Even after two years in the States, I have a lot of ‘muscle memory’ from living in Oman. I still dislike shaking hands and I can’t seem to stop offering people bottles of water. If you show up at my office, I am going to ask if you would like some water. And I feel it keenly that the hot water situation is not figured out sufficiently for me to ask if you would like tea.
One of the many, many wonderful aspects of living in Oman was the constant offering of tea. Many people know this as a kind of joke or marketing ploy but I loved it. When going rug shopping, of course a cup of hot sweet tea makes the bargaining more fun, more like a social interaction. I had lovely conversations drinking tea with the men who worked at my favorite rug shop next to Muttrah Souq.
However, now when I ask people if they want water, I usually get a ‘deer in headlights’ look and a quick refusal. Americans don’t have time, but also I sometimes feel that there is a layer of ‘I don’t want to be indebted.’ If you give me something, what might I have to do in the future?
The people who usually accept are my favorite Americans: blue collar workers. If I am struggling with an armful of papers, it is most often the person in work boots who will open the door, make a joke, hold the elevator or give me a quick smile of understanding. Even before I moved to Oman, I felt an affinity for these people who move, in a fashion, through tribal patterns.
To me “tribal patterns” means an understanding that none of us have everything we need to make it through the day, so what you have at hand to offer other people, you offer. And what you need, you ask for (implicitly or explicitly). Between neighbors in Oman, there is no counting, e.g., “I received this so I must give that is return.” In some cases I know, the neighbors with less financial security received food almost every day and never reciprocated. Some men never brought food to picnic dinners and this was never mentioned – everyone was glad they came, showing up with or without some snacks made no difference.
Often I have found that blue-collar workers in the Boston area live within the same framework. I feel like there are invisible webs of connections with me handing out bottles of water to carpenters, construction workers, movers and delivery people and me getting repaid by different sets of carpenters, construction workers, movers and delivery people holding doors open for me.
I recently attended a lecture by a scholar who, in the midst of a larger discussion, pointed out the problems inherent in “tribalism,” which they defined loosely as groups who unthinkingly follow a particular creed. After the talk, I wrote an e-mail to the scholar, saying:
I am sure you have debated this endlessly, but I do want to make a pointed objection to the use of “tribes” as negative given that I have studied tribes on the Arabian Peninsula for over 15 years.
The answer was rather like the Grinch patting Cindy-Lou Who on the head. The scholar stated that while tribalism “is a problem, but there is nothing wrong with being a member of a tribe.”
Further, they wrote, “in the broader sense of the word, as I use it, we are all members of tribes. In any case, I hope it was clear that I do not use the term pejoratively.”
You can’t claim “this is what I want the word to mean” while ignoring how it is used in everyday life. As an academic in a position of power, you should define your terms carefully and be sure to acknowledge the background, main-stream usage, other points of view and mis-use of your terms.
“Tribe” has been used for centuries to not only describe but dismiss/ disrespect groups of non-Western peoples as being part of “non-evolved” cultures. Tribalism/ tribal/ tribe are used almost exclusively as negative terms within the USA/ EU/ UK. If someone has a “tribe-mentality” the connotation is that they cannot think objectively or rationally. It is not a word that can be pulled out from its cluster of negative connotations when referring to human behavior.
[And it is worth thinking about how the negative connotation of tribal = sheep-like behavior is transmuted to positive when it is used as an adjective for a purchasable item, e.g. tribal jewelry.]
A further part of the scholar’s answer was: “I would say that tribalism is a human universal, present to varying degrees in all cultures and built into the way humans think and feel, but not insurmountable.”
“Not insurmountable”? Insurmounting tribes is an objective only if you are thinking of “tribal” as negative, e.g. backwards, hide-bound and incapable of independent thought.
Obviously, that’s not how I think of tribes, either in the established sense (e.g., tribes in Dhofare) or the more casual sense (e.g., construction workers in Cambridge). I think of tribes as groups of people who support each other and, to come back to the point about offering bottles of water, do not shy away from interdependency.
âf’s Phoenician predecessor, also a K sound, was Kaph, one of the letters whose name has a meaning: the hollow of the hand, the palm. The word (kaff) survived in Arabic and the usual companion languages. In Persian poetry a glass of wine is traditionally held in the kaff. The constellation we know as Andromeda was once called in Arabic The Hand decorated with Henna, Al-Kaff al-khad͎îb, الکفّ الخضیب. (Khad͎ab is one of two words for henna, the other being the more recognizable h͎innâ’.) A kaffa is the pan of a scale or balance. The dual form of the word, kiffatân, is our constellation Libra.
A kalb is a dog; Al-kalb al-asghar is Canis Minor. (Canis major is Al-Kalb al-akbar.) The constellation we call (misleadingly) Crater (Latin for bowl or cup) is Al-Ka’s, the bowl or goblet. The etymological origin of Kochab, the second brightest star in the Little Dipper (Ursa Minor), is contested, but if it’s an unimaginative origin (always a possibility), it may come from kawkab. (A kawkab is a star.)
