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Good morning
Awake?
They took my badge but I wanted to ask you
Did anyone write their name on the badge in Arabic?
Anyone? No one? Ok then...
No problem
Once upon a time
I was having dinner with a friend of mine at a restaurant
So I looked at the person serving us and asked him
Do you have a list of dishes?
He looks at me weirdly thinking he didn’t hear clear enough and says
Sorry?
So I told him again: Can you please give me the list of dishes?
Don’t you know what’s it called?
Yes. No. It’s called a menu (as it’s said in English) or “menu” in French right?
Come see what does she want
He was disgusted
At first he was trying to hit on me
And then he was saying to himself I wouldn’t look at her even if she was the last girl on Earth?
A list of dishes? What’s that?
Two words were enough for a Lebanese guy
To judge a woman sitting in his restaurant of retardation and ignorance
How dare she speak so?
So I started to think
I got upset and I was hurt
Yes of course I was
I’m not allowed to speak my native language in my own country
Where can you find that?
How could we have possibly reached this point?
There’s a lot of people like me in here who could reach a point in their lives
Where they would erase everything that already happened
Just to prove that they are contemporary and civilized?
Am I going to forget my entire culture and all of my thoughts
All of my knowledge and all of my memories
The best memories of the war are probably the childhood stories?
Am I going to forget everything I learnt in Arabic just to fit in?
Just to blend in?
Where’s logic?
Nevertheless
I tried to understand him
And I don’t want to judge him the same harsh way he judged me
Arabic doesn’t meet our needs
it doesn’t
It isn’t a language neither for scientific production nor for researches
You don’t need it neither at universities nor at work
We don’t need it to make any advanced scientific research
We definitely don’t need at the airport
Because if we speak Arabic they’ll take off every piece of cloth?
Where are we going to use it?
We can all ask that
Do you want Arabic? Where will we use it?
Okay this is an existing reality but there’s a far more important reality
That we should consider and notice
Arabic or mother language
Studies and reports show that being fluent in other languages
Requires being fluent in mother language
And that being fluent in mother language is an essential condition to excel in other languages
How’s that?
When Gebran Khalil Gebran started writing
He began writing in Arabic
His thoughts
His imagination
His inner self, his metaphysics
His philosophy
He took all of these from that child who sat in the village
And who grew accustomed to a certain smell, a certain voice and a certain thought
So when he began writing in English
He had a huge knowledge
Even when he was writing in English
And when we read him in English
we smell the same odor
We feel the same feelings
We can picture him both the person excelling in English and the one living in the country
In a village from Mount Lebanon
So that’s one example that can’t be refuted
Second of all, it is said
If you want to kill a nation
The only way to do so is to kill its language
And this fact is known by developed nations
The Germans, the French, the Japanese, the Chinese
All nations are aware of this fact
That’s why they pass laws to protect their language
That’s why sanctify it
That’s why they produce using this language
And they pay a lot of money to develop it
Do we know more than they do?
Okay, If we’re not a developed country and we still have no access no to such advanced thinking but we want to catch up this civilized world
Countries alike us have decided now to develop and to make researches and to catch up these countries
Like Turkey and Malaysia and others
They grasped their language while climbing the ladder as if it was a diamond
They preserved it and kept it close
Because if you receive any product from Turkey or others with no Turkish language
It wouldn’t be a local product
You wouldn’t believe that it’s a local product
They would have consumed and stupidly
Just like we do most of the time
So in order to innovate and produce, they had to preserve their language
If I say “Freedom, sovereignty, independence” (as it’s said in Arabic)
What would it bring to your mind?
Nothing?
Regardless of who, how, and and why but you know
Language is not speeches and whatever words we are using
Language represents particular phases through our lives
To which our emotions relate along with these terms
That’s why when I say “Freedom, sovereignty, independence”
Each one of you has a certain image in his mind
With certain words and feelings for a certain day for a certain historical period
So language isn’t mere words and aligned letters
It’s an inner idea related to the way we think and the way we perceive others and others perceive us
What is our intellectual stock?
