boarders and their fathers never showed up to get them.  You ask a boarder what she did this past weekend and she says, “I walk around the court square all day like a prisoner.”  And in the evening?  She “didn’t do nothing.”  “Anything.”  Did she read?”  “No.”  Study?  “No.”  Watch television?  “No.”  Think?  “No. In this weekend, I just sit and admire the beautiful black of Lycee Bencheneb in the night,” she says, and you think this sarcastic English phrase has a certain poetic grace to it.  But you have to correct English phrases that have a certain poetic grace.  That’s your job.

            “Now, tell to us your weekend,” a student says.  “Do you make laham lahalou?”  They know you were planning to make this dish (literally, sweet meat) because they know everything, and they knew you were going to serve mint tea afterwards and brought you fresh mint from their gardens.  But how had it all turned out?  You explain that there are good cooks and there are bad cooks, and that no one has ever suggested that you are a good one.  After a few more innocuous inquiries, one particularly nice student asks you, very sweetly, if she can ask “une question indiscrete,” to which you reply, also very sweetly, “No, you can’t.”  But she wants to know if you’re for or against marriage.  “That depends on whose,” you say.

            “Has anyone ever been to Mecca?”  It isn’t for local color that you mention this.  It is truly what the students like to talk about.  Anything having to do with Algeria’s national religion, language, independence, history, or cuisine motives them to define and explain and describe—as if they had just gotten a national identity and wanted to put it to use.

            After class, Djamilla Abassi, one of the plus vivante of the students, gives you another poem she’s written in English.  The first poem was about DEATH and included a note to you:  “Please read this little poem and correct to me the mistakes what you find.  Thank you.”  This second poem is about a girl whose illegitimate lover has left her for another woman he finds more interesting because of her inconsistency.  Ms. Abbassi, give you the original, which she’s written in French, and her English translation of the original.  It begins, “From the town from what I cannot go out/Bur from what, however, I can write to you/to (for?) say to you how much I love you.”  It ends with her saying that it’s occurred to her to hate him because “In (at?) the eve of my sixteen years you have left me for another who isn’t all the time the same.”  Then the last line stands out in melodramatic splendor:  “THOUGH CAN WE HATE THE FATHER OF OUR CHILD?”  Djamilla Abbassi.  And to cushion the blow, she adds a note to you:  “When I wrote this poem I thought at the girl of ’79 park Avenue’ so don’t be, please, shocked by the last sentence.  Thank you.”  You’re not sure just what to do with this poem besides correcting it.  You don’t really want to encourage Ms. Abbassi to choose themes and phrases from novels like 79 Park Avenue, to become her mentor, the one responsible for her maybe one day becoming the Jacqueline Susann of Algeria.  You’ll have to think about this.

            Now it’s time for 4 AMB3, students in their second year of English and using a textbook involving the adventures of a young unmarried English couple, Martin and Jillian.  Jillian drives a motor scooter, wears a bikini, and –in Unit 24—does something the students can relate to:  She bakes a cake, which is what you’re going to do this morning.  It’s to demonstrate “have/has just.”  “I have just put two eggs in the bowl,” etc.  You guard against being too innovative because that over-excites them, and maybe their hearts can take it but yours can’t.  You know that when they see you entering the classroom with your visual aids (a mixing bowl, eggs, flour, oil, bananas, a wooden spoon…), they’re going to screech and scream and shout with delight; but since they always screech and scream and shout, you figure it might as well be with delight, so you’re going to ix the banana nut cake.  When you enter, you get just the reaction you’ve anticipated.  They gather around your desk at the top of their lungs, and you shake your head, pretending you’re the one in charge here, and they finally go to their desks.  They continue to ask questions and they then notice that you’re waiting for them to be quiet, so they shout at one another:  “Suktu!  Suktu!” which means be quiet or shut up.  They continue to shout this back and forth while you try to look wise and self-possessed, as if it’s perfectly all right with you if they don’t want to make a cake.  Then there’s the glorious sound of silence.  Treasure it.  It won’t last long.

