July 2004

There, Damascus blossoms in a terrible heat and a no less important influx of people from the Gulf. At certain hours, it becomes difficult to find a free cab. Among these rich tourists, some are quite arrogant: in the old city, I saw one whose large frame, swollen with pride and wallet, occupied the width of the alley.

In the morning, the newspaper for an hour with R., and texts in the afternoon with my teacher. As it is the vacations I give up grammar until the beginning of the school year.

I took this picture especially for you last nightand this made me be hailed by a suspicious young man:

why are you taking this picture? he asks me. I explain to him internet and so on. But why this juice stand? he insists.

I answer that I am trying to give an idea of what Damascus is like in July; besides, Abu Shaker is quite famous here.

And you don’t have that at home? No. And you wouldn’t photograph a frittekot? I should have retorted.

Let’s move on to a sinister encounter, probably a member of some jihad

Don’t worry, it’s my

In summer, it is difficult to get an appointment with him because he is overwhelmed with work. From all over the world people are flocking to have their pianos professionally restored for a price that will allow them to make up for the trip plus everything else (buying a car, he says, but I think he’s putting it off a bit; still… I remember the American prices and they were very expensive indeed).

I’m also trying to catch up on my “posts” as there are a plethora of photos in my archives. Expect to be overwhelmed with chapters.

I have started to lose a few pounds, because although I still wear galabyas at home or at our place, I don’t know anymore, I would like to put on my European clothes from time to time that I don’t fit into anymore.

I think of my return to Belgium, of the reunion with my dishwasher (a year of washing dishes by hand!), with my vast apartment, with the people I love and miss (more than my dishwasher), with Pascal and Dominique, my hosts.

However, in cha Allah, I’m coming back in September to join the Mahad (the school).

Maybe I’ll go to Yemen before school starts. Reading Travels with a Tangerine by Tim Mackintosh made me want to, as he seems to like it there. In this book, he follows in the footsteps of the great Arab traveler Ibn Battutah.

I am green with envy when he tells me that he picks up Ibn Battutah’s travels from a shelf in the bookstore and is immediately captivated by his story, but he reads in Arabic! I am still struggling to decipher – with a lot of help – stories for children! I calm down when I learn that he has been living in Yemen for 17 years (that was 2 or 3 years ago)! Something to look forward to.

I postponed my return several times under various pretexts. In fact, I didn’t really want to go back, but one has to fill in the tax form and go through nine months of mail. There is also the desire to see the friends who could not come to visit .

Marie told me I would miss the cherries and apricots and I could not give them up. There was no reason for me to come home so early. In addition to the fruit (the juicy, fragrant apricots, the amazing blackberries called “touts”), there are the fresh sweet garlic and onions whose consumption does not handicap social life. I didn’t mention the almonds that are eaten with their shell, sprinkled with lemon and seasoned with salt. But that was in April.

Another reason to stay is the sheer pleasure of spending hours reading under the iwan of the Danish cultural center, which is housed in a masterfully restored house in the old town. The iwan is the place to be in the summer and I have photographed it for you; it is a room open on one side. It’s not as hot because the sun doesn’t touch it. In the center of the courtyard, a fountain as in all the houses of the old city.

I was immersed in the study of the language, while being totally ignorant of the history of the country and of Islam in general. I began to remedy this deficiency with the books of the center’s library. 

I smoke my last arguilé on my balcony; I had totally stopped smoking when the only doctor I consulted here (it was before the exams; I was dying of fear and my blood pressure was having unpleasant surges), so when the doctor told me that water did not clean the smoke, that the tobacco contained molasses which increased its harmfulness, in short, that I’d better abstain, I complied. But smoking in the dark, in the evening heat… irresistible.

