by Zora O'Neill
The burnished dunes curved all around, cutting a sinuous line to the horizon. As the sun sank low, they glowed a rosy, ferrous red. There was no other distraction—no wildlife, no plants, only the faintest breeze. I turned to my poem.
I murmured the first words of the mu’allaqa of Imru’ al-Qays:
Qifa nabki min dhikra habeebin wa-manzili . . .
قفا نبك من ذكرى حبيب ومنزل
I traced the familiar curves, the dainty dots of the letters; the flowing cursive seemed to fit with the rounded dunes behind me.
Halt, friends! Let us weep in memory of a beloved and her campsite . . .
For a well-read Arab, the phrase Qifa nabki summons a flood of images, not just from the rest of Imru’ al-Qays’s ode, but from the whole Jahiliya canon: the abandoned campsite, marked by a few pieces of charred firewood; the lost beloved, her eyes as big and dark as a wild cow’s; dramatic storms flashing over the dunes. Alongside these images are moments of bravado—oh, that saucy woman in the camel howdah!—but they are tempered with sorrow. The desert is vast, and the life of the bedu means always leaving a girl behind, as her tribe moves one direction and yours another.
Qifa nabki echoes through the rest of Arabic literature. Centuries later, well after Arabs had settled in cities and grown so soft they wouldn’t have survived an afternoon in the desert, poems still began with an interlude of sorrow in the dunes. A poem wasn’t a poem without camels, dark-eyed women, and despair. Near the end of graduate school, I wasted a couple of months trying to write a paper comparing Jahiliya poetry to American country music. I gave up when I recognized it as a desperate bid to make my absurdly narrow academic field relevant to the modern world. But the premise was sound. Jahiliya poetry had a formula, and a remarkably powerful one—as effective in evoking tears as a honky-tonk tune about cheatin’ hearts and open roads. Not coincidentally, shi’r, poetry, comes from the verb sha’ara, which means both to compose verse and to feel.
The first words of the ode were crystal clear because of their endless reiteration over nearly fifteen centuries, but the rest of the opening line was foggier in my mind:
. . . bi-siqti l-liwa beina d-dakhuli fa-hawmali
بسقط اللوى بين الدخول فحومل
. . . at the edge of a dune between ad-Dakhul and Hawmal
Thanks to my old grad-school professor, I remembered that ad-Dakhul and Hawmal were names of landmarks in the Arabian Desert. So I didn’t have to waste time mucking around in the dictionary, then trying to figure out why this poem was mentioning “first coition in marriage” (dukhul) and “long-suffering” (hamool, the closest word in Hans Wehr to hawmal) right at the outset.
I was curious about the derivation of the phrase siqti l-liwa, though. I remembered it meaning the dune’s edge, and here I was in a place called Liwa. Had it been named for its dunes, or was it the other way around?
Hans Wehr told me that a siqt was a “miscarried fetus.” I found liwa meant curvature, but was immediately distracted by the next entry, lawa, colic. I let out a soft laugh, which vanished in the silent desert. This was such a typical Arabic dictionary moment, like the time I had looked up a word on a Cairo restaurant menu, only to find it meant some kind of squash—or a brothel. Hans was clearly not the man for this job. I really needed to be back in the library with Lane and his eight volumes of bickering medieval sources.
If the first line was like wading into the shallows, the second one was like stepping off into the bottomless depths of the sea. I skimmed on, looking for familiar words. Oh, good Lord, there was so much left! Each beit, or verse, was divided into two halves—hemistichs, in poetry-nerd parlance—separated by a wide space. I was stuck on the third hemistich, the first half of the second beit. The rest of the poem formed two tidy columns down the rest of the page and on to a second. What hubris had made me think I shouldn’t bring an English translation, or even copy down the internal vowels and case markers? I took a deep breath and muddled through four more lines. Something about weasels? Definitely animal droppings like peppercorns.
