It only seems right to end this draining week with an amusing little dispatch from the Nancy-Haifa zone. Today's installment comes from the unlikely source of Samir Atallah, the venerable Lebanese journalist. In his al-Sharq al-Awsat column today, he recounts how he finally met his match: Haifa Wehbi.
Samir Atallah - bet you thought I'd go with a picture of Haifa, didn't you!
As he tells the story, while attending a
conference recently he found himself chatting with his friend, the singer Ragheb Alama. And then Haifa Wehbi enters the room. Even though she
is dressed "extremely conservatively", every head in the room turns. Ragheb, very much the gentleman, introduces the two and sits them down next to each other. He asks Haifa if she reads him. Haifa is demure. He then "wickedly" asks Samir whether he likes the lady's music. Samir (a veteran journalist who has faced a career full of high-pressure encounters) experiences near brain-lock in her presence, starts babbling about how much her music delights him, panics, abruptly gets up,
shakes her hand ("the right one, I think"), and flees - only to be accosted by hordes of fans and photographers demanding to know what they talked about. For the rest of the day, everybody he sees ("most of them older or the same age as me") demands to know what he and Haifa talked about, and how he could possibly
have left his seat "40 centimeters from Haifa". He later asks Ragheb to apologize for his hasty departure to she of the electric eyelashes, and Ragheb told him not to worry about it. After he had left, Ragheb explained, he had asked Haifa, "did you really know who he was?" And she
replied «ولو؟ مش وزير التربية».(*)
A charming story told in a self-deprecating fashion, and for some reason it made my day.
(*) Is there some Lebanese reader who could explain exactly why this is funny - is the joke at her expense, or his? I take it as the latter, but I fear I'm missing some Lebanese in-joke.
My god, man! You can't tell a story like that and leave the punchline obscured? What about us braindead slobs? The ones who can't read Arabic?
Posted by: saurabh | March 24, 2006 at 04:38 PM
I am not Lebanese, but I think I understand enough lebanese to be able to tell why Haifa's final answer was funny. The word ولو in lebanese means "of course", so her answer can be roughly translated as follows:
"of course [I know him], [he's] the secretary of education".
With that said, I don't think Haifa was making fun of Samir. On the contrary, I think she tried to show off her bright side here, but only succeeded in making a fool of herself instead ;-)
Posted by: Karim | March 24, 2006 at 11:00 PM
That would certainly set up a parallel with his attempts to praise her music! ... but مش means "he's *not* the Minister of Education", right? Or doesn't Lebanese colloquial work that way? See, I thought the joke was that maybe Samir had wanted to be Minister of Education and didn't get the job, and Haifa was demonstrating that she knew Lebanese politics so well that she was aware of such an inside-baseball point as his thwarted ambitions. Which would make the joke on Samir, not on Haifa!
Posted by: the aardvark | March 25, 2006 at 06:40 AM
I'm Lebanese, and Karim hit it on the head. ولو translates as "of course" and مش means "isn't"
So the whole sentence translates as "Of course! Isn't he the Minister of Education?"
The punchline is on Haifa, not the other way around.
Posted by: Hassan | March 25, 2006 at 10:05 AM
Aw, that kind of disappoints me... the story would have been much more charming if the joke had been on him. Still pretty funny, though. Thanks for the lesson in Leb-speak...
Posted by: the aardvark | March 25, 2006 at 10:47 AM
That is how I read it: "Well of course I did - isn't he the Minister of Education?" But, she could have been speaking ironically.
Posted by: Anna in Cairo | March 28, 2006 at 04:27 AM
Have you seen this?:
http://www.haifawehbe.com/
o.m.g.
Posted by: paul a'barge | March 30, 2006 at 11:06 AM