All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  My fellow students were American, which answered my nagging question about where my compatriots were studying now that Egypt was in a fresh uproar, Syria and Yemen were firmly out of the question, and the situation in Lebanon was growing more dubious by the day. Most of the students expressed an interest in politics, and one was tackling a dissertation on, as he stated in Fusha, “the intersection of Islam and politics across North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.”

  “A big project,” Taoufik said dryly, and directed us to open our books to something more manageable: a drawing of a family tree.

  Arabic is full of complicated words for family members. Your maternal aunt is different from your paternal one, and one type of uncle can be used figuratively, as a term of respect, but not so much the other type. And in-laws, according to Taoufik, will always be in-laws. “You have to specify,” he said. “Like, ‘He’s not my uncle, he’s my uncle because he married my mother’s sister.’ ” And here he made a slight pushing-away gesture.

  By Middle Eastern standards, my family was pitifully small, so I didn’t have an opportunity to use many of the words, and thus had a terrible time remembering them. To complicate matters, I had noticed that even the most common terms could be used creatively. Egyptian parents called their kids baba (Daddy) and mama (Mommy) to get their attention, and Lebanese granddads had a curious habit of calling all their grandchildren, regardless of gender, jiddo (Gramps).

  Taoufik was working his way around the room, asking the other students to describe their siblings, their parents, their aunts and uncles. When he came to me, I said my family was ana w-rajli—me and my husband—and in the pause when I wondered whether to start next with my mom’s side of the family or my dad’s, he nodded and gestured to the next person.

  Taoufik was not snubbing me, I understood after a second, or recoiling at my terrible pronunciation. It was likely due to the fact that, at age forty, I was expected to be the center of a household, not a little satellite of a larger one, the way the college students in my class were. Plus, I didn’t have children. Taoufik was probably just being polite, skirting the terrible tragedy he assumed must have befallen Peter and me.

  My family may have been small, but it was complicated in ways that not even Arabic had words for. No term for ex-stepfather, for instance—for my mother’s second husband, father of my half brother. And when I alluded to my parents’ divorce (“My mother lives in the state of New Mexico,” I would say in simple sentences, “and my father lives in the state of California”), people had looked sad. This wasn’t so much because of the split itself, as divorce was not considered a disaster, but because I lived so far from my parents.

  And I never bothered to explain the no-children thing. Peter and I just didn’t want them, and most people, anywhere in the world, were puzzled by this. Often, Arabs were much less tactful than Taoufik, demanding, Why no children? You must have children! There is still time! The kindly owner of a bicycle shop in Aleppo offered a free bike to our firstborn—blue for a boy, pink for a girl. Another man, in Abu Dhabi, offered a cruder solution: he would be happy to do what my “weak” husband could not.

  Still, I would need to explain the basics of my family while I was here. I looked at the diagram of the family tree in my textbook and mentally composed the Darija phrases I would need while escorting my parents around the country: “This is my mother, and this is my father. They lived in Morocco before I was born . . .”

  The Place Where the Sun Sets

  I had a crush on Darija from day one. I was taking an introductory class, which is always the phase of dizzy infatuation with any language, when every vocabulary word is thrilling, standards are low, and the learning curve has nowhere to go but up. Moreover, Darija was so alien to me that it reminded me of the days—first in college, then in Cairo—when Arabic had been simply strange and wonderful rather than a complex chore. Completing the throwback effect, my teachers used cassettes for listening exercises. One ka-chunk of a button and it was 1990 all over again.

  Darija was an adaptation of Fusha that I might have made up myself. First, the precious qaf, that wonderful, delicate letter I had chased around Lebanon, was still pronounced, at least in Fes. And some fussy grammar business had been streamlined—for instance, no dual. All Arabic dialects scrapped the verb conjugation for two people, but Darija was the first I’d learned that didn’t have a specific noun form for two items. The dual was a Fusha eccentricity that I did like, in theory, but on a day-to-day speaking basis, it was a nuisance. Besides, the Darija word for the number two was zhuzh, a fun, buzzy word, two sibilants that were a pleasure to say. Such a pleasure that I didn’t think to be mad that Darija had a whole different word for two. It came from the Fusha word zawj, which meant pair (of pants, socks, people, or, oddly, pigeons), and how cute was that?

