i.

When I teach my class how to say sixteen,
seize, one student inquires how to say one hundred.
Cent, I reply. “O-o-ohh!” he exclaims.
“That’s why my mom always goes to cent seize!”

116th Street is Little Senegal,
the street in Spanish Harlem where West African goods are sold.

Most schools have cut their French programs,
but teaching it here sparkles.

Many students have origins in Haiti, Mali, Senegal,
Côte d’Ivoire, and Guinea.
They relate to French the way I do to Cantonese.
When the family language makes its way into the classroom,
they feel more visible,
their home lives more recognized.

I learn that “skirt” in Mandingo is jupu,
like jupe in French.
I learn that Haitian Creole has many French words,
but doesn’t bother with gender, accents,
or the endless clumps of unpronounced letters in French.
In kreyol ayisyen, the colonizers’ tongue
is clarified and transformed.

ii.

The African Market where we go to practice our French
is sleeping. Most vendors are at the mosque to pray,
since it’s Friday. Students browse the kente cloth,
drums, bangles, incense, and shea butter in woven baskets.

One stall has a banner that reads, “Traoré,”
the surname of two unrelated students. They Americanize
their shared name, “tray-OR,” not bothering with the accent,
but explain to me that really, it’s pronounced the French way,
“trah-or-RAY.”

We wander past West African groceries,
eavesdrop on a couple screaming in French,
pass the Maison Harlem wine shop,
and two of the many Senegalese restaurants:
the famed Les Ambassades, and Lenox Sapphire,
whose food my Senegalese colleague declared worthy of home.

We wind up at New Ivoire, the 24/7 Ivoirean restaurant
owned by my student’s uncle,
where the waitstaff have agreed to speak no English to us.
We receive our platters of jollof rice and dibi mouton,
and students excitedly introduce me to Vimto soda.

Language learning should always be thus
fragranced with the spice of students’ lives.