All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  Another panel member, an Arabic professor at the Abu Dhabi branch of New York University, laid out the problems in higher education, including a lack of good teaching materials, for both native speakers and foreigners.

  The third person on the panel, a newspaper publisher, lamented the lack of Arabic in the world at large. If Arabs truly valued their language, he proposed, why shouldn’t there be an Arabic equivalent of the Goethe-Institut or the British Council, teaching the language and promoting the culture around the world?

  At first the discussion was proactive and dynamic—these people seemed dedicated to solving problems I had faced in trying to learn Arabic. These problems were more serious in the Emirates, where well-off children typically studied English from an early age, with little grounding in written Arabic at the same time. The sheikha had established her publishing house when she noticed that her own daughter had learned to read English before Arabic. Shutting the barn door once the horse was loose, the UAE declared Arabic an official language in 2008.

  But as the panelists continued to talk, they revealed a conservative streak. “Some people hold PhDs,” the newspaperman commented with a snort, pushing up his round glasses imperiously, “and what they write can’t be considered Arabic. They should review the rules!”

  The professor, for his part, admitted that, yes, Fusha was the language of the elite. “But when I say elite,” he said, “I don’t mean that in the sense of class. With education, even a farmer in Egypt can be elite.”

  Now it was my turn to snort. What world was this professor living in? Certainly not real-world Egypt, where social mobility was virtually nil and the literacy rate hovered around 65 percent. And not even Hosni Mubarak, the now-deposed president, had spoken Fusha. Everyone knew his Ammiya words were “translated” into the classical style when they were quoted in the newspaper.

  No one on the panel entertained the idea of letting an Egyptian farmer be literate in the language he spoke. For nearly every problem over which the panelists were wringing their hands, the answer seemed to be simply this: let people write the way they talked. If Arabic dialects were written, it would make early reading easier. As it stood, children’s books, including the sheikha’s series, were in Fusha, but only the most devoted—and pedantic—parent would read them aloud. Fusha was the language of school and high culture, not the language of parental love and snuggling before bed. A Palestinian-American couple I knew did read to their children in Fusha, but only because the mom insisted, out of American habit; the dad, though he considered Arabic education essential, found Fusha unnatural.

  If Arabic dialects were written, the newspaperman’s dream of an international Arabic program would reach more people, because students could master more in a shorter time. And there would be no language of the elite, in terms of money or education. Would it be so terrible, I huffed to myself at the back of the room, if these aristocratic guardians became irrelevant, if Fusha faded away and the dialects rose up as full-fledged languages?

  This was what happened in Europe, when Romance languages overtook elite Latin, and the diglossia of the Middle Ages was resolved. In the fourteenth century, Dante composed The Divine Comedy. His epic poem was both theologically meaty and wildly entertaining, and it legitimized the Italian vernacular in which it was written. This opened the door to greater literacy and the creative flowering of the Renaissance. No wonder Dante was crowned il Sommo Poeta, the Supreme Poet.

  The Arab world had undergone one linguistic renaissance, starting in the late nineteenth century, when the florid medieval language was pruned to fit the more practical, populist demands of newspapers and advertisements. At the time, a pro-colloquial camp in Egypt promoted the use of Ammiya in print, but undermined itself by making its arguments in Fusha. With British and French influence rampant across the Arab world, the door on the debate closed. Fusha was a crucial unifying force, a language of solidarity against colonialism.

  I couldn’t help thinking Arabic needed another transformation. Every country in the Arab world could benefit from a Supreme Poet, to bring each dialect to maturity, to pull out and polish its unique vocabulary and distinctive rhythms. Or—one may as well dream—perhaps there could be one Super-Extra Mega-Supreme Poet to unite the whole Arab world, by synthesizing the ease and directness of all the dialects with the entrancing grace of the classical language.

