All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  We crossed the spotless white patio to the shrine, removed our dusty boots, and entered. The Druze are an eleventh-century offshoot of Islam, led early on by a preacher named Muhammad ad-Darazi—hence their name, though they call themselves al-Muwahhidoon, the Unitarians. Their rituals are secret and practiced only by select members of the community. Men in the religious elite wear black trousers, baggy to the knee then tight to the ankle; women wear capacious white veils covering the head and the face below the nose. Inside the shrine, which was edged with floor cushions, I looked for people in these clothes—the most promising, I figured, for eavesdropping for qafs.

  But most people in the shrine were dressed in jeans and T-shirts and talking so quietly I couldn’t hear. Peter and I sat for a while to rest our feet. With the low murmuring and the light slanting in through a stained-glass star in the wall, the place felt like a large, comfortable waiting room. There was Job himself, presumably, in a large marble tomb in the center.

  Back outside, we laced up our boots. The hillside below the shrine was terraced with picnic spots occupied by more carpets, grills, and extended families. We edged our way between carpets, past clouds of meat smoke. I kept my ears open for the qaf, but mostly I heard “Itfaddaloo”—Come, please join us. It had a distinctly perfunctory tone—Peter and I, scabby and reeking from exertion, were not ideal guests.

  After a steep descent, we arrived in a village. It may have been charming once, but now it featured a radically paved town square, with asphalt right up to the doorsills. A young tough in a fast car was driving loops around the central fountain, tires squealing and muffler ripping through the still mountain air. He revved past us, then slowed to a crawl. In his rearview mirror he looked us up and down, then returned to a nonchalant slouch. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He stole a glance over his shoulder.

  “I think he’s hoping we’ll ask him for directions,” Peter said. “We must be the most interesting thing to happen here all week.”

  The guy’s driving had forced me up against a wall, as far out of the street as I could be. I was so irritated I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him, though I knew I was shirking my duty as a visitor. The villagers had done their part, saying “Itfaddaloo” and giving us food. My obligation, like that of travelers anywhere in the world, was to supply entertainment. And this village needed some badly. The teenager finally drove away.

  We asked the next old man in baggy pants for directions to the guesthouse. He too was hugging the wall of a building. “The kids always drive like that?” I asked the man with a sympathetic eye roll. Tires squealed in the distance.

  He chuckled affectionately. “Oh, ʼam-byimbistoo”—they’re just enjoying themselves. He used the double verb prefix, the ʼam-bi that Zaina had claimed was against the rools. But damn, no qaf.

  Along the trail, we met two people who had been maimed by land mines. One worked in the welcome hut at the nature reserve where we were hiking, and happened to run the guesthouse where we were planning to stay that night. He called his wife to tell her to expect us; his fellow ranger dialed for him and held the phone to his ear, as he had no arms below the elbows. That night, he adeptly laid the table, balancing the plates on his stumps, and served us a hearty dinner.

  The other man was blind. He wove cane chairs in the corner of his wife’s preserves shop, surrounded by jars full of pickles and candied fruits. In excellent English he told us how he had stepped on a mine while out hunting with friends, years after the civil war had ended. He had learned cane weaving at a school in Beirut, and in the process he had reconsidered his religion. Now he took a little bit from each, he said—he liked Catholic confession, for instance, and Orthodox frankincense. He was more content than he had been in his old life, as an architect.

  On the last day, in the last village, I finally heard the elusive qaf. On the main plaza, paved over like all the others, I poked my head into a women’s clothing shop to inquire about the bus schedule. “Yes, biyoqef hon,” the woman said—it stops right here.

  The bus was small, and a woman squeezed my arm as she scooted toward the window. “Sit here, sit here,” she said in English, patting the adjacent seat. She wore a white Druze-style face veil, showing only her eyes and nose.

  Nahida, she introduced herself. Born and raised in Chicago. She fished in her slouchy purse and pulled out an American passport. The photo showed a rosy-cheeked woman with chin-length, mousy-brown flyaway hair.

  “This is me,” she said. Her veil covered her mouth, but I could hear that she was smiling as broadly as she was in the picture.

