All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  As I headed toward the exit gate, I saw the family I had passed inside. They were having a picnic on the lawn.

  “Yalla itghaddi ma’ana!” the mother called. Come eat lunch with us. I suppose I should have made at least one polite no-thank-you gesture, put my hand on my heart, and made to walk on. But I was hungry, and they looked so vibrant and happy.

  They scooted around to make room in their circle, and the mother laid out a hand towel for me to sit on. Then she loaded up a plate for me: a jiggly wedge of pasta casserole and a whole leg and thigh of roast chicken.

  Her name was Hoda. Attef was her balding husband, in a dapper plaid shirt and nylon windbreaker, and it was his forty-eighth birthday. To celebrate, Hoda had taken the day off from her job at the ministry of health, and their three children had skipped school. Mohamed, the eldest at age twelve, was studying agriculture. While Hoda talked, I nodded and ate, restraining myself from commenting on the succulence of the chicken, the richness of the casserole. By withholding praise, I was determined not to repeat the mistake I’d made with Medo’s mother and her roast duck.

  Dressed in a long black headscarf and a robe trimmed with a few discreet rhinestones, Hoda was a natural charmer. “Last year I did the ’umra”—the so-called minor pilgrimage to Mecca, a less strenuous alternative or addition to the haj that can be done at any time of year—“and I was scared at first to go alone,” she told me. “But in the end, I met so many new friends!”

  I could see why. With her big brown eyes rimmed in black liner and her easy conversation, she made me feel as if we were in the habit of meeting every week to share a picnic lunch.

  With great resolve, I left a tiny bit of casserole uneaten and some shreds of chicken, so as not to provoke a second monster helping. “You like our Egyptian food?” Hoda asked, inspecting my plate.

  “Of course I do!” I answered. “I’m a bint al-balad.” This little phrase had recently popped into my head, on one of my walks down memory lane. A “daughter of the land” was a true Egyptian, a plucky native. It was a decent joke, as I was looking especially foreign that day, with a camera and a big sun hat.

  Hoda burst out laughing. She tapped Attef on the knee and said, “Did you hear that? She’s like us! Dammaha khafeef!”

  Telling someone she has “light blood” might not sound flattering, but in Egyptian terms it was the very praise I had been craving. To possess, if only for a moment, the easy, bubbly jocularity Egyptians prized—it was proof I had made real progress, not just in this short time in Cairo, but from my previous life here. Back then, I had been a ball of language anxiety; now I was a light-blooded wit who could banter with total strangers. While gnawing on a chicken leg, no less.

  As a bonus, I got Hoda’s jokes. “Take these glasses and wash them,” she told the children, pointing to a nearby water fountain. “And iron them!” she called after, as though giving orders to the neighborhood laundry man. The kids rolled their eyes—they’d heard that one before.

  Hoda and Attef implored me to come to lunch at their house another day, but I was nearing the end of my trip. We swapped phone numbers, and the kids drew me a picture of airplanes, palm trees, and a city skyline with the lotus-like Cairo Tower to one side and the Pyramids to the other. “we love you!!!” they wrote in English.

  Jubilant, I replayed the conversation in my head as I left the museum grounds. I had made them laugh! I had light blood! I folded the drawing and tucked it in my notebook. This was the diploma I’d really earned.

  I saw Hassan one last time, the night before I left Cairo. We met at a club to see a Nubian singer he and his friends all knew. Hassan looked a bit more cheerful this time, laughing his wheezy laugh. The political situation hadn’t changed. For now he was in a holding pattern in the video game.

  I sat quietly in the circle of his friends, trying to find a thread in the Arabic chitchat. Ibrahim, a dark-skinned man with close-cropped curly hair, told a joke about a half-wit house servant. It wasn’t the greatest joke, but I followed his every word, which made me instantly fond of him.

  A little while later, I found myself seated next to Ibrahim in a booth while Hassan and the others milled around greeting friends. Our conversation was going fine, as he explained the deal he had made with his wife regarding child care, which enabled him to be out on a Tuesday night. Then it was my turn to speak. I stammered and froze, tried too-complex grammar, and blanked on basic words. My brain, in anticipation of departure, had given up.

