Dual language books are a go-to resource for students wanting to practice comprehension of their new tongue in an accessible way. Luka Zimmerman and Rana Kayed have put this genre to slightly different use in Long Grass in the Wind: Tales from Language Land, a bilingual Arabic-English book of short narratives.
The authors are writers, artists, film-makers, teachers and translators from Iran, Syria, the Occupied Golan Heights, the Occupied West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere, many of whom have been reluctantly cut off from their homelands.
In the 11 accounts we read of memories, hopes and dreams, seen through the lens of dislocation. Abdallah Motan writes lyrically of the pain of land lost to illegal Israeli settlement and memories of a landscape he can no longer visit. Samah Hijawi tells how she gathered recipes of ancient Middle Eastern foods into a cookery book. Shada Safadi talks of how her relatives communicated via megaphones across the Syrian-Golan Heights border.
The texts collected here are lovely stories in their own right, but they also serve the more mundane purpose of coaching uncertain speakers of either language in linguistic subtleties. “My child spoke English before Arabic in an Arabic country with Arabic parents”, comments editor Rana Kayed in an eerie recognition of the consequences of cultural displacement.
A motif that weaves its way through the narratives is the value of language, and of writing in particular, as a way of holding dear a culture from which one has been severed, and in the words of the editors, as “a deep listening to the forced absences and erasures underway all around us”.
Long Grass in the Wind: Tales from Language Land, edited by Luka Zimmerman and Rana Kayed, is published by Little Toller Books; ISBN: 978-1-915068-55-2. RRP: £12.00
