In our tongues so glib
Our very deaths reside
We have paid dearly for our gift of the gab
Nizar Qabbani
No wonder the war ended
in defeat,not victory,
For we waged it with all the Orient’s gift for oratory,
With quixotic hyperbole that never killed a fly,
Fighting in the logic of fiddle and drum.
Nizar Qabbani
In the sixties, we claimed to be the stronger military power in the Middle
East, a claim that was revealed to be nothing more than an empty boast on
the morning of June 5th ,1967. To the same extent that we overrated our
own abilities, we underestimated those of our historical enemy, which we
dismissed as “a bunch of Jewish gangs”. Events were to prove that the
enemy was far more dangerous than we had talked ourselves into believing .
Nor were these the only instances of “big-talk” during the sixties, a
decade that has become synonymous with hyperbole. A number of notorious
examples come to mind, as when we described the British prime minister as
an effete sissy – a particularly offensive characterization in the
Arabic language – or when we taunted the United States of America by
inviting its president to “go drink from the sea, first from the Red sea
and, after it is dry, from the Mediterranean”, or when we spoke of the
Qaher and its sister missile the Zaher as the ultimate weapon.
When we listen to the rousing national songs composed in the sixties, we
find that, despite their high artistic standard and beauty of the national
and pan-Arab dream they celebrated, their lyrics are replete with big-talk
. The tendency to indulge in bombastic and high- flown language continued
and, in fact, grew, throughout the seventies, eighties and nineties , and
is now such an integral part of our public life that anyone using a
different language today strikes a discordant note .
Thus when we talk of our history, we do not use scientific and objective
language but invariably sink into grandiloquent rhetoric that drowns the
truth in a welter of words .The same pattern applies in our approach to
the here and now. Even a victory by the national football team provides an
excuse for a veritable word fest. Although our standard in the game
ranks somewhere between “average” and “poor” at the international
level, on the rare occasions our players score a victory on the football
field we are not in the least embarrassed to hail them as “conquering
Pharaohs” or to use similarly overblown language to describe what is,
after all, nothing more than the outcome of a match.
The use of superlatives is rampant in our media where, as a look at the
front page of any newspaper will show, big-talk is the order of the day.
Thus any meeting is a “summit” meeting, any decision a “historic”
decision.
It must be said in all fairness that our propensity to use big-talk is in
no way contrived: we are only doing what comes naturally. High-flown
language has become part and parcel of our code of communication, both
oral and written. It is not associated in our minds with obsequiousness or
fawning; we do not use it in order to curry favour or to ingratiate
ourselves with the object of our flattery but as a spontaneous form of
expression. Sadly, this reflects a serious flaw in our mental buildup that
has become deeply-entrenched in our culture. Even the few who are
conscious of the problem are themselves not above succumbing to the
big-talk syndrome on occasion, proving that the problem has pervaded our
cultural climate to the point where no one is immune to its effects.
An example that graphically illustrates how this feature has come to
dominate the cultural landscape in the country is the coverage by Egyptian
television of the marathon that took place around the pyramids shortly
after the Luxor massacre in the autumn of 1997. Viewers were treated to
the amazing spectacle of about ten foreigners, interviewed separately and
supposedly at random, who all said the same thing in virtually the same
words, as though reading from a prepared script: “Egypt is a safe
country in which we feel secure .. terrorism does not exist only in Egypt
but in all parts of the world .. everyone wants to visit Egypt and see its
wonderful antiquities”.
The twenty years I spent in one of the largest industrial establishments
in the world gave me the opportunity to discover that this feature is
unique to our culture, a mark of dubious distinction that sets us apart
from other members of the community of nations, whether western or
eastern.
Cultural evolution in the countries belonging to western civilization,
including North America, has proceeded along a course that equates big
talk with ignorance. Human knowledge is a complex web of interconnected
strands in which there is no room for big talk, only for moderate language
that tries as far as possible to reflect the unembellished realities of
science and culture. As to eastern civilizations, the reserve that has
always been and continues to be one of their most prominent
characteristics shields them from any temptation to indulge in big-talk.
The picture is very different in the Arab world, where the temptation is
indulged to the full. Indeed, the big talk syndrome is endemic to our
culture, which has a long tradition of declamatory rhetoric that places
more value on the beauty of the words used than on their accurate
reflection of reality. Nowhere is this more evident than in the rich body
of Arabic poetry, which is full of poems eulogizing or vilifying this or
that ruler for reasons known only to the poet and often having nothing to
do with reality . The dichotomy between language and truth is not only
acceptable in our culture, it is actually honoured in a famous saying
“The most beautiful poetry is the least truthful” (a’thab
al sh’er ..akthabo).
No
less authoritative a source than the Quran itself addresses the issue when
it denounces poets as “drifters in all directions” and of not
practicing what they preach.
The
writer of these lines believes it is incumbent on all those who are aware
of this distortion in the Egyptian mind-set to raise national awareness of
the dangers inherent in using big talk that is totally divorced from
reality. To that end, they must expose the negative effects of a
phenomenon which has led some to describe us a “culture of words” or,
with scientific progress, “of microphones”.
Educational curricula must be designed to alert our youth to the highly
detrimental effects of this phenomenon, which not only distorts our image
in the eyes of the outside world but keeps us imprisoned in a fantasy
world that we have created for ourselves with no basis in reality. It also
holds us hostage to a past we evoke in such glowing terms that it becomes
more attractive than any present. There is no doubt that the big talk
syndrome is linked to number of other negative features, such as lack of
objectivity, escaping into the past, excessive self-praise and inability
to accept criticism . Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that it
is the bridge that links all these negative features together.
It is also important to emphasize the link between the big-talk syndrome
and the narrow margin of democracy. In a cultural climate dominated by
hyperbole, it is as difficult to expand the margin of democracy as it is
easy for political forces to win adherents through the use of demagogy.
Those who claim that their political project represents “the solution”
to all of Egypt’s ills are merely serving up another course in an
interminable and indigestible meal of big-talk. Economic and social
problems today are far too complex to be cured by a slogan rooted in the
big-talk syndrome.
As
I listen to our public discourse drowning in a sea of hyperbole, I turn to
the words of Nizar Qabbani, who eloquently sums up the situation in these
words:
“We have donned a
thin veneer of civilization
While our soul remains
mired in the Dark Ages.”
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