All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  In the taxi on the way to the airport, a wave of nostalgia—for the life I had only just begun to live here—welled up in me so fast and hard that it prickled in my nose. The looming apartment buildings we passed shone with the lights of countless other lives, and for a moment, I loved every person in the vast, dusty metropolis.

  The redheaded American student raised his hand and offered his take on the tall, thin teacher’s video clip. Rebellion was a natural phase, he surmised, both in human development and in the development of a nation. Consensus was a sign of further maturity. As he spoke, he spun his pen around his thumb like a debater.

  The teacher then turned to me. What was my opinion on the social problems of the youth of Egypt?

  The redheaded American tapped his pen on the table expectantly. All I could think of were barbed comments about spoiled kids. “If everything the teenagers they ask for it, they get it, then this is bad,” I offered. “It means they do not have something . . . strong inside?”

  The Belgian girl winced, but the teacher gave a surprised smile and a nod of recognition.

  After class, I went to the office to request a transfer to a lower level. Abstract principles, hypothetical proposals, social problems—I didn’t want to talk about any of this. The one time I had felt fluent was that dreamy evening on Hassan’s roof way back in 1998. It was a good scale on which to grade myself. If my performance on Hassan’s roof was an A-minus in bantering fluency, I was at a C-plus now. I wasn’t going to improve that score by discussing consensus and demagoguery.

  “I don’t want to talk about politics,” I told the administrator, a woman named Madame Zuzu. This wasn’t exactly right, but it seemed like a more concise way of explaining my dislike of abstraction. “I don’t really have friends here”—not any I spoke Arabic with, anyway—“so I need practice talking to people I don’t know, about regular, daily things.”

  Madame Zuzu raised one eyebrow. “Don’t be so sure,” she replied. Her head was swaddled in a blue nylon turban, which made her look like a storefront psychic and her pronouncement sound like prophecy.

  One minute into our conversation, I regretted calling Medo. He was insisting I spend the whole day with him, despite my repeated assertion that I didn’t have an entire day to spend with him. Nothing resolved, I hung up, feeling unreasonably angry at all Egyptians—that same street-corner chattiness that I loved, that urge to pull people close, could be exhausting as well.

  I was also angry with myself. What had I expected, calling up a total stranger just because he’d left a nice comment on my blog? “i hope its not rude if i ask u to let me know when u come . . . ,” Medo had written.

  And something he had said on the phone had made me nervous.

  “Do you know how old I am?” he had asked.

  “Er . . . no . . . twenty-five?” I guessed, generously.

  Medo laughed self-consciously. “I’m, well, no, I’m twenty.”

  That put him squarely in the realm of shabab, a word we had just been using in class: a period of golden youth afforded by the precision of Arabic vocabulary, the stage of life after adolescence and before full adulthood. Back in my own golden youth, my relationship with Egyptian shabab (it was a plural noun too) had been a bit troubled. There were the downtown idlers who hissed, and the ones who called me names. One day I happened to learn the word sharmoota—whore—from an Egyptian friend; the very next day, strolling down the street, I passed a man who barked the word at me, out of the blue. (At first I had been gratified to understand; only two blocks later did it occur to me to be angry.) Then there were the sweet but unnervingly persistent shabab, such as the slim man with big eyes who had followed me on a thirty-minute walk home, then stood outside my building for hours, staring up at my window. In my private lexicon, shabab had taken on a distinctly negative connotation.

  Now, though, the word rang out in songs and was heralded in newspaper stories, for it was the shabab, those brave young men (and women), who had led the demonstrations during the January 25 revolution. The energy of youth had toppled the grizzled old pharaoh Mubarak.

  After I got off the phone with Medo the shabb, it seemed prudent to email him and mention that I was married.

  “lol, but seriously hadn’t any intentions lol,” he wrote back. “just want to get to know u and show u parts of my country too.”

  Over a few more calls, I bargained him down to a coffee date, in the suburb of Heliopolis, noted for its historic cafés where British soldiers caroused during World War II.

