All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  I was also in touch with Medo, who was still making plans to leave Egypt. Chatting on Facebook, we mostly typed in English, because I knew he wanted to practice. The last time, though, I had thrown in a bit of Arabic: Sallimni 3ala Mama!—Say hi to your mom for me! After I hit send, I fretted. Was it the right preposition, the right chat-alphabet number? Then Medo replied: “Mstnyeenek ☺”—We’re waiting for you to visit. I felt like a magician all over again, just as I had twenty years before, ordering strawberry juice on my first trip to Cairo. A few random letters, strung together, had worked.

  “☺,” I typed back.

  At the same time, in my Year of Speaking Arabic Badly, the language had shed a bit of its magic too. At the outset, I had thought I needed to acquire more knowledge, and the perfect, fluent combination of vocabulary and grammar would work like an incantation: when I got everything just right, a whole world would spring open to me in a flash. But in so many of the situations I had thrown myself into, Arabic worked more like a crude tool, a lever to pry open a door an inch or two. After the door was open, it almost didn’t matter what I said, and sometimes I didn’t have to say anything at all. That time I had afternoon tea in Lebanon with Tony and his overbearing, bird-loving father, the important thing was simply that I was there, helping Tony look good.

  Ultimately, what mattered most to the people I met was not what I had learned in class that day, but what I practiced least often with my teachers: I listened. And I was heartened to know that even if I was never able to tell pitch-perfect jokes, read poems without a dictionary, or write an essay with flawless spelling and appropriate vocabulary, I would always be able to communicate, just by lending a sympathetic ear. Empathy, imagination, listening and nodding, saying thank you from the heart—these were skills I could use every day.

  Even so, how to continue when I was headed home, away from classrooms and people who expected me to speak Arabic all the time? I remembered Alain in Sidon. As he had advised, it would be good enough if I practiced a few weeks a year. Perhaps I would corner an Arab tourist on the street in New York City and invite him home to lunch. One day I hoped to come back and retrace my travels—stay with Medo’s family in Cairo, as his mother insisted I must, or take a road trip with Farah outside Abu Dhabi. I hoped I might attend Houria’s wedding, to a good man who treasured her spirit and charm.

  In the meantime, I would think of them, and all the others I had met, when I read the newspaper. There would be dramatic and violent reversals in Egypt’s revolution; a car bomb in Beirut, blocks from where I had lived; a flood of refugees from Syria’s civil war—but I would remember the stories from this year, of people grappling with the common concerns of building a future, connecting with family, and finding love.

  The delicious-ladies waiter appeared at our table. “You look very happy with your father,” he said. “Do you want me to take your picture?” We raised our tea glasses for a toast.

  “I feel like we’re part of the scenery now,” Patrick said. “A tour group will come through and look at us, and think we’ve always been here.”

  A moped buzzed across the square and exited stage left. When it was gone, there was a momentary lull in traffic. We sat and listened to the murmur of Arabic and the shush-shush-shush of hundreds of feet walking.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you, from the heart:

  First, to James Conlon, whose life in Arabic was a model of practicality and opening channels of understanding; his unexpected death in 2009 made me reconsider my own relationship with Arabic (as well as what I’ve learned about communication in general), and started the gears turning for this book. Another inspiration that is largely absent from this text: Syria and its lovely people. Nowhere else have I encountered such a disparity between American perception (remember the “axis of evil”?) and real daily life. Unfortunately, by the time I had the opportunity to visit again, the civil war made the trip unwise. To Koko the tailor, the bike man of Aleppo, the tamarind seller, the man who shared his salad, the boy who gave me his mother’s phone number in Deir az Zor, the man who asked me what tirmis are called in English, and so many other kind, interesting, and interested people—thank you, and I hope you’re safe.

  Elsewhere in my travels, many people provided invaluable help, perspective, and local insights: Mandy McClure, Amgad Naguib, Cynthia Kling, Phil Weiss, Maala Kabbar, Manal Alami, Holly Warah, Arva Ahmed, Agnes Koltay, Jonty Summers, Andrew Mills, Mariam Dahrouj, Sara Al-Khalfan, Shatha Farajallah, Suneela Sunbula, Andrea and Gary Gold-Urbiner, and David Amster. And to Joanna Marsh and Jose Pelleyá: very sorry I had to write you out; you deserve a chapter of your own.

