All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  As we neared the dropoff point in Beirut, Sahar reappeared, putting a commanding hand on my shoulder. “You come with me in a taxi,” she said.

  “No, no, she’s in Hamra,” a man I didn’t know piped up. “I’ll take her.” Everyone on the bus was mobilizing, zipping zippers, setting bags on laps, jiggling a phone in one hand and car keys in the other. As soon as the bus pulled in, the man steered me to his car. I had only a second to tell Samira I was happy to meet her, but Sahar was consumed in the scrum grabbing suitcases from under the bus.

  The man’s name was Ibrahim. He was a young doctor at the hospital next door to my apartment, fresh out of medical school in Houston. His mother called twice as we drove, and her panicked squawk filled the car. Ibrahim resolutely kept our conversation on small talk. What did I think of this country?

  “Lebanon reminds me of Greece,” I said. My cheery answer landed awkwardly in the dark. “Everyone may live in the city, but their hearts are really in their villages. They’re all so proud of which village they’re from.”

  We drove on in silence. The streets were empty.

  “I know I’m not supposed to ask where people are from,” Ibrahim finally said. “But as a doctor, I feel it’s important information for knowing my patient.”

  Oh. I hadn’t known you weren’t supposed to ask. Not only was it Arabic 101 basics to ask where someone was from, but all the Lebanese people I had ever met before this trip—and there had been many, as Lebanese have emigrated all over the world—bragged nonstop about their villages. The most beautiful views, the freshest air, the most pungent herbs! But they were all Lebanese living outside of Lebanon, often for generations. Inside this country, so carved up by religion and politics, I was learning, the rules were different. This wasn’t a simple case of urbanites wanting to shake off country ancestry, as in Dubai. In Beirut, the question “Where are you from?” was really asking “What side are you on?”

  Ibrahim offered no details about his own roots. We sailed unimpeded over the bridge between East and West Beirut, blighted Martyrs’ Square in shadows to our right.

  When I looked out from my balcony the next morning, I was expecting, if not chaos, then at least some evidence of the stressful night before. Instead, I saw cars, pedestrians, the manoucheh bakery slinging its usual breakfast bread rounds bubbling with olive oil and oregano. The produce guy, with his piles of black cherries, was in his spot next to the parking lot entrance.

  It wasn’t until I slid into class, a few minutes late, that things felt wrong.

  “They were burning wardrobes on the highway last night,” Nick was saying, in Arabic, as he teetered on his back chair legs. He was so tall, he never seemed to fit in our boxy little room.

  “Burning wardrobes—it’s the national sport!” Irene said, rolling her eyes. She was bundled in a pink scarf, protection against the air-conditioning blasting above her. Summer had arrived almost overnight.

  “Where do they get the wardrobes?” Nick wondered. “Do they save them up until there’s a crisis?”

  Years ago in Cairo, my roommate had told me about her friend who, to memorize Arabic vocabulary, concocted elaborate mental scenes, the more jarring and inappropriate the better, as these stuck most firmly in the mind. For dawaleeb, the plural of doolab, he had envisioned a performer in blackface saying, in minstrel-like patois, “Dat’s da way I lib,” and pointing to his wardrobes stuffed full of belongings. This thirdhand mnemonic had worked all too well—not only did I know that the word dawaleeb meant wardrobes, but I winced a little every time I heard it.

  Minstrels, wardrobes, collections of junk—none of that seemed germane to Irene and Nick’s exchange, however.

  “Wait—time out,” I finally said. “What are dawaleeb?”

  “Duh, tires?” Nick answered. “It’s, like, the first word you learn here. Every time there’s some problem, people block the road with burning tires.”

  “Oh, wow!” I said. Nick raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t that I thought tire-burning was exciting, but Nick’s translation was a clue to a secondary riddle. Doolab was a borrowed word, I knew from the two long vowels, which matched no pattern in the Arabic root system. In Persian, it meant waterwheel. I had always wondered how it came to mean wardrobe in Arabic. Not that a tire was a completely logical link between an irrigation tool and a storage unit, but it was a start.

