Asynchronous Love in Broken Arabic

unfinished letter #7

My mother and I send each other voice notes
crossing oceans and time zones
messages sent in the early morning in the west
and received late at night
in the east.

I know we haven’t talked in days,
I might say

I just wanted to tell you
I’m thinking of you,
I just want you to hear my voice
to think of you
listening to my voice.

The messages are a blend of English and Arabic — my English and her Arabic most of the time, but not always.

Sometimes, my Arabic makes its way in.

I say Arabic things I know how to say properly. Prayers. Comments on the weather. Updates about the kids.

Other times, I try to get poetic.

I tell her, inti 3ala alby. Inti fi baaly. You’re on my heart. In my mind.

Flipping the prepositions in a game of reverse grammar psychology. I don’t trust my Arabic, so whatever sounds wrong is probably right, right?

This is the source of my mistake above. I thought in English. I started in the first person, with myself.

Mama replies a few hours later. After her updates on the heat, on her sleeping patterns and fasting routine, on my sister and my nieces and nephews, she gently corrects my Arabic.

So you know for next time, habibty. It’s fi alby and 3ala baaly.

I write it down, knowing I will never commit it to memory.

How much affection have we traded in broken grammar? Does it lessen the value of the words? Or maybe it elevates it, that effort in spite of the discomfort. The attempts to tell her, in her native tongue, just what she means to me.

My Arabic words, when they try to come out into the world - Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

My memory is filled with a litany of traumatic language faux pas.

There is the time, at 12, I stood in front of my entire extended family in my grandparents’ house in Alexandria and said, “ya koll had” when everyone who knows their Arabic knows it’s “ya kollokom.”

There is the time, at 23, I left a voicemail for the seamstress who was making the bolero I would wear over my dress at my sister’s wedding. Arab etiquette dictates that, in any business transaction, you frontload your messages with layers of superlatives.

We are obsessed with niceties. Why say thank you once when you can say it a hundred times in a thousand ways? Nervous as I was, I switched the subject and the object on one of those phrases.

I said, “Ta’abtoona ma’akum” when I should have said “ta’abnako ma’ana”. Effectively, I told her, “You’ve caused me so much trouble” when I meant to say, “sorry for the trouble”.

Arabic has a class of verbs, like French, that invert their subjects and objects. To say, I miss you in Arabic or French, you don’t say I miss you.

You say, Tu me manque. Wahashteeny.

You are lacking from me.

The focus is on the object. And the lacking. The focus is on the one being missed.

This is the source of my mistake above, when I insulted the poor seamstress. I thought in English. I started in the first person, with myself.

My mother must have a litany of English mistakes, but she doesn’t dwell on them. I want to be eloquent. She wants to be understood.

And so she has spoken in her second language to full lecture halls, government officials, principals, teachers, tv stations. Classes full of snarky 6th graders. To my mother, there is no ego in this equation. The message is more important than the medium.

I think about the difficulties of conveying your heart in another language as I watch my children struggle to express themselves in the tongue of their ancestors. The inverted sentence structures. The sounds that come from different areas of the throat. There is the 7a and the kha and the gha and the qa and 3a. There is the soft t and the thick t, the soft d and the thick d, the soft s and the thick s, and on and on.

I take my overwhelm and multiply it by orders of magnitude. I wonder if they hear the beauty in the simple Arabic poems my father used to recite. In the folk songs that lose so much in translation. In the verses of our holy book. I wonder about the loss of nuance. About the translation of both 7ub and wud as love, when there is more. Always more.

My children are polite. They sit before me, eyes glazing over but bodies still, when I launch into impromptu explanations of Arabic linguistics. Did my mother feel this way about me, too?

Let’s chat in the comments:

1. Do you struggle to communicate with a loved one? Is the communication a linguistic issue, or is it due to something else? Age? Culture?

2. How do you think language affects the way we think? And do you think language is changed by place? For example, is Arabic in Canada different than Arabic in Egypt?