Goodbye Gifts

The Shi'a mosque in the old city, popular with Iranian tourists

I wrote nearly this whole post almost two weeks before I left for Cairo, but ended up being too distracted by my conundrum and then my move to finish this post up like I wanted.  Anyway, it started because I felt compelled to write a little bit more about the love side of my love/hate relationship with Syria, because I'd just had a rather lovely experience with my tutor.

I should start with a little background on my wonderful tutor, Maha. This lovable woman in her forties who smiles with her whole face when she smiles and has the gushing, fussy air of a loving Italian grandmother (and indeed she speaks Italian and French fluently), did loads for my fusha (Modern Standard Arabic), especially my speaking and my listening. Not only did she patiently give me council (in Arabic) when she felt I was too distracted by life decisions to discuss my homework, but she always seemed to be as invested in my learning Arabic as I was on my most devoted days.  She told me when I wasn't doing well, and she told me when I was.  And thanks to her honesty, her compliments meant all the more.  Plus she had me over for meals.  

One time she had me and a group of most of her other young students (including my housemate, Philippe) for a breakfast in her brand new apartment.  She had prepared a feast of every traditional Syrian brunch-y type food I had ever been exposed to and more, and we all had a very nice time chatting it up in our respective Arabics.  Maha's apartment was on the 9th floor of an apartment on a hill in one of Damascus's suburbs and the food had been laid out on a table on her balcony overlooking the city in the valley.  It was there I met a stunningly beautiful Dutch-Egyptian girl who got me excited to be moving back to Cairo (this was before I found out about Maryland) by speaking Egyptian with her.  I also ate the most delicious ful (beans, usually with a variety of other stuff mixed in depending on the style) of my life.

Breakfast at Maha's

The other time Maha had me over for a meal was for dinner with her family.  I had been over at Maha's mother's house--where we normally held our lessons-- already because I recently started up a language exchange with my Maha's younger sister to practice my Arabic. Phrased like that, "language exchange" sounds kind of suggestive, but it is just exactly what the name implies. We practice English for an hour and Arabic for another everytime we meet, and it's a good way for both of us to get some practice in. Today had been an especially good meeting as my partner had brought me two CDs loaded with about 400 of some of the most popular Arab pop music hits, so I was especially pleased with my night already. We'd been having our exchanges at 6 o'lock in my mother's house (this is an Arab family after all, and it is not abnormal for people to live with their parents sort of indefinitely), and this time, as we were finishing up, my tutor walked into the room to ask if I would stay for dinner. Of course I said yes, excited about the prospect of a genuine home-cooked arab meal with the whole family even though I was feeling exhausted after a four-hour exchange.

I sat down with the 9 other family members, including my tutor's beloved mother and adorable 2-year old niece (named, if I was understanding the Arabic correctly, "diamond"), and we dug in to the four big dishes of food. There was bright green, lemony tebbouleh salad, traditional yellow "kibseh" rice, a kind of potato-vegetable dish, and meat-stuffed eggplants. The real highlight though was just getting to listen to everyone speak.  

The poorer outskirts of Maha's suburb

This was the first time I had really gotten the chance to sit around and listen to a lot of Syrians speaking with eachother, and I was surprised at how much of the Ammeya I was understanding, despite not having had many actual lessons in it. Nonetheless, my brain and my tongue were feeling pretty sluggish after what had been a double Arabic session with my partner thanks to our previous session having been all in English as I helped her with her C.V. and a cover letter for an embassy job. I was trying real hard to keep up with the conversation, but the whole time I had the distinct feeling that all these Arabic words were just washing over my brain like the tide at the beach. I would register a lot of them and slowly process their definitions, but it was like each one would only trigger a meaning that my brain couldn't quite manage to translate into an actual English word. It was kind of frustrating, but I realized it was also probably a good sign that the words registered a meaning even if I couldn't always verbalize them in English.  When spoken to, I talked a little bit about my going to Egypt and how that wasn't an indication that I hadn't loved my time in ash-Sham (as Syrians call it), but mostly I just tried to listen. 

I was especially curious to learn more about the mother who was a devout Muslim, wearing a hijab and a robe in front of men at all times and what the nature of her relationship was with her more secular children., but instead I ended up playing imaginary telephone for much of the meal with Masa, whose sparkelly name seemed appropriate for her gleeful, sparkly personality. She had a toy cell phone which she carried around in her back pocket and periodically whipped out to pointedly yell "'Alo!" at someone until they responded with some of the usual telephone pleasantries. She seemed to like doing it with me especially because I started responding at first by putting my actual phone to my ear and then moved on to putting up random objects--piece of cake, tissue box, etc.--to my ear and asking what was wrong with my phone as she cackled away.

The night got even better when, as I was about to leave, my tutor accompanied me to the room in which I had left my bag and books. As I gathered up my things, she asked me if I would have room to carry some books to Egypt. She handed me two beautifully bound volumes of political poetry by the legendary Arab poet, Nizar Qabbani, and then proceeded to make me promise they weren't too heavy for me to bring to Egypt and that I wouldn't just leave them behind here. I assumed at first that they were to be books I would bring to a friend of hers in Egypt, but then it became clear she meant them as gifts for me when she switched to English for emphasis to say "these are for you." I was floored. This is a woman who had had me for about ten lessons total, not a one of which I felt like I had been particularly impressive with my Arabic, and she was already giving me a goodbye present.  

The alley next to mine

That was only the latest in a string of recent experiences that have made me realize again how much I had not given Syria a completely fair shake. Many foreigners love Syria for exactly the reasons I had so quickly tired of it: the comforting insularity, the tight-knit foreigner community, the compact city-size. But I hadn't seen some of the other things they had talked about, especially the supposed generosity of Syrians. I had felt that Egyptians were much nicer, because even as they were blatantly trying to cheat you, there was a willingness to sit down and talk with you about at the same time. Syrians seemed closed off to me, distrustful, and always ready to talk behind your back. I experienced much more anti-American sentiment there (always directed at our political policies, never our citizens) and I felt that Syrians were much less polite about it.  But I had started seeing something different in my last month there.


For my last lesson, I struggled to think of what I could give Maha in return for her gift and for all her help.  In the end, I gave her my copy of Jorge Luis Borges's Ficciones.  I chose it not only because I love Borges (see my blog's title, as explained in my first post), but because that particular copy had been travelling around with me all over the Middle East and I'd had it since high school when I first read him.  I know my teacher was really excited to give me some of Nizzar Qabbani's poetry, so I wanted to give her someone whose words were equally beautiful.  Plus, there's no way in hell you could find anything by Borges in English in Damascus.

Found this walking my last week in Syria, thought it was beautiful