  Darija had much of the same formal elegance that I appreciated in Fusha. Men were addressed as Si, and women were Lalla—I liked the sound of “Lalla Zora.” Some terms were gloriously ornate. To illustrate the term for natural light, Si Mohamed gestured to sunbeams streaming into our cream puff of a classroom—this was ad-daw d’rabbi, the light of my Lord.

  Some of the most common words were artifacts from centuries back. To say “I want,” for instance, was bagheet, which I recognized as a grand old verb that, in the Quran, meant to seek or to covet. (In a typically Arabic way, the root had since taken on other meanings: ibtagha is to strive for God’s grace, while another variant means to go whoring.) Thus a visit to the corner store became, in my mind, a noble quest: “I seek water with gas,” I told the man behind the counter.

  Even the writing was pleasingly odd and old-fashioned. Si Taoufik and Si Mohamed wrote in careful, even letters on the whiteboard in an unfamiliar combination of curves and angles. Sometimes the letters were short where I expected them to be tall, or bent back when they should have gone forward. In this contrary way, the writing echoed the bucking, contorted Darija accent. Eventually I recognized this handwriting, as well as the loopier typeface and calligraphy styles that signaled “traditional Moroccan”: they were descendants of Kufic script, that early Arabic writing style in which the first Qurans were recorded.

  To leaven all this old-time formality, there were phrases that sounded sweetly pidgin. As in the Gulf, “same-same” was an essential phrase, though Darija translated it to kif-kif or bhal-bhal. “Sometimes” was mra-mra—time-time. Plenty of borrowings from French added a patois vibe: a tire was a bnu, and a plumber was a plombiyi.

  Given Morocco’s history and location, this pragmatic mix of formal and informal made sense. As the westernmost end of the Arab world, Morocco is hardly part of the Middle East. Its name in Arabic is al-Maghrib, literally the place-where-the-sun-sets. In fact, it is farther west than all of Europe except Ireland. At the height of the Islamic empire, the “center” of power in Damascus (and later Baghdad) considered Morocco the fringe. But this corner of North Africa was a crossroads for armies going in and out of Islamic Spain, as well as the endpoint for trade routes from sub-Saharan Africa. So naturally the kinks of Fusha were smoothed out, to make it easy for a Timbuktu salt dealer to haggle in the market or an exiled Andalusian to buy Berber carpets for his new home.

  What I could not grasp about Darija was its near-total absence of vowels. Each word seemed to erupt in a burst of consonants, which was why listening to Btissam and Yacine felt like riding a wild horse. Si Taoufik’s preferred metaphor was the accordion, which he played in pantomime to illustrate the Moroccan tendency to squeeze words, then occasionally expand them and trail off at the end.

  I could usually follow him and Si Mohamed, with their moderate, careful teachers’ pronunciation, but when they pressed play on the tape deck, the syllables whisked past in a jumble. On the second pass, I might recognize one or two words I knew from other countries, but which had eluded me the first time because the em-PHA-sis was on a different syl-LA-ble.

 
; To illustrate the subtlety of Darija vowels, Si Taoufik made us practice two phrases. Allah ykhalleek means “May God be pleased with you,” and it is what one should say to request something politely. Allah yakhleek, on the other hand, means “May God abandon you,” and it is what one should pretty much never say.

  To avoid the damning phrase and properly enunciate the requesting phrase, Si Taoufik advised us to “open up” the second syllable, expanding his pantomime accordion to illustrate. Contrary to what he advised, however, Si Taoufik kept his own syllables clamped down tight. I knew the distinction he was making—I could see how the words were spelled differently and how they ought to be pronounced. In his rendition, though, Allah ykhalleek sounded exactly like Allah yakhleek, no matter how many times he said it.

