Friday, June 30, 2006

Walls

Ghazi and I landed in Buffalo at 1:15 a.m. last Friday, after 23 hours in transit, and – bonheur inespéré – were met at the baggage claim by Cort, who carried us gently home. The stupor began to lift by Tuesday, enough that by noon I ventured up to UB's Clark Pool. Swimmers accustomed to the Olympic-standard facilities on the North Campus are frustrated at Clark: besides being tiny and crowded, it lacks the modern design features which minimize turbulence. So swimming there is like swimming in open water on a blustery day, plus chlorine, minus fresh air and elbow room. My prolonged exile had so altered my body composition that I had far less muscular ballast than before I left, and this added buoyancy gave my effort an uncanny resemblance to swimming in the Dead Sea. I had declined the chance to make that very excursion only days earlier, amply satisfied to have floated once long ago in that hot salt. But each time I hit the wall to turn, I remembered what it felt like to be unable to sink.

Doing laps on Tuesday, I thought about the precarious infrastructure of my daily routine, especially those of its elements in which I most exult. Restricted to Clark Hall, I might nevertheless be a daily swimmer, but there is a point of exasperation beyond which my commitment does not extend. Local frustrations are trivial compared to the obstacles impeding exercise in the Middle East: the scarcity and expense of facilities for sports like swimming or weight training, the irregularity of crowded road and sidewalk surfaces for cyclists or runners, the lung-searing toxicity of the atmosphere in Cairo and Damascus, and perhaps most of all for women, the absence of any cultural context in which physical exercise, and the forward-looking ameliorist program it implies, could be comprehended.

With whatever zeal a program of self-help strategies might be proposed, such an array of obstacles saps its momentum. Indeed for the Palestinian, the problem is not that he cannot sink, but that he cannot rise to the surface. Edward Saïd writes of Ghassan Kanafani's novel Men in the Sun that suffocation is the preferred metaphor for existence for the Palestinian. Still, an irresistible impulse compels members of our culture to prod people to assume responsibility for the alleviation of their own suffering. Wherever we look in Palestine, someone is afflicted with a disease caused by avoidable behaviors. The rampant prevalence of diabetes, heart disease, emphysema, and lung cancer could not fail to yield to a public health campaign which the American visitor is impatient to see launched. Beyond these illnesses there loom other targets for activism: the ubiquity of hepatitis, the frequency of birth defects in an endogamous society, and the needlessly high incidence of head trauma, amputation, and paralysis resulting from a complete absence of worker and consumer product safety protections.

By its very imperviousness to challenge, our desire to alleviate human suffering ought, as a motive, to invite at least a curious regard. Humans are rarely driven by unalloyed altruism, but even if this were not so, we are confronted here with the vigorous resistance of the intended beneficiaries to the very blessings we would help them reap. What is the meaning of this perverse affront, and what does it reveal?

I think that the resistance of the Palestinian people to messages promoting self-help reveals two things – not about "them" or their culture but rather about the encounter between our two cultures The first is that when we focus exclusively on the population's avoidable self-destructive behaviors, or on constructive behaviors which we endorse and they elect not to adopt, we appear to Palestinians to be willfully averting our gaze from what is by far the most significant factor for their health and well-being, and that is the fact of life under Israeli occupation. Some urge their friends to quit smoking or to switch to diet ("light") Coke, but what arrogance to promote these palliatives and to be silent about the 67 Palestinian women who, since 1980, have given birth waiting to get through Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank, and 39 of whose infants died ("Palestinian Health Care Conditions Under Occupation," Sonia Nettnin). Our official silence over Israel's "Security Fence" / "Apartheid Wall" signals to Palestinians that its catastrophic effects on their health care system are not a subject we wish to contemplate. And why do we avert our gaze? Because we know that without our complicity, there could be no wall and no occupation, and that we are ultimately implicated in the continuing repression of the Palestinians' basic human rights. What standing can we have to urge the Palestinians to assume responsibility for their lives if we deal with our own guilt by shifting responsibility over to our victims?