  “We can speak English,” Ibrahim said—kindly enough, but I still winced. In that second, I felt I hadn’t made any progress in Arabic at all.

  The lights dimmed and the curtain sprang up on a seven-piece band crammed in a tiny box of a stage. Ibrahim leaned over and said, “It’s like The Mubbet Show, right?”

  Arabic has no p sound, which creates such things as Jaban-built trucks, the glamorous Banorama Salon, a society magazine called Barty. Ibrahim’s Muppets reference was spot-on: the band did conjure an “It’s time to light the lights” energy.

  “Yeah, and we’re Statler and Waldorf,” I quipped. Ibrahim cocked his head, questioning. “You know, the old guys in the back,” I said. The cantankerous critics who lobbed comments from the balcony were my favorite Mubbets.

  “Never be the old guys in the back!” Ibrahim whooped, then elbowed me out of the banquette and up to dance. Nearby, a small commotion arose around an agile dancer working his way through the crowd. As he shimmied closer, I saw it was Saad, the legendary desert guide, the party conductor, the man whose jokes I had understood so well at the party on Hassan’s roof, thirteen years earlier. He looked exactly the same: dark-skinned, a bit cross-eyed. Did he have gray hair? Maybe a little pudginess? I couldn’t see well in the dim light and the clouds of cigarette smoke, but it didn’t matter. I waved at Saad through the crowd; he grinned and waved back. Like Hassan, he probably remembered me less than I remembered him, but that didn’t matter either.

  It felt as if barely an hour had passed since I had last lived here. I had stepped out for a second, been distracted by some other things—New York, a job, a husband—but back in Cairo, at this moment at least, the party was still going on.

  Oh, but my aching hip! I had not tried to dance this way in years. The awkward movement, not quite on the beat, nonetheless brought back good phrases. Kan ya ma kan, fi ‘adeem az-zaman (“There was or there wasn’t, back in the old days,” as all the fairy tales begin in Arabic), I had danced in the disco at the Nile Hilton, on Hassan’s rooftop, and in my fellow students’ grand old palace of an apartment. This scene was zayy zaman, like the old days.

  The crowd sang call-and-response with the curly-haired frontman. For a minute I didn’t worry about what language to speak or where I fit in; my earlier stumble into English with Ibrahim was forgotten. I danced, warmed by the hum of the singer’s voice, the sawing fiddle, the tet-tet-tet of the hand drum.

  When I had lived here, Cairo had been a backdrop for my drama. I had worried about my future, about what people thought of me when I opened my mouth. Once, I’d been so sick that I couldn’t leave the bathroom floor, and I thought I’d grown old overnight. Now I was much closer to “old,” by some world standards, but I felt so much better, so much more sure of everything. I had embarked on a grand project to revive my old life in Arabic, and at this moment it was working remarkably well. I could do this—I could keep moving, seeing new places, learning more.

  In Arabic, the adjective for old, in reference to people (rather than objects), is kabeer—literally “big,” referring to the number of years, but perhaps to more. As I danced in this crowd, I caught Saad’s eye again—he was dancing at the center of a circle, a beer bottle balanced on his head. Suspended briefly in time, with the whole Arab world open to me, I felt kabeera, especially in my heart.

  al-khaleej

  The Gulf

  February–March 2012

>   روِي

  (rawiya) To drink one’s fill

  روَى

  (rawa) To tell, pass on, transmit

  راوٍ

  (rawin) Storyteller, transmitter of poetry

  Knowledge Village

  The Arabian Peninsula is the land of the noble poets, who crisscross the desert on camelback, recounting tales of lost loves, fearsome battles, and dramatic lightning storms.

  The Arabian Peninsula, where the Quran was revealed, has the purest Arabic dialect, the one closest to the classical language.

  The Arabian Peninsula is so hot and sexually uptight that the people who live there consider Cairo a decadent summer vacation spot.

