In the tram in Cologne, I once chanced upon a group of young girls who were occupying the back benches and clamouring in Turkish. They grew louder by the minute, their laughter went wild, and they took out pens and lip balms from their handbags and threw them at each other. At that stage, a middle-aged lady sitting two rows from them intervened and lectured them, in Turkish \u2013 about their manners and noisy behaviour, I suppose. Although they did not look exactly shamefaced, they refrained from answering her back, collected their things and quietened down for a moment. Soon they resumed their jolly party, this time in German, dissociating themselves from the common ground they shared with the Turkish lady and, by extension, from her authority.<\/p>\n
My father too was bilingual and used to move with ease between Arabic and English. He was a linguistic phenomenon in the sense that English was his first language, but not his mother tongue. He had been sent by the Education Ministry of Iraq to Oxford in the 1920s to study English, learn to speak it without an accent and come back as an English teacher. He was fourteen and a pilot scheme of sorts. In the course of his four years in boarding school, he lived up to expectations and learned to speak English as well as a native speaker. The pilot scheme failed nonetheless as he also forgot his Arabic \u2013 a side-effect that nobody had taken into account. He relearned it in no time, but with a vague foreign accent which called his origins into question. As a rule, my father spoke Arabic at home and would shift to English whenever he wanted to give us a word of advice or a piece of his mind. He counted, kept books, and corresponded in English. He sang me nursery rhymes like Georgie Porgie and Humpty Dumpty. I never asked him in what language he thought, but I guess that English was a world into which he withdrew whenever he was dismayed at the world he actually lived in.<\/p>\n
At the Jewish school in Baghdad, we were taught French along with Arabic, while English followed a few years later. At secondary school, English and French were a significant part of the curriculum \u2013 about sixteen hours weekly. In addition to the Iraqi state exams, we also sat for French school exams and took A and O levels. As a result we found ourselves studying subjects like Maths, Physics and Chemistry in three languages. What our education was obviously telling us was that we would get nowhere without foreign languages, implying that our future was bound to lie abroad.<\/p>\n
As for myself, I remained ignorant of maths, physics and chemistry, but retained the languages.<\/p>\n
I was sixteen when we fled Baghdad, leaving everything behind, including Arabic, my mother tongue. Under other circumstances, I might well have been seduced by its refined poetry and complex grammar. In my reality though, I had disowned it years before our escape, on account of one word: \u062f\u0648\ufbad\ufef4\ufee0\ufe8d, the Jews. After the Arab defeat in the 1967 Six Day War, Al yahoud became the incarnation of evil thanks to the hail of unsavoury epithets pelted at it daily by Arab politicians, by the press and other media. Artists and intellectuals contributed to the war effort and instilled hatred into generations to come. You could either hate yourself or break with Arabic. I opted for the lesser of two evils.<\/p>\n
Hebrew was relatively easy to learn due to its similarity to Arabic \u2013 both being Semitic languages. It was my fourth language and, eager as I was to be an Israeli, Hebrew was programmed to jump the line and become my first. As it happened, that position would remain vacant. At university, I experienced no difficulty in taking down notes in Hebrew or reading English textbooks, but I had the funny feeling that I was learning the same material twice, as if storing it in two separate language zones. In time I came to realise that my memory and a good part of my cognitive faculties \u2013 including the analytical and aesthetical tools I would acquire over the years \u2013 were divided among four language zones, with a certain degree of overlap and few connecting tunnels.<\/p>\n
Although I became quite proficient in spoken Hebrew, I still preferred to read in English and French. Out of laziness, I supposed, it took me too long to decipher the Hebrew alphabet. Out of resistance, as my Israeli-born friends put it. It annoyed them that after so many years I was still more at home with English and French. As second-generation immigrants, they had rejected the language of their parents \u2013 whether Polish, German, Arabic, Yiddish, or French \u2013 for the sake of Hebrew. In contrast to them I was a first-generation immigrant with a past I was still unsure whether to tackle or to consign to oblivion. In retrospect I\u2019d say that by cultivating French and English I was intuitively fostering my sense of continuity. Unlike Arabic, the two were not associated with painful experiences, and, as opposed to Hebrew, they had been around almost from the start. Or did I also reason, in some unconscious part of myself, that my next future was bound to be abroad again \u2013 in London, Paris, or New York \u2013 and that I would get nowhere without the foreign languages?<\/p>\n