Finally it was too dark to read. I set my books and papers aside and lay back in the sand. It was silky soft, still warm from the sun. The silence settled over me like a thick blanket, and I watched the stars come out one by one. For years after graduate school, I had thought that time had been wasted, all those fruitless hours looking up names of places and precise words for camels and dunes. Yet the whole mess of it had eventually led me here, and that alone made it worthwhile.
I had intended to spend more time in the northern, less affluent emirates, the ones with names I’d never heard before arriving in the UAE: Umm Al-Quwain, Fujairah, Ras Al Khaimah. Back in Dubai, Manal had told me, as if she had spotted a unicorn, “In Fujairah, I saw Emirati taxi drivers!” I had also wanted to drive across the neighboring country of Oman, to Al-Hadd (the Edge), the easternmost point in the Arab world, and watch the sun rise. Somehow, between my days in the library and my desert roaming, I had frittered away more than two weeks farther south, and I was due back in Dubai in a few days.
So I would hit two birds with one stone: I’d see the northernmost emirate of Ras Al Khaimah (Top of the Tent), and I’d take a day trip a bit farther north, a boat ride around the Musandam Peninsula, the proper tippy-top of the tent and a noncontiguous part of Oman. Perhaps I would see a fabled Emirati taxi driver, or an Omani one.
The capital city of RAK, as the emirate was more prosaically known, was refreshingly free of record-breaking anything. Low buildings hunkered below jagged blue mountains. The foothills were dotted with modern villas, faux castles, and hot-pink Italianate manses with blue mirror windows to block the sun.
The next morning, the bus to Musandam wound over the mountains. As soon as we crossed the Omani border, the craggy landscape seemed to shake off civilization—no more pink mansions, no more concrete-block garages, no more people at all.
On the boat, an old wooden dhow like the ones that dotted the creek in Dubai, we drifted far from the world, around the ragged edges of the land. Our Pakistani guide pointed out jellyfish, lionfish, a family of dolphins—as well as Persian saffron he was selling for a special price. With Iran only fifty miles away across the Strait of Hormuz, this area was known for smuggling; apparently everyone was involved.
Meanwhile, I had my eye on the boat captain, because I had heard him speaking Arabic, and maybe something juicier: Kumzari. I had read about this rare language of Musandam, with an estimated 1,700 speakers; the Ethnologue, a great encyclopedia of all the world’s tongues, pessimistically categorized it as “moribund,” a couple of notches above extinct. Kumzari was a natural mishmash of Persian and Arabic, a byproduct of centuries of goods and people shuttling across the water. The Arabian Peninsula may have been the heartland of Arabic, but here at the sunrise end, it nurtured many other linguistic peculiarities and trade patois: Bathari, Harsusi, Shehri, Mehri, Hobyót. According to the Ethnologue, Oman had 22,000 Swahili speakers too.
On the return trip, the captain tried to cajole me into steering the boat—this was my opening. “You speak Kumzari?” I asked in Arabic.
“Yes, sure. I learned Arabic in school, but at home we speak Kumzari—and here at work.” His name was Jasim. His face, under a worn baseball cap, was that of a teenager, but his hands were gnarled and cut. He spun out a bit of Kumzari for me, his r’s rolling up from the very depths of his throat. I hung on every word—its intonation was like the little bit of Persian I had studied, and every so often an Arabic word popped out. I scribbled down transliterated phrases in my notebook. Shai ma Khasab—I’m going to Khasab. Afwayyim—sleeping.
But the strange r’s caught in my throat, and Jasim soon lost interest in tutoring. He pulled out his phone and showed me a photo of his brother with a hammerhead shark, then a video of a friend dancing, a lewd and subtle shaking of the behind, while from off-camera a heckler hurled bananas.
Then our boat was back in port and our group wa
s back on the bus, winding down and down the mountain roads, out of the wild land of Oman and into the shabby outskirts of RAK. By the time I was back in my car, the sun had set. In the dark, I overshot the turn to my hotel.
All I had to do was keep driving to the next roundabout, do a loop, and come back. Except the roundabout was one of the especially huge and awful ones, with three lanes and five spokes. I gripped the steering wheel and sailed in.
