All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

Allah ybarak feek.

  Which meant which, again? I wanted to believe it didn’t really matter, but of course it did, the same way it mattered to say “welcome” instead of “you’re welcome” in English. On every occasion, both in class and out, I stumbled and stammered. My heart was not fluent.

  The GAOs (as I had begun to refer to my classmate’s back-of-notebook list) maxed out the day our class did a unit on eating lunch at a Moroccan friend’s home. It came early in the curriculum because most students faced the situation immediately. In fact, many students complained of being overfed, returning from the midday break groaning about the meat and couscous and bread their host families had forced on them. This was not a problem I had—Btissam was an indifferent cook, and after Yacine saw how inept I was at eating with my fingers, he stopped nudging chicken legs toward me, to spare us all the mess. Still, in light of previous hospitality dilemmas, such as the enormous duck lunch with Medo’s mother, I was eager to learn some ritual ways of managing the situation.

  The textbook conversation involved our two American protagonists, Ellen and Dan, dining with their hostess, Lalla Zohra. (Hey, my name! Or not? If it was common enough to be a textbook name, then why had I found no keychain? Hmph.) As the scene opened, Lalla Zohra was encouraging her guests to eat more: “Don’t be bashful!” she told Ellen.

  I skimmed through the words, looking for substance amid the formulaic niceties. I found none. The whole conversation, which filled a two-column page, was back-to-back GAOs, imploring God to increase the blessings, strengthen the goodness, and plenty more. In an underhanded move, Lalla Zohra even swore by God that her guests must eat. Si Taoufik paused the tape to explain that when someone broke a sworn promise, he or she was obliged to fast for three days. Would Ellen really be so selfish as to make Lalla Zohra renounce all food for that long?

  On the recording, Ellen made an audible gulp. “This one bite is because you swore, may God increase the blessing.”

  Our next important lesson was the process of making mint tea. Si Mohamed shaped the key items in the air: teapot, small glasses, serving tray, giant sugar bowl. I knew them all from home, where Btissam had one filigreed silver set, gathering dust on a sideboard, and a battered tin version that she used morning, noon, and night.

  Si Mohamed demonstrated the verbs to stir, to pour, and to mix by transferring from pot to cup and back again (qleb w-sheqleb, a singsong combination of syllables that reminded me of the word for heart; as a mnemonic, I pictured mint tea bubbling through my veins). Then it was our turn.

  The student who aspired to write a dissertation about Islam and politics everywhere in the world went first. When he reached the step of pouring, Si Mohamed coughed. “Ehherrm. It’s kaykhwi. Nta kaykhwi al-atay. You pour the tea.”

  “Oh, not kayhwi?” the student replied. Si Mohamed coughed again.

  I knew from reading the word that the distinction was one letter: the fricative kha (خ), as in “yech,” rather than ha (ح), the aspirated h, the one for hissing “Hey!” like a spy. But as when Si Taoufik had demonstrated how to “open up” the vowels, I was having a hard time hearing the distinction—the word was too compressed.

  “Because that’s what I thought you said,” the student continued. “Oh, yes, it’s printed here in the book. I just didn’t see the dot. Of course, kaykhwi, not kayhwi.”

  Si Mohamed had turned quite pink from coughing. “Noooo, this is very important,” he managed. “Kaykhkhkhkhwi is correct. The other way is . . .” He smoothed down the front of his pristine muslin djellaba unnecessarily. It was Friday, the start of the weekend, and he was dressed especially well.

  I felt bad for Si Mohamed, but I had my pen poised over my notebook, eager to hear the meaning of this Darija profanity that was making him lose his composure. My store of vulgar Arabic words was still meager, even after Lebanon.

  “It is . . .” Si Mohamed began, in English, which meant the word must be too terrible to explain via pantomime. He looked out the window, avoiding our eyes. “It is . . . what adult man and woman do in the mattress.”

  Every day that passed, Darija showed new, subtle pitfalls. The sleepy-eyed student, the one who thanked God for coffee, had studied in Tunisia, but when he used the word for bread that he had learned there, Si Mohamed again had to supply an evasive English gloss. “That,” he said, “is a word boys shout at each other on the playground.”

