University of Arkansas Press

Chapter Title: The Displaced Voice

Chapter Author(s): IMAN MERSAL

Book Title: Beyond Memory

Book Subtitle: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Creative Nonfiction
Book Editor(s): PAULINE KALDAS, KHALED MATTAWA
Published by: University of Arkansas Press. (2020)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvthhbwf.22

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 19

I M A N M ER S A L

The Displaced Voice

Let us suppose that the voice is a thread of light stretching between the
mouth of the speaker and the ear of the listener, between intention and
interpretation, and that an accent is colored oscillations vibrating around
this thread but not congruent with it. At times, these oscillations may
intensify the thread’s light, adding, perhaps, to the original intention;
at others, they may impede or disrupt it. A single word falling from a
sentence threaded on a luminous cord suffices to make the thread strain
and shake. The listener’s eyes widen; his vision sharpens, hoping to catch
the word dislodged by the accent before it hits the ground. The speak-
er’s eyes may open wide as well. All his limbs and organs may rally to
the cause, each in its own idiom, helping to convey the intention, gaps
notwithstanding, to the ear of the person awaiting it. I am not referring
to the individual voice here as a physiological product of vocal cords
carried on the airwaves, nor as a vehicle of linguistic intent and its target,
nor as a refutation of death, but as an energy born from the accent, in
order to convey the individual voice, the language that voice utters and
its intention.
The accent’s energy follows a different tempo proper to the mother
tongue, and when the voice carries it into a foreign language, the result
is an illusion of an attempt to speak two languages at the same instant,
one on the surface and the other concealed, one in motion and the other
sidelined, up in arms at its neglect and abandonment. The accent is thus
not necessarily a speech defect but rather the mother tongue’s struggle
against mortality. It is competing with the foreign language via sabotage,
sabotage of the bond between voice and rhythm. A syllable is amputated
here or there, an unfamiliar letter rushes forth when it should have bided
its time, a sound leaps onto the head of another and chomps off a part of
its allotted space. The sabotage may also come from the generosity of the

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mother tongue in its dealings with time, adding a few split seconds with
its vowels where the foreign language permits none. Thus, street becomes
es-treet, and clothes becomes cloz-ez.
If we imagine the person with the accent as, in the act of enuncia-
tion, a displaced individual, then let us together imagine the accent as a
displaced voice. This person with an accent may practice long and hard in
order to fit into his new place, and he may succeed in hiding his accent or
in suppressing it for a long time. But, sooner or later, along comes the fatal
moment when practice fails him. It is no accident that moments of anger
are those where the accent, in all its glory, is most likely to rear its head.
Perhaps this is because anger sticks better to swollen vocal cords than
satisfaction does, and is better at agitating the memory and calling forth
the first language to exact revenge, applying its phonology and stirring up
chaos. Someone with an accent need not be an emigrant from one lan-
guage to another. He may well be internally displaced, an emigrant from
one dialect of a language to another. Awad, the doorman of the building
in which I live in Cairo, speaks to its residents with unimpeachable deco-
rum, and in faultless Cairene. But his Upper Egyptian accent leaps out
the moment he yells at one of his children or becomes embroiled in an
argument with one of the doormen of the neighboring buildings.
|||||

A person’s voice can be more individual in his mother tongue, recogniz-

able by its particular timbre, its grain, should I quote Roland Barthes.
When the voice takes on another language, the accent is muddled in its
individuality, tirelessly pointing back to the concealed collective pho-
nology of its mother tongue. For example, the English H is more akin
to an Arabic Kh when my colleague Natalie pronounces it. This is not
just Natalie’s voice, but the voice of the Russian language asserting itself.
In my first year in America the sound of the letter P seemed capable of
dislodging any word that contained it from the thread of light behind
which I stood. This is the letter that we often refer to as heavy B in Arabic,
a letter that doesn’t exist in our language; a failure to pronounce it is
enough to suggest to the listener that Arabic lies dormant inside you.
|||||

When I applied for a position as professor at the University of Alberta, I

had to jump through all the hoops that the academic marketplace requires:
teaching a class in front of an academic committee, individual meetings

186 | Iman Mersal

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with professors, students and the dean. But the severest trial of all was to
deliver a forty-five minute lecture to a packed academic audience. It wasn’t
the content of what I wanted to say that terrified me but rather how I
could deliver it smoothly. How could I manage to do so without colliding
with the bumps in the long words, words with their dread consonant clus-
ters, pivotal words whose fall out of sequence would mean my fall from
contention for the job. The accent at that moment had to be considered
as no less than a speech defect whose repercussions must be minimized.
Wās.il ibn ʿAtāʾ, who lived in the eighth century, was an eloquent
and provocative Mu’tazalite theologian from Basra who preached in
Arabic, his mother tongue, and whose enemies bullied him because of
his inability to properly pronounce the trilled R. But his linguistic genius
inspired him to hide his defect by avoiding words that contained this
letter, replacing them with synonyms: dunuw for qurb (proximity), ‘ala’
for ‘anwar (lights), ya’fu for yaghfir (forgive), madja’ for firash (bed), and
ghayth for matar (rain). He even crafted an entire sermon without one
single r. That is what I had to do—circumvent the sounds the accent
might muddle. I no longer remember how many words I had to substi-
tute, but I do remember my ideas flourishing in this substitution game.
Some words, however, could not be replaced and I remember one: archi-
tecture. My solution was to rewrite it in Arabic script, trying to visualize
it that way, in the shape of a reassuringly familiar language, so that I
might remember how it sounded. But at the critical moment, I tripped
over the word, and a mosque, an Omayyad mosque, specifically, seemed
to be collapsing somewhere, the sound of its broken glass windows issu-
ing on the thread of my voice.
|||||

