Mourning a Language I Was Barely Exposed To

I am not entirely sure where this story begins. Whenever I try tracing my relationship with language back to its origins, I always seem to arrive here.

It’s ironic how living in an Arabic country does not necessarily translate into knowing the language itself.

Perhaps the greater contradiction was being mocked for lacking fluency in a foreign language while living entirely within the comfort of your own. As a child already occupied with school, homework, parents, toys, birthdays, and the occasional bully, worrying about fluency in a supposedly secondary language should not have been a priority.

Things shifted quickly, nonetheless. English became the language of formal education, communication, ambition, and opportunity. With that shift, Arabic was gradually pushed aside — not just for me personally, but for an entire generation.

I keep saying “Arabic,” though that is not entirely accurate. Or perhaps it is, but only partially. What I truly inherited was the dialect — specifically the dialect of Baghdad. It is the language my parents speak. The sound by which I recognize who is from Baghdad and who is not. The sound that instinctively draws me toward people connected to my origins, even when I never truly felt connected to the country itself.

Every time I hear a distant شلونك؟ in a crowd, it feels like catching sight of a familiar face before remembering where you know it from. My heart jolts for a moment at the discovery of this random stranger from “my people.” Yet much of my life was spent distancing myself from that very identity. So why does the dialect still pull at me so instinctively? It remains a contradiction I have never fully understood.

The Arabic language itself always held a particular allure for me. My mother often says that as a child I would read my Arabic language textbooks from cover to cover the very day I received them, long before the school year properly began. The crisp pages, fresh print, and untouched stories fascinated me far more than the lessons they were meant to teach. 

Spoken Arabic, however, never drew me in quite the same way. Even then, I seemed more drawn to the language as literature than as everyday speech.

Still, the stories included in our textbooks rarely captivated me. They were simplified texts designed primarily to satisfy curriculum requirements rather than inspire genuine literary curiosity. Poetry, however, was an entirely different matter. Everything from نازك الملائكة to بدر شاكر السياب and أمل دنقل fascinated me. By year nine, I already knew that pre-Islamic poetry (الشعر الجاهلي) held little appeal for me, a preference that has not changed much since.

I wanted to explore Arabic literature more deeply back then, but I was already consumed by preparations for board exams and university applications. Arabic was not part of my final examinations, and naturally, it became secondary to the subjects that were.

Given that nearly all of my formal education was conducted in English — the sciences, mathematics, and virtually everything else — my parents often worried that “our Arabic” was getting lost in the process.

Even then, I remember thinking that it was not truly the Arabic language we were losing. It was the spoken language — the dialect.

After all, I cannot really lose something I never fully had to begin with.

I did well academically in Arabic. Composition, however, remained my weakest point. Looking back, much of this seems rooted in the educational approach itself.

The texts we studied were often simplified passages written specifically for grammar exercises and comprehension drills rather than excerpts from actual novels, essays, or newspaper articles. Literary curiosity was never truly encouraged, though perhaps the schools themselves cannot be blamed entirely. We were already overloaded with exams, coursework, university preparations, and the relentless pressure of academic performance.

It was only once I started university that I finally felt I had enough space to invest seriously in extracurricular reading, particularly Arabic literature.

At the time, Dubai’s reading culture still felt relatively limited, and many bookstores had already disappeared. Then Kinokuniya opened its doors at the Dubai Mall.

Suddenly, books were everywhere.

Not just books, but worlds.

The Arabic section in particular drew me in. Over time, it grew richer in both genre and selection, while the employees themselves seemed genuinely knowledgeable about the books they recommended. For someone constantly searching for new literature, it felt revolutionary.

Needless to say, I became a regular there.

I would spend hours wandering between shelves, eventually settling into my usual corner with piles of books I could never realistically buy all at once. I learned which corners were quietest, which armchairs offered the best hiding places, and which shelves seemed to produce a new discovery with every visit. The mall outside was always loud, crowded, and restless, yet inside the bookstore everything softened into something quieter, slower, more intimate. It felt like entering an entirely separate world.

As I became more familiar with the bookstore, I found myself increasingly drawn toward the Arabic literature section. Exploring it felt strangely unfamiliar and deeply personal at the same time.

What I mistook for a search for books was, in retrospect, something else entirely. I was discovering a new literary landscape and beginning a conversation with a language that had accompanied me for years without ever fully revealing itself. The books were merely the doorway; the language itself was the house I had been circling for years. 

I did not realize I was also searching for a language I had spent most of my life orbiting from a distance.