When there is no translation

My Arabic tutor Hussein used to drive me crazy.

Straight away I should tell you, he has a reputation here in Syria as one of the best tutors around. Over dinner one night, I simply used his first name and a long-time Damascene – someone who grew up speaking Arabic and would have no reason to know Hussein – knew immediately who I was talking about.

“Oh. That Hussein? He is famous,” the dinner guest said. “He is the best.”

So just like George, the one-named Damascene coiffeur who seems to have done the hair of every well-heeled woman in town, Hussein is a Syrian rock star.

His whole philosophy, he told me over a preliminary, get-to-know-you drink at a little bar in my neighborhood called The Journalists Club, is that most people study classical Arabic. If your goal is to communicate with Arabs today, that’s a big mistake.

Learning "Fus-ha", as this classic form of Arabic is called, is the equivalent of trying to learn to speak English by studying Shakespeare. While The Koran and most media reports are in Fusha and wealthy, well-educated people will probably understand what you say if you speak in Fusha, people rich and poor alike in Syria, as well as Jordan and Lebanon, speak a dialect of Arabic called “Amia”.

There was a lot more to Hussein’s theory, including the politics that inspire people to learn and teach Fusha, rather than Amia, and the history of how Arabs from Morrocco to Iraq came to speak such different versions of their eponymous language.

Suffice it to say, it was clear to me that Hussein saw himself as more than just a tutor. In a capital city where every third person seems to make money by teaching – or claiming to teach – Arabic, this lanky, squawky-voiced chain-smoker sees himself as a linguistic revolutionary. He is prying open the doors of communication between the west and the east one bumbling student at a time.

And so, over a couple of Lebanese beers, we agreed: I would be his next bumbling student.

On the day of our first lesson, however, I learned there would be a little bumbling on both sides. Just getting to Hussein’s took patience.

In the ridiculous summer heat, I would walk a mile to his house. Traipsing through the cobbled-stone souk where shopkeepers and their children stared at me, I dodged mini-trucks reversing at high speed and weaved through traffic jams of honking and sputtering cars, seemingly too large to have attempted passage through the market. Past the butcher shop where carcasses hung on hooks, I ducked through a dark passageway which opened to a maze of deteriorating, three-story buildings. Then, up a short hill, I would scoot past the hole in the path, covered with a brick to keep out mice. Coated in sweat and dust, I arrived at Hussein’s unmarked door.

I rang his bell. Sometimes, he would answer immediately, buzzing me in. Sometimes I needed to ring again. Sometimes I called his cell phone because he was still asleep on his roof, where he sleeps to keep cool in the summer. One time, after several buzzes and a text to his phone, no one appeared and I left without having a lesson.

The most annoying thing of all was that no matter whether he appeared, appeared late or never appeared at all, Hussein would never acknowledge that he was moving slowly. Or that he was sorry.

Our lessons were equally stop-and-start. We’d get on a roll with one of our worksheets and, his young assistant, Foo Foo, would come into the room and start chatting for long stretches with Hussein as though I wasn’t there.

Or sometimes, in his green-stripped pajamas that looked like a cross between a prison uniform and a pirate costume, Hussein would lounge on his sofa, puff cigarettes and sigh as I struggled to pronounce basic Arabic greetings.

“Again, better and faster,” he would say in his robotic squawk.

I considered finding a new tutor. I was the boss here, wasn’t I? I was paying for these lessons, and maybe it was time to put my foot down and find someone a little more reliable. Or at least someone who didn’t literally roll out of bed for class.

But this was That Hussein. And famous or not, I liked his philosophy and, on his good days, his teaching style. And his habit of sticking out his tongue and shrugging to express himself. Where else could I find a tutor like him?

I consulted a friend of mine, who also happened to be taking classes from Hussein.

“Yeah. He’s like that. You just have to tell him ‘Yallah’,” my friend confided.

Yallah (pronounced “yuh-la”) is Arabic for hurry up.

This hasn’t been the only instance I’ve found yallah necessary during my stay in Damascus. As the weeks piled up, I became increasingly annoyed with the pace of life here.

I’d be running late for class with Hussein or an appointment, trying to zip down a sidewalk, and a family, walking shoulder-to-shoulder, would completely and obliviously block the way.

Or I’d speed walk through the souk and those mini-trucks would be jammed, bumper to bumper, honking at one another and making it impossible for pedestrians to walk. I’d have to just stand in the heat with other pedestrians who seemed unfazed and watch as shopkeepers chatted away with the drivers.

