Speak To Me

Music was my first language. I was blessed with a gentle tone and I could sing in tune. I was a dark-skinned, long-legged 7-year old in a white British public primary school chosen to sing “Welcome Jesus” during the Nativity at Christmas. During the rehearsal breaks I savored the wide-eyed looks and warm smiles given by Parent volunteers to my relay of how I was adopted. I didn’t know where Nazareth was or why Mary and the other girls had to wrap their heads in ripped table-cloths of blues, and browns and reds, but I knew how to caress and linger on the right words and hold out the notes without wobbling. No one told me that in the region Jesus was born his name would have been pronounced “Issa”, that the people in the Nativity story didn’t speak English but in fact spoke Arabic, and were closer to my blood ancestry than any of the children sweating on stage in oversized nightgowns with tea towels on their heads. 

A piano, gifted to my mum by her great Aunty was available in the old dining room and I started to experiment with musical instruments and joined the choir. My mum would take every opportunity to make sure I got the support she didn’t. At high school I was somehow able to remain relatively cool and popular while also playing the violin at the local orchestra, acting the thrilling role of the White Witch in the musical of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and exploring the world of technological composition with the help of Apple Mac Logic Pro.

When I secured a place at Nottingham University with singing as my prime instrument, I refused to listen to my Dad’s scolding about how my ironed hair smelled burnt from the GHDs - it was an unavoidable sacrifice if I wanted to keep looking the least bit like the lead from Pussycat Dolls.

My voice died during my first week at University. I spent my first five nights screaming to new gaggles of friends over club beats and my first five days rolling my redshot eyes to my fellow students signed up to the Music degree. The sixth day was an important day. I nervously waited outside a thick and shiny honey oak door to meet my singing teacher for the first time. She was generous enough to continue the class before me for a few more minutes and as I crept closer to listen. I cringed as I heard the shrill opera as the student ran her voice over a particularly challenging arch of notes. The delivery was uncontrolled and wildly out of tune. However, with each repetition of the same section of music the torture became suffocating. Eventually I forced my nervous knuckle to wrap on the door and relive my teacher from the endless torture. She opened the door in a sweeping gesture and I glanced around the room, first in anticipation and then with slowly dawning horror as I found no one else there.

I only ever attended one other lesson with her after that, and for whatever reason, I never found the courage to request a change of tutor. Instead, I found myself freefalling into a genre which made less and less sense. My ears hurt from the pressure to listen. I made bad choices and I threw myself into the life of socializing and partying. As a consequence I unknowingly suffered from alcohol-induced paranoia and depression. I lived by night and dragged myself through campus during the daytime. I sat in the latest lecture listening to birds tweeting with my head pulsing from the hangover from the night before. My mouth was dry and tasted eggy. With heavy eyes I tried to focus my attention on the lecturer and convince myself that what I had just heard was very carefully orchestrated loops of music of a different kind of tune… Clarity eventually came - I no longer recognised the language at all.

I remember the journey home that day because I sat next to another student I did not know too well, who managed during that trip to persuade me to switch to Politics. The following year I was exposed to the dark political powers of Machiavelli and the European Commission and Abu Ghraib.  Ironically everything covered in those studies I learnt a lot later. 

For the most part during those years I made bad choices. I threw myself into the life of socializing and partying. Some nights I would throw away my cash buying drinks for strangers as drunk as I was. I proceeded to waste the remainder of the evening sweeping half-empty glasses off cocktail tables in dimly lit disco rooms to quench a thirst insatiable. My stumbling walk home was on wet pavements lit by gray street lights and a cold moon. Loneliness ate at me most nights, made me bitter and insecure during the day. I lost myself in junk food and pirate bay and whiskey mixed in my coffee.

Brief bursts of peace came when I took the bus the 15 miles from Nottingham city center to the quaint British village of Southwell and dug into home-made meals and slept in a bed with a soft mattress and a cozy duvet. Despite the gentle nudges from my mum and dad I felt like the pearl glow and peach clouds of my childhood were imprisoned behind a fogged window 10-inches thick. All those hours I had improvised on the piano to compose my own musical to Lesley Pierce’s Remember Me. All those dance routines I had practiced in the garage. All those warm moments of carefree laughter with friends between school classes.

Instead of taking a break from it all, I doubled down on the self-destruction. I burned away any remaining imagination with the acid of alcohol.The outfits I bought for nights out began to border on promiscuous.  I stopped attending lectures altogether and kept my bank account afloat through a part-time job at a pub chain called the Flaming Grill (or Flaming Grissle as my Dad would joke). Despite joining the kitchen staff made up of local youth to smoke a joint next to the kitchen door, I was never able to keep up with their cursing and their jibing and their moods. I laughed late at jokes. My comebacks always tripped over each other or were simply unworthy of acknowledgment. Another group I was desperate to feel a part of. Over the three years at University my sense of self was gradually warped and distorted beyond recognition by the sheer effort of trying to remain both interested in and interesting to those around me.

But while I felt like I was being swept out to sea, an undercurrent was actually pulling me in a very different direction. In between the rounds of jagermeister I enrolled in taking classical Arabic as credits. I constantly found myself drawn to that part of the world and just debating fellow students about the Iraq War always brought a sting to my throat. I wanted to learn more about the people who were fighting such injustices.

University only taught me theory. It was not enough and so a quick google led me to sign up to a month’s Arabic course at the School of Abi Baba in Jordan. Needless to say my mum called them up to check the school was real.

It is worth mentioning here that I was well-traveled. In Jordan I found my voice again. And then I learnt the language and I met real shepherds and their flocks. I joined a non-governmental organization in the business development department and through sheer passion and hard work I secured myself a satisfying career in the international development sector. At the place I worked I found my Husband, my faith keeper. I created a new me who was far from the…

The world Baba is universal, it faces no linguistic walls, no verbal barriers. Baba was the first word you fluttered as your tongue and lips stretched and your hands clasped and unclasped in urgent angst for your Dad. Husband, faith keeper.

When they asked (and they always ask) your Dad and I how we communicate with you - do we interact in Arabic or do I promote my native tongue and instruct you in English? - I used to regurgitate the answer I thought was expected from us. Until tonight.

Tonight you taught me the true weight of words. It was crispy outside but you always fell asleep quicker if I weaved you across the courtyard in the pram. As long as I avoided the slats of streetlight which peeked through the dark wooden slats of our house gate adjacent to your reclined position in the pram. Propping up your milk bottle with one hand, the dog’s insisting bark had you sit up straight, alert, and at that moment I knew it would be a while before you slept.

Obediently, I unstrapped you and hauled you into my arms. I held you up to look at the moon and I said “wayn al gamma?” and you pointed your finger swiftly up at the sky and then looked at me with that toothy grin of four little sugar lumps. A moment later as an afterthought I chirped “moon” - tentatively, inquiringly, - and to my delight you twisted back your head and set your eyes again at that white rock painted amidst the stars. Who would have thought that a toddler could see one element and understand it holds at least two names? You taught me tonight, Alyaa, that absentmindedly slipping between languages is evidence that the cultural battlefield can be conquered.