All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  I confessed my ambivalence to Dr. Badawi. Yes, I loved the morphology of Arabic, its mechanical way of producing vocabulary for every situation. I had swooned over the rhythmic grace of old poetry. And I did admire Dr. Badawi’s eloquence, and how much he enjoyed his job.

  But now, in my late thirties, I had come to terms with what my brain craved. I was a dilettante, an amateur, a lowbrow. All I wanted to do in Arabic was talk to people, to gossip and make jokes.

  Unfortunately, my subconscious wasn’t cooperating. The past two nights I’d had dreams in which I spoke Spanish. “My brain is rebelling!” I lamented to Dr. Badawi.

  “No, not at all,” he said with glee. “The foreign language boxes are opening!” He had the same look of excitement I had seen more than a decade before, when he had welcomed us to the intensive program and recalled the moment the penny had dropped for him, on a London bus.

  This reminded me: I had also come here to thank Dr. Badawi for his advice that day. “It really stuck with me,” I said to him. “You told us that if we didn’t understand, we should just make something up.” I had internalized the wisdom, using it not only for Arabic, but for other languages too. It worked during political discussions, when I could nod easily in agreement (with myself) at the right spots; when the punchline of a joke arrived, I could laugh in sync, at my own witticism. I had probably taken it too far—sometimes I used the strategy when I lost track of a conversation in English.

  “Oh, yes.” His eyes lit up. “That’s exactly how I taught myself!” While studying at Al-Azhar University—the most prestigious school in Egypt and one of the oldest institutions in the Arab world, established around the year 970—Dr. Badawi had also enrolled in English classes at the British Council, but he had found them too slow. Back at Al-Azhar, a professor mentioned that the Islamic reformer Muhammad Abduh had learned French by reading. So Dr. Badawi followed Abduh’s lead and plunged into the Trollope novel Barchester Towers.

  “It took me eight months, and I never consulted a dictionary,” Dr. Badawi told me. “If I did come to a word that was crucial for understanding a whole paragraph, I would ask someone.” The books—he went on to read more in the series—were about social and religious maneuvering in Victorian England, “but really, they were like the sheikhs of Al-Azhar,” with all the same politicking and currying of favor. Eventually he branched out beyond Trollope, but not before going back to reread Barchester Towers. The second time, with improved comprehension, he said, “it was just not as interesting.”

  Those books, whatever he imagined in them, had value for him—probably more than for most people who read Trollope. It didn’t matter whether he’d gotten them “right,” he said.

  As Dr. Badawi reminisced, it dawned on me: his advice had been for reading. Because really, what kind of language teacher would advise you to not ask the people you’re speaking with what the heck they mean? I had taken his advice and twisted it into something that suited my personality. I didn’t like admitting I didn’t know things, and I felt like a nuisance when I stopped a conversation to ask for clarification. Surely, I had rationalized, it was better to smile and nod, so my conversation partner didn’t give up in exasperation.

  There in Dr. Badawi’s office, I didn’t admit this colossal misinterpretation. He nonetheless seemed to perceive my capacity for bending reality to my will.

  “Whatever you write about this meeting probably won’t accurately capture me,” he said with the enlightened beam of a mystic as he stood up from behind his desk. “It will really just be what you think.” I stood too, and squared my shoulders, trying to look as if I knew what I thought. “But I understand what I think,” he pronounced. “That’s what makes our talk worthwhile.”

  And with that, the great and paradoxical Dr. Badawi, author of both the world’s most wonderful dictionary and a very peculiar textbook, ushered me out the door.

  See What We Did

  My new Ammiya class, a level lower, was exactly where I wanted to be. The teacher, Hani, was a fireplug of a man, fairly bursting from his polo shirt and pleated khakis. “Suppose your friend says he wants to date a pretty girl,” he asked the class. “What do you say to him?”

  “Fil-mishmish,” quipped a British guy. A great comeback, in the best tradition of Egyptian banter. It meant “in apricot season,” a period of time so short as to mean “in your dreams.”

  Hani chuckled and looked around. “Great. Anyone else?”