Likewise, plans with my family seem to have this entirely up-in-the air quality that made me start and stop like a malfunctioning energizer bunny. For example, my family tells me to arrive for dinner at 9 pm. I arrive at 9:05, my usual late self, and end up sitting on a couch for an hour, waiting to go out. And once we go to the restaurant, we wait another hour to start eating.

Or we plan to do something on a particularly day, but then hours before we are scheduled to meet, I get a call that everything is off. And then we never reschedule.

At a volunteer job, writing press releases for a nonprofit, I hurry to show up on time, catching two buses to cross town, only to be offered tea or coffee when I arrive. For a good 30 minutes, my boss and I chitchat until we get down to business which itself seems to move at a snail’s pace.

In my head, I have started to call this issue The Inshallah Syndrome. Inshallah is Arabic for “it is in God’s hands”, however you can use inshallah in conversation here without implying that you are religious. It is used, as far as I can tell, in place of “Let’s hope so”.

For instance, you might go out to dinner with friends and decide to meet up the next day for coffee.

“Ok, so coffee at five o’clock at Downtown Café,” you might say.

“Inshallah,” your friend would tell you.

Here’s the confusing part: The use of inshallah in itself does not imply that your friend is saying that your plans aren’t concrete. Your plans are solid in both of your minds. However, your friend is implying that while you have decided on this plan, it’s always possible that something unexpected and completely out of your hands will happen preventing you from meeting. I guess that’s something we subconsciously acknowledge in the US, but just don’t seem to express.

Still, I’ve come to find that the spirit of inshallah is pervasive here. Often, foreigners call this imprecision “running on Arabic time”, describing how it is perfectly acceptable to show up late five, ten, even twenty minutes late or start dinner an hour after it was scheduled.

Let me be clear. This isn’t a criticism of how time works here, only an observation. It’s just to say that there seems to be a very different sense of pace here, a pace that was causing me some friction with Hussein.

For weeks, I continued to drudge along the path to Hussein’s house and together, we drudged through worksheets. I mispronounced dialogues while he puffed and said his standard, “Again, better and faster.”

We covered how to greet people, how to order food and how to direct a taxi to my apartment (which, in hindsight, I should have learned the day that I arrived here). He was still seemingly in another world, but for whatever reason, I had decided to continue with him when something strange started to happen.

One day, after two hours of repeating a dialogue about buying fruit and vegetables, I was fast-walking through the souk as usual, back to my apartment, when I heard a shopkeeper yelling out to another shopkeeper and I actually understood what they were saying. It wasn’t “Hey Buddy, move your figs!” or something forceful as Arabic has always seemed to sound to me. It was “Hey, do you have some change?”

I started watching the shopkeepers. They used their pockets as cash registers and rarely had enough change. Or enough of the right change. So often, I would see shopkeepers running across from one shop to another, borrowing coins.

As Hussein and I continued on, I began stopping in the souk on my way home to buy lunch. It was then that I met my Vegetable Man, my Hummus Man, my Bread Man and, my favorite, The Baker.

In my rush to get to Hussein’s on time over the weeks and avoid the stares I get wherever I walk on the street here, I had failed to notice that I was in an everyday farmer’s market -- the kind of market that I only used to be able to stumble around when I played hookie from work.

Call me completely oblivious, but I hadn’t realized that in the backs of these little market stalls, the day’s hummus, pita bread and flaky pastries were being made by hand. And the little trucks that had been blocking my straight path to Hussein’s? They were delivering the fruits and vegetables from a central delivery spot somewhere in Damascus where, in turn, they had been delivered from Syrian farms, my new friends told me.

Now, after class, I visit Vegetable Man, who throws in an extra peach or cucumber any time I stopped by. Bread Man, too, unused to a customer buying for one, tosses me a free pita, still warm from his oven, once in a while. And The Baker and I have formed an attachment involving his chocolate-filled croissants.

I happened to smell them one day when I was starving and bought one, devouring it immediately on the way to class. Ever since, I stop nearly every time I am in the souk to see if he has any more and he always tells me “Bookra” (tomorrow) and laughs at me, sometimes throwing in a sugar cookie.

Three cucumbers here cost maybe 25 Syrian lira, around 25 cents in the US – or the amount you’d pay for a nasty, stale piece of bubble gum from one of those machines they always have at video stores. Both still hot from the oven, a piece of pita bread might run 5 lira and a chocolate croissant around 25 lira. That is to say, unless these men had other jobs or sources of income that I didn’t know about, I was clearly better off financially. In my head, their generosity didn’t make sense. Maybe you get the odd extra piece of fruit or flowers in a farmer’s market in the US, but it’s rare. Here, it’s a regular occurrence that just doesn’t translate.

