kan ya makan... once upon a time...
i remember long ago as a child, working out for myself that 'time' (as we knew it) was something 'made up' by humans, to divide and to count...
'kan ya makan...' is actually not part of my own childhood. although my father did tell me ongoing stories about a girl named gigi and a dog and a swimming pool. how sydney suburban.
the arab art of storytelling (and joketelling) is something that i've experienced more as a grown-up, accumulating elements of a 2nd-hand arab experience.
an accumulation of 'arabness'.
hold on. i take back the bit about 2nd-hand (or 3rd- or 4th-hand).
arabness, as it lives and accumulates itself within the diaspora, is no more or no less arab, ma hayk?
so let me get back to 'time'...
if i lose my language do i lose my own sense of time?
or do i lose my father's time...?
boukra and manyana:
i like this joke about concepts of time and procrastination; it's the one about the dialogue between the arabic speaking person and the spanish speaking person.
the arab asks about the spanish 'manyana'?
manyana is a relaxed tomorrow, not definitely, and if not tomorrow then maybe the day after, and if all goes well, it might happen then...
the spanish speaker wants to know about the arabic 'boukra'?
boukra is a bit like manyana, but not as urgent...
4 comments:
love the joke! we also often hear about 'Koori time', i wonder where that fits in the boukra/manyana scale !?
on time + language:
as some of you may know, i started learning Arabic last year, as i was never confident enough to speak with the very little Arabic I knew, much of that was me repeating what i heard as a child, so in a sense, my own Arabic was never developed as an adult and was really stuck in another time.
taking classes also had much to do with my own frustrations that i just didn't have a language that i really longed for. apart from my surname, it was the only thing that i felt 'validated' me when questioned about my 'arabness or lebanese-ness' by other Arabs/Lebs (grrr!)
so somewhere in my mind, longing for language, i had a somewhat romantic + nostalgic marker that i would not be happy until i could 'dream in Arabic'. Of course dreams don't really have any sense of time when we recount them and after some discussion with a non-Arab friend, she made me realise that many of my own dreams don't have 'language' either. So i came to realise that my dreams are really images and concepts.
so when i come to think of it, i suppose i already am dreaming in Arabic, with Arab images and concepts.
augh! what a relief.... hehe.
xxxo
Nicole
Once upon a different sort of time ...
In the English culture I come from, the concept of mañana speaks of idleness, of moral laxity even and my childhood was filled with a number of saying which reinforce this sense. I remember often being told: “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today” – (a Google search tells me that this saying is variously attributed to Thomas Jefferson and Mark Twain, so this is not exactly a local folk saying.) And that reminds me of the warning that “The devil makes work for idle hands” – so no time for just sitting around. My grandmother was a great story teller and she had a huge store of verses and sayings. She taught us to enjoy life, to see beauty in everything around us and to believe that we could contribute to it. Here’s one of those little verses:
How doth the busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!
Hilary
Language and time - The connection between between them is so subtle, yet so decisive. Can we be in 'Arab time'? It sounds strange but tomorrow, manana, boukra are not the same. They don't contain the same concept of time, nor the same resonance. We know what we mean when we say boukra, and we know what we mean when we say tomorrow. What happens when you are constantly crossing between several languages with different concepts of time?
nour
There is a Ziad Rahbani play / theatre production and its title is benesbe boukra sho link below, check it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vXtuyuJPcI
Back here, Arabs, come out, come out where ever you are and go and see Campbelltown Arts Centre exhibition, ON n ON.
khaled
Post a Comment