i forget the arabic word for economy
i forget the english word for عسل forget
the arabic word for incense & english
word for مسكين arabic word for sandwich
والله & صيدلية & مطعم english for
/stupid girl atlantic got your tongue/
Safia Elhillo, To Make Use of Water (Dilute)
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When we move to Australia, my older sister gets a very special kind of sick. Her tongue swells so much that in her mouth, it feels like a pillow stuffed in its case. My parents decide to take her to a doctor and he says that it’s from the change in environment; because of it, she physically cannot speak, although we don’t know whether she would have chosen to had she been able. Maybe having two tongues is too much to handle, so she puts them both to bed.
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We board the plane from Bahrain to Melbourne on the 23rd of February, 1997. It’s my sister’s third birthday and (because my dad’s best friend’s brother works for the airline we are flying with) they surprise her with a cake. They accidentally mix us up and the square of vanilla sponge has my name, not hers, iced onto it.
I am only five months old when we make the transcontinental move and am less aware of the shift in my surroundings. Unlike my sister, who is deemed mute for two months, I start learning to speak in an English-speaking country.
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I am in high school and my friends discover a recording that my dad has kept for years. It is a song I write and perform as my four-year-old self while living in Australia and it’s no longer accurate to me, mainly because of the way I sound, but also because it’s about my love for swimming—which never really existed. My voice could not sound any less like my current American me; my Os end in Rs and my Rs can’t be heard. One of my friends makes the song her ringtone and her phone goes off during the silence of an exam and for the two weeks that follow, everyone’s conversation starter is something along the lines of That’s not really you, is it?
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Watching old home videos feels like a fever dream. For no particular reason, my dad retires his handheld video camera after we leave Australia and the tapes lie stacked in a wooden cabinet, slowly fossilising. Aside from a family trip to Italy in 2001, all records of me as a child take place in spots like the Melbourne Zoo, Dandenong Ranges, Mount Beauty, and our back garden in Malvern. I wasn’t a very vocal child but the stingy bits of dialogue that do come up are, obviously, in a thick accent. The only audible Arabic is of me mispronouncing certain words, as kids often do in any language.
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Saying the words beer can in an English accent sounds like you’re saying bacon in a Jamaican accent.
My sister shares this useful piece of information with me when she is around twelve years old. I am not good at accents; no one in my family is (my mum’s fake Aussie accent is also her fake British accent which also happens to be her fake American accent). Little tricks like this one make me feel powerful, as though I have more command over language than I am used to.
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On a train with my mum somewhere in Sweden—or maybe it’s Norway—we hear a thirty-something-year-old white woman speak English to her toddler daughter in an accent that is not Scandinavian. They sit opposite us and my mum, excited about this niche companion in a foreign country, asks her where in Australia they’re from.
I am embarrassed before the woman even answers knowing that the accent we heard, although neither American nor English, is not Australian.
“Actually, we’re from Glasgow.”
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My dad is the ten-year president of an Australian expat community in Abu Dhabi called Aussies Abroad. He gives the welcome speech at every function and opens with G’day mates! every time. It is the only thing about his speeches that sounds Australian. He is extremely patriotic towards Australia and, like most patriots, makes it a point to let it be known.
When I become close enough with someone I disclose information about his Southern Cross tattoo, which he got behind our backs one afternoon, came home, said Surprise!, then learnt the symbol’s implication from my sister and me.
I don’t think the audience at these events actually care about how he sounds, but for some reason my siblings and I do.
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When we leave Australia I am four, maybe five and my sister is six, maybe seven. We go back to Bahrain where my cousins speak Arabic or American English or both. Our accent is Australian and it is foreign. My cousins come up with an Astonishment—Mockery spectrum and neither I nor my sister can say a word without some kind of feedback from either end of the scale. Although I forcibly, consciously change the way I sound, I do not make a conscious choice about what my replacement accent will be. My sister’s switch is subconscious. It kind of just happens.
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My mum is born in Lebanon twenty years after the French Mandate is dissolved. She goes to an Arabic-speaking school for the first few years of her life, and an English-speaking school for the next. She has never been French-educated but when an opportunity presents itself, she pretends she’s fluent. What little French she knows is spoken aloud with nails-on-a-chalkboard mispronunciation. Arabic is the only language she sounds native in.
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I (unofficially) change my name to Lu. I grow tired of foreigners asking, and then completely ignoring, how to pronounce Lujayn. I spend a year in the US surrounded only by new people. I go months without hearing my name. Eventually, I forget how it’s supposed to sound.
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My dad’s name is Mohanned. It is the name of a traditional Arabian sword made of Indian iron and therefore derives from the Arabic word for India (al-Hind); not to be confused with Mohammed, the passive participle of the Arabic verb, praise (hammada). In 1997 my dad applies for a credit card with Shell Oil Company and a few weeks later it arrives in the mail. Embossed onto the front of the little plastic card is the name M O H A M E D in block capitals.
