The naming of things

From 25 June 2009

“You like the hubbly bubbly?” asks Anoud, pointing mischievously to the argeelah, the Arab water pipe. Her Saudi friend and former college roommate giggles and remarks on the name “hubbly bubbly”.
“Na’am, bahebb argeelah (Yes, I like the argeelah),” I reply.
“Oh, you call it argeelah, not hubbly bubbly?”
At this I’m getting a bit “huffy puffy”. Why do Arabs so enjoy this running gag about foreigners and the hubbly bubbly? “Yes, the Americans I know and I call it argeelah like everybody else.”
“Wallah (really),” says Anoud, a hint of disbelief in her exclamation.
“I don’t know who calls it hubbly bubbly” I begin, but remembering the British couple seated behind me at the film showing (see previous entry), I continue, “but I think the British call it hubbly bubbly.”
“Yeah, maybe because they occupy Jordan long time ago,” Anoud says, half-serious, half-joking.
“Occupiers, colonizers,” I affirm.
“Yes, colonizers.”
Take that nasally British woman.

We’re seated on a hillside in Salt, a hilly, rocky region dotted with olive trees and a flock of sheep meandering through an adjoining field, their shepherd slumped over a boulder and keeping a watchful eye on them. The waning sunlight of the hour before sunset frames their wooly outline in warm, golden hues, and the breeze stirs the tree branches of the tree shading our group; the air is dusty yet fresh. Katti is my language partner of sorts, a Palestinian human rights lawyer who approached me a few weeks ago at a café. “I need someone with whom to improve my conversational English,” she explained. I smirked; with her correct grammatical construction, clearly this was going to be an imbalanced language partnership. I couldn’t construct a sentence like that in Arabic if my life depended on it. But in the past couple weeks, while I haven’t, regrettably, learned Arabic, I’m pleased with how natural Katti’s conversational English is becoming – and that she’s my ticket to social occasions like rowdy graduation parties and picnics in the countryside outside Amman to see the sunset.
“Eyeyeyeyeyyeyah!” trills the proud mother of a recent university graduate, and she begins dancing proactively Arab style in the middle of the 40 or so guests on the patio. “Amrekiyyah!” she shouts pointing at me. “Taeli!” (You, American, come here!) I’m no dancer, and my awkward efforts at Arab dance evoke laughter – a lot of laughter. I felt my face redden, but I smiled it off. Smiling, acting eager to learn, and taking advantage of my youthful appearance and presumed inexperience have been effective research strategies, and the same goes for such social settings. And more and more I’m learning that being willing to embarrass oneself, to laugh it off, and to be patient and humble, are key for this kind of fieldwork.
“What do you call what you study?” asks one of the younger Jordanian women, impressing me with her studied, clear American accent, and tossing her long, amber hair with cosmopolitan flair.
“Sociocultural Anthropology.”
“What is that?”
“The way people live and make sense of their world.”
“Sounds fascinating,” she said turning back to the woman seated next to her.

Believe me, it is.