As I approached the fourth spoke, I looked to my right to make sure no one was careening into the circle—just as, from my left, someone was trying to make his way out. Our two tiny cars colliding made the sound of plastic party cups meeting in a halfhearted toast.
Conveniently, there was a parking bay off one side of the circle, and we both pulled in. Five men piled out of the other car, all gesturing wildly and shouting—in Arabic! I was thrilled.
Our conversation boiled down to a simple exchange. “You have money?” the driver asked, pointing to his lightly dented back fender, where my car had clipped his.
“No. No money. Must call company of insurance,” I said as cars whirled around the circle next to us. The word for insurance—ta’meen—I knew from reading it on scores of billboards over the years. This was the first time I had uttered it in a sentence.
“You have money?”
“No. No money. I call insurance company.”
After a few more rounds of this, the men bundled into their car and drove off. I got back in my car too. Should I drive away? Was that legal? Could I drive? My hands were shaking badly. While I deliberated, a police SUV rolled up. The officer, in an army-green uniform, did not speak English either. I was delighted.
“I offer profound apologies,” I told him in my most sincere and florid Arabic. Carefully pronouncing each word was a little meditation, soothing my post-collision jitters. “I am not accustomed to the driving in your fine country. These traffic circles—I thought . . .” I couldn’t find the words to explain what I thought, but I had spent a lot of time thinking about these terrifying roundabouts.
“You, my good lady, were at fault,” the policeman declared, likewise in grave but gracious tones. “You are obliged to stay in your lane. Go sida, sem-sem.”
But the other car hadn’t been going sem-sem! Never mind, I was thrilled again, hearing the very words Farah had taught me before I left her apartment in Abu Dhabi. Anyway, my ta’meen would cover the damage, and I was lucky it hadn’t been worse.
The next morning, I had to deliver assorted forms to the police station, a generic new building that gleamed like a car dealership. Covering one wall in the waiting area was a vinyl sign, in Arabic and English, of all the possible traffic infractions and their fines. “Misunderstanding Traffic Circles” was not listed, nor was “Failure to Go Sem-sem.”
My number was called. At the desk, I launched into the story I had rehearsed as I waited. The clerk’s mouth dropped open. “You speak Arabic?” he said, and motioned for his colleagues to come see the show.
Soon six more men were crowded into the cubicle, hunched behind the desk clerk. Was this, as the poem’s structure dictated, my triumphant return from the desert to society? In this case, the last section of my poem would be a boast. I continued my story, and the men hung on every word: my certain entry into the traffic circle, my cautious analysis of the confounding situation, the stunning surprise of the other car, the driver’s desertion of the scene.
My papers were handled with efficiency and cheer, and the men waved when I left. Triumph.
Supreme Poets
In the end, I found all the poetry I was looking for in Dubai, not in the desert. The schedule of the annual four-day literary festival was packed with verse, starting on the opening night with the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti.
At the entrance to a faux tent on the Dubai Creek, past a clutch of real camels, a staffer was handing out headsets for the simultaneous translation. I hesitated, out of pride. But it was sheer delusion to think that, after one evening of browsing my Hans Wehr on the edge of a dune, I would suddenly understand everything. I took a headset.
Barghouti was Palestinian literary royalty, and the crowd of older intellectuals—recognizable by the sheen of their suits and the heaviness of their eyeglasses and costume jewelry—was engaged in a flurry of air-kissing and handshaking. When a festival spokesman stepped up to introduce the poet, the buzz took half a minute to die down. I glanced sheepishly at the perfectly coiffed matrons seated near me and put on my headset.
Barghouti’s elegant, incisive poems reflected political realities as well as more existential ones. This, however, did not come through in the simultaneous translation. As Barghouti read his verses in a slow, serious cadence, the voice of a woman interpreter chirped frantically in my ear. On the one hand, it was a useful reminder of just how many words I would not have understood on my own; on the other, it made the poetry sound ridiculous. Midway through the third poem, I was undone by the dissonance and let out a small giggle. The matrons turned to glare.
