Through The Window

by Jane Stratton

When you open a shop, it’s through the magical realm of the shop window that you observe the mysteries of the street beyond. You begin to tell time by that window– the lulls and lurches of the community as the day rolls on; the familiar face of the child through the window, longing to come inside, but whose resolute mother has been against the idea for a year now, as they drag one another along to collect an older sibling from school. The disappointed faces of older men, yearning for an evening chat, thwarted by the dimming of the shop lights, signalling our goodbye. The restlessness surging from across the street as the young men begin their evening ritual of card games, nargileh, and playfighting. And the sunset at the close of business, something that we have begun to photograph every evening for its reliable beauty.

But it’s the soundscape that really tells me we’re in the right place. We sell books in the languages of the world. And it’s the cacophony of shlama-lak…basemta-raba… cảm ơn…mehfi mishkalah…and zàijiàn that I love most. Heard over the roar of magnificent, beloved cars flexing up and down the street. Unpredictable bursts of Zumba music from the hall next door. Pasifika church-goers dressed to the nines for Sunday services, little boys helping their mums with high-heels that won’t come to the party by staying on. An Arabic-speaking business, spotting a gap in the market, offering colourful mantillas for the El Salvadoreans attending mass. And “Can we go in, mum?” “Bukra, bukra, tomorrow, tomorrow”.

In 2017, I opened LOST IN BOOKS, a multilingual children’s bookshop and all-ages community creative hub in Fairfield, South Western Sydney in the shell of an abandoned lighting shop. We remade the shop with colour and love and the hands of more than 30 local volunteers. Now, I think it feels like walking into a rainbow, inside a cloud. When people look into our window, I hope they see a picture of joy and exuberance. We have filled the shelves with children’s literature from around the world, in the languages of the world. To begin with, the local people didn’t know what to make of us. “Are you in the right place?”, they wondered. “This looks like Newtown or Surry Hills. It’s too nice for here!” Across the road, the beautician kept watch, with a daily expectation that our doors would close and never reopen. She came to say hello and to help spread the word after we lasted the first six months.

We opened shop at the affordable edge of Fairfield’s CBD. Almost eight in every ten people here are speaking languages other than English at home. It’s the display centre for Australia’s multicultural story – the front room.

We don’t like to talk much about the price of entrance though. It might cost your name; your profession; your kids’ ability to speak or write in your first language; your very sense of self. In Australia, we call that “the migrant experience”. But it’s a disaster of the soul, and a crying waste. Why is Australia so blind to the talents, and the treasure of linguistic diversity carried by the people we call “New Australians”?

LOST IN BOOKS opened its doors deliberately in the place where more refugees and migrants arrived than in any other area in Australia, to help newcomers to keep their first languages alive, all the better not only to grasp English, but to allow families to share the depths of their souls, a human need only possible through shared meaning and language.

It feels urgent now to honour and celebrate the ability to speak and to be understood in more than one language because there is a false idea gaining momentum: that English is our national language; and that to be Australian is to already speak English.

In mid-September 2018, the newly appointed special envoy for Indigenous affairs, the former Prime Minister, Tony Abbot, said in an interview with Warren Mundine on Sky News:

It all starts with a decent education. It all starts with learning how to read, to write, to count and to think in the national language. Now, that doesn't mean there isn't an important role for culture in remote schools but nevertheless people need a decent education in the national language.

Since October 2007, Australian citizenship has been contingent on passing a test, administered in English. The Federal Government’s intention is to introduce an additional English competency test as part of granting citizenship. These measures have been defeated in the Senate but remain Coalition policy. The signal has been given. In April 2018, we saw a proposal tabled at Strathfield Council (where 68.5% of the population report speaking a language other than English at home) to implement a measure that would have regulated public signage in languages other than English, so that English should always be the primary language. Even shop windows, those magic interfaces between what is and what could be, would need to note that in Australia, we speak English. If you don’t like it, go back to where you came from.

But the deeper idea of what it means to belong here is a polyglot one. Together as Australians we speak the languages of the world. There are more than 300 languages spoken in Australia, including around fifty First Nations languages. The multilingualism amongst First Nations peoples is evident in the land itself. Think of the Seven Sisters songline that crosses our nation spanning the entire continent, from west to east. It is one enormous story, kept strong in different parts, in different First Nations languages. Many parts, speaking many languages, making up a bigger whole. A pluralism that is older than the very existence of the English language itself.

There are more than 300 languages spoken in Australia, including around fifty First Nations languages. The multilingualism amongst First Nations peoples is evident in the land itself.

Let’s remember: there is no official language in Australia. There is only cultural convention, and the weight of the majority. And that majority of monolingual English-speakers is slowly shrinking. In Western Sydney, mainstream English is simply not the lingua franca or the word on the street. In Parramatta, the booming population centre of Sydney, around two in every five people speak a language other than English at home. And in Fairfield, where we are, the rate is almost four in every five people. It’s a growing national trend. The last Census teaches us that after English, we speak Mandarin, Arabic, Cantonese and Vietnamese. Mandarin and Punjabi speakers are the fastest growing language groups in the nation. And in an increasing trend, more than 20% of us nationwide is speaking a language other than English.