  A Danish blonde with big blue eyes raised her hand. “I would say to him, Forget the pretty girl,” she said, “you should look for a smart girl.”

  Hani’s forehead creased in confusion. I recognized this type of language teacher: the burly, bawdy man who was seldom equipped to deal with nudges toward political correctness. He turned to his briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “We will sing a revolutionary song,” he said, passing around the lyrics.

  Most Arabic pop songs, and a lot of the creative output of the revolution, were sung in Ammiya. And when those lyrics were recorded for posterity, as these had been, it was a rare instance in which Ammiya was written down.

  So great was the gap between high and low Arabic that even the Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, who created otherwise vivid portraits of workaday Egyptians, equated dialect with “poverty and disease.” In his novels, he translated colorful colloquial expressions into Fusha dialogue. The digital age had broken down some of these barriers, as Arabs began to write text messages and Internet comments in dialect, despite a lack of standardized spelling. Another breakthrough came in 2006, when an Egyptian journalist, Khaled Al Khamissi, published Taxi, a book of conversations with Cairo’s famously colorful cabbies, written entirely in Ammiya. Compared with typical books on the Egyptian market, where selling three thousand copies was considered a success and ten thousand copies a bestseller, Taxi was a blockbuster. It sold more than seventy thousand copies and spawned a movie and a TV show.

  Now it seemed natural that during the people’s revolution, marchers brandished signs written in the people’s tongue, Ammiya. And the people who documented the movement wrote down the songs and slogans in the same dialect in which they’d been sung and chanted.

  Hani cued up a DVD. “Here, we will see the video too. Please sing out loud.” He raised his whiteboard marker like a conductor’s baton.

  My hand clutched the lyrics sheet instinctively. I loved Arabic music, but singing aloud could be oddly painful, as I had discovered a few months into my college Arabic 101 class. Our boisterous Egyptian teaching assistant, the counterpoint to our stern professor, had led us in a nursery rhyme, accompanied by a tune on a whirring cassette recorder.

  “Ma-MA za-MAN-ha GAY-ya,” the assistant had directed us to sing, marking the syllables in the air with his hand. “Mommy’s on her way . . .” We were singing about Mom bringing home a bag with a duck in it—a duck that said waq-waq-waq. That part was fun, because it called for the letter qaf, that little cough of a q. But as I sang, I felt an inexplicable sadness, and my eyes welled with tears. Everyone else in class was still happy. What was wrong with me?

  Somewhere in the second verse, which involved a kid named Adel, I discerned a pattern: the poignant sensation surged each time I sang the ʼayn, that mysterious letter that was both expansive and constricted, the one that called for previously unused muscles in my throat. I had heard this sound before, I remembered. At the age of five or so, I had become entranced with a cassette, labeled arabic music in my mother’s all-caps hand. She had recorded it off the radio, trying to recapture the sound of the trips she and my father had taken to Morocco before I was born. The songs’ pure emotion had mesmerized me, though I hadn’t understood a word. That spellbinding effect, I felt that day singing about a duck, came from the letter ʼayn. Even in those near-nonsense lyrics, it was a pure, plaintive keening.

  So twenty-one years later, when Hani handed me the lyrics of the revolution
ary anthem, I quickly scanned them out of habit, looking for the ʼayns. This song, I saw, was going to be a tearjerker regardless, because it was dedicated to the revolution’s shuhada’. The word is commonly translated as “martyrs,” but that puts an unnecessary religious-fanatic spin on it. Hans Wehr does list one meaning of shaheed, the singular, as “one killed in battle with the infidels,” but during the popular uprisings across the Arab world in the past year, shuhada’ were secular. The verb shahida means to bear witness or give testimony. By extension, in the current political situation, the shuhada’ were the people who stared down the dictatorship, saw it with their own eyes, bore witness—and died. All over Cairo, the shuhada’ were commemorated in huge murals, scribbled graffiti, and anthems like this one.

  The video was a montage of earnest young men in their blurry school portraits. In the third verse, the ʼayn in the middle of “Bawadda’ ad-dunya”—I bid the world farewell—yanked at my heartstrings. My voice broke, and I pressed my lips together and stared into the corner of the room. When I looked back to the front, I saw Hani’s eyes were watering too.

