Arabic Archives - KS Mitchell

Words Unspoken

I spotted them on my second lap around the park on a recent spring-like afternoon. A group of women in headscarves is somewhat of an unusual occurrence, though we live close to the University of Arkansas, which has its own share of international students and professors.

I caught the lilt of Arabic as I pushed the jogging stroller ahead of me. Once you’ve learned something of the language, there’s no mistaking it.

Where were they from? Had the executive order on immigrants affected them? Were they worried about their families, their futures, and how those around them now looked at them? Or were these thoughts far from their minds as they enjoyed the sunshine on this beautiful day?

These thoughts flitted through my mind as I continued my jog. When I finished, I took my daughter to the baby swings. I pushed and talked to her and watched the table of women in scarves who sat just in my line of sight. Should I approach them? I had only spoken Arabic a handful of times since I left Yemen ten years ago. I knew it would be a rough go.

After a few minutes, the small girl with them ran to the swings, followed by one of the women. She lifted the girl into the swing and started pushing. I summoned my courage.

“Men fein anti?” Where are you from?

She looked at me with some surprise and perhaps a little caution. “Iraq,” she answered, pronouncing the name not with the harsh American K sound, but with the Arabic qah, the one that lands deep in the throat and lends a certain pop to its words.

“Do you speak Arabic?” she asked.

“A little,” I admitted. She asked where I was from.

“Here,” I answered. Then I explained how I’d lived in Yemen three years, how I taught English there and learned Arabic, and that I hadn’t spoken it much since then. I struggled through the conversation, the words slow in coming. She shook her head a couple of times as she tried to understand. I repeated and tried to understand her accent, so different from the Yemeni ones I’d grown accustomed to.

“Sorry,” I apologized in English. “It’s been so long since I spoke Arabic.”

She shook her head. “La atakelum ingleezi.” She didn’t speak English. We pushed silently for a moment and I thought of all the things I wanted to say to this woman and couldn’t.

‘I’m sorry for the ban on immigration. I don’ t know if it affects you, but I’m sure it affects someone you know and possibly love.’

‘We don’t all agree on this immigration ban. I don’t want you to judge me by the country I was born in, and I won’t do the same to you.’

‘You’re welcome here. You’re welcome to be in this park with me, swinging your child while I swing mine. I want an America where we can do this.’

These are the words I want to say, but the language barrier is too great, the distance between two strangers too difficult.

It’s time to go. I lift my daughter out of the swing. The woman smiles at me.

“Ahlan wasahlan,” she says.

It means welcome, but it carries with it the centuries of hospitality Arabs are famous for when they welcome others into their homes, their lives, their countries. It’s the perfect phrase, and she found it. I nod and repeat the phrase back.

“Ahlan wasahlan.”

You are welcome here.

I leave the park filled with sunshine and children playing and this woman pushing her young daughter on a swing.

I leave the rest of the words unspoken between us.

Tales of Yemen: The Wedding

Dressing for a wedding in Yemen is like readying for the prom. The dresses are flashy, beaded, sparkly and low cut. It doesn’t matter that no men will be in the room at a typical wedding celebration. These ladies dress to impress.

My roommate invited me to tag along to a wedding after I’d been in the country a few weeks. We caught a dibab (van bus) downtown and walked through the dress shops, sweating through our clothes and baltos. Baltos are black coverings, sometimes called abayas, worn by women in Yemen. I wore a balto early in my stay, eventually disregarding it in favor of pants and long sleeved, modest shirts.

In a crowded, downtown shop, I found a purple dress a little gaudy for prom, but my roommate assured me it was perfect for a Yemeni wedding. I paid less than $20 for it, a steal if we’d been dress shopping in the U.S.

The night of the wedding, we threw on our party clothes, pinned up hair, buttoned baltos over our dresses and headed to the rented hall for the wedding. It was already dark when we arrived. Since Aden is closer to the equator, and Yemen doesn’t follow a Daylight Savings Time calendar, sunrise and sunset were roughly the same all year, with sunset occurring between 5:30 and 6:30 every night.

Music throbbed through the thin walls of the hall. We entered into semi-darkness and several women greeted us with kisses to both cheeks, the traditional greeting. They encouraged us to take off our baltos and oohed and ahhed over our dresses. When we walked into the open room, the strong scent of incense nearly overpowered me and the music thrummed so loudly I had to shout to my roommate to be heard. We found a few seats near a back wall and sat down to take everything in.

The bride sat at the front of the wedding hall on a throne like chair, her dress glowing from the spotlight over her head. Her dark hair was coiled into a perfect updo and her eyes were deeply accentuated by thick, black eyeliner. I’d already noticed Yemeni women had a tendency to slather on mascara and eyeshadow. When only your eyes are visible to society, you make the most of it. Tonight, though, the groom would see her for the first time in her wedding gown, without a headscarf and balto. Like any bride, she wanted to look perfect.

Many women danced in small groups. It was an odd feeling watching only women dance together, but in high school there were certainly times when groups of girls would dance together when the boys weren’t courageous enough to ask anyone to dance. We were asked to dance several times, but I declined. We were already attracting attention as foreigners. I didn’t want to overshadow the bride in any way. Some of the dancing was what you might see at any club, but most of it contained the more traditional, sinuous belly-dancing moves that even the little girls reproduced with ease. That definitely kept me in my chair. Next to these gals, I’d look like a clunky robot.

I noticed a small contingent of women slowly visiting those seated on the outer edges of the room. I wasn’t sure what was happening until they reached us. I didn’t speak more than a few words of Arabic at this point, so I only understood the greeting, not the words that followed.