  That vision was particularly hopeless, seeing how the grumpy newspaperman headed a group called the Arabic Language Preservation Association. “It is a rich language!” he said. “We have forty words for camel. Somehow, despite this, we still need foreign terms like tilifizyoon.”

  The odd borrowed word seemed the least of Arabic’s problems, and a fight that even the language academies in Cairo and Damascus had decided they wouldn’t win. Yet the other panelists murmured agreement, and the newspaperman gave a final harrumph. “Arabic rests on the shoulders of every single Arab,” he muttered accusingly.

  By the time the floor opened for questions, I had worked myself into a snit. What if Arabs—and Arabic students—didn’t want to shoulder the burden of this old, heavy language any longer? Here was my chance for another triumphant conclusion to my own poem, to stand up and dazzle the audience with my criticism. But the words coming together in my head were pure Ammiya, with the occasional Lebanese lilt where some of Manal’s adjustments had taken hold. If I stood up and squawked my righteous words in a broad, broken Egyptian dialect, would anyone understand me? At the very least, I would sound silly. This, I fumed silently, was the very problem with Fusha and the elitists who preserved it!

  An Australian woman stood up and asked, in polite and quavering Fusha, if the Emirati government was investing in teaching foreigners Arabic. She had found it very difficult to learn and would like more practice speaking and integrating into Arab society. The three panel members cooed and applauded. Humph, teacher’s pet, I thought.

  The crowd began to file out, and I stayed in my seat, letting my frustration ebb. The Australian woman was right to have made the effort, I conceded. I had been too concerned with my self-image, with wanting to appear as educated as the panelists. I should have stayed focused on what I wanted to communicate, the story I wanted to tell.

  Develop!

  Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl named Hamda. Her mother had died, and her father remarried. Hamda’s stepmother dressed her own daughter in fine clothes and took her to parties, but she dressed Hamda in rags and locked the girl in the oven to make sure she stayed home. One night while the stepmother was out, the magical Esfaisra, a genie shaped like a fish, appeared to Hamda. She released the girl from the oven and dressed her in lovely new clothes. “Go to the party,” the genie said.

  Hamda danced and sang and ate, but took care to leave in plenty of time to get home before her stepmother and stepsister returned. But as she left, Hamda dropped a bracelet. The king’s son found it and declared that he would marry the beautiful girl whose wrist it fit. He traveled all over the kingdom, finally arriving at Hamda’s house.

  The stepmother made her own daughter try on the bracelet, but it did not fit. The prince asked if there might be another girl in the house, and the stepmother said no. But the rooster was listening, and it cried out, “Cock-a-doodle-doo! My aunt Hamda, the wonderful girl, is in the oven!”

  Hamda tried on the bracelet, and it fit perfectly.

  Before the prince was to marry her, he came to her in the form of a dog and asked, “What would you like your dowry to be?”

  Hamda answered that all she would like was a container of dates and a bag of little fish. Her stepmother scoffed at Hamda’s humility, and when the dog delivered the meager gift, the woman told Hamda to eat the dates and fish and leave her in peace.

  When Hamda did as she was told, she became so sick that she vomited, and out of her mouth came a stream of pearls and coral. Hamda and the prince were married and lived happily
ever after.

  The king’s other son then asked if he could marry the stepmother’s daughter. The stepmother craftily requested the same dowry of dates and little fish. The dog came and brought the girl the goods, and she gobbled them all down. But she threw up no pearls or coral, only terrible things.

  So the dog ate her.

  The end.

  I heard this story, so familiar yet so strange, from an old woman named Um Khalaf—not sitting at her knee, but via the Internet. The tale was part of a collection of oral histories of Qatar, one of the few samples of translated Khaleeji dialect I had been able to find before my trip. Fact and fiction, the stories recalled the old days in Qatar, before its store of natural gas brought wealth, and the past of fairy tales, that mythical time of “there was or there wasn’t.” I wanted to meet the team of four women students who had collected the tales, so I boarded a plane to the city of Doha.