Kâf is pronounced like our K, and it has a shape which seems to show a distant family relation to it. The straight line of ک , rising slightly rightward from the top of the upright, called in Arabic the ra’s (head), in Persian the sarkesh (the line “pulled” – keshideh – upward), looks familiar to us. (It gives us two thirds of our three-stroke letter K.) Looking at the various shapes it takes in Nabataean, I’m puzzled how it gets there.
That nearly horizontal extension, the line that gives it its personality, rising at various possible angles, is present when ک appears at the beginning of a word, or the middle. One is taught to draw the upright, its mast, as a simple, erect vertical line, but in practice the upright is more frequently folded down to the left, or even bent over horizontal, parallel to the base line, as if it were the first step in making a paper clip. If it’s followed by an upright (Alif or Lam), it may be a complete circle.
At the end of a word, Arabic Kâf loses the horizontal, the sa’r, and becomes ك , something like backwards L, simply an upright rising from a slightly curved extension with a long foot running along the base line. Then you add a little mark like a miniature 2 (which resembles a Hamza), floating above the base. Persian script is different. Its terminal Kâf loses the little Hamza shape and retains the spar. The Persian adaptation is said to have a practical use—to distinguish Kâf (ك ) from Lam (ل) when writing rapidly. In both cases terminal Kâf sits solidly on the line.
Arabic Kâf (like Fâ) can have a meaning on its own: as a one-letter word in Arabic, attached to its neighbor like a prefix, it means “like” or “as.” It’s also popular as a suffix. At the end of an Arabic word it marks the second person possessive: –k is “your” (-kum in the plural). Thus Salâm ‘alayk or Salâm ‘alaykum. Kâfplays an even more nearly ubiquitous role in Turkish in the infinitive suffix (ending in –mek or –mak). In Persian, –ak is a diminutive suffix, as in cheshmak, چشمک, a wink (from cheshm, “eye) or bâdbâdak, بادبادک, a kite (from bâd, “wind”).
Kâf words in Persian often suggest the tiny and cute: kudak, کودک an infant, kuchek, کوچک, small, and kuchelu, کوچولو, smaller still. Kam,کم, is “a little,” or “not enough.” But Kâf is also for kabîr, “great,” which we are likely to know from the comparative form, akbar (as in Al-kalb al-Akbar). The comparative also has a feminine form, kubrâ’, which to English ears seems a little startling when we hear it as a woman’s name.
Fâ is one of the easy ones: a little circle drawn clockwise, resting, or balancing, on the base line, slightly pointed at the bottom. There is a dot above the circle. (In Morocco you may find the dot underneath.) That’s what you’ll see in the middle of a word. The minimal shape, circle plus dot, gets a little showier at the end or the beginning. At the beginning, raised above the base line, it looks as if the circle were lifted up on a stick, balloon style (فـ). At the end of the word, the line continues on to the left (ف), and forms something like that familiar shallow pan shape one sees in a terminal Ba, Ta, or Tha.
As for the sound, it’s also easy— for us at least. I’m told there are quite a few languages that don’t have it. Old Persian was one. (F words came into Persian gradually — via loans from, I am told, Elamite and Median– which gradually got accepted as one of the family.) Phoenician didn’t have an F either, but it had a P which over time took on an F sound.
The neighborly relation between P and F is pretty well known (i.e. that speakers of Arabic have F, but not the P sound). Thus the complication of loan words from Persian into Arabic: famously, if the word has a P in Persian, it becomes either B or F in Arabic. Often enough those words got reborrowed into Persian again, F words keeping the F. Textbook examples: Persian pîl, elephant, became Arabic fîl, and kept the F when it crossed back into Persian. More famously, Persian Pars became Arabic Fars; Persian Ispahân became Persian Esfahân. Old Persian pairidaeza (a term you would see in the Avesta), garden or for paradise, drifted west to Greek and Latin (and English – our “paradise”), keeping the P sound. (In the Septuagint translation of the Bible, the Greek equivalent, παράδεισος, is used as the name of the Garden of Eden.) As an Arabic loan word, it became al-firdus ,الفردوس, a Qur’ânic word usually translated “paradise.”
V vs W
In Arabic, ف can have a meaning on its own. A simple ف is the word fa-. It attaches to the next word and works as a grammatical connective. The dictionary says “then, thus, and so, however, because, therefore.” It’s a universal joint of Arabic syntax. Sometimes it seems as common as “and.” It may feel something like English “so.” (Sometimes it’s “so” in that contemporary English use which means “a statement follows.”) I always assumed that this use of the word ف had something to do with the letter which resembles it, و, Waw, which has a similar meaning when it stands alone, wa, meaning “and.” I have it on good authority that this similarity of meanings between ف and و , F and W, is a coincidence.
