The first betrayal is the pen. At Cairo airport, it stalls over the landing card. Around Jana, people write with irritating fluency, passports pinned beneath their wrists. Name. Nationality. Address. Purpose of visit. Four little boxes, each with the nerve to ask where, exactly, she belongs.
Jana grew up in Egypt, moved to Boston at eleven, and returned often enough to know the choreography: the hot slap of air at the jet bridge and the officer glancing from passport to face as if one of them were lying. The form went looking for foreignness and found lack.
“I remember being so embarrassed,” she told me. “It was such a basic thing, and I just couldn’t do it.” At first, she thought the shame belonged to migration: to America, to English, to the quiet erosion that begins when home becomes a place you visit with luggage. Then she told her friends in Cairo. “Everyone burst out laughing. They were like, ‘Wait, we can’t fill it out either.’”
The mother tongue had gone missing at home, too.
To say “Arabic” is already to lie. Across a generation raised between Arab cities and Anglophone ones, the pattern repeats. A grandmother’s scolding, we understood. A government form could undo us. We could sing the chorus and fail at the novel, catch the flirtation and lose the reply. Our Arabic worked best at the table – in argument, in affection, in the quick machinery of a family meal – and went quiet on paper, under fluorescent light, where the things that matter get decided.
Jana felt it again in college, in an Arabic class full of American students meeting the language for the first time. “They loved the grammar,” she said. “They thought it was fun.” For Jana, the same classroom felt almost humiliating. “It was surreal,” she told me. “Sitting there with people discovering Arabic for the first time, while I was trying to learn something I was supposed to already have.” A stranger can approach Arabic as a system. You approach it as a debt.
This is a particular Arab story. It belongs to the children of international schools and family WhatsApp groups, of satellite television and school fees. They are Arab enough to be claimed by the region, Anglophone enough to be rewarded for leaving parts of it untranslated.
“She spends ‘I love you’ freely in English. In Arabic the phrase refuses to travel so lightly.”
As a child, my phone calls with my grandmother were love reduced to its administrative essentials: her health, my lunch, the weather. Before hanging up, she would call me habibti with such force that it almost hid the fact that we had run out of things to say. I loved her, but in outline.
As my Arabic improved, the calls lengthened. She told me about her honeymoon in Malaysia, the friend she loathed for cheating at Rummikub, the Turkish soap actor she had distrusted from episode one. She emerged in particulars: sentimental, competitive, suspicious of handsome men on television. She became someone I loved for reasons I could name.
For Yara, mother tongue was not an abstraction. “In my mind, my father was English and my mother was Arabic,” she says. English with her father meant politics, debate, the daughterly sport of thinking she might be the cleverest person in the room. With her mother, the subjects sat closer to the skin – schooldays, friendship troubles, feelings – but Arabic gave them less room. “Every word had weight,” she says. “It was: big emotion, small language.”
The weight cut both ways. She spends “I love you” freely in English – on her best friend, on a stranger who lets her cut the bathroom queue. In Arabic the phrase refuses to travel so lightly. “It feels too serious,” she says. “I couldn’t just throw it out like that. I don’t think I’ve lived a moment that deserves it yet.”
One grief of mother-tongue loss is that it leaves the family intact but flat. Grandparents become archives you can greet but not fully open. Family history arrives as atmosphere: a wedding photograph, a half-told feud, a recipe no one has written down.
The lesson began early, and rarely announced itself as one. Arabic was gradually demoted in my life, edged out by school, ambition, television, and the private humiliation of being corrected in what was supposed to come naturally. In London, I studied English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, and Latin before my “native” tongue. I could conjugate the language of an empire long dead before I could write my own name in the language of the living.
In Kuwait, the hierarchy came air-conditioned – the gospel of the international school. English was on the worksheets, in the assemblies, in the casual cruelty of who sounded “smart” and who sounded “local.” Lara grew up inside it. “Everything was in English,” she tells me. “Textbooks, teachers, presentations. Arabic was just another class, next to Islamic studies.” It produced a familiar type: the Arab child with the smooth, placeless accent, fluent in PowerPoint and sarcasm, panicking over the word for stapler.
“They’d tell us, if you want your English to be good, speak it at home, too,” Lara said. “I thought my parents were being difficult when they pushed back. I didn’t get it then. Now I do.” English kept appearing in the rooms that decided things – classrooms, visa forms, job interviews. Arabic stayed in the kitchen.
“Arabic was just another class, next to Islamic studies.”
Then culture made the lesson pleasurable. Disney Channel gave English a lighting scheme. It came with bedrooms, lockers, slammed doors, mothers who could be defeated with sarcasm and reconciled with before the credits. Hannah Montana and High School Musical became instruction manuals for adolescence. Before we could parse a newspaper headline in Arabic, we understood the emotional grammar of the American teenager. English became the language in which life appeared to have a plot.
