Arabic the Hard Way

VERSUS

It's easy. Just pretend you're swallowing the base of your tongue. Then let out a strangled cry. That's 'ain, one of the handful of letters in the Arabic alphabet which don't exist in English.

I read this advice in a text book years after acquiring colloquial Sudanese Arabic by rough and ready means. With neither a teacher nor the structure of an ordered syllabus to guide me, I attained a basic fluency in the language - by pestering people.

A most unscientific approach to language acquisition, it was certainly effective. Life in a foreign country is hugely enriched if you have a working knowledge of the language.

Two factors in Sudan helped me achieve a high degree of success. I had lots of spare time. But most importantly, I was in the perfect place to become a linguistic sponge. For four years working as an English teacher, I lived in small Sudanese communities surrounded 24 hours a day by Arabic speakers.

There was only one book on colloquial Sudanese Arabic available which I only glanced at after my first year in the country. My habit from the outset, was to carry a small notebook in the

breast pocket of my shirt wherever I went.

Sitting in the market, lounging as a guest in someone's house or perched on top of a desert lorry, I would produce this book on hearing any unfamiliar word or phrase. My victims were usually happy to repeat what they'd said and spell it out to me with a definition in English.

It took time to build up the ability to conjugate verbs and embark upon the heady business of constructing sentences! But I always had the advantage of hearing exact models of pronunciation from my Sudanese friends and colleagues. I didn't have to negotiate around the extra layer of language in text books which trys to explain at second hand, how things should be said. There was no tongue swallowing for me.

The alluring but difficult appearance of Arabic script was a further spur to my enthusiasm, rather than a hindrance.

One Christmas Day, in the tiny village of Ed-Debba on the Nile, I whiled away the hours copying out the letters of the Arabic alphabet and their equivalent English sounds, from a colleague's text book.

This opened a whole new avenue of activity. If I'd been in danger of driving some people mad by my constant badgering over the meaning of words and phrases, I undoubtedly drove others to distraction, once I started testing out my ability to read shop signs, bus tickets and newspaper headlines.

Again it paid off. Practical trial and error rather than the dry study of books allowed me to grasp the language with a constant focus on the application in real situations, of what I was trying to learn.

This was always instructive. It was frequently comic. The day I discovered the Arabic for fingernail 'daffara', I was keen for an opportunity to try it out. The chance came soon after in the village restaurant where I ate.

One of the locals arrived and greeted those of us who were sitting inside eating bowls of fuul beans. He inadvertently dropped a coin on the ground but no matter how hard he tried, couldn't prise it off the floor. With sympathetic intonation, I asked in my best Arabic if he had no, "daffara", (finger nails), with which to lever the coin up. This statement produced a ripple of mirth around me which I hadn't been expecting. Instead of finger nails, I'd asked if he had no 'naddara' - the Arabic for spectacles.

Gathering new words soon became like stamp collecting. I feverishly pursued every new lead. There was an endless supply of fresh specimens to add to my bulging notebooks. Many expressions were so colloquial, I could find no equivalent in standard Arabic dictionaries.

Sudanese Arabic has a word, 'zeefa', for the smell of sand after rain. Remarkable, in a country whose north can go years without experiencing any rain at all.

The Shaigi people who live on the Nile some 200 miles north of Khartoum, are used to drinking tea in times of sugar shortage. But this doesn't mean they drink their tea bitter. Instead they hold a date inside the mouth over which the tea washes as it's swallowed. The date is supposed to act as a sweetener. This practice of drinking 'shai banjoogli' undoubtedly predates the appearance of granular sugar in Sudan.

When I moved to the extreme north to teach in a new school in Nubia, I was delighted to hear that Arabic was the second and not the first language in the region. In fact Nubian, which crosses over into Upper Egypt, is a pre-Islamic language. And in northern Sudan it has at least three variants.

There is fierce debate as to whether 'rotana', as it's called in Arabic, is a fully-fledged langauge or simply a dialect. It seems that 'rotana' once had its own script and was a literary as well as a spoken language.

