Grammatical Errors

Sunday, February 27, 2005

Opinion by Elif Şafak

  Back in Istanbul in his high school days, the very first book Ömer had read, in the first English language course he took, was prosaically titled Learning English-I. That was the course book of the first semester of the very first year.

  In the second semester they had proceeded to another book, Learning English-II, and so it went. It didn t give the impression of making much progress, and in their fourth or fifth semester, the kids were already making fun, scribbling on the covers of the prescribed books, Still Learning English-XIV, Desperately Learning English-XXXV, Forever Learning English CXXI.

  Their teacher had told them the same series was basically being used all around the world to teach kids English, and yet, there were slight local changes here and there as each book was adapted for a different country. Whatever the grandeur of the intentions of those who had planned these series, the title and content of the books were not much of a success. They depicted the English language like something you could never really, fully learn but merely dabble in; a slippery substance you could never fully grasp but only lay a hand on. It was a swift hare you couldn t possibly catch no matter how hard you tried, an aspiration you could neither attain nor be given the chance not to aspire for.

  And yet, despite the demoralizing elongation of their titles, the Learning English series could have been much more enjoyable had their main protagonists been someone other than Mr. and Mrs. Brown.

  If high school kids back in Turkey spoke some sort of a crooked English with maximum attention to grammar rules and minimum competence in vocabulary, part of the blame should be put on Mr. and Mrs. Brown, and rightly so. In the Learning English-I-II-III-IV … series, they roamed the pages doing the simplest things in the most scrupulous ways, never realizing, in the meantime, the extent of the damage on whatever creativity and ingenuity their young readers might possess.

  The couple had popped up in the very first pages of Learning English-I, smiling ear-to-ear in the kitchen of their house. In that initial encounter, Mrs. Brown was standing beside the counter on a mission to teach “plate,” “cup” and “a bowl of red apples,” while Mr. Brown was sitting at the table, sipping coffee with no particular duties. The following week, Mrs. Brown was portrayed in the living room, still with the same smile and in the same dress, to teach “armchair,” “curtain” or to everyone s shock, “television.” Mr. Brown was nowhere in the picture.

  The couple s teaching techniques had, like their clothes and expressions, showed little change in the weeks to follow. At each particular scene at their house, Mr. and Mrs. Brown defined and taught everything around them in terms of three fundamental criteria: color, size and age. Thus, Mrs. Brown cleaned a green carpet while Mr. Brown saw a small dog in the garden, or Mrs. Brown made a white birthday cake as Mr. Brown sat in his old chair, and when the moment arose and they decided the time was ripe enough to complicate matters, they ran vacuum cleaners over small green new carpets or came across big old black dogs.

  Be that as it may, it soon turned out that these indoor scenes were a temporary tranquility, in some sort of an intermediate stage, in the couple s life. Once that phase came to an end somewhere in the middle of the book, Mr. and Mrs. Brown launched a series of outdoor activities, never to be stopped again. They went to the zoo to name the caged animals, climbed the mountains to teach herbs and plants and flowers, spent a day at the beach to wear “sunglasses,” eat “ice-cream” and watch people “surf"; drove to local farms to look for “celery,” “lettuce,” “cabbage,” and to shopping malls to buy “gloves,” “belts” and “earrings,” though for some reason they d never wear them. One other activity they kept repeating every now and then was going on long, languid, “it-was-a-nice-sunny-day” picnics: There they taught “frog,” “kite,” “grasshopper,” as they rested next to a “brook” flowing through the “hills.” Though neither Mr. Brown nor Mrs. Brown seemed to be interested in what was happening in other parts of the world, on one occasion they went to Mexico to teach “airport," “customs,” “luggage” and “sombrero.” To many a students dismay, they quickly came back and were detected at their house once again, giving this flamboyant party to show friends and relatives their holiday pictures (each with a sombrero), while they taught past perfect tense.

  Though they seemed to be in restless motion all the time, there were certain places Mr. and Mrs. Brown would never set their foot in. They never went to graveyards, for instance, and nowhere in their habitat you could come across sanatoriums, rehabilitation clinics or mental asylums, let alone brothels, where most boys in the classroom had made a visit by this time but none had yet dared to go inside. Not that they expected to see Mr. Brown smiling ear-to-ear at a penthouse teaching words everyone craved to learn, or Mrs. Brown recalling that she could do other things with her body than pointing at ducks or making big white cakes. But at least they could take a walk, be on the streets that this Ömer remembered expecting from them. As the world they depicted was so unreal and vague, the language they taught became unreal and vague too, making it all the more difficult to speak English even when you knew what you were supposed to say theoretically -- that is, grammatically.

  Then preposterously, that ominous moment would come, when the bad facsimile of a happy life taught in the Learning English I-II-III … series would be grimly, glaringly tested by the unhappily real life, with its really unhappy people. Hearing their children talk in English was a source of mountainous pride for middle-class Turkish parents. They would miss no opportunity. Out of the blue, in front of relatives and friends, they could force their children to speak English, to say something, anything, as long as it was -- it sounded -- English enough. The parents urge to hear their children speak English, even if with no definite content, for no definite purpose, was agonizing enough, and yet, how much more agonizing it could get would be unveiled the moment these parents bumped into a couple of tourists. “Why don t you speak,” they would elbow their children, “Go and speak with the tourists, ask if they need anything. You ve been taking English courses for two semesters now. You can talk English!”

  Sure they could. They could talk, even chitchat with those tourists, if only the scene had been a little different. Rather than being accidentally located in the midst of horns, ambulance sirens, street vendors and angst-ridden pedestrians scurrying on the broken pavements in this tumultuous city of Istanbul, had they been gently escorted to a nice-and-sunny-Sunday picnic near a brook to fatten on conjunctions and interjections while watching frogs croak and lilies blossom, and had they been asked to connect two independent clauses with conjunctive adverbs rather than the chillingly simple question of “How to get to the Grand Bazaar?” Sure they could talk, but not now, not under these circumstances.

  By the time summer came to an end, kids would have already hated their English teachers, hating all the more Mr. and Mrs. Brown. The next semester would commence upon this shaky basis of solid detestation, offering such little motivation to go on to Learning English-III.

  More than all the things they purported to teach, it was one simple point they declined to acknowledge that made these books so ossified: that all their instructions were correct on paper and yet perfectly falsifiable in life. So deep was the deleteriousness of these books that Ömer might still be struggling with their side effects if it weren t for his deep affection for cinema and music. It was cinema, low budget, independent, and unpretentious American/British/Australian movies as well as a multitude of punk/rock/post-punk lyrics that had taken his language far beyond everything contained in the advanced English books he was made to study. 

  Life – the real life of flesh and blood -- did abide by grammatical rules and yet, incessantly, systematically and fortunately managed to deviate from that ordered existence. Life did construct sentences as grammar required but then also punched holes here and there from where the gist of the language seeped out to find its own way. It was precisely this distortion, and the matchless pleasure residing there, that the Learning English books forgot to teach. This article was taken as an excerpt from the novel “The Saint of Incipient Insanities” by Elif Şafak, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.