  She was thirty-four, and she had moved to Lebanon about eight years ago. Her aunts and uncles were here, in Beqtaa, where she lived, and in villages nearby. (Of course she pronounced the qaf in Beqtaa!) Her English faltered a bit as she tried to explain why she had left the United States.

  “I wanted to live . . . behind my god,” she said. “You understand?”

  I did, in an abstract way. It was an odd preposition—maybe she hadn’t meant it, as prepositions are difficult in every language. But it did suggest a relationship with the divine that seemed right for these mountain villages, as if God hovered in the clouds along the edge of the Mediterranean.

  “And I wanted to wear these clothes,” she said, gesturing at her robes. “But I just couldn’t in America. You know, ‘Ooh, terrorist!’ ” She laughed as she said it and wiggled her fingers in the air in comic fear. She didn’t even go to Beirut now; she was sure someone would pull the veil off her face. Would anyone go that far? I couldn’t picture it, but Nahida’s Druze clothing was a breach of nonsectarian Beiruti etiquette.

  “Did you like living in the United States?” I asked. “Or do you prefer it here?”

  “Oh, I loved America! Life there is more free,” Nahida answered immediately. “But I cannot wear this—what is the word for this?” She gestured at her white scarf.

  “Veil, I guess.” I wanted to apologize that there wasn’t a better word. Like Arabic, English has no shortage of super-precise vocabulary, yet, in a surprising failure of imagination, “veil” is commonly used for every kind of head and face covering: a hijab, a niqab, a nun’s getup, a bride’s accessory, a belly dancer’s frippery.

  And I wanted to apologize for the absurd quandary she had faced in my—no, our—country. While still in Chicago, Nahida had made the choice to become a practicing Druze, a member of the religious class. Then, after she donned the required clothing, she didn’t feel comfortable in America, land of religious freedom.

  Peter had heard her talking and turned around in his seat. “Where did you live in Chicago?” He had grown up in the city. Nahida reeled off her house number and street as though she had just come from there. “Oh, near the Mexican area,” Peter said. “Do you like Mexican food?”

  This was a silly question, I thought, for the real, live English-speaking Druze woman we could be peppering with far deeper queries about religion and culture.

  Nahida’s eyes lit up. “Oh! Mexican food,” she said with a longing sigh. “Let me tell you something.” She took my hand in hers and looked intently at me. I met her gaze and settled in my seat to listen. The bus careened along the road. This side of the mountains, facing the sea, was lush and draped here and there in fog. I thought back to the confessions of unhappy Saeed at the top of the mountain, of Tony and his putes à la route; what secret would Nahida share with me?

  “Right now,” she said, with sincere emotion, “I want a taco.”

  She had tried to cook Mexican food here, she said. But it never tasted right. She couldn’t find the right kind of peppers. “And the—what is the word? The Mexican bread . . .”

  “Tortillas?”

  “You can’t get tortillas. Well, there is one supermarket in Beirut that has them, but they’re seven dollars for a small package.”

  We agreed that this was highway robber
y.

  “Oh, yes—I love burritos too. And en-chi-la-das!” She savored each word as if it tasted of the thing itself.

  We were approaching another paved-over town plaza. “My stop is here,” Nahida said. “You are welcome at my house anytime. Give me your number.”

  The next day, my phone beeped with a message from Nahida: hi baby.

  When Peter and I returned to Beirut, the city felt different. The traffic buzzed far away from us. We took a taxi, and the remarkably old and polite cabbie drove as if by pantomime, wiggling the steering wheel from side to side. After the days we’d spent in the austere and quiet mountains, the gratuitous French and the gaudy fashions of the city struck me as rather sweet. Were all the gold bangles and obvious facelifts so different from traditional Druze clothing in the end? They were the markers of the flashy Beiruti clan, a sect of its own, striving for its own transformation to a resolutely secular existence.

