All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  Farah talked with an eagerness I recognized in myself, as I was starved for company after long days of driving. She patted the overstuffed sofa in her tiny living room, and we sat down to talk. Within ten minutes, we were deep in her life story. The details tumbled out with the same generosity with which she poured my tea and ladled in the sugar. “I tried everything—pills, hormones, everything,” she said, “but I could not have a child. And so we divorced.” In 2000, she had remarried, to a Syrian man, and settled in Abu Dhabi. She was his second wife—or, as she put it, his “local wife.”

  I had never met a woman in such an arrangement. Yes, technically, in many countries in the Arab world a Muslim man was entitled to four wives, but he had to be wealthy or foolhardy to claim them. Or, I saw now, lonely—a permanent migrant, working for decades away from his family. Although she had given up her job in a hospital, Farah was no silly kept woman. In Libya, she had trained and worked as an engineer. “It makes a lot of sense,” Farah told me. “Women, we can go a long time without sex. But men, they have urges. If a man isn’t married, he’ll be going to bad women, and that is not respectable.” Then she added, almost as an afterthought, “And God would punish him.”

  Later, when I met her husband, Abdallah, I was momentarily abashed—I knew too much. He was a small man with a trim gray beard who spoke clear, formal Arabic and very little English; Farah played translator when necessary. Our introduction was the sort of awkward encounter that etiquette books try to save you from. I stuck out my hand; he kept his at his side, then, seeing me withdrawing mine, extended his. We settled on limply brushing fingertips. This too was new to me—I had never met a man so pious that he wouldn’t shake a woman’s hand.

  So for several days I read at the library, and in the evenings I learned from Farah and Abdallah.

  Heritage Club

  The bearded desk clerk personally ushered me to my table. This time, I set aside the Quran and went further back, to the pre-Islamic poetry that I had not read in more than fourteen years—though lines of it still occasionally popped into my head.

  The most famous Jahiliya poems are the seven works called the mu’allaqat, the “adorned” or “hanging” odes. The former meaning is probably more accurate, referring to the poems’ ornate language, but the latter, a folk etymology, is more fun. In this interpretation, these seven poems were embroidered on banners and hung on the Ka’ba in Mecca after the annual poetry slam, like blue-ribbon winners at the state fair.

  At first, before I could understand them well, the mu’allaqat had enchanted me with their sound alone. Composed for oral recitation, they proceed with stately, meditative grace, punctuated by a single end rhyme. They conjure a campfire, with faces of family visible in the warm light and the inky black of the desert swirling behind.

  The more I read, the more intrigued I was by how the poems were made. Unlike the verse epics of the Western canon, which relate a legendary hero’s adventures in the third person, the mu’allaqat are in the first person and often share the poet’s emotions. Yet the poet does not simply pour out his feelings; they are contained in a formal structure that touches on set themes. Most of the poems open deep in the desert, with the poet recalling a lost love. Next comes a scene of solitary travel. Finally the poet arrives back in the circle of the tribe, and turns to a specific poetic purpose: praising a leader, eulogizing a fallen warrior, mocking a fellow poet, or simply boasting of his (and occasionally her) own talents. Shifting from scene to scene, the poems can seem disjointed, but taken as a whole, each holds the elements of any folk story: loss, quest, triumph. And like a parable or a fairy tale, they convey collective wisdom and shared values.

  My own travels could fit into the structure of the pre-Islamic ode, I mused as I read. The first week in Dubai, when I had moped around dreaming of Cairo—that had been the beginning of my poem, lamenting my lost love. Now I was in the period of traveling alone through the desert. Well, at the moment I seemed to be waylaid in the city. Or was this my triumphant return? Shivering in a library, reading old books—no, it didn’t seem triumphant. It was, in fact, the very activity I had sworn off at the beginning of my journey as a reformed Arabic student.