Arabic coffee and Turkish coffee

For nine months I ordered Arabic coffee without realizing that I was being given Turkish coffee. I finally have the recipe for the real Arabian coffee: a bitter coffee with a little bit of unroasted coffee sometimes mixed in and left to simmer for at least half an hour. This is the kind of coffee that is served to you in a small cup. In the street or in a restaurant, you will sometimes see a man with a large coffee pot with a curved spout offering you some. The beverage is strong.

I have already spoken about the Palestinians

To speak of a land without people for a people without land is really an aberration.

They show me the pictures of their schools, their houses, the class pictures; “we had a country. Our land was occupied by its inhabitants.

They are in a dark tunnel without a glimmer of hope.

And yet, and I didn’t know this until I came here, the Jews of the region are Arabs in the same way as Muslims and Christians. We tend to equate Muslims and Arabs; needless to say, the Turks, Iranians, and Kurds are not Arabs, although they are mostly Muslims.

Iraq

Although I don’t regret the week spent with the human shields it only served to give some courage to the Iraqis before the assault; I have no news of the family I met at the Daura refinery. I could not find the Indian medicine that the cab driver asked for his brother and the internet did not forward my messages..

Here, we think a lot about our neighbors with sadness and dismay. The danger of an American invasion of Syria seems to be over for the moment, but who knows… 

In the podcast I talk about the Kurdish marriage

Proclamation of results at the Majad

Happy to have succeeded

I will write to you next time from Belgium Tot ziens et illa liqa !

Syria: The Bashar Years

Newlines PodcastJuly 16, 202107:34 EST

Everyone expected that the regime would find a way to make Bashar president after Hafez al-Assad’s death. I thought maybe they would remove the age requirement altogether. And all they did, in five minutes, in front of our very eyes, it was put down to 34, his exact age. They might as well have said, ‘The president must be 34 and his name must be Bashar al-Assad.’

Rime Allaf is a Syrian-born writer and political analyst. In a wide-ranging conversation with Newlines’ Faisal Al Yafai, she recalls living through the end of the Hafez al-Assad era and traces the Bashar years from the initial optimism of Syrians, through the end of the Lebanon occupation and the Iraq War, to the start of the Syrian revolution.

For the podcast go here

The insistence on teaching Classical Arabic over modern dialects has hindered our linguistic and literary development

Reading with children is, or should be, an enjoyable act of bonding and education. But, in the case of Arabic, I have often found reading in the language I inherited to be an experience of mutual misery. My son and I speak Lebanese Arabic, which he understands well enough — and better every day. But we can only find a handful of books available in that dialect — or in other accessible, useful dialects, be they Egyptian or Iraqi. Conversely, although we find many more books in Classical Arabic, my son understands very little of it. Accessible books are rare, while common books are inaccessible. Children do not seek out books written in an old Arabic, because they are full of unknown words and unfamiliar grammatical structures; parents struggle to instill a love of language and learning, or even to access these materials themselves.

Arabs have done this to themselves, doubly damning their communication in diglossia, or linguistic variety, and denying their role in this. Diglossia is a situation in which two or more varieties of a language are shoved together through social circumstances; for Arabic, there are numerous spoken dialects that exist side by side with the formal, standardized al-fuṣḥā, or fus-ha, also known as Modern Standard Arabic or Classical Arabic. Arabs have tried to elevate the only so-called true or pure Arabic, while working to discredit, disable, and even destroy dialects. They have thus made an official language out of a form that nobody considers a native tongue, while making everyone’s different native tongues seem subpar, uncouth, and useless.

This emphasis on preserving Classical Arabic — itself an acknowledgement that the language needs protection, without which it will die out — has made such reading an unlovable experience for most speakers, who struggle to properly speak the language. More importantly, the fixation with or sacred view of the old language has directly affected the dialects.

Speakers can’t pass on their dialects fully because they lack institutional support, have few available tools, and suffer from sociocultural snootiness toward the spoken tongue(s). And they can’t access Classical Arabic — which everyone glorifies but no one speaks as a native — easily enough.

