Gossip

People here often say that gossip is a "cultural thing" in Arab society, ie everybody does it without shame and the tiniest bits of information expand quite quickly into "truths." Whenever I hear some bit of news, I always dig deeper to try to find the source. People rarely admit to a source but will generally state it is a good one. I have to admit, while I don't make it a habit to be a source of gossip, I do enjoy the game of guessing out the extent of the truth of a piece of gossip.

 

My house cleaner, who I've mentioned before, is always a source of gossip, usually about people I've never met. Usually, I welcome it as an opportunity to improve my Arabic and it feels quite harmless since the people she talks at length about, providing intimate details of their lives, are complete strangers to me. It's kind of like watching a soap opera, but in this case, it is conveyed orally. Today I had a wonderful surprise! I usually don't have much tolerance for my housecleaner's incessant talking beyond 5 minutes, but today was different. It was a day off, I had just sent my son to school, and I was about to sit down with my first cup of coffee when she rang the doorbell. We exchanged a few minutes worth of conversation about each other's families, and then she dropped the bomb….my divorced landlord had gotten remarried…..and the woman is only 36 years old (he's in his early 50s, we think!).

 

But wait, it gets better. In fact, as my housecleaner tells it, they are married but they did not, and are not having a wedding. I don't think there's a word in Arabic which basically states "sleeping together" which my guess is what this relationship actually is. The "wife" moved in apparently with just a single suitcase. Any relationship outside of marriage is just plain unacceptable and incomprehensible in this culture which I imagine is the reason that there is no word for this type of relationship. So, they don't seem to be really married, it would be disrespectful for my landlord to tell the housecleaner that he was just sleeping with the woman. Besides, I have not seen this mysterious new wife coming and going on a daily basis. She is from northern West Bank, which explains my landlord's long absences these days. And the seemingly love affair also explains my landlord's inability to mobilize himself or any other help to fix the myriad of small but bothersome maintenance issues that my apartment is experience at the moment and are in desperate need of some tending to. Although frankly, he was never that focused on that stuff anyways even when he wasn't carrying on a grand love affair.

 

As we sit like teenage girls in full gossip mode, my housecleaner and I unabashedly pull apart the details of how this relationship came to be. My housecleaner frowns as she describes the woman – young with a baby at home, wears tight jeans and small shirts and smokes and drinks openly during Ramadan. "Is this a Muslim?!" she asks me. I explain to her how it was clear to me on several social occasions that my landlord had his eye for one type of girl – the local equivalent of the American dumb blond. We conclude that they are both "majnoon/majnoona" (out of their minds). For her sake, I try to explain, I hope she quickly learns that this man is nothing more than a grey-haired teenage boy, lacking any ability to take responsibility for the smallest things in his life (a whole other blog post!). For his sake, I hope he soon realizes that there are more fulfilling romantic relationships than being with the cultural equivalent of the dumb blond….or maybe not for his sake.

So they're crazy in love and having a culturally illicit affair, beyond the fun of pulling apart the details of their affair through gossip, I do not begrudge them being out of their minds – that is the aphrodisiac effect of love, isn't it? But then my housecleaner starts to make it personal, "Look at you, your son is at least 7 years old, and you, you are so 'sa'ab.'" That's meant to be a complement - Sa'ab is the word people use for children who are quiet, well behaved and conform to the cultural expectation that all children should be seen and not heard. I don't particularly enjoy the fact that my unintentional celibate lifestyle is being compared to a well behaved child. None of this is by choice. And, unlike the Arab culture, I fortunately have no norms that I have to conform to. And yet still, the stuff of adult, mature, romantic, "out of my mind" love still escapes me. I have no great desire to be the sa'ab child in this case.