I have a friend named Ashraf. Actually he is our CASA cultural advisor Ben’s friend, but he humors us newbies and speaks more slowly than most. Ashraf has black hair gelled into parted waves, and a frequent, mischievous smile. He wears jerseys with English writing on them. He manages to make his voice both patient and teasing.
“Is it true that many Americans do not like Celine Dion?” he asks me in ‘aamiyya with some earnestness. We are sitting on cushions at Makan, a warehouse-like but welcoming café, waiting for the musicians to come back on. I laugh, then get pensive, remembering my final moments with my host-sister Fedwa on that rooftop in Fez, Morocco. She had insisted that I translate the song “My Heart Will Go On” for her before I leave, a task that I had been avoiding due to my aversion to songs that make me want to vomit. I did not vomit while Fedwa and I sang the song together directly prior to never seeing each other again, in a mixture of French and Arabic and English, holding each other tight and leaning out over the ledge toward the lower rooftops of Fez. I cried. We both cried, with ineffable sadness.
I elected not to describe this anomaly for Ashraf however, and stuck with my main party line: she sucks. Blondly bold Ben, sitting nearby and ever vigilant, warned me that he had already tried and failed to explain the concept of “cheesy” to Ashraf. It would seem that the “shukhsia Musriyya” (the Egyptian personality) to which we have devoted so much class discussion, contains no such concept. I consider briefly (and now consider at length) the implications of this lacking. To be sure, the phenomenon of “cheesy” occurs with some frequency, if not downright prevalence, in Egyptian pop culture. Posters gasping such asinine movie titles as “Zay al howaa (Like True Love)” and “news” programs featuring slow motion scenes of blighted villagera running from rabid fire accompanied by heartrending music certainly fit the bill. But so much like the silently felled tree in the proverbial forest, if the Egyptians do not see said cheese as cheesy, perhaps it is, in fact, not. So the question remains, if indeed I or Ben or anyone else managed to describe the concept of “cheesy” to Ashraf, would a fluorescent bulb ignite and reveal the folly of his current musical tastes? Or might he discover that in fact this “cheesiness” was the part that he liked? If American consumption of things cheesy is any example, we can satisfy ourselves that awareness of a given item’s cheesiness does not prevent a disturbing number of people from enjoying it.
All told, the explanation of any potential reasons for not liking Celine Dion now failed me. Ashraf, for his part, supported his appreciation with a string of rather inalienable merits: “She has a nice voice. She sings about love. When I listen to music, that is what I look for: voice and content.” What a humbling revelation as to my capabilities in ‘aamiyya. If I can’t even win an argument as to why Celine Dion sucks, I must be truly weak. However, I believe I owe this decline in argumentative potency not only to lack of appropriate rhetorical devices but also to the overall change in my conversational approach when speaking another language. That is, I just kind of want to understand people. So concentrated am I on deciphering their words from the stream of potentially unintelligible sounds that by default I find myself wholly concentrated on their ideas as well. My brain makes a full reversion from offensive to analytic mode, no longer capable of digging out my own opinions. So Ashraf was free to list off with trusting innocence a list of musical artists that would have earned him my harshest derision had he been an American. I nodded and said perhaps I could show him some other music, realizing as I made the offer that my indie rock bands would almost certainly not speak to Ashraf. Ashraf likes to clap hands and dance. Ricky Martin likes to clap hands and dance. I wonder with some discomfort whether Ricky Martin might be “better” than Radiohead on some universal scale.
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