Internationalism versus Globalism in Literature
Is there a difference between a tourist and a tourist?

-"Thanks to your visit" A sign outside of the Maronite town in South Lebanon Bint Jubail, the site of the most recent battle with Zionism which to many people represents the reason why this essay is profoundly unenlightening. Thanks to YOUR visit Israel, English speakers do not even realize the word for earth is Arz.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=239464&commentsubmit=true#lastcomment

Ange Mlinko writes of her short stay in Beirut during a contested election. Unfortunately she gives the impression of gunmen on every block when in fact she was situated literally, within a block or two of the "Capitol Building". So yes, there are typically "machine gun armed" soldiers near any structure in the WORLD in which heads of state meet to discuss gas prices.

She describes 'fanatical' Arabic language patterns.....hmm. The Lebanese are very anal retentive people Ms. Mlinko. Very. Do not mistake their dialect for the less exact (not) classical Arabic. The Lebanese have improved the di-glossial (rather than 'fanatical as she puts it) language (fuhsa), improving it with a rather franco-phile flourish. As English speakers who have no classical intent left within our mutt-speak, we fail to understand the beauty of classical wonders exposed to cultural wonders which produce dialects:

"It’s dispiriting, I wrote in my journal, to have everything reduce to sectarianism—even the colloquial Arabic of my language class is tainted, I learn. Ah, he must be Muslim, said Miriam’s mother as she listened to me recite the phrases he had taught us for greetings and farewells. “Some of that is more literary Arabic.” “We say mneha, not aal, for ‘I’m fine,’ and we don’t say bihatrak, we say au revoir.” Then Miriam characterized the concern with the purity of Arabic as “fanatic”: at bottom it is about the sanctity of the language the Koran is written in. Fanatic too, she thought, was the insistence of her English professor last year that she write e-mail in formal language, not texting abbreviations. Language is for communication, she insisted, so what’s the harm if “you are” turns into “u r”?"

Mon Dieu!

It has literally nothing to do with religion so much as it has to do with a professor who hopes to teach a student the complicated and important role language has in all Pan Arab societies in which newspapers and television broadcast 'media Arabic' which is a close relative of the Egyptian Arabic (thought to be the most exact and teachable) in comparison to Fuhsa itself or 'Quran' Arabic. Educators only come in two varieties in the Levant, purists and charlatans and they cannot be identified by their out-of-date plaid coats...not usually anyway. There is a note of preservation in the discussion of 'classical' languages...you know..the PC concept or rather notion of the loss of culture through the watering down of same said 'languages'. Modern Arabic or rather, Lebanese has been infected with mutt-speak and there are no words for some ideas like 'television' and 'telephone' not to mention there is no P in the alphabet and Pepsi becomes Bebsi.

And, just a little note, the Quran is spelled with a Q and a U. With a Q. With a U. The anunciation of a short o followed by the vowel a sans silent e, inevitably produces the bastardization which has been disseminated in the English speaking media as "Koran" (a very unpretty sound) instead of the dove like Quran. Hear it? Stop spreading this type of mistake by stopping the spread of such stereotyped sound patterns in 'our' culture. I say 'our' but truly, the Western culture is no longer my home. Far from it, it's a tour of a church and a valley.

"Mogrehbi" or Moroccan has become a buzz word in this valley called Americana by the way. Mogrehb 'jumaa' and 'djumma' is like genie to jinn is to djinn. It is a difference between alphabets, not dialects. If it were, the description would be one of Mogrehbi as being nearly impenetrable to most Arabic speakers (be they Lebanese, Egyptian or Oxford type-trainees such as yourself). It is spoken in North Africa all the way up into the Gizan area of Saudi Arabia by the Saudis themselves...the poor ones in that rural and mountainous zone so chock full of types of people who look more like Laplanders than they do inner city American school educated Saudi citizens. So of course he was confused...you were asking if the same word was different.

The name for university (Jumaa) translates most closely to "school of thought" as in, SoQ poetry or the like. It is an ethos minded word and is applied in a most religious sense to the five Madhabs in Islam. (Four if you ask the Sunnites who deny Shia their rightful place in Islamic history.) More importantly, it should be pointed out that the generic terms such as 'madrasa' have been taken wholly out of context in the West to mean 'terrorist' academies when in fact madrasa literally translates to school, elementary to be exact or any sub-level institution that falls more on the three RRRs than it does the philology scale (jumaa).

Even more interesting is the origin (first attested to a Latin origin) of the word TUTOR. It's actual origin is much more likely to be the same as madrasa...that much feared category of terrorese. Tudros (poor transliteration on my part) which is Arabic for "to study" or 'you study' and the root of maderroos (teacher), like all familiar groups of words in Arabic is highly relational to the issue of the transference of information which is headed off with 'da-ra-sa' (my son's best guess at the root letters). As with all Arabic root words, there are three consonants which are then taken and manipulated via the use of phoneticized vowel sounds to mean: teacher, school, learn, etc. Unlike English in which the word for school has literally nothing to do with the word to teach.

And the last paragraph is priceless....a Mohameddan is mentioned....are you uh stammering starlet like a Mohameddan? Yes, it is best to keep people guessing in Beirut but if you have to guess......perhaps you ought to rethink posting essays about it. Or maybe not, I do not mean to sound ungrateful on my own behalf or behalf of the poor Lebanese. It's so nice to see the little country that thinks it is big look a little bigger even if its through the eyes of a poorly trained observer. Next time you get the chance, ask him if he is Druze or Habashi. That will get you into the conversation you hope to have regardless of what he is or isn't. You'll find out about your spy schools and hostage places.

Furthermore, if investigating the nature of the exile (Beirut and Liban happen to be a city and a country of natural exiles, all of them escaping some dynasty or t'other) poet, one would hope a citation of Darwish be present in the actual discussion (but this essay was not a discussion so much as it was an honorary and complacent acknowledgement, literally a postcard with a poet in it feeling poetry like). A few lines from Darwish might have set the piece up brilliantly because Darwish was an external internal exile who is mistaken by the un-informed as an 'Arab' or rather, a 'resident' Arab and spokeman. Much like I am an exile in my own country, there are several levels to exilism beyond the merely personal which Ms. Mlinko portrays here in her essay that likely took less than an hour or two to compose from a few journal entries.

"Beirut is a city of gold and fatigue." or "Beirut, our tent, our star." Something along those lines anyway from a rather dated interview given when I too, was just a 'tourist' rather than what I am now, an exile in my own hometown.


On Beveled Glass and Annas