Forward Into Foreignness - The New Yorker

In the nineteen-sixties, my father, a Corkman, was employed by Chicago Bridge & Iron, an American corporation that built industrial plants worldwide. He worked in hardhat management positions. An early project took him to Mersin, in Turkey. There, he met my mother. She had just spent a year at Langham Secretarial College, in London. They courted in English, then married at Mersin’s Church of St. Anthony of Padua, the patron saint of lost things.

My mother belonged to Mersin’s well-off Christian community, which was mainly of Syrian origin. This Levantine subculture socialized in French, voiced endearments in Arabic, communicated with functionaries in Turkish. Polyglotism was prized. My mother’s father spoke French, Arabic, Turkish, German, English, Italian, and Ladino. He sent my mother to French-language boarding schools in Lyon and Aleppo. She used French with her four children. We called her Maman and my father Papa. My first word was “attends,” because “attends” was my mother’s invariable response to my cries from the crib.

That was in Neuchâtel, in Switzerland. We kept moving—to Tripoli, in Lebanon; to Amanzimtoti, in South Africa; and to Matola, in colonial Mozambique. Our nanny there, Victoria, chatted to us in the language of Lisbon, and my first ironic remark was made in Portuguese. I was four years old. The remark came in response to my parents turning off my bedroom light. “Muito obrigado,” I said. I added, translating, “Thank you very much.”

During my father’s next assignment, in Ras Lanuf, Libya, mother and children stayed in Mersin. At preschool, I rapidly acquired fluent preschool Turkish. My teacher selected me to recite a Mother’s Day poem. I wore a navy-blue velvet suit handmade by my grandmother (her languages: French, Arabic, Turkish, and Greek). The poem began, “Annecim, dünyanın en iyi sin.” My maman, you are best in the world.

My father was posted to Iran. I didn’t want to go. After a family friend procured the airplane tickets, I cursed him: “Allah belanı versin, Georges Chalfoun!” We moved to Kermanshah, in the Zagros Mountains. There I lost almost all my Turkish.

A year later, in 1970, we moved to Den Haag. I learned Dutch. My mother, too, learned Dutch, well enough to attend Leiden University and teach French at the Eerste Vrijzinnig-Christelijk Lyceum. Near the V.C.L. was the Lycée Français de la Haye, at the front gate of which I was deposited, without my consent, aged ten. I’d been happy at the English School of The Hague. Now I faced two years in the French education system. I had learned an important Gallic concept: the fait accompli.

When I was eleven, my mother signed me up for private German lessons with an enigmatic German lady. With her, I reluctantly studied a book called “Die Drei Schwarze Katzen.” Later, I studied German more systematically. I can still affirm the dative prepositions: aus, bei, mit, nach, seit, von, zu, and gegenüber. And außer.

That’s how we did things in my family. You went forward into foreignness. Tabbouleh, hurling, helva, “Inshallah,” “godverdomme,” Georges Brassens, George Best, the Dubliners, Kaptan Swing, Sinterklaas, “Shoot!,” Johan Cruyff, “çok güzel,” “ya’aburnee shuhelwa,” Louis de Funès, “à table,” “Le Trésor de Rackham le Rouge,” “Revolver,” Roger Casement, “Guerilla Days in Ireland”—all of it was our culture.

I became a construction worker in County Limerick; a student at Cambridge, in England; a London barrister; a New York dad. For fifteen years, I lived Americanly, monolingually. My French and Dutch rusted like old bicycles. Then my fourth child came along. We lived on the tenth floor of an apartment building. As the ascending elevator approached, my infant daughter and I watched the floor numbers light up. I named them for her in my mother tongue: Un, deux, trois . . . Her first word was “dix.”

In her eighties, Maman studied Turkish, her fourth language, at the Yunus Emre Enstitüsü in London. When she’s anxious, it calms her to read her notebook of Turkish grammar. My father recently turned eighty-seven. In April, he called me on his return from a visit to Cork. He mentioned that, in the fifties, when his brother Brendan was in Ireland’s north, engaged in revolutionary activities, he wrote Brendan a letter as gaeilge—in Gaelic. My father, always regarded by the family as the English-bound one, left school with excellent Irish but never put it to use. His visit to Ireland, where his nine brothers and sisters spent their lives while he travelled the world, overwhelmed him. Papa said, “I have missed so much.”♦

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