Jasmine and Fire

by Salma Abdelnour

  The park is nearly empty on this Monday morning. It’s a rectangular garden bounded by four streets, and about the size of a soccer field. There’s a round empty stone fountain in the middle, creaky wooden benches with peeling green paint, and everywhere patches of landscaping—olive trees, pines, geraniums, palm trees, pink and yellow lantana flowers. It’s tropical and green yet rundown, with mounds of dry dirt all over. One condo building along the edge of the park is like a vertical garden, its balconies tumbling with jasmine bushes and moss-green plants that look like tiny weeping willows. The Sanayeh Garden reminds me of Washington Square Park in Manhattan, especially in its state of partial landscaping, partial neglect, and its old men playing backgammon or chess on the benches. A similar scene here. I sit and look out onto the expensive apartment buildings surrounding the park, adjacent to more down-at-the-heel buildings now occupied by poorer Shiite families who migrated to the neighborhood from southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs during the war and in the various periods of conflict or tension since then. A few veiled women push their baby strollers past me. A stray orange cat scurries along. I feel the sun on my face and zone out. It’s nice here, though the weekday quiet is a little ominous. An hour later I’m retracing my steps home.

  My mother’s cousin Sami and his wife, Najwa, live on my street, and they invite me to lunch a few days later. They’re both Quakers, and since childhood I’ve found them pleasantly laid back, soothing to be around. Their cook Fahimeh serves us a soup called hrisseh, made with slow-braised lamb so soft it shreds in tender threads into the soup, its broth thickened with ground wheat and generously flavored with garlic. Soul medicine. As we linger at the table, dipping pieces of pita bread into a bowl of dibs kharoub—sweet, thick carob molasses mixed with tahini and a fixture on many Beirut tables—I tell them about my visit to the Sanayeh Garden the other day. After lunch Sami opens the curtain in the dining room and shows me two baby birds nesting in a crevice in the rocky windowsill outside: “There are almost no trees left in Beirut. Look at what happens.”

  The birds get me thinking about nature as home. We all, people and animals, try to make do in our habitats. In a war-torn country like Lebanon, through the conflict, through the constantly shifting cityscape, through the decimation of nature, the people who’ve never left and the people who’ve come back try to make do. Those birds on Sami and Najwa’s windowsill are doing what they can. They’re typical Beirutis, making the best of a compromised situation.

  In Beirut, the idea that both animals and people need healthy trees and fresh air to thrive—not just buildings and roads—seems to have gotten lost along the way. But the city does have a few public green patches besides the Sanayeh and the small open section of the Horsh al-Sanawbar. The Evangelical church downtown has a jasmine-filled vest-pocket park connecting it to the adjacent National Conservatory of Music. The development company Solidere, created by the late prime minister Rafik Hariri to rebuild parts of downtown, has added tiny gardens along the medians in the major roads that pour into the city center and is building a park on a stretch of landfill along the waterfront. The pest-management company Boecker has put in tiny flower beds in scattered spots around town, including some along the median at one end of Bliss, the street that forms the southern border of the AUB campus. But among the flowers, the company has also planted ugly, self-defeating signs nearly as big as the gardens themselves: BOECKER LOVES BEIRUT. Thanks, Boecker.

  Since the reading last month for the Horsh al-Sanawbar book, I’ve been going to other evening events—lectures at AUB or nearby, given by academics, filmmakers, musicians, architects, or other speakers from Beirut or abroad—on nights when I’ve had no plans and haven’t felt like staying home to read or watch a movie. One weeknight this month I attend a talk about graphic design by an American speaker in town from Brooklyn. I’m intrigued by the sound of it—the topic is the link between design and social activism—but unfortunately the lecture turns out to be crashingly dull and vague. At the end, I decide to raise my hand and ask a question. The speaker has said over and over how much he believes in “designing in the public interest” but never bothered to explain what that means. I’m feeling a little shy about asking the question, but I push myself to do it, figuring there’s a solid chance I’m not the only one wondering what he was talking about. He seems glad to see a hand up; at least someone was listening.