  After class, another student, a woman who was doing research with sex workers, explained in more detail. The Tunisian word came from the one for oven, and, well, if we thought about female anatomy, and insults kids used . . . and had we seen Pink Flamingos, where Divine shoplifts the steak and keeps it warm in her own “private oven”? “Also,” she said, crossing her arms sagely, “don’t tell anyone you’re allergic. Here, it means gay.”

  Taken individually, these cough-inducing Darija words were hilarious—oh, Morocco, land of a thousand linguistic embarrassments! Taken together, they were faintly demoralizing, especially when combined with other, more mundane words that, I eventually discovered, did not mean what I thought they meant.

  “OK, I’m finished in the bathroom now. You can turn off the water heater,” I cheerily told Btissam my first night at the villa. I did this four nights in a row, until my class did the unit on buying apricot jam at the store, and I learned that the word I had been using for finish was the one Moroccans use for pay. So I had been dutifully informing my family I was all paid up in the bathroom.

  Then there was my default word for OK, the one that automatically tripped off my tongue in agreement, to keep a conversation rolling. This was the Egyptian word mashi. It took me a week to realize that in Darija, mashi meant “nothing.”

  I also couldn’t quite believe that the verb I used for to walk meant to go in Morocco. Not a terrible misstep, but in a taxi, I told my driver, as I always had in Cairo, “OK, this is good. I can walk from here.” I gestured to the side of the road.

  The driver turned abruptly into a side street and kept driving, his eyes catching mine in the rearview mirror, in affirmation of my impulsive wishes. I had basically said, while pointing imperiously, “Not a thing! Go from here!”

  One afternoon I came home from class to see a lady in a trim white pantsuit and flower-print headscarf coming out the front door. I readied my GAOs for meeting strangers.

  But it was no stranger; it was my host mom, Btissam. I had not recognized her because, in two and a half weeks, I had only ever seen her in ripped leggings and a shapeless T-shirt.

  To be honest, I had been slightly taken aback by her slovenliness, as well as the rest of the family’s. Yacine was always in sweatpants, except when he stripped down to a saggy white tank top and gym teacher’s shorts. Should I be seeing this man’s legs? I wondered.

  But now, as I waved to sharp-dressed Btissam, complete with a patent-leather clutch under her arm, I realized how silly my reaction had been. Back in New York, I had my own set of baggy old house clothes. Any guests who stayed more than a few days got to see me in my bathrobe. So why had I expected Btissam and Yacine to pull themselves together for me, in their own home? Looking at it this way, I was touched that the family had welcomed me so quickly, so unconditionally.

  My assumptions only highlighted how little time I had spent in people’s homes, with families, in the Arab world. Aside from the couple of nights I had spent with Farah and Abdallah in Abu Dhabi (where, I now recalled, they had mostly worn pajamas), I had interacted with people on the street. So I had packed to make a good impression in public: a whole array of modest but stylish cotton pants and long-sleeve silk shirts, with long tank tops underneath, to avoid showing skin when I stretched or leaned.

  Loungewear, however—that I had not packed. For a good two weeks I had been wearing my street clothes around the house. To my host family I must have looked ridiculous, perched awkwardly at the dinner table in the same pink linen blou
se and khaki capris I’d worn to school. There was even something a bit unhygienic about it, now that I thought about it.

  That night, I stripped off my blouse and wore my tank top to dinner. Everyone seemed to relax a little, now that the wide elastic of my sports bra was sticking out.

  The next afternoon when I came home from school, I changed into my nightgown, a floor-length pink paisley thing. Bra or no bra? I wavered, then committed to full home-casual. When I wafted into the dining room in a cloud of cheap rayon, I felt almost naked. No one batted an eye.

  Yacine had changed his house wardrobe that day too. Instead of his usual undershirt, he had donned a frayed white tee that read, in a sort of eye-chart layout:

  I

  can’t

  say what i’m

  thinking right now

  During the many lulls in conversation, I read and reread this message. Yacine had given me the motto of my entire Arabic-learning life.

