Arabic Was No Longer My Arabic

To the memory of my mother, Nawal (1945–2021)

1

My dream, from childhood, was to belong to the tradition of Imru’ al-Qays and al-Mutanabbi—to write in the Arabic I lived with and loved as a child growing up in Bethlehem, Palestine. Here’s how the story I heard over and over from my mother goes: when I was five or so I had memorized verses from the seven pre-Islamic odes (the mu‘allaqat), and started reciting them without any clue about what the words to the poems meant. She dressed me up in a brown corduroy suit and asked my father to arrange for me to recite what I’d memorized from those odes at my school’s end-of-the-year celebration. That memory still haunts me here in the US today: Arabic poetry was fundamental to my connection with language; it began as a child’s plaything for me, even before I understood it as poetry.

Many years later, as an engineering student at Manhattan College in New York City, I found myself immersed in the sounds of a strange new tongue. To a newly-arrived immigrant on the streets of the Bronx, people’s words and conversations in English constantly drummed in my ears; it made a deep impact on me, all of those day-to-day interactions and transactions taking shape in my mind, as sound, as “serious play,” just like those Arabic odes.

I still dream in Arabic, if you are wondering, but art derives its shape from lived experience, rather than dreams. As an immigrant poet, I’ve decided to quit what’s most dear to me, my Arabic writing, to focus on writing as a day-to-day practice in the language of exile, in English. I will exile myself further in my exile, I’ve promised myself. I will not write at all in Arabic till I have a body of work that I can claim as my own. This is the exophonic experiment, one of self-translation, if you will, which gave shape to my first book of poems, Bitter English.

I certainly do not wish to give the impression that I’m living some assimilationist version of the American dream: “I am well and happy ... I deserted my language and got the reward.” It does not work that way. The essential problem of the “mother tongue” continues to haunt your existence as a newcomer; your degrees, your bank statements, your certificate of naturalization, and the many documents you’ve been collecting to make up for the loss of your original home do not account for your language. It is the essential matter that gave you your voice in the first place—and the persisting problem for you, for your psyche, to be exact, is that, as George Steiner puts it, “everything forgets, but not a language.”

2

Leaving behind my engineering studies in New York, I first had to make a long detour through a PhD in Arabic literature en route to my ongoing experiment in exophony. As I studied for that PhD in dreary Indiana, my intent was still to become a poet in my own tongue—and I wrote in Arabic constantly. I thought learning everything I could about Arabic poetry would help me to become the poet I wanted to be in my native language. But another harsh realization set in as I wrote Arabic poems in Indiana; my Arabic was no longer “my Arabic.” Since I’d come to the US, my distance from my context, my home, had rendered my language and those Arabic poems of mine into a mere exercise in textuality. They gave no hint of translating experience into art; it was all nostalgia shaped into metered and measured free verse. I was simply obsessed with recreating the old sounds! Thus, I settled for becoming an academic, and I landed a tenure-track position teaching Arabic at Middlebury College.

But something of that new arrangement did not fit with me, either. Vermont was no place to write Arabic verse. The experience of teaching my native language as something foreign to others was devastating to my art. Maybe it was the reduction of my mother tongue to the abstract phonetic sounds of language instruction that are foreign even to me. It was the epitome of alienation from one’s own dear tongue. I asked myself, as I often do: “Am I destined to teach my own language to Americans so they can butcher my first sounds?” There was no real expressiveness in such a constructed context, not for me at least; it was a language constantly tailored for practical communications, without any poetic dimensions. Moreover, the repetitiveness of drilling verbs and vocabulary lists was soul grinding; and so was putting yourself and your culture on display all the time, whether you wanted or not, because you represented that part of the world to those students, to the institution at large, and to the entire community. Often, conversations with neighbors I met in a shop would turn into: You’re from the Middle East ... so what do you think about the latest news from Egypt ... or some other place in the Arab World?

After putting up with Middlebury for almost five years, I quit my tenure-track teaching position there in 2015 and moved, yet again, to a more cosmopolitan environment—to Philadelphia this time—hoping it might be the place for me after all this wandering. In financial and professional terms, this was a huge step down. But for the first time in my life, I felt that I had given up something to be closer to what I wanted to be: a poet. In Philadelphia, living in an apartment building full of “young professionals” who constantly asked, “what do you do?” I’d say, “I came here to write,” which was enough for them to give me that look: “You’re nuts!” Yes, particularly pistachio! I would say to myself, while steering the conversation somewhere else.