But if we want to find a relationship between F and V, in Arabic, there is a visual one. It results from the absence of V sound from Arabic: loan words with a V sometimes get their own letter. Many years ago, in a store in the Kerman bazaar, I saw a container with the label اُڤالتین (Ouvâltîn). It was pretty clearly an Ovaltine container, and that ڤ with three dots was clearly there to represent a V (a voiced F). You knew from those three dots that it wasn’t a domestic product, Persian having no trouble with the V sound (their و), so that, in Persian, ڤ isn’t of any particular use. The three-dot ڤ – I found out later– is rare in Arabic too. (The only other example I’ve seen is ڤيتنام for Vietnam) but it shows up regularly to represent a V sound in Sorani Kurdish and Swahili. You can see the logic of the shape: ڤ is another case where the triple dots are devised to thicken the sound of another letter (as with ت to ث –T to TH– or س to ش — S to SH). There is variant of ڤ, written ڥ , which plays the same role of representing the V sound in Tunisia and Algeria, though for some reason it doesn’t look as thick. (This is probably just me.) Today Arabic containers of Ovaltine simply write اُفالتین with a Fa, no doubt on the assumption that customers are likely to know English and understand it on their own. Three dots no longer useful, casualties of education.
In Spanish, fulano means something like “so-and-so,” “someone or other,” as in “Fulano, Mengano, Zutano yPerengano,” which I think means something like “Tom Dick and Harry.” The origin is the Arabic word fulân, فلان (falan in Turkish, folân in Persian), where it has the same range of meanings – from an innocent “some random person,” to something more pointed, “that so-and-so,” or even “that bastard.” There is a fragment of a lost poem by the 8th-century Arab satirist Jarîrî, literary insult comic, directed at someone who is too much of a nobody to name.
وَقُلْ لِفُلَانٍ إِنْ تَجَرَّأَ مَرَّةً
سَتَعْرِفُ مَنْ يَبْقَى وَمَنْ يَتَحَوَّلُ
[Tell that nobody (that fulân ) if he tries it again (“it” not specified),
he’ll learn who holds his ground and who runs away.]
I am happy to announce that my chapter “What a Frog in Boiling Water Knows: Oman, Before and After” has been published in Emanations 12. Brookline, MA: International Authors, 2026: 304-311. link to book
excerpt
At the Boston Museum of Fine Arts I like ‘Woman and Flowers’ by Alma-Tadema, one of my favorite painters, but the painting I love most is ‘Rest on the Flight into Egypt’ by Luc Olivier Merson, such a quiet, graceful scene.
I bought a membership to the museum and within a month I was back. I paid a visit to the Egyptian section, then ventured further out, into the American and impressionists exhibits. Two weeks later, I spent another morning walking around without a map. It was nice to come across Paul Revere’s silverwork and the painting of flowers exhibit, but the only places I really wanted to be was in front of Merson’s painting or anything Middle Eastern from before 1500 CE.
Walking into a room in the Ancient Egyptian section that I hadn’t seen before, I suddenly understood why the museum brought me such serenity. The cases were full of small, wooden boats full of men in white sarongs. Oh, I realized, they look like the research guys.
Most of the Omani men I did ethnographic research with are full- or part-time fishermen. And they wear a wazar, a piece of fabric wrapped around their waists that falls to their knees which is often plain white cotton or white with a light checkered or striped pattern.
And the man in the painting ‘Rest on the Flight into Egypt’ sleeps as the research guys sleep when they are camping, directly on sand next to a fire with a blanket underneath and a blanket over which is pulled up to cover the face. For everyone else, the man in the painting is Joseph; for me, it’s one of 15 different men who I was friends with, went fishing with, had hundreds of picnics with, asked questions of and who I miss terribly.
My grief is much smaller than most people who have been displaced by wars and hatred. Relatives co-signed my lease so I have a place to stay; my mom helps me get through a Boston winter by gifting flannel sheets and sweaters. But I stand in front of that painting and cry as it seems to hold all the harmony that I have lost.
Then, as so often happens, the book I needed to understand how I felt appeared at the right time. Amidst the postcards and scarves in the museum shop, I saw ‘All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me’ by Patrick Bringley. Although my favorite museum is the Frick, I also love the Met and the cover mentioned something about grief, so I thought it would be interesting.
I read it in one morning, crying all the way through. What Bringley gets so right is how a loss, even when you know it’s coming and you have a pretty good idea how much it is going to hurt, stops the forward motion of your life. His book isn’t ‘feel-good’ or & ‘how to’; after his brother died, Bringley walked away from his career and became a security guard at the Met for ten years.
known for fiction: Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea) and The Avignon Quintet(Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian, Quinx)
light humor: The Best of Antrobus, Esprit de Corps
travel writing: Prospero’s Cell (Corfu), Reflections on a Marine Venus (Rhodes), Bitter Lemons (Cyprus), Caesar’s Vast Ghost (Provence), Spirit of Place (collection of travel writing)
biography: Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell, 1912-1945; Lawrence Durrell: A Biography by Ian S. MacNiven
if you like his fiction, maybe try: The English Patient
if you like his light humor, maybe try: Hotel Splendide, La Bonne Table, Bemelmans
if you like his travel writing, maybe try: Provence, F. M. Ford; The Station, Robert Bryon
known for autobiographical books set on Corfu in his childhood: My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives; The Garden of the Gods
animal collecting/ creating a zoo: Three Singles to Adventure.A Zoo in my Luggage, The Bafut Beagles, The Whispering Land, The Aye-Aye and I, Menagerie Manor
animal/ nature conservation: The Ark’s Anniversary, Amateur Naturalist
autobiography: Myself and Other Animals
biography: Gerald Durrell: The Authorised Biography by Douglas Botting
if you like amusing adventures, maybe try: Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide; A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
Other texts
Whatever Happened to Margo? Margo tells HER side of the story!
