Omar
Right before cooking this evening, as I was working on an art assignment, I was watching/listening to Arabic videos on YouTube from a guy named Omar Farooq, a Bahrani who has become a bit of a star content creator in the Arab world. I first tripped over his stuff as I was looking for ANY ARAB YOUTUBER who WASN'T EGYPTIAN. It's still sort of hard for me to tell, but Egyptians seem to have a near-monopoly on Arabic content on YouTube, much as they seem to have on Arabic content in the world of cinema. That's one reason a lot of people study Egyptian Arabic, but I told myself I was learning Gulf Arabic back in June, and that's that. I don't want to confuse myself this early in the game. Anyway, my man Omar
- makes a lot of interesting content and
- isn't Egyptian
so he has been a good find. (Here's his channel so you can look). He makes a lot 20-minute or so videos about all kinds of obscure cultural finds throughout the Middle East and North Africa. What makes it interesting is that, on one hand, he's sort of American. I mean, he's Bahrani, but "American", in the sense that he doesn't come across as rooted very deeply in traditional Arab culture, and I'm just guessing because he always looks kind of bewildered and out of place in the scenarios he gets himself into. So, he's no authentic Bedouin. But, on the other hand, he doesn't bring a modern Western view to his subjects, either. You know, you can watch a lot of videos of Westerners in Mauritania and you could easily hold your breath between mentions of slavery this and slavery that. To Westerners, Mauritania is famous for one thing, and that is: being the last country in the world to illegalize slavery (which, I read, is still practiced anyway). But Omar goes to Mauritania, never talks about slaves, and does a deep dive into... poetry. Apparently in the Arab world, Mauritania is known for its remarkably eloquent and effortlessly poetic inhabitants, who never let slip away any occasion for verbal floridity. It turns out they are more serious than people anywhere about memorizing the Quran, and they spend huge chunks of their childhood filling their minds with classical Arabic down to its tiniest detail. And, I suppose, all that poetry going in... eventually comes out.
This is kind of relevant to cooking, but let me detour back through languages for a minute. People who learn a second language really well don't do it by becoming really good at rules or algorithms. No one speaking truly fluently is furiously conjugating verbs or declining nouns in his head. Do you EVER mistakenly say "you is" instead of "you are" (assuming it's not part of your dialect, which for some people, it is). No. And that's because... we never hear "you is". We also never hear "He run" instead "runs", or "I goed" instead of "went", so we don't say it. If you've learned a second language somewhat badly, which is what I kind of did with Portuguese even though I speak and write at an "advanced" level, you DO conjugate furiously as you talk, because you started learning in too mechanical of a way, and put your nose too far into your books, and your ability to speak mostly correctly at a normal pace is really a testament to your prodigiously verabally-oriented mind, and speaking well is probably exhausting. You have to think about the person of the subject you just said so you can get the verb right, you have to think about whether you use a word that will trigger the subjunctive, you have to think about a whole lot. I still speak pretty decent Portuguese for a gringo, but it can be tiring. I told myself when I started learning Arabic that I could not afford to learn Arabic the same way. It's so far off the familiar reservation that trying to internalize every rule and irregularity before speaking would have meant blowing an artery every time I tried to speak. So my strategy so far has been to focus 90% on input, 9% on writing and pronunciation, and 1% on grammar. So, I watch a lot of Omar.
What does this have to do with cooking? Well, I always imagined that trying to learn to cook would be the same as a bad attempt at learning a language; pouring over rules and trying my mightiest to remember them. I'm not even bad at that, but... every time I want to eat? Who can stand such a burden? But I started thinking months ago that perhaps cooking (and music, another front where my early learning was probably misdirected) was like learning a language well. Maybe what you need is not a how-to book. Maybe what you need is just... a lot of input. Our minds are pretty good at zeroing in on the meaningful connections they see, and they're even better at it if we're actively looking; still relaxed but just on alert for new information. Eventually, I theorize, with enough input and enough new connections, I will "speak cooking", without thinking about it. I will just do.
Now it just remains to be seen which I will successfully learn to speak first: Arabic, or Cooking!