West Bank wall at Kalandia

The Wall

There is another reason why our well-intentioned admonitions do not resonate with our Palestinian friends, and this has to do with a commitment to and belief in "progress" which is deeply, deeply engrained in us. Perhaps more than other Westerners, and certainly far more than Arabs, Americans believe that things can be better, that we can improve our lives through our own efforts, and that given such a possibility, it is a moral imperative to work to bring about that improvement; indeed this was the ideology of the entire Clinton presidency. An American regards himself and each of his children as infinitely perfectible individuals. "How to" and self-help books, summer reading lists, tennis coaching, classes in meditation and parenting, body sculpting, nutritional supplements and cosmetic surgery are all evidence of our belief that we can be better tomorrow than we are today.

Our miscommunication with Palestinians might simply be explained by the observation that there is in their society no such notion of people who are continuously self-made and self-updating. But there is a more serious problem between us. The self-improvement enterprise begins with self-criticism as well as criticism of others, since we criticize ourselves via comparison, and in some cases must find that it is others who are wanting. It carries an expectation that others will improve themselves just as we are improving ourselves, or better yet, that they will yield to our ideas for overcoming their deficiencies. However benevolent its overt intention, the exhortation to self-improvement begins with the same critical glance and the same contestation of superiority as the colonial enterprise. Reform plans we make for others, to judge by my own, have invariably two characteristics: they cost us nothing, and they redound to our benefit. As much by our selective silence as by our hortatory eloquence, we reveal that it is we who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the initiatives we support. The engagement in a life-long program of self-improvement, self-invention and self-renewal is inseparable from the impulses which are at the heart of the colonial project: observe, compare, criticize, exhort, exploit, and rationalize.

Is our meddling in the affairs of others a matter of excess capacity, a random by-product of the individual striving cultivated in us by centuries of religious and cultural tradition, or is individual self-improvement merely the presentable alibi we show to cover a project of perpetual exploitation of the other?

* * *

Many long years after Christmas had lost its power to move me, I could recapture some of its sentimental energy by going alone into the living room at night to sit by myself with the tree. In the stillness, the tree's forest refugee fragrance and its colorful lights eventually subdued my awareness of advertising jingles, rehearsals for various pageants, and family disputes. In its humble company, I could return if not to belief in parthenogenesis and redemption, at least to faith in the generosity of the human spirit and other virtues seasonally celebrated in such chestnuts as "Miracle on 34th Street" or "It's a Wonderful Life." It is rare that I can recapture that moment now, despite a willing—a so much more than willing—suspension of disbelief, and some of Lynchburg's export quality whisky.

For many people, the city of Jerusalem exercises a kind of religious power. That its aura is also political is inevitable, since the separation of "church" and state is as alien to Islam and Judaism as it was to the European Crusaders against whose incursions the old city's walls were constructed. Achieving a religious experience of the Holy Land requires suppression of far more than commercial advertising and family arguments. I attempted to transcend these earthly distractions by proxy, going first with the Christian experience, which seemed most likely to be accessible to me. I am not moved by the re-enactors who travel along the Via Dolorosa from one Station of the Cross to the other, or at least not moved to anything resembling prayerfulness.

Damascus Gate in the wall around the Old City

Via Dolorosa

But the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is sacred to me for an entirely private reason: that it was such a joy, such an uphoped for blessing, and such an overwhelming religious experience for my uncle Allan to bring his parishioners from Nashville to pray in the place where tradition says that Jesus was buried.

Mosaic in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher

The Western Wall, all that remains of the Second Temple constructed by Herod the Great, is sacred to Jews and respected by Christians and Muslims as well. According to Rabbi Shraga Simmons, ("The Western Wall," published by the Israeli Ministry of Defense), the Wall is holy because it was the site of the holy temple, remains a permanent reminder of God's presence, is a place of pilgrimage and tears, has remained a focus of prayers, was built with love and dedication, and was the site of Jewish heroism. The Jerusalem Post reports that on Sunday June 25th, some 5,000 worshippers gathered at the Western Wall to pray for the release of the 19-year-old kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, a tank gunner captured near Gaza. Worship at this holiest of Jewish sites traditionally entails placing into a crevice of the wall itself a small piece of paper on which a prayer or request is written. (Not surprisingly, online services facilitating remote prayer have sprung up.)

