It’s been a long hot summer vacation at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s Cato College of Education — too hot to cook inside. So, just before sunset, when the tiny green hummingbirds start buzzing around the cherry red feeder hanging near my dad’s bedroom, we’ve been lighting up the barbecue. For this month’s post, I’d like to write about grilling; listening to Johnny Sablan’s Greatest Hits on repeat; and, understanding and not understanding.
In 1968, Johnny Sablan released the first studio album recorded in CHamoru (the language of Guam), Dalai Nene (Goodness Sweetheart). We grew up listening to the vinyl in Fairfax, Virginia. We lit the grill and ran downstairs to place the record on the turntable. The sound of Johnny Sablan’s voice would signal that the “fiesta” had officially begun:
Maloffan hao (maloffan hao)/You passed by (you passed by)
ya tåya’ neni nai sinangån-mu/and, baby, you didn’t say anything
pues håfa nai neni malago’-mu?/then what, baby, do you want?
We played it and we played it — enough that we (four children/all monolingual English speakers) learned to sing bits and pieces of the album along with my dad who rarely spoke CHamoru at home except when he’d call his siblings back on the island or when a close or distant relative of his same generation came to visit us on the East coast of the U.S. mainland. We’d pull out the record again:
Yanggen konfotme hao na ta para/If it’s your wish that we’re going to end
tåya’ siña hu cho’gue, lao bai hu konfotme/I can’t do anything, but I’ll agree
Maloffan hao (maloffan hao)/You passed by (you passed by).
There’s something to be said about growing up to music that you know without really understanding, at least literally. Even if we could approximate some of the Sablan refrains, we didn’t know what we were singing exactly, only sort of. My dad sure loved those songs and because we loved our dad, so did we.
It was the same for my mom who grew up speaking Rusyn with a “y” — the language that her grandparents and parents had brought with them from the Carpathian Mountains to the Alleghenies between two World Wars. In her final years, we’d drive her into Washington, DC to the narrow limestone cathedral off Massachusetts Ave NW for the marathon “old calendar” (January 7th) hierarchical Christmas liturgy in Church Slavonic. When the time came for the creed to be sung, there was a recognition. The words came back to her from somewhere deep inside. She’d sing them loudly and clearly in a language that her four children and twelve grandchildren didn’t understand but sort of understood because we knew the liturgy in English.
And that was okay with everybody because Baba was happy. You could hear it in her voice. She became young again.
If you’ve set foot in a U.S. college of education building these last ten years, one thing you’ve probably heard mentioned is “the science of reading”, a renewed and heavily funded fixation on systematic back-to-basics instruction around phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. A couple of years ago, a charitable foundation gifted the city of Charlotte twenty-three million dollars to institutionalize the science of reading across its teacher licensure programs and, more broadly, the state of North Carolina — and to develop and implement measures to assess its impact. The controversies about what literacy is and what it isn’t, how children come to be readers, and how science might accelerate student reading achievement have been around since my own “whole language” childhood and across my teaching career.
In today’s data spreadsheets of K-12 literacy instruction, there’s little patience for partial understanding or for not understanding at all. Listening to Johnny Sablan in the steamy August twilight, I wonder if there is space enough in K-12 classrooms for also cultivating the tolerance, the empathy, and the humility that comes from accepting that you don’t (and don’t have to) understand the literal meaning of every word of a Johnny Sablan song to keep you from playing it on repeat anyhow.
Hu gaiya hao gi korason-hu (hu guaiya hao)/I love you in my heart (I love you)
Hu gaiya hao gi korason-hu (maloffan hao)/I love you in my heart (you passed by).
Photo by Ivan Dorofeev on Unsplash
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