When speaking a foreign language, the accented speaker does not choose
the most precise words to convey what he means, as he presumably does
in his mother tongue. Instead, he must avoid those words, despite their
precision, that might undercut his voice, the oscillations of the accent
short-circuiting them one way or another. We can imagine that this lack
of precision may perturb the content of the spoken message. It may even
prevent the message from arriving. But what is more intriguing is to
imagine the accent changing the content of the message, or setting it on
a different path, substituting a cooler message for one more sympathetic,
a cautious phrase for one more daring. After the arrival of a message
which the accented speaker did not intend, he may be startled by its

The Displaced Voice | 187

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beauty, however unintentional. The message has, as it were, been born,
and a correction made to match an intention that only its author knows
might well be disappointing to an ear that has already received it. And so
the speaker may continue with the error, pursued by a feeling of having
veered off course. It is not only language that may be inadequate, but
the voice itself. An accent sets you to quarreling with the words as you
struggle to overcome the inadequacy of your voice, and leads you, like
a Sufi mystic, down paths and through messages into states of spiritual
enlightenment the existence of which you would never have suspected
were it not for this interminable game of choice and avoidance.
The body is a visual support upon which the thread of the voice
depends for its safe arrival. The absence of the body weakens the thread,
rendering it vulnerable to breakage and loss. I can often easily understand
someone with an accent when we speak face to face. On the telephone,
however, the gaps in the message swell and I may pretend I have an old
receiver of poor quality so that the speaker will repeat his sentence. The
comfort of the listener’s body calms the anxiety to which the voice is
prone, aiding it not in overcoming its disability but rather in ignoring it.
When you expect that the ear you are speaking to will not understand
you, you may raise your voice to confirm your presence, to become vis-
ible, to occupy as much space as a voice can occupy. Or you may lower
your voice, as if you hoped to disappear from a scene in which you are
condemned to failure. In both cases, the accent holds sway over the voice
and controls its volume.
When I would accompany my grandmother from the village to the
city of Mansura or to Cairo—on a visit to someone in the hospital or to
citified relatives—she seemed like a different person to me. Her clothes
looked tight; they were part of her formal wardrobe, reserved for outings,
and had languished in the closet for quite some time. The gold she never
wore in her day-to-day life of baking bread and cooking changed the
look of her face and her neck. The roughness of her fingers, decorated
with rings, attracted my attention. Certainly, seeing her leave the house
where she had the luxury of exercising control over all the members of
a big family and becoming a mere visitor in the big city had something
to do with my feeling that she was not quite the person I knew. But her
accent also played its part in the transformation. I imagine her now say-
ing something on the order of Mohammed Abu Isma’iin married Noohaa.
The sound of Isma’iin for Isma’il and Noohaa for Noha led me to doubt her
absolute authority and made me nervous for reasons I couldn’t pinpoint.

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 An accent only becomes a source of shame or anxiety when it sig-
nifies the lower status of the voice speaking to the ear listening. What
determines status usually amounts to more than just the voice and its
intention. It may be any of a number of relationships: that of the center to
its periphery, of the colonizer to the colonized speaking his language, of
the urban to the rural, or of the fortunate classes to those less privileged.
I can’t imagine someone with an Oxford accent feeling ashamed when
speaking to someone with one of England’s working class accents. Nor
would a Parisian feel anxious listening to his accent side by side with that
of an immigrant from Senegal. An accent is thus a transparent metaphor
for relationships of power.
Sometimes the lower status accent in these relationships of power
tries to get rid of its shame by seeking shelter in its foreignness and
strangeness, by choosing to be exotic. I suspect I may do this upon occa-
sion. But I only recognized it as a strategy after seeing it in the perfor-
mance of women intellectuals as they deliver their lectures at academic
conferences, or of authors discussing their work with an audience that
speaks the power language, the language of the center. I have an Egyptian
friend who was lucky enough to be educated in English from nursery
school on and who did his degrees at a university in England. This friend
once said to me, in flirtation or as a compliment, “I love your English.”
My angry reaction to his sentence surprised me; but nobody likes to be
exotic at home. My friend’s backhanded compliment carried a whiff of
condescension, as if he were conversing in his own language, with an
accent that made him closer to the real Englishman, able to recognize
and even love the exotic.
After all these years of speaking and teaching in a foreign language,
years of wrestling with an accent, I am startled by a feeling that my voice
in Arabic is different from my voice in English. Not better or worse, just
different. I remember my astonishment once upon hearing, by chance, a
recorded message I had left on the answering machine at a friend’s house.
I was asking her to clarify directions to her address that I had, as usual,
gotten lost trying to find. In it, inadvertently, I found a poignant illustra-
tion of Agamben’s assertion that the essence of a message is inseparable
from the voice that speaks it. For this was a lost, anxious voice, a voice
with an accent. And this could be nothing but a message of longing for
a destination, longing distilled syllable by syllable, step by step, on this
journey of stuttering and wrong turns.

The Displaced Voice | 189

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