All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  Rana’s mission was to do this all over again for Lebanese colloquial, for the sake of a better Lebanon. She wasn’t daunted—she was more fired up when I left her office. And I felt a bit more at peace. Maybe I could relax about Zaina “correcting” my spelling; maybe I didn’t have to lunge at every inconsistency in my textbook. So the rools weren’t foolproof yet, but writing them down was the first step. Although I couldn’t quite give myself over to Rana’s program, I admired her for being more certain than I was.

  Your Mother

  I had chosen my school in Beirut not for its director’s mission, but for a class I’d read it offered: Let’s Talk Dirty, all about swearing and obscenity in a cultural context. This was exactly what had been missing from my previous Arabic instruction: not only had I skipped over polite phrases like mashallah, I hadn’t learned any of the rude ones either.

  Unfortunately, by the time I came to Beirut, the trash-talking class was no longer offered. The public outcry had been surprisingly intense, Rana Dirani told me. News stories about the class had been posted online, and readers worked themselves into a collective snit. “Instead of teaching the beauty of Arabic,” one commenter lamented, “you make the dirty, low, and vile aspect of our society accessible, and you glorify it in the process.” Another sniffed, “Like we need more low-class people in this country.” All this, despite the fact that the cultural context for swearing in Lebanon was in fact quite rich. The Lebanese were considered the modern masters of a centuries-old tradition of colloquial poetry called zajal that frequently hinges on the art of insult. A zajal session, swapping rhymed putdowns, was as creative, competitive, and ritualized as the dozens was in English, and the Let’s Talk Dirty class’s final exam was modeled on this. Yet in the end, Rana said, she canceled the course, because she didn’t want her place to be known only as “the school where they teach you dirty words.” Outside of class there were plenty of opportunities to learn, she consoled me.

  Were there ever. Taxi drivers in particular uttered streams of invective so hot the air in front of their mouths shimmered. Their profanity was at odds with the elegance of their wheels, vintage Mercedes S-class sedans that cut through the traffic like battleships.

  I didn’t recognize many of the words, but often the expressions were built on the same fundamental insult tactic that works around the globe: if someone says something bad to you, say their mother’s got it the same. I’m a donkey? Your mother’s a donkey! For efficiency, you could just answer, “Ummak”—Your mother. For color, implicate a sister as well.

  Beyond this, I suppose I did have some basic vocabulary. Some bad words just sound bad. ʼArs, the word for pimp, is scorn in a single syllable: a constricted ʼayn, a nearly swallowed r, a heavy s. Other, worse words are dangerously light and easy: kuss for cunt, teez for ass, neek for fuck (which was why Nick went by Nicolas in class). In Egypt, tuz feek means “salt on you,” and zift means “asphalt,” neither of which seems rude in translation, but both are among the nastier ways to tell someone to get lost. These were all too easy to mix up, and then I learned that one of the worst possible swear words in Egypt, conveying such deep opprobrium and disgust that “fuck this fucking shit” sounds jolly by comparison, is simply aha, with an emphatic first syllable and a breathy h. I had probably exhaled that by accident, in exasperation.

  I had also learned one culturally specific insult, years before in Cairo. A friend had unleashed “You look like you haven’t showered in a month” on a sidewalk lecher, and he had stopped dead in his tracks. His eyes bulged with rage, then he melted into the crowd. I practiced the words like a magic spell—to make a man vanish, call him stinky—but deep down, I knew I’d never have the nerve to use it. To an Egyptian, smelling bad is a clear indicator of low class and bad character, but I did not feel comfortable establishing myself as top caste, even if many Egyptians considered me that already, simply because I was American.

  Anyway, I had absorbed too much of the opposite language, the little kindnesses of Egyptian Arabic: the practice of calling someone “your presence” (hadritak) rather than “you,” the generous use of various phrases that mean “at your service.” In crowded Cairo, these were padding that softened the many points of social contact in a day.