  My professors and brilliant colleagues got me through school, and some coached on this book: Andras Hamori, Margaret Larkin, Kamal Abdelmalek, Sherman Jackson, Suzanne Stetkevych, Adrienne Fricke, Amélie Cherlin, Susan Peters, Jennifer Rawlings, Jeremy Rich, and Adriana Valencia. I wish Magda al-Nowaihi were alive to read this.

  For more Arabic facts, stories, and deep thoughts, I was lucky to consult with Chris Stone, Humphrey Davies, Neil Hewison, Ramy Habeeb, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Ali El Sayed, and Kristl Schelm (who inspired the link between geometric design and morphology). Khaled Al Hilli, Ziad Bentahar, Mohamed A. Elgohari, and Nouf Al-Qasimi (and her parents) helped check the final Arabic and saved me from my Fusha-centric self. All remaining mistakes are mine, all mine.

  I could not have made it out of the thickets of early drafts without Margaret Knox, Dan Baum, Annia Ciezadlo, Amy Karafin, Margaret Greer, Ilca Moskos, Elizabeth Faust, Jim Greer, Antares Boyle, Rod Ben Zeev, Lucía Terra, and Carole Bennett. Also thanks to Catherine Harris, for last-minute editing and support, and Marisa Robertson-Textor, for praise when I needed it most.

  For space to write, I am indebted to Laura Pratt, Lee Christie at Genesis Retreat, and Alexis Averbuck. Back at home, Marla Garfield and the Us Weekly copy pit provided sanity, and I worked better in my own space with the help of the Queens Writers Fellows: Heather Hughes, Alla Katsnelson, Jeff Orlick, Sara Markel-Gonzalez, Howard Blue, Brooke Donnelly, and Siobhan Dunne.

  Thanks to Gillian MacKenzie, my excellent agent, and to my acquiring editor, Amanda Cook: your initial confidence carried me through the rough patches. Also thanks to my editor Jenna Johnson, without whom this would have been a very different book, and Pilar Garcia-Brown, who also provided great feedback. Larry Cooper was a model for all manuscript editors; thanks for the countless elegant improvements.

  Finally, thanks to my parents, who set me on such a fine path in life and have given me nothing but encouragement. And to Peter, حبيبي, for enduring my time away, in other countries and inside my head. I couldn’t have done this without you.

  Notes

  xii (the news is, by definition, the abnormal): For this simple but resonant insight, I am indebted to Dutch journalist Joris Luyendijk, who was a Middle East correspondent in the years leading up to the second Gulf War. In two books, he details the gaps between Western perceptions and Middle Eastern realities. Many of these inaccuracies, he argues, are inherent in the process of reporting from countries run by dictators, whose power is based almost entirely on how well they control information. One book has been translated into English, by Michele Hutchinson; in the United States, it is titled People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East (Soft Skull Press, 2009). The U.K. edition is Hello Everybody! One Journalist’s Search for Truth in the Middle East (Profile Books, 2010).

  xiii dictionary originally meant sea: I am taking slight poetic license in implying a true connection between “sea” and “dictionary.” The change in meaning probably came about more mechanically. The most influential medieval Arabic dictionary, compiled by Fairuzabadi in the fourteenth century and used as a definitive reference for centuries after, was titled (in typical medieval rhyming style) al-Qamoos al-Muheet wal-Qaboos al-Waseet, al-Jami’a lima Dhahaba min Kilam al-’Arab Shamameet. In the following centuries, it
was shortened to al-Qamoos al-Muheet, literally “the Circumscribed Sea,” and eventually, qamoos came to mean any dictionary, and not sea. I do like to imagine, though, that Fairuzabadi chose the original title as a bit of a boast—that his project could have drowned him, but he mastered it.

  xvi the more arcane grammar details: Ḏ is the symbol used in the Hans Wehr Arabic-English dictionary for the letter ذ (dhal), which is pronounced like the th in “this.”

