Our fusHa (classical Arabic) teacher is an adorable, kindly man. He’s a father of four, the oldest of whom is seven, and is the son of the son of a fusHa teacher. He speaks in a voice that could address an audience of 300, though we're only about a dozen, in a room twice the size of a bathroom. We struggle in his class. We’ve all taken classical Arabic before, but most of us have never had classroom instruction solely in fusHa at this level. And he will not speak English to us. Not only will he politely refuse to respond to our English inquiries (for example: “This word means what? Bilateral relations?!”) he will respond by reminding us that he doesn’t speak English. At first, we smiled polite, stressed grins indicating that we understood his desire to not translate his descriptions into English.
However, we’ve since come to understand that, really, he DOESN’T speak much English. We are on our own for understanding and sharing amongst ourselves revelations.
He therefore goes to extraordinary lengths to describe, in Arabic, words or concepts we don’t understand. This is a useful tool to practice, for when we’re on the streets in Egypt we cannot trust that the person we converse with speaks English and can help us when we falter. But this is also frustrating when it happens frequently in class. Far too frequently for my taste, or patience. His lessons, as far as I understand, go something like this: Who here works in a [word]? [Word?] What's the meaning of [word]? You know, it's like [other word], which you use when [word] [word] author takes [word].
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I’m convinced our 3amiyya (dialectical Arabic) teacher thinks I’m an idiot. I’ve never had this much trouble keeping up with a class. Rather, since high school math, I’ve never had this much trouble keeping up with a class. I’m pretty sure I placed into “accelerated 3amiyya” with the same oversight I was placed into advanced math class in elementary school: Namely, an attitude of “Meh, she’s okay at the other topics, why not?”
Each day, I feel like I’m riding an Egyptian bus, careening through narrow streets and clinging desperately with one lone appendage. Without fail, every day I will scarcely grasp a concept, begin to dictate this discovery furiously in my notebook, then be called upon by a concerned-looking teacher who has noticed that I no longer appear to be paying attention and must be goofing off. If hearing and speaking and writing fusHa – classical Arabic – weren’t difficult enough, and if using fusHa as the sheer means to learn 3amiyya weren’t utterly anxiety-inducing, the bullet-spray speech of our 3amiyya teacher would be enough to murder the tenuous understanding of any timid student. Or perhaps, it’s just enough to murder me. Sometimes I come extremely close to grasping a concept but have missed one key word. The teacher seems to NOT BELIEVE that I don’t grasp a concept AGAIN and sometimes looks to the heavens for strength, or to my classmates to translate for the poor slow kid sitting in the back of the classroom. (I sit back there because it’s less likely anyone will notice when I melt into a steaming puddle of Idiot.) I almost threw my hands up and laughed last week when our teacher was trying to describe the difference between the word “batata” and “batatas” for us. The spoiler of this story is that I failed to grasp the fine differentiation. But the meat of the story comes when I swear to the Moon and the Stars and the Sky that she told us one of the words is “the type you find in the ocean” – to which I replied, incredulously, in English, “Potatoes in the ocean?!” My classmates rolled their eyes and politely ignored my slippery slide into the Pit of Despair.
At times in this class I confront startlingly vivid memories from kindergarten through third grade – those formative years of school in which a child’s natural intellect is molded into local and national pedagogical norms. For the first time in, oh, 20 years I REMEMBER the frustration I felt as a five-year-old who HAD the answer, but didn’t understand that the teacher wanted us to, say, write the answer with a blue crayon on a yellow construction-paper star, or who was daydreaming about how the concept we just learned applied to what I discovered in the garden the day before and missed the next concept, or who was reprimanded for speaking out of turn when in fact I was just so damn excited to have the right answer for once I couldn’t help but to shout it!
I’ve nearly given up on achieving full comprehension of the Egyptian dialect. Now I’m just aiming to be the comic relief.
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The man who teaches Intermediate fusHa, which is unfortunately not the class I’m in, is a stocky, intense, jovial man who refers to himself affectionately as “the Mexican.” He could pass for 35 or 40, but informed us on our first day in Alexandria that it was his 23rd birthday. He has swooned every student in his class with his fierce love of classical Arabic (for most of us are struggling still with the Egyptian dialect and almost prefer the ancient language we’ve learned in American classrooms), and for his unexpected cultural tesseracts.
To a student who incorrectly conjugated a verb and dropped the long “oo” vowel, he admonished: “Respect the ‘wow,’ man”
To another student who biffed his conjugation and forgot the grammatical marker that indicates a double letter: “Respect my ‘shadda.’ I will kill you.”
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Last week we took our midterm exams/quizzes/assessments in all three classes. Following a two-hour fusHa exam that liquefied my brain, I took a few moments to sit back in my desk and stare affectionately at the wall, admiring its simplicity. In that moment, I was the wall.
One classmate agreed. Though, a little more intelligently. He took the verb “to fail,” or “feshala,” and used it in its noun form: Feshal!
FAIL!
Then, using a grammatical construction we had learned to make an adjective into a superlative (for example, how delicious the food! How beautiful your sister!) , he expounded thoughtfully, “How failing your failure!”
But, not to worry. After all, they say the first ten years are the hardest.
And, speaking of “FESHAL!” here’s the latest example of makes-you-blush Engrish, written on our dry cleaning bags.
