“Musalsal” is the Arabic word for soap opera, an artistic genre in which Egypt has earned itself a comfortable position of prominence throughout the Middle East. In a region boasting a wide audience of house-bound women, the musalsal plays a central role in assuring their continued entertainment and sanity. Spinning fantastical tales of love, deception, family values, social class, tradition and greed, the musalsalat provide a melodramatic mirror in the spirit of Days of Our Lives à l’égyptienne. Now, I must admit that I am speaking somewhat beyond my mandate, since I have never actually watched an American soap opera (unless of course the experience was so bland that my memory mercifully vacated its place). In fact, my ignorance of “(pop) cultural references,” a lacking I attribute to the absence of television in my upbringing (aided by the presence of all the righteous literary indignance a family of humanities professors can provide) has often drawn criticism and can be disastrous in Trivial Pursuit. Excuses aside, my ignorance regarding soap operas led to equal cluenessness as to why anyone might want to watch them, be it in America, Egypt, or anywhere else. Explanations of hooked friends fell upon deaf ears. It occurred to me in these instances, somwhere in my subconscious, that fervent adherence to a religious doctrine must generate a commensurate mental block. This realization did not deflect my staunch disrespect for soap operas and everything I associated with them (namely, women world-weary for no worthy reason, Diet Coke in hand and ashtray in lap, that lounge on threadbare couches in listless eagerness to lose themselves in the poorly acted lives of imaginary losers).
I should have known I could not hold out forever, if indeed I was to understand the humantiy we humanitarians keep dehumanizing. Even my undergraduate thesis advisor chided me after reading my latest claims about how Moroccans must all be post-structuralists in order to conceive of their dual identity: “You do not, I hope, mean to speak for all of the Moroccan housewives whose worldview revolves almost exclusively around inane musalsal plots?” Strangely enough, my key theoretical sources, the peerless Deleuze and Guattari, had failed to draw the musalsal phenomenon into their otherwise exhaustive analysis of humankind, Mille Plateaux: Capitalisme et Schizophrénie.
It was my afore-discussed reversion into this compliant mode in which I place understanding before all else that sparked an interest in the musalsal at last. Shahira, my Egyptian dialect teacher, began assigning them as listening exercises. Suddenly, all of the aspects of musalsal to which I before objected now became invaluable pedagogical tools: simple, predictable plotlines, exaggerated acting, limited vocabulary. I listened with renewed interest and respect, repeating the gaspy, syrupy lines after the actors. Who knew how fun it could be to say such crap out loud:
“I want real love. The kind that leads to marriage!”
“If only we could have a nice apartment and an expensive car. Life is so hard here in the ghetto!”
“Son, all you care about is money! Allah has blessed us with many luxuries, so shut up.”
These people are right at my level, my happy linguistic-understanding chip assures the rest of my brain. This is great. I need to spend time with people that talk like this more often!
I should mention that the content of Egyptian musalsals does seem to differ from that of their American counterparts, particularly in that all roads lead to holy matrimony. The central relationships can be summed up as follows: family members, marriage possibilities, their family members, both family’s members’ marriage possibilities, plus one bad guy and one objective helper guy. Family traditions and values are pitted against class differences and social expectations, permanent and temporary transformations occur in the characters, and in the end the good are rewarded, the good-tempted-away-from-good are punished, and the bad escape and remain at large, teaching everyone involved a lesson and leaving them on their guard. Brilliant.
In the midst of my newfound enthusiasm for the musalsal, imagine my delight to be rewarded for my change of heart with such promptness: “My name is Eli,” said the voice attached to the unknown number in my cell phone, “I was in CASA last year and now I’m working for a Cairo TV network. I have a strange request for you . . . you see, I’m working on this musalsal and we need a foreigner who speaks Arabic with an accent to come in and shoot a small scene. Would you be interested?”
“Umm, ummm, I don’t have much experience, I mean, not since back in the day. . .” I trail off, grateful that he is not, as I am, reliving my last acting role, as a maid in the South Junior High production of Heaven Can Wait.
