by Zora O'Neill
“My name’s Mohammed,” he said, extending his hand. Was he Qatari? What swalif could he tell, I wondered?
“I am Palestinian,” he said. “But born and raised here. This is not my country. But I have no other.” He pronounced it uzzer, and the word trailed away in the night. It was a poignant statement, worthy of the ancient nomadic poets crisscrossing the dark, lonely desert.
Behind us loomed a sign, a giant yellow sculpture of a single word:تطوّر. Tatawwar, it read, an imperative verb. Develop! From under its spotlights, it exhorted Doha: You there, march forward! Play new games! Exert yourself! Don’t look back!
This growing region was gaining so much every day, yet so much was slipping away at the same time: words, dialects, stories, traditions. Still, this uprooting, and the anxiety that came with it, wasn’t new. That tale was as old as the Jahiliya poets, always on the move, always longing for something. Mohammed, a relocated Palestinian, lived not too far from where a poet had stopped at a ruined campsite and said, almost fifteen centuries before, Qifa nabki, Halt, let us weep . . .
“Enjoy the rest of your night,” I told him.
We shook hands again, and I marched forward.
libnan
Lebanon
May–June 2012
حال
(hala) To be transformed
استحال
(istahala) To be impossible
حالة الخطر
(halat al-khatar) State of readiness, alert
The New Beirut
My first night in Beirut, I was jostled out of sleep by a car horn, coming closer with that insistent, international rhythm of celebration: honk, honk, honk-honk-honk. I stumbled out onto the balcony of my rented room and peered down the dark street—Beirut was not a well-lit city. Past drooping power lines and shadows of trees, a black sedan had stopped under a rare streetlight. People clambered out, their shiny clothes glinting in the yellow overhead glow. A woman in a strapless white cocktail dress put her hand over her mouth and ululated—the trilling sound that signifies celebration, or, paradoxically, mourning. Was it the tail end of a wedding? Or the end of a typical night out? From this distance, I couldn’t tell. Everyone hugged and kissed and squealed some more, then staggered off into the dark.
It was the end of their day, but the start of mine. There was no going back to sleep, with the sky just turning purple. In the apartment’s shared kitchen, I made a cup of instant coffee. A rickety chair barely fit on the shallow front balcony, and I sat down to wait for the sunrise.
I had visited Beirut once before, in 1999. The city then, ten years after the civil war’s end, had seemed brittle, muddled. People’s jaws were clenched. You might get change in lira or in dollars. You never knew what language someone might speak to you. It was my first trip in the Arab world beyond Egypt, and it was the closest I had come to raw political turmoil.
When I had first enrolled in Arabic, I knew virtually nothing about the various tragedies of the Arab world. I had grown up in a semirural area, without a television. By the time Middle East disasters trickled down to me, the poison had leached out of them. Only many years later, in a media-Arabic class (the pat phrases of newspapers: preemptive strike, overwhelming majority, disaster area), did I see a montage of news clips. There was the shot-up bus that symbolized the start of the Lebanese civil war, the car-bombed rubble of the U.S. Marine barracks, and tanks firing on the Iran-Iraq border. In the barrage of images, I finally understood how Americans had come by their idea of the Middle East as a place of endless conflict—and particularly of Beirut as a synonym for war zone.
On a billboard above my balcony, the Virgin Mary emerged out of the hazy pink gloaming, her eyes cast down beneficently over the apartment blocks and out to the Mediterranean. On the building across the way, each balcony was outfitted in heavy striped drapes that hung like theater curtains. In one apartment, a slim older man buttoned his dress shirt, hooking the cuffs while he watched a black-and-white movie on a bulging-front TV set. He stepped out to his side terrace to fuss with the greenery—tiny tomatoes staked for best posture, grapevines still leafless but trained for optimal shade. The winter had been harsh and long; now, in early May, it was tentative spring.
In the past five years, Beirut had undergone a transformation. The city was back, glossy magazine stories proclaimed, and more swinging than ever. Cool bars, hip galleries, and fantastic restaurants—this was the kind of normal life I knew existed in the Arab world, but most Americans doubted. But in Beirut? The city had not struck me as normal, not at all. It had felt like a room where people had just stopped screaming at one another. Thirteen years after that visit, and twenty-three after the war’s end, I had come again to see how the city had transformed itself and become a stylish destination.