  I was still in the desert-wandering phase, then. Triumph, whatever that might be, would have to wait. A new plan was crystallizing. I would leave the library and go to some isolated dune, the sort where a poet might have stood and considered an old campfire. I would take my dear old Hans Wehr dictionary, and I would sit in the sand and read the most famous of the mu’allaqat, the one composed by the poet Imru’ al-Qays around the middle of the sixth century. Its first words, Qifa nabki—Halt, let us weep—are iconic, the Arabic equivalent of “To be or not to be.” How much of the poem would I remember beyond the two opening words? It would be a test of my current Arabic skills, and it would give a little shape to my aimless trip.

  I began copying the verses into my notebook, trying not to dwell on how much was completely unfamiliar. I’d deal with that later.

  As I finished writing out the last line, I looked up to find the bearded desk clerk standing next to me. “It is time we close,” he said. As if in consolation, he handed me a juice box, mango flavor.

  “I have some ideas what we can do today,” Farah said over breakfast. In the living room, she had pushed the coffee table to the side and laid out a bedsheet on the floor, for an indoor picnic of bread and apricot jam from her sister in Libya, and cheese from Abdallah’s wife in Syria. The night before, I had told her my plan to drive into the desert and read the poem. Now she was acting as if I’d never mentioned it and offering a full itinerary for the day. We would visit the Emirati heritage club across the street from her old apartment, to see if someone there could give me ideas for my book. Then we would visit a new district of the city named Saadiyat. “It means happiness,” Farah said. “It is too nice!”

  Her enthusiasm was winning. I did worry that I wasn’t improving my Arabic much, here in Farah’s tight, fluent-English embrace. But, I reminded myself, my trip was meant to connect me with people, not books. And, as the proverb said, Ar-rafeeq qabl at-tareeq—Who you travel with is more important than where you go.

  Abdallah came out of the bedroom in his work suit and slippers. He had been up since the pre-dawn prayer, he told me with an energetic wink. At least I could hear Arabic from him, even if a lot of it seemed to revolve around the glory of Islam.

  “I get up to pray too, but I go back to sleep,” Farah said as she folded up the breakfast bedsheet.

  In the car, Farah looked skeptical. “How long have you been driving?” she asked as I held my breath through another one of Abu Dhabi’s giant roundabouts. “I drive when we go to Syria,” she said. “Abdallah gets very upset. ‘You drive like a man—you drive very fast!’ he says to me. No, not like a man. Like in the movies!”

  “Like The Fast and the Furious?” I asked, thinking of Medo stuck in Cairo traffic.

  “Yes! I love that movie! I watched it again last week.”

  The Emirati heritage club, in a dowdy office park, was a bust. The public-relations rep was Egyptian. He served us dates and coffee and loaded us up with glossy brochures about falconry, camel racing, and summer camps for schoolchildren. Then he looked expectantly at us. I wanted to know what heritage—turath, a weighty word—meant to Emiratis; I doubted an Egyptian could say. We thanked him and left.

  Farah had more ideas. In the parking lot after we left, she swatted my arm. “You should have asked to join one of the summer camps,” she said. If I wasn’t careful, she would talk me into staying the next four months, until the camp started.

  Saadiyat, the new city district, was more interesting, even though it had not actually been built yet. Farah and I strolled through the welcome center, a display of videos, interactive touchscreens, and renderings and models of the architectural marvels that would soon be there. Coming from America in a recession, I was struck with en
vy. This exhibit alone probably had a bigger budget than some midsize American cities.

  In Libya, oil wealth had enabled Muammar Qaddafi to crush his country under a demented form of communism for more than forty years. Farah had called him a “barbarian,” and rightly so (even if she had actually meant Berber, a source of confusion ever since the ancient Greeks had named this North African people). In the UAE, unlike Libya, the money appeared to be in the hands of rational people with vision. Saadiyat didn’t have the history or splendor of Cairo or Damascus, but at least it was peaceful.

  At the exit was a guestbook. A girl named Mariam had written an accidental ode to heritage: “It was my grandparent and all my family here, all my beautiful childhood. I loved the sea, it was my baradise. Now it’s the world wonderland. I wish the most beautiful to all.”

  The next morning, I resolved to leave again, but Farah patted the sofa next to her. “Let me show you my pictures,” she said. “Abdallah doesn’t approve of photos, so we have to look while he’s gone.”

