All Strangers Are Kin: Adventures In Arabic And The Arab World, by Zora O’Neill

My generally positive review of this book that I give is dependent on my reading of the author’s self-presentation as being deliberately critical. To the extent that the author wished herself to be seen by readers as appealing or relatable or someone to model themselves after, this book does not succeed, except in those flashing moments of pride where the author thinks herself to have mastered some sort of key to communicating with other people. By and large, the author proves herself to be a somewhat awkward and clueless person, filling notebooks with words but struggling with the basics and fundamentals of what it means to be a good communicator in being a good listener and in being gracious and understanding towards how others see the world and act within it. Perhaps most telling of the author’s general lack of self-awareness is her belief that the Arabic language would be better taught as it is spoken, not as it has been written since pre-Quranic times, in distinction to many of the Academics she encounters in the book who point to the importance of having a common high Arabic standard that everyone is familiar with, even if regional variants diverge widely from this model, and then her intense frustration when she finds in Lebanon a teacher who makes up ad hoc “rools” about Lebanese Arabic to express how that dialect is actually spoken. In the end, predictably, the author finds out that the name she thought was rather rare was extremely common and that it would be impossible to find the person she was named after and that her Arabic was shot by trying to learn too many dialects, even if her “native” one fits her well as an overdramatic middle aged woman.

This book is about 300 pages long and is divided into four parts, each of which deals with the author’s travels in a country/region within the Arab-speaking world. The first part of the book deals with the author’s experiences in Egypt, which began when the author was learning Arabic as a young graduate student in her 20’s, and then continued some fifteen years later or so when the author returned to Egypt in the aftermath of the Arab spring during the period where there was some hope of regime change. The author chronicles the violence committed against the Coptic minority without fully understanding why revolutionary times are bad for vulnerable minorities, which can be a fatal blunder when dealing with the Middle East. This is followed by the author’s experiences traveling in the Gulf, mostly in the UAE, where the author finds herself looking (mostly unsuccessfully) for Emirates accents in the face of massive immigration, and also finds herself struggling to relate to those around her who strike her as intensely reserved. After this the author finds herself traveling in Lebanon and struggling with the complicated identity politics of the nation, once again showing her lack of self-awareness about the toxic nature of identity politics and the landmines that result from quotas and the like, the sort of things she would support at home, struggling with the opposite nature of Arabic and in the contrast between glamour and violence she finds in Beirut. The book then ends where the author’s life began, in Morocco, where the author travels ahead to get a lay of the land before her aged parents arrive on a trip, and where she finds out how common her name is, once she realizes that Zora is only the end of the name Fatima, and that she has people with the same name all around her without realizing it. Included in this part of the book is the author’s quick friendship with a lonely young woman who missed out on education and has lost her virginity, while seeking a way to leave a home in which she is not entirely welcome, it being assumed that she would marry young. The awkwardness of communication is a deeply common human experience, and the author ought not to feel too bad for struggling with it. We all do.

I am not sure if we were supposed to laugh with or laugh at the author as she presents herself in this book. Although it is uncharitable, I found myself laughing at her fairly often, such as when she takes a tour through an area and is slow enough on the uptake not to realize what everyone else realized, that a van full of Christians traveling through the Bekka valley was in some danger from the local Shi’ite militias during times of political instability, which is pretty much the status quo in Lebanon. Similarly, the author’s inability to deal with traffic circles leads her to have to defend herself in traffic court, where she emerged victorious, able to explain her side of the story, fortunately aided by the fact that the person she ran into ran away from the scene of the accident and did not bother to present his side of the story in court. Her best moments are when she understands something about herself, about the way that the Egyptian accent sounds to others, about the way she appears to others, in the way that it is important to put others at ease, in the way that she recognizes that her childless life causes other people to wonder what is wrong with her, and rightly so (if sometimes awkwardly so for some of us). The author’s bravery in travel combined with her somewhat lack of self-insight reminds us that our ability to understand other people often depends in having a good understanding of ourselves as well. I have a great deal of sympathy for the author’s husband, who appears to be a good sport, and a longsuffering sort of fellow. He likely needs to practice that virtue often.