@body arnhem:I told my friend Claudia how inaccessible Turkey’s culture was to me and she said: “For contemporary culture to be reachable we must all speak English and this will destroy all non-English cultures. Do I like it? No. Do I think it’s inevitable? Yes.”
I hated her prophecy but then I couldn’t speak to anyone from town barring the random overzealous expatriate there. Turkey’s culture was inaccessible to me for exactly that reason. I didn’t speak Turkish and the people I wanted to speak to didn’t speak Arabic or English. How simple and magnificent of a divide – you can look into a person’s sincere eyes yet only glimpse hints of stories that you want to hear. Stories that could only be whispered in ears and discussed in speakeasies.
For a moment I thought what a luxury it is that I come from a town where everyone speaks the international language and almost simultaneously I thought that the cultivation of contemporary thoughts and ideas was in extreme opposition to the preservation of ethnic cultures! This is a fact that puts us in a very difficult situation. We have always been taught that those who don’t have a past will not have a present or a future, but this is the 21st century and it is always cited that India will always have the English advantage – as it is referred to – over China. Will Emirati art appear regularly in Art Basel if we begin to discuss it in English? Must we accept congratulations for the first Emirati feature film worthy of being shown in Cannes in English? I don’t know. This is the first piece I’ve written here where I don’t have a strong view about the subject and I feel that I don’t want to decide just yet. It’s too early.
All the people who will curate our museums and attend our galleries, buy our art and watch our films, read our books and critique them – will they do so in Arabic? What is the future of all languages and cultures? Will we all become progressive and unbiased, open minded and politically correct unilingual-speakers? Never has ugly seemed so logical. Never has logic seemed so ugly. Never have both been so inevitably intertwined.
Some of you will call me a pessimist, a defeatist even. Others will describe me as dispassionately practical. I’m not writing this to learn more about myself, I am writing this to look for a glimpse of the future in the present. These are good times but even good times have a price and perhaps we are already paying the interest but just don’t check our bank statements carefully.
Interest is compounding and so is culture and identity. We will all disagree with this notion of paying the price for our loss of language in order to be more accessible to the world. We’ll all speak of how beautiful our language is, how English does not encompass all that our beautiful language does and how it will always be the master of poetic verse. This is all true but everything goes with time. The worse thing about being in a tornado is that you don’t feel it. We think we can be contemporary and preserve our language. We think we’re going to bring Arabic back with our “Desert Renaissance”. We think that because we translated Greek to Latin through Arabic in our past, that we will do such things again. Well there is a reason why Esperanto failed – it is not as simple as English. English will outlive the United States and other English-speaking countries. The Chinese, South Americans and eastern Europeans will all learn English if they want to conduct international trade, and with little difficulty I might add.
We will reach the world and the world will reach us, we will like them and they will like us, and we will influence their thoughts as they will influence ours but in English…only in English.
Mishaal Al Gergawi is a graduate of the American University in Dubai and the CERAM European School of Business
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