by Zora O'Neill
In the afternoon, we drove to the village of Tunis, a hangout for Cairene artists and other bohemians. Our security detail, the soldiers with the taped-together guns, waved our bus down a small lane, where it promptly got stuck. As our driver engaged in minute K-turns, village residents, plus a few goats and a dreamy-eyed water buffalo, trickled in to watch. The soldiers looked on from their jeep, unapologetic.
I took the time to think of palindromes—gumal mitsha’liba, somersault phrases. This term I had learned from Hamdi, the husband of an American woman, Melissa, I knew from grad school. Like me, she had come to Cairo in 1997; she had met Hamdi and had lived here ever since. Hamdi was as much of a word freak as exuberant Ahmed the Word Lord, but where Ahmed quoted classical Arabic poetry and Pharaonic texts, Hamdi was entranced with the colloquial language. He had once voluntarily stayed in jail, on a minor drug charge, so he could have more time to collect the colorful stories, songs, and curse words of his fellow prisoners. Since I had told him about my idea to write a book about the joys of learning Arabic, he had been suggesting topics.
“Tell them about the old books with their rhyming titles,” he said. Hamdi was an antiques dealer, and he pulled a dusty volume from a stack in his warehouse: Takhlees al-Ibreez ila Talkhees Bareez, a nineteenth-century travelogue about the “pure gold” (ibreez) of a sojourn in Paris (Bareez).
“Tell them about the rhythm of the language—can you mark it in musical notation?” The natural cadence of Arabic could be heard in everyday speech, and Egyptians had elevated Quranic recitation to an art.
“Tell them about the doubled roots.” These proliferated in Ammiya, as though Egyptians couldn’t resist repeating particularly delectable sounds. Hamdi spun through a few of the juiciest ones: mishmish, that impossible apricot; masmas, with the suitably chewy, heavy s, to suck the meat off a bone; shibshib, the Ammiya word for flip-flop or slipper, from its shuffling sound on the floor.
“Tell them about the palindromes . . .” Himar ramih (حمار رامح), a jumping donkey. Walad wa-dalw (ولد ودلو), a boy and a bucket. And wasn’t there something in the Quran about kullun fi falakin (كلٌّ في فلكٍ), each in its orbit? The Mamluk historian Ibn Iyas, chronicler of Egypt in the fifteenth century, recalled a quip by the respected judge Qadi al-Fadil, “سر فلا كبت بك الفرس.” That is, “Sir, fa-la kabat bika al-faras”—Go, and may your horse not fall beneath you. Ahmed and Hamdi both probably knew these, and a dozen more.
After a small lifetime, the driver extricated us from the lane and let the doors wheeze open. We ambled past adobe abodes—no sooner had I thought it than Ahmed the Word Lord said it—and cinder-block structures bedecked with gaudy balustrades. Children trailed behind us, one girl in a party dress and haphazard ponytails. A tractor came trundling along, and Ahmed shooed the children out of the road with a string of synonyms: “Ya awlad! Ya atfal! Ya abna’ wa-banat!” Even in the face of danger, why say just “Hey, kids!” when there are three ways to say it, each more delightful than the last? They laughed at the living thesaurus and scampered off.
On the bus back to Cairo, I sprawled in my seat, exhausted. Ahmed gave up the microphone but continued to pace the aisle, dispensing wisdom. His conversation steered away from ancient Egypt and toward his other favorite subject, the English language.
A slight German woman was the only person on the bus with more pep than Ahmed. Earlier, she had complained that we were not moving fast enough; now she was determined to keep to our itinerary. “Are we going to see the waterwheels?” she demanded. Faiyoum’s historic waterwheels, in various incarnations, had kept the network of canals flowing for thousands of years.
“Do you want to see the waterwheels?” Ahmed replied with a playful grin.
“Are there waterwheels nearby?” she asked.
“Which one would you like to see?” Ahmed countered.
She balled her hands into fists. “Answer my question!” she wailed.