  As he answers, explaining how strong graphic design can play a role in influencing opinions and social activism, I realize that besides wanting to hear his reply, I’d also had an urge to signal with my question—in my American-accented English—Hi, I’m American, too. I’ve been feeling a shot of homesickness lately when I’ve overheard strangers in cafés saying they’re from New York, or Americans chatting together on the sidewalk or within earshot of me, as I’d heard a few people in the row behind me doing at the lecture tonight. Part of me wants to say, I’m one of you!

  At the same time, I’ve also been having the opposite impulse: the more I live here, the more I realize how much I enjoy speaking Arabic, finding my groove in it again, and learning all the new idioms and slang. Richard once said to me when I was trying to teach him a few Arabic phrases, “I love how emphatic Arabic sounds. So satisfying.”

  It’s true, Arabic vowels are extra-enunciated, and at the same time there’s a singsong lilt to the language, even more pronounced in certain regional accents. You can almost chew on the words. The language is a mouth workout, perfectly designed for powerful opinions and towering romance and profound melancholy and noisy anger and explosive punch lines.

  Since I got here, I’ve been badly wanting to sound like a native-speaking Lebanese again, not just like the typical emigrant who left during the war and never quite got her Arabic back 100 percent.

  But it can be hard at times to practice Arabic in Beirut; the language issue is tortured here. Nearly everyone is bilingual or trilingual (almost always with French or English), but instead of treating their second and third languages as extra tools for navigating the world, many Beirutis treat English or French as their primary language even if they’ve never lived overseas. Walk into any swank restaurant or boutique or modern office in Beirut, and you’re likely to be greeted in French or English first. Try to switch the conversation to Arabic, whether you’re Lebanese or not, and you’ll sense a resistance. That’s less true in rural villages around Lebanon, or at working-class-run venues in the city like street food stands, or with taxi drivers—situations where Arabic is usually spoken first and often exclusively. But in many contexts all over Beirut, the French-or-English-first habit dominates.

  “The Lebanese are trained from birth to leave Lebanon,” my cousin Karim, the political scientist, says to me when I bring up the language issue with him. It’s no wonder why: the employment situation in Lebanon is almost always bleak, not to mention the constant political instability. Companies around the world are now more equipped than local ones to hire educated graduates from Lebanon’s best universities and pay them decent salaries. There are other reasons, too, for the country’s outward gaze: Lebanon’s cosmopolitan legacy dates back to ancient Rome, when it was a crossroads for traders and travelers from Europe, Asia, and all over the globe. The country’s recent past as a French colony is not so easily forgotten, either. Speaking multiple languages fluently, most commonly French and English, has a long history around here.

  I can understand why the Lebanese want to practice and even show off our fluency in multiple languages, no doubt hard-earned while living or studying abroad for years during the war or going to an American- or French-run school in Lebanon. And I probably sound like a hypocrite when I get annoyed with the Lebanese for defaulting to French or English, since I’m still more comfortable in English myself. Sure, I do keep trying to override my English impulse and speak Arabic here, but I admit I’m proud of my English fluency and I sometimes get lazy with Arabic. Also, since I’ve had the chance to live in the United States for most of my life, I have
zero moral high ground compared to fellow Lebanese who’ve spent most or all of their lives in Lebanon, and lived through the entire war here, and who want to prove that they can function in the bigger, more prosperous world.

  Nonetheless, it’s hard not to sense that many Lebanese are also running from Arabic, in a desperate bid to sound and feel Euro or American. The habit of avoiding Arabic in daily life feels to me like a sneaky, insidious sort of shame, an elevation of a borrowed identity over a Lebanese one. It’s as if we’re saying Hey, the world doesn’t like Arabs much, but listen, we’re not Arabs!

