All Strangers Are Kin

by Zora O'Neill

  “When is your mother coming for tea?” Btissam asked me every time we crossed paths at home. I had been avoiding translating for my mother, out of nervousness, but I couldn’t stall much longer. Fine, I said, this afternoon.

  Walking to the house, Beverly and I ran into Btissam’s housekeeper, Fatima. The first time I had met this wiry woman with flashing black eyes, she had told me she wasn’t married, then launched into a story I didn’t follow. From the intimate way she had greeted me ever since, I wondered if she might have confessed something very personal.

  Here on the street, she grabbed my wrists with her strong hands and kissed me loudly, once on one cheek, twice on the other, tak, tik-tik, like the start of a song. Then she squeezed Beverly in her iron grip and kissed her too, as though she had always known her.

  At the house, I told Btissam I’d seen Fatima. “Who?” Btissam replied.

  “Fatima, the woman who works here,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “FA-ti-ma. The shaghghala, the khaddama, the . . .” I couldn’t remember the Darija word for housekeeper, so I threw out all the words that came to mind, as Ahmed the Word Lord of Cairo might have done. Btissam looked perplexed.

  “Oh, Fa-TI-ma,” she finally said, subtly shifting the emphasis to the second syllable. There was no good reason for this pronunciation; it went directly against how the name was spelled. Something tugged in my chest, not as hard as when Zaina in Beirut had spelled words “wrong,” but enough to make me think my infatuation with Darija might have worn off.

  Btissam bypassed the villa’s grand salons—two adjacent rooms with a cutaway wall between, always kept dim and empty, awaiting a party of forty—and beckoned us into the small room where the family and I usually ate dinner and watched TV. Like the larger rooms, the small salon was edged in deep upholstered banquettes with heavy matching pillows, but this room was snug enough that everyone fit easily around the plastic-covered dining table. It was a low, round table on wheels, which Btissam would roll into position, just above my lap; it reminded me of being locked into a seat on a roller coaster. Sitting down with her and my mother, as a translator rather than a student and host daughter, was like boarding the tallest, scariest ride yet.

  Btissam had put on a purple T-shirt and pulled her frizzy hair into a little ponytail. She served the sweet mint tea from the fancier teapot, then offered us bowl upon bowl of candied chickpeas, crumbly cookies, and other snacks I had never seen before in this house.

  After my talk with Beverly about listening comprehension, this was my first opportunity to practice it. Breathe, be quiet, I told myself. Just relax and listen. Our conversation went fairly smoothly, though it helped that Btissam spoke slowly for my sake. I explained Beverly’s past in Morocco, her current work as a teacher of herbal medicine, how many children she had—answering all the usual questions. It was small talk, the kind that, in a classroom setting, could so easily dull the brain. But now it gave me purpose—I felt useful rather than trivial. It was a far cry from simultaneous translation, but for fleeting moments I felt that other part of my brain, the one that was safe from my own perfectionist nitpicking, fully light up. Before I knew it, an hour and a half had passed, and Beverly looked sleepy enough that I knew it was time to take her back to her hotel.

  In the taxi, I must have still looked like a relaxed and capable conversationalist, because the driver launched into a story, in somewhat halting Fusha, about his Scottish girlfriend and the problems they’d been having. She didn’t want to move to Morocco to be with him; he couldn’t afford to move to Scotland. They could live together in Spain and both find work, but he wasn’t sure she was committed, and besides, the Spanish treated him like a pariah. She was beautiful and strong, but maybe she drank too much.

  He told me all this as he sped across the mile-long gap between the ville nouvelle and the medina. When we arrived near the medina gate, we sat a few minutes longer in the car as he wrapped up his tale. “Thank you,” he finally said. “I feel better that I talked to someone about this.”

  “Wow, honey,” Beverly told me as I walked with her through the lane to her hotel. “You speak so well! You’re so expressive, so assured.”

  I had said only a few words to the driver: “Very hard!” “That is bad!” Before that, my translation between Beverly and Btissam had shrunk both women’s eloquent comments to basic platitudes. My mother couldn’t hear all my awkward changes in register—here Fusha, there Darija, there a desperate reach for Egyptian. All she saw was that the language had worked: I had communicated. Which was the important thing, and the thing I was always forgetting.

