Episode: 26 — "Bi-cultural + Bi-lingual" · Full Episode #26
Date: 16 June 2020
Language: Mixed Arabic and English
Rafa Rjeibi (رفاء الرجيبي) is a Libyan applied linguistics lecturer. She was born in Newcastle, where her father was completing a PhD, and raised between the United Kingdom and Libya. She teaches Arabic at SOAS and the London School of Economics, and has been a teaching assistant at Tripoli University since 2007.
Rafa's first teaching job was at her mother's summer English school in Libya. At nineteen, she was handed a classroom of 15–20 students, some older than her, and panicked. What she noticed that day stayed with her: the block was not language. Her students could not express themselves because they had never been taught they had a right to an opinion. She traced this back to a culture of instruction that treated disagreement as disrespect.
In her second year of school, a teacher told the class she would know who had prayed from their eyes — that their eyes would "sparkle" (تتلقلق). Rafa decided to test it: she did not pray. Her friend Du'aa did. The teacher identified them correctly. The experience planted a lifelong suspicion of didactic lies told to children, and shaped how she approaches teaching now.
See: The Fly School
Rafa won a Libyan government scholarship for a PhD in the UK in 2014. The process took four years. Her file was lost. Men in military gear took over the ministry. At one point she compiled a list of 300 names of stalled applicants to force the ministry to notice hers. Walking through London one day she saw a sign for Arabic teacher training at SOAS and enrolled the same day. She turned out to be part of the first cohort and graduated top of her class.
See: The PhD Nightmare
At a checkpoint in Libya, an officer refused to believe her dialect was "Libyan enough" — her accent had drifted after years in Britain. She answered: "My car is Libyan, my passport is Libyan, my name is Libyan." The story became a way of talking about how language is used as a gate to identity.
Rafa's central idea in the episode: children raised between two cultures do not simply speak two languages — they forge a third, a lingua franca built from both, which becomes their real native tongue. Code-switching, in her framing, is not a failure of either language but a feature of the combined one.
"My car is Libyan, my passport is Libyan, my name is Libyan." (EP 26)