Quite tired
It’ll be an exhausting semester: it’s just begun, and I’m tired. Modern Standard Arabic has definitely always been my forte, but now my colloquial homework is starting to look much more attractive since it involves watching TV serials and chatting with people rather than slogging through difficult texts. The most exciting thing that had happened to me in the past few days was seeing one of the actors from the television serial we’re watching for class hanging out in a cafe. My friend and I worked up the courage to say hi to him, and he politely chatted with us for a few minutes, although he seemed somewhat on guard–perhaps he was confused at having been recognized by two Americans.
New York is supposed to be full of celebrities, but in four years there I saw precious few of them (I also don’t watch much TV and friends have “spotted” people whom I’ve never heard of). By far the best place I’ve been in for local celebrity-spotting is Beirut. A friend and I watched a rather bad Lebanese movie, Al-Bosta (The Bus, about a troupe of actors who reinvent a folk dance to techno music) while in Beirut, and within the next two days we had seen three of the principle actors in restaurants around the city. Damascus is a bit larger, but my colloquial Arabic teacher still instructed me to try to run into the television serial actor again: I should ask for his phone number, she said, and invite him to talk to the class.
A new semester
Thursday was the orientation day for CASA’s fall semester, and it looks like we’ll have just about as much Arabic homework as we can possibly stand—although the texts we’re reading also seem like they’ll present a marked improvement over some of what we read in the summer. The fall semester’s rubric contains four different classes: Colloquial Arabic, Reading and Vocabulary, Speaking and Listening, and Independent Reading. In colloquial, we’ll be continuing on with the interrupted summer syllabus that became truncated when our teacher’s shoulder got smashed (thankfully, she seems fine now), along with watching episodes from the Syrian serial “The Difficulty of Crying” (عصي الدمع). In Reading and Vocabulary, we will attempt to absorb pages and pages of reading—the entirety of Abdul Rahman Munif’s The Trees and the Assassination of Marzuq and Hoda Barakat’s Stone of Laughter, as well one classical text and multiple modern texts per week, including excerpts from other books. Speaking and Listening will involve listening to various recorded television broadcasts and—surprise—talking about them. For Independent Reading, we were asked to read choose any book to read on our own throughout the semester and discuss our progress weekly with a professor. I chose Mohammad al-Maghout’s I Will Betray My Homeland, a long collection of prose-poem-essays, which I’m excited about for several reasons: I wanted to read something that dealt with Syrian culture, history, and politics since I’m here in Damascus, and I wanted it to be something whose language I could admire and enjoy. Maghout was a poet as well as a novelist and screenwriter, so each of the short pieces in the book are well-crafted with a great attention to detail, and his book is highly critical of Syrian society and Arab nationalism—though with the critical eye of one who loves his country enough to want it to be better, not the estranged malevolence of some neo-con expats I could think of.
I’m sure I’ll learn a great deal this semester, but for now I just foresee myself being bent prone like a slender willow branch under the weight of my homework, and I’m feeling quite apprehensive.
Duly humbled
The heat these past few days has been stifling, and even on my balcony I’ve had to resort to sitting in damp clothing in order to keep cool for lack of a breeze. But at the very least, for now I’m no longer being stifled by my homework: today was our final exam for CASA’s summer semester, and it was very, very difficult–even more difficult than the CASA entrance exam, although mercifully much shorter. The listening section, in which we heard a clip from al-Jazeera describing the ruckus caused by an Iranian film describing Anwar as-Sadat as a “traitor” and his assassin as a “martryr,” as well as the essay question asking us to analyze a quote from the novel we’ve been reading, were of average difficulty. The reading section on which I spent the bulk of my time, however, consisted of a very long, very dense article on the Iranian media, which most disappointingly contained almost none of the semester’s vocabulary words that I’d spent part of my weekend reviewing, but did contain a large number of words I certainly didn’t know, along with tortuous sentence structures that ensured that I still don’t have a clear idea what it was trying to say. When the CASA students and faculty went out to lunch afterwards as a capstone to our summer, my teacher asked me how I was.
“I’m spent,” I admitted. “That was an extremely difficult article.”
“Yes,” she said good-naturedly, and appeared to consider the matter. “I think what I really wanted to show you guys with the test was how much Arabic you still have to learn. I found during the semester that there was some arrogance among the students this year in their dealings with the readings and other material.”
I admitted that there was a certain sense among my classmates and myself that, having been accepted to CASA, we were the best Arabic students around, and that some of the readings (which yes, I occasionally found idiotic) were beneath us or didn’t deserve our time.
“We can learn something from every article,” my teacher reminded me. “That was what I wanted you guys to think about after the test.”
Well, she succeeded; after an exam like that, I don’t feel I have much to boast about.
What the %$#* did she do?
Lately the CASA program has been, if not in shambles, at least in a state of disarray. Class has been interrupted lately by the long procedure of applying for Syrian residency, as well as negligence on the part of Damascus University itself. A ceiling tile in one of our classrooms recently snapped, sending half of it flying down onto the unsuspecting shoulder of our colloquial Arabic teacher, who merely said, “Ooof,” and went on with her teaching. On the following Sunday, however, she was absent from class, and the next day we received word from our MSA teacher that something was really wrong: “Ghada fekshit her shoulder,” she announced. Everyone in the class stared; I wondered if our teacher was performing a rare demonstration of her facility with English slang, something we’d also been treated to during jokes about the Arabic word for otter. No, it turned out; “fekshit” meant that she sprained it, but the English homonym would have actually been a more appropriate description of the situation. Ghada came back to class with her arm in a sling a few days later to teach, but despite the return of her usual verve, things were difficult. It was clear that her head was swimming at times from the codeine pills the doctors had given her for the pain, and although the pain was in fact enough to keep her awake at night, she admitted, she stopped taking the pills during the day so that she could be more present in the classroom. The following week, we learned that the new doctors’ orders prescribed complete rest for her for the next two months, meaning that she would unable to finish the summer semester with us. It was a very sad moment both for the students and, I think, for Ghada, who told me on the first day of class that even if she felt tired before teaching, just seeing her students made her alert and enthusiastic again. Meanwhile, the University wasn’t providing her with any sort of compensation or help with paying doctors’ bills, and while I don’t like the excess of personal-injury lawsuits in the U.S., for now I wish that there was something hanging over the administration’s heads that would have prompted them to give her something more than a get-well phone call.