Ahmed, still smiling, could have been Egypt’s wise fool, a character called Goha who delights in confounding everyone he encounters. In one fable, someone asks, “Widnak minein, ya Goha?”—Where’s your ear? With his right hand, Goha reaches up over the top of his head to touch his left ear. In everyday conversation, Egyptians use this question to tell someone to get to the point; the gesture alone, reaching over the head, can telegraph “You’re doing it all wrong.” If only the German woman had known this—she could have bested Ahmed at his own game, with a wordless retort to his maddening questions. Instead, she groaned and flopped back in her seat.
A British woman commented on Ahmed’s English skills. He studied avidly, he told her. “The Oxford English Dictionary—it beggars description. It is ineffable!” he said. “With that one book, everything else opens up to you. The Library of Congress, everything.”
I had thought the same thing about Arabic, trusting that something so vast could be contained between the covers of a dictionary. My green Hans Wehr was only a fraction of the size of the OED, and I had still lost myself in it.
At the edge of the city, our bus idled in a traffic jam. Ahmed quizzed us on English vocabulary words. I stared out the window, too tired to speak but playing along in my head.
Someone cut through Ahmed’s swirling wordplay to ask, “What do you mean, exactly?” I pictured the soap-opera matron, hands on her hips, and thought, with mild satisfaction, I can say that in Arabic: Azzzzdak eih bizzzzzabt? The woman’s throaty voice echoed in my head.
“I’m just talking about words,” Ahmed replied coolly. For a moment, with his fixed grin and his overlarge ears, he resembled America’s own wise fool, Alfred E. Neuman. “Not reality.”
In my second week in class, my tired brain slowly recovered from Ahmed overload. Hani energized me with a batch of snappy, real-world adjectives. Milyan, read my notebook: fat, fleshy in a good way, “filled out”; sha’i: wound up, like a hyperactive toddler; multazim: dedicated and on the ball, and its opposite, nayim fil-’asal: “sleeping in honey,” totally clueless. When the next weekend came, I felt multazim enough to leave the city on my own.
I took a local train out of Cairo, headed for a camel market. Ahmed would approve, I thought as I boarded: qitar, the word for train, comes from the verb for linking a line of camels together with ropes. The windows were jammed permanently open, and my car was ankle-deep in the split hulls of sunflower seeds. I was the only non-Egyptian on board, and one of the few people not transporting a huge bundle. Children worked their way down the aisle selling plastic toys, safety pins, and more sunflower seeds. The train chugged through the outer neighborhoods, past trash dumps and homely high-rises in medias res, bristling with rebar.
We eventually emerged in the lush delta, the area where the Nile bloomed outward—from the sky it would look like a sawsan, a lotus blossom. In these acres of river-blessed green, gawky egrets poked at alfalfa and women wrestled with cabbages as big as boulders. Men in the fields watched the train roll by. These were the fellahin, the tillers of Egypt’s rich soil, the salt of the earth; in the popular imagination, and as I had seen them twenty years earlier, these men wore the traditional long cotton robes called galabias. Now they stood in ill-fitting T-shirts and trousers, staring vaguely, as if they’d forgotten what they’d come outside to do.
Working his way down the aisle, the conductor did a slapstick double take when he saw me. “Ya sitt hanim!” he said with a flourish as he gave me my ticket. His remark—My distinguished lady!—paid respect, but underscored how out of place I was. Sweaty and dust-covered like everyone else, I was nonetheless a relative aristocrat, in still-creased pants fresh from the laundry, a silk shirt, and a jaunty hat. So naturally I was deserving of the old Ottoman honorific sitt hanim.
The Ottoman Turks took over Egypt in 1517, and they left their mark on food, clothing, and language. They brought the hookah (sheesha), fezzes, and chicken kebabs, or at least the name for
them, shish tawoo’. The Ottoman system of honorifics merged with the local one, and although Nasser had officially banned the terms in the 1950s, as part of his populist movement, many remained in circulation. To call a man a bey or a basha or an effendi could be a genuine act of kowtowing or a sarcastic gibe. It was also a conveniently easy joke.
“Alf shukr, ya bey,” I told the conductor—A thousand thanks, my good sir. He gave a grin and a half-salute and stepped into the next car.
Off the wheezing train in the village of Birqash, I was still a few miles from the camel market. After a little negotiation with a passing pickup truck, I was lifted into the back, which was already packed with standing passengers. As I clambered in, I snagged a pant leg and ripped it wide open, an eight-inch-long, L-shaped tear from midthigh down. The wind blew cold on my naked knee, and the only other woman on the truck made frantic gestures for me to cover it up.
