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Foreword

I

have been thinking long and hard about writing this book for a while now, but never had the courage to do so. This is mainly due to a scar I’ve been bearing for fifteen years ever since university. I was in my final year at Durham, studying Music and German, and I thought it would be a great idea to take an interpreting course for one of my compulsory modules. It was a tough module, but somehow, I managed to wing it through the first months without working too hard. I was good at speaking German, having spent a year there during my third year at university. My third-year professor, Mrs. Schumacher (a native German herself) loved the quiet, studious female students, the type that would always produce the perfect answer, written neatly on a piece of paper, but were generally very shy when speaking in front of the class. Basically, your typical teacher’s pets. I fitted into that category like one of the Klitchko brothers in a Royal Ballet performance of Swan Lake. So it was quite natural that, from the very first lesson, she absolutely hated me. Months later, after a simultaneous translation test that had gone particularly badly — probably because I was still a student and preferred drinking in bars to studying in my tiny room — I remember Mrs. Schumacher handing me back a marked paper. As she did so, she looked at me with an overdose of Schadenfreude — one of the few German words that has made it into international vocabulary, roughly translatable as ‘rejoicing in someone else’s misery’ — and said patronizingly, and I quote: “Considering that English is not your first language, you did pretty well, Fadi.”

I was fuming, but managed to maintain the appearance of zenness, repeating the mantra ‘Goosfrabaaa’ under my breath over and over. Then, I shrugged it off and carried on being a happy-go-lucky student. It was only many years later that a niggling feeling began to resurface; akin to a cancerous tumour that gradually expands in your body, turning healthy optimistic cells into rotten ‘doubters’. In hindsight, however innocent that comment seemed, it did the desired damage; it told me I would never be able to write like a native English speaker. Without going into great detail about my personal biography, I will divulge the fact that English is my third language. Throughout my young adult years, I constantly felt the need to prove that I was good enough. And having done that as a young adult, first by being accepted into a top sixth form college, and later into Durham University, I had finally managed to put my demons to rest.

But as it turned out, the demons were still there, waiting for something to trigger them, and Mrs. Schumacher supplied it with pinpoint accuracy. It is quite possible that this trigger was the main factor that prevented me from writing this book earlier. Another reason might be the fact that there is a great chance of me being expelled from Germany, should this book ever get published. Taking Brexit into consideration, and the fact that I might become a persona non grata, there is a risk of my being denied a residency visa on the grounds of having an