  “You know where the Starbucks is?” Medo asked.

  I arrived late, frazzled and sweating; he was looking cool in sunglasses, with artfully gelled sandy-brown hair. He shook my hand and smiled, revealing braces. He was so tall he barely fit in his chair.

  He had brought his sister, sixteen-year-old Sara, who also wore braces. Perched shyly next to her brother, she looked trim and sensible in jeans and a simple, powder-pink headscarf. “She doesn’t speak much English,” Medo said in apology. “I will translate.” I knew Medo wanted to practice his English, so I let him go.

  Our conversation was as awkward as a job interview and a first date combined. I was acutely aware of our age gap. He was in college, studying journalism, he told me, but his school—staff and students—was on strike at the moment. This was slowing him down. “I want to leave Egypt as soon as I can,” he declared. “This country is a disaster. This is why I practice English.”

  I glanced at Sara. Did she know her brother wanted to move away? I hadn’t expected this. In his comments on my blog and in his email, he had sounded proud of his country.

  “Yes, I want to show people what is good about Egypt,” Medo explained. “So they are not afraid.” Medo had one foot in the country, one foot out—an ambivalent ambassador.

  As we slurped the last of our drinks, Medo said, “Sara has a dentist appointment. It’s a couple of blocks from here. Yalla.”

  It was 9:30 p.m., which was not unusual—doctors kept late hours to accommodate working families and the heat. As a social outing, though, visiting a dentist was new to me. A few blocks down, we turned into a seemingly abandoned mini-mall where stray cats nosed through trash on the stair landings. The dentist’s lobby was spotless. The three of us sat on an old turquoise vinyl sofa in the waiting room.

  A wall-mounted TV showed a classic black-and-white Egyptian movie, from that golden era in the mid-twentieth century when Cairo was the center of cultural production in the Arab world. The heroine, her hair sculpted in dramatic black waves, fought passionately—and wittily—with the be-fezzed hero. “The dresses then were amazing,” Medo sighed.

  The dentist called us all in, and Medo and I sat to one side while Sara’s braces were tightened. When the dentist was done, he sat down to chat. He had been following the Occupy Wall Street movement, he told me in English, and he saw parallels between it and Egypt’s situation, which was growing tense as the parliamentary elections crept closer.

  For decades, Egypt had been so stagnant that political machinations had no bearing on daily survival, except to change the price of bread. Regular people rarely bothered to discuss politics in any detail; instead, they cracked a joke or two and carried on. Now, though, every political shift was felt immediately in daily life, and everyone had an opinion. I found myself wishing I could participate and reply to the dentist in Arabic.

  Oh, Madame Zuzu, I thought, looking over at Medo and Sara. Of course you were right, with your blue turban and your prophecy. Of course you looked skeptical when I said I didn’t have any friends and didn’t want to talk about politics.

  Two Tongues

  The textbook I used in my first year of Arabic class, in 1990, had none of the elements that were common in my French curriculum from the same time—no cultural sidebars, no recurring college-age characters who meet frequently at a café to chat. Instead, its stilted design match
ed the basic, formal Fusha it taught. The glossy pages were entirely in Arabic, not typeset but handwritten, in simple calligraphy. Watercolor illustrations of objects—cats, desks, pencils, disembodied limbs—floated in space. In one image, a boy’s head tilted over a small bowl, a delicate stream of liquid pouring from his mouth. An existential red question mark hovered over him—what could be the matter? ʼAndi qay’, read his answer: I have vomit.

  The textbook shaped my image of Arabic, and not in an entirely positive way. Not only did the phrase ʼandi qay’ still pop to mind every time I felt queasy, but from the start I had the impression of a language that was cryptic, intimidating, and not quite rooted in place. I kept the book for more than twenty years, as a relic from an earlier time, and it sat on my shelf, undisturbed, until I was packing for my return to Cairo. I reached for my beloved Badawi dictionary, that lively catalog of life in Egypt, and my glance happened to fall on the spine of the adjacent volume, my old textbook. All this time I had never bothered to read the author’s name, written in Arabic.