  In Beirut, those niceties seemed to have been stripped away. This made no sense to me—people were pussyfooting around what village their family came from, but they felt free to tell the guy in the next car he’d fuck his mother up the ass if he cut in. During that particular episode, I sat in the back of the taxi with my hands folded primly in my lap while my driver’s neck turned red and spit flew from his mouth. The guy in the next car screamed right back about my driver’s mother and her own violated behind. After several rounds of aggressive engine revving, we drove on.

  “Beirut was much better during the war,” my driver said after a block. His neck was returning to its normal color. “You could actually earn a living then.”

  We weren’t coddled much in class either. Our lesson on adjectives included nasih (fat) and bish’ (ugly), and then we practiced them by describing pictures of people. Almost all of them were fat and ugly. Freestyling about a photo of a bloated child in a striped shirt and beanie, Nick added, “wi-bilit.”

  When I asked what that meant, he teetered on his chair’s back legs and threw out his long arms. “I don’t know, just bilit,” he said. “Stupid, I guess?”

  At the front of the room, Zaina was giggling, revealing a cute dimple. “You know, loud. Dumb,” she said.

  “Not as funny as they think,” Nick added. “Like a wuzz.”

  “And what does that mean?” I was scribbling in my notebook.

  “Oh, someone who’s trying to be cool but totally isn’t,” Nick said with assurance.

  Zaina jumped in again. “Mahbool—that means dumb.”

  “And zinnikh, that’s a good one—annoying and stupid,” Nick said. “And sa’eel. Also annoying.” He demonstrated the difference with a dismissive wave of his hand. Zinnikh—with a throaty kh as in “yech”—got a big wave; sa’eel got a little one.

  Zaina was nodding with heartfelt enthusiasm and writing each word on the board. “Why do we need to learn all this stuff?” I asked Nick. “Who are you saying these words to?”

  “Oh, when you’re driving, of course.”

  Afterward, we went out to do our homework over coffee. Sally the Southerner drawled out a translation of one of the more cryptic sentences, and Nick nudged her with his elbow.

  “Huh. You’re not entirely useless, then,” Nick said, copying her answer into his own book.

  Sally knew how to hunt, sail, tie knots, and charm her way into good Internet service, a rarity in Beirut. She might have been the most capable person in our class. She looked miffed, but Irene burst out laughing. “Nick! You are so totally Lebanese!”

  “Sure,” he said, pleased. “But what do you mean?”

  “The backhanded compliment. That is so typical.” She had been shocked when she first heard how her mother-in-law talked to her own sisters. At a concert with Irene, I had briefly met the woman in question: short, chain-smoking, with a fabulous froggy voice in which insults would sound particularly rich. Like the rest of us, Irene was also feeling her way in Lebanese culture, but the stakes were higher: peace in her marriage rode on figuring out whether her mother-in-law really meant what she said.

  Sally was laughing by now. “Oh, right, I get it. The guy I work for does that too,” she said.

  I was pretty sure the average cab driver was not using this rhetorical technique, but I vowed to be a bit more open-minded the next time I heard someone say something nasty.

  I didn’t have to wait long. A few mornings later, I was walking through Hamra when a man sidled up.

  “ your feet,” he said to me in French.

  “I’m sorry, what?” I asked him in Arabic.

  “Ah, yo
u are American,” he replied in English. “I wanted to say to you, your feet are quite nice.” He slipped into step alongside me. “But your middle toe could be a little longer.”

  “Thanks for the advice—I’ll work on that,” I said with a big, crazy fake smile, my standard response to street weirdos. I made a hard right turn to lose him.

  “Wait!” he cried out, scrambling to keep up. OK, I thought, here was a challenging opportunity to appreciate a half-assed Lebanese compliment. I turned and looked at him more closely. He was young and pudgy, with big, blinky eyes and slicked-down hair, and he fairly quivered in his freshly pressed short-sleeve plaid shirt. His khakis had a knife pleat down each leg.

  “Well, you see, I have a foot fetish,” he said seriously as he trotted along next to me. “So I notice these things. Women here, they don’t take good care of their feet. But you clearly do.”