“Well, experience may not be that important. If you don’t think you would mind being surrounded with lights and equipment and people runnning back and forth and shouting instructions to you in Arabic, then I don’t think it should matter very much.”
If I didn’t think I’d mind? It sounds terrifying. “Well, yeah, kind of sounds like Cairo on a usual day anyway, right?” I cover my apprehension. Now Anna, one does not pass up this sort of thing. One strives to be the sort of person who totally loves this sort of thing, and then eventually one becomes that sort of person. Mish kiddah wa la eeehhhhh? ("Isn't that right?") So I agreed to meet Eli in a coffee shop the next day, unsure of what our encounter was to consist. It turned out to be the first of many unexpected situations arising in my bout with the Egyptian musalsal. I found him upstairs in the Cilantro Cafe by AUC, poised with a videocamera in a red velvet loveseat. After a few cordial exchanges accompanied by businesslike flashes of grin, Eli produced a slip of notebook paper on which he had scribbled a sentence in Arabic. Would I mind introducing myself to the camera and then reading the line a few times? I squinted at his scribblings and decoded the phrase: “Bilash tisafir bukra. Mish ‘ayza ghayurak inta. Bamoot fik....” ("Don't travel tomorrow. I don't want anyone but you. I adore you.") My experience with past musalsal had well prepared me to pronounce the likes of this maudlin sniveling. I delivered it with a well-honed pout, then spent the remainder of the day imagining ways that I could have injected more oomph into it. I was fairly certain that I had ended a potential career in musalsal acting, suddenly my fondest ambition, due to a case of the Shy. Then Eli called and followed his greeting with a pressing query: could I make myself look thirty-five? If so, my spot in the musalsal was as good as secured. Um. Usually I am mistaken for an eighteen-year-old, so we’re talking about a seventeen-year leap here. He rattles off a list of make-up suggestions for the ageing project, and asks if I could go home and try them out, then give a call so he could come see. Um. “They don’t have to know how old you are,” he explains. “If you think you could do this, it’s worth a shot.”
Hours later Jen, Sarah and I stand in front of our bathroom mirror while I make grotesque faces enhanced by my eyeliner-ed “laugh lines” (I swear I don’t have any). We agree that Sarah’s best efforts have indeed succeeded in making me much uglier, and wonder if that counts. A moment of foreboding elapses as we contemplate my shadowed, poreless face, wondering if at thirty-five nature will have wreaked such actual havoc on our youthful beauty. As it turned out, Eli called the next day and said that it didn’t really matter, I should just come as I was and wear something chic, and could I come pick up my lines right now? Wow, I’m famous. The single typed sheet of Arabic becomes my prized possession. I repeat my lines over and over, throughout dinner with Aaron at the Nady Yunany (Greek Club), into the night, and in my dreams. Here they are, in rough translation:
“I didn’t imagine that I would be sending documents of such importance so quickly.”
(Egyptian guy)”Bla bla bla”
(returning his flirt) “You never stop working for a one moment!”
(something along the lines of “Who’s talking about work, I’m talking about thoughts and feelings!”)
(laughing) “I’ve heard them talk a lot about the exchange of drugs, but not feelings!”
Just think of the possibilities for expression in those three short lines! Think how many ways I could blow them! Just one choke between an “’ayn” and a “qaf” and I’d lose my head completely and forget how to speak Arabic and run from the room. I would trip over a camera cord, or man, on my way, and the crew’s surprise would soon turn to mirth, their hearty laughs accompanying my flight. Try as I might to banish this manner of images from my brain, I did not sleep well. How could I prepare for an experience that I could no sooner imagine than I could Nabil singing showtunes? Of one point I felt fairly certain: that in order to avoid the nightmarish possible ends to this really quite insignificant event, I would have to rise above my better-known self. I visualized the moment which began as a demoralizing confrontation of my physical limits and ended up as proof of the power of the mind to overcome them: me stranded on the wrong side of a creek in Morocco, as my new travelmate Ian and our mountain-goat-like farmer guide beckoned from the right side, toward our town and my now remote former life. My bramble-scratched, trek-exhausted legs solidified and anchored me to the bank. I cannot jump this. I know to you it looks like a dirty trickle but to me it is a watery grave, or at least a sloppy, embarrassing fall. Tears welled up and brief considerations of a new, lonely life on my side of the creek flashed behind them. Then I jumped and we went back to the hotel. I hoped to make a similar heroic leap into the Egyptian musalsal.
