All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  I looked up at the clock in Seoul room: thirty minutes had passed with no sign of my teacher. Back downstairs at the reception desk, the Russian woman had been replaced by a man from the Philippines. I had no Tagalog to offer.

  “My teacher isn’t there,” I said.

  Thereupon ensued a process of notifying higher-ups, of placing calls, of a drawn-out telephonic rebuke. “Where are you?” a woman, summoned from a back room expressly for the rebuking, snipped into the phone. “The student is here, and she’s very upset!”

  I cringed and waved my hands to soften her blow. I was not at all upset. A one-on-one class was high pressure, and three days after arriving, I still felt bleary from jet lag, or perhaps from the gray timelessness of the sandstorm that had only just lifted. We rescheduled for the next day. I practically skipped out the door.

  Knowledge Village was indeed an outlet mall, but for colleges. Representing New South Wales, Australia, was the University of Wollongong, where the Kazakh student had been headed. Across the way was the Islamic Azad University, in front of which stood a blond woman in a white miniskirt suit, smoking and chatting in Persian with a frail, plaid-shirted punk. It was the largest university in Iran, I read on a brochure, with more than eighteen campuses and an enrollment of 1.9 million.

  On I walked, past the University of Manchester, Michigan State, and the University of Phoenix, until I reached the food court: the obligatory pizza counter and salad bar, plus an array of international options. The Lebanese counter was set up like an American Chinese takeout place, with a menu board of backlit photos. I marched up and said clearly, “Fattet hummus.”

  This was my third attempt to engage someone in Arabic conversation in as many days. The second, after immigration, had also been at the airport, where I had asked a man at the transit desk, “If you please, where the station of metro?” He had replied in subcontinent-accented English, “Madam, you must go up one level.”

  After ordering my lunch, I looked for a little nod of recognition from the counterman. I had said all the tricky letters right, and at the end of fatteh even added the cryptic letter ta marboota, a t that was only sometimes a t, and in this case it was, due to the grammatical relationship between fatteh and hummus.

  He gave me my change, but nothing more. Possibly he was not Arab; possibly he didn’t care. In Cairo, I thought as I waited for my order, the counterman and I would be fast friends by now, holding up the line while we exchanged pleasantries. In this new city, I felt a twinge of loneliness.

  The fatteh, a casserole of pita scraps and garlicky chickpeas, soothed me. Fattet hummus, I mused—not just a pleasure to eat, but a pleasure to say. It had two shaddas, those doubling marks that really made you pause and savor the letter. And you got the breathy, aspirated h in hummus, and the heavy, dramatic s that left your mouth in a thoughtful, serious pout—a substantial word for a substantial bean, the noble garbanzo.

  Many centuries ago, the Bedouin who roamed the Arabian Peninsula cultivated even more complex sounds. Back then, the dod, that ponderous, voice-of-God d, had been more of a dl sound, made by tucking the tongue up to one side, on an incisor—rather than behind the front teeth, as lazy city slickers did nowadays. I had always considered the heart-tugging, tear-inducing ʼayn to be the signature sound of Arabic, but early grammarians had been proudest of that complicated, asymmetrical dod. They dubbed Arabic lughat ad-dod (لغة الضاد), the language of the dod.

  In a convenient bit of wordplay, lughat ad-dod sounds like lughat addod (ﻟﻐﺔ اﺿﺪاد), language of opposites, which is equally true. English has a handful of double-edged words, such as cleave and inflammable, but Arabic is full of paradoxes, enough to inspire whole medieval treatises on the subject. Baseer means sharply insightful, but also blind. Sha’aba can mean both to gather and to disperse. A now-anonymous wag quipped that every word in Arabic means itself, its opposite, and a camel. See, I wasn’t skipping class, I told myself as I scraped the bottom of my fatteh dish; I was pondering the very essence of Arabic.

  Unfortunately, no one around me was speaking it. The chatter in the food court was almost all in English, coming from Australians, Indians, Malaysians, East Africans. Dubai, in the little I had seen of it, was an exhilarating convention of global delegates. But the ancient deserts of Arabia, full of paradoxical poets who touched tongue to incisor as they recited, seemed awfully far away.

