The Displaced Voice

University of Arkansas Press Chapter Title: The Displaced Voice Chapter Author(s): IMAN MERSAL Book Title: Beyond Memory Book Subtitle: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Creative Nonfiction Book Editor(s): PAULINE KALDAS, KHALED MATTAWA Published by: University of Arkansas Press. (2020) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvthhbwf.22 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms University of Arkansas Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Beyond Memory This content downloaded from 173.183.254.218 on Mon, 09 Nov 2020 18:39:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19 I M A N M ER S A L The Displaced Voice Let us suppose that the voice is a thread of light stretching between the mouth of the speaker and the ear of the listener, between intention and interpretation, and that an accent is colored oscillations vibrating around this thread but not congruent with it. At times, these oscillations may intensify the thread’s light, adding, perhaps, to the original intention; at others, they may impede or disrupt it. A single word falling from a sentence threaded on a luminous cord suffices to make the thread strain and shake. The listener’s eyes widen; his vision sharpens, hoping to catch the word dislodged by the accent before it hits the ground. The speaker’s eyes may open wide as well. All his limbs and organs may rally to the cause, each in its own idiom, helping to convey the intention, gaps notwithstanding, to the ear of the person awaiting it. I am not referring to the individual voice here as a physiological product of vocal cords carried on the airwaves, nor as a vehicle of linguistic intent and its target, nor as a refutation of death, but as an energy born from the accent, in order to convey the individual voice, the language that voice utters and its intention. The accent’s energy follows a different tempo proper to the mother tongue, and when the voice carries it into a foreign language, the result is an illusion of an attempt to speak two languages at the same instant, one on the surface and the other concealed, one in motion and the other sidelined, up in arms at its neglect and abandonment. The accent is thus not necessarily a speech defect but rather the mother tongue’s struggle against mortality. It is competing with the foreign language via sabotage, sabotage of the bond between voice and rhythm. A syllable is amputated here or there, an unfamiliar letter rushes forth when it should have bided its time, a sound leaps onto the head of another and chomps off a part of its allotted space. The sabotage may also come from the generosity of the This content downloaded from 173.183.254.218 on Mon, 09 Nov 2020 18:39:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms mother tongue in its dealings with time, adding a few split seconds with its vowels where the foreign language permits none. Thus, street becomes es-treet, and clothes becomes cloz-ez. If we imagine the person with the accent as, in the act of enunciation, a displaced individual, then let us together imagine the accent as a displaced voice. This person with an accent may practice long and hard in order to fit into his new place, and he may succeed in hiding his accent or in suppressing it for a long time. But, sooner or later, along comes the fatal moment when practice fails him. It is no accident that moments of anger are those where the accent, in all its glory, is most likely to rear its head. Perhaps this is because anger sticks better to swollen vocal cords than satisfaction does, and is better at agitating the memory and calling forth the first language to exact revenge, applying its phonology and stirring up chaos. Someone with an accent need not be an emigrant from one language to another. He may well be internally displaced, an emigrant from one dialect of a language to another. Awad, the doorman of the building in which I live in Cairo, speaks to its residents with unimpeachable decorum, and in faultless Cairene. But his Upper Egyptian accent leaps out the moment he yells at one of his children or becomes embroiled in an argument with one of the doormen of the neighboring buildings. ||||| A person’s voice can be more individual in his mother tongue, recognizable by its particular timbre, its grain, should I quote Roland Barthes. When the voice takes on another language, the accent is muddled in its individuality, tirelessly pointing back to the concealed collective phonology of its mother tongue. For example, the English H is more akin to an Arabic Kh when my colleague Natalie pronounces it. This is not just Natalie’s voice, but the voice of the Russian language asserting itself. In my first year in America the sound of the letter P seemed capable of dislodging any word that contained it from the thread of light behind which I stood. This is the letter that we often refer to as heavy B in Arabic, a letter that doesn’t exist in our language; a failure to pronounce it is enough to suggest to the listener that Arabic lies dormant inside you. ||||| When I applied for a position as professor at the University of Alberta, I had to jump through all the hoops that the academic marketplace requires: teaching a class in front of an academic committee, individual meetings 186 | IMAN MERSAL This content downloaded from 173.183.254.218 on Mon, 09 Nov 2020 18:39:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms with professors, students and the dean. But the severest trial of all was to deliver a forty-five minute lecture to a packed academic audience. It wasn’t the content of what I wanted to say that terrified me but rather how I could deliver it smoothly. How could I manage to do so without colliding with the bumps in the long words, words with their dread consonant clusters, pivotal words whose fall out of sequence would mean my fall from contention for the job. The accent at that moment had to be considered as no less than a speech defect whose repercussions must be minimized. Wās.il ibn ʿAtāʾ, who lived in the eighth century, was an eloquent and provocative Mu’tazalite theologian from Basra who preached in Arabic, his mother tongue, and whose enemies bullied him because of his inability to properly pronounce the trilled R. But his linguistic genius inspired him to hide his defect by avoiding words that contained this letter, replacing them with synonyms: dunuw for qurb (proximity), ‘ala’ for ‘anwar (lights), ya’fu for yaghfir (forgive), madja’ for firash (bed), and ghayth for matar (rain). He even crafted an entire sermon without one single r. That is what I had to do—circumvent the sounds the accent might muddle. I no longer remember how many words I had to substitute, but I do remember my ideas flourishing in this substitution game. Some words, however, could not be replaced and I remember one: architecture. My solution was to rewrite it in Arabic script, trying to visualize it that way, in