            You explain the obvious, using the future progressive tense:  “Today we’re going to ma a cake.”  There are cheers, and various students take it upon themselves to translate this into Arabic, adding their own comments along the way.  You want again.  So much of teaching is waiting.  You explain very SLOWLY that they must be VEry, VEry QUIet or we AREN’T going to FINish our CAKE.  They nod in agreement.  You write the ingredients on the board for them to copy into their copybooks.  “Now, reMEMer that this is ENGlis class not HOMEmakeing, so we’re Going to SPEAK in ENGlish.”  They nod again.  “Now I want SOMEone to put the FLOUR in the BOWL.  Frantic cries come forth:  “My!  My!”  (You still haven’t figure out what they shout “my” instead of “me” or “I” or “Moi,” but you’re grateful it’s an English word.)  You choose Ms. Bakti from the multitude to come forth and perform this magnificent stunt.  “What’s Ms. Bakti going to do?”  Half the class answer at once, not quite in unison because, for one thing, they all seem to be speaking different languages—Arabic, French, an occasional word in English.  You ask Ms. Sander.  “She putting a flour in the bowl.”  “She’s going to put some flour in the bowl,” you correct.  Ms. Skanderi nods in agreement.  You want her to repeat, say the sentence correctly.  It’s not fair for YOU to get all the practice.  The class continues like this with mult-lingual outbursts between each “She’s going to…,” “she’s….,” and “she has just….”  But that cake gets mixed and the r3ecipe copied into their notebooks so see how functional English can be?

            You put the cake batter (which is now in a cake tin) in your straw basket and a student helps you carry the rest of the ingredients to the teachers’ room where the other teachers all express interest in your domesticity, taking time out from your class to bake a cake.  Mr. Fekhar explains that this is what is known as the audio-visual method.  What an idealist, you think.  This is what is known as total chaos.

            After a ten minute break (over so soon, so soon), you go to the class with which Marie Josie has so recently had a confrontation.  You dare to go there unarmed except for their corrected tests which will provoke anguished cries of “injuste!” and “Vous donnez les notes au hasard!”—unless, of course, Marie Joseie’s speech has caused a radical change in personality.  You see no sign of this as you enter the room.  Half of the students stand while the others go on knitting.  You wait, and the knitting half finally put away their needles ad yarn.  They see you have the papers and they shout remarks and questions on the subject of grades.  You wait.  Then you explain that you’re going to…”On n’a rien compris,” a couple of students say.  “Dites-nous en francais.”  “En Arabe,” another suggests.  You break down (so far not literally) and explain in French that you have noticed that when you give back papers at the beginning of the class, everyone pays more attention to the grades and fainting dead on the spot than to the corrections.  So today you’re going to go over the tests before you give them back.  The students decide to let you win this one.  So you go over the test, question by question, and the students want to know why you can’t say “Live you in Medea” in English if you can say “Habitez-vous a Medea” in French.  You ask them to keep French out of this.  “You must try to think in English.  DON’T TRANSLATE      “  “Ne traduissez pas!”  says a student, giving you just the support you need.

            After you’ve finished going over all the questions and they’ve give you their suggestions on how to improve the English language to make it comprehensible to foreigners, you ask for their complete attention, and they give  you some of it.;  You begin by saying that in our four years of teaching, you have never met students more gifted for dramatics; they have impressed you from the very beginning with their theatrical talents; so, instead of directing their energy to moving you to tears and convincing you that life cannot go on if you don’t change their grades for the better, why not just concentrate on understanding the errors, correcting them, and learning from them?

            They smile broadly.  They like your speech, and there’s the light of recognition in their yes.  You give back the tests and the moans and groans and whimpers begin.  But no one faints.  In fact, no one has ever fainted in any of your classes.  You were told they’d faint, at least from time to time.  Are you a too-lenient grader?  Close to the end of the class, the assistant I charge of the attendance sheets brings in a sheet for you to mark and sign.  You ask the students if anyone is absent from the other group, and they say that yes, Ms. Sebbah is ill.  Ms Sebbah is the one who ran screaming from Marie Josie’s class yesterday.

            Now it’s eleven o’clock and you’re free till two.  Since the shops close at noon, you’ll do your shopping now, right after you go to the post office.

