Sudan has been my home for nearly eight months now, the Arab world for two years, and I’m now in the middle of my third Ramadan. I certainly did set out to become an Arabist, much less an Orientalist. I was merely bored with the places I had been and perhaps in a slightly jump-on-the-bandwagon sort of way, I wanted to take on the Middle East. If I could learn Arabic, I thought, I could learn anything.
Now it’s 24 months later and it seems likely there will be another 24 more. Venturing into Arabic is a lot like opening a door to a corrdior you never should have touched in the first place. It’s far too intriguing to stay away completely, yet no matter what you do you’ll never reach the end of it and the further you climb inside the more entagled you’ll become. The more likely you are to never shake it off entirely. The same is true for the Middle East and the Arabs, a place and people I seem to have formed a surprisingly symbiotic love-hate relationship of fascination and repulsion. That affair, which began in the Levant and carried on through the deserts of Egypt has come to where the River Nile’s two branches meet and pause before moving to feed the east of Africa.
In Khartoum nearing a year, I’ve made a home. And a country I knew nothing about has drawn me in deeper than I could have imagined. Maybe it’s the Arabs again with their hallways of temptation, or perhaps the Great Continent itself drawing me deeper inside a world still negotiating between Arab and African. Or maybe it’s the Nile.
A well-known Arabic proverb speaks of the somewhat unexplainable attraction.
“He who drinks from the waters of the Nile, must forever return to it.”
The comfortable and abrupt hypnotic simplicity of Sudanese Arabic adds a Nilotic touch. “Tegeraja.” To return to it, yes, but more accurately, “to come returning.” To come returning, as if you never really left. As if even from the moment you leave, you are not going, but rather beginning the process of coming back again. No doubt many of the foreigners that have come into contact with the Sudan will attest to the truth in the idiom. For reasons I certainly cannot yet explain, we somehow find ourselves coming…and forever returning.
إللي بيشرب من مية النيل لازم يجي راجع تاني
Posted by oecumene13 