The woman pulled me down to sit on the truck bed, in a forest of men’s legs, and pushed the fabric into place. If only I had bought those safety pins the kid had been peddling on the train. Together the woman and I rooted through my bag for a solution. When I pulled out a long scarf, she grabbed it and, in a few quick moves, tied it like a tourniquet around my knee.
“Ya bashmuhandis!” I crowed, and shook her hand. I was paying the conductor’s compliment forward with another Turkish-style honorific, basha (pasha), plus the Arabic word for engineer. The woman, a sturdy fellaha in her sixties, laughed and tugged at the leg of the man nearest her.
“Did you hear what she called me? A bashmuhandis!” she shouted up to him.
Word spread, and soon the whole truck rang with laughter. A man offered me a hand up. “Why are you going to the camel market?” he asked. “Are you an ustaza”—a professor—“of camels?”
He was playing the same game, addressing me with the term of respect for learned people, and ribbing me for being foolish enough to come out to this godforsaken place. We’d left the green delta for the desert again; the sky and the earth were the same shade of beige. The truck rolled to a stop in a cloud of dust in front of the market. Good timing, because I had only one more witty riposte.
“No, I’m a duktoora of camels!” A PhD in camelology. I mimed turning the page of a book and looking thoughtful as I eyed a nearby specimen of dromedary excellence.
I climbed out of the truck almost as gracelessly as I’d arrived, and walked away with my leg scarf flapping in the breeze. At least I left them laughing.
Later, leaving the market, I bantered in Arabic with a comically eloquent suitor (his pickup line: “Today there are two suns shining on us, because you are so beautiful”) and, waiting at the train station, charmed some surly teens by writing their names in English. Their fast, rollicking speech confused me, and a woman sitting with her family on the next bench leaned over and said, “Don’t worry, they’re teenagers. We can’t understand them either.” We chatted lightly, eating peanuts, until the train came.
But, as on my ride in the back of the truck, these were fleeting exchanges, love-’em-and-leave-’em moments of wit. After I boarded the train with the family, conversation petered out, and I felt as if I had promised fun I couldn’t deliver. The father turned to the stranger next to me and started discussing the military council, which had taken charge of the country following the revolution and was now managing the elections. I couldn’t follow. Fluency flickered next to me like the telephone poles outside, ticking by the train window a bit too fast to see clearly.
Days of Rage
Hani stood in front of the class and pulled at his hair, grimacing. “Mitghaz.” He turned to write on the board: متغاظ, infuriated.
He paced, looking at his watch and scowling. “Za’alan.” زعلان, annoyed.
He crossed his arms and glowered. “Ghadban.” غضبان, irate.
You could be mitdayi’ (fed up with) your job, he told us, or ’al’an (anxious) about your kid not doing well in school. Or roohak (your spirit) could be fi manakheerak (in your nose) after that jerk pulled his car in front of yours on Arab League Street.
During his performance, I wrote in my notebook a dozen synonyms, plus a sketch of a hand gesture for irritation: hand in a fist below the chin, as though pulling on an invisible beard. This list of words, more than anything I’d heard about the political situation in the past three weeks, made me worried for the future of Egypt. The tear-jerking, nostalgic anthem from my first class with Hani had now given way to the frustration of daily life and the uncertainty of the future.
After his compelling performance of the subtle shades of rage, and his explanation of the situations in which they might come up, Hani turned to me. “Zora, are men in America mitnerfizeen?”
Were men in America stressed out? I understood the words, but I couldn’t formulate an answer. Was this a question about the role of men in society? Or a question about stress and the economy and social demands? Hani wanted a quick response, not deep content. This was a conversation class, after all, and I was thinking too hard to converse.
“Men in America are mitnerfizeen, of course,” I began. “And the women too. Some men, some women. The economy, since the year 2008 . . .” I had wandered off into abstract territory and hit a wall, as I couldn’t remember the words for unemployment or depression, and couldn’t begin to explain the debate over bank bailouts. The awkward pause stretched out while my head spun with ideas I could not express.
