Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
-Constantine Cavafy
But last year stories began to reach us from the capital of unrest among the barbarians…Of this unrest I myself saw nothing. In private I observed that once in every generation, without fail, there is an episode of hysteria about the barbarians. There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters.
-J.M. Coetzee
Que barbaridad!
-Emma Nunez, Arequipa, Peru, 1973, said about her husband Tomas when he came home drunk late at night
For the Egyptians call all men barbarians who do not speak the same language as themselves.
-Herodotus, The Histories
There is a commonly perceived thin line between civilization and barbarity in marriage just as there is in foreign affairs and matters of national security. Those outside our gates, our hedge rows, our shores, our marital bed. But how to tell us from them? By skin color…vocabulary that is considered either polite or impolite…Knowing the soup spoon from the salad fork from the fish knife…
Emma considered Tomas’ kisses to be barbaric when he’d been drinking pisco, as she told me at the breakfast table the next morning when she would often, because she was feeling gaseous and wanted to be well mannered in the presence of a gringo guest, turn her head away and let out a lady-like belch. I shared a room with their eight year old son, our bed room was beside theirs separated by a curtain, so yes, I can say that there was indeed a thin line between civilization and barbarity in Arequipa that summer.
Egyptians didn’t like me not knowing the difference between the words aywa and na’am. Both mean yes, each used at different times. My Arabic improved over the 12 months I lived in Cairo and near the end of my stay I had a conversation on the street with someone who thought I was Lebanese, because of my accent he told me. No, he didn’t think that I was a khawaja, a European foreigner, a word that when used by an Egyptian often made me feel like a barbarian, but rather that I was an Arab. In that case, I seemed to fall on the civilized side of the line. My Arabic had become a little less barbaric at least in one man’s eyes.
In Peru just as in Egypt I don’t believe that I ever became a solution. I always felt more like a problem, especially whenever I opened my mouth. But I plead guilty to being perceived as a barbarian from time to time, and it is probably even more true today, when all an American has to do is to show their passport, than it was yesterday, when we had to incorrectly say aywa instead of na’am to an Egyptian, and thus sound terribly barbaric in their most civilized of languages.