I had come for my own transformation too—a linguistic one. While I had studied in Egypt, other students I’d known had gone to Syria and Lebanon for classes, and I envied their soft accents. Their words sounded dreamy and light, in contrast to the sometimes flat and nasal Egyptian dialect I spoke. Where Cairenes say a hard g, Beirutis buzz a soft zh, like the j in bonjour. Words have an elegant lilt, the last syllable often trailing off in a breathy eh. Ammiya honks like a goose; Lebanese sighs like a dove.
Much as I now loved Egypt, I thought as I drank my coffee and looked over the Beirut rooftops, we had been thrown together by chance, through the teachers I happened to have and the grants I happened to win. Ammiya was undeniably practical, my teachers told me, because it was understood across the Arab world. This was largely due to Egypt’s longtime dominance in television and movie production. Arabs everywhere had been raised on Egyptian film stars and their witty banter, from the black-and-white era to modern romantic and political comedies.
But with the spread of satellite TV, Ammiya began to lose its primacy in Arab media; now people commonly heard dialects from Lebanon and the Gulf. More personally, I was still conscious of Ammiya’s melodramatic, soapy intonation. I had never felt quite comfortable, quite real when I spoke it; I felt more like a character in one of those campy movies. Maybe Lebanese dialect was a better reflection of my true self—and I was here to try it on for six weeks, like a new outfit.
At the apartment next to the older man’s tomatoes and grapevines, a woman puttered in and out from the balcony. She peeled an onion with a paring knife, letting the papery outer layers cascade down into the treetops. She hung out a skimpy nylon slip on her laundry line. If ever there was a place to see how the Arab world’s conflict-ridden reputation intersected with daily life, Beirut was it. Before the civil war, the city had been known as a liberal bastion, an intellectual and creative capital. Yet the social divisions that caused the conflict still ran deep; on this point, Lebanese society was resolutely conservative.
Just as I propped my elbows on the balcony railing, the better to watch the tiny domestic drama unfold, my neighbor-characters froze for a second. The vintage movie shrank to a pinpoint in the middle of the bulging TV screen, the tinny music died, and the neighborhood’s background hum vanished. The power had been switched off.
As the woman who owned this apartment had warned, Beirut was enduring rolling blackouts of three hours per day, on a rotating schedule between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Spotty electricity was something I had experienced on my first visit; Israeli jets had just bombed city power plants, in retaliation for Hezbollah activity. Now, though, shaky infrastructure was apparently the norm.
The woman disappeared into her living room. The man ran his hands through his hair, shrugged on a light coat, and walked downstairs.
He seemed to have the right idea. I finished my coffee and went to grab a city map from the living room.
As I walked west through the quiet streets, more memories of my first visit returned. Humidity. Hills. Bougainvillea and staircases instead of streets. Green almonds, fuzzy and tart as stunted apricots: an epiphany that
linked almonds (lawz) and stone fruits (lawziyat). French fries in my sandwich: just as revelatory. Armadas of gleaming new BMWs, their windows tinted black as oil, interspersed with rickety old jewel-toned Mercedes with matching hubcaps. The Ziad Rahbany album Bema Enno, all jaunty jazz and cooing vocals, as we cruised the coast highway in a rental car, concrete blocks and Hezbollah banners giving way to banana plantations. “Such long straws!” I marveled in my trip diary, because the other differences from Egypt—historical, culinary, geographical, linguistic—were far too large to capture on paper.
On that trip I had stayed with a grad-school friend who had studied in Damascus and Cairo. I admired her adaptability, her gold-trimmed sunglasses, and her habit of greeting people with the groovy phrase “Shlonak?”—literally “What’s your color?” For years, I had treasured this as my sole bit of Lebanese dialect. Finally in Dubai, in class with Manal, I had a chance to try it out. Manal had tossed her lustrous black hair and laughed: “Only Syrians say that.” So here I was in Beirut, starting my language education nearly from scratch.
