All Strangers Are Kin Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  EGYPT

  Empty Talk

  Inside the Word Factory

  A Prophecy

  Two Tongues

  See What We Did

  Where’s Your Ear?

  Days of Rage

  Hidden Fingers

  Illuminating the House

  Graduation Day

  THE GULF

  Knowledge Village

  Practical, Fashion, Extreme

  When Your Ear Hears

  Eau de Facebook

  What He Did Not Know

  Heritage Club

  The Best People

  Supreme Poets

  Develop!

  LEBANON

  The New Beirut

  What Is the Rule?

  We Don’t Talk About Politics Here

  Almost a Dead Language

  Your Mother

  Easy—but Not Good

  The Weird Uncle

  Pierre and His Friends

  We Have Not Taught the Prophet the Price

  Land of Thorns

  MOROCCO

  Daddy, Mommy, Gramps

  The Place Where the Sun Sets

  You Pour the Tea

  God Is Beautiful

  Speaking Mexican

  Let’s Chat in Arabic

  Sweet Sensation

  Up in the Old Hotel

  What Is the Name of This?

  Crossing the Bridge

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  Landmarks

  Cover

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Egypt

  Empty Talk

  Inside the Word Factory

  A Prophecy

  Two Tongues

  See What We Did

  Where’s Your Ear?

  Days of Rage

  Hidden Fingers

  Illuminating the House

  Graduation Day

  The Gulf

  Knowledge Village

  Practical, Fashion, Extreme

  When Your Ear Hears

  Eau de Facebook

  What He Did Not Know

  Heritage Club

  The Best People

  Supreme Poets

  Develop!

  Lebanon

  The New Beirut

  What Is the Rule?

  We Don’t Talk About Politics Here

  Almost a Dead Language

  Your Mother

  Easy—but Not Good

  The Weird Uncle

  Pierre and His Friends

  We Have Not Taught the Prophet the Price

  Land of Thorns

  Morocco

  Daddy, Mommy, Gramps

  The Place Where the Sun Sets

  You Pour the Tea

  God Is Beautiful

  Speaking Mexican

  Let’s Chat in Arabic

  Sweet Sensation

  Up in the Old Hotel

  What Is the Name of This?

  Crossing the Bridge

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Zora O’Neill

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  O’Neill, Zora.

  All strangers are kin : adventures in Arabic and the Arab world / Zora O’Neill.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  isbn 978-0-547-85318-5 (hardcover)—isbn 978-0-547-85319-2 (ebook)

  1. O’Neill, Zora. 2. Women journalists—United States—Biography. 3. Travel writers—United States—Biography. 4. Arabic language—Study and teaching—Foreign speakers. 5. O’Neill, Zora—Travel—Arab countries. 6. Arab countries—Description and travel. I. Title.

  pn4874.o68.a3 2016

  910.917'5927—dc23

  2015020508

  Calligraphy for the words “Egypt,” “The Gulf,” and “Morocco” by Elinor A. Holland.

  Type design for the word “Lebanon” by Rana Abou Rjeily.

  Cover design by Martha Kennedy.

  Cover photograph © Lee Frost/Trevillion Images.

  v1.0516

  For my family

  and in memory of James Conlon

  Everything in its time is sweet.

  —arabic proverb

  Prologue

  In America, in the era of the War on Terror, Arabic has taken on a certain air of menace and danger. There’s a jihad, a holy war, going on, the newspapers report. In clips from the front lines of conflict, insurgents bellow “Allahu akbar!” from behind grenade launchers. Hijabs are symbols of extremism or tools of misogynist oppression, depending on which television pundit is talking. Fatwas are synonymous with death sentences. Al-Qaeda has become a generic term for Islamic terrorists of any kind.

  But from daily life in Egypt, where I first studied Arabic, I gleaned entirely different meanings for these same words. A jihad is that extra effort you put in to achieve a personal goal. People exclaim “Allahu akbar!” in the same way I say “Oh. My. God!” Women wear hijabs as cute accessories that pull an outfit together. Fatwas are doled out by radio and TV personalities, combining entertainment and advice much as Judge Judy and Oprah do in America.

  Al-Qaeda, though? Fair enough. That word has always struck terror in me, not for its literal meaning, “the foundation,” but because its plural is the term for grammar.

  This is a book about the Middle East, but it is not about holy wars or death sentences or oppression. Instead, it is about the Arabic language and how it’s used every day: to tell stories, sing songs, and discuss personal troubles, aspirations, friendships, and fashion choices. It is about Arabic for its own beautiful sake, and as a key to a culture and the three hundred million people who speak the language.

