The first time my Arabic teacher Somaya called me “Yahya”, I cringed.
“Ya, Yahya,” she said- “Hey, Yahya,”- calling my attention back to the dot-lined squiggles of my Arabic textbook. Yahya: pronounced: “Ya-CH-yah”- the “ch” a similar sound made by the last two letters of the Scottish “loch”. Ya-CH-ya. Yaaaa-ccccchhh-ya. A roiling gurgle, as if you were trying to cough up a fish bone. I’ve since avoided this kind of throat aerobics by pronouncing the damned word as “Yak-ya”, which now sounds like a species of Himalayan pack animal.
“Yahya” is my Arabic name through a rather circuitous etymological route. Sean is the Gaelic version of John, a name given to, among others, the flea-bitten, hydrophilic madman known as The Baptist. John, in its turn, is either a Hellenized or Latinized version of Yohanan, the original Aramaic name in the 1st Century CE, when the Roman Empire still ruled the area over which the Israelis and Palestinians are playing tug-of-war today. Yahya is the Arabic variation on John and Yohanan, for Islam is believed by Muslims to be the definitive, perfected correction of the corrupted Jewish and Christian traditions, and borrows heavily from its mythology- including all its prophets.
The “aw” sound made by “Sean” does not exist in Arabic, and prior to “Yahya”, I was addressed as “Shoon”. This is akin to the choice between being addressed as “shovel-face” or “swamp-dong”. Nevertheless, it was not nearly as bad as my partner-in-revolution Kieran’s options. His Irish name completely defeats the Arab tongue, and has been alternatively butchered as “Ki-raan”, “Ki-roon”, “Qi-raan”, or “Qi-roon”- all of which are subtly different and wholly wrong. In typically pompous fashion, Kieran decided that his Arabic name should be “Iskander”- as in Alexander The Great. In the end, he settled for “Karim”.
The suburb of Cairo where our school and apartment are located is named Al-Dokki. It sits on the western edge of Cairo’s hellish sprawl, on the other side of the Nile. It’s a typical Third World urban hood. Blocks of sand-toned or brick-red apartments, with peeling paint and walls stained various shades of black over the years by the fumes of passing traffic. Construction on new blocks proceed even as old blocks slowly crumble into the courtyards below. The sidewalks are rife with potholes, with every crack and manhole used as a depository for garbage. A thick haze sitting lazily at street level turned my white shirt grey in less than three days.
But this isn’t the whole story. Every balcony has a satellite dish, and they cover the flat tops of every apartment building like mushrooms. The sidewalks, scrubbed every morning by the shopkeeps, are lined with green prayer mats, plant pots, chairs and stools occupied by jolly mustachioed Arab men and cheeky Arab lads, and teem with the lively cacophony of local society. “Sabah al-hir!” you shout into the madness. “Sabah al-noor!” is the inevitable response, from someone, somewhere. “Good morning… the morning is bright!”
Sharia Soliman Gohar, the long market street that leads from the subway to our school, is typical. It’s one part wet market, one part shopping strip, one part transportation route, one part residential area, and one part village square.
Old women in headscarves sit amid mounds of wicker baskets filled to the brim with eggplants, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and strange-looking bulbous roots, shucking beans out of their pods. Donkeys drag carts full of bananas or mystery meats as their hawkers weigh out purchases on balance scales. There are butchers with shanks of beef and mutton; fishmongers with carts and baskets of fish, shrimp, and cuttlefish from the Nile, and from the Mediterranean in the north and Lake Nasser in the south. There’s a whole shop full of cages- some stuffed with chickens, others with rabbits. In one cage is a huge black-feathered creature whose head is always tucked under one wing. I haven’t yet decided if it’s a turkey or a giant condor.
Tailors work their foot-pedaled sewing machines; young boys with tins of boot polish and brushes hail me with “Jackie Chan! I polish your shoes!” - never mind that I’m wearing sandals. Old men in gallabiya gowns and turbans mingle with young men in business suits, or T-shirts worn tight and flamboyant in the European style, at the coffee shops, sucking back tobacco on burbling water pipes. They start as early as 8 in the morning, taking a pipe with their morning tea. Schoolchildren in their uniforms run back and forth, skipping with ease between the honking cars, whose drivers nod courteously at me as they zoom past on the narrow streets, missing my knees by mere inches every time.
And at the end of the street, on a wall below the highway: “AMERICA GET OUT OF MIDLE EAST!”
I can’t yet say that this place feels like home, but no place really ever has. I’m still getting used to it, I suppose. I miss strange, unimportant things: seeing girls’ hair, English second-hand book stores, light roast medium coffee at Starbucks. White-capped peaks in the distance and a faint salt-tang, however imagined, in the breeze. Sunset on the Granville Street Bridge, mirrored on the glass-paned high-rises of the waterfront and on the waves of the sea. iPod-induced isolation on the bus. Breaking into construction sites after a booze-sodden night at the Atlantic Trap.
It won’t last. Already this place is captivating, and it’s the little things that do it. The pocket-sized zip-cover Korans that bearded devotees in lace skullcaps and Westernized girls in tight jeans alike read on the skytrain- I can’t wait till the Koran is recorded in MP3s and the locals start listening to it on iPods. The elegant calligraphy of the Arabic script that describes the contents of a Chicken Supreme Pizza on Pizza Hut menus in the language of the Koran. The latticed stonework and slender minarets of the mosques; the narrow labyrinths of shop-lined alleys hiding behind every street.
$2 taxi rides. Watching your cab driver swerve through three lanes of traffic, then roll down his window to ask the driver of a car he almost hit for directions. The irony of watching Egyptian men in stylish sports jackets and greasy, gel-soaked haircuts walk arm-in-arm with young women swathed in full face veils and shapeless black chadors. Playing chicken with oncoming traffic as you saunter with feigned nonchalance across Cairo’s choked roads, muttering prayers under your breath.
And the haunting call to prayer, which acts as my alarm clock every morning, without fail, at 5 am, blasted from the loudspeakers of a distant mosque:
"Allahu akhbar! Allahu Akhbar!
Ashadu an la ila illah Allah!
Ashadu an la Muhammad rasul Allah!"
God is great. I testify that there is no God but God; I testify that Muhammad is the Messenger of God.
At the end of every Arabic lesson, the students in my class are asked to carry out simple conversations using the vocabulary we’d learnt up to that point. A girl asked me in halting Arabic if I missed my country- “country”, or “balad”, being a word we had just learnt that morning.
“Qalilan,” I answered slowly, searching my limited vocabulary for the correct words. “Leh-kin Misr baladi el-en”.
A little. But Egypt is my country now.