  Most days before class, Btissam and I drank mint tea and ate toast, and she would ask, “Did you study?”

  “Yes, I studied a lot,” I would answer.

  “Good. Studying is very good,” she would reply.

  It wasn’t much of a Darija conversation, but at a quarter to eight in the morning, it was all I could handle.

  Beverly’s visit opened some communication channel. Perhaps it had given Btissam a better context for me, so I wasn’t just some wrong-aged alien in inappropriate clothes, perched nervously in front of her TV. I was a real person, because I had a real mother.

  The following day, as Btissam dunked her bread in her tea, she spoke at length. She had worked all her life as a seamstress. She had wanted to go to college, but she hadn’t had the opportunity. After she married, Yacine had gone to work in Kenya and Nigeria, while she had focused on putting the kids through good schools. Her two older sons were out in the world, she said, employed and doing well. Amal, so much younger, wasn’t taking school seriously, though. “I want her to study, because I wasn’t able to,” Btissam said. She looked tired.

  Btissam’s story, confessed in the same way many other strangers had shared with me, explained so much: her Coke-bottle glasses, from the close work of sewing, her halfhearted cooking, her frequent exasperation with her daughter, even her morning queries about my homework. Only later, in class, did I realize I had understood every word.

  Speaking Mexican

  In the afternoons, Amal and I usually sat in the salon, sort of doing our homework and sort of watching TV—I guess like sisters everywhere. We got along fine, at a basic level. When Amal learned that I spoke Egyptian Arabic, she said she did too. Or, well, she and her friends pretended to speak Egyptian when they wanted to be funny. Did I want to hear?

  She took a deep breath and stared down at her hands, getting into character. Then she swung her thick, black hair up with a dramatic toss. “And you do this to me why?!” she squawked.

  I had to laugh. Not only had she grasped that Ammiya quirk of putting the question word at the end, but she had used the distinctive lightbulb-turning gesture Egyptians use to demand explanation. She also confirmed my suspicion that, to non-Egyptian ears, this inverted sentence structure sounded as overwrought as it did in English. It was a habit I had not been able to break, neither in Lebanon nor here in Morocco.

  At 4 p.m., we both stowed our books and concentrated on the screen, because it was time for Amal’s favorite TV show. Hareem as-Sultan (The Sultan’s Harem), as it was called in Arabic, was a soap opera made in Turkey and set in the sixteenth-century Istanbul court of Suleiman the Magnificent. It was a hit in its native country and all over the Arab world.

  At its peak under Suleiman, the Ottoman empire reached west to present-day Algeria—but, except for a few years at the end of the sixteenth century when the Turks had occupied Fes, no farther. Morocco, unlike most other countries in the Middle East, showed virtually no Turkish cultural influence: no hookahs, no borrowed Turkish titles or suffixes, not even common Turkish foods like chicken kebab. It helped explain why Morocco seemed so different from the rest of the Arab world—and it made for an especially transfixing and exotic TV show for teenage Amal. As for me, I would cheerfully watch any soap opera in Arabic. The language of me
lodrama was never complicated.

  The first scene opened in the harem, populated with concubines in jewel-toned dresses. Amal loved the red-haired heroine. “She is very, very, very beautiful,” she breathed.

  Amal and I usually spoke English together. She spoke it the way I spoke Arabic. She sounded convincing enough with basic phrases. “Hel-lo! How are youuuu!” she sang out every time she saw me. After that, her vocabulary stalled.

  “Oh, my teacher, he is very, very bad,” Amal told me once. “He talks, talks, blah blah blah blah. He makes me very mad. He is very stupid. He does this.” Here she puffed out her cheeks and crossed her big eyes.

  “And we laugh, laugh.” She shook her head wildly to convey the full force of her criticism.

  But then, thinking better of it, she softened the blow. “But it is OK. He is good.”