  This was the sum of my knowledge about a landmass that measures a million square miles. I suspected it was not correct, as my sources were questionable. The poetry, which I had last consulted in graduate school, was about fifteen hundred years out of date. The assessment of the Gulf dialect was a rumor I’d heard back in the day from some fellow Arabic students. And the part about the weather and sexual mores I had deduced myself, from observing “Gulfies” two decades earlier in a Cairo nightclub, showering the famed belly dancer Fifi Abdou with crisp Egyptian pound notes.

  How had I managed to study Arabic for so long while holding such confused impressions about the language’s actual birthplace? It was as if I could recite The Song of Roland in Old French, yet persisted in thinking Parisians all danced the cancan in the streets. A major factor was a random turn I had taken in grad school. For my master’s degree, I had intended to study the modern Arabic novel, but to better understand it, I found myself digging down to the bedrock of the literature: the poetry of the Jahiliya period, literally the “age of ignorance” before Islam. Contrary to the name, it was an era of poetic erudition, and themes and phrases from works composed in the sixth century could be found in the court verse of medieval Baghdad, the love poetry of Al-Andalus, and contemporary Palestinian protest literature.

  My grasp of the poems came slowly. To prepare for class, I combed through all my available dictionaries, then strung together the most plausible meaning from the words I’d collected, like Mad Libs in reverse. The only word I reliably recognized was habeeb, beloved, because it was in every Arabic song ever written. In class, my professor would pick apart my “translation” for deep grammatical misreadings (oh, of course, it’s a dual imperative weak-third-radical verb), then point out shallower pitfalls, such as my failure to recognize a long-disused term of camel husbandry. Most unfair, I felt, were place names. Arabic has no capital letters, so some nights I could spend forty-five minutes trying to find the definition for the Arabic equivalent of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

  Finally, though, my professor would lean forward and recite the lines again, and all the lovely words would fall into place, like pearls on a necklace. This was the payoff for the hours of logic-puzzle-like work. For a few minutes, Fusha was a true communication tool—in this case, for communing with the past. English is cut off from its roots—the original Beowulf is lost to all but the Anglo-Saxon specialists, and even then it dates to only the eighth century at the earliest. Arabic, though, has stayed consistent enough that it was still possible for me, in the late twentieth century, to read words that were first uttered seven thousand miles away in the year 500-something.

  The place names I had stumbled over in class—the Den of the Wild Deer, the Place of the Rain-Pregnant Clouds, the Pilgrimage Site of the Circumambulating Virgins—refer to real spots in the desert. Unfortunately for me, I realized as I planned my first trip to the Arabian Peninsula, they were technically within the borders of Saudi Arabia, which did not welcome solo women travelers. But even if I could have persuaded Peter to accompany me, it wouldn’t have mattered because the Saudi government did not grant tourist visas.

  The United Arab Emirates, on the other hand, issued me a visa on arrival at the airport in Dubai, and let me proceed unescorted into the city. My plan was to stay in Dubai for four weeks, taking Arabic classes and trying to pick up some of the Gulf dialect. Afterward, I had another week to drive around in search of traces of the poems I had once studied. The end of my trip would coincide with a literature festival back in Dubai, where I hoped to compare old poetry and new.

  When I arrived at my rental apartment, on a cool day in February, a low-grade sandstorm blurred the horizon. As familiar as Cairo, its people, and its Ammiya had been to me, Dubai was the opposite: a city where I knew no one, much less how they spoke. In the past decade, I had read plenty about Dubai’s rapid transformation into a booming metropolis, but the only silhouette I recognized from my living room window was the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. Beyond that stretched a hodgepodge of skyscrapers, then a gray haze of desert—the same desert that eventually crossed the border and encompassed those fabled places enshrined in verse.

