Damascus emerges as Arab cultural capital of 2008

DAMASCUS (AFP)












Damascus heads into a new year as the cultural capital of the Arab world for 2008, hosting a year-long series of theatrical and musical events, along with talks by renowned intellectuals.

American linguist and leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky, Czech writer Milan Kundera and Lebanon's famed songstress Fairouz are among the personalities coming to Syria as Damascus assumes the cultural mantle from Algiers.

But not everyone welcomes the planned events, with Syrian writer Ibrahim Haj Abdi calling them "ephemeral cultural festivities." "Syrian intellectuals might have believed these promises (by the organizers) if only they had been accompanied by efforts to free one of the country's most important intellectuals, Michel Kilo," he wrote in Sunday's pan-Arab daily newspaper Al-Hayat, published in London.

Kilo was jailed in 2006 for being a co-signatory of the Beirut-Damascus Declaration, along with nearly 300 Syrian and Lebanese intellectuals. In May this year he was sentenced to three years in prison.

The declaration called for an overhaul of ties between the two states and for Syrian recognition of the independence of Lebanon, where Damascus was the major powerbroker for three decades until 2005.

Twenty years after she last performed in Syria, Fairouz -- the greatest female Arab singer since Egypt's Umm Kalthoum -- will take to the stage on January 28.

In May a conference will bring together Chomsky, Kundera and novelist Isabel Allende, the daughter of former Chilean president Salvador Allende.

Another Syrian novelist writing in Al-Hayat also slammed the organizers of the year's festivities.

"My experience with the organizers quickly dismissed any hope... of seeing it revive the role of culture that has been destroyed over decades" in Syrian society, wrote Samar Yazbek.

The cultural year will get under way on January 10 with a fireworks display on Mount Qassiun overlooking Damascus, followed by an official ceremony nine days later.

http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2007/12/28/43481.html

Great post from joshualandis.com

Five undeniable facts about the Syria that I saw / by Ehsani
Monday, December 24th, 2007

I have just returned from a short one-week trip to Syria. As you may recall, I had once written a note on this forum describing how Syria was made up of two countries: one for the one million well to do and another for the other 19 million. I will offer below a summary of my updated impressions since. My observations are predicated on list of what I consider to be five undeniable facts about the Syria that I saw.The first undeniable fact that I have encountered on this visit is the ever-widening gap between the poor and the wealthy of Syrian society. While this phenomenon has been in place for years, one cannot but take note of the recent acceleration in this trend. What makes this subject matter particularly interesting is the fact that Syria is still a supposedly socialist country. One would have thought that such excessive wealth concentration is the hallmark of more capitalist societies rather than Baathist ones. Perhaps the observation below can explain the reasons behind this process:

The second undeniable fact that one cannot ignore is the way with which Bashar is changing his father's long and heavy imprints on this country. For all practical purposes, Socialism is slowly but steadily being dismantled as an economic system. The new official title of course is "social market economy". The word "social" is presumably still there to assure the 19 million Syrians that they will still continue to receive their subsidized necessities and the most basic forms of state assistance. What is most noticeable, however, is the speed with which the "market economy" part of the new economic paradigm is spreading in the country. The new "Aishti" clothing store adjacent to the Four-Seasons hotel proudly advertises on its outside window the following:

Prada men's shoes – SYP 27,500
Brioni mens pants – SYP 22,000
Iceberg t-shirt – SYP 13,800
Armani dress for ladies – SYP 248,500

One cannot help but wonder how the late Hafez Assad would have reacted had he seen these prices displayed in his so-called Baathist capital

Syria's push for increased investments:

The country is abuzz with the latest wave of foreign and domestic investments. The leadership has done an outstanding job in this endeavor. Not a week passes by without an announcement of a new wave of investments from Qatar, Kuwait, U.A.E. or Saudi Arabia. Similar announcements seem to come from domestic investors in the new "holdings" companies that have been set up. Those that have already taken the risk of investing have thus far been handsomely rewarded by having seen the value of their investments in real estate (mostly still empty land) rise rather dramatically. This has encouraged more investments and a virtuous circle of higher prices and more investments to take place. The third undeniable fact is that there is no going back in this trend towards opening up the country to foreign investments and a more liberalized economy.