  How many times had I made elaborate gestures like this? How many times had I repeated myself, for lack of more to add? How many times had I contradicted myself because I couldn’t remember nuanced adjectives? And how often had I made my conversation partner grit her teeth and want to flee the room?

  On TV, the scene switched from harem intrigue to a raucous battle, all thundering horses and flashing scimitars. I had pegged Amal as a princess-loving girly-girl—she did have that giant poster of Muslim Barbie over her (my) bed. But now she leaned forward, rapt. “This are my favorite part.”

  I preferred the harem scenes. I found Arabic much easier to understand in the domestic sphere, even when it was being whispered menacingly in a palace hallway. Out on a battlefield, words were distorted by being bellowed at top volume, and all those clashing swords and smashing skulls made it harder to hear.

  This particular show was also a bit tricky to understand because it was dubbed in Syrian Arabic. It sounded lovely, as graceful as Lebanese, but slower, though I didn’t recognize all the vocabulary. This dialect dubbing was a striking change from when I had last watched Arabic TV, back in the late 1990s in Cairo. Then, my roommates and I had been hooked on nightly episodes of the American primetime soap Santa Barbara, dubbed into country-neutral Fusha. “Thou hast betrayed me, she-devil!” a wronged wife, all shoulder pads and puffy hair, would lament; the mistress would retort, “No, my beloved, this is justice!”

  It sounded absurd to me as a language learner, but Arab viewers loved it. Occasionally I would be out during the Santa Barbara hour and pass the corner coffeehouse, filled with men staring rapt at the TV in the corner of the room.

  At that time, in the late 1990s, Fusha dubbing was still relatively progressive. For decades, virtually all foreign shows in the Arab world had been subtitled. Then in 1991 a Lebanese production company purchased the rights to a Mexican telenovela called Tú o nadie (You or No One) and dubbed it in Fusha. It was a massive hit. The dark-eyed beauties, weeping copious tears, were naturally adored by Arab audiences, and the characters’ passion and big hair counterbalanced the formality of the words the producers put in their mouths. Over the next decade, the same company dubbed many more Mexican and Brazilian soaps, and the phrase “speaking Mexican” (yitkallim mekseeki) became a joking euphemism for speaking Fusha. My Santa Barbara, with its Spanish name, was caught up in the wave—it was all in “Mexican” too.

  In the time since I had last watched Arabic television, the Mexican speakers disappeared, replaced by dubbing that reflected how Arabs actually spoke. The first soap dubbed in dialect, a Turkish production, was released in 2008, in Syrian. Noor, as it was called in Arabic, drew eighty-five million viewers and the condemnation of a Saudi cleric, who called it “replete with evil”—a sure sign of success. Some of that success was due to the star actor, who resembled Brad Pitt, but many also credited the language, which was refreshingly informal and accessible, even to non-Syrian viewers. Dubbing in dialect rapidly became the norm. Syrian, generally considered clear and light, was most often used for historical dramas. Comedy could be dubbed in wisecracking Egyptian, though Lebanese was used for some sitcoms. And here in Morocco, I had seen a couple of shows dubbed in Darija—or I had assumed that’s what it was, as the words went by at triple speed.

  Children’s shows were the last bastion of Fusha dubbing, because they were considered educational. With anime, it sounded jarring, because the grand Arabic dialogue alternated with distinctly Japanese grunts and gasps of surprise. Nerdy SpongeBob SquarePants, however, sounded as though he had been born to speak Fusha.

  Amal was past all that, at least today, as she was fully absorbed in the adult world of Hareem as-Sultan. The action had shifted back to women reclining on divans, nibbling sweets and scheming.

  “Do you understand the Syrian well?” I asked Amal as the final credits rolled.

  “Oh, yes,” she replied with a toss of her thick black hair. “It sound very, very nice!” Would Amal, one day years in the future, quote Syrian phrases she had learned on this show, the way my high school friends and I still repeated the occasional Monty Python punchline? If Fusha did ever fade, perhaps this was how the western edge of the Arab world would stay connected to the eastern one.