  5 lose something in the translation: In Fusha, one asks “How are you?” by saying Kayf al-hal? Literally this means “How is your state?” At the same time, a hal clause is a grammatical construct that describes a state and always takes the accusative case. So, Kayf al-hal also means “How do you treat the hal clause?” And the right answer is “Accusative” (mansoob).

  If you like that, here’s another. As a bonus, it involves the eighth-century grammarian Sibawayhi.

  A student arrives late at night at the house of Sibawayhi’s teacher, who is known for keeping strict hours. “Please, tell him Ahmad is here,” the student tells the servant who opens the door. “Insaraf!” (Scram!) says the servant. “Ana mamnoo’ min as-sarf,” Ahmad protests.

  What just happened? The name Ahmad is a diptote, a noun that can take only two case endings instead of the usual three. His punchline could translate to “I can’t scram,” but he’s also saying “I’m a diptote.” Hilarious, right?

  12 Your Lord is the most generous: This is my translation, though in general I prefer M.A.S. Abdel Haleem’s exceptionally readable version (Oxford University Press, 2004), which also has good footnotes and a parallel Arabic text.

  15 a table with rows numbered I to XV: The use of Roman numerals here should give you an idea how incredibly musty Arabic instruction was in Europe and America for a long time. The first European linguists to analyze Arabic were classicists who used a Latin framework for everything from grammatical terminology to numbers. Nowadays, Arabic teachers in the West more commonly refer to verb types as Arab grammarians do: not by number, but according to their pattern, using the verb fa’ala (فعل), to do: istaf’ala (استفعل), for example, instead of Form X.

  In their compulsive enumerating, the European linguists would have done better to use the standard 1, 2, 3, and so on, because these at least came from the Arabs, who had adopted them from India. This numeral set includes the useful non-number zero (sifr in Arabic, whence English “cipher”), which the Romans never had.

  But the notation styles diverged at some point centuries ago, and today many Arabs use numbers that only loosely resemble what Europeans call “Arabic” numerals. They go like this (from left to right, unlike the rest of the writing system):

  ٠‎ ١‎ ٢‎ ٣‎ ٤‎ ٥‎ ٦‎ ٧‎ ٨‎ ٩‎

  In Arabic, these “Eastern Arabic” numerals are called arqam hindiya—“Indian” numbers—and they’re used primarily in Egypt and countries north and east. Most countries in North Africa use Western Arabic numerals.

  17 apostle began a friendly letter: Much later, I learned that other Arabic scholars were fond of this game too. One of the people who took it exceptionally far was Ibn Jinni, who, in the tenth century, developed a trippy theory he called ishtiqaq kabeer, grand derivation. His deep etymology not only considered words that share the same root, but also analyzed common meanings in roots with shared letters, even if they were in a different order. By his way of thinking, the words ʼabeer (fragrance, from the root ʼayn-ba-ra), rab’ (a spring campsite, from ra-ba-’ayn), and ba’r (dung, ba-’ayn-ra) were related because they all represented the concept of transfer: scent transferred through the air, transfer from winter to summer, transfer of food to waste. This is summarized—along with a fascinating modern theory that suggests Ibn Jinni was on to something—in Kees Versteegh’s The Arabic Language (Columbia University Press, 2001).

  18 a good verse has: Some of the older Arabic-only lexicons are even more absorbing than Lane. The first, written in the eighth century, is Kitab al-’Ayn, organized according to where in the mouth a letter is pronounced. It begins with the constricted ʼayn, which comes from deep in the throat, continues through meem, which hums from the front of the lips, and concludes with the “letters of the air,” the three vowels and the hamza, the glottal stop.

  21 “chaos with respect to people . . .”: Advanced Arabic students will recognize this as a direct translation of the grammatical construct known as tamyeez, in which an indefinite noun in the accusative case carries the additional meaning “with respect to” or “regarding.”

  30 it means open space: I trust this is true, and that the name does not come from the root ra-ha-ba, with a regular h, whence the word irhab, terrorism.

