Experimenta Arabica
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:...."
Forbidden ones, ridiculous ones, absurd ones and banal too.
-A sore one I must add.
It is the lingua Arabica, al-ʿarabīyah, ʿarabi, the tongue of the natives, the dark-skinned natives, the language of crisis and the language in crisis.
What a difficult "thing" to write about.
And what a formidable task that stares me back in the face, fearsome and Semitic, majestic and foreboding, marking diacritics, uttering guttural phonemes.
How could a language of such status be subjected to crude sociological and historical manipulation?
How could a native tongue become a personal taboo?
Personal? I would say collective taboo.
And I think the word 'taboo' could not be more fitting, something prohibited, and sacred all at the same time.
Arabic became a taboo.
And while everyone takes pride in not being able to converse properly in Arabic, or to even deny any degree of fluency in the language at all, I am amazed by such degrees of internalized self-hate.
It became a status symbol and an indication of sociological class to abandon any relation to Arabic, not as a language per se, but its legacy, history and culture.
And it remains to be disputed and contested what kind of legacy it is, and observers and analysts are spilt in equal groups, but the richness of the heritage and the legacy is acknowledged by anyone who came close to knowing it.
Not to mention native speakers of the language.
And while bilingualism is a trait to be admired, the cacophony of sounds that rise in union denigrating Arabic is alarming and upsetting.
A language is a people's memory, history, past, dreams, desires, a weltanschauung, all that is chucked in the trash in the aftermath of a post-colonial trauma.
And a whole series of binary associations were constructed, native/backward, Arabic/ignorance, monolingualism/low-class, Bilingualism/prestige,.....etc
It became so internalized, that even desires were expressed in a non-native language.
We -I included- were unable to express our fundamental desires in Arabic.
Every dim-witted, half-educated queen who thinks she can write (you know who are you little shit), showers us with mental refuse and a series of semantic failures, calling it "a blog".
And every homo in Cairo, who was lucky enough to get access to Mansham or Gaydar, writes a little reportage filled with orthographic disasters and syntax nightmares, insisting that that is "English", and flatly refusing the suggestion that Arabic is in fact a better modus operandi.
Ever the one to subvert and upset, in the physical of sense up-set, I decided to conduct a little experiment, the Experimenta Arabica.
I will flaunt my bilingualism unabashedly over all of them gay websites and see how will the vicious queens react! lol
Will they become queasy at the sight of the Arabic script? Choosing not to acknowledge it and move on?
Oblivious of how significant is this silence/absence?
The silence which has become the only thought in Arabic.
"To talk of many things:...."
Forbidden ones, ridiculous ones, absurd ones and banal too.
-A sore one I must add.
It is the lingua Arabica, al-ʿarabīyah, ʿarabi, the tongue of the natives, the dark-skinned natives, the language of crisis and the language in crisis.
What a difficult "thing" to write about.
And what a formidable task that stares me back in the face, fearsome and Semitic, majestic and foreboding, marking diacritics, uttering guttural phonemes.
How could a language of such status be subjected to crude sociological and historical manipulation?
How could a native tongue become a personal taboo?
Personal? I would say collective taboo.
And I think the word 'taboo' could not be more fitting, something prohibited, and sacred all at the same time.
Arabic became a taboo.
And while everyone takes pride in not being able to converse properly in Arabic, or to even deny any degree of fluency in the language at all, I am amazed by such degrees of internalized self-hate.
It became a status symbol and an indication of sociological class to abandon any relation to Arabic, not as a language per se, but its legacy, history and culture.
And it remains to be disputed and contested what kind of legacy it is, and observers and analysts are spilt in equal groups, but the richness of the heritage and the legacy is acknowledged by anyone who came close to knowing it.
Not to mention native speakers of the language.
And while bilingualism is a trait to be admired, the cacophony of sounds that rise in union denigrating Arabic is alarming and upsetting.
A language is a people's memory, history, past, dreams, desires, a weltanschauung, all that is chucked in the trash in the aftermath of a post-colonial trauma.
