Good morning.
Awake?
They took my badge but I wanted to ask you,
Did anyone write their name on the badge in Arabic?
Anyone? No one? Ok then...
No problem
Once upon a time, not so far away
I was having dinner with a friend of mine at a restaurant.
So I looked at the person serving us and asked him,
Do you have a list of dishes?
He looks at me weirdly thinking he didn’t hear clear enough and says,
Sorry?
So I told him again, Can you please give me the list of dishes?
Don’t you know what’s it called?
Yes. No. It’s called a menu (as it’s said in English) or “menu” in French right?
Come see what she wants.
He was disgusted.
At first he was trying to hit on me.
And then he was saying to himself, I wouldn’t look at her
even if she was the last girl on Earth.
A list of dishes? What’s that?
Two words were enough for a Lebanese guy
to judge a woman sitting in his restaurant of retardation and ignorance.
How dare she speak so?
So I started to think.
I got upset and I was hurt.
Yes of course I was.
I’m not allowed to speak my native language in my own country.
Where can you find that?
How could we have possibly reached this point?
There’s a lot of people like me in here who could reach a point in their lives
where they would erase everything that already happened
just to prove that they are contemporary and civilized?
Am I going to forget my entire culture and all of my thoughts,
all of my knowledge and all of my memories,
the best memories of the war are probably the childhood stories?
Am I going to forget everything I learnt in Arabic just to fit in?
Just to blend in?
Where’s the logic?
Nevertheless
I tried to understand him.
And I don’t want to judge him the same harsh way he judged me.
Arabic doesn’t meet our needs,
it doesn’t.
It isn’t a language neither for scientific production nor for researches.
You don’t need it neither at universities nor at work.
We don’t need it to make any advanced scientific research.
We definitely don’t need at the airport.
Because if we speak Arabic they’ll take off every piece of our cloth?
Where are we going to use it?
We can all ask that.
Do you want Arabic? Where will we use it?
Okay this is an existing reality but there’s a far more important reality
that we should consider and notice.
Arabic or mother language
studies and reports show that being fluent in other languages
requires being fluent in mother language.
And that being fluent in mother language
is an essential condition to excel in other languages.
How’s that?
When Gebran Khalil Gebran started writing
he began writing in Arabic.
His thoughts,
his imagination,
his inner self, his metaphysics,
his philosophy.
He took all of these from that child who sat in the village
and who grew accustomed to a certain smell,
a certain voice and a certain thought.
So when he began writing in English
he had a huge knowledge
even when he was writing in English
and when we read his writings in English
we smell the same odor,
we feel the same feelings,
we can picture him both the person excelling in English
and the one living in the country,
In a village from Mount Lebanon.
So that’s one example that can’t be refuted.
Second of all, it is said
if you want to kill a nation,
the only way to do so is to kill its language.
And this fact is known by developed nations.
The Germans, the French, the Japanese, the Chinese.
All nations are aware of this fact.
That’s why they pass laws to protect their language.
That’s why they sanctify it.
That’s why they produce using this language
and they pay a lot of money to develop it.
Do we know more than they do?
Okay, If we’re not a developed country and we still have no access
no to such advanced thinking but we want to catch up this civilized world.
Countries alike us have decided now to develop and to make researches
and to catch up these countries.
Like Turkey and Malaysia and others.
They grasped their language while climbing the ladder
as if it was a diamond.
They preserved it and kept it close
Because if you receive any product from Turkey
or others with no Turkish language
it wouldn’t be a local product.
You wouldn’t believe that it’s a local product.
They would have consumed and stupidly
just like we do most of the time.
So in order to innovate and produce, they had to preserve their language.
If I say “Freedom, sovereignty, independence”, as it’s said in Arabic
what would it bring to your mind?
Nothing?
Regardless of who, how, and and why but you know,
language is not speeches and whatever words we are using.
Language represents particular phases through our lives
to which our emotions relate along with these terms.
That’s why when I say “Freedom, sovereignty, independence”
each one of you has a certain image in their mind.
With certain words and feelings for a certain day, a historical period.
So language isn’t mere words and aligned letters.
It’s an inner idea related to the way we think
and the way we perceive others and others perceive us.
