Qat: words, things, and men
The spring 2006 issue of
Verbatim
(which arrived a few weeks ago; things are a bit behind schedule) leads
off (pp. 1-6) with an evocative piece by Gregory Johnson on chewing
qat (the psychoactive leaves of the
plant
Catha edulis) in
Yemen. I found two aspects of the article notable, one
small but striking, the other subtler.
Item 1. On page 3, Johnson tells us
Now qat
has taken over society to such a degree that most outsiders and even
some Yemeni view it as a self-inflicted curse that is the root of all
modern evils: underdevelopment, poverty, and lack of water. The
rest of us, however, are too busy chewing to pay much attention.
Those who refuse to chew have never experienced kayf, that elusive, nearly
untranslatable word, which allows one to melt into the background,
becoming perfectly at ease with one's surroundings and oneself.
Whoa! You experience a
WORD? The
WORD
allows you to become one with your surroundings and yourself? I
don't think so. It's like saying
I finally experienced nirvana, a
three-syllable word for a kind of transcendant state.
I nearly died from necrotizing fasciitis, the name of an affliction
known commonly as "flesh-eating bacteria".
This is a kind of use-mention pun, treating the word and the thing it
refers to as the same. In Johnson's sentence, what's elusive is
the
CONCEPT; what's nearly untranslatable is the
WORD
-- untranslatable because the concept is elusive, with no easy
counterpart in our outsiders' modes of thinking. The confusion
might be promoted in Johnson's case by two different uses that
italicization can be put to in English: for using a non-English word
("the pleasure of
Schadenfreude"),
and for mentioning words ("
polysyllabic
is polysyllabic").
The easy solution is to refer to the thing: the state (called
khayf) that results from chewing
qat is hard to describe;
I nearly died from necrotizing fasciitis (whose common name is
"flesh-eating bacteria"; etc.
Item 2. Very close to the beginning, Johnson says
In Yemen, qat chews provide a popular and
important forum for debate and dialogue. Nearly everyone chews ...
And later (p. 5):
Nearly every occasion in Yemen is an
occasion to chew.
(Looking ahead: the issue is going to be about "nearly everyone" and
"nearly every occasion").
The tale goes on, with stories of long chews involving recitations of
poetry, disputations, the complexity of obtaining
qat, and so on. There are
hints along the way:
... even old age and toothlessness fail
to stop some, as old men use a mahtana
'grinder,' to ... (p. 1)
But really, wherever you go the scene is the same: men are cursing,
jostling, and invoking God's name ... (p. 3)
I've watched men sample nearly half a bag before they purchased
it. (p. 4)
Eventually, we get (on p. 6, right before the end) to:
Men wrestle with their internal jinn in silence until the silence
is broken and the music ceases, as someone mumbles a quick goodbye and
slips on their sandals. The chew comes to a rather hurried and
untidy end as everyone prepares to leave. Most men tend to go
home to a quiet evening with their families, relaxed and at ease with
the world.
Ah.
EVERYONE doesn't chew
qat.
MEN chew
qat. The whole business
is part of the "men's world" of Arab culture, the public world, which
takes place outside the domestic sphere, the private world.
Now I'm
NOT saying that this sort of public/private,
male/female split is something peculiar to Arab culture. It
occurs all over the world, has been much commented on in the West in
the literature on women's history, and still crops up in places like
Harvey Mansfield's troglodyte
On
Manliness (2006).
Instead, what's surprising is that Johnson is so absorbed in the
culture he's talking about that he fails to translate for his
readers. He supposes we share the assumptions of the world he's
describing, in which only men would gather for affiliation,
competition, and verbal displays, in places away from their
homes.
Yes, I know: women have other lives, with their own social
configurations, in "private" places. That's not the point.
The point is that the women are erased in "nearly everyone", and
domestic occasions in "nearly every occasion", and a reader from
outside the culture could easily fail to appreciate that.
[Full disclosure: I'm a
Verbatim
board member, but I had no hand in preparing this issue.]
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at October 6, 2007 03:05 PM