My Heart Had Become Narrow for You

I remember that I hadn’t been particularly keen on taking Arabic.

I was eighteen, smarting from a brief career as a physics major, prowling the University of New Mexico course catalog for something to pad my schedule. Being a freshman, I was not able to register right away and other language classes had been filled to brimming while I waited my turn to get registered. I knew that I wanted to take a language — I still had the haughty dream of being able to speak fifteen — but didn’t know which tongues I wanted to master for myself yet. Arabic was a class that was left for me, and, I reasoned, I was interested in Darfur and the Sudan, so why not?

It would not occur to me then that this act — clicking on the register button — would come to define my life for the next four years. I fell in love with Arabic, and then I fell in love with the Middle East. Suddenly, I was looking for textbooks on Kurdish and Turkish, and then I found my clueless way into the Persian Club, and I knew that this was where I belonged. I completed coursework in the Arab Spring and North African literature studies. I wanted to speak Arabic in Jordan, Persian in Iran.

And through some tough negotiations, I felt myself like a plane blading into the sky at liftoff. My speech was halting, shy. But I was understanding Arabic and Persian in particular of all the Middle Eastern languages. I even tutored Arabic to young children. I was never fluent, I hasten to add, but I had a good time palling around with the vocabulary, the way Arabic swayed and Persian crunched.

The point I make here is that today, as I sipped green tea, I rejoined the stream of these two languages, sifting through vocabulary and reviewing my notes on tanween and shaddah. I remember ezafe. I almost cried, as silly as that is to admit. I missed this. My heart had become narrow (as one says in Iran) for Arabic and Persian.

These days, I am getting ready for my graduate work in linguistics, the degree that was meant for me far more than physics ever was. Language is the great love of my life. As a writer and as a linguist, I love to see the machine of language, a thing that is all movement, all freedom to create. It is my favorite part of human cognition. I want to peep at it from around corners and take its hand and guide it to a field of flowers, a place where we can observe each other in the perpetual beauty of the early spring sun. It is a cruel fact that when I was sickest, the thing that was taken away from me was my ability to interact with, to become, language. What a gift to have it back.

Even as I tussle with my writing, pushing and pulling my way to a rough draft for Projects Guernica and Platelet, I really look at my Persian dictionary and I want to weep because this constellation of sounds has congealed into a beautiful, beautiful universe of words, syntax, morphemes, hope. To speak, to be a linguistic creature, is to hope and to love.

And when I reviewed in my textbook, salaam, I was transported back to being a budding linguistics major with my finger on a line of IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet, not the beer) and my eyes roving between my list of abstract nouns. Despite the fact that Arabic is not related to English, nor to any language I had studied at that time, it came rather naturally to me. Its differences made sense, if you will. Persian, an Indo-European language, was a bit less obvious, concealed itself beneath a cloak. But were it not for them, I would never have gotten into Turkish, Hebrew, or (maybe in the future) Urdu.

I cannot describe how freeing it was to write some practice sentences in my new Arabic grammar guide. When I first moved to this tiny apartment, I put my books in storage with wonderful, selfless friends. However, I hoarded Akkadian and Arabic and Persian and Spanish and Portuguese (A tale for another day, but Portuguese was another language I never thought I would love), and they sit in prime real estate on my bookcase. There is such poetry to them. Sometimes I listen to the radio in Spanish and am following most of it. I would like to be back there with Arabic and Persian before I resume my studies in the fall. One of the perks of working from home, I am fortunate to say.

I split my time among several languages, but today wanted to sit and play with Arabic gemination for hours. And the plurals. Arabic’s plurals were always a fearsome thing to me. I never fully mastered them. That is a mountain I am still climbing.

But it gave me such joy and peace to be back. Now that I am here again, looking at the rafters that I once scaled with a sizeable army of words, I never want to leave. I would rather keep chipping away at the things that stand between me and fluency, freedom, and a new way of seeing the world. I strike words of fire.