  Dr. Elsaid Badawi.

  This confounded me. All this time I had pegged Dr. Badawi, with his just-make-something-up ethos, as a freewheeling colloquial guy. How could the same man have written my stodgy Fusha textbook too? They were opposite poles of the Arabic language!

  As soon as I arrived in Cairo, I made an appointment to meet Dr. Badawi. He was officially retired, and I doubted he remembered me, as I had not distinguished myself as a particularly good student. Now I was making fresh efforts, though, and I wanted to ask him about the best language-learning strategies. I also wanted to ask him a thornier question: Fusha or Ammiya, the language of books or the language of the street? Where did his true loyalties lie?

  Dr. Badawi still kept an office at the American University in Cairo, but in the time since I had last studied there, the institution had ceased to be technically in Cairo. The prestigious school had pulled up stakes from its small, nearly century-old campus on Tahrir Square, with its tree-shaded courtyards, to a massive new lot in a satellite city to the east. The bus hurtled past the city I knew, onto a desert highway edged with billboards for new communities—AUC’s partners in exile, or escape. Riviera Heights, La Rêve, Smart Village, and a place called, unfortunately, Rehab (it means open space, from the verb rahiba, with a breathy h, to be roomy).

  In the years since I had first run up against the stark difference between written and spoken Arabic, between Fusha and dialects like Ammiya, I had learned the proper linguistic term for the phenomenon: diglossia, literally “two tongues.” Communities that exhibit diglossia typically use a “high” version of a language for formal situations and a “low” one in casual contexts. In Arabic-speaking countries, that meant fancy Fusha for reading and writing and general impressing, and the local dialect for everyday conversations.

  Many communities once characterized as diglossic—Haiti, for instance, split between French and Creole—had since closed the gap through official policy. But for Arabic, spoken in more than two dozen countries, there has never been a single regulating body to push changes, and more important, Fusha has been too closely linked to heritage, history, and religion to be phased out. In fact, according to some linguists, the situation has split into triglossia. Most students in the Arab world learn three registers of Arabic: the language of the Quran (even if the students are not Muslim), a somewhat more modern style of Fusha found in newspapers and contemporary books, and their own spoken dialect. In any case, no Arab learns Fusha as a mother tongue. Children grow up hearing and speaking a dialect; elementary school brings Fusha, essentially as a second language.

  Foreigners typically learn Arabic the other way around. Fusha is taught as the base, the scaffolding, and after some years, a dialect is laid over it like a tent. I had built up so much Fusha infrastructure that when it came time to lay on the dialect, it didn’t fit right—my Fusha kept poking through. Functionally this was fine, as Egyptians could understand me, and this was how teachers had always justified a Fusha-first approach. But for fluency, it didn’t help. Spoken Fusha, with its archaic grammar and vocabulary, always sounds unnatural, like speaking in Shakespearean forsooths and whithers and thous, with some biblical begats for good measure. Plus, I was forever analyzing everything in terms of my trusty Roman-numeral verb chart, which slowed down my speech.

  Over the years, as I contemplated the problems I had encountered learning Arabic, I wondered whether I had gone about it wrong. Learning Fusha first didn’t mimic how Arabs learned their own language. Then again, maybe that wasn’t the right model either, as many Arabs I’d met positively loathed their Fusha educations, rarely felt comfortable writing, and seldom read Arabic for pleasure. Even worse, I had found that many Arabs were barely aware of the magnificent root system, the engine that drove their own language—and I couldn’t very well give up thinking about that, could I?

  Dr. Badawi was an expert in the field of Arabic education, so surely he could advise me. And to have written two such utterly divergent books, he must have resolved diglossia in his own life, as Arabs must do if they want to move between formal and informal situations.

  The bus sighed past one last fantastical compound—Future, read the sign on the faux Roman coliseum—and dropped me on the edge of the new campus. I wandered lost among vast plazas edged with sleek, geometric buildings in striped earth tones, their walls cut through with dramatic arches. On the stairs by a food court, I phoned Dr. Badawi for guidance. “I just passed the Cinnabon?”

