Yesterday I woke up in Yemen

Words in Arabic can be crazy.  In Standard Arabic, some mean dozens of things, depending on the emotion of a sentence and the words that come before and after.  And these meanings can shift dramatically when spoken by a person in his dialect.

Learning the spelling and usage of a word, and how it morphs, say, depending on its position in a sentence, the time, the gender, the case, the definiteness, and the like, are only half the battle.  There is a web of meaning that buttresses a word, and you need to figure out which intersection of the web vibrates at the given instance.  It’s beautiful and fluid, but ridiculously complicated.  I’m never sure what exactly they’re trying to say.

This dilemma is not unique to Arabic, but I’d argue more prevalent than in English.  “The car that is running in the drive is mine.” — Which car?  The one that is running.  Running to where?  No, the one that is turned on.  Is it excited and ready for action?  No, it’s gears are turning.  Is it deep in thought?  No, it’s right on top of the driveway.  Why do people drive on parkways and park on driveways? — Anything taken literally gets you confused, and words function beyond what’s given in the dictionary.

I feel a more precise language, say with English versus Arabic in terms of the variety of meaning for a given word, puts your thoughts into neat, tightly packaged little boxes.  But I question whether or not this is a good thing.  The way we think, how we feel, our ideas, our emotions, hopes, and dreams swirl around, interconnected in a large pool of our brains.  Whenever we verbalize anything, we scoop up little cups from the larger mass, pulling pieces of the whole and sticking them into little words.  Can you really describe how you love somebody? These words are a distillation of something beyond what’s spoken.  We utter some words, and they float through the air until another brain receives them, and they are reprocessed and compared to one’s past experiences with language, and a meaning is derived.  I think we take for granted the consensus that is required for this miraculous process to occur, that we have some sort of shared experience that allows us to transmit meaning from one to another.  I’m also pretty sure that in this processing, transmission, and reprocessing, meaning is lost or changed or in discord.  I wonder how often we’re truly “understood” by others.  So while I’m frustrated in learning ten meanings for a given word in Arabic, I respect that this language is not “precise”.  It’s probably more reflective of the nature of our verbal capabilities.  It’s probably nearly impossible to fully master, but maybe having so many different ways to say something allows Arabic speakers to understand and be understood better.

One word in Arabic I really like is, غربة or roughly “ghurbah”.  Most every word in Arabic is derived from a three letter root.  Words are built by adding letters and vowels to the root, according to many patterns.  Some of the definitions for this one word are, “absence from the homeland; life or place away from home.”  I find to better understand a word, it can be helpful to look at the root and the other words formed from it.  The root غرب (gharaba) means “he went away, departed, is absent of something, is a stranger, is strange, odd, obscure.”  غرّب (gharrab) means more of the same, but also “to go westward, banish, exile, expatriate” with وشرق (wa-sharraqa) means “to get around the world, to see the world”.  اغرب (ah-gharaba) means “to say or do a strange or amazing thing; to exceed the proper bounds in, to overdo, to exaggerate something, to laugh heartily.”  تغرّب (tagharraba) means, “to go to a foreign country, emigrate, to be far away, become Westernized, be Europeanized, to assimilate.”  These are some of the verbs.  The nouns are great, too.  غرب (gharb) means, “West; occident; vehemence, violence, impetuosity,” where the definite, ال-غرب, means, “the West.”  You can head westerly, or something can be westerly, or of the West, from ‘not here’.  The word  غرباء و غريب (ghareeb, plural ghurba’a”) means, “foreign, strange, alien, extraneous,” or with the right preposition after it, “strange, queer, quaint, unusual, extraordinary, curious, remarkable peculiar; amazing, baffling, wondrous, marvelous, grotesque, difficult to understand, remote, rare.”  This is probably way more than you wanted to read, but I’m getting geeked up about this language, and I want to do it justice, somehow share it with you.  From this root you can get peculiarity, the sunset, the place or time of the sunset, and a time for prayer, among many other things.

Well, lately, and especially last week:

انا اشعر بالغربة كثير اليوم.    لا اريد ان اكو ن موجود في وطني — لكن اريد إصدقاءي و اسرتي الان، في اية مكان.

