While I was living overseas, I tried very hard not to offend my Tunisian and Moroccan friends and acquaintances. I think I mostly succeeded.
My cultural blunders, however, provided my friends with lots of innocent merriment.
For example:
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While in Tunisia, I bought a cunning little satchel to carry my books, papers, cigarettes, etc., back and forth from home to the office. Finally one day, my friend and coworker Halim rolled his eyes at me. “I've been meaning to tell you,” he said in his unnervingly perfect David Niven-style English. “That's a school bag. It's like something a ten-year-old would carry.”
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I was always anxious to improve my Arabic. Sometimes I did this by copying the pronunciations I heard in the office. I noticed that a lot of the women in the office said “good morning” in Arabic in a very particular way, with a sort of sigh, eliding the final consonants. I figured it was the local accent, and started copying this, thinking that it made me sound sophisticated. Halim again, after a few days of this: “Please stop saying it that way. You sound like a woman.”
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When I left Tunisia, an American friend gave me a lovely white-linen scarf from Djerba as a going-away gift. I still have it. It has blue stripes and long fringe at either ends. I wore it a lot after I got back to the United States, until one of my bosses at Brown asked me in a strained voice if I was aware I was wearing a Jewish prayer shawl.
But sometimes there was sweet revenge.
One day in 1985, my American housemate Kathy came back from a trip to the United States with a big jar of pickled jalapenos. We were eating them right out of the jar. A Tunisian friend (whom I won't name, in case he reads this, but he knows who he is) scoffed at these American “hot peppers.” He'd seen me choking and wheezing on lethally hot Tunisian red peppers often enough, and reasoned that he was a lot tougher than I was. So he scooped a jalapeno out of the jar, just as he'd seen us do, and put it in his mouth, and -
Oh, my dears, it was spectacular. I expected cartoon flames to come out of his ears. He was literally crying, running around the house, flapping his hands.
It turns out that there are “hot peppers” and “other kinds of hot peppers.”
Isn't multiculturalism fun?
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