  A few minutes later, Dr. Badawi strode across the courtyard, looking relaxed and cheerful, in a camel-brown blazer and striped shirt, his white hair brushed back—just as I remembered him. He led me to his office, fetched me tea, and settled in behind a desk strewn with papers.

  When I told him how I’d noticed two seemingly contradictory books on my shelf, both by him, he laughed. “I recently wrote a dictionary of the Quran. Now that’s the exact opposite of Ammiya!” The book had taken him five years to write, and it garnered the annual Islamic book prize from the government of Iran, he was proud to report. He went to Tehran to accept the award, and shook President Ahmedinejad’s hand.

  But how did Dr. Badawi reconcile these two—or three—sides of Arabic? How should it be taught?

  “The sensible thing, the most efficient thing—though we don’t always do that, do we?—is to start with the written language,” Dr. Badawi said. This was not the answer I had been hoping for. “Because if you focus on speaking,” he continued, “the only person you have to speak to is your teacher. With a book, you have it with you always.”

  Dr. Badawi seemed to be conjuring a vision of scholarship from the past, the kind in which students sat alone in the library and communed with the ancients. Generations of Arabists in the West had learned this way. One of my most erudite professors had never learned a dialect; he cheerfully spoke Fusha to taxi drivers when he traveled to Jordan for research. According to Dr. Badawi, professors of Arabic at Oxford were notorious for beginning the semester by saying, “Here’s the alphabet and a text to read. Go home and start working, and we’ll discuss next week.” Class enrollment would then drop to three freakishly dedicated students, enough to justify the professors’ existence and “give them money for the wine at their dinners,” as Dr. Badawi put it.

  Although I loved the quirks of the classical language, Fusha always felt a bit theoretical when I read it, more like solving a calculus problem than anything else. When I read the colloquial phrases in Badawi’s dictionary, I could hear a voice in my head saying the words, an amalgam of all the teachers and taxi drivers I’d ever had. It never happened when I read Fusha; all I heard was my own faltering voice. To internalize the flow of classical Arabic, I would have had to listen to thousands of hours of dull news broadcasts. Speeches by politicians worked too—perhaps Hassan Nasrallah, the fiery, eloquent leader of Hezbollah, or less controversially, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian pr
esident who led the 1952 revolution and who was still admired for his moving Fusha oratory.

  So I wondered if I had gone wrong in progressing too far along the path of reading Fusha. “It was only after I came to Cairo and learned some Ammiya, and really spoke to people,” I told Dr. Badawi, “that I started to believe in Arabic as a real language, attached to a real culture.” After all, even Nasser spoke Fusha only for effect, setting up a grand idea in the loftiest possible tones, then underscoring it with an Ammiya punchline. The people listening weren’t native Fusha speakers; no one was.

  “It’s true,” Dr. Badawi acknowledged. “Without colloquial, you don’t really know the language.”

  He reconciled the gap between writing and speaking by emphasizing what he called ʼammiyat al-muthaqqafeen, or cultured-people’s colloquial, the type of Arabic an educated person uses to discuss serious or abstract subjects. It’s characterized by colloquial word order (subject, then verb) and other simplified grammar, but most of the vocabulary comes from the classical language or is borrowed, where necessary, from foreign languages. Dr. Badawi considered this the best approach for his foreign university students, because “your target is your counterpart in the society—not a carpenter, not a janitor. You want to know my language. So that’s what I do—I teach my language.”

  If your goal was to be a scholar, this was great. In the long run, you would be hobnobbing with other professors from all over the Arab world, and you would be able to express yourself eloquently. But it wasn’t my goal to be a scholar, as I had realized while staring out the window in my spoken Fusha class in 1997. Speaking educated Arabic about educated things was not something I had ever found particularly fun. And if there was one thing I was determined to do in Cairo this time, it was to have fun.