abu wilyam ~ أبو وليام

I’ve been thinking about friends and friendship since writing my last update, and I’ve also discussed the issue with a few friends who read the post. With their help, and with some private reflection, I can say that the picture I presented didn’t quite capture the whole situation, and that I misjudged and assumed somewhat.

To some degree, it’s been a lesson in how easy it is to come to conclusions when writing or reflecting on something. We know, somewhere in our brains, that the reality of life is almost always more complicated than articles and analyses we read about it, but we still crave those narratives which let us sort the mass of information that we deal with.

So the nuance I now want to add to the picture of friendship and expectations I painted last time has just as much to do with me (with Americans) as it does with Arabs. I wrote of the difficulty I sometimes have in navigating friendships here that seem to expect much more of me than what I think is the norm at home. All true. A key thing I failed to mention is a difference between speech here and speech there, and the idea of rhetorical speech. I mean “rhetorical” here as in a rhetorical question: speech that serves some social or persuasive purpose secondary to its literal meaning.

Syrian Arabic is inflected with a huge number of polite expressions – I’m constantly learning new ones, or new nuances to ones I already know. There are expressions for all sorts of purposes that English does not have anything for, such as what you say when someone has showered or shaved, or what you say when someone dies – and each has its own individual response. That is not to mention the five or so different ways you can ask to be let off the servees (microbus) or the perhaps uncountable ways you can express gratitude, each which also has its own proper response.

Sometimes these phrases are used “rhetorically,” as in the case of the famous phrase: إن شاء الله (inshallah). It literally means, “if God wills,” and is used whenever talking about the future, as a reminder that it is in God’s hands. But anyone who’s lived here a little while has learned that sometimes إن شاء الله (inshallah) can become a way to make excuses. If you ask, “When will you have such-and-such in stock?” the answer, “بكرا إن شاء الله” (tomorrow, inshallah) may just be a polite way of saying, “we do not expect to have that in stock.” Or not. The challenge is how to know when. (By the way, many Syrians criticize this kind of usage.)

One common rhetorical habit here is inviting people. Friends fight with each other about who among them gets to “invite” the others for the $0.11 per person servees fare. When you see your neighbor walk by, you might say, “Come in and have some tea!” – and you may well not want them to come in, but it’s a polite thing to say. If you really want to invite them in, you would have to repeat the invitation after multiple refusals – it would be rude for them to accept after the first invitation. This is not to discount the legendary Arab hospitality, which is alive and well in Syria, but there’s an element of واجب (duty) to it – you must offer, whether you mean it or not.

For an American who is not used to these kinds of politeness games, this is all very tricky. I’m not used to offering food or drink unless I mean it, nor I am used to the polite turning-down/offering-again game. I have no instinct to insist that guests eat or drink after they refuse a first or second time.

This is not to say that we don’t have comparable “rhetorical” habits in the U.S. I’m thinking of our habit of awkwardly saying, “Let’s get together sometime …” or “I’ll call you …” when we end conversations with acquaintances. Sometimes we don’t mean it, except as a way to end the conversation politely. Syrian Arabic also has a “rhetorical” conversation-ender, though one that is much simpler and more honest. You ask, بدّك شي؟ “Do you want anything?” (i.e., Do you need anything from me before I go?) and the person replies, سلامتك “Your health.” (i.e., I only want your good health). Boom, the conversation is over, just like that, with no need to fudge with half-hearted promises.

[Side note: the Arabic word مبالغة means both “rhetoric,” as in the Greek science, and also “exaggeration.” I don’t know the etymology of these meanings, which came first, and how they are related to each other, but I’m very curious about the connection…]

It takes a finely tuned social sense to know when this kind of speech is meant literally or not, wherever you are, and my own instinct is to take people very seriously on what they say. So when a friend says to me, وينك؟ ليش مانك مبيّن؟ انا بدي ازعل منك لأنك ما اتصلت فيني… “Where have you been? Why haven’t we seen you at all? I’m annoyed with you since you haven’t called me …” my instinct is to feel pressure because this person is annoyed with me and I don’t want to annoy anyone.

But a close Syrian friend suggested after reading my last post that maybe these friends aren’t actually demanding anything of me and that maybe this kind of speech is not meant literally. It seems likely, in fact, that expressing intense missing, longing, and even annoyance in response to the absence of a friend is a way to show you care. In other words, maybe I shouldn’t be taking everyone so seriously and include this “friend chatter” among the types of talk that may – or may not – be meant rhetorically.

This is not a retraction of what I wrote before, however – I maintain that friendships really are different here. When I instinctively thank friends for a favor they’ve done me with a simple شكراً “Thanks,” they often get annoyed, because “thanks” implies that we’re not friends. You say “thanks” to shopkeepers, not to friends. Sometimes people even respond to “thanks” with, لا شكر على واجب “no thanking for a duty!”

Yet as I sit here writing about it, I can’t remember a time when someone has gotten offended over the phrase, الله يعطيك العافية “May God grant you health,” which is often used as a substitute for “thank you” – among other things. So perhaps this phrase – with all of its rhetorically layered meaning – is a way to thank a friend without hurting his or her pride.

It’s yet another thing to listen for. Needless to say, I’m still learning a lot.