Language is not just a window into human nature but a fistula: an open wound through which our innards are exposed to an infectious world. – Stephen Pinker, “The Stuff of Thought,” 2007

If it’s true that language creates a portal into who we are – our commonalities – it also exposes us to whom or what we believe ourselves not to be.

Is it necessary to belong in Australia that you speak English? Reckoning with this question goes to the heart of what it means to belong; to be successful; to be employable; to make sense to others; to hold onto your own name; to be valued on your own terms; to be considered intelligent; to be understood as a whole person; and to be valued by our society.

There is a difficult corollary here, for if we decide to value multilingualism, we make a demand that monolingual English speakers understand their limitations, and become more capable, global communicators, by learning from bilingual and multilingual community members.

Successive governments have exhorted the nation to learn foreign languages, and failed. But perhaps, at a minimum, we might manage to keep languages other than English alive in the 21% of the population that already speak them? If we could maintain literacy in languages other than English, we would gain a powerful and internationally significant asset. We are already a multilingual society. And we look that gift in the face when we say that to be an Australian, you must already speak English.

That position is like inviting a stranger into your home for tea but never giving them a cup from which to drink, and refusing the gift they offer you as they come through the front door.

A day in Fairfield is a day staring down the incongruity between the personal ambitions of newcomers and the conditions of the society they seek to join. Every day, I sit down for tea with someone determined to make a new start, pushing for ways to be helpful, busy and productive in a society that says, “first, learn English”. An emergency physician from Mosul turned retail assistant, qualified to practice medicine here but unable to land work for lack of local experience. A trilingual civil lawyer from Baghdad driving school buses every morning and afternoon, and working shifts with us in between. An Iraqi civil engineer reimagining herself as an interior designer, and since last week, a journalist. A film director at a loss. A celebrated screen actor from Iraq performing for an appreciative diasporic community. A news editor, setting up shop with an Iraqi newspaper in the suburbs, working the avenues to build circulation. A maths professor, trying hard to celebrate early “retirement” to mask his disappointment. All looking for a way to contribute, all of them saying, “yes, I can”, even if they have no idea of where to begin.

I will always remember the words of a Vietnamese teenager I interviewed in Bankstown in 2007. She explained to me that she had a new name now since arriving in Australia, and that she was trying to arrive at a new career aspiration having given up on her dream of being a teacher in the belief that she would never speak English well enough to have the honour of teaching others. I remember her looking me in the eye and shrugging. Better to accept what is than mourn what might have been. Is that what she was saying?

We are a children’s bookshop working with newly-arrived families everyday. The chief spokesperson is often the child. The most significant moment at which bilingual children lose the foundations for literacy in their mother tongue is when they begin mainstream school. It’s the ability to read and write that they lose through monolingual instruction and our desire for them to “integrate”. As young people and adults, they mourn that loss, and ask us to provide connections to bilingual literature, audio books and courses to learn to write what they know how to speak. In the rush to acquire English, we forget that the scaffold to any new language is a strong footing in the first. Have we thought this through?

To be stranded between two language worlds, not fully literate in either, is difficult territory. There is no terra firma, no depth or solace in language. Speaking and to commit words to a page is to hesitate, to stumble and to feel exposed. I lived in Thailand aged 17, straight out of school as an exchange student. I know the loneliness and fear of being disarmed through a lack of language. I see it in the people around me now.

We have no method to ensure that first languages are alive. We monitor the absence of English every four years, but why are we not concerned to ensure that newcomers (and First Nations peoples) can think in their mother tongues, in order that they can make meaning in English, on their own terms?

Our inattentiveness to first language maintenance creates family contexts in which parents and children are “lost in translation”, without the means to exchange their deepest feelings for lack of a fully shared language; and in which children are asked to act as translators for their families, discovering too soon what it is to be adult. Curious childish ears overhear most things, and many is the time we have checked our tongues to stop a child from interpreting sensitive matters for a parent.

When language becomes a relic from “home”, it can ossify along with the culture and values it signifies. It becomes a private thing, even something to hide away, rather than something that is shared, celebrated and that can evolve in society, in public. It’s something that you “speak at home”, as the Census reminds you.

学一门语言，就是多一个观察世界的窗户。

To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world.

- Chinese Proverb

Our shop window invites you inside in five languages. Inside are children’s books in more than twenty languages, and a team of staff and volunteers whom together, speak 60 languages.

On the streets beyond our window, 6,500 newly arrived Iraqi and Syrian refugees are making a new start in Fairfield. They speak Assyrian, Arabic, Chaldean, English, and some of them have brought bits and pieces of the languages from the places they passed on the way – Romanian, Greek. To hear them talk, to speak with them in my faltering Arabic, is to see the world reconfigured, reimagined, enriched and enlarged. It’s a gift for us all.

Jane Stratton is the Founder of Lost In Books, and Creative Director at Think+DO Tank Foundation.