And with that, I, a young Palestinian girl raised in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, suddenly had a Texan twang, and occasionally parroted the phrase “sweet niblets” at any minor frustration. My brother, meanwhile, spoke in the argot of London boys: “finished” for ruined, “chopped” for ugly, every sentence standing around in a black puffer jacket. He was Jaffa and JD Sports, inheritance and algorithm. Same parents, same kitchen, different feeds. Both of us fluent in borrowed cool, less fluent in the language our mother begged us to love.
My mother staged her intervention through Ms. Shireen, a saintly Arabic tutor whom my brother and I treated as a state-sponsored threat. Her offense was modest: she wanted to teach us verbs. Every Saturday, we hid in cupboards, under beds, and behind curtains, holding our breath as though Arabic were a predator with a lesson plan. Once, my brother spent six hours in a closet to avoid class. I refused to attend in solidarity, early proof that I could turn almost anything into a cause.
Effort had to compete with an entire childhood of ease. Every correction was an exposure. My brother learned this over lunch, in front of a gaggle of grandmothers comparing weak knees, bad backs, fading hearing. Trying to join in, he turned to my grandmother and said, wallah, Teta, sum’itek mneeha. He meant: your hearing is good. He had said: your reputation is good.
My grandmother, a deeply religious woman in her eighties, howled. “She was creasing,” my brother said. “Everyone was creasing. I remember thinking, I’m never saying anything in Arabic again.”
The story entered family folklore, where linguistic mistakes are lovingly, mercilessly preserved. Shame works strangely in a half-held language. The mistake becomes communal before the fluency does – you reach for the conversation and come back as the anecdote. Soon, you learn to say nothing perfectly.
Silence worked better at family lunches than in flirtation. Desire made new demands of the language, most of them unfair and badly timed.
“People flirt with me in Arabic, and my brain just buffers. By the time I find the words, the moment is gone.”
You can survive a bad case ending in class. You can recover from a misspelled caption. Flirtation is less forgiving. A joke translated half a second late is dead on arrival; a compliment explained in real time loses its heat. By the time you have built the sentence, the moment has already chosen someone else.
Jana flirts in English. “People flirt with me in Arabic,” she said, “and my brain just buffers.” She laughed. “I understand it, but I’m not quick in it. By the time I find the words, the moment is gone.”
A born-and-bred Lebanese man, speaking on condition of anonymity, tells me he saves Arabic for girls whose Arabic is poor. “Arab girls who don’t speak great Arabic love it,” he said, with the chilling calm of a man who had weaponized postcolonial longing before lunch. “It makes them feel connected to a part of themselves they cannot access.” The line was appalling because it was accurate. I have been exactly that girl. He performed ease; I felt, briefly and dangerously, claimed by the language I had been trying to deserve
If desire punishes delay, prayer does something crueler: it reveals which language your need reaches for first. After the formal prayer, after the Arabic discipline of it, comes the private bargaining: the whispered inventory of wants, fears, humiliations, and minor catastrophes.
I confessed to my mother that when I bring God the dramas of being a 23-year-old girl, I usually do it in English. My Arabic knows how to ask for mercy. My English knows how to itemize the problem.
“Even your dua?” my mother said. All those Arabic lessons I’d dodged, and they’d finally caught up with me – here, of all places. Her face did the translating. Surely the Creator of all things, including language itself, understood me. Still, my mother’s certainty stayed with me. Somewhere along the way, even my pleading had acquired an accent.
Lara is open about being neurodivergent, but Arabic often leaves her stranded between symptom and diagnosis. “I have no way of saying ADHD except saying ADHD,” she told me. “Or I say, ‘I can’t concentrate,’ which doesn’t fully explain it. I end up using English as the intermediary, because I don’t have the framework for it in Arabic.” Her medication fares no better. “The only Arabic I have for it,” she said, laughing, “is Egyptian slang for meth.”
Arabic-speaking families have endurance, sacrifice, faith. What arrived pre-translated was the modern self – in medical reports, therapy-speak, the soft bureaucracies of burnout and boundaries. To pretend otherwise would be nostalgia with better grammar.
“There is something faintly ridiculous about trying to pass down a language one is still Googling at midnight.”
At some point, longing replaced avoidance. This was inconvenient, since longing is much less useful than grammar. We avoided it because we were embarrassed, then stayed embarrassed because we had avoided it.
What I want now is Arabic I am willing to use, however imperfect. There is something faintly ridiculous about trying to pass down a language one is still Googling at midnight.
Relearning is unglamorous. You stay on the phone after the weather has been discussed and endure the small panic of having no next question. You text your mother for the word for stapler and feel grateful when she sends a voice note instead of the spelling. You learn diagnosis, desire, apology, grief, God. Slowly, badly, the language becomes less ceremonial. It returns to use. The inheritance is imperfect, but the silence was, too.
The landing card still asks for name, nationality, address, purpose of visit. It has no box for the language your grandmother dreams in, or the word your brother reached for and lost.
Still, the form waits. The boxes are small. The pen is borrowed.
Purpose of visit? To stay longer in the room. To ask the question after How is your health? To learn the word before the person who needs it is gone. To answer, even badly, when the language that raised me calls my name.
Some names have been changed at the subjects’ request.
