I sat by myself in the street until a boy of about eight years old passed by. I called him and said, “Who is your father?” “Abdallah al-Haj Ali.” “What’s your name?” “So and so.” “And your brothers and sisters?” “So and so, and so and so, and so and so.” And so we went on until the number in his household amounted to twenty three people, whereas his father had admitted only to eight.
-The Memoirs of Babikir Bedri, An Autobiography
It is hard to get names and relationships straight in some Arab extended families. Brothers can be full or from a different mother or unrelated but off the same wet nurse. Forget about daughters, aunts, and mothers. I was once introduced to the older sister of a man I’ve known for many years and she said, I met you and we talked a long time ago. I said, I don’t remember and she said, you came to my father’s house and sat in the men’s quarters and we talked through a crack in the door.
That’s why I liked to befriend the family’s youngsters. They didn’t look at you like you’d dropped in from the planet Mars and they talked to you like the simple-mind whose broken spoken Arabic you sounded like. But you could get a free vocabulary lesson from them, like playing a game of you point-and-they speak pictionary. As long as you could see it, they could say it. Donkey. Ear. Donkey ear. And most children had all their teeth, so that solved the problem caused by using the old and toothless as your word informants.
Babikir Bedri, an original companion of the Sudanese Mahdi and later an educator who founded what was to become Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman, had similar troubles in getting all the names in the household straight. His grandson Gasim is now Ahfad’s president and presides over his campus- quite a household it is- like a benevolent father figure.
And he is proud of his girls and knows most of their names. When I wanted some student interviews for an article I was writing, he waded into a crowd of them during their class change-over and pulled two aside. Tell me if you want others, he said to me. I’ll make them talk all you want. And he smiled.