…Cairo stories – Rasha

Rasha | If you know what I mean…

I love speaking different languages. What I love is that whenever I speak a different language, I am a different person. If I could, I would speak every language in the world. There is something about speaking another language that allows you to try things on, to try things out. You have a different personality in another language. Your voice is different… You are different… To speak many languages is like a kind of endless story that you invent for yourself as you go along, bit by bit, like Scheherazade, but in fact, you never find out the ending.

I was born in Lebanon, and I didn’t study Arabic until college. But, Arabic is the language I enjoy speaking the most, the language of the street.

My parents wanted me to be a citizen of the world, so they sent me to many schools to learn different languages. I began at the French school. I remember how excited I was hearing fairy tales in French, those classic fairy tales from Europe that Charles Perrault collected. I didn’t want to be Sleeping Beauty or Little Red Riding Hood. I hated to go to bed and I was afraid of the dark but I was charmed by the poetry in the language, even though I couldn’t understand why none of the girls in the stories ever spoke.

When I was ten and a half, I went to German school. Suddenly it was all precision in language, endless suffixes and predicates, a language more meticulous than French, infinitely expandable. But, I loved Grimm’s fairy tales. They were so frightening. And I loved how they didn’t make sense, and I could read them again and again trying to puzzle out their meanings.

For the first part of high school, I went to the English school. And I graduated to novels. Jane Austen. George Elliot. Henry James. And even more adult novels. I didn’t always understand exactly was happening in the novels either…
The nuances, the innuendos, what couldn’t be said…

All the things left unsaid…

Only gradually did I come to understand that what you don’t say is just as important as what you do say. But, we have that in Arabic, too…

We are constantly saying “yanni”which translates to “I mean” or “you know’: We say that often… “yanni”… without ever having to say exactly what we mean, it’s a way to answer a question without ever having to really answer…

If you know what I mean… Yanni…