  Much as I admired Darija otherwise, I decided that flawless pronunciation should not be one of my principal goals. In the case of Allah ykhalleek, where I risked giving a grave insult if I said it too briskly, perhaps it was better not to embrace Darija tightly. For compliments, I was sure no one would mind if I doled them out in plodding, clearly articulated Fusha.

  It was the second week of September, and a street fair near my house was busy selling books, backpacks, polyester uniforms, and other gear for kids headed back to school. I opted for the less scholarly cotton candy on offer at the entrance.

  “One of those, please,” I told the man awkwardly in Fusha. I held out a handful of coins so he could pick the right amount. He gave me a cloud of pink caught on a fresh green reed, a natural touch that almost made the stuff seem like a health food.

  As I walked away, I kicked myself for such a feeble interaction. What was the point of loving my class so much if I couldn’t use the words in the street? I had been in Morocco nearly a week, yet I was still stammering and playing the bumbling tourist when I spoke. Everywhere I went, Darija was rushing by, and I hadn’t worked up the nerve to jump aboard. I could have greeted the man politely. I could have asked him the price. Those were phrases I knew from class. I could have asked him what cotton candy was called in Arabic. That might have been illuminating, I thought as I strolled, because the English words “cotton” and “candy” both came from Arabic.

  I passed a stall selling pretty handmade keychains, thin slices of wood with Arabic names painted on in black calligraphy. Here, for the first time in my life, was my chance to find a personalized souvenir!

  Midway through college, it had dawned on me that my name might be Arabic—I was named after a Moroccan woman, after all. It had taken me a while to make this leap, because, in my mind, Morocco had always been separate, an almost mythical setting for my parents’ adventures, while the Arabic I was learning came from a place much farther east. Until I made the connection with my studies, Zora had just been my name. I hadn’t even particularly liked it, though my mother assured me my namesake was a great role model, a savvy single mom who had run her own business, a hand laundry service. Beverly had admired Zora’s independence—rare not only in Morocco at that time, but in America too—and hoped to confer that spirit on me.

  Whatever. Zora, I thought, clashed with my Irish last name. The movie Zorro the Gay Blade, released when I was in fourth grade, inspired jokes for years. When the Valley Girl craze hit, I missed out because I couldn’t spell my name with an i and dot it with a heart. And I never once found a personalized mug, bumper sticker, or keychain.

  “I think it’s supposed to be Zahra,” I had proposed to Beverly during a phone call home in college. “That means flower.”

  Not only did it mean something, but it was more fun to write. Spelled phonetically, as my Arabic professor had taught me the first week of class, Zora was a dull string of standalone letters with no option for fun cursive loops: زورا. Zahra, by contrast, had a squiggly ha in the middle and a ta marboota, that cryptic, usually unvoiced t, at the end: زهرة. (I was especially fond of that last letter, which looked like its name, a “tied-up ta,” or a little cartoon mouth, open wide in alarm.)

  “Honey,” Beverly had replied, “I’m pretty sure I know my friend’s name. It was Zora.”

  “But you don’t speak Arabic,” I persisted. “You could have misheard. They have a weird accent in Morocco.” At the time, I knew this only through hearsay.

  “Honey, your name is Zora.”

  The next semester, I read a fascinating Lebanese novel called The Story of Zahra, by Hanan al-Shaykh. When Beverly asked what I was studying, I sent her a copy. The protagonist was a neurotic mess of a woman who fretted and picked her scabs while the Lebanese civil war raged.

  She called me a week later. “I’ve been thinking. Maybe your name is Zahra.” I tabled the topic.

  Years later, when I went to Morocco for the first time, I tried a new variation on my name every time I introduced myself: Zahra. Zohra. Zorrrrrra, with a lavish trilled r. Everyone stared at me blankly. In Tangier a day before I was set to leave, I ran out of toothpaste. At the pharmacy, a bustling, middle-aged woman behind the counter gave me the usual friendly interrogation that is part of any business transaction in the Arab world. Where was I from? Did I like Morocco? Was I married? And what was my name?