  The reason my feet looked halfway presentable was because I had shelled out way too much for a hasty pedicure at the New York airport, in a last-minute attempt to meet the high standards of grooming I had been warned I would encounter in Beirut. Never mind my disheveled hair, my shiny nose, my shapeless clothes—at least my feet would pass muster. That the admirer of my coral-pink toes was half my age, a bit soft around the middle, and an admitted pervert was inconsequential.

  “Look, see—this is a nice foot, but her polish is a little chipped.” He had pulled out his phone and was thumbing through photos. I stopped and peered down, shielding the screen from the sun so I could see better.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “She does have very straight toes.” What was I doing? I was late for class.

  “You understand!” He bounced with excitement. “Lebanese women wear a lot of makeup and do their hair, but their feet are bad. So when I see someone like you, who is pretty on top and with nice feet, I have to stop.”

  I waved my hand modestly, his mention of my stubby middle toe forgotten. Oh, go on.

  “And you’re American, so you know about this. I now understand I have this thing, this foot fetish.” He clearly relished the phrase, the same way I rolled new Arabic vocabulary words around on my tongue.

  “I’m a photographer, and I was helping a friend with a shoot, and I noticed I was”—he tugged at the collar of his white undershirt—“very interested in the model’s feet. So I went home and I looked on the Internet, and I found these videos! And they are from America!” He beamed at the coincidence.

  Soon he was saying he’d like to take pictures of my feet, if I had time. I demurred. I was late for class, and my husband, you see . . . I cast my eyes down solemnly, modestly.

  “Oh, yes, married.” He blinked, crestfallen. “I, I don’t know what to do. I tried asking at a pedicure salon if I could take pictures there, but they sent me away. Too many married women. It would be complicated, they told me . . .”

  I left him on the corner, mulling his options, and strode off to school.

  Easy—but Not Good

  In Beirut, my conversations were still stalling, as people routinely switched to French on me, so I planned another weekend trip away in search of Arabic. I set out northward, to the seaside town of Jbeil. It was closer to Beirut than I realized, and a lot smaller. In less than an hour, I had looped through its cobblestone streets, Phoenician ruins, and wax museum (where, in a scene with John the Baptist, Jesus wore a helpful name tag: “Christ”). Unsure how to pass the hours before dinner, much less bedtime, I perched on a wall next to a church and pondered my next move. A hymn spilled out the door over the craggy stones: “Allah . . . ,” sang the congregation.

  It is a misconception in the West that Muslims worship a mysterious deity named Allah. Allah means “the god,” or, in English convention, God with a capital g—a force as familiar to Jews and Christians as to Shiites and Sunnis and Druze. This is the part of the world where monotheism got its start. Jerusalem was only 150 miles south of where I sat; Jesus (excuse me, “Christ”) was born in Bethlehem, a few miles farther on. Saint Paul had his conversion on the road to Damascus, fifty-five miles east.

  Just inland rose Mount Lebanon, the spiritual home of the Maronite Church, established in the fourth century. In fact, the Maronite Church could be said to be the reason Lebanon existed as a state in the first place, as the church’s leaders worked during the Mandate period, the two decades of French rule following World War I, to carve out a majority-Christian territory from what was then greater Syria. How well that had worked was the subject of considerable debate, to put it mildly. During fifteen years of civil war, Lebanon splintered along sectarian lines, like cracks spreading in a sheet of ice. But everyone used the same word for God.

  I was pondering the oneness of it all when a ruddy-faced man approached. “Vous êtes frensawiyeh?” he asked.

  “No, not French. Amerkaniyeh,” I told him in Arabic, adjusting my “American” to the more elegant way Zaina had instructed. She had tsked at my Egyptianized amreekaniya.

  “Oh! Btehki ʼarabi!” he said, then switched back to French. “Vous êtes seule?” Physically, he looked in his twenties, but a few pimples, big front teeth, and shiny eyes suggested his mental development had not quite caught up. “Do you want to walk to the harbor with me?” he asked, in Arabic again.