  When I did meet my teacher, the following morning, she immediately set me at ease. Manal conformed to the image I held of Lebanese women; namely, that they are all elegant and beautiful. She had toasted-almond skin, ever so lightly freckled, with a fabulous nose that looked straight off an ancient vase. She removed her enormous black sunglasses, shook out her lustrous black hair, and propped the glasses atop her head, ready to work. Not to worry about my Egyptian dialect, she told me breezily. I should speak however I could, and then we’d review where I could make changes to Lebanese.

  On the surface, the various dialects of Arabic vary widely, but they share key similarities in underlying grammar, which make them, oddly, more similar to one another than any one of them is to Fusha. So, no problem—all I had to do was adopt a completely new accent and learn a fresh batch of basic conversational vocabulary. Kwayyis—good. No, what was the Lebanese word? Right: mneeh.

  The one-on-one conversation that I had been worried about came easily because I was genuinely curious about Manal and her life here. She had lived in Dubai for eleven years, which, in this fast-growing city, made her practically a native. She was willing to explain the social system in the crudest terms, for the sake of my comprehension: Emiratis owned things; Europeans ran things; Arabs from other countries, such as her Lebanese architect husband, designed and implemented things; Filipinos, Indonesians, Bangladeshis, and everyone else from Asia built things and cleaned things. The Danish woman in my class in Cairo would have crossed her arms and cocked an eyebrow at this stereotyping, but I was glad Manal was speaking slowly and using familiar verbs and nouns.

  As we chatted, I tried to counter the advice I’d taken so wrong from Dr. Badawi. Rather than nodding when I got the general idea of her story, I asked Manal to stop and explain the specific words I didn’t know. Of course, this was her job as a language teacher, and mine as a student, but I was tentative at first. In Cairo, I had grown used to talking with strangers, where, in the name of sociability, it had seemed wiser not to sweat the small stuff—and if I failed to understand, I would get a fresh start with whomever I met on the next block.

  But in Dubai, I feared Manal might be the only person I would find to speak Arabic with, and I wanted to make the most of it. Fortunately, she had the ideal language teacher’s outlook: genuinely amused by and interested in her own language. “Oh, that’s a good word!” she would say whenever I asked her for an explanation.

  My reward for asking questions was some excellent new vocabulary. Manzoo’, totally wrecked, came, I found later in my dictionary, from the verb that means to be in the throes of death. Also handy: moobeeli ʼam-byikharraf, my phone is going senile. I drank up the new words eagerly—each one suggested a juicy, real-life adventure.

  Practical, Fashion, Extreme

  In between classes, I vowed to squeeze as much Arabic out of Dubai as I could. Khaleeji, Fusha, Lebanese—I would take whatever I could get. Ordering correctly at restaurants wasn’t getting me anywhere, so I went to the Dubai Museum. Maybe there would be a crew of school kids to tag along with, and mooch off their Arabic-speaking guide.

  But the place was filled only with sunburned European tourists, so I read the Arabic labels on the displays instead. Lu’lu’, pearls, I murmured to myself—these treasures, collected from the Gulf waters by skin divers, had brought the city its early wealth. Then in the 1930s, the Japanese developed less expensive cultured pearls, and Dubai slipped into economic doldrums.

  Daw, dhow, the hand-built wooden boat with its thin, elegant hul
l and its canvas sails—this vessel had plied the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, connecting Dubai with Iran, Asia, and East Africa. In the museum, the dhow was presented as an artifact, but I had just walked past a dozen of the boats moored on the wharves nearby, being loaded with truck tires and refrigerators in boxes stamped made in china.

  Tijara, trade, was illustrated with a frenetic video montage of freighters and building cranes and time-lapse construction since the 1950s. This city sustained itself not on oil, as I had assumed, but on its busy ports. The display ended on a bullish note. It had not been amended since the 2009 downturn, when construction stalled and Dubai’s government-as-corporation took a $10 billion bailout from neighboring Abu Dhabi, the emirate that still drew profits from oil.

  Near the museum exit, I noticed a small, dimly lit room. Al-bedu: the Bedouin, the sign read. And underneath: “They love good deeds and hate evil. They are proud of their customs. They have strong personalities.”

