We struggled to teach our children Arabic. It seemed important to retain what they had known of the language before we left the country. As parents, this issue is tragic, yet to our children it is comic since they feel such deep concern about our mother tongue is unwarranted. To them, our insistence on speaking Arabic is mere nostalgia arising from our attachment to a bygone past. They link it to the folklore and habits of the motherland and compare it to the tradition of eating hot kishk on cold, winter evenings.
‘Cool! It’s cool, our Arabic, but what’s the big deal?’ they ask. This attitude, which we hear so often, confirms our suspicion that language to them is no more than a series of fragments – halves and quarters taken from many different languages, including Arabic.
‘But, dear, what about our language?’ I ask my son. ‘Don’t forget it’s what you heard as a child back in Lebanon.’
‘Sure thing! Our mother tongue is cool, really cool,’ he mocks me in Arabic. ‘We’re using it right now, aren’t we?’
This is as far as you will ever get in such a discussion. It is unlikely that your son or daughter will be interested in further debating a seemingly incomprehensible subject that clearly means so much to you as a parent but little to them. Actually, Arabic means a lot to me. When we left Lebanon, my son was ten years old. To me, Arabic is the harmony I created while communicating with people in Lebanon. Yet my son’s language has obviously been imparted to him by the world he inhabits.
I used to think that we appropriate the objects we own vocally, that the paraphernalia we use in our daily lives responds to the very sounds emitted by our vocal chords. My son, on the other hand, believes that the objects we have to leave behind only belong to the voices that happen to call to them, to vocalise their names. That’s why I write and he paints.
Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and find my son sitting in front of his computer screen. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask, intrigued. He tells me he is chatting online with young men from all over the world. They use virtual names and addresses that only turn real after an online friendship develops and confidential e-mails are sent.
I sit next to him, my eyes glued to the screen. He tells me about Internet language and explains that he chats with these people using a coded language of acronyms and abbreviations that Internet users are apparently familiar with. Ban, he tells me, actually stands for burns, and ASL stands for the age, sex, and location of the interlocutor he is talking to. This is basically a new version of English, interspersed with other languages and simplified in its phraseology so as to facilitate communication between people living in different parts of the globe.
‘Is this the new global language?’ I ask in dismay. ‘Of course not,’ he quickly replies, assuring me that this is only ‘chat’ language. In the blinking dialogue box on the screen, a steady stream of racist profanities is being exchanged by my son and his Swedish chat buddy. I start arguing against the vicissitudes of Nazism and white power groups but my son gives me strange looks that make my concerns seem naïve and out of place. This rabid Swedish Nazi could very well be our sweet Arab neighbour who owns a grocery shop in the adjacent street. Foul talk could simply be a way to escape boredom under the protection of online anonymity. ‘Mom, this is just chat. You don’t need to start fussing again.’
Once, I caught him chatting up his best friend in Lebanon, using a fake name and the same foul language that his Internet pals are so fond of. He laughed and said that chatting has become an addiction among the young in Lebanon today. I wonder how much Lebanon has changed over the years. People who have never left the country are now able to travel vicariously through the Internet to a world of ‘chat’, where barriers crumble and rules cease to exist.
Translated by Sleiman El-Hajj