Whether this trend has been driven by political necessity or by genuine belief in the merits of free markets is an open question. My suspicion is that it is more likely to be the latter. It is important to note that the pace of the economic reforms is unlikely to go in overdrive mode. Instead, it will more likely be of the sure and steady variety. The already wealthy will get even richer while the poor will struggle with higher inflation and falling real wages.

The fourth undeniable fact is that the country's fiscal budget will continue to feel the stress in the years ahead. One cannot help but be struck by how little the very wealthy are taxed. It is imperative that this broken system receives a comprehensive overhaul. Similar taxation reforms are sorely needed in the real estate area. A major reassessment needs to take place in order to more accurately reflect the new market value of real estate pricing and hence taxes levied. 

The fifth undeniable fact is that while economic reforms will continue, political reforms are unlikely to follow suit at anywhere near the same pace. This leadership appears to be extremely comfortable with its ability to hold on to power. The young leader appears to be in an absolute control of his country. Those that refuse to believe this are denying what seems to be the obvious. In this atmosphere, the pressure to offer political concessions is close to nil. The late Hafez Assad had built an incredible security apparatus that has come to resemble a fortress. It did not take the new President much time to fully appreciate the value of this intricate system that he had inherited. It seems inconceivable that he will take any risk in this area. Calls for political reform will be viewed as nothing but a trap and a slippery slope that must be avoided. Human rights advocates, for example, are likely to be sorely disappointed with the government's willingness to deliver.

Conclusion:

Bashar is steadily but slowly dismantling the old socialist nature of his father's reign. He is too clever and too cautious to do this on faster scale. He is fully aware of the economic challenges faced by the vast majority of his people. Given the need to grow the economy and fix his country's fiscal mess, opening the economy to foreign direct investments is a decision that is irreversible. The rich will continue to get richer in this environment. On the political front, Bashar is unlikely to loosen his grip and institute any significant reforms. Egypt has been down this before and it may well offer a similar model of more economic liberalism without the political reforms to match. Come to think of it, is the ultra successful economic model of Dubai any different?

On the Last Day of Eid

Today, I laid rose petals on Byzantine ruins and lied down on broken walls with flowers across my chest.

Interregnum

I wanted to get Indian with my friend, E, last night, but she couldn't make it because she was at the Syria-Iraq border.

This morning, she briefly touched on her experience.  She was visiting a refugee camp that sits, literally, in between the borders of Iraq and Syria.  There are around 500 or so Palestinians in this year-old refugee camp.  They are living in tents, and only two months ago were electricity and running water installed in this camp.  They fled the violence in Baghdad and had hoped to enter Syria last year but, because of their refugee status, were denied entry.  They had no where to go, so they set up tents between the borders.

Delegations from Chile and Sudan have offered to take in some of the female refugees, rupturing families and leaving young men behind.

Excerpts from Notebook, mid-August 2007, Beirut

Will I be miserable when I get to Damascus, or is there a future for me there?  Would I have to kill myself if I got drafted into the military?  Maybe not.  There is a great security, a dull comfort, in routine, an opportunity to surrender to an authoritarian-totalitarian government's schedule.  I could write a play about it.  Maybe the theatrical imagination is omnipotent.  Because it has the potential to generate place and time from language.  In real time.  And in real space.
...
I could feel the resonance of her smile after she hung up the phone.

Al Hayat Article on Jawad al Asadi's NISA' AL SAXOPHONE

«نساء السكسو ... فون» تهتك نص الشاعر الاسباني لوركا ... جواد الأسدي يحاصر «البيت» الخراب بهواجس النسوة

بيروت – عبده وازن     الحياة     - 09/12/07//

لم يقتبس المخرج العراقي جواد الأسدي نصّ الشاعر الاسباني لوركا «بيت برنانردا ألبا» بل أعاد كتابته نصاً وعرضاً مشهدياً بعدما أمعن فيه تفكيكاً، حاذفاً منه مقاطع وشخصيات ومضيفاً اليه مقاطع وأبعاداً. «البيت» الذي شاءه الشاعر القتيل رمزاً لـ«السجن» الذي وسمت به اسبانيا في عهد الديكتاتور فرانكو جعله الأسدي عبارة عن «بيت خراب» بحسب عبارة إليوت (الأرض الخراب)، بيت عراقي وعربي في آن واحد. ولعل المشهد المأسوي الأخير الذي أطلت النسوة الخمس من خلاله بملابسهن السود، بدا أشبه بـ «وقفة» على أطلال ذاك البيت، الذي دمرته مواقفهن المشبعة بالكراهية والحقد والثأر، علاوة على الحروب المعلنة في الخارج التي أتت نيرانها على الحقول والحدائق.

