The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> A Night to Honor Narsai David

A Night to Honor Narsai David
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Sunday, October 9 2011, 19:43:43 (UTC)
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....was held last night in Turlock, well, actually in Denair, which is attached to the ass-end of Turlock. The hall, at a church, was surprisingly muted and very tastefully done....subtle colors, plenty of space, high ceilings and all the stuff you don't expect....music was good too, not too loud....the food was miserable, inedible....fortunately the lobby reception area still had a good stock of fruit and cheeses so a few from our table snuck out there and brought back something tasty.....the speakers, before Narsai's segment, were atrocious....voices like nails being driven into your head, slowly. A mic in the hands of an assyrian is deadlier than a gun.

...there was a video message from Anna Eshoo which was fulsome in its praise but praise well deserved...as the new chairman of the board of the AID society Narsai has already traveled back to DC twice this year and met with serious people among them the ambassador to Iraq...this is a person who will not embarrass us and that in itself is a big step.

The vice president of the AID society gave a talk in which she listed their achievements and their continuing emphasis on education and language for which they have translated thousands of textbooks into assyrian and now have all-assyrian classes from kindergarten all the way through high school...again it was mentioned how important it is to maintain the language and presence so we won't be lost etc.

But, I wonder. Do we mean that now we are raising generations of assyrian kids whose main window on education comes through a dead language? Would we do such a thing in America....in England, France or Sweden? Is this really the best way to prepare our Iraqi children and young adults to succeed in an Arabic language country? Maybe not and then I remembered that we, not they, but we don't WANT them to succeed in Iraq...in the past any assyrian who did so was suspected of being a traitor, and since you couldn't be expected to go far in Iraq by calling the government "usurpers" and worse, no more than you could hope to go far in America saying the same sorts of things, will these young adults be helped or hindered by this sort of education?

What, exactly, are these students being prepared for? We know the AID society doesn't want them to leave garbia...this is the core of their mission: to enable assyrians to stay. And, of course, along with an entire 12 grade education in assyrian comes the notion that we are the descendants and have rights to land etc. If any of our kids marry Muslims, Qurds or Turks, we look upon them as traitors....so just how far can this new generation of assyrian educated kids go in Iraq? Can they assimilate...can they even get along, let alone thrive....would they want to?...would we ALLOW them to? How well prepared will they be, with all assyrian schools and curricula, to move out into the larger community...to succeed or even try to? And, with this much of a heavy dosage of assyrianism, with its land-claims and indigenous claims, made worse by this latest Christian jihad, how will they be viewed by the larger population? Won't they be perceived, even more now, as a fifth column?....as foreign to the rest of of Iraq...of sort being there only to continue making claims and demands extending even to the United Nations and embarrassing Iraq some more, maybe forcing some government retaliation or crack-down and then....here we go again.

As nice as it sounds, in the abstract, to save a language and all of that....at what price? What is more important, people's lives and futures or a language? Especially a language that is well-preserved today and studied and learned by non-assyrians with no danger of its disappearing?

Would we do the same to our kids here? Don't we WANT them to succeed here...don't we urge them to get in there and fight and learn and understand what it takes to succeed, to be safe, to achieve a better standard of living for their kids and so on? Are we really helping assyrian kids in Iraq to do the same...or are we unconsciously creating a group of outsiders, of people shunning and then shunned by the very people and neighbors and government they need to understand well in order that they too may achieve what we want for our kids elsewhere?

At what price is this language worth "saving"? And, what about saving, not the language or culture, but the children?



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