I’ve been longing for my homeland; I’ve been feeling very queer.  Moving from suburban Illinois to Bay Area Sprawl, California for school was even strange for me, but this move was huge.  I lack a shared experience with most here.  I did not grow up in a conservative Muslim country, one with very different values and worldviews, one providing a completely different material existence than what I’m used to.  One thing I’ve noticed is that I feel comfortable most of the time pretty much anywhere.   A small town in Illinois, a big city in California, in the middle of nowhere in Turkey, in my room, at a party, or writing in a garden in the Middle of the East.  Life here may seem strange to me, but life is good.  I like it.  I was socialized well by my family so I make friends easily.  I like my new friends.  What weighs so heavy on me today is leaving those I meet and those I love behind.  A new friend of mine is going back to Germany tomorrow, a coworker to Connecticut.  And I long for my homeland not for toilet paper or sidewalks or beaches where you can tan your bum, but for the people.  I am missing the hell out of my family and friends.  I feel ghurbah.

Nobody understands you better than those who raised you, those who grew up with you, shared your life when you emerged from that period we no longer have memories of, when became social beings.  This shared history of your family members is an embrace whose nature makes you feel close and warm, assured and definite.  We /are/ our families.  They provide us with love and support, values and education, and not the least, DNA, and these all assemble themselves into a unique creation: you.  The good and the bad come together to make who you are.  You could never be you, as you are today, had each element not been in place at its precise time.  A butterfly flapping its wings in Lemont could contribute to the soft breeze in Sana’a.  There are people around me who now share where I am and where I am going, but nobody will ever know me like my family, those who know where I’ve been and from where I came, the foundation of who I am.  It’s strange and scary to have this foundation no longer directly under me, but the sensation is more of flying than that of falling.

None of the people here knew me before Yemen.  I feel an airplane gave birth to me almost two months ago.  Upon descending the stairs of the jet onto the runway, I took my first steps in a new and very foreign life.  Sure, I brought the old me with me.  I believe there’s an essence to people’s personalities, immutable aspects of their lives, but when you take a fish out of water it sure does flop around a lot.  Living without my family and my friends, with a whole lot of people who don’t speak my first language, in a place where men wear skirts and gowns and the women walk under a pile of black laundry, it’s impossible to live like you used to.  What’s been interesting is to see what it is within me that lives on, and what is that has changed in my new environment.

There are innumerable books over the ages written about how the displacement of self breeds great growth by providing a new space for self-reflection, one unavailable in our everyday lives.  The comfortable patterns of old, those formed in the midst of those people and places who know you, give way to something completely alien.  Sometimes you’re a kid in a candy store, sampling from the colorful variety before you, and sometimes you’re a kid wandering the department store.  You stepped out from under the clothes rack giggling a “peek-a-boo”, and are terrified to realize your mom isn’t looking at blouses anymore.  My separation from what I know and what I took for granted sometimes makes me feel like I’m in an isolation chamber of my own construction.  There are two of me.  I sit in this chamber, and I sit behind those one-way mirrors, observing myself.  I’m wearing a clinical white jacket with my name on the chest, I’m holding a clipboard and taking notes.  Sometimes I nod my head, sometimes I scratch my chin.  The charts before me have jagged lines jumping up and down, but thankfully, they indicate growth.

I didn’t decide to come to Yemen thinking it would be easy. Most of the time I’m comfortable and happy, but ghurba has been with me these past few days.  I think about my family and my friends a lot, and I try not to get stuck future tripping, trying to live here and now and do what it is I came to do.  I remember when I was little waking up in the middle of the night with a sharp pain in my leg.  I’d crawl crying into my mom’s bed, and she’d rub my leg to make it feel better, telling me not to worry.  “It doesn’t feel so great when you’re growing an inch over night, does it?”

I write this blog for the people I’m close to. Living thousands of miles away from my tribe in America, this is a portal for them to see my life here in Yemen. I realize this is a public blog. It is as such so if a friend of a friend thinks something I’ve written is interesting, they can pass it along. I never imagined I’d gain any readership from the vast world I’ve never met.

I write to describe my life in Yemen. How I react to new experiences with these new people in this new culture. I write to try and show what I see, so that they can see it too. I try to include some day to day events, the struggles and the joys of full immersion. But I also aim at communicating the intangibles of this new life, the emotional reactions, those things that seem planted in your heart, or your stomach, which don’t have a name or a shape, but grow and poke you and make you feel all funny.

To express the abstracts, the intangibles, language only gets me so far. I cannot say, “I feel this way, because..”. I don’t know if this is because I’m not that great of a writer, or if these things are pretty much verbally inexpressible. However, I still try. I say what I can with the words I know, and I try to use all other conventions to bring them closer to what I really mean, to what I really feel. I hold the approach to my version of truth that lives in my gut above all else.

