tl;dr: Double double toil and trouble; Beirut, bibliophiles, brouhaha. Basically, a language update. Hello hello hello! Happy belated Halloween and happy voting season, USA. I was luckily able to observe both traditions in Amman, and I hope you were, too, wherever you are. For those back home, I'm sure this is a time full of apprehension and political ads; the latter I don’t personally have to deal with this year, but I’ve still got a fair amount of spookiness going on around me. For example, I'm frightened to acknowledge that the semester is more than half over. Is this how time works, post-college? You sneeze and a month has gone by? Life is exhausting, but in a good way (for now). The toil and trouble of my coursework pays off tenfold with each passing week, alhamdulillah. I've even gotten to a point where it feels natural to be spending most of my free time in Arabic -- media, music, roasting my friends/being roasted (the latter is more common). I’ve got a few fav Jordanian meme accounts and a goofy daytime talk show that I can veg out to, and, of course, I’m keeping up with the times by reading...horoscope predictions. (The 12-sign astrological system we all know and love actually has an Eastern Mediterranean heritage, which is to say that people in the Arabic-speaking world also get to have debates about whether they broke up with their ex because he was an Aquarius.) But back to earth: somebody sent me a really thoughtful question a while back that I’ve been mulling over recently. The asker studied Spanish in college, but found themselves feeling uncomfortable about how the language operates as social politics in Latin America. After mentioning Quechua and other indigenous languages, they wrote: “How do you balance the desire to learn languages that reach out to the largest quantity of people with the notion that reaching out to people in historically colonist language may not be the best way to understand the cultures of minority and indigenous populations?” A (good) complex question about a (good?) complex world, but the answer, for me, is a fairly simple matter: I don't pretend that the language I'm learning is something it's not. Most authorities count about 400 million Arabic speakers worldwide, but that's certainly contestable based on one's definitions of "Arabic" and "fluency." In any case, learning Arabic doesn't mean I get the right to claim to represent them. As I’ve explained in a previous post, Arabic is a diglossic language; dialects vary greatly from place to place, while the formal register has about the same highfalutin’ tone anywhere. People crack a lot of jokes about Americans only ever learning formal Arabic — while it’s technically the lingua franca of the Middle East and North Africa, nobody really wants to grab a beer with someone whose conversational style resembles Shakespeare. Also, as the questioner wisely suggested, "International" Arabic doesn't really fly with demographic minorities in linguistically diverse places like Morocco or Sudan. My solution to this mess is to choose my battles. I'm better at picking up languages in casual social settings, anyways, so I’ve tended to focus on strengthening my skills in the urban Levantine dialect. It was never my intention to pretend that I can act as an authority on the goings-on of Northwest Africa and Libya and Sudan and the Gulf states and Egypt AND Iraq…I am consistently humbled by all the language(s) of Arabic I don’t know and will never master. It's worth noting that this isn't just a problem for foreigners -- even people who are native Arabic speakers themselves wonder what the categories "Arab" and "Arabic" really mean. By the end of this year, I should be fairly comfortable conversing in Lebanon/Syria/Palestine/Jordan (“the Levant”), and I'll also be able to churn through a "universal" book, inshallah. Will I probably sound elitist and foreign to a lot of people, based on my year spent in a classroom? Almost definitely. But all I can hope, as is the case for most such uphill battles, is that I can succeed at keeping up constant vigilance about this issue. After all, I don’t only just read horoscopes and memes! I’m an actual student, I promise!! Last week, we read our first novel of the year, Ghada Samman’s Beirut 75 . Hardcore literary Arabic. Elements of Samman’s style actually reminded me of the character development of one of my fav English authors, Virginia Woolf, which was exciting. It’s always a little strange to read dialogue that uses so little of the vocabulary I use in my day-to-day in Jordan, but that’s Arabic, for ya. Some chapters, it felt like I was reading the dictionary as much as the novel. Reading is a labor, but a labor of love.
I’ve had one other noteworthy chance to stretch my linguistic muscles, and it’s the last thing I”ll mention (thanks for bearing with me on a long post). Three weeks ago, I was over the moon to finally fulfill a long-time fantasy: visiting Beirut. Beirut is sometimes called “the Paris of the Middle East,” and while I’ve never been to Paris (and still don’t know if being compared to the French is a compliment), I can vouch that the city is full of art, fashion, and effervescent romantic charm. It was so fun to hear Arabic spoken slightly differently and, in a quintessential Beirut style, mixed with equal parts English and French (if you’re also a nerd about linguistic mixing, click here). I posted a Beirut section to my photo gallery, if you want to take a look at my favorite sights and scenes. As I've said before, I am so blessed by the classmates with whom I get to take these sorts of adventures. It was so cool to explore the city through not one, but five pairs of eyes and ears (also mouths, ugh the food was so good). Much love from Amman, in this time when the days are literally getting darker!?! If you have reading/watching/listening recommendations for my upcoming Saturdays spent in bed hiding from the winter wind, please do send them my way.
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