Praying at the Western Wall

The third holiest site in Islam is located in the same complex as the Western Wall, a complex known to Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount, and to Muslims as el Haram e-Sharif or noble sanctuary. From a rock in the center of the the Haram e-Sharif the Prophet Muhammed is believed to have ascended to heaven. The Dome of the Rock was constructed over this rock, but this places it also over the site of the Second Jewish Temple. Thus, as the Wikipedia article explains, there is one extremist Israeli faction which wishes to transport the Dome of the Rock to Mecca so that the Third Temple can be constructed on the Temple Mount. Because the ground itself under the Dome is considered sacred, no Muslims support this plan, and few Israelis do either. But fundamentalist Christian groups view the construction of the Third Temple as an enterprise to be launched as soon as possible so as to hasten the Second Coming, Armageddon, and the Rapture.

The Dome of the Rock

Each of these sites -- the sepulcher, the wall, the sanctuary -- has an aura of sanctity which comes, if not from a divine presence, at least from the intensity of the assembled believers. In prayer, Christians kneel down to kiss the sepulchral rock, Jews bend forward to touch the wall with their heads, and Muslims prostrate themselves in submission to God. It could be possible to achieve a state of prayerfulness here, almost to live in a state of prayerfulness, were it not for the unbending righteousness of the zealots and the ungodly hatreds they unleash upon each other. Is it praying if I ask the Lord that he should smite mine enemies with his sword? What kind of prayer for peace would cancel out all the prayers for annihilation making their up to the sky? Maybe we should pray for the humility to know how to pray at all.
And he spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others: Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a publican. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other: for every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted. Luke 18:9-14.

In each of the great religious traditions, prayer requires a personal engagement. There is no mailing off the request to God and then sitting back. Coasting along the path of least resistance for so long, I have rationalized my disengagement with the excuse that the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is not for amateurs, that it requires either full-time commitment or none at all; that it isn't my business really; that I have no dog in that race. But this week, as Reham is preparing to leave Jerusalem for Cairo, Israel has raided Palestinian government headquarters in nearby Ramallah, seizing eight members of the cabinet and twenty members of the legislature, and has destroyed much of Gaza, through which Reham's bus to Egypt might normally have passed. How very like a dereliction of parental duty it now feels never to have done any small thing to contribute to peace, to a better existence for Palestinians. And how precious beyond everything the dog I don't have in that race.

The incursion which captured Shalit and the massive Israeli retaliation come just as the Palestinian government has approved a National Reconciliation Plan drafted by five political prisoners held in Israeli prisons. In polls, 77% of the Palestinian people support the document, which calls for the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, as well as a right of return for Palestinians displaced since 1948. The latter provision, even on the hypothesis that it actually resulted in anyone actually reclaiming territory in Israel, can scarcely be taken as a serious threat to "eliminate Israel as a Jewish state by flooding it with Palestinians" ("Israelis Batter Gaza and Seize Hamas Officials," New York Times, June 26, 2006). Nevertheless, the prospect of hearings over expropriated land is threatening to Israelis because the moral foundation of the society depends on the truth of a founding myth which cannot sustain scrutiny: a land without people for a people without land. (Read the transcript of an interview on this subject on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! June 29th program.) The prospect of a political settlement is also unsettling to various external Arab regimes, indeed the Syrian government is thought to be behind the incursion, and to have banked on the extremism of the Israeli reaction.

