Pig Sty Avenue

...is what my students wrote on the scrolling marquee of the classroom pc on my last day there. I blogged about that here and got two rather irksome and thoroughly ignorant comments: people will read what they want into almost any text, for better or worse. I thought that post reflected the ambiguities of the country, and my own equally ambiguous feelings towards it. The first commentator was clearly unable to detect ambiguity and decided to take umbrage: if it's not unstinting praise, it must be fearsome criticism. The cunt probably prowls the blogosphere searching for things to take umbrage with. Anyway, for various reasons, I'm taking an interest in matters Libyan again. Foreign interest continues in the oil . Of course. And the regime is keeping a high diplomatic profile . This is the chair I used to sit in, in the garden at the house I shared in Zawiyah. It's empty, you'll notice, for now.

... Zaghawa . Sociolinguistically, it's noteworthy that when asked what their first language is, students will tell you the language in which they received their education: Arabic, or French or Swahili, and keep shtum about their first language - the language they learned as babies. We might think that they are unwilling to mention the language of their home because it has diminished status. But maybe they think their linguistically curious teacher is a nosey parker? Maybe asking someone "What do speak at home?" isn't too far away from "What do you say at home?" To which "none of your business" could be an appropriate response. I only mention it now because a student told me today, when I was helping him fill in a form, that his first language is really Zaghawa, not Arabic as he had said before. Arabic is "for outside". Zaghawa is difficult for outsiders to learn, he said: "like Chinese".