He calls them and opens the conversation with “I’ve received the credit card—”
They don’t wait for him to continue.
“Oh yes hello sir! We realised that you made a mistake in your application form and misspelled your name. But don’t worry. We corrected it for you.”
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My sister moves back to Melbourne by herself for university and lives at a college where no one speaks our mother tongue. We don’t have family in Australia and she chooses not to talk about where we are (really) from. Her name, Jeanine, coincidentally passes as a French one when in fact my parents chose it as a salute to the Palestinian city of the same name.
She tutors Level 1 Arabic and finds that it is the only time she speaks Arabic in those three years. Her accent, whether forcibly or not, shifts from sounding English to sounding Australian with a bit of an English twang to it.
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My maternal grandmother is sick and her tongue (along with the entire right side of her body) is literally paralysed. She speaks in a series of wails that, to everyone other than my auntie, are illegible. Within each sound are flickers of frustration. Her tri-lingual thoughts are perfectly coherent, her spoken words are not.
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In Houston, my 78-year-old great aunt (who is also, I think, my second cousin twice removed, but I don’t try too hard to understand my paternal family tree), born in Palestine, raised in Syria, and barely speaks English, tries to bid farewell my white American friend: goodbye; take care; drive safe; it was lovely to meet you. Instead, she tells her in English, after only having spent four hours together, I love you.
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There are more ways of saying I love you in Arabic than I can count. One of my favourites is the phrase ta’burneh. It literally means you bury me and, like a lot of other Arabic phrases, needs to be read into in order to be understood. The sentiment is that you hope your loved one will be there to bury your corpse because you can’t bear the thought of outliving them (and then having to live without them). My siblings and I say it to my mum whenever she does something we think is cute. She hates it, but we say it anyway, because there’s no other phrase that delivers the way it does.
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I am in Austin, Texas and take an Uber to a magazine launch one night with three other bilinguals (they are native Mandarin, Persian, and Swedish speakers) and we spend the ten-minute ride exchanging respective language-specific phrases that can’t really be translated. When I order a car to take me home, the driver’s name is Chad and he pronounces my name perfectly. He is actually called Shadi and we realise that (although there isn’t much of an overlap in time) we had both spent a generous fraction of our childhoods in Abu Dhabi. We code-switch until I am home and exchange numbers. I never text him.
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I am living in Abu Dhabi, the city that makes up a large and important fraction of my formative years—pre-teens, teens, late teens. In year nine, the English literature classes at my school are separated into sets based on skill level. There are five sets and I’m in the top one. I sit at a table with seven other girls and we are all, originally, from non-English speaking countries. About half of my English class grow up alongside a language that is not English.
Our teacher, like most teachers at my school, is British and assigns us fifteen minutes of independent reading before class. That year is coincidentally the year I become extremely invested in English language writers of Middle Eastern descent. I read Khaled Hosseini, Susan Abdulhawa, and Edward Said (or at least try to read Edward Said). My teacher asks that I branch out a little. I don’t. I want to know what it’s like to have that kind of command over the English language as an Arab.
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I become enamoured with my mum’s recently deceased Lebanese-American childhood friend after we attend his memorial in West Sussex in 2012. He grew up with my mum amidst Lebanon’s civil war. He is a published writer of short stories, poetry, and cookbooks. I use the two latter, poetry and cooking, to navigate my identity.
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When we host foreign visitors in the Middle East, my dad tricks them into trying what he sells as authentic Arabic food. It’s not authentic, it’s just kind of rare. It usually consists of goat’s feet, intestines, and testicles. He is the only one in my family who enjoys these delicacies. I try tongue one morning when my aunt, uncle, and cousins come over for Friday breakfast. The bumpy texture reminds me of a raw plucked chicken and I don’t make it past the first bite.
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Although I spend years frequenting her Friday family lunches, I am not close with my paternal grandmother; none of my siblings are. I think it’s to do with the fact that we have nothing in common besides our eye colour. She is a traditional Palestinian woman who left her homeland at the age of eight, got married at sixteen, and raised five children. One day, when I am sixteen and we are staying with her in Bahrain for a week, my sister overhears her on the phone to a friend talking about Mohanned’s kids. She is complaining about us and the fact that our grasp of the Arabic language isn’t as strong as our cousins.
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My brother will never date a monolingual. He tells me this in the car one night, with no organic context to the conversation. He doesn’t care whether her non-English language is the same as ours, he cannot picture a romantic relationship with someone whose only thought process is in English.
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My non-Arab friends, who live in the UAE for anywhere between five and fifteen years, barely learn a lick of Arabic while they’re there. They have a weekly one-hour non-native Arabic class and it is typically spent harassing the teacher and throwing around their food. The very little Arabic they do learn is a collection of swear-words, most of which are homophobic slurs that they sling at each other, unaware of their weight.
