Alfabet/Alphabet

ISBN: 9781989287606

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Alfabet/Alphabet

a memoir of a first language

New!

alfabet / alphabet is the record of Sadiqa de Meijer’s transition from speaking Dutch to English. Exploring questions of identity, landscape, family, and translation, the essays navigate the shifting cultural currents of language by using an eclectic approach to storytelling. As such, fellow linguistic migrants to anglophone Canada will recognize elements of their experience in alfabet / alphabet, while lifelong English speakers will perceive their mother tongue in a new light.

Contributors

Sadiqa de Meijer

Sadiqa de Meijer is the author of the poetry collections Leaving Howe Island and The Outer Wards. Her work has won the CBC Poetry Prize and Arc’s Poem of the Year Contest, and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She lives with her family in Kingston, Ontario.
Chapter Contributors Pages Year Price
This chapter is a reflection the author’s mother’s Dutch lessons.
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 4 $0.40
A poem in Dutch and English
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 2 $0.20
This chapter explores what Dutch sounds like to English speakers.
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 4 $0.40
In this chapter, the author looks back on her time as an ESL student.
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 5 $0.50
This chapter explores language in the context of Dutch and English colonialism
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 3 $0.30
In this chapter, de Meijer writes about Dutch as the language of her inner world.
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 4 $0.40
The author confronts conflicting feelings about the aesthetics of the Dutch language.
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 6 $0.60
The author and her partner deal with a Neo Nazi during a trip to the Netherlands
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 6 $0.60
The alphabet in Dutch, along with a helpful guide.
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 6 $0.60
The author recalls a trip to England, and her father’s struggle with depression.
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 6 $0.60
A passage from Genesis.
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 5 $0.50
The author reflects on her migration to Canada, and her first encounters with poetry.
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 6 $0.60
The author recalls a trip to buy bread, and the power of names.
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 5 $0.50
This chapter examines the poems of Ida Gerhardt.
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 7 $0.70
On the chronic abstraction of using a language learned after childhood.
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 3 $0.30
The chapter explores Dutch etemology.
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 7 $0.70
This chapter concerns the sounds of Flemish, also called Belgian-Dutch.
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 4 $0.40
This chapter concerns Punjabi, the author’s father’s mother tongue.
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 6 $0.60
In this chapter, the de Meijer writes about poetic emphasis, and how this can differ between languages.
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 8 $0.80
On photography, and the progress of time.
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 7 $0.70
On being Dutch and mixed race, and the reactions this can produce.
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 5 $0.50
In this chapter, the author writes about coming to appreciate the subtle qualities of English.
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 6 $0.60
"Mother tongue, is this when you’ll surface, under cover of night, in the mind’s somnolent dark?"
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 3 $0.30
On Dutch words with no English equivalent, and the impossibilty of some translation.
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 4 $0.40
On raising a child, and linguistic duality.
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 4 $0.40
This chapter explores the Dutch notion of silence.
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 3 $0.30