Ode to Proverbs
It is common for people from my culture to speak in proverbs or aphorisms. I’ve always been fascinated by the way ordinary people use language so well. I delight in sitting with an uncle or a cousin from the countryside tell stories peppered with sayings and pauses and rhetorical questions that engage the listener, that hold their suspense, the body language, tone of voice, gestures, manner of sitting, all part of the act of storytelling. They pepper their speech with pithy sayings such as ‘Muhiim ma’aha qofka halka uu kumaqnaa, lakin muxuu keenay.’ You should not ask where one has been, but what has one brought back. Or ‘Waxa afkaaga kujiro qalbigaaga xadaa.’ What’s in your heart your mouth steals. Some of the best storytellers I know are not formally educated. Language and wisdom are not dependent on education.
A proverb operates in timing: one has to know the right moment to insert it in speech. Proverbs operate in memory. Along with folk tales and myths and legends. They are viral, passed through the word of mouth, and live in memory, stored away, to be plucked for use at the appropriate time. The key that opens the speech or the lock that fastens together what has already been said. Or convey drama or resolution or caution. Right after a particularly resonant proverb, a listener might say, ‘Somaalidu been way sheegtaa, Latin been Yuma mahmaahdo.’ Somalis lie but they don’t lie in their proverbs. I’ve always found that one funny perhaps because it is true of all human beings and all proverbs. One can therefore say that humans lie but they often don’t lie in their proverbs. Somali proverbs, like other proverbs, often use imagery of the natural world, giving them simplicity and can be almost universally understood, and they are heavily figurative and draw parallels between two things to drive the message home: ‘Ilka iso run labadoodba wan la cadeeyaa.’ Teeth and truth are both whitened/cleaned. Or, ‘Tolkaada iso kabahaaga wan luau dhaxjiraa.” You have to be in your kin and your shoes. Most Somali proverbs offer practical advice, like doing things in their natural order: ‘Ood side u kala hooseyso baa loo kala qaadaa.’ Thorn fences are lifted in the order they are stacked. Or they show things in a new light, they ‘defamiliarize.’ Such as the proverb, ‘Qof albaab furan magalo, waji furan but gala.’ One does not enter an open door but one enters an open face. This proverb makes us think differently about what truly welcomes people, an open door may seem welcoming but the person may not truly be welcoming, however, an ‘open face’ i.e. a someone who is genuinely ‘open’ to us is. Because proverbs are culturally specific, some of their meaning is always lost in translation: in the proverb above the thorn fence imagery may not be familiar with people who are not nomads so it will not make sense to them.
Whenever I hear a new proverb or aphorism, I note it down. I have a growing list that incudes proverbs from different cultures, though mostly Somali. Sometimes I haunt websites that have compiled Somali proverbs. I find solace in their preservation, because with each generation, we are losing these stories and sayings, as people are getting less proficient in the language. I’m attempting to improve my Somali, which, though fluent, is not advanced.
Aphorisms take on the big questions, how do we live, what are we? They are the stranger that lights the way in the dark, that shows the forest from the trees. Because in our digital age we have access to a lot of information, which is a blessing, but it also exposes us to information overload: there are so many books to read and so much information digest to think about, further muddling our thinking and the complexity of our world confounds us. Good aphorisms quiet my mind. They are concise and order ones thinking. And I love concision, in speech and in writing, something I aspire to. My search for brevity is a search for sanity. The best words are those that are few and to the point, said Rumi.
My favorite scholar Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad has a remarkable gifts for aphorisms. He calls them ‘contentions.’ He’s written several volumes of these, the last of which was collected in a book of essays. Some of my favorite contentions of his include: ‘Our faces are a prediction.’ ‘Guilt is a warning.’ And ‘To love a woman you must love womanhood.’ I admire their wisdom, concision, and they are ostensibly simple. There is also an aphorism I like by the Egyptian-American poet and aphorist and essayist Yahia Lababidi: ‘In the deep end every stroke counts.’ He writes: I love the comforting precision of aphorisms. They are like vessels that travel through time. They are timeless, linking the past to the present with a golden thread of universal onness. Aphorisms know us better than we know ourselves. (This last line contains much truth, doesn’t it?')
Proverbs are universal, as Lababibi observes. Though there are proverbs that exist only in certain cultures, you’ll find lots of similar proverbs across cultures and times. Some equivalent of a ‘stich in time’ proverb. Or something that tells us about the strength in unity, the dangers of arrogance, or some version of ‘Hurry hurry has no blessing’ perhaps exists in every culture. The difference is in the phrasing or imagery used as this depend on culture. The values they contain are mostly universal, the imagery is different. They point to the onness of our thinking and our preoccupations.
I am drawn to aphorisms because of a search for wisdom, a futile attempt to “figure life out”. I yearn to grasp life so I can have a clear map of how to live. It is a futile and impossible endeavor, I know. And it is frustrating, but I comfort myself with the belief that this search itself is the meaning, it is the grasping. Give me Khalil Gibran or Hafiz or the Meditations and I’ll be happy because I can find a condensation, a distillation, a resonant precision. he aphorism’s power lies in its ability to condense a glimmer of existence in a few words. This Persian proverb captures it well, as only an aphorism can do: Epigraphs succeed where epics fail.
(Murad’s contentions can be read here: http://masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/contentions.htm )