ينجح جواد الأسدي دوماً في «استيحاء» النصوص العالمية وإعادة كتابتها حتى ليصبح وكأنه مؤلفها الثاني. هذا ما فعله سابقاً في نصوص لجان جينه وانطون تشيخوف واوغست سترندبرغ وسواهم. وعرضه المسرحي البديع «الاغتصاب» أثار حين تقديمه حفيظة صاحبه الكاتب سعدالله ونوس (اقتبس نصه عن مسرحية لأنطونيو باييخو)، نظراً الى «الخيانة» الجميلة التي مارسها الأسدي إزاء هذا النص الملتبس. في نص لوركا الذي أصبح «نساء السكسو... فون» (مسرح بابل، بيروت) حذف الأسدي ثلاثاً من الفتيات وأبقى على اثنتين هما أديلا وماغدولينا. برناردا ألبا نفسها جعلها مغنية أوبرا محافظاً على تسلطها و «ديكتاتوريتها». أديلا لم تنتحر كما في النص الأصلي وماغدولينا جعلها تقتل أباها عن غير قصد. الخادمتان اختصرهما في خادمة واحدة هي لابونتيا... لكنه لم يبدل الأسماء ودمج الفصحى بالعامية ساعياً الى ترسيخ أكثر من مستوى للّغة المسرحية تماشياً مع مستويات العرض المسرحي نفسه الذي تراوح بين الغروتسك أو التضخيم والبورلسك والأسلبة والواقعية والباروديا أو المحاكاة الساخرة التي لم ينج منها حتى الغناء الاوبرالي المزدوج (ديو) بين برناردا والخادمة. ونجح الأسدي في دمج الأنواع هذه مشهدياً جاعلاً من اللعبة المسرحية لعبة بصرية تهذي وتتفجر.

إنها «خشبة» جواد الأسدي أولاً وأخيراً. سينوغرافيا بديعة بألوانها المتنافرة (الأسود، الأحمر...) وجداريتها التي وضعها الرسام العراقي جبر علوان الذي صمم أيضاً الديكور والملابس. والنسوة اللواتي عُرف علوان بهن لم يغبن عن مخيلة الأسدي (أديلا حين تتمدد بجسدها المتفجر على الطاولة أو على الكنبة) وهن كنّ حاضرات في صالة المسرح عبر معرضٍ جميل، بأوضاعهن الجسدية (والنفسية). وبدا المعرض مدخلاً الى المسرحية، مدخلاً جمالياً ودرامياً. شاء الأسدي خشبته أكثر من خشبة: عالم داخلي تفصله عن «معترك» النسوة ستارة من «نيلون» كأنها غشاء بكارة حيناً وراءها يكمن عالم اللاوعي الذي يتفجر حين تنفتح (الستارة) بعنف غالباً، أو كأنها تارة جدار تتعارك معه الفتاتان، جدار سجن هو البيت نفسه. واختلق الأسدي أيضاً خشبة هامشية او زاوية للجدة العجوز الخرقاء والمهلوسة التي أدى شخصيتها ببراعة الممثل رفعت طربيه موظــفاً طاقــاته خـــلف قناع تلك العجوز التي تعيــــش على حافة «الذكريات» والهواجس الجنسية.