“They want to know if you’d like perfume?” my roommate translated.

“Sure,” I agreed. The first lady held a small vial of oil. She dabbed it on my wrists and behind my ears. I could tell it was some sort of incense. I later learned Yemen is where frankincense is harvested and for years it was carried to market on the backs of camels on the Incense Trail.

The next woman held a small burner. Pungent smoke flowed out of it. More incense. She waved her hand through the smoke, wafting it towards me. I blinked, my eyes watering from the smoke and intense smell.

“Is this normal?” I asked my roommate, trying not to cough. She laughed. “They love incense here.”

I tried to embrace the moment, but I was glad when the woman moved away, taking the smoky perfume with her.

The last woman held an exquisite silver pitcher, the kind you imagine might be used to serve tea to a sheikh or a king. She spoke a word I didn’t understand, so I shrugged and smiled. She took my non-committal gesture as acquiescence and tipped the pitcher forward, spilling perfume down the inside of my dress, soaking the purple material with its overpowering scent. I gasped and stepped back.

“Helwa?” the woman asked. “Beautiful?”

“Helwa,” I choked out, still stunned. My roommate started laughing. She declined the pitcher of perfume and the women moved on.

“Was that normal?” I asked, dabbing at the damp perfume with a napkin.

She shook her head. “I’ve never seen that in my life.”

We fell into a fit of laughter. My eyes stung and I could barely breathe through my own cloud of oiled, smoked and drenched body and dress.

Suddenly there was a flurry of movement. Black baltos flew into the air like ravens scattering in a field. They eclipsed the bright colors, exposed skin, the perfect coiffures, until nothing could be seen but dark eyes, bright with anticipation. A woman brought my balto to me and gestured for me to put it on.

“What’s happening?” I whispered to my roommate.

“The groom is coming,” she whispered back. As she spoke, a young man appeared through the entryway dressed in a sharp suit, hair and mustache oiled. He peered through the sea of black, looking extremely nervous. His bride waited on the throne, her white dress the only color visible. He took his place on the empty chair next to her and shyly took her hand.

I tried to imagine what this wedding looked like through his eyes, the heady scent of perfume, the hundreds of women all in black save his bride, who looked straight off the cover of a magazine. No wonder he looked stunned.

“Let’s go,” my roommate whispered. I agreed. My first Yemeni wedding had been thoroughly eventful. We headed home, carrying the scent of the wedding with us. Even after I showered, the scent clung to my skin for days.

These memories of Yemen still cling to me, too. I remember the words of the woman holding the silver pitcher after she drenched me with perfume. “Helwa?” she asked me. “Is it beautiful?”

My time in Yemen was at times overpowering, mysterious, overwhelming – a mix of emotions and experiences poured over me when I wasn’t quite ready for it. Still, I accepted it as the gift it was.

It was helwa, indeed.

The Puzzle of Language Learning

I’m not a jigsaw puzzler. Growing up, my grandmother, mother and twin sister would gather around a puzzle and work in silent camaraderie as they slowly built a complete picture out of what used to be a jumble of separate pieces.

I couldn’t sit still for these sessions. “One piece,” my mother would sometimes suggest. “Just look for one.” She meant to be helpful, but the idea seemed too daunting. How much time would I spend trying to fit this one piece into the puzzle when I could be doing so many other interesting things? Running and playing outside, reading a book, even playing a game seemed far more exciting.

My taste for jigsaw puzzles hasn’t changed, but I have discovered my own version of that silent art; language learning is my jigsaw puzzle.

My online Cherokee lessons began this week. Cherokee is the fourth language I’ve actively studied as an adult. It’s a challenging one with its own syllabary, where symbols represent syllables and letters can look like English, Greek and Hebrew, yet they are completely unrelated to these letters.

This week our instructor posed the question, “Gadohv uyelidi tsaligi tsidehadeloqua?”

“Why do you want to learn Cherokee?”

That’s a good question? Why do we study any language? Of course, the first answer is to communicate. But that’s not often the motivation behind language study. Just think how many people take French in high school. If you’re choosing a language based on the probability that you’ll use it to communicate, French is one of the least likely candidates these days. (However, if you do speak French, you’ll be treated far better than most tourists when you visit France. If you’ve made the effort to learn it, bon voyage!)

So language learning takes on a deeper meaning beyond communication. There is the desire to understand a culture within their own language, to converse with people on their terms, to read great literature in the original language with all of the nuances, rhythm and poetry it portrays, and finally, to connect somehow to people who might seem completely different me on the surface.

You’ve probably heard the expression language opens up new worlds. Of course it does, and not just through communication. My studies in Spanish led to trips in Mexico, Latin America and Peru but also created deep friendships and a firm sense of independence in me. In France, I experienced the gratitude and hospitality only bestowed on those attempting to speak French instead of presuming upon the locals to speak English. The challenge of learning Arabic, with its different alphabet, reading “backwards” from right to left, and layers of grammar, required a new level of commitment and focus. My latest attempt, Cherokee, is motivated more through my desire to connect with family history.

Jigsaw puzzlers work the puzzle for that sense of achievement when they fit the last piece together to create the whole. I learn languages for the accomplishment I feel when grasping and remembering the right word, when I’m able to communicate an idea in a language not my own, for the smile and light in the eyes of the speaker when they realize I’m speaking their language.

My language studies may not result in a whole understanding of a language or a people, but it does build a framework that I can return to, adding a piece here and there, until the picture looks at least a bit like the cover on the box.

Puzzle Image courtesy of jannoon028 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net