  Nick set his chair down with a thump, bringing my thoughts out of the dictionary and back to the here and now. His translation also explained why my fellow hikers had been so tense on the bus. I hadn’t grasped that we—a busload full of Christians, I supposed, though of course we had never discussed it—might be caught on the wrong side of a flaming line, in the Be’aaaaaa, where Hezbollah and Amal staked claim.

  “Right, dawaleeb,” I said to Nick, nodding.

  Almost a Dead Language

  Zaina handed back our first quiz. I had thought I’d done well—only one or two words had been unfamiliar, and I had been the first to finish. But it was covered in red X’s, with a failing grade at the top.

  The demerits were not for the words I had used, but how I had written them. But, but—I thought as I flipped the pages of the quiz. That’s the way the words are really spelled! I felt the same visceral wrench in my chest that had seized me when Zaina had written the word for fifteen without a ra on the end.

  In my Ammiya classes in Egypt, spelling had been a side issue, covered in one go by pointing out how the pronunciation was streamlined. In all dialects, not just Ammiya, the trickier sounds are often glossed over. The dh (like the th in “the”) usually shifts to a simpler d or z. Likewise, th might become t or s, and the qaf, the delicate, coughing q, usually becomes an easier g, or just a glottal stop, a soundless stutter. Because colloquial spelling wasn’t standardized, sometimes my teachers had written words the way they sounded, sometimes the way they were “really” spelled in Fusha. And they had certainly never graded on spelling.

  While Zaina was introducing the day’s lesson, I pulled out my pen and rescored my quiz. Disregarding the spelling “mistakes,” I had missed a total of two questions. That gave me a solid A.

  When I was done righting these wrongs, I tuned back in to class.

  “Tell us what you did this morning,” Zaina had just asked Dutch Danny. He always told a good story, and Zaina had sat down in a chair to listen, tugging her miniskirt closer to her knees.

  “I woke up—”

  “Tsk,” Zaina interrupted, jumping up. From Egypt, I knew this tongue click was shorthand for “no.” But the way Zaina did it, lighter and a bit offhand, I had a hard time hearing it as simple negation; to me it sounded like the chiding of a judgmental grandmother.

  Danny had spoken exactly one word, sahsahet. “You mean fi’it,” Zaina said in a sharper tone than usual. Her marker squeaked as she wrote on the board. “This is how you say ‘I woke up.’”

  This was puzzling. Both words were in our book, which Zaina usually followed to the letter. Danny just nodded and continued with his story.

  During our break—because, by this time, I knew that questioning Zaina’s rools didn’t yield any useful answer—I asked Danny to explain his exchange with our teacher. Surely he, who had dated a Lebanese man for years, had woken up in Beirut enough times to know what he was talking about.

  “This happens with so many words,” he said. “You learn one from a Catholic, one from a Shiite, and they both laugh at you. And now we are studying at a Muslim school”—we were? I hadn’t thought to wonder, and I didn’t know how he could tell—“so those are the words we are learning.” Danny was used to navigating Beirut, crossing sectarian lines with his vocabulary learned on all sides. He told me not to worry about it.

  I did worry, though. If language was as marked by sect as everything else in Lebanon, as Danny suggested, this threw my whole Arabic-study plan into disarray. When I had starte
d classes in Cairo, I was convinced that focusing on Ammiya rather than Fusha would free me from the unwieldy, book-learned classical language. When I had moved on to Dubai and here to Beirut, I was sure that studying dialects would get me out of my head and help me speak from my gut, or my heart. They would make my life smoother, fuller with human interaction—and in Beirut, I hoped, a bit more glamorous.

  But in Lebanon, there were apparently dialects within the dialect. If I chose the wrong one, I might alienate my listener as quickly as if I had asked which village he was from, or made some remark about a political party. Perhaps in this complicated country, Fusha, though it was the language of the Quran, could be more neutral than colloquial speech, since it would give no clues as to one’s sectarian affiliation. I could say istayqathtu—the ponderous classical word for “I woke up”—and no one would immediately guess which side of Beirut I’d been sleeping on.

  I had considered Fusha an anchor tied to my ankle, dragging me to the bottom of the sea. Now, in its regimented order, logical spelling, and vocabulary that predated Lebanese identity politics, it looked like a life preserver.