Dining with the Durrells: Stories and Recipes from the Cookery Archive of Mrs Louisa Durrell – mom’s recipes!
I am happy to announce that my essay on ‘Marriage and Peace’ has just been published. The photographs were taken by Onazia Shaikh.
It is difficult to write about my book, Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in Dhofar, Oman, given the current war in the Middle East. The anthropological study of people’s lives seems unimportant in the face of such terrors and tragedy. Also it’s hard to understand why such a peaceful country as Oman has been pulled into the war, given that for over 50 years its unofficial motto has been ‘Friend to All, Enemy to None’. Salalah, the city in southern Oman where I lived for 19 years, has been bombed twice.
Anthropology in war is a fraught undertaking; the Human Terrain project, the American government’s attempt to merge military logic with ethnography, did not work.
Anthropology is more along the lines of ballroom dancing. You need peace now, peace in the recent past and the expectation of peace in the future to get started; you also need a group of people who are willing to learn a new way of movement. I like the analogy because people who haven’t done ballroom dancing can dismiss it as frivolous but learning when to turn, when to cross, how to follow the music and how to move in clothes and shoes that are unfamiliar while making the right kind of small talk is excellent training to become an ethnographer.
And marriage is a peace-time activity; you need peace and food security to think of adding someone to the family and for people and goods to travel to the celebration. So my book is a peace-time book. It reflects my thinking about how Omanis in the southernmost region go about finding someone to spend their life with and how to create a peaceful life together. I cover how men and women decide to start looking for a partner and all the following steps, including the dissolution of a marriage and old age. I did most of my work with people from the hakli, or qara, group of tribes whose first language is a Modern South Arabian language called Gibali (Jebbali/Shahri /Shehret).
The monsoon season (finally) started yesterday so, in celebration, I went for the first time to a small, cute shop which sells food made by a local woman. I had driven by and seen it but never gone in. With the drizzle coming down at a steady pace, I decided to have a small party, support women who are selling food, and, of course, continue my food research!
As I viewed the sandwiches, cooked food and cakes on display, I discussed the food in a mixture of Arabic and English with the expat man who was working. “Is this strawberry cake?” I asked, pointing to a cake with a pink layer of what looked like jam. He said yes. I repeated the question in Arabic to make sure, then moved on, “Is this cake with coffee flavor? Is this chicken? Is the chicken spicy or normal?” etc. I bought a selection of things, went home and produced them for my guests: this is non-spicy chicken, this is strawberry cake, this is coffee cake.
Wrong. All of it wrong. The chicken was fiery hot, it wasn’t strawberry and the brown cake was ‘Lotus’ flavored, not coffee. Sigh. Last week it was at KFC, I ordered 4 chicken strips and Dew with ice; I got someone else’s order and was told that the Dew, which had no ice, has “ice inside.” Sigh. In these kinds of example, it’s a mixture of linguistics and culture. I would not think of a ‘biscuit-flavored cake’; a white cake with medium brown frosting looks like ‘coffee’ to me. ‘Ice’ to me is cubes the size of cherry tomatoes, not that the soda is cold.
Sometimes it is an issue of what you ask for is not what you get but sometimes it’s a visual and cultural problem, as in the photo above – I enlarged that photo several times, tilting my head, thinking “WHAT is that in the little bowl?” Finally I decided it was walnuts and date maamoul (dates with spices cooked into a paste, surrounded by a heavy sugar cookie dough and baked). I don’t think of walnuts as breakfast food so I had to wait until my eyes could “see” them. Several times I have seen shallow bowls of dates and assumed it was pieces of meat and vice versa. One trick I learned is that if there is a coffee dallah (traditional Arabian coffee pot) it is dates; if there are cups of tea, it is probably meat. [Or in the above photo, the piece of wood doesn’t look like what I expect ‘camp fire wood’ to look like: it’s dark, full of holes, almost insubstantial looking. But from camping in the desert, I know this is typical of wood you can find or buy and it serves as a marker, “we are very far from town.”]
There is another level of difficulties: seeing various food items and not understanding how they fit together. A friend remembers being in a grocery store with me when we were in grad school. As we came around the corner of an aisle and the end cap had: cans of tuna, cans of peas, cans of sliced mushrooms, egg noodles, salt and canned cream of mushroom soup. I looked at her and said how this combination of food was a culturally-bound signifier of middle-class American in middle America, an implied recipe without stated recipe. Everyone who saw that display would know that all these items should be bought and cooked together to create a tuna casserole. But someone from outside that culture would see a collection of disparate items. Such as the photo below: chips, processed cheese and bread. This might be read as “put cheese on bread and eat with chips.” But Omanis know, you open the bag a little then crush the chips. Put cheese on bread, sprinkle on chip fragments and then roll up into a tube.