  I still couldn’t speak like these people, but maybe that was fine. I had been striving for a total transformation in Arabic, a dramatic new identity. I hadn’t made much progress, largely because I had been so overwhelmed by the culture’s little codes, the clues and symbols that exposed sect and allegiance. I couldn’t learn them all, but without knowing where I fit in, I couldn’t decide what to learn. Being an outsider here was easier than being an insider. I was excused from knowing the most proper behavior, all the minute courtesies (or discourtesies) and the complications that lurked under the glamour that I had admired from afar.

  Maybe the blind man weaving the cane chairs, the one who had lost his sight to a land mine, was on to something. Rather than identifying with one group, he had picked all the good parts from various Christian sects. Outside of Beirut, I had picked through Arabic the same way. The language didn’t have to be anything mysterious or dogmatic, just a tool to make my point, or to make sure we were on the right trail. Then I could dress it up with whatever I liked. The more I traveled, the more I collected. I could say inshallah as much as I liked. I could tell my swalif, my stories, Gulf style. And I could pronounce my qafs from the back of the throat, as they were meant to be.

  Excellent rationalizing, I told myself as Peter and I waited for the plane. I needed it, because I was headed to Morocco soon, and this would only add to my Arabic identity crisis.

  al-maghrib

  Morocco

  September–October 2012

  أصُل

  (asula) To be firmly rooted

  تأصّل

  (ta’assala) To derive one’s origin

  أصول

  (usul) Principles, axioms, guidelines

  Daddy, Mommy, Gramps

  In the airport gift shop, buying New York City knickknacks for my host-family-to-be, I imagined a heartwarming intercultural exchange. We would gather around a table in a cozy room somewhere deep in the medina of Fes, Morocco’s historic former capital. Flipping through a picture book, we would compare modes of transport—taxis in New York, donkeys in Fes. My host father would chime in with a rhyming proverb about donkeys. Two days later, after successfully navigating my way home through the medina’s web of alleys, I would find the occasion to work the proverb into conversation. This would make my host parents’ charming, well-behaved child laugh with delight. Everyone would beam—I was making such progress!

  What really happened: My host mom, Btissam, was sporting an i ♥ ny T-shirt when I arrived. She thanked me for the candies and the books and stashed them away somewhere. My host family wasn’t impressed by my big-city life—a fresh American tramped through their house every few months. And forget learning donkey proverbs from Dad. Btissam and her husband, Yacine, lived in the French-built ville nouvelle, the new city a mile away from the old medina, in a modern house. Yacine listened to my stumbling Fusha—wrecked after all my country-hopping—and switched on the TV.

  It wasn’t that they were unfriendly. It was that I was hardly an ideal host daughter. Being forty years old was the first hitch.

  “Think of me as your mother,” Btissam, a decade my senior, said gamely as she showed me to my room. Over the bed hung a big poster of Fulla, the Muslim equivalent of Barbie, looking chic in pink plastic heels, a pink plaid skirt, and a black abaya with silver brocade sleeves. A deflated party balloon drooped from another wall, and schoolbooks were wedged in a cheap bookcase. Everything in the tiny room—the sofa, two chairs, my bed, the curtains—was done in the same pink-and-orange zigzag fabric.

  What had happened to the girl who lived here? If Btissam had mentioned her, I had not heard it. She was giving me the house tour in rapid-fire Darija, as Moroccan dialect is called, her voice occasionally rising to a squeak, like a bath toy—a disarming tendency of women I remembered from my previous visits to Morocco. I caught roughly every seventh syllable. In a leap of illogic, one even Dr. Badawi would have considered too inventive, I spent my first night in the villa convinced I was occupying the bedroom of Btissam and Yacine’s recently deceased daughter.

  So I was relieved to meet Amal the next afternoon, when she returned from a school trip. She was a perfectly healthy, slightly pudgy fourteen-year-old, with big eyes and thick black hair. The only family tragedy was that I, as a paying guest, had temporarily booted her from her bedroom.

  The other thing that made me an undesirable host daughter was that I knew too little Arabic to have a real conversation—but also too much to be treated like a child, which at least would have been entertaining.