The morning of the shoot, I gathered the few garments in my limited Cairo wardrobe to which I thought the adjective “chic” could be loosely applied and set off to meet Eli. We taxied out to the Hotel Baron, and gave my lines a few run-throughs. What was this musalsal called anyway? Qalb al-Dunya, or, “The Heart of the Universe.” Dag. So what was it, a love story? Oh no. Its hero was an Egyptian adopted by American parents and sent off to war in Iraq, where he encounters all manner of adventures ranging from brushes with al-Qaeda to equally dangerous foreign women and eventually resolves to find his birth parents in Cairo, an endeavor which somehow puts the CIA and Islamists (separately, I assume) on his trail in a number of high-speed chases. It’s the Ramadan musalsal you see, so it basically needs to represent the apex of all melodrama. Wow. I wondered aloud where my three flirty comments fit into this opus. Eli reread my paper ‘neath furrowed brow and declared that some important information seemed to have been unveiled. Al-humdu lillah.
Upon arrival, I was hurriedly presented to a handful of Egyptians milling about with equipment and papers in a hallway upstairs. Does she speak Arabic? Great. Eli then excused us to get some water, which ended up being water at the outrageously priced café downstairs. Eli went ahead and let me pay for it. I began getting cross, and then hungry, and started feeling less like a princess of the silver screen and more like an eyelinered and useless version of my former self. Eli sat across from me smoking cigarettes and disappeared to “talk to the crew” for indefinite periods of time, leaving me with the one member of the operation that seemed to have taken an interest in my cause: an elderly, almost toothless gentleman named Mahmoud. His actual position and responsibilities, like everything else at the Hotel Baron, were unclear, but he seemed to fancy himself General Acting Coach and Crash Arabic Tutor. My tall, willowy self-appointed caretaker wore a pressed white shirt tucked into dress pants, which is more than can be said for the remainder of who appeared to be the musalsal crew, who wore t-shirts and attitudes incommensurate with their potbellies. I slumped and straightened in my chair, and struggled not to run out of forced smiles for Mahmoud.
I was awarded a brief reprieve from this tête-à-tête when Eli spirited me upstairs to have my make-up done and clothes assessed. Muhammad the make-up man escorted me into a hotel room and sat me down on a stool facing the window, “so he could work in natural light.” An adolescent boy who I imagined to be his son stood by handing him products and puffballs. He applied at least five layers of foundation to my face, asking me a number of questions in a soothing, indulgent voice. I wondered if doing that voice was part of makeup-man training. “Shekli ta‘aban?” I asked as he started in on the sixth layer of foundation. “Do I look tired?”
“La, habibati, abadan, bas al-camera tishuf kuli haga,” he assured me ("The camera sees everything"). He then handed the lipstick over so I could apply it myself, which I did with little skill. I tried to wipe off the sloppy corners without Muhammad and his youthful crew noticing. Then he sent me on my merry way, that is, into the crowded hallway with no further direction. Eli located the costume lady, named Rasha, to inquire after my apparel. I had come bearing a bag of options, unsure of the required degree of chic. Rasha gave me a once over. “What you’re wearing is fine, honey,” she declared, and left me looking down at my metro-soiled slacks in confusion. Well, OK. I decided to change my pants anyway, if anything to give myself something else to do. My attempts to seek guidance from anyone upstairs resulted in shrugs and instructions not to worry. Rasha looked at my lines and had me read them once, then proclaimed to the director that all was well, I spoke Arabic. He eyed me with some doubt and asked again to make sure. Aiywa, ya ragul. Have I just been speaking it to all of you or what? I went back to my post at the café to write unflattering descriptions of the entire crew of Qalb al-Dunya, only to be joined by Mahmoud once more.