As it is used today, Classical Arabic is not even a complete or living language. Most people do not use it much and only do so in formal settings (or, perhaps, for official purposes). It lacks expressive qualities needed for everyday speech. This discourages wider uptake and use, which in turn creates a scenario where Arabs cannot develop such phrases. If dialects were to disappear tomorrow, people would struggle to use Classical Arabic as an everyday language.

Dialects are limited, too. Often mutually unintelligible, dialects divide people who might otherwise be part of a realm connected culturally by the Arabic language, such as somewhat standardized Arabic in the press and certain sociocultural traditions and practices. Lacking legitimacy and acceptance, dialects are less useful — at least now — in different spheres like education, law, and administration (areas that also involve precedent, meaning that future changes are constrained by the past).

Perhaps nothing illustrates Arabs’ contradictory approach to their language than the messages they give their children. On the one hand, parents laugh at their children when they pick up Classical Arabic words (from, say, cartoons). They chide their children with comments like, “Nobody speaks like that.” But they also implore their children to learn the language they have just exposed as useless and worthy of derision. Recalling a time when her kids were fighting, one Arabic professor laughed with exasperation at the thought of one yelling at the other: “tabban lak!” — an archaic and awkward phrase meaning “damn you.”

On the other hand, people degrade dialects all the time. Children who ask why a certain phrase is used are told they are speaking a “grammarless” or even “fake” language. Even worse, that language might be branded as vulgar. Parents might call someone who uses even the simplest, easiest words of their lexicon a “farmer” or a “barbarian.” In doing so, they attach shame to the language of their daily lives. Unlike Classical Arabic, nonetheless, dialects are unregulated and so better allow users to create new words or absorb new phrases from foreign languages or the old language.

Reviewing global literacy rates against money spent on education, the language professor John Myhill concluded that the focus on Classical Arabic in formal education hurts literacy rates in Arabic-speaking countries. Across the board, even in richer Gulf Arab states, Arabic-speaking literacy rates are lower than expected given the amounts these governments spend on education. The problem is worse than the numbers suggest, although an illiteracy rate of 28% in Egypt should be alarming enough. Exam results, a widely used metric of educational success, fail to convey an accurate picture of language proficiency given reports that people pay bribes to pass literacy exams (according to an article in Al-Fanar, an academic assessment, and my interviews with non-governmental organizations working on literacy in Egypt).

Arabic speakers admit to holding negative views of Classical Arabic — and, relatedly, their own skills in it. Everyone from high school students to adults expressed a “dislike of reading in general, especially ‘longer pieces’ like books,” during a study in Egypt by Niloofar Haeri, a linguistics professor at Johns Hopkins University. Finding Classical Arabic to be “heavy” and “scary,” Haeri’s participants “simply did not enjoy the activity” of reading and found writing to be even more difficult and “intimidating.” Suggesting that the official literacy numbers are shaky at best, she notes that “the majority of people do not attain a level of literacy that allows for participation in various creative or civic communities when these require proficiency in the official language. … Even grammar teachers, copyeditors, and university-educated people speak routinely of their fear of making mistakes.”

They learn to speak one language at home and read or write another language at school.

While other researchers have made different arguments, they ultimately misdiagnose and understate the problem. Helen Abadzi, a faculty member at the University of Texas at Arlington College of Education, claimed in an article that Arabic is difficult for children because the script is complex. Echoing a complaint common among Arab scholars, she stated that reading tests in four Arab countries “have shown a widespread inability to understand written text.” Describing issues that children clearly face because they learn to speak one language at home and read or write another language at school, she concludes that the problem is the complexity of Arabic script. But the script, or the script alone, cannot be the problem. Other languages, such as Persian, use the same script as Arabic, but their users do not face the same reading and writing challenges.

Make no mistake. The problem is diglossia.

When I studied Arabic as a child, and when I restarted studying it as an adult, I didn’t know much about these issues. The more I learned, the angrier I became. Why did I, and millions of other children, have to go through a bad education system that left us frustrated and hating our own language, then go through it again while trying to relearn Arabic as adults, and then perhaps again while trying to teach our children?

