Break Dancing in Fujairah
It is a typical evening for 16-year-old Khamis al Yamahi as he walks down to the basketball courts in Fujairah City for some break-dancing.
Yet his uniform of jeans, T-shirt, baseball cap turned backwards and black Reebok trainers, underlines a deeper message about the radical changes in how a new generation of Emiratis see themselves.
“I only wear my kandoora when I can’t find my jeans,” he says.
Like many other teenage boys of this small northern emirate, Khamis and his friends are as comfortable musing in English over the message of the murdered American rap artist Tupac Shakur as they are speaking in Arabic with their parents.
“Tupac, man, he has meaning,” Khamis says in fluent English that carries an American twang. “Every single word he sings has meaning.”
Bombarded with MTV music videos and MP3 downloads of their favourite rap artists – Eminem, Lil Wayne, Akon, 50 Cent – they emulate with precision the hip hop slang spoken on American streets.
They attend private schools in which English is the language of instruction and where there appears to be less emphasis on Arabic studies. They mingle with foreign friends who have never learned Arabic.
By embracing American youth culture, many are defying their parents like no previous generation, dimming hopes that one day they will be the torch-bearers of their ancestors’ customs.
Khamis is the product of the English-language instruction at Fujairah Private Academy, a majority Arab national institution where he also studies French and Italian. Very little of his classroom pursuits, he says, goes toward learning classical Arabic, or Fushah.
“I take Fushah, but we just talk in our local languages in class,” he says.
Much of his day is spent watching English-language music videos, or hanging out with Emirati and Pakistani and Australian friends at the Ozone internet cafe, playing video games or downloading music onto his MP3 player.
But his fondness for American culture does not mean he has totally abandoned that of his parents, he says. You have to choose what feels right...MORE
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