  The other day I was reading a Lebanese news and culture website that was going on about how most Lebanese, allegedly something like 80 percent, are not Arabs but Phoenicians, descendants of a legendary, ingenious seafaring people who lived along this part of the Mediterranean coast from the fifteenth century B.C. and invented the alphabet. The Phoenicians are now considered by most historians to be just another name for the various Canaanite tribes who lived along this coast but were never unified as one tribe.

  The Lebanese, however, especially the country’s more historically West-leaning Christians, have always been enthusiastic about the Phoenician bit. Maybe a little too enthusiastic. Then again, that’s no big surprise. There’s a long history of Arab rejectionism in Lebanon. The country was carved out from the historic Bilad al Sham, or Greater Syria, region in part as a home for the Maronite Christians, who considered themselves distinct from the Arabs. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, the mutually beneficial relationship that the Maronites, living in the area then called Mount Lebanon, had been cultivating with France—the French protected the Maronites from persecution in exchange for a competitive foothold in the coveted eastern Mediterranean—resulted in a homeland for them and eventually in the nation of Lebanon.

  In Wadad Cortas’s memoir A World I Loved, she explains that for a number of years after World War I—from 1929 to 1943, when Lebanon was run as a French colony—most schools around Lebanon taught French and forbade Arabic, thanks to a calculated strategy by the French administration to instill a love of France and to erode any budding nationalist feelings in students. A tried and true colonial tactic, it worked beautifully in Lebanon. The effects have trickled down through the decades: French-speaking Lebanese parents continue the tradition by sending their kids to French-focused schools where Arabic is essentially a second language. And many of them speak mostly French at home, too. These days there are also many American-run schools that teach primarily in English. Although those schools are aimed in part at the American kids of expat parents working in Lebanon, they’re also filled with Lebanese kids who grow up speaking American-inflected English not just at school but at home, too.

  Ironically it’s my American friends in New York who most seem to love the sound of Arabic, and who keep asking me to speak it around them and teach it to them, and who listen in when I talk to my parents on the phone, even when it’s in our typically Lebanese, half-Arabic-half-English mishmash.

  “Hi, keefik? Shoo akhbarik?” Hi, how are you? What’s new?

  As proud as I am now that I’m getting comfortable again with my Arabic, I still have a long way to go before I can say I fully speak the language—my language. That’s because Arabic isn’t just caught in a schizophrenic battle with French and English in Lebanon; it’s also splintered into so many regional dialects that people living in different Arab countries, even sometimes in different towns or neighborhoods in the same country, are often speaking what can sound like different languages. For instance, my Arabic is specifically the Lebanese dialect. Had my family stayed in Lebanon throughout my school years, or had I studied Arabic on my own in the States, I would have learned the formal version of the language, called classical or modern standard (fus’ha in Arabic), which is understood all over the Arab world, taught in schools, and used on TV news, in official speeches, and in literature. But now when I listen to or try to read formal Arabic, I strain to understand it fully, stumbling over words I’m not used to.

  The other day I saw a funny article in a Beirut student-run newspaper called Hibr, which prints its stories in both English and Arabic. The piece was by a young Lebanese guy who was lamenting his generation’s increasing escape from Arabic and lack of interest in learning the formal fus’ha. He decided to write his rant in Lebanese-dialect Arabic, which is weird to see in print. It’s like writing for a Texan audience and using y’all instead of you. I understood every word of his piece, so rare for me when reading Arabic text, which is virtually always written in the more formal version. The student writer’s point was that if the formal fus’ha is scaring off Lebanese youth, and they’re not learning it so well in school, why not just embrace writing in darej (the local dialect) instead, since at least we’d be hanging on to some version of our language.

  I can’t see that happening anytime soon, but here’s an encouraging sign: around Beirut lately I’ve seen a few posters that say SPEAK YOUR LANGUAGE! in big bold letters. And if that op-ed piece in Hibr is any indication, Arabic may be earning some coolness points with the new generation.

