Hagger!
An English word goes to Saudi Arabia
During my last visit to Jeddah, my daughter and I went to visit her father, my ex-husband. He and his family had moved outside the city, an hour’s drive from my apartment in al-Balad through increasingly spacious, undeveloped neighborhoods where big-box retail stores were rubbing shoulders with the desert.
Situated improbably in a rather desolate area of unpaved roads and eerie quiet, my ex’s house was a sprawling, dilapidated villa. My daughter, who had lived there for a few months, gave me a quickie tour of the place, which was astonishingly large, before we all sat down in the living room to watch al-Jazeera, drink soda, and catch up.
There we met my ex’s youngest daughter, Jhoury, a four-year-old who was napping on one of the sofas. She woke with an adorably cute stretch and came over to greet us, gawking at me, a soon-to-be elderly white American who had inexplicably arrived in her living room. She inspected my face closely, then turned to her older sister and asked: “What is that?”
We laughed about this, but she went back to inspecting me and soon asked another question: “Why are you old?” an existential query that I didn’t feel I could answer sufficiently in Arabic. Then she said the most improbable thing.
“You are hagger.”
Hagger
Many years before, when my ex and I were still a couple, we had gone to visit my grandmother in Michigan, driving from New York, stopping at Niagara Falls, and spending a weekend in my grandmother’s house near Lake Michigan.
My grandmother always had a grand old dame vibe. Tall, slender, elegantly dressed, her white hair perfectly coifed, she sat us down to tea one afternoon and began telling us about her grievances with her neighbor, a woman she had been in a feud with for decades. The specifics are now lost to time, I only remember that the neighbor had recently lit a match to the TNT of their relationship and my grandmother was fuming about her trashy behavior.
My grandmother, who’d happened to be standing at her front window that day, had seen the woman walking down the street, and she reported to us with a certain wicked delight that the woman looked horrible. Something was clearly very wrong with her.
“She looked positively haggard!”
The way this word escaped her lips, the hot breath of indignation, the obvious glee of Schadenfreude, struck my husband like a clarion bell. He snorted his tea. He tried to make eye contact, desperately wanting a private moment where he could reply to this, uninhibited. He asked me later: What did she actually say? What was that word? I explained “haggard” and he accepted this gift, holding it close to his chest like a small, wounded bird, loving it, appreciating it, nursing it gently over the years until it became a full-fledged phoenix, born to infinite cycles of reincarnation.
It became endlessly funny. For a while, he would repeat the word randomly. In front of the TV, he’d blurt out “haggard.” Sometimes he’d relive the afternoon tea. “Remember your grandmother’s tea? The look on her face when she said haggard!” My God, how much she hated that woman. You could see the years of resentment, hard and fixed, and the pleasure it gave her to see her neighbor so degraded. And it all came to a burning point when that word escaped her lips. It had, for a moment, steeped my ex in an old, foreign world, Midwest America of the 50s, where having one’s hair out of place was the worst that could happen, where some Dickensian grandmother would sit at her battleship of a dining table, entertaining guests on fine bone china and dry cookies, and momentarily lose her composure, albeit primly.
Sitting on my ex’s sofa in Jeddah, my daughter explained to me that her father was still extraordinarily fond of the word and had, in fact, taught it to his entire family so that whenever he said it, they all chimed in (“Hagger!”) with eye rolls.
The minute Jhoury said this to me, her older sister leapt in (“Oh no, sorrreeeeee!”) but we were all laughing, because Jhoury was right, I was hagger.
I operate on the theory that the ways we criticize others reflect our own deep discomforts about ourselves. Criticism is a perverse little act that makes us feel as if we are strengthening ourselves when we are actually revealing a self-perceived weakness and our inability to tolerate it. There are plenty of things that deserve criticism, of course, but even the way we talk about big and obvious horrors will reveal something about ourselves. It can even reach these painfully singular moments when a word that seems to encompass a whole lifetime of petty hates gets ground to a sharp point and strikes, leaving a cut—not in the target but in the self. My grandmother, forever associated with the word “haggard,” lives on in the outskirts of Jeddah.
OMG Zoe. You look positively Radiant!