What is our intellectual stock?
Why do we say this person knows while another doesn’t?
So if I come and tell you “Freedom, Soverneighty, independence”
If your son comes and says, “You are still following that thing
that has freedom, that symbol." What do you feel like?
If you feel at all then that’s very good.
We won’t have a problem anymore.
Let me just leave from here because I will be talking nonsense.
The idea here is that these phrases remind us of certain things.
My friend is Francophone and she married a French guy.
I was asking her how was she doing in everything,
and she said it’s all good
except once I spent an entire night trying to translate
what “To’borni” means (Literally: I would die for you).
Because She told him “To’borni” by mistake
he was thinking, is there anyone who is that brutal?
Or maybe she wanted to kill herself? “Bury me” for example?
This is something really small
but look how much it makes us feel helpless.
I can’t tell my husband this word because he won’t understand it.
And he is right, that is how he thinks.
Then she told me that he listens to Fairouz
with me but one night he sat next to me
and I was trying to translate it to him maybe.
He can feel what I feel when I listen to Fairouz,
so she wanted to translate.
“I extended my hands and stole you away from them.
And because you belong to them”
Here is the catastrophe,
“I pulled my hands back and left you”.
Translate this for me.
Ok.
What did we do
to protect the Arabic language?
We have made this into a civil society issue
and we launched a campaign to protect the Arabic language
even though a lot of people told me,
“Don’t bother yourself with that”. No problem.
The campaign has launched a slogan that says,
“I talk to you from the east and you answer me from the west”.
We did not say,
“No, we don’t agree. And we are the language.”
We didn’t do that because
we won’t understand this way.
And if someone comes to me and says that
I will start hating the Arabic language
we are saying that….
We are trying to see how we are living in reality.
Then be convinced with a way that mimic our dreams and ambitions.
A way that dress the same way as we do and thinks the same way as well.
So “I talk to you from the east and you answer me from the west”
Is the perfect saying for such a thing.
Something that is really simple but innovative and convincing.
After that we started a campaign that has the letters put on the sidewalks.
You saw it outside here.
A letter with a yellow stripe around it
written on it, “Do not kill your language”.
Why?
Seriously do not kill your language.
We all need to not kill our language
because if we kill the language we will have to go back
and search for an identity.
We have to look for existence.
We need to start over from zero.
Not only that,
we won’t be able to be civilized and contemporary.
Then we took pictures of young guys and girls
hugging the Arabic letter.
“Cool“ pictures of young people,
because we are very “cool”.
And whoever says we caught you saying an English word (cool),
I am adopting the word “cool”.
Let them come and do whatever they want to do.
Let them give me a better word that works on our reality better.
I will keep saying the “internet”.
I will not say “A slice on the spider web”
because it just doesn’t work.
We are not kidding ourselves.
But to get here we all have to be convinced
we do not want to make the one who is bigger
And thinks he has the power over the language
that he can make us think and feel the way he wants us to.
The idea here is innovation.
If we can’t go to space and build a rocket we can be innovative.
Every person here is an innovative project.
Innovation in the mother language is the way.
Let us start now from this moment.
Write a novel.
Produce a short film.
One novel can make us international.
It can bring back the Arabic language to the first place.
It is not like there is no solution.
Seriously there is.
But we have to pay attention and be convinced
that there must be a solution.
And we have to be a part of this solution.
At the end what can you do today?
Now? Tweet! Who here is tweeting?
I beg you.
Seriously I beg you even though time is almost done.
In Arabic, English, French or even in Chinese.
But don’t write “Ma’oul” (reasonable) like “Ma32oul”.
Because that is a disaster.
This is not a language.
You are entering a virtual language and a virtual world
and no one will take us away from this place ever.
That was the first thing we can do.
Secondly there are a lot of things that we can do
today no one is convincing anyone
we are here to be alert about the subject
and now I will tell you a secret.
A child when born the first way he recognizes his father through language.
So once my daughter is born I will tell her
(Arabic): “This is your dad honey”.
Not this is your dad honey.
And in the super market I will promise Noor if she thanks me
I wouldn’t tell her, “Daites merci mama”.
And I hope that no one heard her.
Let us get away from this foreigner complex.