Eating begins with the eyes and everyone sees food through their cultures, upbringing and experiences. Learning to see again, see new, and re-see is a long process that I am still in the middle of.
I will be leading a book discussion at the Boston Athenaeum: Two Views of Corfu, April 25 at 10 am
Join us for a discussion of two very different books which feature the same landscape and main characters. Most people know only one of the Durrell brothers, but each one has his own brilliance. Lawrence writes about the historical and literary landscape in an artistic and serious manner, while Gerald focuses on the local wildlife, a group which includes his older siblings. The juxtapositions between what each one thinks is important and noteworthy makes reading the books in tandem a delight. Gerald doesn’t deign to mention his brother’s wife; Lawrence ignores the fauna. Gerald has nothing to say about Greek myths; Lawrence pretends he is not with his family. Read one book or both and join a short visit to the gorgeous Greek island of Corfu. If the conversation leads to a wider discussion of Lawrence’s fiction (The Alexandria Quartet), Gerald’s impressive improvements in how zoos are designed and the Boston area’s best Greek restaurants, all the better.
Lawrence Durrell – known for fiction: Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea) and The Avignon Quintet(Monsieur, Livia, Constance, Sebastian, Quinx)
light humor: The Best of Antrobus, Esprit de Corps
travel writing: Prospero’s Cell (Corfu), Reflections on a Marine Venus (Rhodes), Bitter Lemons (Cyprus), Spirit of Place (collection of travel writing)
children’s fiction: White Eagles Over Serbia
biography: Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell, 1912-1945; Lawrence Durrell: A Biography by Ian S. MacNiven
if you like his fiction, maybe try: The English Patient
if you like his light humor, maybe try: Hotel Splendide, La Bonne Table, Bemelmans
if you like his travel writing, maybe try: Provence, F. M. Ford; The Station, Robert Bryon
Gerald Durrell – known for autobiographical books set on Corfu in his childhood: My Family and Other Animals, Birds, Beasts and Relatives; The Garden of the Gods
animal collecting/ creating a zoo: Three Singles to Adventure.A Zoo in my Luggage, The Bafut Beagles, The Whispering Land, The Aye-Aye and I, Menagerie Manor
animal/ nature conservation: The Ark’s Anniversary, Amateur Naturalist
children’s fiction: Rosy Is My Relative
autobiography: Myself and Other Animals
biography: Gerald Durrell: The Authorized Biography by Douglas Botting
Several people have asked me, “Aren’t you glad you aren’t in Oman right now?” Actually, no. I wish I was there, but I have aged out of work visas and can’t afford one of the housing units that comes with a residence visa. I do not support this war and I think America should stop bombing Iran. It must be terrifying for the people who are staying and all the photos of expats leaving the Arabian Peninsula make me reflect on how difficult it was to leave Oman, even with plenty of notice and in peacetime.
In remembrance of happier times, this is an essay I wrote in 2017. May peace come soon to all troubled lands.
“I’ve never such a beautiful ocean” – tourist
“Holy sweet Jesus he’s got no clue” – local
“Public Relations” lyrics from the musical Don’t Stop the Carnival
Tourists burble. Tourists gush. If I hear a woman is raving about how “the food is so natural and healthy!” you can be sure that she’s got a plane ticket back to the Land of Whole Foods and Mexican restaurants within a week or two. It’s amusing to watch a man coo about how relaxing life is here, all the while checking his Blackberry and reading e-mail on his laptop at one of the two cafes in town with wi-fi.
Expats don’t coo. Expats don’t prattle. The people who live here, we send SMSs: “Flaxseed oil in at the pharmacy,” “Sandstorm coming – batten down hatches,” “Did you hear X is in the hospital?” and “Do you know a good carpenter?”
I call an expat friend and ask, “What’s the name of the place you hang your clothes?”
He starts throwing off fancy French furniture terms: armoire…
“No, no,” I say, “What’s the simple word. I forgot it.”
Pause.
“You mean ‘closet’?”
“Yes!” We say goodbye and hang up the phone.
A woman who came to town for an extended visit mentioned to me that she had a rental car. I told her to be careful; any problem that happened to the car while she had it was her responsibility.
She said, “I didn’t sign a contract.”
I said, “It doesn’t matter, the understanding here is, unless you go to Budget which is twice as expensive as normal rentals and has insurance, that any problem is your fault and you pay for the repair, as well as the regular daily charge.”
She said, “But I didn’t agree to that and I didn’t sign a contract.”
Expats do not say “I didn’t sign a contract.” They would laugh and tell you about the rental car in Uruguay, which would segue into a story about Nepal, and then into that fabulous B& B in Dorset. Expats know that this is not a theme park full of natural and healthy food, beautiful scenery and exotic folkways. It is a working community. You either stay cut-off by cycling between your job, the two expat grocery stores and the big hotels or you become part of it – whether you agree or not. Expats are normal people who have evolved and devolved into a new species.
