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Task A

1.
Describe Nora’s experiences and behaviour in her first year at school.
(Comprehension) (12 Punkte)
2.
Analyse how Nora’s parents and their relationship with their daughter are portrayed. Refer to narrative perspective and use of language.
(Analysis) (16 Punkte)
3.
Choose one of the following tasks:
3.1
In a recent survey among young Americans about the relevance and meaning of the American Dream today one participant characterised the USA as offering “an opportunity for people to better their lives, in a society where people are equal and all have the same access to resources”1. Comment on this statement, referring to work done in class on American myths and realities as well as current social and political developments.
(Evaluation: comment) (14 Punkte)
[1] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/oct/15/the-results-are-in-young-people-still-believe-in-t/
(Zugriff: 23.06.2021)
3.2
Walking home after Mrs. Winslow has told her about synesthesia for the first time, Nora reflects on her childhood as well as on her hopes and fears for the future. Write her interior monologue.
(Evaluation: re-creation of text) (14 Punkte)

Laila Lalami
The Other Americans

The novel is set in California where the Moroccan Guerraoui family immigrated to.
1
Your head in the clouds. The idiom rang like an echo in my life. It had started when I was
2
nine or ten, so absorbed in reading my books that I didn’t hear my name when I was called
3
to the dinner table. “You have your head in the clouds,” my mother would say, often with
4
affection. A few years later, when I helped out at the restaurant after school, the remark turned
5
into a bitter reprimand. “You gave out the wrong change. You have your head in the clouds,”
6
my mother complained. And later yet, when I decided against medical school, it became an
7
accusation. “You’re going to ruin your life, benti. You have your head in the clouds!”
8
Having my head in the clouds was my way of surviving. This realization came to me early,
9
on my first day at Yucca Mesa Elementary, when Mrs. Nielsen cheerfully read the children’s
10
names on the roster, but could not bring herself to say “Nora Zhor Guerraoui.” Twice she
11
started on the middle name and stopped, frowning at the consonant cluster. The class grew
12
silent, united in its curiosity about the word that had made the teacher falter. Then Mrs.
13
Nielsen lowered her reading glasses over her nose and peered at me. “What an unusual
14
name. Where are you from?” At recess, the kids fanned out and gathered again in small
15
groups – military kids, church kids, trailer-park kids, hippie kids – groups in which I knew
16
no one and no one knew me. I stayed behind by the blue wall that bordered the swings, and
17
watched from a distance. In the cafeteria, I ate the zaalouk my mother had put in my lunchbox,
18
while the other girls at my table whispered among themselves. Then Brittany Cutler, a pretty
19
blonde with plaited hair and a toothy smile, turned to me and asked, “What are you eating?”
20
I looked up, immensely grateful for a chance to finally talk to someone. “Eggplant.”
21
“It looks like poop.”
22
The other girls tittered, and for the rest of the day they called me a poop-eater. […]
23
In class, I was quiet. At lunch, I sat alone. The silence cloaked me with safety, but it betrayed
24
me a few months later, when Mrs. Nielsen became convinced I had a learning disability.
25
She called my mother into the classroom one sunny morning in May and used words like
26
severe mutism, social anxiety, oppositional behavior. The terms failed to elicit a flicker of
27
recognition from my mother. After a moment, Mrs. Nielsen’s voice dropped to a whisper.
28
“There’s something wrong with your daughter,” she said. I sat on a yellow mat in the corner,
29
playing, listening, waiting for my mother to say, “There’s nothing wrong with my daughter.”
30
But she only nodded slowly, as if she agreed with the teacher.
31
When my father came home that night and found out what had happened, he said the teacher
32
was a fool. “Hmara,” he called her, a word he reserved for the television anchors with whom
33
he argued during the eight o’clock news. Then he reached into the fridge for a beer and
34
started sorting through the bills on the kitchen counter. I watched my mother’s face for a
35
reaction. It was immediate. “And you know more than the teacher?”
36
“I know more about my daughter.”
37
“Salma didn’t have this problem in kindergarten. She was first in class, always.”
38
“There is no problem, Maryam.”
39
“If she doesn’t speak, she has to repeat the year. That’s what the teacher said.”
40
“No, she doesn’t.” He ruffled my hair. “Nor-eini, try to speak in class, okay?”
41
But the teacher’s threat, relayed and amplified by my mother, was indelible in my mind. Not
42
speaking meant that I would have to repeat, and repeating meant that I wouldn’t have to see
43
Brittany Cutler or her acolytes every day. So I stayed in kindergarten another year. I learned
44
the alphabet again and the pledge of allegiance again, though this time there was Sonya
45
Mukherjee, a girl who was just as quiet as me, a girl who didn’t fit in with the others, either.
46
By the time I started the first grade, I had one friend.
47
Still, it wasn’t until middle school that I fell in with my own tribe – music nerds. Two
48
summers earlier, having noticed my talk of music and colors, my father had enrolled me in
49
piano classes with Mrs. Winslow, a neighbor who had retired to the desert after years of
50
teaching music at USC. She gave a name to how I saw the world. Synesthesia. And with that
51
word came the realization that there was nothing wrong with me, that I shared this way of
52
experiencing sound with many others, some of them musicians.
Aus: Laila Lalami, The Other Americans, London: Bloomsbury Publishing 2019, S. 17 – 19

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