It's interesting to note the thrust of Islam in Sudan. The Nubians were the last group in the north to convert to the religion of the incoming Arabs. They in turn chose the Arabic word 'rotana', meaning 'gibberish', to describe the tongue of the Nubians.

Today Nubian is dying out. It's use in school classrooms is discouraged and younger people are unwittingly mixing the native speech of their forefathers with Arabic vocabulary.

But to me, the prospect of living amongst Nubian speakers was just as exciting as the experience of being in Sudan. It was clearly time to grab my notebook and start pestering my new hosts.

Laconda Raid

Sudan Studies, Number 8 (May 1990)

A 'laconda' is a very cheap Sudanese hotel akin to a dosshouse but low on sleaze. A typical example in central Khartoum is situated between the Gasr an-Nil and Saalih hotels. I once took some Save the Children Fund workers who'd never before eaten fuul beans, to have supper at this establishment. Patrons sat outside on straw birish mats to eat, while streams of taxis, lorries and Toyota pickups buzzed up and down, only inches away from the diners' ears, droning like oversized flies. My aid worker acquaintances, who thought the cheapest meal to be had in the capital cost ten Sudanese pounds from the Sahara Hotel, enjoyed their first taste of the ubiquitous bean and were astounded to learn that it was available in the city for as little as 75 piastres.

Months later I was back in Khartoum staying at the Gasr an-Nil. From my third floor window I had a perfect view of the boys from the laconda as they transformed their stretch of unpaved sand and dirt into a 'restaurant'. A long trestle table facing the traffic held bowls of salaata, a type of yoghurt called mish, a peppery sauce of red shatta and a wide-diameter metal pan for barbecuing mutton. On the ground at the end of the table, a charcoal burner as big as a household dustbin supported a pot shaped like a huge hip flask. This was the specialised utensil for boiling fuul beans. There was also an enormous aluminium container full of water, with a communal mug adrift on the surface.

The sheyaa stall beckoned with enticing tendrils of steam and smoke which arose from the chunks nof mutton hissing on the hot pebbles and smouldering charcoal. Sunset was approaching and the city was pleasantly warm instead of punishingly hot. I stepped out of the Gasr with some companions into the heady atmosphere of the street and wandered down towards the laconda, relishing the sound of the birds fighting in their hundreds for a place to perch in the roadside neem trees and savouring the various smells which crept into the open at nightfall. We walked up to the trestle table and ordered some fuul and sheyaa. While the others sat on the birish with beans and bread, I waited by the table until our quota of meat was charred enough to be edible.

We had been sitting on the ground eating for about ten minutes when a lorry stopped level with us and the twelve or so men, who'd been balanced on the back, descended - and with mute, uniform efficiency began to dismantle the rudimentary restaurant, throwing its paraphernalia into the back of their lorry. The barbecue went in, the bowls of yoghurt and salad likewise. The boys managed to drag the fuul pot back inside the front gate of the laconda but were not so fortunate with the water container. A member of each faction held a side of the water pot and a silent tug of war ensued.

The entire raid passed off without the exchange of a single blow or angry word, a surreal dumb show unfolding before our eyes. I remember trying to eat as fast as possible for fear that our supper was about to be whipped away from under our noses, but for some reason we were not disturbed, unlike the Sudanese customers who had their evening meals unceremoniously snatched away. Their task completed, the men boarded the truck and were driven off into the night.

The only explanation we could pluck from the mass of rumours and fictions which constantly swarmed around Khartoum like locusts, was that the newly-elected government was cleaning up the capital and was putting unlicensed traders out of business. Half an hour after the raiders had swooped, I saw the smoke of scorched meat rising from the roadside once again. the boys had hastily reconstructed their 'restaurant' and were doing a brisk trade. Earlier, the boy in charge had wished us farewell from the ruins of his establishment with a grin wider than a broad bean and the words, "Sudan is a very bad place".