If Arabs wanted to keep Classical Arabic and dialects, they could still develop an education system that took on the challenges of diglossia and even turned the presence of dialects and Classical Arabic into a strength.

Read on here

July 10, 2021ACTUALITIES, BDS Campaign

The actors of the film ‘Let There Be Morning’, directed by Israeli Eran Kolirin, are boycotting the Cannes Film Festival, despite the fact that the film will premiere there this Saturday.

Palestinian actors boycott the Cannes Film Festival, as their film is presented as Israeli

The actors, who are Palestinian citizens of Israel, explained in a collective statement on social networks that this is a “political act of absence” to protest against the cultural erasure of Palestinians by Israel. “We cannot ignore the contradiction of the film’s entry at Cannes under the label of an “Israeli film” while Israel continues to carry out its decades-long colonial campaign of ethnic cleansing, expulsion and apartheid against us, the Palestinian people,” the casting team said in a statement. The production team further explained the prejudicial erasure that is done to Palestinians when their work is categorized as “Israeli” in the media.

“Every time the film industry assumes that we and our work fall under the ethno-national label of ‘Israeli,’ it further perpetuates an unacceptable reality that imposes on us, Palestinian artists with Israeli citizenship, an identity imposed by Zionist colonization to maintain the continued oppression of Palestinians within historic Palestine; the denial of our language, history and identity,” the actors wrote.

“[…] Waiting for us to stand idly by and accept the label of a state that has sanctioned this latest wave of violence and dispossession not only normalizes apartheid, but also continues to enable the denial and whitewashing of the violence and crimes inflicted on Palestinians.”

‘Let There Be Morning’ is a film based on a book by Palestinian journalist, screenwriter and author Sayed Kashua. It tells the story of Sami, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who returns to his hometown with his family to attend his brother’s wedding. After the wedding, Sami, his wife and son encounter Israeli soldiers who force them to stay in the village, and Sami is soon imprisoned and besieged in his hometown, not knowing why or for how long.

“The film, which is the result of our collective creative work, is about “The State of Siege,” a phrase coined by the revered Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich,” the release said. “The state of siege manifests itself in walls, checkpoints, physical and psychological barriers, and the subordination and violation of the Palestinians’ identity, culture, movement and basic human rights.

The film stars concluded their explanation by calling on international artistic and cultural institutions to amplify the voice of Palestinian artists and creators, as they “resist all forms of Israeli colonial oppression against the right of the Palestinian people to live, be and create. The statement was signed by actors Alex Bakri, Juna Suleiman, Ehab Elias Salameh, Salim Daw, Izabel Ramadan, Samer Bisharat, Yara Jarrar, Marwan Hamdan, Duraid Liddawi, Areen Saba, Adib Safadi and Sobhi Hosary.

Director Kolirin told Haaretz, “I understand [the reason for their action] and I support each of their decisions … It hurts me that they are not here to celebrate their amazing work, but I respect their position.”

Source: Middle East Monitor

Februari 14 2003

What are you going to do there, the somewhat incredulous Ami had asked me ?

It must be said that in general, Syrians do not like to be sent to this region very much. Deir is a bit like the Wild West and last night, I thought so in a cyber  crowded with kids, no one was surfing(way too expensive), but they use the computers to play. The people in charge give me their own pc to access the Internet. On my web page I intend to correct a title, when suddenly a cup flies above my head and comes crashing on the wall behind me. There ia a noise of broken dishes towards the entrance. A window is broken. A melee ensues that becomes more serious when knives come out and two boys (17 and 13 years old) try to cut the cyber managers. Their hands are slashed and when they call for help, they flood the phone with blood. I tell myself that my editing will have to wait and I hand out some Kleenex. Angry at their attackers, they scream in a language I no longer recognize. I don’t think the killers are aiming at me, but still, I’m afraid someone will die. The police arrive and the victims go to the hospital for treatment.