Expat – Definition
The first part of my definition of living expat is that it’s voluntary: moving to another country by choice to study, work, retire, create art etc. I am talking about a narrow band of middle-class experiences – not forced immigration or those ‘on the wind’ fleeing war, disease and/ or poverty. I made the decision to live on the Arabian Peninsula.
The second part is that I live middle-class. I live alone (not in a camp or apartment with co-workers), I can move about when and how I choose (not being driven in a bus), I have two days off every week (not only an afternoon or no free-time at all). On the other hand, I know nothing of upper class life beyond what I read in Town and Country. My car is 8 years old and has over 300,000 km; I worry about retirement. I don’t think I am ever going to have a set of Ghurka luggage or diamond stud earrings, much less one of those really gorgeous Persian rugs.
My third point is that it’s living expat. I have traveled to 38 countries but have lived overseas only 4 times. “Living” I define as having an address where mail is delivered, having a bank account in a local bank, and having a set of places to go to – your café, your beach, your tailors, your schwarma stand.
The fourth part of “living expat” is what does “expat” convey? Mawuna Remarque Koutonin’s article [https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/mar/13/white-people-expats-immigrants-migration%5D discusses how “expat” is a racially charged term. I can’t speak for other areas of the world, but I’ve lived in the Middle East for 14 years and on the Arabian Peninsula, “expat” it is an indicator of economic status not country of origin. Here, “expat” means people who have a position which allows them to sponsor bringing over a spouse and/or kids and people who are free to move about as they please outside of work hours. To talk about one group, people put qualifiers in front, such as Arab expats, Indian expats, Western expats. “Expats” is used as opposed to “workers,” almost always men, who live in single-sex compounds whose movements are more closely controlled.
I have never heard of anyone referred to as a “guest” and “guest-worker” is not a configuration used here. I have only heard “foreigner” used by Gulf Arabs referring to non-Muslims. My personal pet peeve is people who call themselves “nomads;” just as bad are businesses which cater to this nonsense: “tools for nomads” with $600 backpacks. Do you carry all your worldly possessions yourself or with a pack animal? Are you without bank account and/ or property? Do you sleep in structures you erected yourself? Do you roam around a wide geographical area without changing continents? No? Then you aren’t a nomad.
Expat Talking
There are many positives of living expat. When British Airways lost my luggage, I had to make a list of the items lost: handmade slippers from Muscat; shoes from Edinburgh; shoes from Leiden; dress from Victoria, BC; skirt from my tailors; shirts from Boston and San Francisco; jean jacket from Denver; Swiss cosmetics; earrings from Maine. Reassembling that small suitcase would take thousands of dollars’ worth of airplane tickets as I pick up clothes as I travel to see family and friends and for conferences.
This is normal for people who live middle-class expat but can be really annoying for those who don’t. We are used to have objects and experiences from a myriad of places and with other expats, ordinary conversations can quickly turn insufferable for normal people: the waterfalls in Vancouver airport vs. the mini-tropical forest in Bali’s airport, Taba in Egypt vs. Aqaba in Jordan, foot massages in Phuket vs. head massages in Delhi, Rhodes vs. Crete, water-taxis from the airport in the Maldives vs. water-taxis in Dubai, island hopping in the Seychelles vs. island-hopping in the Caribbean, Malta vs. Corsica, the Khan el Khalili in Cairo vs. the Blue Souq in Sharjah, Stockholm vs. Amsterdam, Doha airport vs. Chicago airport, throwbacks to crossing into Turkish Cyprus vs. crossing into East Germany. As I said, it gets old fast for people who have built their lives in one or only a few communities.
Every expat has had the experience of being asked “What’s it like” as if one can sum up living in a country for a year in two sentences. And then there are people at home who never even ask that, who avoid any mention of the life overseas.
Expats learn to keep quiet about their lives and open up only with other expats with whom they can trade experiences and opinions freely: making fun of Jumeirah Janes, debating the best college to stay at during the summer in Cambridge, complaining about being woken up by the sound of kookaburras in Brisbane and loons on a Wisconsin lake, comparing Swiss Christmas markets vs. southern German Christmas markets. Expats who have lived in the toughest conditions are usually the nicest. People who lived in Cairo and Dubai are never as friendly or helpful as those who lived in Afghanistan and Papua New Guinea where cooperation meant survival.
Expat Travel
Baltimore, Lisbon, Mousehole, Heidelberg, Petra, Charlotte Amalie, Santa Fe, Al Mukulla: expats get to used to the chance for travel during vacations and the perks of travel seem so obvious, it’s useless to complain about the times I have walked off a plane after a 10+ hour flight trying to remember what country I was in, looking at the signs at passport control trying to remember which line to stand in, all the methods of coping with jet-lags, the stupid mistakes done under the blight of jet lag, and most importantly, the sense that you can never have all the things you like together.