After discussing a variety of topics in Arabic, Mahmoud decided upon his third visit to my lonely table that I needed to be taught. He switched into broken English and began quizzing me on basics to the extent that his vocabulary allowed.
“Table!” he intoned and pointed. “Tah ra baaayyy za. Tarabayza. Table.” He continued to repeat the corresponding words with such conviction that my attempts to prove my comprehension, or at least to feign acquisition, went unheeded.
“Ay want. Ay wanta Anna. YOU! Ay wanta YOU. ‘Aaayyyzah. ‘Ayzah inti. ‘Ayz, ‘ayza.” He gestured between us with declining precision until he got confused and warned me that Arabic is a very hard language. It will take me a long time to learn, but I must not give up. I must continue to talk, talk as much as I can to everybody I can, “in Arabic only!” he scolded in broken English before reverting back to the language I allegedly did not know. “Inti shukhsia munfataha, an-nass ya’ashur bi rahha ma’aki. (“You are an open person, people feel comfortable around you”).” He fixed his googly eyes upon me and averred, “Anna makes people feel good about themselves. She listens, she talks and they listen.” Gee, thanks Mahmoud. I am glad you cannot listen to my inner monologue (stuck on an alternation between, “Leave me alone” and “Damn, I’m getting hungry, that is, homicidal,” neither of which would make anyone feel “bi-raahha” in my presence). So yet again, the simple, smiley foreign adaptation of me got mistaken for a girl of uncommon patience and compassion, and my friendship with Mahmoud plowed on through that fertile ground. He apparently meant what he said about feeling comfortable around me, because without warning he pointed to his near-toothless gums and apologized. “No teeth,” he regretted. “I am sorry.”
I was sorry too. Absence of teeth pushes the Egyptian version of the graceful language I study beyond garbled to unintelligible. However, it dawned on me as he burbled that in terms of exposure I am actually getting more used to toothless than toothful Arabic, since I’ve seen a full mouth of pearly whites about as often as bikinis. The inevitable reassurance one takes in familiarity still applies; even unpleasant tasks, once mastered acquire a soothing quality. (I am thinking here in particular of how good I got at balancing in those Moroccan squatter toilets without touching anything while gathering up my voluminous smocky clothing. The prevalence of parasites in the couscous certainly gave me a lot of practice.) I told Mahmoud that teeth were not important and turned my compassionate ear toward his list of further physical ailments. As each body part received its accusation from Mahmoud’s smoke-stained finger I racked my brain for the expression we had learned to say to sick people. I had practiced it on my sheghala twice the day before. As it turned out, Mahmoud moved on before I could try out any of the jumbles of syllables my sluggish memory was producing. He noticed that I had the now much crumpled and coffee-splattered sheet of script containing my key to stardom. He snatched it up and began reading it aloud with all the breath and drama that Eli had told me to avoid. His advice had seemed off-base to me considering the exaggerated acting style of all the musalsals I had listened to.
Mahmoud’s approach confirmed this. He ordered me to say each line, mouthing them along with me and stopping me at the slightest divergence from the melody he had chosen. He took great relish in making sure I understood the meaning of “tebaddul ghazaluh,” the direction in italics next to my second line, which means “returning his flirt.” I realized that in order to convince Mahmoud that I had captured this nuance, especially since he appeared not to know the English word for “ghazal” I was going to have to say that line in a very provocative voice. While I doubt my command of Arabic truly allows for the introduction of such nuance, I have the advantage of speaking with a foreign accent, which I sense makes anything I say sound pretty suggestive. I delivered it with slutty gusto. Mahmoud was delighted and convinced that he had discovered a born actress. Like his reaction to my Arabic, my displayed capability inspired him to teach what he had just declared me already to possess in spades. He launched into a full lecture on the philosophy of acting, based on two main and much-repeated points: body language is everything and you must act from the heart. Many physical examples accompanied this speech, making the whole endeavor something of a performance in itself. Eli sat by, silent and smoking, his eyes unreadable as to whether he thought Mahmoud was full of it. I had begun to collect that Eli was one of those unnerving sorts who rarely offers his opinion through words or body language, but nonetheless gives off the distinct vibe that he has them. At any rate, he seemed to value the old codger’s expertise enough to request a similar workshopping of the scene he had just been handed to act in that day (he was supposed to be a director, then a cameraman, now an actor . . . well, as we Americans say in Egypt, “Mafish nizaam, khaaalas!”: "There's no order whatsoever!"). What an odd pair of different kinds of weirdo I am stuck with, commented the irritable chorus in my hungry brain. Mahmoud, master of nuance, must have heard because he suddenly fixed me with a knowing stare. “Inti mayta min al-jowa‘,” he observed. “You’re dying of hunger.” I tried to protest, not wanting to buy anything else from that plunderous hotel café, but to no avail. He bounded off (he actually looks more like a gazelle than I do) to the counter and scooted back with a handful of small croissants. Rarely has a stale horn of butter tasted so good. Then, “Anna. Anna. Ya ANNA! Tala‘ii, come here!” It was time for my scene.