            You love the post office because of its hospitality.  First they shake your hand, and then they show you the new stamps they have.  You put your Christmas cards on the counter and they help you select five centimes of this stamp and ten centimes of that one until you have 160 centimes of beautiful Algerian stamps.  Then they help you arrange the stamps on the envelopes.  They ask to see what cards you’re sending and you show them the Mosque of Medea, which they seem to think shows very good taste on your part.  One of the clerks looks at your addresses and asks, “Mademoiselle, qu’est-ce que vous avez fait?” and you think, “Oh, dear, what have I done?  Maybe there’s a postal regulation against addresses written alternately in read ad green.”  But it turns out that he’s favorably impressed that you’ve addressed your cards in the colors of the Algerian flag.  If then dawns on you that red and green aren’t just Christmas colors.

            You say good-by, and they invite you to come again soon, and then you go to the market, spread out so nicely in one of the streets.  You buy some carrots, potatoes, and parsley, and ask for eggs. The person helping you doesn’t have any so he walks you across the square to an egg merchant who’s kneeling on his mat, saying his prayer.  You wait.  When he’s finished, he sells you six eggs, and you head for the butcher shop.  The first thing you see is the absolutely gigantic gray cat that hangs out three.  While you’re staring in awe at the monster cat, the butcher approaches and asks how your laham lahalou turned out.  What a memory this town has!  You say you’re going to try, try again, and that’s what you’ve come for another half-kilo of mutton.  After you buy this, you get a half-loaf of bread at the baker’s.  It’s just been made and is still warm—and all for 20 centimes (about 5 cents)!  You now start home with your basket full of mutton, bread, vegetables, and 4 AMB3’s cake batter.

            When you get home, you put the cake in the oven, heat the chorba you make enough of to last a week, and return to your bedroom, the only room in your apartment that has anything in it.  It has a blanket-covered, Arabic-style mattress-bed, a couple of low tables, some borrowed mats, and a little petrol burner you like to think of as a fireplace.  Home and hearth.  You eat your chorba and bread, and then make mint tea while you listen to a cassette of Fiddler on the Roof in French.  (You also brought the French version of Jesus Christ Superstar into Algeria, which makes you as culturally sensitive as the English texts.) 

            A little later, you take the banana cake out of the oven and leave for school.  You arrive ten minutes in advance, which means you can share the latest news with the other teachers.  The bell rings and you go to Group 2 of 1 ASSA.  They greet you in Arabic, as usual, and you respond as much as you’re able to.

            While you’re going over the test questions to the usual hum or whispered Arabic in the background (and foreground), a strange hush falls over the students and they rise in unison, looking attentive…or hypnotized.  A miracle, you think.   A vision.  And you’re right.  It’s the headmaster, Mr. Benterkia (Monsieur le Proviseur), who’s entered the classroom with two electricians to indicate an electrical outlet that needs fixing.  You shake hands with him, and he gives permission to the students to return to their sitting position.  While the headmaster and the electricians go about their business, you proceed with the class "comme it faut.”  Ms. Ferhat,” you begin, and Ms Fekhart’s face turns purple.  She cups her hand around her mouth and whispers, pleadingly, with real tears in her eyes, IN ENGLISH, "After!”  This moves you, and you try to choose a foolproof question. You’ve never seen a student concentrate so hard when you were asking a question, and—HAPPY ENDING!—she get it right!  Soon the headmaster and the electricians leave, the students exhale and ask you why you’re laughing.  You turn purple, cut your hand around your mouth, and whisper “After!”  They laugh and explain that they were (who ever would have thought it?)  nervous.  You tell them that now that you’ve seen how “corr3ect” they can be when scared to death, you’re going to see that the electrical outlet needs fixing on a regular basis.

            At three o’clock you go to Group 1 of 1 ASLA, a class you’ve divided because of the responses on a review test they took.  This was their third year of English.  At the beginning of the year, they told you that their teacher the first two years was more understanding than you and always spoke English to them in Arabic so they could understand.  You tried to explain the modern method of oral English, but they wanted no part of it.  They couldn’t understand you because they hadn’t learned anything the first two years with an Arabic-speaking teacher who spoke to them Arabic, so they wanted another Arabic-speaking teacher to speak to them in Arabic so they wouldn’t have to understand, and could continue not to learn English.  Logical.