  One of Si Taoufik’s main academic interests was Arabic dialects. After my last class, I asked to hear his theories, and we sat in the school’s garden to discuss them. “Imagine taking a trip,” he said. We were speaking in English, but out of teaching habit, he picked up a pantomime suitcase. “You set out walking, in Iraq,” he said, swinging his arms a little. “And you walk west. As you walk, you would not notice any specific point where the language shifted. But when you reach here, in Morocco, you would be speaking a very different type of Arabic.”

  This range of Arabic he described made a wonderful image, and it illustrated how fruitless it was for me to try to speak each kind of Arabic precisely matched to wherever I was. There were a few natural barriers—rivers, mountains, patches of desert—that hindered the pure flow of language across the Arab world, but overall, Arabic was a spectrum, not discrete chunks with labels.

  This didn’t prevent Si Taoufik from, in the next breath, broadly stereotyping the dialects. “To me, Algerian sounds very aggressive, a little vulgar,” he confided. I had never heard an Algerian speak, so I couldn’t judge, but I wondered whether his perception was related to having a nearly million-square-mile neighbor with which the border was closed.

  “Lebanese sounds . . . womanish,” he went on. “And Egyptian Ammiya—that sounds womanish too. But in a different way, you know?”

  “Right,” I said. “Like, Lebanese is all soft and glamorous, like some pretty girl.” Though I had seen the complications of Beirut firsthand, they hadn’t totally changed my impression. “But Ammiya—that sounds like a middle-aged woman telling jokes.”

  Si Taoufik was sipping his coffee, so he didn’t immediately reply.

  In the pause, I rewound what I had just said. Wait, I was a middle-aged woman telling jokes!

  Here I’d been casting about for alternatives to my Egyptian dialect, imagining I could have had a different life in Arabic—more glamorous if I’d been in Beirut, more medieval and rich if I’d been here in Fes, more fluent if I had studied any spoken language sooner, in more depth. But the problem wasn’t the dialect. It was me, of course.

  I had been so young most of the time I’d studied in Egypt, and that soap-opera clip, with the woman shaking her shoulders and squawking, “You mean what, exactly?”—in my twenties, that had made me cringe. It stood for everything that was wrong with the Egyptian accent. Now, though, when my teenage host sister Amal had mocked that same melodramatic intonation, I had felt a certain pride—yes, that’s just how I sounded.

  A middle-aged woman telling jokes, indeed. I laughed out loud, and Si Taoufik cocked his head, questioning.

  “I . . . it’s because . . .” I gasped, slapping my thigh so hard I sloshed my mint tea out of its glass. “Ha! I mean, I just turned forty, and . . . I guess I’ve finally aged into my Arabi
c accent.”

  Let’s Chat in Arabic

  Rabat, Morocco’s capital, had a great imperial history, defended by an impressive fort, but its modern reputation was one of dull bureaucracy. When I had told Yacine my travel plans, he flicked his eyebrows up and huffed, “Eh, Rabat.”

  I thought it was fantastic. I had three days in this new city, alone, before meeting my family in Tangier. It was a relief to have no role to play for anyone. Overnight, the last bit of enchantment that had made me Btissam and Yacine’s daughter wore off, and I woke up a plain old boarder. I was free, in my traveling clothes, in a city that, after subdued, inward-looking Fes, felt as anonymous and cosmopolitan as Paris. In the lobby of my hotel, businessmen with gold watches huddled in negotiations, and intellectuals with sculpted hair pored over the day’s French paper. I walked to the city tram, just to ride and admire the scenery.

  I had intended to wander around the neighborhood at the end of the line, but when we arrived it was drizzling, the air was biting cold, and the streets looked dull and sterile. I ducked back into the warm tram, to go back the way I had come.

  A minute later, a young woman sat down across from me. She stared pensively out the window, checked her phone, pulled her sheer leopard-print scarf tighter at her ears, checked her phone again. It was a natural extension of her fidgeting when she leaned over and asked me something in French.

  I studiously told her I did not speak French, and she answered, “Oh, good, you speak Arabic.” Then she let loose a torrent of Darija. As soon as I could get a word in, I explained my situation—the time in Egypt, the newness of Darija, the total failure in listening comprehension.