I arrived downtown faster than I expected—Beirut was small. Two million people in eight square miles, and less than two miles between East Beirut, where I’d started, and West Beirut. In between, I crossed Martyrs’ Square, named for nationalists who were executed for leading a revolt against the Ottomans in World War I. The area had been the cultural heart of the city in the 1960s; then, during the civil war, it was the Green Line—the no-man’s-land divide between the two sides of the city. Now it was a glorified traffic median.
When I had visited in 1999, this area had been consumed in reconstruction as far-reaching and complex as open-heart surgery in progress. For the most part, it was now all sewn up. Café chairs were stacked in rows, and dress mannequins stared mutely through the windows of the Hermès boutique. A Rolex-branded clock tower presided over a cobblestone roundabout. If East Beirut was, in the broadest brush strokes, Christian and West was Muslim, then downtown had been claimed squarely by capitalism.
I pressed on up a hill, past a vacant lot where the weeds smelled of the countryside, to Hamra Street. Like Martyrs’ Square, this had been a swinging social and intellectual scene fifty years earlier; I had tasted a bit of it at chrome-trimmed cafés and a bar decorated with a life-size photo mural of Georgina Rizk, Miss Universe 1971. I knew many of these places had closed in the past decade—a shame, after surviving fifteen years of war—but I was appalled to see, as I walked the length of the street, that they had been replaced by Starbucks, Caribou, and Costa Coffee.
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, unexpectedly overcome with exhaustion and irritation. Luxury brands and coffee chains—this was the new Beirut everyone was so thrilled about? I turned back toward home and bed.
Passing Starbucks again, I noticed the people in the sidewalk seats. At one table, an old man in a striped dress shirt and V-neck sweater shook his newspaper flat. A woman with a meticulous titian bouffant pulled a sheaf of papers from a soft leather case. Watching them, I felt restored; these people looked as if they had been playing these roles every morning, even as the stage set had been struck and rebuilt around them. I ordered a coffee, then sat down on the edge of their tableau.
If I had studied Lebanese dialect so long ago, what would my part be in the new Beirut? Would I be a swank, air-kissing Lebanese lady, like my teacher Manal? Would I be out in the street ululating at five in the morning? Or would I be watching old movies and tending my grapevines? What would my life be like if I had gone to Beirut or Damascus in 1992, instead of Cairo? What would I be like?
A woman marched by in four-inch Lucite heels, silver leggings, and a frilly aqua hijab bedecked with iridescent flowers. Well, I wouldn’t be like that, I reckoned. But perhaps if I learned to speak the way Beirutis did, some of the city’s glamour would still rub off on me.
What Is the Rule?
The tragedy of Arabic classes is that they always seem to be scheduled before noon—a time when I prefer not to talk at all, in any language. Throughout college, I had rolled out of bed for 9 a.m. dates with grammar. But the inane faux conversations—“Yesterday I went shopping. What did you do yesterday?”—sent me into a spiral of existential despair. I hoped I had adapted over the years, but my morning classes in Cairo, despite or perhaps because of exuberant Hani, confirmed my inability to chitchat early in the day. If I had stayed in class in Dubai longer, my morning time with Manal would probably have soured too.
My Lebanese classes, by contrast, were scheduled for two nights a week at 5 p.m., an hour when I felt life was worth living and words worth speaking. On my first day, I was feeling pretty jazzed up. I had clinched a deal on a cheaper place, a crash pad in a six-bedroom penthouse in West Beirut, then eaten a surprisingly sensational lunch in a restaurant by the Rolex clock tower, which made me rethink the slick downtown area. From a street cart, I bought an American-size paper cup of Turkish-style coffee, which I drank until I spilled it on myself, because the caffeine made my hands twitch.
Even after all that, I still had time before class for a stop in the school’s café. “Aseer laymoon,” I said to the bartender—lemonade.
“Fresh?” the bartender asked in English.
In these first few days in Beirut, I’d barely spoken any Arabic. Often, the person I was speaking to would switch to French. I’d repeat what I wanted in English, then Arabic again. Conversations usually ended before we reached consensus.
After a few minutes, the barkeep presented me with a glass of orange juice. I considered protesting, but he seemed busy, and the juice looked good. I sucked it down and headed to class.
