“Why are you talking like that?” “No, but seriously, why are you talking like that?”
As a young child I never once understood why my parents always mirrored the dialect of any Arab they spoke to. It did not matter whether they spoke to a close friend,neighbour or someone of authority. It was as if they were ashamed of even sounding slightly Sudanese. To make matters worse it seems that non-Sudanese Arabs expected us to change the way we spoke so that they could understand us. Growing up I even began to scare myself in the presence of other Arabs when I started to slowly change my accent and the words I chose in fear of saying something ‘differently’ that someone could pick up on. It will never cease to amaze me when fellow Arabs look at me in awe when I speak Arabic, as if they never expected to hear a black person utter ‘their’ language-as if I am performing some kind of magic trick.
Where does this come from? There is a general consensus that Sudanese and san’ani Yemeni arabic are both the closest dialects to classical arabic. Why are we then made to feel like our interpretation is wrong or something to be ashamed of? A better question might be: why did we ever, as the only black, arabic speaking nation, expect Arabs to view us and the way we speak as equally respectable? Our history of being sold to the Ottoman empire and the Egyptians since the 1820s clearly still haunts us. In fact, it feels wrong to call it history. We are still being sold in more ways than one. Ponder on that thought.
Khartoum, Sudan
You only have to switch on the arabic channels on TV to see the mockery of our customs, accent, hair, ideas, culture, colour, dances, food, words, practises...do I need to continue? Switch on an Egyptian comedy show and you might find an interesting portrayal of us. It might involve some black-face depictions and an implication of us being united by laziness. The mockery doesn’t end there. It doesn’t come to a surprise when we take all of this into account, why we morph our dialect into that of the Arab we are speaking to. It isn’t surprising then that we get embarrassed to use the unique words our ancestors passed down to us.
So where do we go from here? Arabs need to do better. We need to do better. Yes, we as Sudanese people are uniquely too african to just be arab, yet too arab to just be African. Yet we are not watered down Arabs and I hope we reach a point in the near future where we can start to feel like equals in our own ‘community’. Did this sound a bit like an angry rant? I am not sorry. You should be.