  God Is Beautiful

  My mother arrived in Fes swaddled in flowing cottons and a bit teary-eyed. “Oh, honey, I feel like I’m home!” she exclaimed at the door of the hotel where I’d installed her. (Btissam and Yacine would probably have welcomed her at our house, but it seemed too confusing to mix host family and real family.) She was on her way south to meet friends; later, we would meet again up north, with my father. Her two days in Fes were a trial run of my tour-guide abilities and my Darija skills.

  Theoretically, Beverly shouldn’t have needed my help at all. She and my father, Patrick, had traipsed around Morocco more than forty years before, alone, with none of the comforts or resources modern travelers like myself took for granted—in many ways, a far braver trip than I had ever undertaken. Yet something had happened over the years: I became the independent, intrepid one, and my mother tagged along at my heels, saying, “Whatever you want to do, honey, it’s fine with me.”

  I did at least have a working knowledge of the Fes medina, which was where Beverly and I walked first. Fassis call the medina Fes al-Bali, literally “Old Fes.” The root of the word bali implies decay and dilapidation, but the medina was a lively, functional city, with schools, shops, homes, and my mother’s hotel inside its fortified walls. It even smelled alive: rosewater, freshly carved cedar, grassy dung from the donkeys that swayed through the lanes.

  I loved the place because it conjured medieval Andalusian texts I had read in graduate school. It was easy to stumble into a quiet cul-de-sac where recent centuries had yet to intrude, with only the sound of murmured Arabic coming from a high window. There was also a direct connection between this city and the court of Córdoba. Fes, established in 789, became a refuge for intellectuals and aristocrats forced out of Islamic Spain at various points, especially when the Catholic kings took over.

  These refugees brought many things that are now considered distinctly Moroccan: the ornate plaster and tile decoration that made my classroom such a confection, for instance, and rich court foods such as the pigeon pie called bstilla. The exiled Andalusians also brought a particular kind of Arabic that, way out here in the west, cut off from the center of the empire in Baghdad, had developed distinct patterns and preserved some old details. That was why Fassis pronounced the qaf, Si Taoufik had explained to us—it was a linguistic relic.

  Sections of the medina were dedicated to traditional trades. In class we had learned these terms, and with each new word, Si Mohamed had asked, “Do you have this in America?” Not in quite the same way. To find an American weaver, you had to go to a craft show; to find a blacksmith, you went to a “living history” museum staffed with reenactors. In Fes, you went to the medina.

  In the dyers’ quarter, Beverly and I watched men wrestle skeins of brilliant indigo floss out of giant vats; in the coppersmiths’ square, the ping of small hammers rang out. At the woodworkers’ square, we happened across the tradesman’s ethic applied to language. In a museum of carpentry, one case displayed small wooden planks that students traditionally used as rudimentary chalkboards, coated with a daub of clay and inscribed with the day’s Quran lesson. The shaky, overlarge letters reminded me of my own attempts to control my pen in my first year of Arabic.

  In an adjacent case was another set of planks, worn soft at the edges, patched with copper, and covered in elegant ribbons of calligraphy in that angular but looping Moroccan style. The heavily used planks were the students’ diplomas. I would have liked to have received my master’s degree in the same way, inscribed on the duct-taped cover of my Hans Wehr dictionary.

  Late in the afternoon, I led Beverly to the perfumers’ quarter. We turned into a shaded lane and stooped to enter a rough wooden door. The difference between outside and in was as striking as Btissam’s transformation at the threshold of her own house. The narrow medina streets were often covered, so they felt like interior halls. Meanwhile, “inside” this building was completely open to the sky. The walls of the courtyard whirled and exploded with the finest Andalusian craftwork: mosaic tile patterns, wood carved so fine it resembled lace, plaster incised with vines and interlocking words.

  A hadeeth, a saying of the prophet Muhammad, advises, “Allahu jameel wa-yuhibb al-jamal”—God is beautiful, and He loves beauty. Strictly speaking, this was the Prophet’s answer to the question of whether it was a sin of pride to wear fancy clothes. But the principle, especially as it seemed to be practiced in highly decorated Fes, extended to all ornamentation: it was good as long as it was for God. So in this space, a Quran school built in the fourteenth century, the students had not toiled in austerity with nothing but their wooden slates. They had studied inside a physical reminder of one of God’s many fine qualities.

