My father, Rbai Rafid, with the Ginza d’Hiia he edited and wrote out. Text and edition: Rbai Rafid Al-Sabti. Design, typeface and layout: Ardwan Al-Sabti.
When my father recites in Mandaic, I can hear the difference within a few words. Not because his voice is beautiful, though it is. Because of what he does with the short sounds.
A Rbai is a priest who has himself ordained a priest, and that is what he is. At the river he is the one who recites, and I have always stood beside him as Shkanda, the ritual witness, whose task is to hear whether anything goes wrong. I listened to him before I could read a letter, and I listen to him still. Everything I understand about the sound of this language, I first heard in his mouth.
Mandaic, spoken the way he speaks it, lives in its short vowels and in the time given to each sound. Some sounds are held, some are passed over quickly, some letters on the page are not pronounced at all, or are pronounced as something other than what they appear to be. None of this is written down anywhere. You cannot find it in a grammar. It is the difference between a language and a transcription of a language. My father learned where every one of those short sounds falls, and how long to rest on it, from his father, and his father learned it from his.
You can hear when someone did not learn it that way. Much of the Mandaic spoken today was learned from the texts, carefully, sound by sound, every letter given its full and equal weight. The result is careful, and it is not how the language was spoken. It comes out stretched, even, deliberate, the way a word sounds in the mouth of someone for whom it is not a first language. Those who learned this way are doing their best, and I do not fault them. What they speak is a reconstruction, read off the surface. The surface is not where the language lives.
My father’s pronunciation came down a line I can name. He learned it from his father, my grandfather, Rishama Ram Yuhana. Ram Yuhana learned it from his own father, Ganzibra Najim. Najim learned it from his father, Ganzibra Zihrun, and Zihrun from Ram Zihrun himself.
Najim is also the priest who taught Lady Drower. But what he could give Drower and what he gave his own line were not the same thing. To her went what moves through ink, the texts, the words, the glossaries. The sound did not go with them. The sound went down the other line, from a priest to a son close enough to hear it daily for years. When I listen to my father, I am hearing, at several removes, what Najim made in the air, and what his father made before him. It does not travel through ink. It never has.
Of Zihrun, the youngest son of Ram Zihrun, I will tell one scene, and it is about listening. His brother Bihram had died, and Zihrun, who had not yet ordained anyone, not even his own sons, no longer believed the work could go on. Some time later his young nephew Abdulla came to him and asked to be ordained. Zihrun told him he was far too young, and told him to read aloud from the holy book of souls. Abdulla recited so purely that his uncle did not interrupt him once. He listened to the end, and the hope he had buried with his brother came back. He ordained him soon after, and Abdulla was the first priest he ever ordained. That is how it has always been checked in this line: by ear.
My father stands at the end of that line of listening. This is how it happens. He is reciting the ritual and I sit beside him. He turns the book toward me, so that I can read along at an angle. He points at a word. He says nothing, and goes on with the prayer, and I know at once what he means.
What he gave me begins in moments like that one. He taught me the way of looking. How to attend. How to tell a thing that was received from a thing that was assembled. How to know, before I can fully explain why, that one form is right and another is a careful imitation of right. I learned to hear the difference in a Mandaic vowel before I had any idea that the same faculty would one day let me see the difference in a Mandaic letter. Every typeface I have drawn and every manuscript I have read rests on that hearing, and I owe it to him. He has watched this work grow over the years and trusts me to carry it, and what I find in the manuscripts I find myself. That is how he raised me to work.
That is not information. It is a discipline of perception, and it is transmitted the same way the pronunciation is transmitted: not taught so much as absorbed, by being near it, for a long time, from someone who carries it correctly. I did not know I was learning it. You never do. You stand at the edge of the rituals, first as a child, the way the sons of priests always have, and then for the rest of your life, and the way of looking enters you through the standing there. Years later you find it already inside you, doing its work, and you realise it was the gift all along.
My father carries a position in the community, and a weight that comes with it. He once put it to me through an image I have not stopped thinking about. You cannot lift a date palm out of Iraq and plant it in Europe and expect it to live. It was shaped by a heat that is not here. The image has stayed with me because it leaves a question open. How does a tradition shaped by the heat of one place survive in the cold of another? He gave me the image. The question is mine to carry.
That is the difference between us, and it is also the inheritance. He gave me a way of seeing so exact that it shows me even where he chooses not to speak. A father who teaches his son to look properly knows that the son will one day look in places the father has chosen to leave alone, and he teaches him anyway.
He is the twenty-third generation. I learned to hear from him what he learned to hear from his father. What I learned from him I take with me into the work that is still to come.
The work goes on. The hand is the same, and so, now, is the ear.