  Few Americans have a clear image of daily life in the Arab world, which means they have no baseline against which to compare the latest shocking newspaper headlines. Without a sense of what’s normal (the news is, by definition, the abnormal), all the riots, car bombs, and civil wars easily expand to fill the imagination. This book attempts to show what’s not normally covered in the media, the familiar settings—shoe shops, parking lots, chicken restaurants, living rooms—that exist in even the most foreign-seeming countries.

  This is also a book about how I learned Arabic, or tried to, in my travels around the Arab world. At age thirty-nine, in pursuit of some kind of fluency, I embarked on a series of trips to Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates. If this were a story about French or Italian, I wouldn’t have to explain further. European languages frequently inspire lifelong romances, and people decamp to Tuscany or Provence without a second thought. With Arabic, it’s not so simple.<
br />
  In fact, you could say that with Arabic and me, it’s complicated. We go way back, to the early 1990s, when the language was an obscure field in America, considered about as useful as Old Norse. (An acquaintance assumed she had misheard, and that I studied aerobics, because that made more sense.) I took it up as a college freshman, bent on reinvention. Arabic was interesting, I reasoned, and would make me seem interesting too.

  Arabic wasn’t my first foreign language—I had high school French and a bit of Spanish—but it was the first I used in a foreign land. When I went to Egypt to study for the summer, at age twenty, I marveled at how I could utter a seemingly random collection of sounds to a waiter, and presto, there appeared a glass of fresh strawberry juice, garnished with a sprig of mint. I felt like a magician. In the classroom, Arabic had been hypothetical; in Cairo, it worked.

  The marvel of that summer drove me for years of classes in America. But by the time I returned to Cairo, for a full year of advanced Arabic, I was burned out. I don’t think it’s making excuses to mention that Arabic is hard. As a professor once told me, Arabic takes seven years to learn and a lifetime to master. Arabic grammar is a complex web of if-then statements. The vocabulary is deep enough to drown in—the word for dictionary originally meant sea.

  Most confounding of all is that there is not one Arabic, but many. Written Arabic is relatively consistent across five million square miles, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. Spoken Arabic, by contrast, takes dozens of forms, in twenty-five countries in Africa and Asia. For seven years, I studied primarily the written language. I could parse a poem composed in the sixth century, but barely chitchat with my landlord in Cairo. When I left school, I had a master’s degree, yet I had felt fluent only a few times.

  After school, I moved to New York City. At first, I maintained a little connection to my studies—as a tourist, I visited Lebanon, Syria, and Morocco. But soon I built a career as a travel writer to other destinations; I got married and bought a house. Those years of Arabic, I thought, were an unfortunate diversion, a false start on adulthood.

  Yet the language continued to rattle around in my brain. I noticed it everywhere my work took me. In New Mexico, the irrigation ditches are called acequias, from as-saqiyah, the waterwheel. At a flamenco show in Spain, the audience cries “Ojalá!” (Allah!) I lectured my friends on the Arabic etymology of English words: “‘Algebra,’ sure, everyone knows that—but did you know ‘sugar,’ and ‘coffee,’ and ‘alcohol’?”

  In 2007, after nine years away from Egypt, I went back, to update a guidebook. I was surprised to find my Arabic not as rusty as I’d expected, despite so much neglect. I enjoyed speaking Arabic. I even missed it a little.

  Here is where I should mention that I am sometimes overly optimistic, or a bit greedy, or just delusional. My father, at age seventy-seven, often jokes that he’s still looking for a musical instrument that he can play without having to practice. I have the same hopeful attitude toward languages. I have tried a bit of Persian, a year of Dutch, a week of Thai; I dip into Spanish every few years. I imagine that if I could find the one language that clicks in every way—the right teacher, the right culture, the right mix of fascinating quirks and charming yet logical idioms—I might finally be fluent in something.

  Yes, Arabic is monumentally difficult, but my return to Egypt reminded me that the language is full of the quirks and idioms I loved. I wanted to plunge back into Arabic, to rekindle the thrill I’d felt on my first trip to Cairo at the age of twenty. The key was to find the right circumstances.

  When I started investigating classes in the Middle East, my husband, who had known me in graduate school, was skeptical. “Are you sure you want to study Arabic again?” he said. “You were so miserable then.”

  Things would be different this time, I told him. I would focus on spoken Arabic, not on the written version and all its grammatical complications. I would interact with people, not books. Classes had improved since the 1990s, when only about five thousand students were studying Arabic in the United States. Some of my professors in those years had taught Arabic as if it were a dead language, reading the text aloud, line by line, then translating to English and analyzing the grammar. Now thirty-five thousand students were enrolled in Arabic classes, and they had more dynamic teachers, jazzier textbooks, and colorful flashcards to help.

  I had changed too, in ways that would make me a better, happier student of Arabic. Approaching middle age, I was less insecure than I had been in my twenties, better traveled, and—key for language learning—more comfortable making a complete idiot of myself.

