Why Not Arabic?

It’s hard for me to answer that question myself. Why did I lose the language that I was born into? How did it so easily escape from me? After moving to the United States in February of 2016, I began to ask myself the same question. Why not Arabic? I truly did not think it would be that easy for a girl like me— born and raised in Qatar, originally from Sudan— to lose my Arabic so easily. To this day, I still understand most of the language, but I quickly began losing the speaking aspect of it as I became more focused on perfecting my English.

Wherever I went, when I would visit family or even walk into my own house, the instant smell of bakhoor, wood chips that have been soaked in perfume oil, would absorb me. With such a beautiful scent, I recognized I was home. Walking into such a distinctive smell, I felt comforted and safe. As I started losing my Arabic, I started to feel less secure. I never realized that such an ominous feeling was catching up to me. I would regularly call my grandmother (haboba, what we would say in the Sudanese dialect) back at home and I would hear the same question as time went on: Why is your Arabic so broken now? I didn’t even realize that when I was trying to form the words to talk back to my grandma, I began to start mixing my Arabic and English in the same sentence. I just couldn’t seem to figure out the words. What happened? You used to speak Arabic so fluently, America changed you. “Ma Arfa haboba” (I don’t know Grandma), I responded. I knew what I wanted to say, but it just took me a lot longer to figure out the words.

I have lost and forgotten a lot of things in my life: my keys, my debit card, a sock, my brother’s birthday. Just like for everyone, forgetting something is a part of my life as much as having a strong memory. But only once in my life have I ever witnessed a great memory die under questionable circumstances. This death escalated rather quickly. I grew up speaking this language and it was always stored in my head - speaking wise, comprehension wise - up until a few years ago. I had, for almost twelve years, used it every day for most of my life. I remembered it so well that I could talk to anyone, even people who spoke in different dialects. And then, about a few years ago, I tried to keep a conversation going with my haboba, and all of a sudden it wasn’t there. “Keif al madrasa”, she would ask - meaning how is school. I responded with, “Al madrasa kweysa, lakin … my classes are hard” — which meant school is good, but… I began to develop a stutter. I couldn’t think of the right words. They were somewhere in my head, but I just had no memory of how to say them anymore. They simply disappeared. This death felt like a black hole I was quickly sinking into. “La hawla,” haboba responded with, which meant Oh god. I heard the disappointment in her voice. I could barely read the letters anymore. The only three vowels in the language became harder and harder to grasp as the years went by. Reading and writing from right to left rather than the norm I became used to (English’s left to right) became so foreign to me. I became too caught up in my life in America that I didn’t realize that this death in my memory was catching up to me. I've plagiarized my life by losing my Arabic. It was something I once knew and something that once 'belonged' to me. After losing it, I can't say it is mine anymore. I became a burglar in my own language. I took it away from myself. So now when I try to speak or write, I am plagiarizing who I once was.

Arabic has always been a part of my life. When I’d go to a store and, and someone would ask me if I speak Arabic because I look of Arab descent, I used to be able to say, “Oh yes, I speak Arabic fluently!” Now it’s turned into “I can understand, I just don’t speak it very well.” Arabic was a language that was part of me, but now I feel like it’s not. It’s a scary feeling - feeling alienated from something I once knew. I have a lot of family members living in America, so Why not Arabic? — or even What happened to your Arabic? is a question I come to ask myself too. Trying to keep up a conversation and just mixing back and forth from Arabic to English, I end up feeling embarrassed, to the point where my Arabic tongue has slowly developed into all English. I became too diffident to keep the conversation going any longer. I didn’t want them to hear the struggle in my voice - from something I once knew so well. I let myself drown in the silence.

To be drowning in the silence of what once used to be my mother tongue is a silence I don’t want around anymore. I want to escape this feeling. I want the question Why not Arabic to go away. I want to be able to speak Arabic fluently, like I once used to, so now that starts with the changes I decide to make for myself. I took an Arabic class last semester, and my haboba has been helping me - reminding me of some simple words I keep forgetting, and just taking the steps I need to take. Jhumpa Lahiri writes about her love for learning a new language that ‘didn’t belong to her’ (as others around her implied). She loved Italian because she “felt the need to have a relationship with the language” (Lahiri 9). She wanted a challenge to be able to tackle so she compares her struggles using the metaphor of different kinds of doors (“porta” - in Italian). She explains how she has "struggled to open a series of doors. Each one leads [her] to another. The more [she] confronts them, the more [she passes] through them, the more others appear, needing to be opened, to be overcome." The more she had to learn, the more she experienced the doors opening in learning new things, along with the ‘barricaded’ doors, which were more challenging to figure out. This shows me as a reader that she is willing and, more importantly, motivated to learn Italian no matter what tries to stop her. This metaphor had the greatest impact on me because Lahiri’s motivation to learn this new language almost pushes me to motivate myself in re-learning Arabic. I am slowly beginning to feel comforted by the scent of bakhoor once again. My main goal now is to change the question from Why not Arabic? to Why Arabic? from now on. “Inshallah” (If God wills), as my haboba would say, I could accomplish it.