  In my memory, Cairo is always sepia-toned, though the brownish hue comes not from nostalgia, but from dust. Sand blows in relentlessly from the surrounding desert, coating all buildings and any car left in one spot for too long. If a sprinkle of winter precipitation manages to wash some of the sand away, the khamsin—the spring desert wind, supposedly named for the fifty (khamseen) days it lasts—comes every year and restores it.

  So in my walks around the city after class every day, I was surprised to see that the leaves on Cairo’s trees were green, even shiny, as if it had rained the night before. In the past, the sand patina on the apartment buildings had been an unbroken golden brown, but now some Cairenes had discovered bright exterior paint. Every block or so, a single balcony burst out in bright orange or mint green.

  The new colors matched a dramatic change in mood I had noticed in Cairo. During the late Mubarak era, a common expression of caution was imshi gamb al-heit—walk close to the wall. Play it safe, to avoid the hungry eye of the police state. Now people moved freely, happily. At night on the bridges and the corniche along the Nile, they seemed to walk with a new sense of ownership, pride, and purpose. Strangers spotted my foreign face from across the street and gave me a thumbs-up, as if to acknowledge our new shared democracy. One called out in Arabic, “Hey, amreekaniya, you see us on TV? You see what we did?”

  The palpable excitement, the pops of color, the crowds—it all did something to my brain. The language boxes were opening, as Dr. Badawi had said. With every new classroom phrase I reviewed as I walked Cairo’s familiar streets, I retrieved another from my past. I felt like a medieval monk revisiting a memory palace; the whole city was my mnemonic.

  South of Tahrir Square, near my old apartment, I passed a corner grocery, and its distinct smell—a mix of coffee, cumin, and washing powder—triggered shopping phrases: this one, two of those, a quarter kilo of white cheese, by your grace. These closet-size shops were a language learner’s crucible, as everything had to be requested, so the youngest, smallest man could shinny up a ladder and fetch a yellow box of Bride brand tea. I had practiced my numbers here, asking for four, seven, anything but a standard dozen eggs from the stack of crates by the door. My roommates and I had even worked up the nerve to place a phone call, the most extreme test of language skill, to request that young man at the grocery to come collect our crates of empty beer bottles. In preparation, we had consulted Dr. Badawi’s dictionary: “Lamma t’uuz tishtiri biira laazim tigiib il-fawaarigh ma’aak,” read an example in the entry for the verb firigh, to become empty. “When you want to buy beer, you must bring the empties with you.” I imagined Dr. Badawi, in his camel-brown blazer, getting a lecture from our frog-voiced grocer.

  In medieval Cairo, I wound through the narrow streets and recalled the phrases for begging someone’s pardon, the polite ways to edge around donkey carts, women with massive shopping bags, and beggars with outstretched hands. Here I had learned that meaning could shift according to geography. Two miles away in downtown Cairo, a hiss from an idle man on a corner was a come-on; here, in a dogleg lane, from a man on an overburdened bicycle, it meant “Outta my way!”

  As I walked, some words simply appeared in the air, untethered to a place from my past. Badawwar—I had said this a million times, I could tell from the way it echoed in my head for a whole afternoon. I muttered it like an incantation, then, as I passed a kushk, the all-purpose sidewalk kiosk bursting with newspapers, phone cards, and sandwich cookies, I remembered: “I’m looking for . . .” Kiosks were always a good place to ask for directions—or anything, really.

  Badawwar ’ala sha’a, I had said to doormen, over and over, when I had arrived in Cairo for my intensive program—I’m looking for an apartment. After that, I was attuned to the phrase, and overheard it in cafés, often from one young man to another. They were looking for not just any apartment, but an affordable one to buy, on a limited income, in this overcrowded city. An apartment was a fundamental requirement for any middle-class marriage. Marriage, in turn, was a requirement for sex. So, by the transitive property, an apartment meant sex. There was a whole life plan in a single sentence.