عالم داخلي، مغلق ومسوّر، تفجره النسوة المتشابهات، الأم والفتاتان والجدة والخادمة وكأنهن أمام مرايا ذواتهن وأجسادهن المقموعة. ضحايا و «جزارون» في وقت واحد، مسكونات بالكراهية والبغضاء، ينتظرن اللحظة التي تتيح لهن الانتقام من «الآخر» ومن أنفسهن، هن اللواتي وجدن في صورتهن صورة القامع نفسه. موت الزوج والأب لم يكن إلا موتاً للماضي السلبي: الزوجة برنردا التي تألمت لموته ظاهراً وجدت في هذا الموت متنفساً لها وراحة لن تطول كثيراً. لقد تحررت من هذا الجسد «المعطل» الذي مكث عشرة أعوام في فراش المرض وهي عشرة أعوام من الحرمان الجنسي. أما الابنتان فقد انتهتا عبر موته من فكرة «الأب» الغائب أصلاً و «الخائن» الذي لم يكن يبالي إلا بنفسه وهواياته وحياته الخاصة. حتى الخادمة لم تستطع أن تكن له المحبة، مثله مثل برناردا المتسلطة التي تعاملها باحتقار وقسوة لكونها الخادمة، على رغم انها كانت أداتها لتتسقط أخبار الابنتين، ولم تكن الخادمة تتوانى عن الوشاية بهما انتقاماً لنفسها.

عالم من الكراهية والكبت والبغضاء المتبادلة تصنعه نسوة مكبوتات ومحرومات يسعين الى انتهاز الفرصة كي يقتلن بعهن بعضاً، كي يقتتلن ويدمرن حياتهن المدمرة أصلاً. هكذا ذهب جواد الأسدي بعيداً في رسم ملامح هذه النسوة، متخطياً الملامح التي كان رسمها لوركا، معتمداً القسوة واللاوعي والحوافز النفسية الخبيئة. برنردا ألبا، الأم القاسية تجد نفسها وحيدة، ليس بعد موت الزوج وإنما بعد تحررها منه. الحداد الذي تعلنه كأنما تعلنه على نفسها، هي مغنية الأوبرا التي لم تبق لها سوى الذكريات. تلجأ الى الغناء الأوبرالي والكنسي (السرياني...) وبعض الفلامنكو (ظهر في البداية أيضاً) بحثاً عن عزاء. تمارس على ابنتيها سطوتها تعويضاً عما فاتها، لكنها لا تتمكن من قتل ما بقي من حنان الأم. هنا تكمن قوة هذه الشخصية التي جسدتها بقوة ورقة في وقت واحد المغنية جاهدة وهبي التي كانت احدى مفاجآت العرض. الابنتان أو الاختان، أديلا (ايفون الهاشم في إطلالة جميلة جداً) وماغدولينا (نادين جمعة في اداء قدير)، تفيضان بالكره والبغض، تشي واحدتهما بالأخرى، وتغار واحدتهما من الأخرى، خصوصاً في ما يتعلق بالجنس و «رجل الاسطبل». فتاتان تعيشان بجسديهما المحرّقين الى الرغبة، بل بالأحرى بهواجسهما الجنسية و «الفانتسمات» المتفجرة. جسدان على حافة الانهيار، يحتاجان الى نار الرجل التي تشعل فيهما اللذة. جسدان متألمان من شدة الحرمان وسط هذا السجن، وسط هذه العزلة القاتلة. حتى الخادمة التي أدت دورها عايدة صبرا بمهارة فائقة مازجة بين التضخيم والأسلبة والسخرية، بدت تعيش هاجس الجنس، لكنها راحت، بخبثها كضحية، تذكّيه في الأخريات، لا سيما في برناردا ألبا، التي ذكرتها مرة بعجزها عن الاستمناء. ولم تنجُ الجدة بدورها من هذه الفانتسمات» التي باح بها جسدها العاجز.

دخل جواد الأسدي أعماق هؤلاء النسوة ونفذ الى لاوعيهن وهواجسهن وأحوالهن الداخلية وفجّرها، فاذا بهن كتل من لحم ودم وشبق وحقد وبغضاء. يكرهن العالم (البيت) مثلما يكرهن صورهن، مثلما يكرهن بعضهن بعضاً، مثلما يكرهن فكرة الأب والأم والسلطة كيفما تجسدت. وعوض ان تنتحر اديلا تُجنّ، وهكذا شقيقتها. انها القسوة التي طالما انتهجها جواد الأسدي، القسوة التي لا تطهّر الذات إلا بالعنف الداخلي بالموت، القسوة التي تجيب على الأسئلة التي لا أجوبة لها، عبر إلغائها. وعندما تجد النسوة أنفسهن أمام لحظة الموت (المجازي) أو العزلة المطلقة يلجأن الى التداعي من خلال «المونولوغ» مواجهاتٍ أنفسهن بأنفسهن. الأم والابنتان والخادمة، جميعهن يلجأن الى «الاعتراف»، اعتراف ما قبل الموت، ما قبل الخراب الذي سيدمر البيت. ولعل أجمل «مونولوغ» هو الذي تبادلته ماغدولينا مع الخادمة، وقد غدا «مونولوغاً» بصوتين انطلاقاً من دفتر المذكرات الذي دونتها ماغدولينا.

