12. Khunfushār in America

The steamships that cross the Atlantic are pipes pouring creatures from the crowded Old World into a New World open for generations, where humanity may breathe with full lungs in a broad space that embraces millions of arrivals.

Back and forth these pipes go between the shores of America and Europe, carrying on their decks thousands of workers and seekers after employment in the arena of labor that is America.

The immigrant arrives and falls silent in astonishment before the country’s grandeur. His tongue is tied because mind and heart are occupied contemplating what civilized human thought has achieved in art, industry, and science. He looks, for example, at a skyscraper and counts its stories one by one. When he reaches fifty, after the veins of his neck have nearly stiffened, he shakes his head in wonder and continues on his way, turning back every other step to fill his eyes with the marvels of construction.

An acquaintance takes him from New York to Brooklyn on the subway. Halfway there, the man tells him that the train is traveling under the depths of the sea. His heart leaps in terror and amazement. His thoughts split into branches that cannot rejoin, and he stands humbled before the human greatness whose heart circumstances have allowed him to enter.

A friend stops with him at an intersection. As far as he can see, lines of automobiles move north, south, east, and west like legions without beginning or end. Thousands cross in every direction with order and attention. He imagines himself in one of God’s gardens.

Throughout, the recent immigrant remains amazed. Mind and heart speak of the wonders of invention; his tongue stays frozen and cannot move. What can a weak immigrant’s mouth say before the grandeur and immensity of the New World that he sees with his own eyes?

But the tongue is not tied for long. Yesterday’s silent immigrant suffers a reaction and becomes a man of many words. The age of astonishment has passed. Now he looks upon the aims of greatness as though he saw before him the oven at the entrance to his village house. When he looks upon the fifty-eight stories of the Woolworth Building, it is as though he beheld his vineyard hut—four wooden posts and walls of straw. When he rides the subway beneath the water, he no longer marvels; he might be sitting on his donkey, his legs joining the animal’s four in dragging along the face of the earth.

A friend told me that his brother passed a week unable to answer a word. At first the family feared he had been struck dumb. But the week had scarcely ended when the mute became an orator of the first rank. In anyone’s presence he seized a conversation from A to Z and mixed ʿAbbās with Dabbās.[54] If anyone tried to stop him, he cared nothing for the man or his warning. He had become an authority on every art, science, and occupation—this after walking on the roof of the “subway” and wondering how it had been made from pieces of glass. Every difficult matter was now the easiest of things, and for each he possessed an explanation whose garment he alone had woven, without partner.

Once, for example, a gathering was discussing Brooklyn Bridge while the City of New York was occupied with extending Manhattan Bridge. The brother seized the subject. His sibling nudged him in vain to shorten his remarks and allow someone else to speak. He continued his explanations until the gathering ended. There was no reason to marvel at the construction of great bridges, he explained; the matter was perfectly simple. Their foundations were built on cork. Sheets of it were laid on the water, the structure built on top, and the whole gradually sank until it reached the bottom.

My informant did not know where his brother found such an explanation. Though unable even to read or write, the man dared plunge into the weightiest matters, making light of Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, and all the rest.

I knew Saʿd Qamar in a city in one of these states. He was an old bachelor of long standing who had emigrated to America by way of Egypt, so his tongue inclined toward the speech of the pharaohs. For twenty years in America he spoke the language of Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Aḥmad Shawqī, and Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm.[55]

Saʿd Qamar did not know A from B, but his tongue was in constant motion and nothing could stop it except death. I do not know whether death succeeded. He died and was placed in his grave, and the darkness of eternity concealed him from me; I therefore cannot state the matter with certainty.

Whenever the late Saʿd saw a circle of people—whatever kind and whoever its members—he sat nearby. First he lent an ear to their conversation until he could draw one end of it toward himself. Then he took hold and began, never finishing until the gathering ended and the dear friends dispersed.

He became known for intruding into every subject. In conversation he was physician, philosopher, merchant—everything. Yet he did not comprehend what he was in the world of existence. He died without knowing whence he came, where he went, or why he had existed upon the dusty earth.

The late Saʿd loved America because, as I once heard him say, it “opens the blind man’s heart.” In our country, the effendi, bey, bishop, priest, and teacher gave no man like him a turn to speak. Here in America, however, every person was free to say whatever he wished.

The people of that city knew the late Saʿd’s nature. They became fond of his conversation and found amusement and pleasure in the comic forms of his explanations, proofs, and authorities. They would egg him on and inflame him until he grew angry; then their entertainment began.