  Culturally, the Gulf Arab countries are often lumped together, but after five weeks in the UAE, the neighboring country of Qatar, just an hour’s flight west from Dubai, felt to me like an exotic new world. In the Souq Waqif, the city’s renovated old market, the men folded their ghitras atop their heads in fascinating new ways, and many more women wore niqabs. The shops sold frankincense and special baskets for desert picnics. I even happened upon, wonder of wonders, street food. From a gleaming silver tureen, a woman ladled up a concoction of slippery seeds, sweetened and warmed with saffron, and then told me the price in Arabic. By the time I arrived for my appointment with the four story collectors at a sprawling villa, I felt a bit like Hamda myself, a stepdaughter invited to a ball.

  Sara, small and slim, with nut-brown skin and coolly sculpted hair, welcomed me into a sitting room that made me feel like Alice, shrinking away in Wonderland. Its overstuffed sofas could have held eight people each; the drapes sagged under the weight of fist-size tassels.

  In the center of the room, around a low table laden with finger sandwiches and coffee thermoses, our group was just four: me and hostess Sara al-Khalfan, dwarfed by her armchair; doe-eyed Shatha Farajallah; and tomboyish Mariam Dahrouj, sporting thick black bangs and a plaid shirt. They were all recent graduates of Qatar University, and the oral-history website, called Qatar Swalif, had been a project for their journalism program. We exchanged Arabic pleasantries, but these well-educated women spoke far better English than I spoke Arabic, so I was grateful to switch. Mariam, the strongest English speaker, steered the conversation.

  In the Khaleeji dialect, swalif are the “everyday stories” people tell when they get together: childhood memories, brushes with death, I-walked-uphill-both-ways complaints, and warning parables for children. To tell these stories is to soolaf—the verb I had been so excited to hear from unhappy Saeed, that morning in the parking lot on the mountain near Al-Ain.

  In the Gulf countries, the everyday stories had a special resonance now that “everyday” was so different. In less than two generations, just since the 1970s, lifestyles had changed drastically, from rural subsistence to highways, high-rises, and fully stocked refrigerators—those “precious icons,” as Nasif at the Dubai cultural center had called them. Grandparents who had grown up in tents told swalif to grandkids in air-conditioned sitting rooms.

  These were the stories that Sara, Shatha, and Mariam had set out to record. In the process, they also recorded a different everyday language: the Qatari dialect also had changed drastically in a few decades. “It was surprising to learn I can’t understand some people in my own country,” Mariam said, and the other women nodded.

  “So, did you stop and ask what the words meant?” I asked, thinking of my own resolve to make this effort.

  “We didn’t want to do that,” Shatha said, lowering her doe eyes. “Old people don’t like to know young people are cut off from their roots.”

  So the women went home and asked their own grandparents, translating old Arabic to new Arabic. Sometimes the words were for objects that had vanished—futtam, pearl divers’ nose clips, for instance, or gargoor, a woven-wire fish trap. Sometimes the dialect word was a borrowed quirk. Dakhtur had been the word for doctor back in the days of British influence; now Qataris were more connected to the rest of the Arab world, so most people used the standard Fusha word, tabeeb.

  Shatha, from a Palestinian family who settled in Qatar in 1948, had been surprised to hear stories that were so different from the ones she had heard from her own grandparents. It was the first time, she said, that she had felt acutely that her roots were in a different place and culture. “But I did recognize some special words,” she added. “They were very bedu, very rural, the same as Palestinians use.”

  Sara served thimble-size cups of saffron-laced tea, translating the subtle language of the ritual for me. Pouring duties for tea or coffee went to the youngest person in the room, and when I had drunk enough, I should shake my cup from side to side. “And if I fill the cup to the brim, it’s an insult, like saying ‘Get out!’” she explained. “My brother used to do it to a man he didn’t like. You read about this in poetry too.”