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I try to construct the best approach to coming out to my mum. It is the first time I think about coming out in a language other than English. In my head and to my friends, I practise the potential conversation. How about…
- I’m a lesbian (she thinks it’s a swear word)
- I’m gay (she associates it with men)
- I’ve been dating X for two years now (but this should be solely about me)
- I like women (the phrase* sounds stupid, childish)
*makes a lot more sense in Arabic, where like and love are used interchangeably.
I don’t come out at all. I don’t think words can carry the way I need them to.
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I am in my third year of university and somehow manage to write a linguistics-based niche into three of my four final assignments. None of my subjects are linguistics ones, and I have never taken a linguistics subject. I wonder whether my professors and tutors are sick of my extensive citing of David Crystal’s seminal text, How Language Works.
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My parents reveal at dinner one night that they both dream in Arabic. Neither I nor my siblings have ever had the luxury.
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My dad is born in Damascus, Syria (but he is not Syrian) to Palestinian parents (but he has never been to Palestine). He grows up in Bahrain (but he is not Bahraini). Along with my mother, my sister and I, he is naturalised as an Australian in 2000. He moves back to the Middle East in 2001 and when he is asked where he’s from, he doesn’t hesitate for a second.
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It’s the school holidays and we are back in Melbourne for a month-long visit. On the train home (but really it’s a furnished apartment that we’re renting for the month), a man interrupts our conversation to share some unwarranted insight.
Where are you guys from?
I’m getting British from you (he means my sister)
American from you (he means my brother and me)
And Islam from you (he means my parents)
My siblings and I remember this exchange not because of what the white man says, but because of what my dad retaliates with:
“It’s called Arabic, you dense wanker.”
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I consider myself white-passing but my sister doesn’t agree. I think it’s the blue eyes and pale skin, I think they overshadow my nose and dark body hair. I try to think of ways to Look More Arab (wear gold, dye my hair black, start wearing eyeliner again) so that people know that I’m an immigrant without my having to tell them. What instead gives me away is me opening my mouth. I’m asked why my accent isn’t Aussie and, after quickly probing the situation, determine how diluted my answer should be.
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I overhear (and eavesdrop on) conversations on public transport that I know other passengers can’t understand. It happens:
- in Melbourne
- in Texas
- in Milan.
I feel like I’m being let in on a secret without them even knowing they’re telling it. I feel like I can be part of a conversation without having to contribute at all. I feel like I’m socialising by proxy.
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There is a pair of women wearing hijabs directly to my left on a bus in Amsterdam a few Decembers ago. They are speaking Arabic. It takes a few minutes for me to realise it, but they are actually speaking about me. It takes a few more minutes before I realise they are being unkind (something about the way I am dressed, the unsmoked joint tucked behind my ear, and that because of the ring through my nose they mistook me for a cow). I don’t let on that I’m listening to, and understanding, every word.
I’m going to confront them.
I’m going to confront them if we get off at the same stop.
I’m going to confront them in Arabic if we get off at the same stop.
We get off at the same stop and I walk far enough away that they can no longer see me and I cry.
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I am twenty-one in Chicago visiting a close friend from high school. She grew up speaking Arabic too and on my second night we brave the first snow of the season to watch an Arabic-speaking band perform (one we have been listening to for years). They are on their North-American tour and have just come from Bloomington, Indiana, where they played two nights ago. Bloomington, according to the 2010 census, is 83% white. The band ask us if anyone in the crowd speaks Arabic and we, as a collective, erupt. I spend the entire night in and out of tears and the woman in front of us keeps turning around to check whether I am okay. I am. This is one of the scant handful of times when I feel a part of a people.
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My brother makes a joke in Arabic one day when he is eleven years old and even though it’s not actually funny, my mum can’t stop laughing (comedically, her terrible sense of humour is a running joke in my family). She says that you aren’t fluent in a language until you can write a joke in it on the spot.
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I spend my eighth birthday in Abu Dhabi. It is a new city, in a new country, and my dad helps me make invitations for the party. It is at a bowling alley and my dad comes up with the pun Join me, we’ll have a bowl! He shows it to my siblings, who are unimpressed. He shows it to my mum, who doesn’t get it. Although none of us match his enthusiasm, he can’t stop looking at the freshly printed pieces of paper and smiling to himself.
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According to my mum and regional superstition, accidentally biting your tongue is a sign: it means you’re about to get a present. She tells me this when I am quite young and my eyes are red and very wet with tears of pain. Every few months I will accidentally bite my tongue, cheek, or the inside of my lips without any kind of present-based repercussion.
I have almost twenty years of experience disproving her theory—all I get in return is a swollen sore that catches on my teeth whenever I speak.
About the author
Hasib Hourani is a Palestinian writer, editor, and arts worker living on unceded Wurundjeri Country. They are a 2020 recipient of The Wheeler Center's Next Chapter Scheme. Hasib's writing worries expectations of land, identity, and the relationship between the two. You can find their work in Meanjin, Overland, Australian Poetry, and Going Down Swinging, among others.