The current rampage is already fading from the our headlines, and yet in its aftermath the most choking misery will fall more thickly than ever on the Palestinian people. Except in the United States and Israel, everyone understands that there is no military solution. There is also no diplomatic solution, no religious solution, no political solution, no economic or social solution which can succeed in the current mental landscape and its physical avatars on the ground. There is only the slender hope that a fresh and brilliant imagination will emerge through whose vision people will be transported to that open field beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, past the smog of prayers of mutually assured destruction, beyond the utopias they yearn for, to a space where they can breathe.

West Bank wall at Kalandia

Friday, June 23, 2006

Backstroke in the Levant

While swimming off the coast of Tel Aviv last Tuesday, Ghazi had a very painful encounter with a recent invader of Mediterranean waters, the so-called Medusa (Rhopilema nomadica).

According to this article in Philologos, these are indopacific creatures which migrated north from the Red Sea through the Suez Canal.

Rhopilema nomadica, aka the Medusa

The welts left by the Medusa on Ghazi's arm and back were taken quite seriously by physicians in the family; Mahmoud Nashashibi, a cousin, brought him prescription antehistimines and antiobiotics, and was concerned to know whether Ghazi's tetanus protection was current.

Yuk.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Love and commerce in the Middle East

Among the rigorous competitive local sports for which American visitors are least prepared are those surrounding the buying and selling of goods and services. (Another is street survival, where one competes in two leagues: pedestrian vs. vehicular and inter-vehicular.) When a bargain hunter comes away from the souq pleased with his haggling skills, we can be sure that he is not nearly so pleased as the merchant. Accustomed to standing by slack-jawed while the scanner totals our purchases and siphons money from our account, we Americans are utterly unprepared for the Middle Eastern shopping experience.

There is something initially offensive to American instincts about variation in prices when applied to individual consumers. We don’t cry foul when inner-city grocery stores charge more for milk than suburban supermarkets, but charging everybody at the store the same price – a price which is known and accepted in advance – seems to us the only fair and democratic way to do business. There is no getting around the fact that this is a difficult cultural adjustment for us to make, but a moment’s reflection makes it obvious that the merchants and taxi drivers in the world’s oldest center of trade and commerce are simply applying at a more granular level the same free market principles that we advocate: the price of an item or a service is what a buyer is willing to pay and what a seller is willing to accept. It is also essential to the Middle Eastern version that everyone leave happy, since merchants want customers to come back and bring their friends. This is why I prefer to think of the transaction as sport rather than combat.

Advertising targeted to individual consumers on the basis of the purchases they make through loyalty or credit cards, the websites they visit and even the words they use in their e-mail (à la G-mail) makes us shudder at the erosion of privacy. But as I discovered here two decades ago, “privacy” is a recent and fragile construct. Everybody knows your business, whether the information travels via cybernetwork or from one coffee drinker to another. Middle Eastern merchants are not wired to any database, but they evaluate you precisely using the vast amount of data which you freely emit. Long before they answer your question “How much for this piece?”, they have noted the language you speak as well as the volume and accompanying gesticulation; they have studied your apparel, haircut, shoes, gait and demeanor to determine what country you’re from and what social stratum you inhabit; they determine whether it is you or your companion who decides on expenditures and whether you have already acquired any objects during this foray and if so from where; from the objects which attract your gaze and the questions you ask, they learn which religion you belong to and what is your degree of fervor. Whether yours is the faith of the prophets or that of the organic farmers or that of the liberation freedom fighters, your consumer proclivities and susceptibilities will have been calculated. The advantage of their data mining over our anonymous automated system is, to my taste, the sporting human interface. Versus Wegman's, I have no chance; here, I might win a round or two.

It is entertaining to watch the system adapt to confusing signals, such as those which we three emit when travelling together. Reham has gone completely native and has actually been able to get into various archaeological sites at the Egyptian rate. Ghazi greets people in Arabic, but his punk/urban appearance (wild hair, sagging pants) is irreconcilable with either of the two hypotheses through which his presence might be explained, since that look does not suggest leisure travel and would not normally be tolerated by an Arab parent. Apparently I am emitting signals that seem more German or British or Canadian than American, because it usually takes the merchants four or five guesses to get it right.