  Badawwar ’ala rihan, I had asked at the greengrocers—I’m looking for basil. That wasn’t food, the bossy woman at the corner produce stand told me; it was for keeping mosquitoes away. I later found basil growing like a weed in a parking lot, and harvested great bunches of it, to the security guards’ amusement.

  Badawwar ’ala . . . Now I was looking for that vintage coffee bar, the one with the cloudy mirrors and the countermen in short-sleeve white shirts. I had lost my way in these streets I thought I knew so well. I should have asked directions at the kiosk.

  When I finally arrived, half an hour late, Hassan was waiting at a small chrome table, reading the paper. He looked just as I had last seen him thirteen years before, on his roof terrace, swapping jokes with his friend Saad, the desert guide, and laughing his wheezy laugh.

  “When I got your email,” he said as I sat down, “to be honest, I was not sure who you were. Now I remember—you were friends with Susan!” My roommate, blond and charming and near fluent, had made quite an impression in Egypt. One of our teachers had taken every excuse to praise her and pat her fair skin; the rest of us, duskier and error-prone, she had pinched, squealing “Hamawwitak!”—I’ll kill you!

  Hassan ordered me a coffee and assessed me again. “You look different, really, older,” he said, but kindly. I liked this aspect of Egypt, this frankness. Time passed, things changed—there was no way around it.

  On closer inspection, Hassan had aged too. He still had a round, boyish face, but his fuzz of hair had turned gray. He had studied in Belgium, married, had twin boys with his wife, divorced. He had moved out of the apartment with the wonderful rooftop long ago, he said wistfully. Now he lived on the outskirts of the city, on Pyramids Road, to save money; since the revolution, there were few Russian tourists, or any tourists at all, in need of his guidance.

  “It’s OK,” he said, waving away my concern. “I am working also as a journalist now, to write about the revolution.” Egyptians had pushed forward an amazing transformation, he said. In the early days of the Tahrir Square sit-in, he had brought his ten-year-old sons, to be sure they witnessed this moment in history.

  Later, when regime-funded men charged the square on camelback, wielding whips and Molotov cocktails, Hassan had returned, passing the security cordon with a long-expired medical ID from his days as a dentist. He fought hand-to-hand against the riders, defending the demonstrators and helping the wounded. I had watched the surreal event on TV, never guessing that kind, round-faced Hassan was in the fray. Probably a dozen more shuhada’ were made that night. The Battle of the Camel, Egyptians had dubbed that clash, both boasting and mocking—it was the same name as a well-known seventh-century battle in Basra, the f
irst civil war in the Islamic empire. Hassan laughed a bit as he related this detail, but his eyes looked tired.

  Where’s Your Ear?

  Ahmed paced the aisle of the tour bus, in showman mode with a microphone in hand. He was introducing each of us, riffing like a free-jazz genius: “Susan! The same as Arabic sawsan, lotus flower. When you inhale it, it heals what ails you,” he called out with syncopated flair. “Ah, and we have Vivian! She is vivid, and vivacious!”

  When I had met Ahmed at the Egyptian Museum a few days earlier, he had handed me a business card that proclaimed him a Malik kilam (ملك كلم), in mirror-like Arabic script: a King of Verbiage, a Word Lord, or, to stretch the palindromic effect into English, an Emir of Rhyme. All elbows and ears, he was slight, as though his body existed only to carry around his brain. I had jogged after him through the exhibit halls, trying to keep pace with his Pharaonic etymologies, his mnemonics for hieroglyphs, and his shameless puns.

  Now we were headed southwest out of Cairo toward the fertile land of Faiyoum, which the pharaohs had first irrigated with canals more than three thousand years before. It was once the center of an ancient crocodile cult, Ahmed told us, and we would see the ruins of the temple.

  Off the bus, he jammed a jaunty wide-brimmed hat on his head—instant Egyptologist. It was high noon. Soldiers with machine guns stood on nearby hills, looking serious about their responsibility to protect us tourists. (For a reason no one could articulate, Faiyoum was officially considered dangerous for foreigners, and had been so for decades.) But when we’d met our military escorts at a checkpoint twenty minutes back, I’d seen that one of them held a gun patched up with string and tape. Ahmed waved merrily and marched us down the trail.