  I also wanted to spend a while in the Arab world, to reassure myself that the places and, more important, the people were as I remembered them. I wanted to step behind the curtain of news and talk about everything else that was happening: this movie, that new job, this old friend. In search of regular life, I embarked on four trips over the course of a year. Each was five or six weeks, studying and traveling. In between, I returned to New York, to reassure my husband; a couple of times, he visited me. But for the most part, I was alone—the better to meet new people and push myself to practice Arabic at every turn.

  I departed on the first trip in the fall of 2011, just as the hopes inspired by recent popular uprisings—the so-called Arab Spring—had begun to dim. My itinerary was a sort of linguistic Grand Tour: I visited four countries that represent the main dialects in the Arab world, as well as a wide variation in Arab culture. I began in Egypt, to reconnect with friends and to freshly appreciate the country’s distinct sense of humor. Then I went to the Persian Gulf—mainly the United Arab Emirates, but also Oman and Qatar—to fill a large gap in my education: I had never visited the peninsula where Arabic first flourished and where the poetry I studied in graduate school was composed. With somewhat lower intellectual aspirations, I continued to Lebanon, where I hoped to absorb a bit of Beirut’s glamour, starting with the lovely-sounding Levantine dialect.

  Last, I traveled to Morocco. In addition to being the far-western fringe of the Arab world—with an accompanying far-out dialect—Morocco was also my oldest personal connection to Arabic. Off and on in the late 1960s, before I was born, my parents lived there. I grew up with their stories and souvenirs; even my name came from a woman my mother once knew in Tangier. My trip started as others had, with classes in the local dialect. Then my parents, on their first time back in Morocco in more than forty years, joined me, and together we relived some of their travels—the ones that had, in large part, set me on my own path.

  It was an awkward, funny, and gratifying year. I rediscovered words I had long since forgotten and learned new ones that changed what I thought I knew. I was reminded of what I’m not particularly good at, but I also developed skills I had never been taught in the classroom. And I confirmed the adage I had heard early in my studies. Seven years was a drop in the bucket; Arabic could indeed consume a life.

  A few notes before we begin: Many names have been changed to protect those who shared their intimate stories with me, not knowing they would become characters in this book. In a few spots, I have altered the chronology of my trip slightly, to spare the reader some of my U-turns and false starts. Arabic words have been transliterated in a relatively loose way, spelled so as to best suggest their pronunciation to non-Arabists. On the one hand, this goes against my perfectionist urges and my schooling; on the other, it relieves us of pages cluttered with scholarly-looking ḍiʿācrīṭics like ḏis (a tiny joke for those in the know; there are more, along with the more arcane grammar details, in the endnotes). Likewise, I have used some common English terminology and naming conventions: Nasser, not Abdel Nasser, for instance, and “medieval,” reserved in its strictest sense for Europe’s Dark Ages, to refer to the same centuries in the Middle East, which were a shining era, the golden age of the Islamic empire. It will make academics twitch, but my aim in this book is—as it was in my travels—to make the Arab w
orld a more familiar place, not a stranger one.

  Yalla. Let’s go.

  masr

  Egypt

  September–November 2011

  ضحِك ب

  (dahika bi) To laugh at

  ضاحك

  (dahaka) To laugh with

  استضحك

  (istadhaka) To make someone laugh

  Empty Talk

  Cairo’s traffic was worse than ever. My taxi ride from the airport, well after midnight, was stop-and-go. The smell of burning fields, marking the end of the growing season, lent a faintly apocalyptic air to our halting progress. An accident blocked two lanes, and volunteers in sports jackets and ragged T-shirts directed us around the wreckage, lit by sputtering flares.

  How was Cairo doing now, eight months after the January 25 revolution? I asked my driver. (We spoke English, as the only foreign words that had popped into my head on arrival were, perversely, Spanish ones.) Did he feel safe? American newspapers had been reporting a “crime wave” of muggings and black-market gun sales. This had worried my friends and family as I planned my trip, but I knew this was statistically nothing compared with America’s crime rates. Besides, I simply couldn’t imagine Cairo turning dangerous—the crowds left little room for criminal behavior. Whereas New Yorkers, I had found in my life there, coped with crowding by ignoring everyone around them, Cairenes took the opposite tack: Get involved in your neighbors’ business, or that of your fellow metro passengers, fellow shoppers, fellow walkers-wading-into-traffic. Pull people close and bind them to you.

  The city was still safe, my driver said as we sailed down an exit ramp into Ramses Square, though he didn’t take his family out too late anymore, just in case. They usually came home by midnight or one. Now it was past two in the morning, and we plunged into the square in front of the train station as if into breaking waves. People bustled, dashed, or simply stood nibbling sunflower seeds. Vendors’ carts lit by dangling fluorescent bulbs displayed packages of socks and bootleg CDs.