NON-FICTION : Kess emak, a love letter to Beirut / Halim Madi
If you haven’t read Halim Madi’s writing or haven’t heard him read his writing, well you are in for a treat. We are big, big fans of Halim here at The Racket and featured this amazing essay in The Racket Journal : Issue Seventeen. It is, frankly put, about the Lebanese way of saying crass things about maternal private parts.
It is, as Halim’s work always is, about much, much more.
“Kess emak, a love letter to Beirut”
by Halim Madi
Legendary comedian Pierre Desproges, in a fictitious televised trial of Jean-Marie Le Pen, wonders why we can’t make fun of death – which makes fun of us. He cites “the suddenness with which the scythe reaps the basic activist, the budding CEO, the opera princess and the child, playing hopscotch, next to the gutter, in the streets of Beirut.”
A few feet down, on the curb of the road, a tall young man bends to start a ritual – negotiate the price of his ride with one of the city's fuming taxi drivers. Because he looks like a foreigner – the hair, the earrings – the price is double. He conveys contempt with a gaze before pulling his head away from the window. And then both, the driver and the young man, once out of earshot, say in unison: Kess emak. Which means the vagina of your mother.
Fuck you never cut it for me. For one, the phrase lacks a subject. As if the offender was not willing to endorse the act ie. I fuck you. They leave the affronted wondering as to their commitment to the insult. But then of course, in English, I fuck you sounds like the outline of an intimate fantasy which is not what you’d most like to share with the person who just rammed into your bumper.
The immigrant mind grappling with English insults is a Hollywood movie set that veers from horror to comedy. The first time I heard shit hit the fan, the rest of the conversation was covered with flying excrement. And in that same foreigner mind, fuck you sounds eerily similar to bless you wherein decades of secularity have eroded the subject out of the grammatical construct. God bless you is a social faux-pas in a society where agnostics are not burned on a stick anymore. God fuck you is a different beast however. A screeching on the black board of ethics. Simply unacceptable. And yet, the foreign mind was taught subjects perform actions and precede verbs in this language. When confronted with fuck you this mind is hard pressed to fill the holes.
Fuck you falls flat as an evading non-committal tactic. The times I was told “fuck you”, I was tempted to answer yes, and in improv fashion. The insult sounds like a child begging to be understood. A surreptitious plea. Please ask me to elaborate. Yes, and.
My anger never took fuck you seriously. I default to insults from my mother tongue. Lebanese slurs, as must be the case for all immigrants, are the pride of their people. 3rd world country citizens might not be able to brag about their country’s economic success or stable infrastructure, but dignity will emanate from how ill intentioned one’s language can be. The ingenuity of a people, in all its complexity, can often reflect in a language’s gibes. For instance, Lebanese people take special pride in how their insults desecrate the offended’s deceased:
Kess em mawta mawtek translates as the vagina of the mother of the dead of your dead.
Evolution made us the one species who buries its dead. These insults reach deep into what it is to be human. They add both an existential flair and a disturbing bravado to the act of offending.
The discreet joy people derive from these defamations is once removed from the pride one might feel talking about a parent with a shady past eg. a gangster father. It is twice removed from the pride one feels when talking about broad generalizations relating to their ethnicity’s quirks and weirdness eg. The Lebanese are “crazy” or “warm” or “fun to be around”. It is akin to the sad enjoyment one gets from being part of an exclusive and exclusionary club. One that struggles to be understood by outsiders despite wanting their closeness.
Kess emak or the vagina of your mother, is the bread and butter of Lebanese insults with infinite variants and flavors. Kess emak is a gracious insult. It does not qualify the vagina of the mother. It merely points out its existence. It notes the potentiality of your mother’s sexual identity, which, in turn, can trigger the male-identifying’s Oedipal complex.
Kess emak is fraught with gender bias of course. There is no Ayr bayak or the penis of your father, which should trigger some folks’ Electra complex — Arabic being a gendered language, emak refers to a male identifying person’s mother, whereas emik refers to a female identifying person’s mother. I’ll use emak for the time being.
Kess emak hayawen
The vagina of your mother animal
Is one such interesting combination. It is not qualifying the vagina by referring to its primal nature. Maybe alluding to the mother’s wildness and promiscuity. Rather it is simply a litany. A laundry list of affronts. Firstly, your mother’s vagina [exists]. Secondly, you are an animal. But that is not always the case.
Kess emak el manyoukeh w bayak el ahbal w setak el day’ah
The vagina of your fucked mother and your stupid father and your demented grandmother
This can quickly get confusing: Who is whose mother, whose vagina is being targeted and is the father a trans-male or a cis-female? However, since these combinations are usually meant to draw out the put-down rather than build a rational argument, the questions are left unanswered.
I doubt I ever used kess emak before leaving Lebanon at 17. In France, it became a covert way to insult my perceived enemies. A way to reestablish justice. With almost no consequence. The listener had to be within earshot. My hope was for them to feel the animosity viscerally and yet remain bewildered, deprived of any proof or basis for retaliation.
Kess emak chou hal hmar
The vagina of your mother what a donkey [again, a list rather than a qualification of the vagina]
As the immigrant years piled up and went by, as foreigners started using "Beirut" as a metaphor and a shorthand for chaos, kess emak became the soul of Beirut for me. Beirut became the vagina of a mother. In all its complex cultural and anthropological complexities. The sexual identity of mothers is something we’d rather not consider or face. It is a dispensable reality. Similar to opening up about our promiscuous adventures at the family dinner table. The audience prefers to focus on the dessert recipe. In that sense, mothers’ genitals are like Beirut. A topic best left unaddressed.
Alternatively, when there is space for such a subject, short of making the audience squeamish, it makes them giggle. Mothers’ vaginas are funny. Precisely because part of us has chosen to a-sexualize mothers, the conceptual combination of the two seems farcical. Like Beirut, we’ve turned mothers into metaphors.
I doubt the people I insult with kess emak actually register any hurt. My kess emak in foreign countries is the proverbial tree falling in the forest with no one to hear. And yet my kess emak is not so much for the line cutter or the outrageous driver. Its audience is different. Kess emak is my love letter to Beirut. An uttering of my alliance to the capital that birthed and raised me. A bowing to both its obfuscating and comical natures, a renewed acknowledgement that Beirut is a piece of reality. An extracting of the city from the realm of metaphor. A liberation. A revolution.
Halim Madi is a writer living in the Bay Area.