When I returned to the scene this morning, I didn’t see them anymore and I hope they didn’t lose their jobs because at first sight they had nothing to do with this mess. The little I understood of the situation made me think of Brussels and the Marolians’ raids at the Jambe de bois (a café near the Place Anneessens) that you are all too small to have known. At that time, the Marolians were underprivileged Belgians while the population of the Jambe was composed of students and it was regularly assaulted with a peak at the Saint V the big student feast.

Let’s go back to Deir. One reason for coming here is the Euphrates, whose name I much prefer in Arabic: el Fourati. There are also the remarkable ruins of some fortresses and especially of Dura Europos and Mari (already inhabited before the XXVth century B.C. and one of the strongholds of the Sumerians) towards the Iraqi border.

At the airport of Deir, no cab, no shuttle. With two other travelers we wait. One of them ends up going to a Rover and soon invites us to join him. An extremely kind gentleman is at the wheel and drives us to our respective destinations. Just like that. It was a good start and the rest is history.

I stay at a hotel that a friend told me was on the banks of the Euphrates. Not so, I am in fact at the edge of the canal. The river is 500 meters away towards the French bridge, a suspended footbridge.

Deir is close to Iraq not only geographically, but also by accent, music and affinity. Here, the war is felt even more painfully than elsewhere.

I have talked about them at length; some of them even make common cause with Saddam, even Ossama. Don’t rush to the conclusion that they are terrorists, but the Americans are pushing some Arabs towards these people because they need personalities who can rally them. They tease me about “old Europe” and I tell them that we have become the new Arabs.

The inhabitants speak a different Arabic than in Damascus; as for the music, I love it: harsh, it has desert accents.

I have to find transportation to visit the sites conveniently and as the hotel is very evasive, I take things in hand.When I boarded the cab of Hani, I knew at once that hewas the man of the situation. The symbiosis is total since he does everything I want which is not obvious in this country where the man often does not even listen to what the woman suggests. Except for MamnouA (verboten), nickname we gave to my sister during her visit; the driver not having lowered the radio after her repeated requests, she must have frightened him so much that we had peace during the rest of the trip. Same thing for the hotels that he suggested so insistently that it was hard to resist, except for MamnouA. It was convenient to have a sister who took the unpopular attitudes for me.

As for Hani, I spent three wonderful days with this very young man, dignified, classy, who was visibly interested in my visits himself. I even spent an evening at his home with his wife, his children and the mayor of Deir.

I even went as far as Qamishle to see the Tigris, but Ain Diwar is beyond what my back can handle and that will be for another time. Little did I know that I would soon see it in Baghdad.

Deir Ez-Zor

Used by the nomads of the Middle East, the Arabic word zor refers to the scrubby vegetation that covers the lower terraces of the desert river valleys, especially those of the Jordan and Euphrates, says Universalis.  

A look at the city

Qalat Rahba (on the road to Abou Kamal)

Doura Europos

Fourati

Mari

And above all, the people

Below is a crucial character: it is thanks to him that I am sending you these pictures. I had forgotten my camera in his car and he went looking for me to give it back.

I think the restaurant is called Sayag; the happy cooks

The famous tanour, makes the best bread ever

January 2003 My sister and her husband visit

Filed under: Blog — annie at 3:22 pm on Thursday, January 30, 2003 Edit This

January 2003

Translation: Time moves quickly; I’m almost halfway through my stay. I don’t realize I’m in Syria because I feel so at home. Everything is going smoothly; I feel transparent..

The weather

Springtime weather. Cat are in heat and you can hear them courting

The exams

They ended today (January 18). I did pretty well. I’ll be reunited with most of my classmates next semester.
In the meantime, I’m going to treat myself to a real vacation because the pace has been steady for four months. However, stamina quickly increased use, and I was doing just fine studying six hours every day.