In Amman, too, I was out to dinner with a new friend and his wife who had spent time helping me get around the city as I tried to get an interview with Saijida Al-Rishawi, the would-be bomber involved in the 2005 hotel explosions that killed my relatives.

To thank them for their time, particularly because I couldn’t see why complete strangers were being so nice to me, I slipped a reluctant waiter my credit card. When we were finished with dinner, the check came directly to me. The couple erupted.

“But I invited you to dinner!” the man said.

His wife looked like she was going to cry, barely peering up to look at me.

“I am very mad at you,” his wife said as we walked to their car awkwardly.

Ahh, nothing was making sense in the Middle East! I went left when I was meant to go right. I showed up on time when I was supposed to be late. I was given free things from people to whom I should be giving free things. I had cultural whiplash.

It was only one morning, several days later with Hussein that I was able to make sense out of all of these situations.

For weeks, he had sat on his couch, telling me to repeat everything, to be better and faster. I was getting used to the spastic quality of our lessons, even beginning to enjoy the coffee breaks we took and the conversations we had about Syrian culture. As I became better and faster, he, too, seemed better and faster. But I still questioned whether the struggle had been worth it.

This particular morning, I was breezing through another one of Hussein’s dialogues when he stopped me abruptly.

“Stop transliterating,” he told me.

“What’s that?” I asked him, surprised that he was awake.

He looked quickly at the sheet of Arabic text that I had been reading. Like all of Hussein’s worksheets, it had drawings of cartoon characters doing everyday things, pictures that looked like they came from some sort of alien life manual. My sheet was also covered in my cryptic pronunciation notes. For example, for the Arabic word for dessert, I had written hal-luh-wee-yat.

“See! You are still thinking in English. You are still using the Latin alphabet. English is not Arabic,” he said, more than slightly annoyed and slowly taking another drag. “Read the Arabic letters in front of you.”

Smoking a cigarette, scrolling through God knows what on his laptop and barely looking at me, Hussein had been able to hear immediately that I was doing this so-called transliteration. He had caught me.

“You will never learn if you use English to understand it. You have to retrain your brain to think in Arabic,” he said, his tongue hanging out, expressing what I could only imagine was exhaustion in giving a speech he must have given hundreds of times.

It struck me pretty quickly that maybe this was part of my problem as I maneuvered through life here. After months of assimilating, maybe I had finally reached the places between east and west where there was no translation. (See photo above: A camel hanging in my favorite butcher shop to advertise fresh camel meat!)

Since my realization, I can’t say that I’ve started loving the traffic jams in the souk or the plans with my family that seem to get canceled half the time. Or the way my aunt continues to search for my husband instead of spending our time oh, I don’t know, getting to know each other.

But I think I’ve stopped trying to make sense of these things. I’m trying to take it all as it is.

As far as Hussein is concerned, this has done wonders for my Arabic pronunciation. The other afternoon, he declared with a big smile and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth that he was officially promoting me from beginning level to intermediate level. It seemed like time for a celebration.

“Where are the dancing girls?” I joked.

Hussein just stuck his tongue out. He didn’t need to say anything else.

‘

Noor

** A quick apology to regular readers – I'm so sorry for the delay in entries over the past couple of weeks. I have been repeatedly sick with a mysterious bacterial infection that has caused several days of debilitating fevers and general discomfort. Hopefully, a superhuman strength medicine (prescribed by my doctor in Monterey and bought at the pharmacy here for $2!!!) will soon do its work. Fingers crossed very tightly. I have also been traveling regularly to Jordan where I have met with government officials and others in Amman (an amazing city) in an attempt to interview Saijida Al-Rishawi, one of the participants in the November 2005 hotel bombings that killed my cousin and uncle. Sentenced to death by hanging in November 2006, she is now in a women's prison just outside of Amman where, according to her attorney whom I interviewed, she spends her evenings singing to herself in English. I am now waiting to hear from the Jordanian government as to whether they will honor my request. With all the traveling, the meetings and the fevers, I've been pretty wiped out, but I have so much to share with you and hope to catch you up as quickly as possible now that I am semi-up and running again -- DA **

As the intolerably hot summer rolls on in Damascus and we sleep through the afternoons and eat watermelon and wild cactus fruit through the night, there are big questions in the air.

Will Syria and Israel make peace through ongoing talks in Turkey?

Will Syria open more of its markets to foreign investors and what will happen if and when that happens?

Are Mohammed and Noor really getting divorced?