  Beverly and I rested there in silence for a while. I tried to trace the letters cut in the plaster, but my eyes skittered from pattern to pattern, texture to texture. Eventually I relaxed enough to focus on a single shape within the greater decoration: a star, say, then a hexagon. From each point radiated another, more complex pattern, transforming and expanding. This was a physical representation of how Arabic worked, another metaphor for the infinitely flexible root system. In the big picture, the ornament of it was overwhelming, something I could never grasp completely. But if I concentrated on what was in front of me—that I might master.

  At the end of the day, Beverly flopped in her café seat at a bend in a busy lane. She looked pale and small in her chair, her cloud of silver hair disheveled—perhaps I had pulled her too far along with me. Fortunately, she revived as we dipped into our spiced lentils. “The women are all dressed like beautiful birds now,” she marveled, watching the passing crowd.

  In Morocco in the 1960s, Beverly said, clothes had all been gray and brown, a country of sparrows. Now women flitted by in robes of emerald green with yellow in the sleeves, cobalt blue with fuchsia trim, dove gray and pink, with a box gift-wrapped to match. God was beautiful, and He loved beauty.

  For this trip, Beverly was playing hooky from her Spanish classes at home in New Mexico. That was fine with her, she said. She had hit a roadblock. “Whenever someone speaks directly to me, I freeze,” she said, demonstrating her deer-in-the-headlights look, mouth agape. “My teacher calls it quedarse en blanco—to blank out. At least I learned that!”

  I recognized this blankness, the panic brought on by the fear of an impending question. It had happened even in the relative comfort of my lessons with Manal in Dubai, and it happened all the time here in Morocco. No matter how well I performed in class for Si Mohamed and Si Taoufik, in the streets, I froze. I never had this problem in Spanish, or in Egyptian dialect—I could usually latch on to a few words in a question, then toss out some basic phrase to keep a conversation going in what I hoped was the right direction. Here, I heard little and spoke less in response. Perhaps my stumbling in Morocco was a defense mechanism, because if I were to speak Darija, then people might reply in Darija. In excruciatingly fast, vowel-free Darija. On the occasions I could mus
ter an answer, I found myself doing so in Fusha. It bought me time, and it signaled, “I’m not from these parts. Be kind.”

  Though I sympathized with my mother, I couldn’t help needling her a little. I was reminded of all the times she had called me in college. “Hey, you always told me just to wing it,” I said. “Why don’t you do that yourself?”

  As I spoke the words, I heard an echo: Dr. Badawi’s voice, telling me, “Just make something up!” It was the same idea, that you don’t have to know absolutely everything before moving forward, yet I had never considered his and my mother’s advice synonymous. In college, I had been so bent on distancing myself from home that I hadn’t even admitted to myself that my interest in Arabic might be related to my parents’ travels. I certainly hadn’t mentioned it to Beverly, lest it validate her parenting style and all her hippie axioms. Only years later, when I felt fully independent—fully grown into the name my mother gave me—was I able to take Dr. Badawi’s advice to heart.

  A fine drizzle started. Barely breaking stride, the passing women pulled up the hoods of their djellabas; the points stuck up like cardinals’ crests.

  “One of my friends offered me some self-hypnosis tapes,” Beverly said, ignoring my dig. “I think that might do the trick.”

  This was how my mother and I differed, and perhaps why I found it so hard to take her advice. I had been thinking the trick to better listening comprehension might be something more concrete, less woo-woo. I wanted to find videos or recordings with a transcription of the dialogue, so I could match the written syllables with how they sounded.

  But my mother was probably right—much as it pained me to admit it—that good listening required some broader, more abstract skill. When I was able to listen well, it seemed to happen in some separate lobe of my brain, safe from my usual rule-checking, case-ending-verifying, dictionary-referencing self. I needed some way to access that quieter self, the one I had briefly felt in the madrasa in the medina while staring at a single point in the ornament. Comprehension was a rare bird. You had to be calm and let it alight, then stay still enough not to chase it off.