I bought a towel at the Khan el khalili before leaving Cairo. Our negotiations had reached a certain price that was still higher than what I wanted to pay, but which apparently my data profile encouraged the merchant to expect. He made a move which looked like a time-out, a way of avoiding stalemate:

Merchant: Ma sha’ Allah, your husband is a very lucky man!
Me: More than you imagine! We are divorced.
Merchant: Not possible! How can this be?!
Me: Believe it.
Merchant: Wa Allahi, I shall marry you.
Me: No kidding?! So then the towel would be free?
Merchant: Yes, a thousand towels. And more!

What I had taken to be a time-out was of course the end game, since the charming incongruity of the marriage proposal disarmed my aggressive shopper strategy.

However flattered I was to know that, at my advanced age, I could still fetch a thousand towels, this was nothing next to the offers coming in for Reham’s hand. So far the most lucrative proposal was one we received in Luxor, in the Valley of the Kings, where with no disrespect for Reham’s beauty I must say that the luxury of the royal burials may possibly have had an inflationary effect. Personally, I was ready to sign off on the two million camel proposal, but Reham objected that the suitor kept changing the terms, and Ghazi, as the ranking male, wanted to hold out for a seaside villa for the family. I think we were too hasty in declining these offers – a nice Red Sea vacation home, where we’d never want for towels, was surely within our grasp.

In the Middle East, as in America, art and commerce are also bedfellows. Here is a photo (below) I shot from a car riding north out of Beirut towards the mountains.

Nancy Ajram

Reham explained to me that the featured spokesmodel, fabulously popular Lebanese singer Nancy Ajram, stars in a music video which, by an amazing coincidence, began as a Coke commercial. The song’s catchy refrain is productively ambiguous: “Ana mish aiza illa hua,” which in the commercial means “I don’t want anthing but it [Coke]” whereas in the music video, the pronoun would be translated as “him,” so something like, “I only want him, nobody else.” It goes without saying that every airing of the song or video reinforces the Coke marketing message and adds up to priceless free advertising. It seems unavoidably obvious that Coke “made” Nancy, but that will have to be a subject for further inquiry. By the way, a rival pop star is the spokesmodel for, you guessed it, Pepsi.

All of which brings me a restaurant in Amman where I was sent by friends at AMIDEAST. I was in search of a dish called “frika,” which is basically wheat harvested while it is still a bit green and then smoked. (You can take the girl out of the south...) It is the most amazing taste, but for some reason (it doesn’t go well with Coke?), it is difficult to find. It figures on the menu of Rim el Bawadi, which is why my friends sent me there.

Rim el Bawadi is a very new restaurant situated in the poshest of the new outer-ring neighborhoods of Amman, a city whose explosive growth is partly due to Iraqis who buy land there (paying in cash with dollars) and largely, surely, to enormous American investment. The restaurant has a lot going for it: the food is good and reasonably priced, there are seemingly hundreds of tables in a variety of open-air rooms staffed by eager waiters, and there is a play area for children. But the most striking thing about the restaurant is its conspicuously artificial “Arab” identity. Rim el Bawadi is an Arab restaurant which is pretending not to be Continental or American, but pretending to be Arab. Despite its address in the capital of an Arab country, not an iota of its lavish “Arab” decor is or is meant to appear authentic. There are Bedouin artifacts everywhere, but they are displayed incongruously in decors which are of vague Damascene or Ottoman or Egyptian inspiration. Waiters scurry about dressed up as Bedouins, but they themselves are Egyptians (as are virtually all waiters in Jordan) and they don’t know how to pour the coffee in the famously Bedouin way. Near the children’s play area, there is a brightly lit photo studio where diners can dress up as Bedouins and have their photo taken. Now if this were at Disney World and the people dressing up were from Wisconsin, that would be one thing – “Have a real desert experience without all that tiresome sand!” But the people here dressing up as Bedouins are not foreigners, they are Arabs, they are the Jordanians who live in Abdoun and Shmeisani, and whose grandparents or greatparents themselves lived in or near the desert. By their eager participation in this simulacrum, they seem to be putting distance between themselves and the ancestral traditions in which the West has been too eager to freeze them. It is easy to sympathize with their impatience to be recognized as a modern society, especially given the political and economic cost of being classed as “developing,” but to watch modern Jordan cannibalize the ancient Bedouin traditions is amazingly sad, to say nothing of the dubious superiority of the MODERN LIFESTYLE which is effacing them.