  Another son of old family friends comes to Beirut for a visit one November weekend, with his wife and kids. They’re living in Saudi Arabia right now because of his job with a multinational corporation, and one night that weekend they invite me out to a downtown lounge called MyBar with their Beirut friends. As I look for them in the bar, I walk past the stylishly dressed young men and women milling around the glossy, white-walled space—a glamorous but, to my taste, soulless vibe. What can I say? I like dark little pubs so much more, the divey bars cropping up around Hamra, and similar hangouts in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Our crowd that night is mostly Lebanese, a mix of Anglophone and Francophone types, and as we’re standing around a high round table clinking our glasses of wine or whiskey-and-soda, a few in the group start asking me where I grew up, what I’m doing in Beirut these days. When I reply, in Arabic, that I’ve been living in the States but I’ve just moved back to Lebanon to see if it’s still home, they automatically switch into English. I try to divert the conversation back into Arabic, but no takers. On this night, like so many others, it’s a battle. I feel defeated. Do they just want to show off their English? Or have they decided I’m not Lebanese enough to speak Arabic with?

  I’m in a similar situation a few days later. Over drinks with Mirna at a packed pub called Torino in the Gemmayzeh area, I notice she’s wearing a cool strappy leather bracelet, and I compliment her on it. She tells me she bought it at a shop called Ants, a few blocks from my apartment. I stop by the store later in the week to scope out some early Christmas-shopping ideas. I walk in and find what’s essentially a Berkeley head shop: incense burning, strummy sitar music on the sound system, and a wall hung with leather and bead bracelets and necklaces. A few hippie kids are sitting on Indian-print cushions on the floor and chatting in a mix of English and Arabic and French, and what sounds like Armenian, too. I ask a question in Arabic about the price of a bracelet I like, and one guy, curly black hair tumbling to his shoulders, answers me in English. Same when I ask another question, about whether a pendant hanging on the wall comes on a brown instead of a black leather rope. I can’t tell if here at Ants, on this rainy afternoon, I’m in the same kind of language war I was fighting at that downtown bar the other night—or if this guy actually doesn’t speak Arabic well enough to answer me, although he seems to understand it perfectly.

  Returning exiles like me must be confusing—not just to ourselves but to everyone. What language to use with us? Many of us want to speak Arabic and get it back up to speed, but our accent hints that we haven’t lived here in a long time. How should I communicate with this person? I imagine a Lebanese thinking. Is she a real Lebanese, or is she one of those people who is just back for a little visit from the States and can barely speak Arabic anymore?

  I’m also starting to notice something funny about my English as the months go by in Beirut. Even though I can sound very
American when I want to, I hear myself switching into a kind of Lebanese-accented English at times. In Lebanon, some English words get so Lebanese-ized that they become essentially Arabic. Sorry, for instance, becomes suhrry, the vowel clipped, the r’s rolled. Speaking certain common English words with a Lebanese accent is a halfway point between the two languages, a way of not siding too much with either one, and not sounding too Americanized. I hear myself doing it more and more. I wonder, though: the longer I stay in Beirut and work more Arabicized English words like suhrry and okeh (instead of okay) into my vocab, will I erode my hard-earned American accent? Yes, probably. If you fall into new pronunciation habits, over time they’re bound to stick.

  I’m wondering how much I should care about hanging on to my American English, even while I dust off my Lebanese Arabic—and whether I can re-earn my identity as a Lebanese local, linguistically at least, and still hang on to my Americanness. The languages are starting to battle it out in my head, or maybe they’re learning to live together. More and more lately, as I walk down the street, I notice that I’m thinking certain thoughts in Arabic, like What’s happening to this building? Can I walk through this construction site, or do I have to go around the block? I haven’t had internal monologues in Arabic since I was a child. But other kinds of thoughts still come more naturally in English. I need to get home asap and finish up that assignment, for instance. Or Richard, I wish you could be here right now to see this insane billboard. When I talk to one of my American friends in my head, and talk to myself about certain subjects like work assignments, it’s still always in English. But when I talk to the city, and have imaginary conversations with its streets and buildings and history, I’m surprised to find that I’m starting to address them in Arabic.