  After dinner the second night, Btissam reminisced fondly about the previous guests, two students who had arrived not even knowing the alphabet. The pair had provided hours of free comedy by sitting around the house practicing all the funny Arabic sounds. “The best was the qaf,” she told me, letting out a gale of giggles. “Oh, how we loved that! They sounded like chickens!”

  I understood this story primarily with the help of accompanying gestures, as Btissam hooked her thumbs in her armpits and flapped her stubby wings, and a bit of onomatopoeia—she used the familiar waq-waq-waq, which I knew from the old Egyptian children’s song. Otherwise, most of what she and Yacine said sailed right over my head.

  I wasn’t helpless, because I could make myself reasonably well understood in my Egyptian-Lebanese-Fusha mélange. The communication did not run the other way, however. Every time Btissam or Yacine spoke, I felt as if I had strapped myself to a bucking bronco. I could usually grab hold of the first word, but after that, the rhythm jumped and rolled.

  “Tonight .” One second, and I hit the ground.

  “When you go out .” Barely two seconds.

  “This is the dog. Shut up, dog! You should .” Good. Longer. But whatever it was I should do sounded really important. That was one cranky-looking German shepherd.

  “Oh, that Amal! She such a . If she says .” I’d been thrown, but my boot was caught in the stirrup and I was being dragged along the ground.

  It was fitting that I was able to arrange a homestay with a family during my month of classes in Morocco, as this country was woven into my own family’s history, via objects and anecdotes from my parents’ travels there. And, of course, my name.

  The first time I had visited Morocco was a few years after I left graduate school and twenty-eight years after my mother named me for her neighbor near the Tangier hotel where she and my father had stayed. On that trip, I had felt simultaneously bewildered and right at home. I recognized the earthenware bowls I’d eaten out of as a kid, as well as the pillow-strewn salons, like my own living room. And in Marrakech, I saw that my parents must have settled in New Mexico for its same red-brown adobe, jagged mountains, and turquoise sky.

  Yet that familiarity had sometimes refracted and sent me reeling. There’s my dad, I thought one afternoon as I fell into step behind a man in the exact same dark brown djellaba my father owned. And there’s my dad. And there. Several days passed before I stopped expecting to s
ee his face peering out from a wool hood. And whenever I heard someone call “Aji”—Come here—I felt a sudden intimacy with the person, because that was how Beverly had summoned me all through my childhood. She spoke no other Arabic, but she had kept this word as a souvenir.

  My current homestay was also appropriate because it was preparing me not just for Arabic class, but for the two weeks after, when my parents would arrive and we would visit their old haunts together. Granted, my duties as a host daughter seemed to consist mainly of showing up for meals. As a real daughter, I would be expected to do a lot more, such as pick out restaurants, get us to trains on time, and, above all, translate. The trip had been my harebrained idea—half a gift to my parents, who had not been back to Morocco since the late 1960s, and half a gambit to satisfy my curiosity about their lives before I existed, when they were younger than I was now.

  The train schedules and restaurants I could handle. It was the translating I was worried about. I had to agree with the general attitude across the rest of the Arab world: namely, that Moroccans are impossible to understand. On my previous trips, I often communicated more successfully in French than in Arabic. “Good luck,” an Egyptian friend in New York had scoffed when I told him my plans to study Darija. “I hear a Moroccan, he sounds like a Scottish does to you. No, worse—like a Jamaican.” I would have to retune my Arabic ear, to turn the impenetrably foreign into the familiar. My time with my parents depended on it.

  Fortunately, my Darija class was excellent, beginning with the classroom itself. A riot of geometrical tiles, intricately carved white plaster, and beveled-edge mirrors, it was like studying inside a pastry. My two teachers were energetic, methodical, and committed to teaching only in Arabic—or, where necessary, charades. Mohamed, who taught the first session, was a meticulously groomed man with a system of hand gestures for grammatical points (masculine: stroking an invisible beard; feminine: flipping hair up at the shoulder). Taoufik took over after the midmorning break. Tall and thin, with a gray caterpillar of a mustache, he employed a three-part move to explain the word tawledt (I was born), hand curving over a pregnant belly, downward gestures with both hands between his legs, then his fingers up to pop his droopy eyes wide open.