  “Ismi Zora,” I said, barely thinking. I was already mentally on the plane home. So no flair, no trills. Just the way I’d said it my whole life.

  The woman broke into a wide smile, then reached out and clapped her hands to my cheeks. She looked deep into my eyes, as though she recognized me from long ago.

  “Zweeeeeeyna!” she practically squealed, opening up the vowel as far as it could go. Loooooovely!

  Her hands still cupping my face, she turned to introduce me to her fellow pharmacists. “This is Zora,” she told them. “She’s Moroccan!” She stroked my cheek and hair and beamed at me.

  Despite all that drama, I still didn’t know how my name was spelled. In my rush of excitement at being recognized, I had not thought to ask the pharmacist to write it for me. At least my mother had the grace never to say, “Honey, I told you so.”

  At the keychain stand at the school fair, I picked through the pile of girls’ names, scanning for familiar letters. Aisha, Hakima, Khadija, a very long one, Fatima-something. But nothing resembling Zora, in fact nothing at all starting with ز, the letter za.

  When I arrived home, Yacine was in the dining room, watching TV as usual. He waved me in. “There. Are. Some. Problems. For. Americans?” he said, slowing down his Arabic to a glacial pace to make sure I understood. “Something. Happened. In. Libya?” He saw my blank look and gave a big shrug. I was dismissed.

  When I checked my email, I had a message from a reporter, asking me for a quote on how I, as a traveler in the Middle East, was handling the trouble.

  Problems? Trouble? I checked the news online. The U.S. embassy in Benghazi had been attacked—two days earlier. And rioters had been tearing up downtown Cairo, also for two whole days. This was the first I had heard of any unrest. It made a pleasant change from Lebanon, where neighboring Syria’s strife had pricked the skin every day. I was “handling the trouble,” it seemed, by being far, far off to the west of it.

  You Pour the Tea

  Back in Beirut, my teacher Zaina had tsked me out of tacking inshallah onto the end of a sentence. In Fes, I had to get back in the habit of invoking God at every turn.

  Si Mohamed was vigilant—future plans required inshallah, and when they didn’t, he looked genuinely pained. Even more important was proper gratitude. “Always, always you must say lhamdullah,” Si Mohamed admonished my sleepy-eyed classmate who had praised his powerfully strong coffee. After any good fortune, one must always, always thank God.

  I liked this aspect of Arabic. These phrases were a pleasant ritual; they also paced out a conversation and bought me time. Pausing to thank God, a phrase I could say without thinking, gave my brain a free moment to race ahead to find the next substantive words I needed. Unfortunately, just because
I admired this aspect of Arabic didn’t mean I was any good at it. I had the basics—min fadlak (please) and shukran (thank you)—but they were tiny drops in a sea of gracious phrases.

  On our first day in Darija class, we were given a confusing heap of formulas, many of which were subtly different from what I already knew. “These are very important,” said Si Mohamed, himself the picture of politeness in a crisp caftan. “When you say shukran, you’re saying thank you with your brain. When you say barak allahu feek, you’re saying thank you from the heart.”

  At the class break later in the week, I sipped mint tea with another student. She showed me her notebook, in which she had dedicated the back page to a list titled “God for All Occasions.” The next time we drank tea together, at the end of the second week, the list was already spilling onto the next page.

  I had not been so diligent. Although Si Mohamed had warned us that these phrases were essential, each day I had assumed that surely this would be the last batch of them. And then came the phrase for when you offered to pour water for hand-washing at lunch and the phrase for “when a bad smell comes out of you,” as Si Mohamed tactfully put it. Soon I was neck-deep, flipping desperately through my notebook for the right words.

  Barak allahu feek.

  Tbarak allahu ’aleek.