Samia Nassar Melki
Special to The Daily Star

Samah Idriss’ two children didn’t like to read in Arabic. For the editor in chief of the literature magazine Al-Adab, this was more than worrying.
Like his father before, Idriss strives for a renaissance of the Arabic language with his magazine as well as the Al-Adab publishing house.
But now not even his children were interested in the language he loves.
“My children, who are 5 and 8 years old, started nagging about the ineptness of Arabic and the unattractiveness of Arabic books for children,” Idriss says, “to the extent that I felt they were almost taking a position against Arabic.”
He realized that part of the problem were the children’s books available in Arabic.
“In a child’s mind, the unattractiveness of the books becomes the unattractiveness of the language,” Idriss explains. And he realized that something needed to be done “to enhance the death of the Arabic language,” he says.
Luckily, Idriss has a wife, who even though American born, loves Arabic, too ­ and speaks it impressively well for an adopted tongue. Kirsten Sheid came up with the idea for a new style of children’s books.
“When the children and I would travel for the summer to the States,” Sheid says, “Samah would tape the bed time stories he usually tells the girls so that they would keep hearing
his voice and their language being spoken.”
For Idriss’ 41st birthday, Sheid transcribed the tapes in colloquial Arabic and asked her husband to edit these bedtime stories for children.
The result is the book series Stories of a child from Beirut with four separate storybooks: Kusset al-Koussa (The story of Zucchini), Um Jadida (A new Mom), Bint al-Shakraia (The blond girl) and Taht al-Sarir (Under the bed).
First presented at this years’ Arabic Book Fair, the series proved to be an instant hit and quickly became the best-selling item at the fair.
Taking a look at other Arabic children’s books this doesn’t surprise.
“When you see what is out there for kids as Arabic literature,” Idriss says, “it is very depressing.” Idriss explains that most books for kids in Arabic are translated poorly from French or English. Making things worse, some publishers are so clumsy they leave the images in these books in the original order, running in opposite direction to the text.
Thus, the books’ characters are European with story lines Lebanese children can’t identify with. Otherwise, if Arabic in theme and origin, the stories tend to have heroes plucked from history of a 1000 years ago.
Worst of all, insists Idriss, is the waaz, the preaching kids are subjected to in Arabic books, making them read like religious sermons rather then distractions for kids.
“All of this is a form of alienation for children,” Idriss explains, “whereas I think that our local experience is rich enough to entertain them.”
Take the story of Kussa, Zucchini, a favorite of Idriss’ children and their friends, which of the four books is geared to the youngest readers, from the ages of 5 to 8, the others varying from 6 to 9 or 6 to 10 as clearly marked on each book.
Kussa tells the story of a boy being promised by his mother a bowl of ice cream if he finishes his meal of Kussa bil Laban, Zucchini cooked with yogurt, a common Lebanese dish.
“I don’t know of a Lebanese child who would not identify with this,” Idriss says.
Sheid, who is currently finishing her PhD in anthropology at Princeton, explains that although her husband wrote these stories in Classical Arabic, he kept an ear for what children are used to hearing, the basis of which being the communication one usually has with children.
Idriss uses words like O.K. written in Arabic or bouza, meaning ice cream which is a colloquial Lebanese term. But Idriss insists that he is writing a modern form of classical Arabic, and never betrays classical structure or grammar.
“I wanted to treat Arabic as a living language, not as a mummy that has been living in an incubator for ages,” he explains, “that is why I used Turkish words like bouza and Persian ones, as well as English and French, because that is how we speak and that is how we show that Arabic is a living language capable of integrating new words and expressions.”
As expected, this new way of writing has had its backlash with teachers and parents accusing Idriss of ruining classical Arabic.
“The problem is worse than that,” he says, “because some teachers don’t know Arabic and they don’t go back to the dictionaries, they think that certain words I have used are not classical Arabic when they actually are.”
Idriss is referring to words he decided to incorporate in his text such as zahkana (to be bored) thought of as colloquial but in reality deriving from a classical expression meaning “one’s spirit leaving one’s body,” a metaphor for extreme boredom. Certain that a child would follow the meaning of his text better with zahkana as his choice of word rather then the accepted classical one like dajarna, less familiar to young ears.
Idriss says, he has also been inspired by the Suzuki method of music teaching that he observed in his eldest daughter’s violin lessons. “The Suzuki method is based on teaching children pieces of music they already know and enjoy thus giving them confidence to tackle them,” Sheid explains, “By putting familiar words in there, you are rewarding children for what they already know and making them feel that they already have some control over this language.”
Whereas when introducing new and difficult words in the text, Idriss makes sure that the context, the pictures and the plot all interact so as to clarify the meaning of the word and keep the child’s reading flowing.
“I am writing what I think is literature that is entertaining to children,” explains Idriss. “My obsession is not education, because education sometimes kills the language, whereas I want to make children intrigued by the language and associate it with joy and the expression of their own feelings which they themselves have not yet figured out.”
Judging from the success of these books and the positive reaction of children to them, he might have just pulled it off.

Kusset al-Koussa, Um Jadida, Bint al-Shakraia and Taht al-Sarir can be bought at $5 each at Librairie Antoine, Al Bourj Bookstore, Shammas, Virgin Megastore and Kidshop & Mustard, Achrafieh