The Iraq War

In my class at the Institute, we decide to stay if the Americans invade Iraq. However, if the Belgian embassy told me to pack up, I would be forced to leave.

The Dutch received a pre-warning and the Germans have recensed their nationals in Jordan.

Saddam, and for that matter Osama, have few supporters here, but that doesn’t mean the Syrians support Bush.

The New Year’s Eve

I buried 2002 in a wonderful place, the Umayyad Palace, photos below.

What makes its charm is obviously the setting, but also Samir, the boss.

After restoring a real ruin, he wanted to turn it into a museum, but he finally decided to open a restaurant. Samir is Palestinian and his wife is Syrian. Palestinians are much better treated in Syria than in Lebanon, for example, where they are excluded from many professions. Here, although not having access to nationality, they have the same rights as Syrians.

This is the only place in Damascus where you will see a real whirling dervish. On the occasion of the new year, he is accompanied by his son who also spins.

Heart of gold, Samir is extremely generous, a quality much appreciated among Arabs. During Ramadan, he invites several groups of orphans to his restaurant. At his place, the atmosphere is simple, but the oriental buffet is excellent. For this New Year’s Eve, there were only Syrians accompanied by their families, including children.

Although frequented by tourists, the place was not deserted by locals.

One evening, I met a direct descendant of Charlemagne.

In search of Arabs

Who is an Arab here? You, my Syrian friend, you are Christian, but still Arab? No, I am Syrian.
And you, my friend, you are Syrian? Yes, but I am an Arab.
The others are Turks (500,000), Kurds (1 million), Armenians, Circassians, descendants of the Crusaders, Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, a real melting pot in short. What unites them is the language, the nationality and for the 80% of Muslims, the religion. The great Saladin was a Muslim before he was a Kurd.

Churches

They are numerous in Damascus. Here is an Orthodox church, Holy Cross, near Bab Touma.

Working in the street

Mattrass “renewer“

When I was growing up in Brussels, we used to take the woolen mattresses to him to wash and re-fluff them.

Carpet sellers

Besides the specialized stores, there are merchants who set up their business in the street before the first cold. In the houses, they clear the carpets when the heat returns.

A street office

We see small tables in the street where people fill out questionnaires. They are also public writers although the literacy rate is high.

The last hakawati0

He is a professional storyteller.
He reads an episodic story that can be heard every day at 5 p.m. at the Nawfara cafe. He has his followers who come to watch the show daily.

Here is the path to the Nawfura (it skirts the mosque of Ommeyades) and a view of its terrace.

The storyteller’s name is Rasheed El Hallak /Abou Shadee, which means father of Shadee.

After a long preamble in which he pays tribute to the great men of the past, he gets to the heart of the matter.

I can distinguish a few words, but there is little hope that I will soon learn the twists and turns of his stories about Sultan Beybars among others (one of the heroes of the fight against the crusaders; he took the Krak back from them . My brother-in-law, who knows Arabic very well, hardly understands it any better than I do because the hakawati speaks in popular Syrian Arabic with a strong accent. However, he sometimes reads texts in Fou-ha. After the show, he will let me look at his antique notebooks, all handwritten, which come down from generations of predecessors.

The show is worth it: watching Abu Shadee’s exchanges with the audience, seeing him interrupt to ask for a glass of tea or to look down on the chatterboxes, watching the regulars pull on their hookahs (did I tell you that we say “drink” a hookah in Arabic?) and ESPECIALLY waiting for the moment when he swings his sword and hits the innocent stool .
Everyone shouts HEY; there follows a delicious wait as there may be a second and third blow. Arabic coffee is served in small cups that are passed from one to the other.

Abu Shadee is unfortunately the last of his dynasty.
Wouldn’t there be someone to take over the torch?
My friend, a tour guide without work because of the state of affairs, asks him if she has a chance. He encourages her to go for it. And we are in Syria, and she is a woman!