يجيد جواد الأسدي العمل على الممثل وكانه عماد اللعبة المسرحية. فالعرض هو عرض الممثلين مثلما هو قائم على السينوغرافيا والديكور والموسيقى والحوار... يعطي الأسدي الممثلين فرصة تحقيق ذواتهم انطلاقاً من الشخصيات التي يبنيها باحكام ومن العلاقات التي ينسجها بمتانة. يجد الممثل نفسه على خشبة الأسدي وجهاً لوجه أمام ذاته متجلية في ذات الشخصية التي يؤديها. هنا يصبح التمثيل بحسب الأسدي تجسيداً للذات الانسانية، بصراعها الداخلي وهواجسها وأحاسيسها العميقة. لكن التمثيل لن يخلو أيضاً من فن اللعب لا سيما في لحظات الهتك والسخرية والتضخيم.

لم يكن من المفارق أن يحول جواد الأسدي «بيت برناردا ألبا» بيتاً عراقياً وعربياً وأن يدمره ويجعله أطلالاً، مغلّباً طابع التشاؤم على المصير أو المستقبل، فالمأساة التي عاشها ويعيشها كمواطن منفي ومقتلع تشهد على عمق التجربة التي يكابدها. والمهم أن «الخطاب» المأسوي هذا ابتعد كل البعد عن التفجع والمأسوية المباشرة (والكربلائية العراقية) من خلال اللعبة الدرامية الفاتنة التي أدتها هؤلاء النسوة – الممثلات والتي توازت فيها السخرية العابثة والفجيعة الداخلية. انهن «نساء السكسو... فون» كما عبّر العنوان. وكلمة «السكسو...» ليست هي «الساكسو...» انها اللفظة الموسيقية المحرّفة بغية ان تشمل حال الجسد. انه العزف الموسيقي على مقام الجسد. وما أجمل هذا العزف حقاً.

Review: "Crying of My Mother"

Stripped of their galabayehs, they stand quietly with their backs to us under the soft blue light, their breath drifting like smoke in the frigid air. The expansion-contraction of their torsos is deep at first, but it slowly gives way to calm. Simple and ethereal, the closing stillness of "Crying of my Mother" is pregnant with a serene abandon that left us in the audience molten.

Choreographed by Muhannad Rasheed and featuring Rasheed and Duraid Abbass, the twenty-five minute dance performance ran December 1st through 3rd at Teatro in Damascus, Syria. The only private performance space in the city, Teatro is an old Damascene house cum theatre institute and production venue founded and directed by May Skaf, a well-known television and film actress in Syria. The performance took place in the central courtyard whose grand two-story arch has been rendered a proscenium.

The piece opens with Rasheed and Abbass in khakhi galabayehs cradled together before a fire. Rasheed's hand stretches forth taking in the heat while Abbass combs through his companion's afro. Their bodies, twin fetuses in a womb, are barely distinguishable from one another, and the moment denotes a sense of isolation as if the two worn men were resting for a night in the midst of a taxing journey.

But they are not desperate, not hopeless; rather, a tranquility, albeit one loaded with heavy fatigue, colors the scene. They have each other. The unbridled intimacy, at once brotherly and romantic, establishes a pianissimo, legato foundation from which the performance evolves. The movement takes on a staccato dynamic, and the bodies become disfigured and even corpse-like. Afterwards, the piece crescendos into a scene of mourning and concludes with a moment of ethereal peace.