  This use of “they” was puzzling. My own idea of the Bedouin was a bit fuzzy, certainly not as clear in my mind as my other preconceptions of the Arabian Peninsula, the ones regarding poets on camelback and pure-Arabic speakers. But I had thought that here, on the edge of the Arabian Desert, Bedouin were all around. Yet this exhibit suggested they were some elusive race that you might glimpse only if you sat very still in the desert during the right phase of the moon.

  Back at my apartment, I consulted my dictionaries. I had been conflating Arab and Bedouin, or at least assuming that here, in the Arabian Gulf, the two must be synonymous. The word “Arab”—or rather, an Assyrian cuneiform version of it, with the root ʼayn-ra-ba—first referred, as far back as the mid-ninth century b.c.e., not to an ethnic group precisely, but to any desert dweller. These folk stood in contrast with the Assyrians themselves, genteel urbanites who lounged in palaces in Nineveh, near present-day Mosul, Iraq. The desert people were a thorn in the Assyrians’ side, judging from their carved depictions of Arab raiders, mounted two to a camel, one at the reins while the other wielded a bow and arrow.

  The raiders had some success, for later, the Old Testament referred to “the kings of Arabia.” And when the Romans swept in to Petra, now in Jordan, and to Palmyra, in what is now Syria, they called the area Arabia Petraea. The Arabs led camel caravans through the desert, hauling treasures from the Red Sea in the south to the Euphrates River in the north.

  Meanwhile, the word bedu (بدو) meant desert; it developed into a collective noun referring to the nomads who lived in this terrain. Not that these desert people called themselves Arabs or Bedouin—they identified by clan: Kindah, Banu Tamim, Quraysh. And to confuse the matter, over the centuries the root ʼayn-ra-ba split, so the roaming Bedouin were called a’rab (أعراب), while more settled tribes were ʼarab (عرب). Here was perhaps the seminal example of paradox in Arabic vocabulary, the heart of the “language of opposites.”

  In the early seventh century, a few tribes in the Arabian Peninsula pulled together under the banner of a new religion called Islam. In less than a century, an empire was born; for convenience and prestige, the rulers moved the capital to Damascus. From new urban palaces, where fountains splashed and flowers perfumed the air, the desert-rambling Bedouin began to look like an exotic people, the Arabs’ own noble savages. This image pervaded the first Arabic grammar books, which settled usage debates by citing the speech of Bedouin informants. Their Arabic was considered correct and pure, uncorrupted by the city. By the tenth century, however, this kind of fieldwork waned. City people, now in even fancier digs in the new capital of Baghdad, believed themselves superior, and the Bedouin could no longer be trusted. Some, the grammarians tutted, had been known to accept bribes to settle an argument in favor of the payee.

  In the modern era, the term “Bedouin,” at least when used by a city dweller, could be synonymous with bumpkin. The Bedouin accent—pronouncing the suffix -ik as -ich, for instance, and adding an extra vowel in the middle of words—sounded to some ears like a romantic cowboy’s drawl or, to others, like a hillbilly’s unschooled twang. And in every country where Bedouin still lived, from Egypt to Iraq to Oman, they slipped uneasily between a traditional nomadic life and a settled one. Sometimes they herded sheep around the desert; sometimes they herded tourists; sometimes they set up in cinder-block homes the government preferred they settle in. They were perpetual outsiders—outside the city, living out of doors.

  Recalling the museum displays on pearls and boats, I finally saw why people in Dubai might consider the Bedouin to be “they,” not “us.” It was simply that Dubai faced the water. These were seagoing people and city dwellers, quite unlike the desert-tempered Bedouin. This distinction went back at least to the first century, when the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, a Greek guidebook for seafarers, described the “Fish-Eaters” who occupied caves along the Red Sea coast of the Arabian Peninsula, as opposed to, inland, the “rascally men who live in villages and nomadic camps.”

  In 1833, a branch of the desert-based Bani Yas tribe split off in protest over the leaders’ infighting. The clan established itself by the Dubai Creek, where they embarked on trade, loading dhows with goods. In less than two hundred years, rascally men from nomadic camps had become Fish-Eaters, and, to judge from their self-representation in the museum, they were not going back inland. Out my apartment window, the twinkling Burj Khalifa stretched more than two thousand feet up and away from the desert.

