Generation Zero: Standing on Nobody's Shoulders

Friends were talking about being first generation. One meant being the first in the family to get a degree; another had gone further than parents who had already been to university. It was a friendly conversation. I sat there doing the arithmetic of my own family and trying to work out where I fitted into it. The ladder they were describing starts above my head. Their first rung is a floor nobody in my family had ever stood on.

I was the first to finish elementary school. That is where I begin counting.

I call that generation zero. There is a line people in research like about standing on the shoulders of giants. I like it too, but it assumes somebody has already done the work of becoming shoulders. In my family, education had not yet given anyone a reason to believe in it. What people could see was a pair of hands missing from the household, then another year without wages, then another. The return was always somewhere in a future nobody in the family had reached.

So they told me to stop. In middle school I could have started working. In high school I had already spent long enough on this. They were not strangers trying to discourage me. They loved me, and every dirham mattered, and I could understand the argument. That made it harder. I had very little to put against it except that I still wanted to know things.

Curiosity helped. I read things because they had print on them and took things apart because they had screws. It was an appetite before it was anything a school could reward. Stubbornness helped too, although I am less proud of that. Some of it was a boy refusing to let the people who told him to stop be right. It happened to keep me moving in a direction worth moving in. I cannot tell that story honestly and make all of it determination.

At school there were always classmates who understood in one pass what took me three. In a class of forty-five or fifty, we could have learned a great deal from one another. Instead we were ranked against one another, and much of what the room rewarded was how well we could reproduce what had been written on the board.

I nearly got expelled in high school for correcting my physics teacher, with math, about physics. I was right, which made it worse. Reasoning could get treated as insubordination while a correct reproduction of the lesson passed for understanding.

The crowded rooms left teachers little chance to notice what was happening in the lives behind the answers. Some of the students who were quicker than me left. The cost was not tuition; we were in public school. It was another year in which the family could not use their hands or collect their wages. The argument to stop was sometimes an act of care, and accepting it did not make them less intelligent or less brave.

I carry their counterfactuals around with me. Any full account of generation zero is a group photo where most of the faces are missing, and the missing were not the weak ones. The rooms lost them.

I said nobody in the family believed in education. That was almost true. My grandmother was dying the year of my baccalaureate, and in her last days, battling death and losing, she told me to follow my studies to the end. That was the whole instruction. She did not say which end. Not a diploma, not a degree, not a title; she never defined it, and then she was gone, and an instruction whose end is undefined cannot be completed. It can only be abandoned. That is what saved me. I thought of giving up at every stage of this story, and I do not mean idly, I mean I came to the edge of it more than once with the papers practically in my hand. Each time, the same small arithmetic stopped me: quitting would mean deciding that this, here, was the end she meant, and that was the one decision I had no right to make on her behalf. So I kept going, not always out of hope, some years out of nothing but the sentence. That thought kept my mind alive. That memory kept it looking. It still does. I am many years and several countries past that room now, and I have not found the end yet, which I have slowly come to understand is what she was actually giving me. Not a goal. A direction with no stopping condition. In a family with no evidence that education paid, she could not leave me a map or money or a name to call. What she had, at the very end, was one sentence’s worth of belief, and she spent all of it on me.

By university, I had spent years being told I should stop. I was pursuing something my family could not see paying off, and I still did not know where I was going. There was nobody to ask whether a school was good, whether a field had a future, whether this form or that exam was the one I should worry about. I learned what the next step was while trying to take it. When somebody asks how I planned the path, I can make it sound much more deliberate now than it felt then. A great deal happened late, by accident, or because I stood near someone who knew something I did not.

The part I did choose was the people I tried to stay near. I think of some of them as unnamed mentors, because they did not know they were mentoring me. They were doing their work where I could watch, and the work kept changing the size of words I thought I understood. Where I came from, an engineer was a civil engineer. That was the kind anyone had seen. A community I had to find showed me there were other doors behind that word. My school and teachers were assigned to me; the community was something I could choose. Nearly every door in this story was first shown to me by someone standing in it.

Staying did not put a net underneath me. When you are generation zero, failure has a different shape, because you failed at a thing you were told not to do. You did not just lose the years and the wages those years could have been, you lost the argument. Every stop you refused becomes an I told you so with compound interest, and the people who would have caught you are the same people whose judgment you overruled to get here. You fall alone, onto concrete, in front of an audience that predicted it. So no, I could not fail fast. I could not really fail at all. Every decision had to be calculated like it was the last one, every risk priced twice, every opportunity turned over and inspected for the trap, because one real mistake does not teach you a lesson, it ends the experiment and proves the family right. People sometimes read that constant calculation as coldness or as fear. It is neither. It is what careful looks like when you are the only collateral you have.

One offer I still remember came from a professor. Stay in Morocco and do a PhD with me, he said; it is better for your future, you will just waste your time in the USA. There was no funding, no lab, no salary, no environment in the offer. I was already paying for research out of my own pockets. Staying would have meant continuing to do that, without the support I needed to live while working. The only resource in the offer was me.

I wanted to be chosen badly enough that I sometimes let interest in my work feel like belief in me. I overvalued a door when I had no other door, and I could talk myself out of asking an obvious question because asking felt like ingratitude. I had to learn to look at what an offer actually provided, even when I liked how it sounded. I also had to build alternatives. A no is difficult to mean when there is nowhere else to go. That part took longer to learn than the advice makes it sound.

When I think back to the table with my friends, I feel no bitterness. Their parents’ degrees were somebody’s generation zero once. I do not need their climbs to be small for mine to have been difficult. What I want is for someone after me to have one person in the family who has been down the path and can answer a question about it. When she wonders whether continuing is reasonable, there should be somebody who can say from experience that the next step exists.

I was never told which end to reach, only to keep following. For now there is this work, and there are people I can make the route a little less obscure for. She will stand on shoulders. I know, because I am building them, and I know what they cost, because for one generation, mine, the shoulders and the wall were the same thing.