And a whole series of binary associations were constructed, native/backward, Arabic/ignorance, monolingualism/low-class, Bilingualism/prestige,.....etc
It became so internalized, that even desires were expressed in a non-native language.
We -I included- were unable to express our fundamental desires in Arabic.
Every dim-witted, half-educated queen who thinks she can write (you know who are you little shit), showers us with mental refuse and a series of semantic failures, calling it "a blog".
And every homo in Cairo, who was lucky enough to get access to Mansham or Gaydar, writes a little reportage filled with orthographic disasters and syntax nightmares, insisting that that is "English", and flatly refusing the suggestion that Arabic is in fact a better modus operandi.
Ever the one to subvert and upset, in the physical of sense up-set, I decided to conduct a little experiment, the Experimenta Arabica.
I will flaunt my bilingualism unabashedly over all of them gay websites and see how will the vicious queens react! lol
Will they become queasy at the sight of the Arabic script? Choosing not to acknowledge it and move on?
Oblivious of how significant is this silence/absence?
The silence which has become the only thought in Arabic.
Comments
i spent sometime in the Gulf, where Arabic is more commonly used on "mansham" than here in Egypt, i would have not screened some Arabic texts and would have went one or two not even a handful of who sent me in Arabic
now that i am back in Egypt,
Yes my screen method does include the Arabic language, but it also includes, horrid English Grammar, French messages, and here is a funny one that i have been called superficial on, it includs underwear too if its Cotonil, i dont respond... i know its superficial but at least i have the guts to admit,
While being on the topic of language which is an interesting one to me is movies... i use to be an airheaded guy that use to refuse to go to arabic movies (not i am no longer not an airhead) ... and well some friends took me to two arabic movies, and well i actually enjoyed it... i also started listen to arabic music this summer (does amr diab count)
anyway i liked this blog obviously with an exception of one little part you know being LOVE.PEACE.UNITY but lets not get into that :) good post
I do take pride in being able to speak read and write Arabic, but I have no intimation to it as a native tongue. The sad thing is, we have been colonised since 500 BC and we have to call something our own (the Copts actually can) so at some point there was a consensus that this was it.
It is funny when people associate their inability to speak arabic with class, but if you take the above into consideration, it just means they're preferring one colonial culture over another.
Good for you!
My concern was the desperate attempt everyone does in being something that they are not.
The Western, white master, that is.
As for M, darling, you always push the envelope a little notch, huh?
I would have to flatly disagree with you.
While I can not tell for sure what my ancestors spoke 1000 years ago, I can tell you in confidence that for the past 10 generations the language they spoke was Arabic.
I am not concerned with mythical past, and the illusion of authenticity.
The "Arabs" colonized what is now modern day Persia and whole chunks of Africa, and they both do not speak Arabic.
Or want to.
Its not a matter of replacing one colonial culture with the other.
Its a matter if the people chose to assimiliate this culutre or not.
While what happend to the Copts during the Arab conquests of Egypt remains to be a historical black box, no one really knows how the shift finally happened, but we know by the 11th C massive migration from the Hijaz forever changed the demographic make up of what is now southern Egypt, and the Magherb countries.
In the case of European colonizers this was not the case,
the elite in Egypt for example, remained staunchly Francophone, despite the British being the primary colonizers.
The French historically colonized Egypt for two years, that in itself can not explain why the lingua franca back remained French.
The argument of successive waves of colonizers is only valid inasmuch that the colonizers themselves adopted the culture of the colonized, I think that would be the case of Egypt.
The Arabs were no different.
And while I have no intention of learning Latin or Berber (for the sake of learning and curiosity maybe, but not for the sake of a "mythical authenticity") , I know for fact that as far as recent memory goes Arabic featured there prominently.
And still remains so.
You are all fake
how come you are all Arabs
Egyptians though
judging each others
yet all your posts, comments, even your conversations with each others
not to mention your childish attitudes
IN ENGLISH
and you all still wondering
You actually made me laugh!
Thank you (in a very sardonic, affected kind of way)!
www.manjam.com/ahlawi