  Farah’s uncle and father had been in the political elite; in their photos, they were dapper, midcentury gentlemen with oiled hair and fezzes tilted just so. Farah’s mother perched on an angular 1960s sofa. Her aunt stood regally on her wedding day, in a stiff dress embroidered with intricate silver geometry; on her chest lay a gold-and-ruby necklace as complex as a chandelier. Farah appeared as a young woman in green corduroy bell bottoms, alongside a crew of colleagues, on an engineering assignment in the Eastern Bloc. Later, with big 1980s hair, she leaned on a balcony in a red dolman-sleeved sweater.

  “That is a beautiful picture of you,” I said.

  “Is it?” she replied vaguely, her eyes averted.

  “Mashallah!” I remembered to add, and her face brightened.

  “That was my honeymoon—with my first husband,” she said. “Abdallah and I have no picture of us together married,” she said. “Isn’t that silly?”

  As she was putting away the box of photos, a key turned in the front door. “That’s Abdallah, back for lunch,” Farah said. “You must stay. He has ordered food for all of us. And I made dessert.”

  Over a platter of spicy chicken and rice, I told Abdallah I had been reading about the Quran at the library, knowing this would please him.

  “Ah,” he sighed. “You can write a whole book about a single verse of the Quran and still not understand it fully.” He smiled a beatific smile and pushed a chicken leg toward me.

  Farah emerged from the kitchen with a tray of cake topped with jiggling fruit-filled gelatin. She cut me a piece as large as a paperback book, and when I protested, she whacked my thigh. “You must eat. We are the dictators—we say so!” Abdallah joined in, mock-frowning like a tyrant and modestly swatting the air an inch from my leg.

  “Now you should have a nap,” Farah said when I finished my cake and moved to gather my belongings. “It is not safe to drive when you are sleepy.”

  I would have liked nothing better than to stay here for the rest of my trip, listening to Farah’s stories. But I did need to go. The structure of the poem demanded it—the open road called.

  “OK,” Farah finally said when she saw I was serious. “You know where you’re going? Turn right outside.” She put down her glass of tea to gesture. “Then go sida until you see the freeway.”

  “Sorry, what’s sida?”

  Her forehead wrinkled. “Oh, wait. That’s not English. Is it Arabic?” She paused to think. “No, no—it’s not. Sorry. I’ve been here too long! Everyone says, ‘Rooh sida! Sem-sem.’ I think sida is from India, for straight. And sem-sem—well, you know that.” Same-same—the great international pidgin phrase. Maybe I would learn the Gulf dialect yet.

  Farah spritzed me all over with perfume she kept on a tray by the door. “Dolce and Gabbana—too nice!” she said, smoothing down my hair and giving me a hug. The scent stayed with me the rest of the day.

  The Best People

  The road to Liwa, home of the most scenic sand dunes in the emirate of Abu Dhabi, was straight and dull. I stopped for cardamom tea at a gas station, the thrill of which wore off about the same time the radio signals turned fuzzy. To break the monotony, I stopped for a hitchhiker. I had noticed several men thumbing rides before this—workers, I supposed, who had no other transport than their company-provided buses. In another poem, Imru’ al-Qays wrote the wise and lilting words “Wa-kullu ghareebin lil-ghareebi naseebun”—all strangers are kin to one another. As a foreigner here, I felt a kinship with this lone man, frail and wispily bearded, standing by the side of the road, his kurta flapping in the wind raised by passing trucks.

  When he approached the car, his eyes widened with surprise. He peered in at the back seat and, seeing no one, lowered his brows in doubt. Still, a free ride was a free ride. He climbed in and arranged himself primly on the seat, his back perfectly straight. I asked him where he was from, but after a few attempts, it was clear we had no languages in common. I drove on, trusting he would direct me to stop where he needed to get out.

  This man in my passenger seat, more than anything, illustrated how different the UAE was from Egypt or any other part of the Arab world I had visited. In all those places, I had never been able to forget that I was a woman. Usually this was a small pleasure, the reminders coming in the form of extra attention, compliments, or conversational flourishes: “my good lady,” “sugar,” “honey.” Less pleasant reminders were the crude invitations from idle men on the street.

