‘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.

In that first class, surrounded by various kinds of white people as well as one other brown guy, and a black man—a Nigerian Muslim who whispered to me that his name was Abdurrahman, but to call him Toli because ‘people hear Abdurrahman and think, you know, it’s so hardcore’—I learned how to spell my first Arabic word, baab, which meant ‘door’. It was appropriate, if a little on the nose, to identify first the means by which you can enter and exit a room, a house, a life. Every word acts in this fashion, not just literally as a signifier for an object or material reality, a way to hold the world in your mind, but also as a portal to other words, both adjacent to it—as in doorway or frame—and back from it, as in dur, the Proto-Germanic term from which dore, dure and eventually door emerged. I heard baab, spoke it like a sheep with the rest of the class, and stepped through what opened.