You may have heard about the Turkish soap opera Noor which has recently received attention in the Western media for its popularity here in Syria and throughout the Middle East. The Middle East Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) – or someone who sold the show to MBC - bought the rights to the show which was then called Gummush, dubbed it in amia, the Arabic "street dialect" spoken throughout Syria and Jordan, renamed the show Noor and started playing it to wide acclaim.

And by wide acclaim, I mean wide acclaim. Here in Syria's capital, Damascenes young and old, rich and poor, male and female, dig this show. There are posters and t-shirts featuring photos of the characters and tag lines like "Noor: Love and Romance" on every third street corner, around the bookstores at Damascus University and in bus stations. Perhaps I own a poster.

At 5 pm, 10 pm and 1 am, one of the three times the show is broadcast each day, you need only step outside in Damascus and be in ear shot of the Noor theme song – and most likely, you'll hear the theme in stereo.

One night, I was in a greasy kebab shop packed full of men shushing one another so they could follow the plot. Another night, I was walking through Bab Sharki (literally translated as Eastern Door), one of the entrances to the oldest parts of Damascus, the oldest city in the world, when I heard the dramatic drum beat and twangy violins and I knew immediately that it was 10 pm.

Watching Noor also happens to be a great way both to learn Arabic and have something to talk about with just about anyone on the street, in a taxi or at a party. So along with my fellow Syrians, I, too, have become entirely engrossed in the happenings of Noor despite the fact that I'm never sure exactly what's happening.

Thankfully, the plot appears to be very simple. In a ritzy mansion on the banks of the Bosphorus live four generations of the Fakri family. There's Mohammed, the hot, 30-something business man; Noor, his equally hot wife who has her own fashion line called, surprisingly, Noor; Mohammed's mother, a red-head with an intense face lift who occasionally plots against Noor; Jido (grandfather in amia) Fakri, Mohammed's grandfather, the official family peace broker; Mohammed's sister, an artist who is married to Mohammed's best friend, Anwar; their cousin Bana, a mischievous business woman who, at some point, was involved with some sort of Istanbul mafia (at least, as far as I could follow); another cousin, Fagher, who recently went on a long trip and came back being played by another actor (Don't you just hate when that happens?); and their two servants, a man and woman that recently married and always seem to have bad luck.

As is prerequisite for the soap world, every Noor character is superhumanly attractive and is prone to major life incidences on a regular, if not daily, basis. Just in my short, three-month stint as a Noor fan, I've seen at least four car accidents, three marriages, two near-divorces and a Christmas episode to boot.

But there are lots of ways in which Noor is nothing like a Bold and the Beautiful or an As the World Turns. It's a lot more innocent. While an American or British soap opera might have several extra-marital affairs, a car wreck and a miscarriage in one episode, one divorce in Noor can take up to seven or eight episodes as we find out what each character thinks about the impending divorce and the couple cry in their separate rooms to Turkish love songs.

Much has been made in the both the Western and Middle Eastern media about how modern the characters in Noor are compared to the Arab viewers watching the show. Apparently on Al Jazeera earlier this week, my Arabic tutor, Hussein, watched the woman who does the voice-over for Noor's character debate a scholar as to whether the show is positively influencing society with its subject matter including divorces, abortion and affairs.

While I can't really imagine a television show becoming such a source of discussion in the US (imagine if Jason Priestly had argued for the social benefits of Beverly Hill's 90210 on Crossfire), here it makes sense. The two other most popular soap operas, La Mise and Bab Al Hara, follow much more conservative plots.

La Mise, another dubbed-over Turkish soap opera, is the story of a man who wants to marry a woman, but fate seems to always keep them apart. Personally, I find the show really boring. However, when I lived with my Uncle Zoo, he often yelled at the characters and had to be reminded by my aunt that it was only a television show. I also know a 38-year-old businessman who recently had to stop watching the show because he couldn't handle the heart ache between the couple.

Bab al-Hara, a show that started during last year's Ramadan and will start again in several weeks with this year's Ramadan, is set in Damascus during the French mandate in the 1930s and doesn't have nearly the number of opportunities to insert the risqué situations of Noor.

So perhaps folks here watch Noor for a glimpse of what life is like in the West. Or perhaps they are watching blue-eyed, chiseled Mohammed – played by Turkish model Kivanc Tatlitug - who is H-O-T.

Modern, hot or not, most of all, I enjoy the show's wonderful Turkish quirks. Many of the key scenes in the show happen around the breakfast table where the family eats cheese and cucumbers and drinks that delicious, sweet Turkish tea in little glasses.

