Travelling ideas and their baggage
To travel is a privilege not afforded to all. While that might seem a bit hyperbolic in times like these, it is in fact a reality for most of the world. Personally, I remember a time when traveling by plane cost several hundreds of euros, and traveling quickly (i.e. by Concorde) came to amount half of the price of a new car. Traveling is more than a question of money, but also one of perspective: how can a place truly ever be seen, heard, understood without visiting it.
Believe it or not, but while traveling in northern Italy, I have met a woman, living in the Tosco-Emilian Apennines (equidistant from the Tyrrhenian and Adriatic Sea), who has never once travelled the 1:30 hours to the seaside. She simply remained up on the mountain. This does not, however, mean that she has no notion of what the beach looks like, but rather no means of how to get there. So why bother, when she can travel through cinema, television, and literature; If Mohamed won’t come down the mountain…
Not only people travel, culture does too. It is impossible to travel to another culture (physically or via the arts), without bringing one’s own culture to the other. Think of it like baggage. Although most people would love to travel light, there are some things that we simply cannot leave behind. In the case of culture, it can be some things such as the act of counting on one’s hand: to count starting from the thumb, or from the index finger? — think of the cult scene in Inglorious Basterds. Or how we imitate animals (does a dog bark woof woof, or bau bau; or even hau hau). This also applies to the way of thinking. Association and perception, the building blocks of any idea, are formed by our background. It is like the Rorschach test of culture. That is why such phenomena speak to the bigger picture of the environmental aspect of ideas. This became especially evident to me when I read Youssef Idris’ The Cheapest Nights, impeccably translated from its original classical and Egyptian Arabic into English by the Alexandrian translator Wadida Wassef.
Youssef Idris was an Egyptian writer, born in the countryside, and the first of his family to make the big migration to the city, in his case to Cairo. He is important to the Egyptian literary tradition for putting his focus on the typical everyday life of the Egyptian people, instead of the idealized image of the Arab identity.
While reading the English version of this wonderful collection of short stories, a few things struck me. It began with the introduction, written by Wassef herself, explaining her obstacles to a complete rendering of the text. While the narration itself is written in classical Arabic, the dialogues are in Egyptian Arabic. A difference not only in language variety, but in style. Here, it is important to note, that to this day, it is frowned upon to write in the many dialects and varieties of the Arabic language, since they are considered inferior to the “pure” (an almost “liturgical”) koranic Arabic. The problem is: in Egypt only the educated have a degree of fluency in classical Arabic, which in itself is not a 100% intelligible with Egyptian Arabic. It is a difference as big as the one between Latin and Italian. It is not impossible to understand, though it still requires a specific access to information and education in order to passively understand, let alone speak or write it. So, the fact that the author has opted to still make use of the spoken Egyptian Arabic in his literary works poses an important cultural weight. And it is exactly here, that ideas did not travel. Wassef, who is fluent in both Arabic(s) and English, still could not convey this crucial stylistic/ linguistic idea in her translation, since the difference between dialects/varieties is not as culturally charged in the target language, English. And to use any transliteration of a variety of the English language would not only be wildly inappropriate if not offensive, but furthermore terribly inapt to describe the cultural notion of language in a post-colonial society. Moreover, it is a context so specific to the Egyptian experience, that the intersectionality between language, register, and socio-economic standing would be lost on most Non-Egyptian readers. The ideas are too heavy to traverse cultural borders.
Here, the work is to be enjoyed for what it is: storytelling. Anything else would require an introduction to linguistics and a plane ticket to Egypt (I recommend Aegean Airlines for anyone flying from Berlin): Travelling is necessary to get an idea of the language situation over there.
The small but culturally very charged everyday issues can also represent another good example of “sedentary ideas”. These do not travel well, since they are hyper-dependent on location, history and culture. For instance, in one of the short stories, the protagonist hires a domestic helper (simply referred to as a servant — khadamma in Egypt). The protagonist, who lives in a high-rise building in the prestigious island of Zamalek in Cairo, hires a woman who arrives dressed in a melaya — a bedsheet. Wassef had decided to keep the latinized transliteration of the Egyptian Arabic word in her translation. It shocked me to see only the italics but no annotations to explain it. While I understand that while translating, sometimes it is better not to translate in order to convey, I still wondered how anyone who has not the slightest clue of Egypt could understand it. Furthermore, even I, a person who grew up in Cairo, did not fully comprehend the meaning of wearing a bedsheet. Since I have never seen (or at least never noticed) someone wear a melaya in the affluent neighborhoods of my childhood, I merely thought it strange. Only after asking around in Egypt, an explanation popped up; an extra layer to this heartbreaking short story.
A melaya is the garment of the poorest of the poor in Lower Egypt (ironically, that is northern Egypt). Worn only by women over their undergarments; In Egypt that would typically be over a thin under-dress, such as a camisole, known as a combinaison. It is uncommon (but not unheard of) in the rural communities and is the equivalent of wearing a potato-sack-dress. Unlike the US-depression era garments, it is highly associated with sex work, and is a socio-economic marker in the urban societies of Egypt. It is thus a phenomenon endemic to Lower Egypt, where women in underprivileged situations dress modestly in accordance to the patriarchal and paternalistic values of their environment.
Once understood, the fog of it all lifted, and the narrative took on a different shape. It became more subtle and concise, and the style of the storytelling became more coherent. The translation suddenly gained seriousness. It made me curious to know what other issues eluded me for lack of better knowledge.
All this to say: all ideas that travel change to some degree or another. Some changes are massive, and become truly shocking; others are so small, they become imperceptible to the untrained eye. Skimming through this specific experience, the notion of travelling ideas intrigued me very much. And contemplating the globalisation of it all, I know for a fact that ideas have never travelled as much as right now. And nonetheless, some concepts do not travel easily. Similarly to the airplane experience, some notions travel with so much ease, it is like going into the overhead compartment, while others are too big, too specific, too fragile, or simply too heavy. Special care is needed, or else it simply will not work, and they have to go into stowaway.