Bil 3arabi

I am reading Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake these days. I fell in love with this book from the first page- a pregnant Aashima struggling to adjust to her new foreign world. Ashoke's uncompromising elegant suits and polished shoes. And their son, Gogol, stuck with a name he despises. He tries to strip himself off it, stuck in between Bengaliness and Americanness- speaking this and that, forever conflicted with this identity crisis.

We had a rule at home when we were kids. No English at home. English is for school, only. At home, we speak Arabic. That is your language. A non-negotiable rule. Once a trip to the theme park that we'd been planning for days got cancelled. This is so fun! somebody had said. The No-English rule was like a soapy hand trying to grab on to our threatened Arab identity. It managed to hold on sometimes. But other times, it slipped. Uninvited English words made their way into our carefully constructed Arabic sentences. They invaded our thoughts, visited our dreams. They were the first to arrive when I put a pencil to a paper, the first to come in mind when I opened my mouth to speak.

At gatherings, my uncle tells us of the family history we never witnessed. Of my grandfather and his generation, and the lives they led, an ocean away from the kind I do. On their daily conversations strewn with couplets of poetry invented on the spot. On the recital contests between them that entertained them on lazy afternoons. On the letters they wrote each other- eloquent letters in complex Arabic, ones I'd need a Google translator to decode. On the odes written for the important marriages and births in the family. Personalized ones, with symbolic use of the names in question. They're called a taareekh because in the last couplet, the numbers corresponding to each alphabet that appears add up to the date of that event in the Islamic Calendar.

On my last trip to Baghdad, we stayed over my great-aunt's house- a home that housed the scholar of her husband. I was brushing my teeth at the sink when I noticed a part of the wall by the corridor protruding. It's a library, they said. We slid the wall and the smell of old books whipped me. Books filled shelves from floor to ceiling on all four sides and in the middle as well. I didn't go to sleep pleased with this sight but disturbed, because a thought kept nagging me: You'll never be able to read and appreciate the books that make up your family's libraries.

Maybe the No-English rule couldn't stop English becoming our first language, but I am grateful it existed. I may stumble upon some Arabic words, use them in the wrong places, but at least I speak it at home, talk to my parents in the language they gave me, recognize it as mine. I may not fully comprehend the works of Al-Mutannabi, but at least I can read them, grasp its feel, appreciate the beauty of its rhythm. Maybe I whizz through dozens of English novels, and snail-pace through a Naguib Mahfouz once a year, but at least I try to stay loyal to my language.

A couple of days ago, I was out for lunch with a friend. The waiter brought an English menu for her, an Arabic one for me. English menu too, please, I say. You'll pick quicker in English, Ghadeer. You know how awful it is trying to decipher transliterated dish names, I justify in my head. But as I look through the English menu, I can't help picturing this. My ancestors looking in at this scene. Being told, 'That's your daughter, there, pushing away the Arabic menu, looking through a foreign one and blabbering away in English.' It saddens me, that I am more comfortable in a tongue that's not mine.