The best way to teach English to foreigners is through sexy books. Lin Sampson discovers A Girl Walks Into A Bar.
I am teaching English in Greece. My first pupil is Dmitri the chemist in Syntagma Square. He is everyone’s first pupil. Liza who passes him on to me says, “He will never learn English but maybe you can learn Greek.”
It is our first lesson. On a large piece of paper he draws something that looks like a hot water bottle. “What is this?” he asks. When I do not know he pokes me in the chest.
Breast? He writes the word diligently in his big empty exercise book.
Dmitri is going to Sweden for his hols and he wants to marry a Swedish girl. For this he says he needs to know all parts of the female body.
Somehow English is not good at this. I say primly vagina and he solemnly writes it down.
My Greek gets better and better. I can say, “If you touch my leg again I will call the police.”
His English gets worse. One day I am passing a small bookshop in Monastiriki with tattered paper backs in all languages. I find one called The Nude in the Mirror and buy it for Dmitri.
Dmitri’s English improves dramatically, “Explain, explain,” he shouts, when there are words he can’t understand but intuits are what he calls ‘sex-words’. I am teaching Sexlish.
By the time he leaves for Sweden he can say ‘her dress slipped off her olive coloured limbs’ (a phrase repeated frequently in the book) although he never quite got the hang of the meaning of ‘olive coloured’ and always thought it had something to do with a tree.
In the Sudan I teach in a small private university situated between a prison and a hospital where people are passed out on mattresses in the grounds, the peripheries scattered with bloodied bandages. These two institutes seem bonded together, one leading to the other. Up the side of the mud wall of the prison is a ladder.
Omdurman it is a romantic place. It is where the White an Blue Niles meet and the suq is the largest camel exchange in Africa. People come miles to sell their camels, the women ‘filthy with erotic mystery’ (Ted Hughes) with their decorated feet like crushed diamonds in the dust.
Surrounded by desert and bound by ancient history, it looks like an old parchment. It is always sudden; emperor of the unexpected. A pupil tells me there is a tomato in the suq that is crying like a baby.
My pupils come from places with names like Wad Madani and Ombada. One is very tall and thin as a knitting needle with blue-black skin with small perforations on his cheeks like smocking. He rides a small child’s bicycle. They are all very poor, some came to school on donkeys and one arrives with a troop of goats. The men wear dusty shifts, gallabeyas, and the girls wear frothy white tobes. Everyone wears cheap plastic sandals.
There are no books apart from a very old phrase book that contains such phrases as Will you starch my cummerbund today. The class share about ten words of English between them but they are imaginative and intuitive and do a lot with these ten words, showboating them relentlessly. Sometimes when I arrive they are standing together singing. They never do homework and their English deteriorates daily.
I search for my old fail safe teaching manual. The Nude in the Mirror, not available in Khartoum, but I find a copy of The Love Object by Edna O’Brien and laboriously type it out and roneo it on a filthy machine with violet coloured ink. Phone not working. Printer not working.
And now I think of it how I could have done with A Girl Walks Into a Bar – a choose your own erotic destiny novel by 3 Cape Town girls. Open it on any page and the frottage of the font smacks (I use the word advisedly) you.
“He tilts your head back and starts kissing the length of your neck, using his teeth and tongue, and you cry out as he take both your breasts..”
Another page: “He rubs your buttocks, kneading your skin, his fingers briefly slipping between your legs..”
Ah they would have all been fluent in a month. Dmitri might have died from excitement. As I ponder the phrase my mind takes up ‘kneading’ and I see myself explaining about bread – there is no end to the possibilities…
Book details
- A Girl Walks into a Bar by Helena S Paige
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EAN: 9780908387915
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- A Girl Walks Into a Wedding by Helena S Paige
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EAN: 9780908387946
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