3

I wish I could say that sharing my love for Arabic poetry is what prompted me to join the community organization Al-Bustan Seeds of Culture in Philadelphia after quitting New York, Indiana, and Vermont in my haphazard pursuit of poetry. To be honest, I was without a job at that point and merely working with what came along. The founder of this nonprofit, and its director at the time, Hazami Sayed, invited me, out of the blue, to the basement of her house where the organization was based; there she offered me tea and the position of “Project Manager” for a new initiative to promote and teach Andalusian Arabic poetry. This involved selecting and translating classical Arabic poems from the time of the Arabs in Spain—what might be referred to as Islamic Spain or Andalusia. The selection of poems from al-Andalus would be put to music in the tradition of that period, only now with a contemporary musical composition commissioned by Al-Bustan. We would teach the poems to the immigrant Arab community at large. We set up readings, small concerts, workshops, and lectures, leading to a final event presenting a selection of poems set to the new music and sung by a choir and soloist. Frankly, I believe that my lack of any management skills forced me to end up doing most of the work myself. After all, I was an expert on the subject, with a PhD from an American institution which I’d obtained to announce to the world my mastery of classical Arabic poetry. But all along, I really only wanted to write poems.

4

Joining the Arab diaspora in Philadelphia, working with Al-Bustan after a series of self-imposed exiles, it seemed like things had just begun. But it felt as if I and my fellow Arab immigrants, many of them artists, were merely stumbling upon ourselves, or maybe on what remains of those selves far from home. The sounds that have no place on the set of our American lives, how could we make room for them in our lives here, together? Wasn’t this rather like what I’d been doing in Indiana, writing all that metered Arabic verse to recreate something of our past, far from home? Why did we feel this call to return to the Arabic poetry and music of Andalusia of all places? Will al-Andalus always be the emblem of our lost abode, al-dar, al-manzil to use those words repeated over and over in Arabic poetry? Is this why al-Mutanabbi, as I translate him now, once said:

                       For those places have places in the heart
                                       They are lost, abandoned ruins now—
                                       But their places in the heart remain alive,
                                                        Inhabited, and full.

5

I’d come to Philadelphia to become a poet in English—to exile myself from all beginnings. But I found myself beginning again, this time in an empty church with a group of other lost Arab artists. Among them was a Moroccan with a hand disability who played the traditional string instrument called the qanun, which like a harp requires the use of every finger on both hands. There was also a Syrian who embraced the cello but couldn’t speak English or Arabic without dissolving into shyness. Another Syrian on the drum, or derbakkeh, who lost all his teeth to heavy smoking when he came to the US, liked to recall his triumphs over cigarettes and bare his new teeth whenever we all stepped outside for a smoke. And finally, a Palestinian who (unlike myself) wouldn’t say the word “Palestine” out of fear that someone might hear us, served as the violinist and head of the band. They were all accomplished musicians, but we still needed a lute or oud player for the ensemble to be complete.

We were about to embark on a revival of Andalusian poetry, and especially the Muwashshah form, which marked a significant leap from the main form of Arabic poetry, the qasida. I was supposed to act as the literary expert and “Project Manager.” I started by naming the project “Words Adorned,” and while everyone seemed to like it, I thought to myself: this is what poets share with the gods, I suppose, the fallacies of naming.

Giving our project an English title, I couldn’t help but feel that we didn’t share a language, as much as we shared its loss. This put in motion certain theatrics where we all tried to shape a new image of who we wanted to be in this land, even as we sought to retain something of that old self we’d left behind. Try as we may, we couldn’t revive our past selves because we had forgotten who we were. Only language remembers. So when my daughter came along with me to our sessions, my collaborators would talk to her in English, knowing that she was born in the US—but when they turned to me, they spoke in a formal Arabic dialect that we could all understand. “She can speak Arabic!” I insisted.