the shape of a reassuringly familiar language, so that I might remember how it sounded. But at the critical moment, I tripped over the word, and a mosque, an Omayyad mosque, specifically, seemed to be collapsing somewhere, the sound of its broken glass windows issuing on the thread of my voice. ||||| When speaking a foreign language, the accented speaker does not choose the most precise words to convey what he means, as he presumably does in his mother tongue. Instead, he must avoid those words, despite their precision, that might undercut his voice, the oscillations of the accent short-circuiting them one way or another. We can imagine that this lack of precision may perturb the content of the spoken message. It may even prevent the message from arriving. But what is more intriguing is to imagine the accent changing the content of the message, or setting it on a different path, substituting a cooler message for one more sympathetic, a cautious phrase for one more daring. After the arrival of a message which the accented speaker did not intend, he may be startled by its The Displaced Voice | 187 This content downloaded from 173.183.254.218 on Mon, 09 Nov 2020 18:39:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms beauty, however unintentional. The message has, as it were, been born, and a correction made to match an intention that only its author knows might well be disappointing to an ear that has already received it. And so the speaker may continue with the error, pursued by a feeling of having veered off course. It is not only language that may be inadequate, but the voice itself. An accent sets you to quarreling with the words as you struggle to overcome the inadequacy of your voice, and leads you, like a Sufi mystic, down paths and through messages into states of spiritual enlightenment the existence of which you would never have suspected were it not for this interminable game of choice and avoidance. The body is a visual support upon which the thread of the voice depends for its safe arrival. The absence of the body weakens the thread, rendering it vulnerable to breakage and loss. I can often easily understand someone with an accent when we speak face to face. On the telephone, however, the gaps in the message swell and I may pretend I have an old receiver of poor quality so that the speaker will repeat his sentence. The comfort of the listener’s body calms the anxiety to which the voice is prone, aiding it not in overcoming its disability but rather in ignoring it. When you expect that the ear you are speaking to will not understand you, you may raise your voice to confirm your presence, to become visible, to occupy as much space as a voice can occupy. Or you may lower your voice, as if you hoped to disappear from a scene in which you are condemned to failure. In both cases, the accent holds sway over the voice and controls its volume. When I would accompany my grandmother from the village to the city of Mansura or to Cairo—on a visit to someone in the hospital or to citified relatives—she seemed like a different person to me. Her clothes looked tight; they were part of her formal wardrobe, reserved for outings, and had languished in the closet for quite some time. The gold she never wore in her day-to-day life of baking bread and cooking changed the look of her face and her neck. The roughness of her fingers, decorated with rings, attracted my attention. Certainly, seeing her leave the house where she had the luxury of exercising control over all the members of a big family and becoming a mere visitor in the big city had something to do with my feeling that she was not quite the person I knew. But her accent also played its part in the transformation. I imagine her now saying something on the order of Mohammed Abu Isma’iin married Noohaa. The sound of Isma’iin for Isma’il and Noohaa for Noha led me to doubt her absolute authority and made me nervous for reasons I couldn’t pinpoint. 188 | IMAN MERSAL This content downloaded from 173.183.254.218 on Mon, 09 Nov 2020 18:39:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms An accent only becomes a source of shame or anxiety when it signifies the lower status of the voice speaking to the ear listening. What determines status usually amounts to more than just the voice and its intention. It may be any of a number of relationships: that of the center to its periphery, of the colonizer to the colonized speaking his language, of the urban to the rural, or of the fortunate classes to those less privileged. I can’t imagine someone with an Oxford accent feeling ashamed when speaking to someone with one of England’s working class accents. Nor would a Parisian feel anxious listening to his accent side by side with that of an immigrant from Senegal. An accent is thus a transparent metaphor for relationships of power. Sometimes the lower status accent in these relationships of power tries to get rid of its shame by seeking shelter in its foreignness and strangeness, by choosing to be exotic. I suspect I may do this upon occasion. But I only recognized it as a strategy after seeing it in the performance of women intellectuals as they deliver their lectures at academic conferences, or of authors discussing their work with an audience that speaks the power language, the language of the center. I have an Egyptian friend who was lucky enough to be educated in English from nursery school on and who did his degrees at a university in England. This friend once said to me, in flirtation or as a compliment, “I love your English.” My angry reaction to his sentence surprised me; but nobody likes to be exotic at home. My friend’s backhanded compliment carried a whiff of condescension, as if he were conversing in his own language, with an accent that made him closer to the real Englishman, able to recognize and even love the exotic. After all these years of speaking and teaching in a foreign language, years of wrestling with an accent, I am startled by a feeling that my voice in Arabic is different from my voice in English. Not better or worse, just different. I remember my astonishment once upon hearing, by chance, a recorded message I had left on the answering machine at a friend’s house. I was asking her to clarify directions to her address that I had, as usual, gotten lost trying to find. In it, inadvertently, I found a poignant illustration of Agamben’s assertion that the essence of a message is inseparable from the voice that speaks it. For this was a lost, anxious voice, a voice with an accent. And this could be nothing but a message of longing for a destination, longing distilled syllable by syllable, step by step, on this journey of stuttering and wrong turns. The Displaced Voice | 189 This content downloaded from 173.183.254.218 on Mon, 09 Nov 2020 18:39:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 173.183.254.218 on Mon, 09 Nov 2020 18:39:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms