The only language of loss left in the world is Arabic-/These words were said to me in a language not Arabic.//…O, this is the madness of the desert, his crazy Arabic//…You’ll all pass between the fleeting words of Arabic.//…Well, it’s all now come true, as it was said in the Arabic.
-Ghazal, Agha Shahid Ali, where Arabic is the poem’s radif, refrain word
The very first time, I was not prepared to spend forty days speaking to the drovers in a language not Arabic, or rather not the Arabic I had been trying to learn for the past four years. After that intensive year in Cairo I barely spoke Egyptian Arabic well enough to follow coffee house conversations, even when sitting across the table from my interlocutors and could watch their lips move.
The Arabic of tribal Kordofan is different from the Arabic of Khartoum. I once bought a colonial-era English-Sudanese Arabic primer, with practice sentences such as “Please direct me to the British Embassy”, but I didn’t see much use for it in the Wadi al-Milk, so I gave it away to some Sudanese-American girls who had left Sudan when young and in America were forgetting their mother tongue. They came from an educated family in El Obeid, so I don’t know if their mother’s spoken Arabic was more of Kordofan or more of Khartoum. But I gradually learned to get my meaning across to the drovers, to KhairAllah better than the others, to the point where they would only sometimes have to call him in to translate for me…another one of his unpaid jobs on the Darb al-Arba’een.
When I see him these days, KhairAllah and I speak less in full Arabic than in only the few prompt words that recall our eighty days together on the trail. Billa Ali, the kindly camel thief we invited to dinner…Masood abu Dood, the drover with the funny name, Father of Worms…Al-Khuwei, the well flats outside al-Nahud where he and I first met…Bilal waqa’a, Bilal fell, off his camel drunk with millet beer. That is a language not really Arabic, it is a language of words not even spoken, but rather of people and places and events remembered, thirty five years later and still good for a chuckle or two.