بين لغتين / Entre deux langues

I teach maths to sixteen-year-olds and they think I'm made of logic. What they don't know is that I spend Tuesday and Thursday evenings writing poetry that I can't always say whether it works or not, because the criteria I'm using shift depending on which language I'm writing in. Arabic is where I grew up. French is what my education was conducted in, starting at age six, and what I still reach for when I want to think carefully rather than feel quickly. Some ideas come in one and won't translate. I have a poem about my grandmother that I've written six times in Arabic and three times in French and each version is true and none of them is complete. Casablanca is a city that also lives in two languages, sometimes in the same sentence, sometimes in the same shop sign. The billboard on the corner of Rue Mohammed V near where I grew up has been half-repainted four different times that I can remember. That's the image I keep returning to. Not as metaphor, just as fact: a thing that has been partially replaced and is still somehow standing. I'm not trying to write the same poem twice. I'm trying to find what exists in neither language and sits between them.