Chance once brought me into a circle of this kind. When someone saw Saʿd approaching in the distance, he called, “Here comes Saʿd! Open a subject for him to seize, and let him entertain us for a while.”

Everyone was smoking cigarettes. One man said, “The discoverer of tobacco was an American. America is the mother of tobacco.”

(At that moment Saʿd entered, greeted us, and sat down. He had heard the speaker’s final words: “America is the mother of tobacco.”)

After taking his seat he asked, “What are you discussing? Tobacco? Smoke is like steam: it rises from water when you put it over a fire.”

The man who had made the remark answered, “No, no. We are not discussing the origin of smoke, so spare us the evil of your philosophy. We disagree over whether the tobacco we smoke in cigarettes—or, in other words, cigarettes or tobacco itself—was discovered by an American. What is your opinion?”

“Tobacco! Tobacco is Arab. A king of the Arabs discovered it thousands of generations ago.”

(Our late friend had seen Arabs and Turks in cigarette advertisements. The idea lodged in his head that Bedouins smoked a great deal and that the water pipe was purely Arab. He therefore engraved upon his brain that tobacco was Arab in every respect.)

There is no need to repeat the famous story of khunfushār and the man who claimed to know everything; it is known far and near.[56] I mention it only because its story resembles that of our late friend—may God moisten the earth above him.

The late Saʿd customarily supported his explanations with proofs and histories revealed to him on the spot. He therefore bent himself to the tale:

“That king had an only daughter whom he worshiped. He would not have sold one hair of her head for all the kingdoms in the world. One day he entered her room and found her dizzy, with smoke coming from her mouth. He called out her name, and her name was . . . God curse the devil, it was on the tip of my tongue. Her name . . . her name . . . Listen, let me remember. Her name . . . her name . . .”

I do not know why he stumbled over this name when he could fabricate whole volumes. But so that the event might provide us with an element of farce, God inspired him to stumble until he discovered it.

We waited impatiently to obtain the name so that he might advance his story and show us where it would lead. Nearly half an hour passed. He rubbed his brow and cursed the devil for making him forget. The name had been on the tip of his tongue. He had neither swallowed nor spat it, yet it was no longer there. How had it flown away? No one knew.

At last, all eagerness to hear the event, I had an impulse to throw him a name. Perhaps he would take it and release us from his guessing and our waiting.

“Her name, Uncle, was Dukhkhāna.”[57]

His face flashed with light. He struck the floor with his foot and shouted, “Dukhkhāna! Her name was Dukhkhāna!”

His story ended there amid the people’s laughter. I, however, feared he had come to believe that Dukhkhāna truly was the name of the king’s daughter whose history he had begun to tell. After the circle dispersed, I sat beside him and whispered:

“Did you see how I rescued you from your guessing and supplied an invented name for the king’s daughter?”

“An invented name? Are you trying to laugh at me? Am I a child? Did I not know her name when it was on the tip of my tongue?”

“But I swear by God, the word ‘Dukhkhāna’ came from me at random. I threw it to see if it would stick to the wall of your brain. It stuck and released us from waiting.”

He turned his back on me and made the water pipe gurgle, laughing openly at my attempt to persuade him that Dukhkhāna was a stray shot with no relation to truth.

Again he said, “He wants to laugh at me! If I were married, my youngest child would be older than he is.”

News reached me that Saʿd Qamar died a year ago. I suspect that even in his tomb he continues to believe that the Arab king’s daughter was named Dukhkhāna and that she discovered tobacco—hence its name—thousands of years before America was discovered.

I am deeply, deeply saddened that in his lifetime I could not persuade him that the word engraved upon the tablet of his imagination was a fabrication. I fear that, amid the repose of the grave, he continues to disturb its awful peace by repeating that invented word.

NOTES

[54] “Mixing ʿAbbās with Dabbās” is a rhyming idiom for confusing unrelated people or matters—roughly, mixing everything together indiscriminately.
[55] Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905), Aḥmad Shawqī (1868–1932), and Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm (1872–1932) were leading Egyptian intellectual and literary figures. The joke is that illiterate Saʿd’s acquired Egyptian colloquial speech is grandiosely identified with their language.
[56] Khunfushār is the classic Arabic emblem of pseudo-learning: in a well-known anecdote, a pretended scholar invents the word and then supports it with fabricated poetry and authorities. It has no stable lexical referent; the title announces learned nonsense transplanted to America.
[57] Dukhkhāna is fabricated from dukhān, “smoke” or “tobacco,” with a feminine ending, making it sound like a woman’s name and allowing Saʿd to derive tobacco from the princess.
