Communicating Arts - Main Web SiteAs declaimed and printed in The Washington Post:
"Now, I swear to God, if we will hear anyone is with al-Qaeda, even if he is still inside his mother's womb, we will kill him," Suleiman said. "The man was one of the swords of the council in the province. If one sword falls, other swords will rise." [1]
I have not studied Arabic, and at 52 and with a disgraceful track record in high school French, doing so now seems unlikely. Nonetheless, the role of Arabic in conflict comes up now and then, and I feel it worth discussing here, albeit in translation.
In his sometimes battered but still brave old classic, The Arab Mind, Raphael Patai looks across the Arab campus into the relationship between the formal language and various flavors of Arab culture [2] as well as the common tendancy toward heartfelt bombast. For Patai, Arabic has played a role in organizing (as a social class discriminator), sustaining, and, in some ways, trapping its speakers, especially as regards the management of time (e.g., " . . . if we will hear anyone") that institutionalizes the instance as it keeps all things eternally present.
The colloquial term applied here and there to the braggadocio: "Big Talk."
And may I say it's gorgeous.
Ali Hatem Ali Suleiman's words have an elegant, poetic, and powerful literary quality seldom found in blunt (and perhaps pretentiously humble) American political life. Spoken by the leader of the largest tribe in Iraq's Anbar Province to step off revenge for the murder of Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, the Sunni leader of a council of tribes allied with the Iraqi government in opposition to incursion by Al Qaeda, the words speak to the emotion of the event.
American editors would find such a prose overwrought, even purple, but then perhaps we are the more poor for that. Having set aside the once Ciceronian music made of our language, we may also have set aside much of the beauty, heart, and spirit that was either in our persons or inspired by, expressed through, and reflected in that style.
Not all find beauty in Big Talk.
The term itself my be interpreted as provocative: "There goes Mr. Big Talk," or "That is some Big Talk, mister."
There comes along the question too: is there a walk, realistically speaking, to go with the Big Talk?
Egyptian business leader cum Arab social critic and poltical boulevardier Tarek Heggy has noted, "In the sixties, we claimed to be the stronger military power in the Middle East, a claim that was revealed to be nothing more than an empty boast on the morning of June 5th ,1967. To the same extent that we overrated our own abilities, we underestimated those of our historical enemy, which we dismissed as “a bunch of Jewish gangs”. [1]
Heggy's familiar view--logical positivist, practical to a fault--derides the "grandiloquent rhetoric that drowns the truth in a welter of words."
Although Heggy recognizes Big Talk (the capitals here are always mine) as a part of natural language behavior, he rather finishes it off as, "this reflects a serious flaw in our mental buildup that has become deeply-entrenched in our culture."
I would not be so keen on characterizing as flaws the male aesthetic sense, pride, and vanity (being something of an aesthete myself) that I believe bound in with language.
When my father, who owned a good set of golf clubs and drove a Cadillac, attacked my interests in music and other arts with similar and aggressive criticism, I would remind him that without male vanity and pride, the world would contain neither golf courses nor Cadillacs nor much else of interest beyond the quotidian.
Here's the nut, so to speak: the dream bin for golf courses, Cadillacs, polished marble, and grandiloquent mosques is language universally.
However divine, divinely inspired, more casually human or manufactured on Madison Avenue, language structures impression and perception.
I also believe nature speaks through our poetry and other arts; it is something that comes through humans that tune to it and through the development of an ample technique enable that force to come through their hands, their eyes, their mouths; in turn, the poetry and other art fashioned, the manner of speaking, creates around itself its own internally coherent culture.
In the power that language has to frame existence, individually and culturally, Big Talk may well represent a most cherished refinement.
Here I will leave alone for now the content and intents of Big Talk.
As there are good reasons for artists retreating to colonies, private studios, and corner rooms in obscure apartment buildings, there may be similar conditions buttressing the preservation of effusive language in cultures or among people long considered geopolitically isolated.
As with many a song in the western ear, what comes together in the singing becomes exalting--not only no wonder the Taleban destroys music cassette tapes wherever it may confiscate them but also finds in its own speaking out of the Koran its melding with the divine.
Blues singer Bonnie Rait once said after playing through a piece on Oprah, "Folks, I've got to tell you, it feels as good as it sounds."
I understand those words.
I would bet Ali Hatem Ali Suleiman would understand them too.
2. Patai, Raphael. The Arab Mind. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973.
3. Heggy, Tarek. "The Big Talk Syndrome." Arab World Books, n.d.
Correspondence and Permissions: James S. Oppenheim