A mix of Brazilians, Brits, and Italians, the group was friendly, wisecracking, and sharply dressed. Within a few minutes, we learned the cute and useful verb talfan, to telephone.
After the break, the teacher quizzed us on the alphabet—a sign the class was probably at a lower level than I needed. I flipped through my colorful, cartoon-illustrated book. The grammar was familiar, thanks to Manal’s quick summary in Dubai, but I didn’t recognize some of the polite phrases—what to say when you get into a taxi, for instance. (Ya’teek el-’afiyeh, I mouthed to myself—May God grant you vigor.) One page showed all the foods you could buy on the street: roasted corn, chestnuts, a sesame-covered bread called ka’keh, shaped like a dainty handbag. And orange juice, labeled “3asseer laymun.” (This was a hip school—it referred to Lebanese dialect as “urban Arabic”—so it used the hip chat alphabet for transliteration.)
A mistake, I thought. Then I remembered my café order before class. So, laymoon, a word that sounded like lemon, and meant lemon in Egypt and in every dictionary I’d ever seen, actually meant orange in Lebanon? I had expected basic vocabulary would be different from what I knew, but this was positively unfair. At least I had not pointed out the “mistake” to the bartender; then I might still be standing at the bar, trapped in a who’s-on-first loop because, without the aid of a book, I never would have grasped that the word for orange was lemon. The few Arabic cognates were sacrosanct; I treasured them. Now one had become a faux ami, a false friend, as the French call these treacherous words.
After class, I cornered one of the school’s staff and asked to move up a level. I didn’t admit my oranges-and-lemons problem.
“I suppose,” she said reluctantly. “But the night classes are full. You’ll have to join the morning intensive.”
“Morning?” I said weakly.
“Nine to noon, Monday to Friday,” she replied with the kind of natural cheer only a language teacher can muster. “Oh, and you’ll need the book.” She dropped a thick, spiral-bound sheaf of pages on the table—nothing like my cartoon-filled intro text.
Five minutes early, I slipped into the last seat in the classroom, at the end of a U of tables. I sipped my coffee and stared into space, waiting for the teacher to arrive.
“Hello,” the man next to me said point
edly. “I am Kaspar.” He had ice-blue eyes and wire-rim glasses. In front of him on the table, he had laid out an assortment of mechanical pencils in a neat row.
Oh, right—greetings and introductions were normal in a room full of strangers. Even in the morning. There was serious, shaggy-haired Andrew from England; Nick, a tall, genial Lebanese American just out of college; Sally, with a Southern drawl; blond, British Sophie; Eliza, Lebanese raised in France; Dutch Danny, shaved bald and a shade of pink only northern Europeans turn in sunny climes; and Irene, an American woman who worked for the Red Cross.
Together they represented the whole range of Arabic experience. Nick and Eliza were the “heritage students”—early exposure to the language and culture had given them impeccable accents, loads of slang, and in-jokes, but no grammatical foundation. Kaspar’s background, on the other hand, was pure Fusha, studied intently for several years in Switzerland. Danny was here for love, or post-love: he and his Lebanese boyfriend had broken up, but he still wanted to learn. Irene straddled both sides. Like Kaspar, she had studied only Fusha, but her husband was Lebanese, and she spoke dialect—or tried to—with his family.
Our teacher, a young Lebanese woman named Zaina, projected a schoolmarm vibe, despite dewy skin and a form-fitting tank top and miniskirt. Perhaps it was the pantyhose. Perhaps it was her reliance on the word “rule.”
“Wa-hayda ar-rule”—And that’s the rule—she said decisively to conclude any explanation. She pronounced “rule” as if it were an Arabic word, with a lightly tapped r and a pure, long vowel: rool.
Next to me, Kaspar’s head bobbed at each rool. He took minuscule notes in an engineer’s grid-lined notebook.
We were covering grammatical topics I already knew, roughly, but these rools of Zaina’s were not familiar. In Egypt, my Arabic teachers had always referenced the classical language. “It’s like Fusha,” they would often say, to explain a detail in the dialect, “but easier.” Zaina, by contrast, operated in a sealed world of colloquial Lebanese, with no reference to Fusha. This became clear when she introduced the rools for counting.
