2020-05-28
20 分钟Saoirse Ronan ("Little Women") reads an essay about how a language barrier impacts the relationship between a young woman and an Iraqi doctor. This is an encore presentation.
Produced by the ilab at Wbur Boston.
From the New York Times and wbur, Boston.
This is modern love stories of love, loss and redemption.
I'm your host, Agna Chakrabarti.
In many ways, love is about communication.
But what about when you're trying to communicate with someone in a different language that you're not fully fluent in?
Emily Robbins writes about that in her essay grappling with the language of love.
It's read by Saoirse Ronan.
She recently starred as Jo March in Little Women.
We often hear about how hard it is to be articulate in a foreign language.
But when I began to study Arabic, what took me a long time to learn was not how to speak, but how to listen.
Looking back, I see that my inability to listen well cost me my first love.
The man I loved was an iraqi doctor.
Young, like me.
He had been forced out of his country by war and had come to Syria to work in a refugee camp.
This was in 2008, before the revolution.
I was in Syria to study Arabic.
We met in that camp, and for the next year, we were constantly falling in and out of love, breaking up and getting back together, pouring out our hearts and fighting, mostly because of all he wanted to tell me that I didn't understand.
We did this in Arabic, his first and my second language.
The doctor and I were both alone in Damascus.