  The place names of Dubai are resolutely unpoetic, not fanciful but literal. The World is an archipelago of artificial islands shaped like the world; the Palm, a peninsula that resembles a palm tree. The Pearl, even as a construction site, was a bare round lot glittering nacreous in the sun. I stopped next to it, somehow lost en route to Knowledge Village, which, on the map I’d consulted before leaving my apartment, looked like a cross section of a brain.

  After many long minutes, another pedestrian appeared on the wide, empty sidewalk, a teenager with milk-white skin and teardrop eyes. He was from Kazakhstan, he told me, and yes, he knew where my language school was; he was going that way himself.

  On the ground, Knowledge Village resembled not a brain but an outlet mall with a Tuscan-village theme. Inside an ocher plaster building with a faux-terracotta-tile roof, my school was marked with posters of smiling students holding flags of many lands. The receptionist wore a button that said Speak to me in English or Russian! I chose English.

  “Upstairs,” she said. “In Seoul room, past Sarajevo and Cairo.”

  I was early, scared straight after my numerous late arrivals in Egypt. I squeezed into a desk and watched the clock. This school was the only one I had been able to find that offered intensive classes over a short period, rather than weekly meetings geared to resident expats. When I registered, I had pictured myself communing with interesting people from around the world, including an Emirati teacher, who would be my entrée into local culture. But then the group class had been rescheduled because of low enrollment. Would I like private lessons? an administrator had emailed to inquire. And would I prefer a Lebanese or a Syrian instructor? No, Emirati was not an option. I settled for private tutoring with a Lebanese teacher—at least that would help prepare me for my planned visit to Beirut, later in the year.

  If I had marveled less at Dubai’s architectural stunts and read more about its demographics, I might have known my initial vision was doomed. The United Arab Emirates was home to about eight million people, but only one million or so were Emirati nationals, and in the city of Dubai, they made up an even smaller portion of the population. With one of the world’s highest per capita incomes, Emiratis did not take such humdrum jobs as teaching Arabic at a language school in a Tuscan-village-themed open-air mall.

  The rest of the UAE’s population was classified as guest workers—wafideen in Arabic. Literally the word means delegates, and when I had arrived, the airport had felt like a predawn convention of international representatives: men from Kandahar in mirror-spotted caps, West Africans in bright starched fabrics, a brigade of sari-clad women, noses studded with gold. In the UAE, by far the largest contingent of wafideen, more than two million people, came from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan; Indonesia and the Philippines sent major delegations as well, as did Europe.

  In the few days since my arrival, the only Arabs I had encountered—or at least the only people who looked obviously Arab to me—were the airport immigration agents. They wore not the pseudomilitary uniforms of border guards the world over, but crisp white
robes and, on their heads, gauzy white scarves set in place with black cords. My agent was a limpid-eyed man with wavy hair and a perfectly trimmed beard. “Good morning,” I had croaked in the best Arabic I could muster after a red-eye flight.

  “Morning,” he had replied, in English, stamping my passport. His eyes flicked over my shoulder to the next person in line.

  It was not the most auspicious beginning to my trip, but, I reminded myself as I peered down the empty hall looking for my teacher, I had added the Persian Gulf to my itinerary precisely because I knew so little about it. Asphalt-coated Dubai didn’t look immediately hospitable to noble poets on camelback, and the heat I had assumed Gulfies went to Cairo to escape wasn’t a factor either, at least not right now—it was downright chilly this morning. On top of it all, the map here in Seoul room labeled the water to the north the Arabian Gulf—a bone of contention I hadn’t been aware of.

  As for my notion that Gulf dialect, or Khaleeji as it was called, was somehow more pure, more true and authentic, that had been corrected before I arrived. A few months earlier, in England, I had met a Saudi police officer in a pub, and we had discussed my study plans. “Actually, I wouldn’t say we speak a particularly pure Arabic,” he had said, sipping his pint of ale. “We get so many people from all over the world, working, coming to Mecca on the haj, that we speak a very simple form of it.” This was a relief. I had been imagining a corps of Saudi grammar enforcers, akin to the country’s morality police, who beat people with sticks for not observing the Fusha rule of gender polarity in the numbers from three to ten.