6

This is what we share, and this is what separates us. We simply don’t know how to belong anymore. Our Arabic is not one. Our tongues are split; in sheer numbers, the experts who like to count say that there are at least thirty-two varieties of Arabic spoken in the world today. I don’t know, there’s probably more! When I was a child in Palestine, traveling from Bethlehem to my father’s village in the south, I heard so many varieties of the Palestinian dialect—I loved going along with my father on this trip—and yet I understood almost nothing of what people were saying to me on the way. And now I was supposed to teach immigrants from all over the “Arab world” the correct pronunciation of old sounds? I began by talking about meter and rhythm in classical Arabic. I wanted them to pronounce the sounds correctly. “What am doing here?” I was full of doubt. “I left everything in Middlebury so I’d teach language again, but this time Arabic to the Arabs?”

7

Out of nowhere, I began to sing the meter of a particular poem, just as my father taught me. Nothing I’d done to teach them about Arabic poems had succeeded so far. So I sang, like my mother often did. I created sound. It was the sound of the classical form I learned as a child. Nothing I wrote outside of it in my early attempts at verse ever qualified as poetry to my father: “It has to follow the classical sounds, like this.” He sang a meter here, taught me another there. It was the first and only time we understood each other. So I sang to my fellow Arabs in Philadelphia as though I would always be that boy I once was, reciting verses on a stage. They started to smirk and wink at each other: yes, beginnings are the source of all humiliations.

I sang, and my voice began to gain some tonal notes in this impromptu rendition of the poem. It is one I used to sing and sing, often to myself when I started off in this country. I’d find an empty chapel in Manhattan, and would sing aloud to myself, filling the structure with those old sounds; back then I could only hear those sounds as an echo of my own voice. Now we were all in this together, maybe.

I finished the parts I knew of that Muwashshah. The leader of the band, a musical genius on his violin who seemed to me to have difficulty ordering his thoughts without it, said at last: “Why don’t  you sing? We can work with that. I’ll join with my violin. Let’s try it.”

8

A few weeks later, I was scheduled to give a reading and lecture on Andalusian verse as a prelude to the final performance of  “Words Adorned.” But our irrepressible band leader had his own ideas for the event. “Sing,” he insisted. “We’ll accompany you.” After a hasty last-minute rehearsal the night before the show, I began to feel that repeating my intimate and spontaneous performance of our earlier Arabic lesson as a public event was a very bad idea! Afterwards, I walked off the stage, having performed and “celebrated” an art to which I don’t belong, feeling emptied. It wasn’t a physical exhaustion. When I’d sang to myself earlier in an empty church in Manhattan, I felt empowered by those old sounds. But when I sang them onstage to a room full of people, making a show of those intimate practices, I seemed to have lost something—like so many other things from my first home.

Was it out of pure laziness that I, the “Project Manager” of “Words Adorned,” ended up singing in public instead of hiring someone else to do it? Was I pushed to do it? Or was I tempted to be part of the show, on stage, for the audience’s applause? It’s hard to tell now. But the first words that came out of my mouth when I was alone again with my partner, Huda, and my daughter, Samaa, was, “I’ll never do such a thing ever again.” I came to Philadelphia not to sing, but to write poems, even if they must be in a bitter English that I must own. “I owe it to my mother tongue to speak,” I said to Samaa and Huda. And many months later I discovered why I’d said those words when I wrote in a poem: “because this English tongue owes me/a language.”

9

Organizations such as Al-Bustan make it possible for immigrant artists to rehearse and perform against the backdrop of their fading backgrounds. Yet all too often, othered artists are asked to perform their otherness on the stage of a receiving culture, and art becomes a political pantomime of received stereotypes. The immigrant artist will always risk this kind of erasure because they are invited to play the stereotype. To counter this, poetically and politically, I, as an immigrant poet, have to remind myself constantly that there is no such thing as the English language, just as there is no such thing as the Arabic language, or any other language with an incontrovertible set of rules that can govern the poetic act. There is only the tongue that can produce sounds and acquire its own taste of the fact. And while some are made for the stage, others are made for the page—I now sing only to myself, and to my loved ones. Whatever your art is, it can only be made by, or translated from, a language that you alone can create. This is the exophonic experience—at its core is the fact of translation in all its forms; at its core is the realization that poetry plays part in the self-translation that can sometimes move art to action.