  In the UAE, aside from the shop clerk who had offered to spritz me with Facebook perfume and the man who had possibly tried to seduce me by telling me about his dead wife, I felt none of this attention. On paper, this didn’t make sense: the Emirates had the largest gender imbalance in the world, 2.7 adult men for every woman. But these statistics did not translate into street hassle, at least for me, a middle-aged white woman. In some parts of Dubai, I had walked for blocks without seeing any other women, but also without a single comment. The anonymity had made me lonely at first, but by now I enjoyed it. It was a luxury I didn’t have even in New York.

  The hitchhiker and I rode for ten minutes in awkward silence until he gestured to the side of the road. A gravel driveway led to a chainlink fence and, beyond, an oil derrick. He got out and trudged away, looking back once to confirm that he had not imagined the whole thing.

  Emboldened, I looked for more hitchhikers. The next one, standing at yet another gravel road to an unmarked work site, was from Pakistan, he said in well-rehearsed English. That was his only line. He sat in the back seat, silent, like a taxi passenger. I dropped him at a bus station in the middle of nowhere and drove on.

  The third hitchhiker was brimming with energy, unlike the others, who had been somewhat wilted in the heat. Better, he looked Arab—like someone I could talk to. He jumped in the front seat and gave me a toothy grin. “Where are you from?” I asked in Arabic.

  “I’m Egyptian,” he said, his smile stretching even wider. “My name’s Hussein.”

  “Ahsan nass!” I gushed, slapping the steering wheel with excitement. The best people! This was the effusive expression Egyptians always used when I told them I was American, and it was fun to turn the tables.

  More exciting still, I understood the man. It was as if I had finally tuned in to the right radio station after cranking the dial through patches of static. Hussein was from Cairo—“the capital itself,” as he grandly put it—and was working here in construction.

  But there was a problem. In my enthusiasm, I had picked him up while headed the wrong way—I had been looping around trying to find a turn I had missed. Hussein needed to go to Abu Dhabi, back the way I had come. I apologized and offered to drop him at the edge of town, but he directed me to the mini-market nearby.

  In the store, Hussein raced around offering me things. Chips? Twinkies? Sunflower seeds? Every suggestion was an excuse to touch my arm. I was a woman again, for better and worse. I settled
on an orange soda, and he went for an energy drink, as if he needed more pep. After clinking our bottles to toast our most fortuitous meeting, then shaking hands at least four times, we parted ways.

  But as I drove slowly back to the highway, I noticed in my rearview mirror that Hussein was walking in the same direction. He hadn’t needed to go to the market at all; that had just been an excuse to spend more time with me. It was boiling hot, and the guy had spent a portion of his tiny income on drinks for us. I made another U-turn.

  “Get in,” I called out my window. “I’ll take you back to where you started.”

  When we got there, we again thanked each other profusely, and he squeezed and kissed my hand and gave me his mobile number. I nearly had to push him out of the car. He was still waving as I drove off. I was smiling too—that orange soda, and the little dose of Egyptian conversation, had hit the spot.

  In Liwa, I checked in to a hotel, then drove out to the desert for the sunset. I had grown up in what people called a desert, but that rocky New Mexican scrub, punctuated by tough, pointy plants, was nothing like this. I gasped at every turn. This was proper sandy desert, the edge of 250,000 square miles known as ar-rub’ al-khali, the Empty Quarter. The Arabic word for desert, sahra’, also means bleak, but now in the golden hour, the terrain looked soft and welcoming.

  The road was a black ribbon curling around each dune. On a few curves, the sand had drifted onto the asphalt, creating an unnerving illusion of the road having crumbled away. I drove as far as Tell al-Kabir (the Big Hill). The name was a mild understatement for such an awesome mountain of sand. Two four-wheel-drive vehicles, small as tadpoles, skittered down its face; the drivers’ faint, elated whoops cut through the silence. Backtracking out of sight and earshot of the dune-bashers, I found a spot to pull off the road. I gathered a few things in my bag and walked a short way into the desert, looking back frequently to check my position. I was not here to get lost, just to read a bit of poetry. I nestled down in a curve of fine sand and unpacked my notebook and my green Hans Wehr dictionary.