It is useless to grumble but inside most expats’ hearts there is a wish for impossible meals and events: Dutch pancakes with American coffee, an English pub lunch with waiters who come to the table, Bangkok with the air quality of Edinburgh, Winnipeg’s summers with Puerto Rico’s winters, Dubai shopping but with taxi drivers who speak English; bookstores in Oxford that stay open later than 6pm; Tartine pastries at the Hong Kong airport.
An expat’s life is always a mosaic, never a unified whole. My favorite way to travel is the 8-seater plane from Logan to visit my mom, the train from Sydney to Melbourne, a sailboat in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the DC metro. My favorite stores are Ragamuffin on the Isle of Sky, the main Jim Thompson store in Bangkok, gold stores on the Ponte Vecchio, and M & S. My favorite hotels are the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, MA and the Peninsula in Bangkok but my favorite places to eat are the Palm Court at the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh, the Windmill café in Kingston, Ontario, pretty much any restaurant in Rome and the Lime Tree Café in Jumeriah. I want to walk off my favorite beach in the BVI, have a ‘rice table’ in the Netherlands for dinner then fall asleep to the blinking of Grand Forks, ND fireflies.
Expat Decor
I always think that a person’s home should be like a 3D collection of Girl Scout badges; it should reflect who you are and where you have been. Living middle-class expat means that it’s easy to collect pieces from all over. In my living room I have a sofa I bought in Bali, a chair from India that I got in the Emirates, and an Egyptian rosewood chest. The three pieces are nice, but don’t really coordinate with each other or my dark wood IKEA desk or my dark wood book cabinet which had a glass front section resting on top of a (non-coordinating) set of cupboards. That’s one of drawbacks: you pick up pieces as you go along, and you simply have to tell your furniture to get along with each other because it’s almost impossible to get things to match.
Another characteristic of expat living is that pieces usually develop narratives. I have a dish a friend brought me from her trip to Iran; one rug is from the store run by two Iranian brothers at Mutrah souq. There are very few things that I have bought anonymously, so to speak, at a store which I can’t remember. When I go to a friend’s house and admire something its: “I picked that up in a little village in Cambodia when I worked there” or “Got that in Siberia.”
Every piece has a story. The rug I bargained for with a friend standing by amazed at my ability to spin tales about the poverty of teachers to lower the price. The coffee table was bought at X store on Y street with my friend Pat pretending to be my husband and saying I was spending too much money in an effort to get the price down (that trick worked). Even my computer has a story of the how I got it and what happened when it broke down (four hours of sitting in the store reading a novel because I was not leaving until it worked).
Even as a single woman, there’s not much shopping I do on my own – there is often an Omani or western friend to give advice, and I willingly go on shopping expeditions in turn. When I walk thought my apartment I see the pieces connected to my friends Marlene, Tom, Rosemary, Samantha, Barbara, Sophie, Margie, Sanda, and Helen, all of whom have since left town but whose memories remain.
Another effect of living expat is that decorating is usually very personal – you often incorporate other people’s lives and they incorporate yours. In my sitting room, my sofas are from a dear friend who was selling them when she left Salalah. Given how much turnover there is, if you see something you like that a friend has, if they leave you have a chance to get it in a way that would seem predatory in the States. Several times I have had the unsettling experience of walking through a good friend’s house and deciding which of their pieces to buy.
On the other hand, when I want to get rid of something, it doesn’t go out anonymously on the street to be picked up or to someplace like Salvation Army. I give it to the woman who cleans my house. In the Middle East, almost all middle-class households have maids, who either live-in or have keys and come to clean a few times a week. Mine has worked for me for almost ten years and, like most expats, I give her her salary, bonus twice a year and whatever I no longer need.
My old sofa, coffee table, pillows, even shoes and purses are set in a pile for her and she takes everything. I wonder if they are all in her house or if they are handed on to her friends. That angst of “I can’t get rid of it because it still has some use in it” doesn’t exist here – if I don’t need something, don’t like it anymore or have bought a replacement, I can pass it on knowing it will be used. I see it as a ladder: an Omani friend gave me a gorgeous wooden bookshelf; I give the woman who cleans for me my old fridge.
Expat Fitting In
As you live expat, and start to understand the culture, the prevailing wisdom is that you should try to fit in. I agree with this most of the time, but there are also times when I think deliberate dissonance is helpful. Sometimes speaking, dressing and acting in ways that mark you as a foreigner can create a more positive interaction, especially in dealing with Arabian cultures in which people usually dislike being surprised.
I learned this point when I went to two social events with a non-Omani Muslim woman (I’ll call her Muna). We were both wearing the right kind of clothes for the event but Muna greeted each Omani guest in the correct way but I said, “salam aleikum” – the wrong thing to say. This greeting should be said by a person who comes into the room, but I was sitting down. It is such a blatant mistake, each woman who was greeting me paused for a moment, looked at me carefully, then carried on with greeting the other attendees, often gesturing towards me and asking other women, “Who is she?”
My incorrect greeting immediately signaled that I was foreign and the women could immediately adjust their expectations and assumptions about me. Older women did not wonder why I don’t stand up and kiss them on the head, etc. There was a momentary flutter, but I was quickly forgotten.