Words.
I play with words that bite, with words that hug, with words I only vaguely understand the meaning of. Sometimes I like to drop grammatical conventions, stringing together words that seemingly don’t relate, because the mess of the words relates to the mess of the feelings I’m trying to sort out. Sometimes a phrase feels absolutely perfect at the time I write it, and then I go back later and wonder what the hell I meant. Sometimes I use a dictionary to look up words I have published.

A selective gaze.
Often I’d like you to know what a place looks like. A picture can do that, and sometimes I post pictures. Usually, though, I try to explain it. I can give colors and shapes and sounds and tastes and smells and textures, but these relate only the sensory input data, and sometimes I hope to relate a place based on what happens after these senses are processed, my impressions given to me by my swirling brain. I’ll leave out the smog for a day that feels beautiful to me. I might focus on dirt or dust when I’m feeling out of place. So things are brighter or dirtier or better or worse or this or that based the tone or flow or emotion I’m hoping to achieve, on what I hope to evoke in my readers back home.

Medium.
I can’t help but be the main character in a narrative about my life and my experiences, but I try to back up from everything as much as I can. I don’t want to say too many, “I thinks” or “I feels.” I do what I can to express what’s inside, and language helps: certain words, sentences, paragraphs, keeping some details, tossing others out, embellishing these but not those. Projecting your feelings into the landscapes, or reshaping characters into your thoughts. These conventions become the vessels that fail at delivering that which I can’t even pin down myself. The heart of my experiences here are thus approached from many different angles, giving different perspectives and different impressions, using the world around me to describe what’s inside me. Thus a landscape is not just a landscape, someone I’ve met is not who they are. I can’t give a perfect description, but I can manipulate my writing to reflect how I feel.

—————-

In short, this blog is a collaborative writing project in which I take the world I see, process it, imagine how I can convey my feelings to my readers, invent and toy with new ways to do so, try to do it, and then hear back from them to see how I did.

The people and places in this blog are creations of my mind.
They are based on the reality I live, but I do not aim to objectively represent this reality.
I aim to convey subjective reactions of not even the people, not even the place, but my processing of these things based on what I feel.

I’m not a journalist reporting facts.

Upon finding out that the people who inspired the characters I’ve invented for my expository purposes have found my blog and have read what I’ve written makes me sick to my stomach. I cast such an ugly light on these characters not to disparage real people, but to use them, these invented characters, as a medium to describe my distaste for American diplomacy, for the Western prejudice against Islam, and for everything else I feel.

For disliking some American policies, I cannot apologize. Criticizing government is one of the best ways to change minds so that government changes. I feel dissent is patriotic. If you don’t agree with something, speak out! This freedom of speech is a freedom to criticize, and it’s one of my most coveted aspects of our democratic nation. I love my country, but I’d like to see a lot of changes. To explain my feelings on government policy in Yemen, I equated the government (the policies, the state of the nation, etc.) with two people I met who work for the government. That these characters are so close to those I’ve met makes the sting all the more real when they stumbled upon what I’ve read, and for that I apologize sincerely.

It is my hope that this entry places what I write into context, that it expresses my intentions, and now, my apologies. But as I’ve said, I know that words fail.

One of my good friends wrote some very insightful reactions to some of my concerns, and I want to reprint them here:

“….
I also thought that the tone of the entry betrayed certain aspects of your own thinking. Although I thought that your reasoning was astute and the tone of bruised naivete was effective, it’s really strange that you did not cut those two people more slack. You write about Yemenis with such compassion, even the ones who harass you for money for hours. And I know that you’d never publicly post about one of your classmates that way, even someone that you hated.

I think that the reason you felt justified in making these comments was because these were two people in a position of power. But, honestly, these are not public figures. And it might have been better to think of them less as “diplomats” than as “social acquaintances who happen to work at the Embassy.” And see how, if you had thought of them more in the same way as you’d think of your classmates, whether how you wrote and talked about them might have changed.

So, to summarize. It was a fun, well-written post that had one or two genuine insights. But, real bloggers and columnist alienate and bash people because they know that someone is going to read what they write and that it’s somehow going to matter. Since your blog is small, the the net good is so much lower than it would be for them. Finally, it might be worth thinking about whether you actually did these people something of an injustice in ignoring their own feelings.
…..”

My blog is indeed small, and I never thought what I wrote would make it back to the source. I feel like a gossiping schoolchild, whose friend has found out I’d been bashing them to get ahead myself. I still believe words are weak to convey truth. But I’ve been reminded how incredibly powerful writing can be.

Blog post suspended, pending much pondering.