As for the actual Bedouins, I had mentioned in an earlier post that we would try to find the family of the Bedouin guide thanks to whose intimate familiarity with the desert I was first able to see the amazing spetacle of Wadi Rum. When the kids and I travelled there this week, we did not see Abu Salem (= father of Salem) and his family, but when we gave the photos to the Bedouin guides we did meet, we got news of them. It seems that the father, Abu Salem, had died many years ago. Also the youngest son, Mohammad, had died in a car accident – a 4WD had flipped over. The second son, Eid, had married and had children and was still living in the area. Salem, the oldest, is director of customs at the port of Aqaba.

I had been afraid that I would find Salem and his brothers working as barristas at the Wadi Rum Starbucks, or that I wouldn’t be able to find any trace of them at all. It is good to know that the family is still part of the desert, still custodians of a spectacular treasure, but even this vestigial presence seems doomed to disappear. The government now pays Bedouin families to build houses and settle down, and the legendary desert patrol is now conducted via 4WD rather than camel. The lure of city jobs or military careers pulls many of them away. Seeing the traditions disappear over time is a bit like looking at the ornately sculpted façades of Petra which, through time and erosion, are receding back into the flat surface of the sandstone from which they were so painstakingly carved two millenia ago.

Nabatean temple at Petra

If I were to produce an illustrated lexicon, the word “ineffable” would be illustrated by images of Wadi Rum and Petra.

Petra

It is humbling for a wordsmith to be confronted with the utter inadequacy of language to convey even the feeblest notion of their spectacular and dreamlike beauty. To visit these holy places again was an unhoped for blessing; to visit them with my children, escorted by the next generation of Bedouin guides, was a transcendent experience.

Wadi Rum

We took many photos of the landscape, of the prehistoric inscriptions, and of Mousa, our 17-year-old guide. Ghazi fell so in love with the place that I know for certain he will return. When he does, he'll bring these photos back with him. If the human race is lucky, Ghazi will find Mousa and his family there at Wadi Rum, and not working at Rim el Bawadi.

Abu Salem, Salem, Eid, and Mohammad, c. 1983

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Leaving Egypt

Ghazi lazing on the felucca
DSC_3167
Originally uploaded by amerune.
A&E shirt, iPod, bag of salted pumpkin seeds, Ghazi takes leave of Egypt on board a felucca, cruising back up towards Luxor on the Nile from a cruise down to Banana Island and Crocodile Island.

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Leaving Cairo

Tonight Reham and Ghazi and I head to the Mubarak Train Station where we'll board the Abela Sleeping Train. If all goes according to plan, we'll wake up at 5:00 am tomorrow (Thursday June 8th) in Luxor, where we are really gonna get Egyptian.

Over the last couple of days, I've visited as many places as I can in medieval Cairo, including the Mosque of Ibn Tulun, pictured below:

Mosque of Ibn Tulun

Early this morning, before it got hot, we took a little side trip through villages and farmland to see some of the less frequently visited pyramids, including this one, which is apparently the oldest stone monument in the world, and actually an ancestor structure to the real pyramids. I'll write something more learned when I have time to polish this post:
The step tomb of King Soser

At Saqqara outside Cairo

Of course we also did the mandatory shopping in Cairo's (in)famous Khan el khalili, a vast network of alleyways all filled with entrepreneurs. We enjoyed sitting at Fishawi's, which is apparently the most famous of the Khan's coffee shops, frequented by writers, journalists, students, and those drawn to its mystique.