  And in this way, I was happy to find our conversation turning, as I had hoped, to a more general discussion of the power of Arabic and literature in their own lives. How well did these women understand pre-Islamic poetry—was it as much work for them as it was for me? The mu’allaqat, those fine Jahiliya odes, provoked a rueful smile in Shatha. “We memorized them in school,” she said, “but it wasn’t that easy.”

  “Oof, the atlal,” added Mariam, eyes rolling under bangs. Atlal, with a deep, portentous t, were the campsite traces, the last sign of a departed lover, that were mentioned at the start of every poem. “You were brave to try.”

  I told the group about the brave, or foolhardy, interpreters at the literature festival. Poetry, the women all agreed after they stopped laughing, worked only in the original language. “It’s like telling a joke,” Mariam said. “Once you translate it, it’s not funny. Or not as beautiful.”

  They held competing opinions on the value of Nabati poetry over classical Fusha writing, but they were all roundly sick of any kind of oratory involving big, elaborate words. “Old people, especially men, appreciate it,” Mariam said, rolling her eyes again. As the conversation bounced from topic to topic, from Arabic rap to the relative merits of pulpy novels, I sat back and considered my good fortune to have met these smart, well-spoken women.

  Statistically, the odds were in my favor, as women made up the substantial majority of college graduates in Qatar and the rest of the Gulf region. Granted, this wasn’t quite as positive as it sounded, as college often represented the sole option for women; men, by contrast, could study abroad, join the military, take a government job. Still, the future, I thought, must be good, if the Gulf countries had so many women like this.

  I could have stayed chatting all night, but I didn’t want to get the full teacup, or, I remembered from Nasif’s talk at the cultural center in Dubai, the cloud of incense. We bustled to go; I slipped on my shoes and Mariam and Shatha put on their abayas and made phone calls for rides.

  At the front gate, I had some confusion with the taxi driver, and when I turned back toward the house to ask Sara for help, I was startled by a black-clad wraith. In a moment, I realized it was only Mariam, disguised in her abaya, her sheer shayla draped over her face. She pulled the black fabric up quickly and winked at me.

  I left the taxi on the narrow waterfront park along Doha’s arcing bay. I wanted to stretch my legs and think about all that the Qatar Swalif women had told me. The night was cool and windy; only an occasional jogger passed.

  At the north end of the bay, new Doha was a jutting line of skyscrapers and construction cranes, telling the same fairy tale as Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Down at the south end was the original city center and the Souq Waqif. The tallest building was a replica of the ninth-century minaret in Samarra, Iraq, coiled like a snail shell, stacked like a
wedding cake.

  Midway along the waterfront, I came across a small, open geodesic dome. Inside stood a young man with beefy arms so big they stuck out from his sides a bit. When he saw me, he walked a short distance away and busied himself, stretching, pacing, looking at his phone.

  The dome was a complex piece of playground equipment, with a touchpad at each joint. A sign detailed a number of games and patterns to play.

  “It’s cool, isn’t it?” the burly guy said in English, still at a distance. He had looked up casually, as though just noticing me. “It’s new. Two weeks only.” As he walked toward me, I automatically smiled politely and turned to go.

  A few paces away, I caught myself and turned back. It was cool.

  “You want to . . . ?” he asked.

  “Um, how about . . . ?” I proposed at the same time.

  I put down my jacket, and he gestured to the start button. “Go for it,” he said. “I’ll be red. You’re blue.”

  I pushed the button, and the dome filled with karate-chop sound effects. We raced from side to side, each trying to hit our respective colors as they lit up. In less than ten seconds, I was panting desperately. He beat me, but only 150 to 120. We crouched in the dome, breathing hard and grinning stupidly.

  “That was fun,” I finally caught my breath enough to say. “Thanks for letting me try it.”

  “No, thank you. I have used it only alone before this,” he replied. Elaborate courtesy was the best way to avoid the awkwardness of physical exertion with a stranger of the opposite sex. In a public park. At night.