Heart a-pounding, I clipped over with as much grace and nonchalance as I could muster. Cameramen and photographers had already surrounded a salad-laden table in the hotel restaurant. It’s a good thing I had that croissant or I probably would have broken all veneer of professionalism in a feral attack on the vittles. Hands and voices herded me into the booth-bench on the far side of the table, where I sat alone under the lights and the sudden collective scrutiny of a sea of crew members. I smiled and made faces through my makeup, leaned this way and that, smoothed my hair, scanned the crowd for anyone who might be my acting partner. Then the tall, gruff actor I had been watching in a previous scene slid in next to me, wearing sunglasses, puffing on a cigar and holding a few loose sheets of script. “I haven’t even seen this scene yet,” he chortled to the actor pulling up a chair across from us. He began to bumble through the lines, cigar alternately in and out of mouth.
Great. My ability to say my lines on cue depended rather crucially on catching the ends of his, which might well be impossible. Then he noticed me and I bucked up. Time to pretend you’re an actress, kiddo. Your grandmother always said you should be one, right? And she is never wrong, right? So that means you are. Show this guy. And I do. “You’re American?” he explodes. “Mish ma‘oul, impossible! Hey listen to this girl! Listen to her speak Arabic!” Both men lean in with interest and I deliver the only speech I can perform with any kind of improvisational flair: where I am from, how long I have been here, how I totally don’t speak dialect and am totally sorry about that and am totally trying hard with God’s help (I tend to be even more superlative in a foreign language – I have replaced “like” with such fillers as “totally,” “very much” and “always”). We discern that we both love France and exchange a few pleasantries en français. Their profuse compliments instill a sufficient amount of courage to carry me through the anticipated terrifying moments of actual filming. I hear my voice, as if disembodied, admonishing these seasoned Egyptian actors with breezy pluck, “Inna nushtaghal shwoya wa la la?" ("Are we working or not?") They are laughing and we are performing the scene, my aristocratic-looking interlocutor leaning into me with all the congeniality of a dear friend, or at least a right old bounder. I play back and he pours me a glass of rosé. We lift the glasses to drink and simultaneously spit the disgusting Koolaid that hits our lips back out. We are still laughing and sputtering when the cameraman informs us that we’re done. The scene was great, thank you. “You were fabulous,” he comments to me as he moves his equipment on to the next venue. “Yeah, where did you learn to act?” my partner wanted to know. Um. From that fella Mahmoud over there. “Really wonderful,” says the other actor. “Iktishaf fa’alen, hayya.” ("She's a real discovery.") I hand out my phone number to a couple of gentleman who present themselves as the responsibles and the crowds disperse.
Wha? Done? After all that? I can’t believe it. I wander in a half-daze, heart still pounding, to the table where Eli is still sitting and grinning. “You’re a natural,” he congratulates me. “One take! They must have really loved you.” Uh. So wait a sec. Could I really have discovered a new talent? And could that talent really involve acting in Egyptian musalsals? Am I still my self? Am I a better self? These questions all received my serious contemplation as I sailed back through sunset Cairo in a cab listening to Abdel Halim Hafez. I decided that my makeup-masked reflection in the rearview looked decidedly Lebanese.
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