Los Angeles Times, CA
Nov 8 2004
A Family Name That Walks Ahead of Me
In America, the Arabic Sa’adah is difficult — a slow business of
articulated syllables and repeated A’s.
By Marjorie Gellhorn Sa’adah, Marjorie Gellhorn Sa’adah is a writer
in Los Angeles.
Because my father, a U.S. Army officer, was stationed in France in
1965, I was born in Paris.
Bébé Sa’adah was wrapped in a pastel blanket and taken home from the
hospital without a first name. My parents soon settled on one, and
the prénom Marjorie was entered on my French birth certificate, a
delicate carbon- paper page affixed with a stamp that indicated the
payment of a one-franc tax. I was only a day or two without a first
name, but in some ways, I feel as if my last name has walked ahead of
me ever since.
Sa’adah is an Arabic name. I say my name, and I watch as Americans
listen to it, write it down on forms and enter it into computers. I
pronounce it and spell it and make a little hooking motion with my
finger to help explain the apostrophe.
To Americans, the name is difficult, but I’ve found that through all
the flashing colors of terrorism alerts, few Americans seem to have
the cultural fluency to identify its source. I wish they did, that
the distance between us and the far-away, seemingly foreign people we
are at war with was shortened in this way.
The root of my name is sa’eed, “happy”; sa’adah is “true happiness.”
But the spelling of my name just approximates Arabic letters,
transcribed by immigration officials. My Syrian grandfather
immigrated to the U.S. after World War II when my father was a boy.
My grandfather’s brothers arrived in different years, met different
immigration officers, and the spelling of the name — A’s and E’s and
apostrophes — varies across the family.
The apostrophe stands for ayin, an Arabic consonant the English
alphabet lacks. Technically, an ayin is a “laryngeal voiced
fricative,” a sound my Arabic textbooks caution is difficult for the
non-Semitic tongue. It is a stopping sound, somewhat like the catch
between the two halves of “uh-oh.” Meeting me can be a slow business
of articulated syllables and repeated A’s.
I first attempted Arabic in graduate school, in a class so difficult
I dropped it before it sank my GPA like an anchor. Arabic calligraphy
flows right to left, each consonant is a choice of four intricate
letter forms, and vowels usually go unwritten — which makes for
difficult reading, let alone comprehension: lt ln cmprhnsn.
I tried again, on Sunday mornings at the Islamic Center in Los
Angeles. This time, I set a modest goal. I wanted to be able to greet
people: my grandfather, the Arabs and Arab Americans of my parents’
generation who correct me with a “tsk” when they hear me flatten out
my ayin, dulling the sound of my own name.
The classroom was tiny, windowless, filled by a dozen people. There
was an African American man and his teenage sons, learning Arabic to
help them study the Koran. There was a hip white woman who played
drums in a world music band and wanted to small-talk and joke with
her Arabic bandmates, and a teenager, wearing her coffee shop uniform
for her afternoon job, sent by her parents. A thin white man who
complained about the center’s coffee, noted everyone’s name and never
bought the textbooks. Our teacher taught him the words for “I will
walk to Starbucks,” but after three weeks the man stopped coming.
Except for him, my classmates and I came to know each other. We were
all from more than one place: “Ana min Misr; ana Amrikeah,” said an
engineer who lives in Riverside. “I’m from Egypt; I’m American.”
The most recent arrival was Farida, an Azerbaijani fleeing war
between ethnic Azeris and ethnic Armenians. On the airplane coming to
the U.S., she told us, the man seated next to her was Armenian. They
looked at each other, acknowledging their common destination — peace.
“He is not my enemy,” she said. “He is more like me than he is
different.”
None of us in the class were alike. The drummer smoked Marlboros
during breaks, Farida tucked stray hair back under her hijab. But we
were more alike than we were different.
We unfolded a map of the world and looked at the wide part of it that
speaks Arabic — countries that stretch across North Africa, through
the Middle East, into Asia. We learned the names of homelands and
wars and family members, and we traced all those lines toward Los
Angeles.
In 1965, I had a few days without a name, and, as it turned out, a
month without a country. That’s how long it took for my parents to
receive the official document that confirmed that I was a
foreign-born American citizen.
It’s tied with two long red ribbons, stamped with a glossy medallion,
embossed with the seal of the U.S. Department of State. It looks like
a prize, like a promise. It’s postmarked France, it’s written in
English, it says my name and, in one language of many, “Ana
Amrikeah.”
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