  Loitering in the Arabic section of the bookstore, I nonchalantly flipped through a book of poetry by the ruling sheikh of Dubai. Not that I understood much of it—I was holding it only in hopes it might spark a conversation. In Cairo, I would have been swarmed by other customers, gabbing, interrogating, offering recommendations. Here, I soon noticed, my gambit was wasted, as there were no other customers.

  Over on the English-language side, I perused the “local topics” section, dominated by a wall of imperiled-in-Arabia books, every cover showing a woman’s face covered in an alluring veil. Nearby, I found a piece of Kuwaiti chick lit penned in “Arabeezi,” part Arabic, part Ingleezi (English), using the numbers-for-letters chat alphabet. I browsed for useful Khaleeji phrases, but found only “3n el na7asa” (translated in a footnote as “Don’t be mean”) and “Abi 9amonat Jeben” (“I want a cheese sandwich”). At least the book’s heroine, a pudgy ex–med student, seemed more real than the veiled women on the covers of the other books in the section. And she spoke more Gulf dialect than I might ever learn in person.

  The bookstore opened into the surrounding mall, twelve million square feet of retail and thousands of shoppers, all so diverse and global that I did not attract a second glance. I passed an information desk, staffed with three men in matching black suits and one in a white Gulf-style robe. Like the crisp-robed airport immigration agents, who had seemed so incongruous in civilian rather than military garb, this man looked out of place. Then a trio of women approached and peppered him with questions in Arabic, and I understood. The robe was itself a kind of uniform, a marker of rank—and, practically speaking, a way of identifying who spoke the national language. Even more practically, here was a captive audience for small talk. I took a deep breath and headed for the man in the robe.

  “Where is a store of mobile, if you please?” I asked politely in Fusha. I refrained from adding that my phone had, in Manal’s words, been going senile—I didn’t want to muddy the waters with Lebanese slang.

  He considered me for a millisecond. “Here,” he said in English, tapping a spot on the mall map. “There are many, by the Waitrose subermarket.” His eyes flicked past me to the next lost shopper.

  The man’s linguistic snub, like the one I’d received at the airport, was probably not intentional, but it still smarted. In Cairo (words I found myself thinking more every day, with ever more longing), I could not walk twenty feet without someone striking up a conversation. In Cairo, I had been a virtual celebrity! In Cairo, city of extro
verts, I had collapsed into bed exhausted every night, my brain full to bursting.

  Now, in this more reserved city, I was like any other anonymous traveler, interacting with the usual ticket sellers, doormen, and shopgirls. Anywhere else in the world, this would have given me ample opportunity to practice the local language, but in Dubai, the service-sector workers did not, as a rule, speak Arabic. And when I encountered the rare one who did—the immigration officer, the information desk staffer—he spoke to me in English.

  My phone errand forgotten, I found myself in the luxury wing of the mall, all flattering light and Italian boutiques. The ladies’ restroom was equally luxurious, room upon room, with full-length mirrors and tufted settees. Older women sat amid their shopping bags, huffing and sighing and speaking too high and fast for me to understand. When two younger women entered, I turned to eavesdrop.

  “ Fersatchi ?” one woman said to the other, reaching over to stroke her friend’s shimmery green collar, laid just so over a black robe.

  “La, Doolchay . .”

  If either of them had said, “Don’t be mean” or “I want a cheese sandwich,” I had not heard it; all I had made out was “Versace” and “Dolce.” The women stood in towering heels at the mirrors, adjusting gauzy black scarves over immense beehive hairdos and applying fresh eyeliner in dramatic swoops.

  It would be fun to chat with these girls, but how to start? My first instinct was to say, “Sheek awi!” (Very chic!), but this was straight Egyptian dialect, and it sounded too coarse here in the mall’s luxury wing. But what would I say in Fusha? “O madam, the Dolce and Gabbana is most suitable for you, with respect to its emerald-green hue”? When I considered complimenting the women in English, I realized it was not normal to make friends in the ladies’ room. I patted on some lip balm and slipped out.