Speak Arabic... If You Please!

She can still taste them on her teeth, those brief moments she spent among them... They were the strangest moments of her life, and she cannot remember ever suffering at a party of pleasure as she did just then...

In less than the twinkling of an eye, she looked up to find herself amid a company of perfumed ladies, every one of them in the most sumptuous and most splendid of attire — and why not, when they are at a "cocktail" party, an occasion that gives each one the chance to appear the star of the gathering, in elegance and chic, in coquetry and charm... It is only natural, then, that she should glimpse the whole world through the great halo of "I" that each had cast about herself.

Up to this point the description is natural, and talk of beauty runs long; so I shall cut the road short to come to my point.

I have mentioned elegance, and I am the first to be mindful of it, for it is an important side of a woman's personality. I love beauty, too, and I believe it is a part of God... But it — beauty, that is — seemed embalmed in flasks through which emptiness blows...

There was not one among the ladies who did not know Arabic, and yet I heard not a word in that tongue; and I feared that if I opened my mouth no one would understand me, so I preferred silence. But that did not shield me from the arrows of searching glances asking who this woman might be... and what the worth of her presence was, if she spoke Arabic without mincing her letters or affecting the refinements of foreign accents?...

That is one; and here is the second: I picked up the telephone one day and dialed the number 11, and the voice came to me from the other end: "Yes..." So I asked, quite simply, for the number of the Chinese Embassy... and the soft, genteel voice shrieked at me: "Who?... The what embassy?..." I repeated to the girl on the line the name that she understands — or so at least she pretended... At last I could do nothing but spell the name out... and break it into syllables... and once more she answered that she had not understood... I looked about me, searching for some means of making this young lady understand what "al-Sin" means... Finally an idea came to me, and I said to her: the Embassy of "Chine" — that is, China in French... And she answered: "Ah... la Chine... say so from the start," then put down the receiver, and that was the end of the matter...

No, daughters of my country: we are no longer in the age of colonialism and of bending our necks to foreigners, that we should twist our tongues with their accents. We are in the age of independence. For once I ask you to listen... and to understand. For once I hope we may come to understand one another in a single language, within this frame we have agreed to call a homeland!...