  What else did I have to do? The port was five minutes down the hill, and his half Arabic was better than none. On the way we passed another church, where a crowd had gathered for a wedding. Two beefy men in suits greeted my escort warmly. At least I had not hitched my horse to a known lunatic. His name was Tony.

  As we made the turn back up from the port he said, “Will you come to my mother’s house for tea?” I weighed this offer against my earlier plan, which was nothing.

  “For an ʼasrooniyeh? I would be delighted,” I replied. We had just learned this word in class, and I was pleased to have an opportunity to use it. It means a social event in the ʼasr, or late afternoon; a subhiyeh is a pre-noon outing, from subh, the word for morning; sahra, the word for a soirée, comes from the verb that means to stay awake all night.

  Tony phoned his mother and told her jubilantly, “I am bringing a friend! An amerkaniyeh!” His parents lived up the hill, on the other side of the highway, a twenty-minute walk. By the time we reached the highway underpass, Tony had switched from French to almost all Arabic, and I was catching about half of what he said. When I recognized words like bhebbik—I love you—I stopped in the middle of the road.

  “Listen,” I told him, speaking slowly to convey the gravity of what I was saying and to make sure I got the words right, “I am married. You are making me very nervous with all this bhebbik and habibti. My husband would be very unhappy to hear it. If you don’t stop talking like this”—I paused for effect—“I can’t come to your mother’s house for an ʼasrooniyeh.”

  He clamped his mouth shut and swallowed hard. He shifted from foot to foot. Then he looked down and said, “OK, I’m sorry. Please come.”

  We walked a little farther. I kept looking back, dropping mental bread crumbs along our trail: right at the cemetery, left at the bakery. “Maybe you can spend the night with me?” he finally asked, plaintive, and reached out to touch my arm. I jumped back, balled up my fist, and yelled. We were on a steep hill and I happened to be slightly ahead, so I towered over him.

  It was a cruel overreaction, I sensed immediately from the way he cowered. I must have briefly impersonated someone he feared.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Please come.”

  He cheered as soon as I started walking again. Unfortunately, his blatant come-on had opened the floodgates to a conversation I didn’t want to have, but he was speaking Arabic, and it was good practice. He had had sex four times in his life, he told me, while he was in the army; they had all been prostitutes. Here he switched to French, for the rhyme: putes à la route, he called them.

  “I am da’eef”—weak—“and my fa
ther doesn’t love me because I talk too much,” he said as we walked up and up the hill. “I pray a lot, to take the devil out of me,” he told me, “but my church doesn’t answer. Once I went to the Greek church, though, and I really felt the light.”

  When we arrived at the turn to his apartment building, Tony stopped in a grocery store to buy cookies and Nescafé packets. As we climbed the last hill, he turned. “Maybe my father will be happy with me,” he said, “because I am bringing you to visit. Maybe he will be proud.”

  In the dim apartment, Tony’s mother, a plump woman with reddish hair, and his older sister were sitting in puffy armchairs watching television. Tony introduced me, then pointed to the painting of Jesus on the wall above them. “Voilà, c’est Dieu!” he said—as if to say, You know, the guy we were just talking about. Serving the cookies and drinks without ceremony, he was talking fast, telling the women how we had met, how I was a writer, how he was smart for having guessed I was a writer after seeing my big bag, my pen, and my messy hair. All the while, his voice increased in volume. From the depths of her chair, Tony’s mother waved to shush him.

  “He gets so loud,” she said to me apologetically.

  We watched the TV for a few companionable minutes and then Tony’s father came in. I had expected more of an ogre. He was a slight, tanned man with mischievous blue eyes. He settled down on the sofa next to me and chatted as though I were a neighbor who had popped by.

  Still, after seeing how Tony had cowered in the road, I didn’t want to shift my loyalties, so I refrained from laughing too much at his father’s jokes. Not that I understood them all anyway. I smiled and nodded, falling back on my old bad Badawi-induced habit of making up a story to fit.