Postby nooj » Mon Feb 13, 2017 9:38 pm
I know this is technically not about language, but someone said that they liked my little stories, so I'll put this one out there. Actual linguistic thoughts...well, I am knee deep in Moroccan Arabic and loving every single moment of it.
I woke up early to head up to a village in the mountains with a bunch of books that we had bought to donate to the local school.
It was a beautiful, quiet place, nestled at the foot of snow-capped mountains.
The primary school, the sole one which serves the entire town, looked well run. Even better than some schools in the city.
The library for the children included books in Arabic, English, French and Amazigh. Most of the kids there were Berber, as you can tell by checking the student names on the roll. I tried some of the apples for which the area is justly famous.
Above the entrance to the library it says العلم نور و الجهل عار : knowledge is light/ignorance is shame.
In the city, walking back home after being dropped off by the bus, I literally ran into Hamza. He told me they were gonna do a tangia dinner in the medina, at our friend’s place. Tangia is a kind of meat stew with spices, cooked in these clay earthen pots during the whole day, leaving the meat soft and tender so it falls apart easily in your hand. Meals are eaten with hands, well the right hand anyway.
Traditionally it’s made and eaten by men, so it was like a boy’s night. We were 16 men there in my friend’s cramped living room, eating and talking. As the night went on, one by one people came in, leaving their motorcycles in the ‘foyer’ (well, inside the house, so now we shared space in the house with bikes as well). In the city and especially the old city, that is to say the medina, the preferred method of transport is the motorbike.
I hopped on the back of hamza’s bike. He drove me deep into medina, navigating the labyrinth-like alleys with ease. He was born there and still lives in that same building with his family. Most Moroccans do, until marriage. Holding on, sans helmet, weaving in and out of a stream of people and bikes on narrow, cobbled streets in the souq, I was reminded a little of my travels through South East Asia: not the people necessarily, but the consummate skill, the practised ease and the sheer daring the drivers exhibit. I don’t have the guts or the brains for it. And if even seasoned Moroccan riders have a story of near misses (or tragic fatal accidents), then I-d have no chance.
As we shared around the sweet mint tea, a crucial social lubricant in Moroccan culture (I must have drunk more tea in the last 3 months than in all of my life) they talked about topics as wide ranging as sex and alcohol (treated with about as much seriousness as boys) to work, to theological stuff, all in the fluent, mellifluous local variety of Arabic.
They were code shifting so quickly between English and Moroccan Arabic that I only managed to understand the general gist with my rudimentary Arabic. In a more Francophone circle, Moroccans would pepper their Arabic with French, in the North they’d do the same, perhaps with a bit more of Spanish. For the details I had to turn to a workmate who gave me a running translation, interrupted by people who would turned around and dispute what they had heard him whispering (”that’s not what I said!”), at which point he would shrug sheepishly. But I was awestruck by his ability to do so without skipping a beat.
At one point we came to talk about magic and the evil eye, and whether we believed in it. Some people said yes, others said no, the partisans of each side bringing up the Qur’an, hadiths, their conception of the religion, and their own personal stories into the fray.
I’m accustomed to thinking of religious Muslims as serious, focused, elderly men. My workmates wear T-shirts and jeans, watch Game of Thrones and are at the same time, devout. This was a realisation that dawned on me as I watched these men touch gingerly on where they really believed in life after death and their own interpretations of their faith. It was a learning experience.
In the midst of the most heated discussion about the evil eye and the jealousy and desire that it involves, listening close to my translator friend, he stopped talking and I realised all of a sudden that in unison the rest had also fallen silent. I must have missed some signal.
It was one of the young guys, who began to sing. The one I jokingly thought of as the most model-like in terms of his fashion and good lucks, who had been quite quiet throughout the whole thing. He has normally a deep kind of voice when speaking, but now, now his singing was high, clear, fashioned with artistic-intent. He struck the figure of a muezzin calling to prayer.
I could understand scarcely a word, because the language was classical Arabic. A world apart from the beautiful cacophony of modern languages they had been speaking the whole night; a voice ripped from the past, calling from 1400 years ago.
Later I learned, to my surprise, that he had undergone the rigorous training that characterises a mujawwid since he was a child, which involves not just memorising the Qur’an from back to front to become a hafiz, but trained in the art of tajweed, the recitation of the word of God.
He was reciting a chapter of the Qur’an that talked about our desires: how if we controlled our inner desires, we would be destined for eternal glory. If we let ourselves be controlled by our desires, we would be destined for eternal shame. Later one of the guys jokingly summarised its relevance for all of us: it’s about how we’re all going to hell.
I was struck by the manner in which we listened. Normally how I listen to singers I appreciate is by looking at their faces to see the interplay of emotions, to see how they react, in order to feel with them. It’s important to me.
But the men didn’t do any of that. They bowed their heads, looked at their hands or closed their eyes. Not out of disinterest, not at al. The singer, however charismatic, is not the point of interest. He is the vessel and the vessel is only glorified by what passes through him. When he stopped to take in a breath, we hung on the silence...
I snuck a glance, but the rapture written on his face as he sang made me look away. It was too private to look at.
Then it was over. I guess it was entirely appropriate that God had the final word in our speculations about human failings and weaknesses. A prayer to prophylactically seal any dangerous breaches we may have inadvertantly caused by our talking.
Liive the righteous life. Fear God. Isn’t that it?
Or boys night was over. We shook his hand and slapped him on the back. Then we went home.
11 x
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