Traveling without a Mahram

The first time I traveled without going anywhere, it was through a foreign language.

I was sixteen years old when I first met the French language, in my third year of secondary school. Since I was in the literature division, I was required to explore and touch the world of this language, and to allow it to touch me, in my hidden-away heart. It became something I was passionate about.

A week after registration for classes for the new semester, Saqr spotted the French textbook in my hand while I was getting ready to leave for school. He snatched it from me.

“What’s this?” he asked in disbelief.

“A French textbook.”

“And why is Your Highness registered for French?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Are we going to abandon the language of the Quran and spend our whole lives studying the language of the unbelievers?”

“French is required for literature students.”

“You’re in the literature division?”

“You didn’t know?”

“Why don’t you study something respectable? Science, math . . .”

“My grades weren’t good enough.”

“And why not? Because you don’t study!”

There wasn’t anything for me to say, because I have been branded with suspicion and everything is my fault.

“This is what happens when you mess up.”

He said it while opening the book with the tips of his fingers, as if he were touching something contaminated. He paged through it a little, his face sullen, disgusted. I didn’t understand the point of paging through a book you couldn’t understand. “What a joke. This is a defeated ummah, from head to toe! Uncertain of who we are, infatuated by the West, imitating the unbelievers in everything!”

He said Arabic is the best of all languages, that it’s the most beautiful and eloquent language on earth, that it’s the language of Paradise, that I should be proud of it instead of studying the “language of unbelievers.” I would have liked to ask him: How is learning French an insult to Arabic? How is it possible for there to be a believer language and an unbeliever language? But I didn’t dare. I lowered my gaze and started trying to get out of the situation while he went on about his love and passion for Arabic, even though he frequently mispronounced and misspelled words and mercilessly rendered all verbs in the accusative case, right or wrong.

Even though it was a very basic course, I was charmed by the beauty of French. It made me happy that life could be different. A language that is like music—you love the way it feels in your ear and in your mouth, you put its vocabulary in your heart and experience its lightness, its flutter, its coquettishness, and its ability to melt on your tongue. A dancing language, filled with elongations, inflections, and elisions, and many silent letters, like boxes filled with secrets. If you dare to speak it, you feel you’re speaking with a tongue full of honey, afraid the honey will spill, that it will drip from the corners of your lips; you worry that the honey will slip out and you’ll be left without.

I paged through the book every day to find a new word. I’d spell out its letters, both silent and pronounced. I’d trace it on my palm, hide it in my mouth. I explored this new world like the discoverers going to the ends of the earth: an entire continent of my own. I buried myself under dozens of pillows and read “la fleur blanche.” I repeated: “La fleur blanche! La fleur blanche! What a jolie fleur blanche you are . . .” I loved the French ‘r,’ which is pronounced like the Arabic letter ghayn. I tickled and caressed the letters in my mouth. Fleur! I felt I was diving deep and leaving my reality, inside the French ghayn. The things around me were no longer what they were. This isn’t my room and my room is not in a basement, and the air conditioner doesn’t drone, and the ceiling isn’t filled with yellow blotches and the olive rug is a green meadow. I traveled. I traveled in language, without a passport and, more importantly, without a mahram—a male guardian.

Saqr sensed the wondrous chemistry that this language set off in me: the slowness in my mouth, the lightness of my steps, the shine in my eyes, my walk that was almost a dance. I was in love and everything I said and did betrayed me.

Every time he came down to the basement and found me stretched out on my back, French book in hand, courageously practicing the pronunciation of each word until it was just right, he would start complaining.

“Do you spend all day in front of that book?”

“I have a test,” I’d lie. I would ignore other subjects just to read a line in French. I was discovering my passion.

“If you’d studied science like you study French now, your grades wouldn’t have been so poor, mazmoizelle.”

“Mademoiselle,” I corrected him.

But he liked the first one better. He liked it specifically because it annoyed me, and he started repeating “Mazmoizelle . . . mazmoizelle.” Then just “mazmaz,” and finally, shortening and playing with the pronunciation so that it was alternately “maz,” sour, and “mazza,” appetizer.

Many other words fell victim to his sabotage attempts. ‘Bonjour’ became ‘bon-sure,’ ‘bon-cure’; ‘bonsoir’ became ‘bon-saw,’ ‘bon-paw.’ Once when we were getting into the car he asked me how to say ‘car’ in French. I told him: “Voiture,” and he told me I looked like I was about to throw up. From then on he started calling the black Lancer ‘Foitoot.’

Day after day, word after word, Saqr ruined the beauty of French, poisoned it, walked all over it, and left its letters broken and bleeding in my mouth. Whenever he asked me about a word and I answered him, he did what he could to make it into a joke. Everyone would laugh, and I had to pretend to laugh with them and pretend to accept it, as if it didn’t hurt.

In this world it was no longer possible for someone to study a beautiful language that is like music, whose words flow like streams and cleanse the soul. That was a luxury I didn’t deserve. I wondered: If it was possible to travel through language, the way I traveled to the cafés of Paris, to its streets, sidewalks, and dark alleys when I repeated “la fleur blanche,” if it’s possible for a person to travel in a foreign language, could I travel in my mother tongue?

My old language was sad by nature, polluted by others, splattered with their mud. It sank under the burden of words locked up out of reach and a monopoly on truth that killed their unique meanings—this language, my language, could I refine it, recreate it, and claim it for myself alone? Could it be something that resembles me and speaks with my voice?

On that day I was, if only in my thoughts, very much a poet.