Hani broke in. “Men in Egypt are very mitnerfizeen, all of them. All the time. We have to make enough money for our children to go to school, and then spend time driving to work in the traffic. We must be sure our children are succeeding. And we also have to make money for our wives to go shopping, and for the bills of their mobile phones!”
At this last sentence, the Danish blonde glared and crossed her arms. “Izzay bit’ool ‘gender norms’?” she said with a theatrical roll of her ice-blue eyes. “How do you say ‘stereotype’?”
Hani looked genuinely confused. “Stereotype? Ya’ani eih?” he asked her. What did this word mean?
While they argued, I reviewed the vocabulary Hani had given us. Mitnerfiz was the most versatile word, potentially encompassing all the other shades of anger and stress. But it wasn’t Arabic; it was derived from the English word “nervous.” This was the brilliant root system in action, the ingenious word factory taking raw consonants and spitting out meaning. The vowels had been stripped off and the v turned to an f (there is no v in Arabic), then the consonants squished into the Ammiya adjective pattern. Like any other adjective, it could now take a plural ending: mitnerfizeen, like all the men of Egypt. Or it could be feminine: the Danish woman was mitnerfiza, because she had let Hani’s bluster get under her skin.
Theoretically, Arabic shouldn’t have any loan words. The root system, that efficient word factory, should be able to produce all the required vocabulary from local products—that is, innately Arabic letter combinations. Poets had traded on this versatility for centuries, coining words that made sense in context to anyone who grasped the patterns of word formation. If a muthaqqaf was a cultured person, then a mutathaqqaf (the passive participle of the verb form that connotes doing something temporarily) was a part-time cultured person, a poser.
The word factory had chugged along fine in the early centuries. Then, with the expansion of the Islamic empire, Arabic also expanded into territories where other languages were spoken. In the process, Arabic absorbed vocabulary from Persian, Turkish, and more. Most of these words were, as “nervous” would be later, bent to fit into the root system. In the late nineteenth century, European languages made a sudden, fresh impact, as the French and the British brought foreign technology and concepts to the Arab world. For a few concerted decades, the self-appointed reformers at the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo and the Arab Academy of Damascus attempted to supply native equivalents. But just as the Académie Française couldn
’t eradicate le camping and le week-end, the Arabic academies found it hard to make the official coinages stick. By the mid-twentieth century, a guy in his office, talking into his nifty new tape recorder, probably found it easier—and hipper—to say deektafoon (Dictaphone) instead of the stuffy dictionary word istiktabi (the asking-someone-to-write-something-thing).
The academy did manage to Arabicize abstract, technical words such as dimuqratiya (democracy), imbiriyaliya (imperialism), and ra’smaliya (capitalism, a rare compound construction combining the words for head and money, to echo the Latin root). With their broader use, concrete nouns such as tilifizyoon and radiyoo slipped into Arabic relatively unchanged. By the time I enrolled in Hani’s class, the academy had long since given up the Sisyphean struggle to keep Arabic “pure.” In my Hans Wehr, there was an entry for the aberrant five-consonant root verb narfaza, to make nervous.
I met Hassan again, at a downtown ahwa, an old coffeehouse where people sucked on sheeshas and set their tea on rickety metal tables. It had been his regular place when I first met him in 1998. I was hoping there would be a crowd, and I could ease into Arabic, maybe hear some jokes, test my bantering skills. But when I arrived, Hassan was alone. He had his head down, looking at his phone.
“Look, Zora, here are my sons at the revolution,” he said in English. He held the phone out to show me, a wistful half-smile on his round face.
The interim government, headed by the military council, had set dates for elections, a month away, yet the voting system remained opaque. No one was sure who the local candidates were, or where to cast a ballot when the time came. The Muslim Brotherhood’s party was getting a lot of press, as was a far-right-wing Islamist crew, the Salafists, who seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, ranting against Israel as well as the Copts, Egypt’s Christian minority. My teacher Hani wasn’t the only one who was infuriated, annoyed, stressed out. In the three weeks I had been in Egypt, I had noticed a change in mood; the crowds of people out at night seemed more subdued, and I had witnessed two random fistfights. No one had given me a “Yay, democracy!” thumbs-up in a week. Hassan sucked moodily on his sheesha, letting the smoke leak out his nose.