There is a lot of musicality to the show, too. How many characters in Dynasty, for example, belonged to an oud-playing club like Jido Fakri? In one recent episode, a good five minutes was devoted to good ol' Jido and his friends strumming their ouds and singing what I imagine were traditional Turkish songs in the mansion with seemingly no connection to the episode's plot. In another episode, when Noor and Mohammed had one of their many arguments, Noor was looking longingly over the Bosphorus as a drunken Mohammed stumbled around somewhere in Istanbul. Suddenly, she began to sing, and it seemed as though her song called Mohammed back to the mansion.

Which brings me to tell you about the strangest "Noor" episode I've watched yet.

Let me set the scene up for you. Remember my 75-year-old aunt who named her cat Nancy after Nancy Ajram, the Middle East's Britney Spears? Well, my aunt also happens to plan her entire social calendar around Noor episodes, despite the fact that the 5 pm episode is always a repeat of the previous evening's 10 pm show.

I was visiting her in Aleppo this past weekend to celebrate my 28th birthday. Between my aunt trying to introduce me to Aleppo's most eligible – and apparently oldest and baldest – bachelors and, after coming down with another high fever, going to the doctor (which turned out to be a plot on my aunt's part to introduce me to yet another bachelor), we devoted our lives to Noor.

Both wearing long gallabiyas (I borrowed one of her long muu-muu-like robes), we sat on her sofa by the air conditioning, drinking coffee or eating her special soup, and watched attentively to see whether Noor and Mohammed were going to divorce.

For weeks, our favorite couple had been having problems stemming from one fateful night. Mohammed had gone to his ex-wife's house to visit his son and, drunk or tired (I haven't figured out which), he passed out in his ex-wife's bed. In flash backs set to Turkish music, we learned that nothing had happened between Mohammed and his ex-wife (who also used to be confined to a wheel chair but somehow miraculously now walks).

Noor couldn't handle the disrespect Mohammed had shown her and she demanded a divorce. Episode upon episode dragged out as Mohammed tried to woo Noor back. He apologized. He searched all over Istanbul for her when she disappeared and brought flowers to her. Finally, he gathered his whole family and his ex-wife, who told Noor that nothing had happened between her and Mohammed, and he told her how much he loved her in front of everybody as she stood on a balcony. Still, Noor held steadfast.

On this particular afternoon in Aleppo, my aunt and I lay side by side in her bed together under the air conditioning, watching as Noor and Mohammed said their goodbyes the night before they were scheduled to divorce. Mohammed had driven Noor home after they announced over the family dinner table that they were getting divorced. At a traffic light, their special song came on the radio coincidentally and a young street girl offered to sell them a dozen red roses.

"She said, 'I hope you are able to have love with this girl'," my aunt translated for me. "See, even she knew that there is something between them!"

After putting the flowers in water and letting Mohammed see their baby, now destined for life as a child of divorced parents, Noor shut the door of her newly purchased condominium as Mohammed walked to his Mercedes.

Suddenly, heavy metal music accompanied by a chorus of Turkish singers started up. In slow motion, both Mohammed and Noor walked back to the door where they had just left one another, neither one knowing that the other was also having second thoughts about the divorce. But Noor didn't open the door and Mohammed didn't knock.

I thought this would be the end of the drama, but who was I kidding? We were watching Noor.

When Mohammed arrived back at his mansion, he found one of the long-stemmed roses lying on the floor of the car. He walked in his backyard with the rose, looking at it longingly, and finally tossed it into the family swimming pool. Meanwhile, Noor took the bouquet from its vase and, with tears streaming down her face, pushed the lever of the garbage can with her stylish boots and threw the roses away.

The choir and electric guitars continued. So did my aunt.

"I hate her! I hate her!" she screamed at the television. "What's he gonna do? He's gonna kill himself. Then what?"

Mohammed walked towards his house and Noor walked to her bedroom to check on their baby. Suddenly, both walked back to their respective flowers. Mohammed fished his rose out of the pool and Noor put hers back in the vase and placed them next to the baby's crib. Crying, though totally unaware of the absolute synchronicity of their emotions with the dramatic metal music, they looked longingly at their flowers and smiled through their tears.

And then the episode went to commercial.

Days later, when my aunt followed me back to Damascus and took over my bed as her Noor watching station, we learned that, in fact, Noor and Mohammed would get divorced. Yet, immediately after the official court proceedings, they would be involved in a dramatic car accident in which Mohammed would have to pull Noor from a burning car.

It seems our summer passion in Damascus continues.