On the other hand, several women tried to speak to Muna after she gave the correct greeting. Then Muna would explain she didn’t understand Arabic, which would cause surprise and begin a several minutes conversation about how the woman THOUGHT Muna was Arabic-speaking, but she wasn’t and where was Muna from and why was she at the event and wasn’t it a surprise! Several Omani would say they thought Muna was from X country, Muna would explain she was from Y country, the women would say “Oh you look like you are from X,” Muna would affirm that she was from Y, the women would ask “Is your mother from X?” Muna would answer no; her mother was also from Y. This happened several times and after her country of origin was cleared up, there was no more conversation.
What happened with me was opposite. The women sitting near me would usually ignore me for an hour or so, then ask me a question or two (how long had I lived in town, was I married, did I have children, was I Muslim etc.) which would slowly grow into a longer conversation. After two or so hours, all the women around me would have talked to me. As I was sitting quietly, smiling at the children, accepting tea, looking as benign as possible, the women would socialize with each other, occasionally glancing at me, then slowly one or two would start the process of figuring out who I was and passing that information around.
I had given them space and time to adjust to me and I happily answered all their questions with answers that made sense: I am a teacher, I have learned Arabic from my students, I am a friend of the groom’s sister, etc. There was always a sense of wonder – this American Christian sitting amongst us! – but I made no sudden moves, gave ready and plain answers, smiled at children and (with honesty) professed myself delighted with the house, food, tea, party and the company. Slow, easy and steady but always marked as different and foreign.
This insight was found by chance (the first time I did this, I really didn’t know the right thing to say) but I realized that, on the Arabian Peninsula, the more you speak and act correctly, the more it is believed you know all the culture’s rules. In my experience it is far better to start off with an obvious stumble and rehabilitate yourself later than to start strong only to fall off. Set the bar low, make it clear you don’t have all the necessary cultural knowledge and mistakes are forgiven or at least not coded as deliberate rudeness.
Expat Friends
Expats friends can sometimes turn to gold. When I met The Divine Ms. S., I felt like I was reunited with my birth sister. Just as my idea of ‘plot’ is add another shark attack, my idea of decorating is throw a few more rhinestones on. She had a living room with floor to ceiling red velvet curtains on all the walls and a four-foot mirrored snarling jaguar statue. Truly a woman after my own taste.
Living overseas in a small community everyone knows each other – most people live next to or near people they work with; you see all the same people at the same (few) restaurants and shops. You can’t move unobserved. You and your car are known entities and, maliciously or not, information is passed around. If you go to Lulu’s you either see someone you know or someone was driving by and saw your car, or someone saw you take the Lulu’s bags out of your car.
You learn not to lie, but to preserve some sense of privacy, to be circumspect. You seldom use names in conversation or discuss your specific plans. Everyone says, “Oh I am busy that night” or “Yes, I know that restaurant. I went there with a friend once.”
Once you become part of a circle, you have to take care of those people; you have to help. Like it or not you are in for giving rides to the airport, rides if their car went in for service, borrowing books, handing out whatever medicine you have, sharing the names of good dentists and plumbers. Unlike a small town in America, it is impossible to find basic information here. There is no Yellow Pages, much less store web-sites. The opening times change, stores close or move locations. You have to tell the newcomers the name of the good tailor and about the Japanese dollar store. The gardeners have to tell each other when a certain plant (mint, yellow hibiscus, almond trees, olive trees) is available at the nursery and when there is a delivery of clay pots. The person you told about the good new shawarma stand is the person who, tomorrow, will tell you about a good place to have curtains made. You have to walk people into stores and hand them over to your ‘cushion guy,’ your ‘frame guy,’ your ‘copy guy’ and your ‘coconut guy.’
You get to know what everyone in your groups likes to eat and drink. As I walk around the grocery store, I send off messages: “Hey, they have tortilla chips!” and “Hey, they have dried cherries.” I get calls now and then, “Hey, they have cranberry juice!” and “Candy canes are in.” When I leave town, I ask for requests. When my friends return from trips, I get goodies: Halloween candy, vitamins, clothes dye, doughnuts, curtain fabric.
Expats almost always develop a veneer; whoever you meet you can manage a pleasant conversation about something. You go to a party, end up sitting next to someone you didn’t know – you two look at each other and there is an almost palpable assessment, “Ok, let’s get on with it” and you make a go at figuring out something in common: How long have you been in town, where do you live, where do you work? You smile and wave when you see acquaintances, “How are you?!”
Nothing serious, no soul-baring, no sharing, no real talk, just simple chat, do you know where to get a good hair cut? Have you heard anything about the new Al Jazeera flights? A bit of complaining about the weather, a little discussion about what’s available at the grocery store, “Strawberries are in at Isteqrar!” and “I saw real Hershey’s chips at Al Haq.”
Expats know: you do what you can with what you have where you are.
Risse, M. “Living Expat.” Emanations: Chorus Pleiades. Carter Kaplan, ed. Brookline, MA: International Authors, 2018: 308-318.
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