I took off my headset and let the rhythm of the words wash over me, catching phrases here and there. The words I understood best were the concrete ones—a cup of coffee, a wooden table—but they were infused with grace through the elegant Fusha. In my head, inspired by Dr. Badawi, I strung together my own poems.
When that failed, I simply listened to the audience. A particularly rich and melodious line would prompt appreciative exhalations—“Allah!”—and a ripple of applause, the way jazz aficionados praise a fine solo. Behind me, the matrons’ heavy bracelets clicked softly as they clapped or moved a hand in the air in time with the rhythm.
The next night, a panel of Emirati poets convened. It was a smaller affair, in a drab meeting room in a side hall of the hotel, but this time two interpreters were on the job. The tag-team approach produced no better results, though the source material might have been to blame.
“My eyes follow her steps from the house to the mall . . . ,” a female voice intoned in my headset. The poet’s microphone had a touch of reverb, so mool (mall) resounded in the little room.
I did my best not to laugh. This was Nabati poetry, a form composed in Gulf dialect that was related to the pre-Islamic odes I had studied. Its name came from a word with connotations of corruption and brokenness, apparently a reference to its colloquial phrasing. Bedouin culture may have fallen out of favor with these city folk, but they had not stopped versifying. Over the centuries, local poets had carried on composing poems to honor battles, great heroes, and loves lost.
“Even if she smacks me with her love,” a male interpreter picked up the thread, “I will still . . . be patient for love?”
None of my professors had mentioned that the Nabati tradition existed. Perhaps they lived too far in the past, too deep in books. Or perhaps they didn’t consider the colloquial language legitimate. The current poets had swapped camels for fast cars and abandoned the campsites for malls, but they were working with the same themes and the same rigid strictures of rhythm and rhyme. Poetry was very much alive, not just in this hotel conference room, but on television, in the hit show Million’s Poet, a competition similar to American Idol that aired on Abu Dhabi TV. The work by the sheikh of Dubai that I had pretended to read in the bookstore, in hopes of attracting a talkative stranger—that, I realized now, was Nabati poetry. And in my drives around the desert, I had heard it on the radio occasionally, slow and sonorous, sometimes enhanced with spacy electronica in the background.
A second poet stood. He had abandoned his family for the woman he loved, he recited, and the experience tore him apart. His voice quavered with emotion, but the message coming through my headset was resolutely undramatic. Everyone else in the room sat rapt, under the spell of the words.
“And I lost weight—”
The woman interpreter broke off midline. At the podium, the poet carried on, unaware.
The other interpreter stepped in to finis
h. “I just want to see my family again,” he said. Then came the audible click of his microphone switching off.
I turned to look at the translators’ booth. Two figures were hunched over, shoulders shaking with silent laughter.
In my view, simultaneous translators were awesome, in the truest sense of the word—I could not fathom how they spoke so instinctively, acting as mere vessels for the words. Yet even with this oracular talent, they faced an impossible task in this room. It was one thing to communicate the crucial points of a rant by Muammar Qaddafi on the floor of the United Nations. It was quite another to convey the emotion in a poem. Translating poetry was a task of hours, sometimes years, not split seconds.
As I had done at the Barghouti reading, I took off my headset and listened to the sound of the syllables. The shape of these poems and the stories in them had been handed down, generation to generation, told and retold, the collective experience of a people distilled to its essential moments. Poetry—and the Quran with it—was the heritage Arabs had carried out of the desert, to the very edges of the Islamic empire, and preserved until now.
On the last day of the festival, I attended a panel on the future of the Arabic language. The panelists neatly represented all the problems Arabic faced in the modern age. Addressing the issue of early education was an elegant sheikha from the ruling family of the neighboring emirate of Sharjah. Her publishing house produced children’s books featuring Arab characters and Middle Eastern settings. This shouldn’t have sounded radical, but it was, because most Arabic children’s books were translations of foreign stories set in foreign places, such as that blond Swiss imp Heidi.