At Fishawe's

More fun with mirrors at Fishawe's cafe

Yesterday, among the Fishawe's guests, we espied a young man who, by his features, could have been Arab, but who by his Oriental attire -- white turban, loose-fitting white shirt, 19th-century vest, everything except the Ali Baba slippers -- seemed more likely to be a graduate student at, I dunno, Berkeley. As Reham and I watched him assessing the foreign female clientele of the cafe and overheard his familiar conversation in Arabic with the head waiter, the precise nature of his entrepreneurship occurred to us. As elsewhere in the souq, the customers are served according to their fantasies.

Which brings me to a couple of other striking occupations I have observed here. There is the Parking Consultant and Space Maximizer, who pushes parked cars (neutrally parked, it seems) closer together so as to maximize the number of cars that can fit onto the street, and who leaps up to help new arrivals position themselves, a service for which they express their material gratitude.

One of the most arresting scenes I have witnessed here was the daily commute of a woman whose occupation I at first could not figure out. She was pedaling down the insanely street, her conveyance a cart mounted on a bike frame. With her left hand, she held steady a one-year old who was straddling her left shoulder. On either side of the cart were two very young boys, running alonside the mother and pushing the cart. I happened to witness the return trip another day, when the traffic was even worse. Yesterday, by chance, I discovered that she arrives early in the morning to a favorite spot in an alley downtown, fries up felefel and french fries, then sells a quick cheap lunch to local kids. Her children sit politely near her. I bought a sandwich, and went back today looking for a pretext to buy a dozen. But she was gone.

Well, time to head to the train. More from the Valley of the Kings, insha'allah, in a couple of days.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Us and them

One of the alternative lives I’ve always wanted to lead is that of the analyst of political uses of images. What a fun subject! It may be that you have to do the intro course in a country other than your own. At any rate, I know that until I had taken the Middle East immersion version, I was oblivious to American stagings.

So in Jordan, as previously mentioned, one frequently sees an image showing the late King Hussein in a warm and friendly pose, sitting with his son and heir King Abdullah. In Syria you see a montage consisting of an image of the late Hafez el-Asad next to an image of his son and heir, Bashar el-Asad. There is sometimes a third face, that of the president's brother -in-law who happens to be the chief of military intelligence, and who was implicated in the assassination of Rafiq Hariri.. Perhaps because Syria was for so long in the Soviet orbit, the tone of the imagery is more severe; there is no grinning; it is not warmth and happiness being conveyed, but rather raw power. Not “Love me, love my son,” as in Jordan, but rather “Remember how I kicked your ass? Well! You ain’t seen nothin yet!” An enormous gilded bust of Hafez el-Asad at the entrance to the military museum in Damascus is particularly communicative.

Syrian dynasty

In Beirut, in contrast, emotions and political impulses are manipulated via the imagery of martyrdom. Given the decades of civil war, each faction has a long roster of fallen heroes, and recent violence has only made the lists longer. What I don’t know, and couldn’t know without a vastly better grasp of local politics, is the precise agenda for which the images are being exploited. It is obvious enough to surmise that the ubiquitous and larger-than-life images of Hariri and Tueni are fronting a campaign to rid Lebanon of Syrian influence. But there is surely more to it than that. I am curious to know whether the Hariri-Tueni support for rebuilding and modernization was offensive to those who considered that traditional values were being swept away in a rush to become a client state of America and the West, or those who thought that the coercive rhetoric about unity foreclosed a full airing of grievances, or those who thought something else altogether.

Apropos only vaguely of all this, there is an interesting commercial running on MBC2, a satellite TV station which plays American movies with Arabic subtitles 24/7 throughout the region. The commercial shows an Arab woman in a modern house wearing a headscarf and modest dress. She wants to serve orange juice, but is struggling, poor dear, what with the oranges rolling everywhere, and having to wield the big knife and the juicer, and OMG, did she just break a nail? She throws up her hands, and behold, a gleaming two-liter jug of made-from-concentrate orange juice appears magically on her counter, ready to be served to guests. Message: our product is compatible with your traditional values of modesty and hospitality, and if you’re ever going to have LIFESTYLE, you don’t have time to make your own orange juice.