  31 once characterized as diglossic: Other places identified as diglossic include northern (German-speaking) Switzerland and Greece. Switzerland is not such an extreme case, as the Swiss German dialect is not considered “low” in status. Greece, however, resolved its diglossia in an extreme way in 1976 when the government abolished the self-consciously classical written language called Katharevousa. This was the final blow to the recently ousted conservative junta, which had championed the artificial language. Since then, the more casual demotic Greek—Dhimotiki—has been standard in print.

  32 I couldn’t very well give up: There is also a theory in linguistics that Semitic languages are not quite as root-based as they appear. Most of the research has been done on Hebrew, however, which is a slight outlier because for almost two thousand years it was not a spoken language, which may affect how native speakers use it and think about it. See Joseph Shimron’s Language Processing and Acquisition in Languages of Semitic, Root-based Morphology (John Benjamins Publishing, 2003).

  38 Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz: The Mahfouz quote came to me via Niloofar Haeri’s excellent book on sociolinguistics in Egypt, Sacred Language, Ordinary People: Dilemmas of Culture and Politics in Egypt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Much of her research on Ammiya and Fusha usage, as well as Arabs’ opinions of their Fusha schooling, confirms what I’ve heard anecdotally.

  55 slipped into Arabic relatively unchanged: There was apparently an attempt to Arabicize “television,” as Hans Wehr includes the noun tilfaz (under the verb talfaza, to televise), which roughly follows the “noun of instrument” pattern (مفعال). This includes words such as miftah, a key, from fataha, to open—that is, the thing-with-which-you-open; or meezan, scales, from wazana, to weigh. The process of Arabicization is not strictly a modern problem, however; it was also discussed intensely in the ninth century, when translators in Baghdad deliberated how to translate ancient Greek medical texts. For ailments, they settled on the pattern fu’al (فعال), an emphatic form that was also linked to certain sounds. These most successful of Arabicizations are still used today, in common words such as suda’ (with a heavy s and an ʼayn), for headache, from the verb sada’a, to crack or split; and duwar, vertigo, from dara, to turn.

  65 a noisy fart: There is an Arabic word for a quiet fart as well, fasya, derived from the verb fasa, to fart silently. During the African Cup, I heard announcers on Egyptian TV refer to Burkina Faso as “Burkina Fazzo,” to avoid saying “Burkina They-Farted-Silently.”

  “the season of the flood”: Before the dam was built at Aswan, the Nile traditionally flooded in fall and marked the beginning of the growing season. Its opposite, the springtime ebb, was marked in Pharaonic times with the festival of Shemu. Copts carried this tradition forward along with the name. Egyptians now celebrate spring with picnics on the Monday after Coptic Easter, with the Arabicized name of Shamm an-Neseem, “smelling the breeze.”

  88 gender polarity in the numbers: Then my Saudi pub friend went on to tell me about his time as an exchange student in Arkansas. “When I smell bacon,” he said dreamily, “I forget all about Islam.”

  89 relationship between fatteh and hummus: This relationship, a way of expressing possession, is called an idafa. In this case, the literal translati
on of the idafa phrase is “the fatteh of hummus”; similarly, kitab ar-rajul is “the book of the man.” But the idafa construction is so common in Arabic that (I can say from experience) it’s easy to overlook when translating, and so fail to flip it around to the smoother English phrase—“the man’s book,” in this example.

  One literal translation of the idafa is well known in English, however: Saddam Hussein’s declaration, in the first Gulf War, that an American attack on his country would lead to umm al-ma’arik, the mother of all battles. English has since absorbed the phrase “the mother of all . . .” and uses it so liberally, it’s hard to believe it wasn’t known before 1991.

  as lazy city slickers did nowadays: Linguists theorize that the dl sound lasted long enough to be borrowed by other languages. For example, the Spanish word alcalde, which means mayor, comes from al-qadi (the judge), which at the time of borrowing was probably pronounced more like al-qadli.

  Incidentally, al- is the definite article in Arabic. When spoken, it is sometimes elided with the following consonant for euphony—to an- or ad-, for instance. When other languages incorporated Arabic words, they often took the article as well, which is why so many Arabic borrowings start with a- or al-.

  90 itself, its opposite, and a camel: I first read this quip in Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s book Yemen: The Unknown Arabia (Overlook, 2001), the opening pages of which are a dizzying introduction to the wonders to be found in the Arabic dictionary.