  More and more frequently, our class stumbled on usage disagreements. Nick cited his cousins on some piece of slang; Zaina tsked. Irene quoted her mother-in-law; Zaina tsked. We hit an impasse with the principle of continuous prefixes. These syllables attached to the front of a verb are found in most Arabic dialects, although the syllable itself differs. With the prefix, a present-tense verb takes on a sense of repetition or routine. In Ammiya, atkallim ʼarabi means “I am speaking Arabic at this moment”; bitkallim ʼarabi means “I speak Arabic as a matter of course.” Lebanese has a tiny complication, in that there are two prefixes, ʼam– and bi–. According to Zaina, they could not be used together. That was the rool, no excebtions.

  I could have sworn I had heard Manal in Dubai start verbs with ʼam-bi, both prefixes together. I checked my notes—yes, that’s what I had written.

  Late one night, I burrowed into online forums on Lebanese dialect intricacies. Many posters confirmed what I had heard, while others backed up Zaina’s usage, and everyone provided helpful translations. I compiled my findings into a single page, complete with citations, then reviewed them, highlighting each point. When I was finished, I paused in surprise. I had convinced myself that Zaina was a terrible teacher, with all her rigid rools and her unwillingness to acknowledge how anyone else might speak. But when was the last time I had been so thorough? Even if it was by accident, she had made me a much more diligent student.

  The next, deeper revelation came as I was closing the tabs in my browser. For settling this ʼam-bi- argument, my Fusha grammars were no help. And there was no definitive Lebanese dialect text; all I had in print was The Abou Abed Joke Book. I had picked it up at a bookstore and devoured it hungrily, excited to hear the ring of a Lebanese voice in my head as I read, even if it was only little stories about ne’er-do-well Abou Abed and his scandalous wife. For explanatory references, all I had were the word nerds on the Internet and the school’s spiral-bound textbook.

  That textbook may have been “wrong” relative to what I had heard other Lebanese people say, but to Zaina it was right. That and all the rools she was teaching us reflected the way she spoke. She was teaching her Arabic—and according to Dr. Badawi, that was the way it should be done.

  This school, it finally dawned on me, was doing exactly what I had wanted, the very thing I had had the urge to jump up and yell about at the conference in Dubai. It was treating colloquial Lebanese Arabic as a legitimate language, totally separate from Fusha. While I had been busy imagining a Supreme Poet of the People composing a masterwork that would free everyone from the shackles of classical Arabic, I had not bothered to imagine what this might look like to me, as a student of Legitimate Lebanese. Alone in my apartment, I groaned aloud at the obviousness of it all. Of course a teacher would have to present the rools from scratch, of course she would have to standardize spelling. So not only had I not recognized my supposed dream come true, I had spent the past two weeks fighting it tooth and nail. I felt like a jerk.

  Until near the end of the twentieth century, only one kind of Arabic mattered enough to have its grammar scrutinized and written about in books. Real Arabists—and Arabs, for that matter—studied Fusha. That was that.

  The various dialects of Arabic were considered mere corruptions of the classical language, simplifications that even the most dimwitted students could pick up just by conversing. Humphrey Davies, a longtime literary translator of Arabic, told me his professors at Cambridge had considered colloquial Arabic “an amiable eccentricity, to be humored.” Colloquial teaching materials were rare. The Ammiya textbook I used in Cairo in 1992 covered not much more than the basics. In Lebanon, one private dialect teacher was famous for her use of course materials from a British school established in the 1960s in the village of Shemlan. They consisted of vocabulary lists: 102 key verbs, 123 professions.

  English has its own distinctions between high and low speech. Responsible teachers would never instruct a student that “gotta” or “wanna” is correct, but they would accept its spoken use. Similarly, linguists accept that African American Vernacular English—or Southern American English, or Appalachian English, or any other English dialect—has its own internal logic and grammar, its own rools. In colloquial Arabic, people were only starting to acknowledge the same.