Now we’re all for liberating people from back-breaking demeaning tasks all over the world, and no doubt I have pension stocks in Nestle or whatever multinational is pimping its juice to folks over here. But speaking as someone raised on the miracle of canned food in the 50s, I remember what a revelation it was to taste fresh asparagus, green beans, and chow mein.

Which brings me to the question of what it is that we’re looking for when we come over here. I come to this question via the ethical issue of photography here, where every published image of an exoticized other reinforces stereotypes of Arab backwardness and by implication the natural right of the superior civilization to help itself to local resources. On the other hand, if we suspend consciousness of the staggering economic imbalance separating our worlds, it is possible to see an interest in the exotic in a more decentered way. I mean, on the one hand, I can refrain from taking a picture, reproaching myself with the thought that it is unethical to perpetuate a stereotype of a primitive backward society. But isn’t there a certain smugness in that posture? I have been struck by the number of people who ask me if I would be in a picture with them, or if they could take my picture. There were, for example, four Sudanese ladies visiting the Syrian National Museum, sponsored by their Ministry of Education. And the charming girls from Aleppo at Qasr Azem in the old city. Ghazi is clearly an object of fascination, what with his sagging pants, Bob Marley shirts and wild streaked ‘fro, and in the poorest sections of Cairo, the attention he gets is not particularly friendly. The ubiquity of American television notwithstanding, we are as exotic to “them” as they are to “us.”

Teachers from Sudan
The demoiselles of Aleppo



But what did I go out in the desert to see? Something real, something authentic, à la Baudrillard? People who still eat fresh food, still know how to make things, still struggle against an untamed environment? All of that seems exactly true. But there is also the search for origins, the search for evidence of cultural continuity. It is an unspeakable joy to see up close what the Crusaders saw: the Islamic arches which were to revolutionize Christian architecture. Or the Roman columns (of Greek inspiration) stripped from a Crusader castle and now on either side of the mihrab in the mosque. Fragments of silk carried along the silk route from Asia to the Middle East are on display in the National Museum, and in Qasr Azem there are robes and dresses in the same silk brocade patterns now sold in the Souq el Hamidiyeh, where I used to come and buy them with reckless abandon. These silk patterns are woven on a French-designed Jacquard loom, which is not without likeness to early computers.

Damascus

Next to the 10th-century Al Azhar mosque in old Cairo is a caravanserail, called the Wikala el Ghouri, which was built in 1504. In that setting, last night, Ghazi and I watched a performance of Sufi dancing, known commonly in America as whirling dervishes, and locally and I think not entirely respectfully as “tannura” ("skirt"), since the performers call themselves Al-Tannoura Egyptian Heritage Dance Troupe. The musical instruments were ancient – the rababa, a stringed thing, a kind of flute, and of course the drums. The dancing was beautiful, so artful. The troupe – which looked Turkish to me – was all male, but a middle-aged man mimed the movements of a harem dancer with exquisite grace and irony. It was an unforgettable spectacle, and will probably be the highlight of our Cairo visit.

Sufi dancing Sufi dancing

As I understand it, the whirling dancing induces a mystical trance. VERY plausible. Watching the artful labor of love, I thought about the first time I had ever heard of the great Sufi mystic poet Jalal ed-Din Rumi, who wrote in the 13th century in a region of what is now known as Afghanistan. I was on Brant Avenue near Bailey, driving to what I hoped would be work, on the morning of September 12th, 2001. NPR was rebroadcasting an interview with Coleman Barks, who had translated Rumi's poetry in English. Here is the selection they read, as I pulled the car over to the side of the road, momentarily incapacitated.

Poem 51

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other"
doesn't make any sense.


Sufi dancing