In the light of my limited command of each of my four languages, I never aspired to be a writer. When I came to Germany in the mid-1980s (and learned German, regrettably at the expense of French) I was involved in conceptual art. In time, language infiltrated my work until words finally supplanted images. A mental block helped in the process. A night-long performance left me empty and exhausted for months during which I could not think art any more. To keep myself busy, I started writing \u2013 in English, there was no question about it. Was I following in my father\u2019s footsteps, living out his nostalgia? Was it the rhyme of Georgie Porgie which made English seem so intimate and accessible \u2013 an adopted mother tongue of sorts? It was an intuitive choice rather than one based on reason. On bad days, I tend to have my doubts about my decision to write, but I have never questioned the choice of English, despite the daily labour of shutting myself off from my German environment in order to tune my mind to English.<\/p>\n
If I pointed a finger of blame at an Arabic word earlier in the text, I would like to add that I owe my Baghdad novel to another. Al Azrak was the name of a character in a short story by Paul Bowles \u2013 it means indigo in Arabic. It was a word I hadn\u2019t heard for more than two decades, not particularly significant, but for reasons I cannot explain, I was overjoyed at the reunion. I kept enunciating it, taking delight in every syllable and repeated it over and over as if anxious that it would slip away again. Al Azrak triggered the need to dig up more and more forgotten words and sounds and smells, and eventually to write down my reminiscences of my childhood and of Baghdad.<\/p>\n
On a trip to Lisbon I came across a commemorative wall in a park: a long horizontal slab of light brown stone on which the brass characters were mounted. As a large portion of the characters was missing, vandalised I suppose, you could not make out whether it initially had been a running text or columns of names. The damaged surface of the stone and the traces of the missing words evoked my sense of loss in relation to language, as much as my reclamation of that loss through the process of writing.<\/p>\n
When I start on a new text, my thoughts are usually in a mixture of two or more languages. So first I look up the English terms, filling linguistic gaps so-to-speak, but the translation does not automatically unify my thinking. Besides, I find no English equivalent for the word \ufee2\ufea4\ufeee\ufe98\ufe98 in Arabic, or to the expression ..\u05e7\u05e4\u05e1 ..\u05e7\u05e4\u05e1 in Hebrew. No proper term for the German Begegnung either. I am reluctant to lose them in translation \u2013 a sign that I still have a foot in both camps. The telephone rings. I do not pick it up, I cannot afford to slip into German, not right now. I consult the English dictionary for the hundred and first time to verify that I am using the correct words in the correct way. I cross out two false friends. The text is taking shape. I go for a stroll and wish I had somebody to talk to in English. Somehow, my English-speaking friends have either moved out of town or we are not that friendly any more. Back home, I read out what I have written and feel at one with my voice. I carry on working and realise at a certain point that I am thinking only in English and that I am not so much of a foreigner in my mind any more. In the evening, my partner is back from work, and German moves to centre stage while English slowly seeps away. Tomorrow morning, the chase will start all over again.<\/p>\n
Rather than an adopted language which comes to stay, my English proves unreliable and feels like a borrowed tongue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the tram in Cologne, I once chanced upon a group of young girls who were occupying the back benches and clamouring in Turkish. They grew louder by the minute, their laughter went wild, and they took out pens and lip balms from their handbags and threw them at each other. At that stage, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":15564,"template":"","categories":[42,12],"class_list":["post-14823","stsp_text","type-stsp_text","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-issue-17","category-non-fiction"],"yoast_head":"\n