  I went to talk to Rana Dirani, the director of my school and the developer of my textbook, to ask her: Was she doing what I thought she was doing? Was she trying to make the Lebanese dialect its own language? I felt I had my answer just from her firm handshake, her fierce black eyes, and her strong jaw. This was a woman on a mission.

  “Yes, for sure,” she said without hesitation, smacking the top of her big wooden desk for emphasis. “I really had this idea to codify colloquial.”

  In Arabic, putting colloquial on the same footing as Fusha is problematic for a few reasons. First, it is considered vaguely suspect. The logic goes like this: Arabs don’t need to study the language they speak; their Arabic classes are all about classical rules and written formalities. As a result, studying dialect is something only foreigners do, and because, according to a certain paranoid view, foreigners must be in the Middle East only to gather information for some meddling government or other, studying dialect almost certainly means you’re a spy. This paranoia was prevalent in Lebanon, and with good reason—that British school in Shemlan, for instance, had produced several notorious intelligence agents. A few days before my appointment with Rana at school, I had spoken with Samar Awada, a freelance teacher developing a Lebanese dialect curriculum of her own. “I get that look a lot,” she had said. “You know, the ‘you’re working with spies, aren’t you?’ look.”

  Another problem with taking colloquial more seriously is that it implies taking Fusha less seriously, which in turn implies a devaluation of the language of the Quran. As Rana laid out her plan for writing the literal book on Lebanese colloquial, I asked her if she had any reservations about casting aside Fusha and all its historical associations.

  Not at all, she said. Her school taught Fusha because it was still necessary for advanced reading, but in her view, it was “almost a dead language,” precisely because of its association with the Quran, which rendered it untouchable. “And the reality is that people don’t understand the Quran,” she added. Her black bob swung along her chin as she shook her head with irritation. “Sometimes I pray and I don’t understand. I sometimes have no clue! But if it were in colloquial, I could understand.”

  No other teacher I spoke to on my travels took such an extreme position. Even Samar Awada, a very practical teacher, had expressed a sentimental fondness for Fusha. It would be a shame if it went the way of Latin, she had said, and died out completely. It should be taught “for its beauty, not just as an obligation.”

  Perhaps the thorniest problem with elevating the vari
ous Arabic dialects was that it could lead to a more fractured Arab world. In the heyday of Arab nationalism, the 1950s and 1960s, Egypt’s charismatic leader Gamal Abdel Nasser had managed to briefly unite his country with Syria, although they shared no border. Those days had long passed. Yet despite wars, tyrannical leaders, and significant cultural differences, solidarity among Arabs persisted across the Middle East, in large part due to a shared language, because Nasser and other nationalists had defined Arabs as anyone who spoke Arabic. Identifying as Arab first could elevate you above petty local politics and make you part of a greater culture, one that preserved the Greek classics and brought the world algebra and falafel.

  Yet Rana waved off Arab nationalism—she was much more concerned with the fractures inside Lebanon. Whereas I had been spooked by the subtle divisiveness of sectarian differences in Lebanese colloquial, she saw it as a unifying force. This was because dialect countered the innate elitism of Fusha, the same elitism that had frustrated me at the conference in Dubai. Not everyone could afford a good education in classical Arabic, Rana said. “So that leaves the spoken language, the only language that can make a connection between all Lebanese people.” She was building her all-Lebanese curriculum in part for American and European semester-abroad students, but more so for her fellow citizens.

  “Lebanese people say to me, ‘I don’t know how to read.’ I say, ‘What, you don’t know the alphabet?’” She leaned forward over her desk, conspiring. “I know what they mean, of course, but I push them. I want to create a belief in this language.”

  When I had embarked on this project to relearn Arabic the right way, I had wanted someone to congratulate me on my wise decision to abandon Fusha. It was a sign, I thought, of a devil-may-care attitude that came with true maturity, a sign that I was no longer that kid who had to get every single word just right. But with Zaina backing me up and Rana telling me to go for it, I discovered I hadn’t changed much after all. I loved Fusha’s rules; I had lived by them for all my years of school. I admired how grammarians had polished them for centuries, extrapolating them from the Quran and Bedouin informants, then spreading them around the Islamic empire to keep new converts and language learners from screwing the whole beautiful thing up.