Why do we say this person knows while another doesn’t
So if I come and tell you “Freedom, Soverneighty, independence”
If your son comes and says “You are still following that thing that has freedom, that symbol. What do you feel like?
If you feel at all then that’s very good
We won’t have a problem anymore. Let me just leave from here because I will be talking nonsense
The idea here is that these phrases remind us of certain things
My friend is Francophone and she married a French guy
I was asking her how was she doing in everything
And she said it’s all good
Except once I spent an entire night trying to translate what does “To’borni” (Literally means: I would die for you) mean
Because She told him “To’borni” by mistake
He was thinking that is there anyone who is that brutal?
Or maybe she wanted to kill herself? “Bury me” for example?
This is something really small
But see how much does it make us feel helpless
I can’t tell my husband this word because he won’t understand it
And he is right, that is how he thinks
Then she told me that he listens to Fairouz
With me but one night he sat next to me
And I was trying to translate it to him maybe
He can feel what I feel when I listen to Fairouz
So she wanted to translate
“I extended my hands and stole you away from them
And because you belong to them”
Here is the catastrophe
“I pulled my hands back and left you”
Translate this for me
Ok
What did we do
To protect the Arabic language?
We have made this into a civil society issue
And we launched a campaign to protect the Arabic language
Even though a lot of people told me
“Don’t bother yourself with that” No problem
The campaign has launched a slogan that says
“I talk to you from the east and you answer me from the west”
We did not say
“No, we don’t agree. And we are the language..”
We didn’t do that because
We won’t understand this way
And if someone comes to me and says that
I will start hating the Arabic language
We are saying that….
We are trying to see how we are living in reality
Then be convinced with a way that mimic our dreams and ambitions
A way that dress the same way we do and thinks the same way as well
So “I talk to you from the east and you answer me from the west”
Is the perfect saying for such a thing
Something that is really simple but innovative and convincing
After that we started a campaign that has the letters put on the sidewalks
You saw it outside here.
A letter with a yellow stripe around it
Written on it “Do not kill your language”
Why?
Seriously do not kill your language
We all need to not kill our language
Because if we kill the language we will have to go back and search for an identity
We have to look for existence
We need to start over from zero
Not only that
We won’t be able to be civilized and contemporary
Then we took pictures of young guys and girls
Hugging the Arabic letter
“Cool“ pictures of young people
Because we are very “cool”
And whoever says we caught you saying an English word (cool)
I am adopting the word “cool”
Let them come and do whatever they want to do
Let them give me a better word that works on our reality better than that
I will keep saying the “internet”
I will not say “A slice on the spider web”
Because it just doesn’t work
We are not kidding ourselves
But to get here we all have to be convinced
We do not want to make the one who is bigger
And thinks he has the power over the language
That he can make us think and feel the way he wants us to
The idea here is innovation
If we can’t go to space and build a rocket we can be innovative
Every person here is an innovative project
Innovation in the mother language is the way
Let us start now from this moment
Write a novel
Produce a short film
One novel can make us international
It can bring back the Arabic language to the first place
It is not like there is no solution
Seriously there is
But we have to pay attention and be convinced
That there must be a solution
And we have to be a part of this solution
At the end what can you do today?
Now? Tweet! Who here is tweeting?
I beg you
Seriously I beg you even though time is almost done
In Arabic, English, French or even in Chinese
But don’t write “Ma’oul” (Translates literally to reasonable) like “Ma32oul”
Because that is a disaster
This is not a language
You are entering a virtual language and a virtual world
And no one will take us away from this place ever
That was the first thing we can do
Secondly there are a lot of things that we can do
Today no one is convincing anyone
We are here to be alert about the subject
And now I will tell you a secret
A child when born the first way he recognizes his father is through language
So once my daughter is born I will tell her
(In Arabic): “This is your dad honey”
Not this is your dad honey
And in the super market I will promise Noor if she thanks me
I wouldn’t tell her “Daites merci mama”
And I hope that no one heard her
Let us get away from this foreigner complex