            Today you decide to be stern and unsmiling the way you were at the beginning of the year when you were trying to establish yourself once and for all as the fascist dictator you were told you had to be.  You figured that any superior, untouchable, infallible person would do, so you would enter the room as Her Holiness and conduct the class as if performing a sacred rite, a high mass, or the Moslem equivalent.  Solemnly, reverently, “Here beginneth the first Lesson.”  But being High Priestess had become too demanding, so you had decided to be a mere mortal form time to time,  But now, when you return to an imitation of your earlier impersonation, instead of being seen as infallible, or even stern and sensible, you are seen as melancholy.  Ms. Benhadjoudja shouts to her classmates, “Suktu!  Ms. Martin est trieste aujourd’hui.” 

            The lesson for today is “Not for Jazz,” the scintillating tale of a musical instrument called a clavichord, made in Germany, bought by the author’s grandfather, kept in the living room, and studied for the passive voice.  You avoid labeling though because a student’s knowledge of English is best indicated by her ability to use it, not define it.  Oh, but they want to define and analyze.  The want formulas that they can write in their notebooks and memorize and recit3 e like poems.  And that they can TRANSLATE.  The idea prevails that they don’t understand anything until they’ve translated it.  You use the classic example of the mother tongue.  When their mothers taught them Arabic, did they translate it for them into French?  Did they explain the grammar rules?”  “Ah,” they say wisely, “But you’re not our mother.”  True.  You try to step aside from that clavichord ad give them examples they can relate to:  Where is bread sole?  When was the new mosque built?  When was independence won?  Are you allowed to chew gum in class, Ms. Tedjini?”  They answer these questions well, in spite of their determination not to, and Ms. Tedjini even takes the gum out of her mouth.  You’re satisfied, but they aren’t’.  They want it all translated.

            At five, the students gather around your desk and sing for you in Arabic.  Ms. Banyeklft gives you some galette, Algerian bread she’s made, and the recipe.  The students are always so generous with cakes and breads.  They know bribery is their only chance.  No, you’re not that cynical (or perceptive?)), and you really appreciate their generosity.  You think of how much you’d like them if it weren’t your responsibility to teach them English against their resistance.

            It’s dark now, and you’re once again in your hooded coat, walking through Medea.  You take another one of those instant baths, add some color to your face (brazen hussy), and put on a Kabylie dress.  Then you get out the chorba again.  Benedict stops by to see why her iron won’t work for you, and of course it turns out to be an electrical outlet that doesn’t function.  There’s another knock at the door, and it’s Jean, the philanthropist who bought your refrigerator from you when you needed money, then let you keep it, recognizing a charity case when he saw one.  You plan to give him back his 500 dinars in July ’66.  In the meantime, you’re giving him English lessons three times a week to show your appreciate for the no-interest loan.  To show his appreciation for the English lessons, he’s brought you raisin cake and truffe.  He and Benedict talk about moving and electric currents, and you return to the chorba.  Fafa and Moktar arrive.  You can all have dinner together.  Fafa goes to the kitchen, like a storybook heroine, to spin straw into gold.  Unfortunately there isn’t any straw, so you have to settle for little cakes made from unrolled couscous.

            While you eat, Fafa and jean practice the English structures you’ve taught them, and Moktar drills the new phrase you taught him:  “Do you mind if I smoke, please?”  Unfortunately, Moktar’s interest span is much longer than yours, and you finally find yourself crying, “Smoke!  Smoke!”  Then  Fafa speaks to you in Arabic to give you your chance to shine.  “After!”you whisper, turning purple.

            In a couple of hours, everyone has left, and you change into the Kabylie dress you sleep I and get into bed.  You blow out the candles and think about 2ASMB and Ms. Abbassi’s poem.  And the people you love and, for good measure,, the people you don’t love.  And 1 ASSA and the baker shop.  And the people at the post office and the market place and the egg merchant kneeling.  And laham lahalou and galette and 1 ASLA…