Just you wait Henry Higgins

I never cared much for musicals. I remember watching Mary Poppins as a child, impatient and wound up at these lengthy, unnatural irruptions of song and dance. The keen observer in me noticed a certain discrepancy with such unexplained sung jollity, and the shocking lack thereof in the real world. Singing was one thing, but how did an entire ensemble, let alone a symphonic orchestra sneak into kitchens and bedrooms? To this day, and despite recent advances in quantum physics, such occurrences are deemed highly unlikely, poorly understood at best.

As much as I was willing to concede this amazing phenomenon to my lack of experience in life, I scowled nonetheless at the annoying break in the story’s flow. My attention span never quite managed to bridge the gap, and the dislike has stayed engraved in my taste buds ever since.

A while ago, like an atheist receiving a dispatch from God, I was confronted, disquietingly, with a negation of that long-held disbelief. Some people, it appeared, do break into song. At the merest whim it seems. This Copernican revolution was conveyed to me by none other than my Arabic teacher, Ashraf.

Over the course of about a year this sensitive man tried diligently and untiringly to pave my shaky foundations of classical Arabic with more useful, durable flagstones of Palestinian spoken dialect. With a self-devised system of color-coded syllables and unwavering didactic mettle he did indeed manage to spruce up my skills in this beautiful, yet harrowingly difficult language.

If only I’d done my homework more often. Perhaps it’s my nonchalance then that caused Ashraf to resort to a more peculiar device in the uphill struggle of educating me. He began, occasionally at first, then downright regularly, to break into song, albeit on the pretext of me, filling out missing lyrics on a whiteboard. I admit he brings a marvelous Fairuz, lute-solos and all, but it was all I could do to cringe. Is this really, utterly necessary? I caught myself thinking, reminiscing meanwhile all those times when I preferred the silent predictability of Lego bricks to whatever atrocity Disney was dishing out to the family living room.

Don’t get me wrong, I love to sing. In fact I’ve recently taken it upon myself to do just that in Ramallah’s infamous punk formation called Dome of the Rock. But I’m not one to mash up a meal into unrecognizable goo, and I like in that vein, to keep my art forms separate as well. Why, you start blending and jumbling, where will it end? I guess I’m just old-fashioned that way.

I tell myself that this is why I stopped taking Arabic classes, lest anyone think I’m too lazy to study or do homework. In stead I unplug my iPod whenever I ride in busses, and just listen to people talk, betting in addition on a subliminal silver bullet to improve my Semitic babble.

Now, winter is here, and perusing the video store for the endangered species called “Stuff I Haven’t Yet Seen Domesticus”, I wound up renting “My Fair Lady”. One can do worse than Audrey Hepburn, I thought, aware nonetheless that some form of singing was involved. Luckily I was alone watching it, so I didn’t have to explain to anyone the sea change that was taking place; didn’t feel compelled to remain obstinate and knee-deep in entrenched beliefs. I simply, utterly liked it. I don’t know what the hell happened. I’m illegally downloading the soundtrack as we speak.

Perhaps, like Henry Higgins, my puerile notion had received its comeuppance or, watching the enthralling Liza Doolittle, I’d grown accustomed to her…. voice. Damn.