Shameful Scenes... Harmful Ones... Around My Language

In a corner of the Exhibition grounds there is a market where shoes are sold and bought... In one of the isolated shops was a salesman in whom I discerned a gentleness of temper and a soundness of character, so I went up to him wanting to buy a pair of shoes... and I was appalled to find that he neither understood Arabic nor spoke it — he was an Armenian, not an Arab... When I asked him the reason for this neglect, he answered me with evident artlessness: And why should I burden myself with learning a difficult language which its own people do not master, and which they do not even like to speak?... I use Armenian with my own kind, and French and English with everyone else... I fell silent at the answer, for it was unanswerable, without a doubt...

When I was alone with myself, I began to review those harmful, shameful scenes that pass before us every day, standing as living proof of our disgraceful neglect of our language — and thus of our contempt for ourselves and our very being...

An elegant Arab lady enters a shop and asks the salesman, in French, the price of a yard of cloth; he is ashamed to answer her in Arabic, and so he replies in a sickly, threadbare French; she looks down on him with disdain from her heights, and goes out pitying him and his ignorance...

Arab schoolgirls groan whenever the bell rings announcing the Arabic lesson; and when they enter the classroom, they set about asking the teacher the meaning of a word in French, so that she may give them its Arabic equivalent for use in their composition exercises...

The directress of a foreign institute, who has now lived in our midst for upwards of thirty years, disdains the study of the Arabic language: she knows not a single word of it and will not hear a single word of it; and if one of the pupils, in spite of her, makes her ears hear what they hate, she visits severe punishment upon the girl in expiation of her deadly, hideous sin...

A university young man, counted by his professors and acquaintances among the very finest of Arab youth without exception, for his abundant intelligence and his wide reading, is asked to give a brief, extemporaneous talk in Arabic on a subject well within the scope of his specialty; he grows flustered and alarmed, then speaks, and stammers; and what he says is threadbare in style and sickly in expression, spoiling the university man's valuable opinions and modern theories, so that they come out deformed, disfigured, dull, casting over their author a tinge of weakness, incapacity, and carelessness...

Enter one of the clubs or the pleasure-haunts scattered through the capital... and you will think yourself now in Paris, now in London or New York... for the people here speak nothing but English or French — that is, if they are people of learning and culture; and if their rank in that field is lower, they mix together a threadbare Arabic, a broken French, and a scattered English picked up here and there...

A tourist makes for the Lebanese capital to spend some time... He steps down from the airplane and looks for a hotel to stay in; kindly folk hasten to name for him the famous hotels: there are the Bristol, the Normandy, the Saint-Georges, the Capitol, the Palm Beach, and the New Royal — all of them Western names at which the tourist marvels... He chooses one of these hotels, and in the morning he goes down to town, strolling through the streets and learning their names: this is the Rue Picot, that the Rue Chateaubriand, this Allenby Street and that the Rue de France, and so on... and the tourist's astonishment grows... In his wanderings he tries to

read the names of the shops and stores, and behold, the prominent and visible part of each name is written in Latin letters — quite apart from the name itself being foreign: this shop is called the Rayon Bleu, that one Oxford, this one Windsor and that one K.B., this one Lourdes and that one Optica, and so on and so forth — a multitude of such names filling our markets... Then, in the afternoon, he tries to choose a cinema to see some show... He looks over the names of the halls, examining them, and lo, he is met by the very same tune: from the Empire to the Roxy to the Capitol to the Rivoli to the Odeon to the Hollywood... Then, after the show is over, he tries to take a cup of coffee or tea in one of the clubs or pleasure-haunts, and he looks about, and there are the Marquis, the Pâtisserie Suisse, the Palcade, the Union Market, the Pâtisserie de Genève, the Semiramis, and so on and so forth... And so it goes when he wants to spend the evening: there are the Kit Kat, the Colorado, the Eden Roc, the Grotte aux Pigeons, etc. — and he returns at night to his bed wondering: is he really in Beirut, the well-known Arab city??...

A friend whom chance placed beside me on the school benches for many years afterwards went off for a single year to the American States, to pursue her studies... I ran into her by chance yesterday, and behold, she was wearing garish colors and loose, flowing clothes in emulation of the American fashions... She came up to me, speaking a sound English tinged with a pure American accent — one marvels at how she managed to master it with such speed and ease... I proceeded to answer her questions in Arabic, whereupon she cast me a pitying glance, saying: What is the matter with you? Have you forgotten your English?? And to provoke her, my answer was yes... At that she eyed me with a disdain coupled with a touch of compassion, then answered me from her heights, puffed up with vanity and lost in pride:
— As for me, I have forgotten Arabic!...