As such, "Crying of my Mother" broaches the subject of death as metamorphosis. The transformation is, however, twofold: we witness shifts in the corporal and the gender identities of the dancers. After the theme of corpsed bodies builds momentum, the men slowly lift their galabayehs over their heads and clench their collars shut under their chin in silhouette, evoking images of mourning women in a chador, burqa, or jilaabah.

The quaking intensifies, and the performance climaxes as the men slowly pull the galabayehs off their bodies, shedding their skin and letting it fall to the ground. So, mourning entails the man's adoption the body of the woman--the mother--as a surrogate. Whereas the male body is the site of physical pain and death, it is the female body that carries the burden of emotional suffering, and it is the female body that has transformative agency, taking in the dancers--tortured, murdered, and left for dead--and bearing forth reborn, naked bodies.

Duraid and Abbass and their families were displaced by the 2003 American invasion of Iraq and subsequent civil-war and are refugees in Syria. Throughout the next couple weeks, "Crying of my Mother" will travel to the Netherlands and to Italy. The migration of the art and artists is a testament to the paradoxical realities of the military industrial complex which serves to colonize and to ravage peoples on the one the hand and to foster and to circulate the cultural production of pillaged societies on the other.

The St. Andrew's Ball

We left early. The champagne was tasty, but the St. Andrew's Ball at the Four Seasons last night did little more than confirm my disdain for expatriates, especially Americans and Brits, in Damascus.

I picked up my tuxedo from my aunt's house on Thursday afternoon in anticipation of my first Damascus ball, thinking Four Seasons + Damascenes + maziqa + dancing + open bar + Glam^3 = unforgettable. No one does Glam better than Damascus. No one. Except maybe Fergie.

The "chieftain" of the Caledonian Society, a hoary chum with eyebrows like ashen tumbleweeds, greeted us at the top of the staircase. His Lucky Charms shoes matched his kilt, and his Scottish accent rang with charming vigor. He directed us towards the saggy-faced lady.

"Table 31, Loch Lunaig," she said, dropping our tickets in the giant raffle tub. "Y'can see the tayble chart o'er dere." We glanced across the room past the dozens of men in kilts and marching band outfits and spotted--not the chart--but floating trays of champagne.

It's been ages since I've seen so many Caucasians. Where did all these expats come from? Where are they hiding in Damascus? I didn't see but a handful of Arabs. At first, I thought, "Duh, obviously, they'll show up at least an hour late." But I was wrong.

Thank the lord our table featured a bottle of Glenmorangie Scotch; otherwise, my friend Sh and I would have dropped dead of nausea. There were six Americans at our table, four of whom were teachers at the Damascus Community School. They looked and sounded like they had been plucked from their minivans in rural Nebraska and dropped in Syria. They knew little to nothing about this place and, aside from discrete comments about their cats who eat their scarves, had trouble conversing.

It was a nightmare featuring Laura Ingalls Wilder and friends. Remember those girls and boys from high school at Woodward who were so dull they just kind of blended into the background? Yeah, they were there, too.

After the British Ambassador's endless monologue about global warming (what the hell?!), the chieftain took the mic and invited everyone to the dance floor. The lead singer of the band, flown in from Scotland, proceeded to dictate dance instructions to the two hundred strong herd. When we saw the girl in the jester outfit doing a Scottish jig, we knew it was time to evacuate.

Castrating Simba

One of the wool rugs was missing from the long marble corridor leading to my bedroom.

"He's pissing everywhere, now! The rug's drying on the balcony. Emily washed it, and it's hanging outside," Mama Hiam complained, crunching through a heart of raw lettuce. "He meows at night, all night, outside my door. I'm castrating him. Tomorrow. We have an appointment at 9am with the doctor, and we're going to castrate him."

Simba is a spoiled and reticent Turkish angora. He takes his meals in the kitchen but drinks only--ONLY--from the crystal ashtray that Hiam fills periodically throughout the day. Every morning, after a cup of Nescafe and half a red apple, she puts on a hospital mask and brushes Simba inside out, working his body like he was a rag doll. He's surprisingly okay with all the maneuvering, and it's only when she gets to his tail does he begin to resist.

It was Hiam's daughter who managed to coax her to getting a cat shortly after the war last summer. At first, Hiam rejected the idea altogether, I think in a stubborn effort to assert her self-sufficiency and comfort in solitude. She didn't need a cat, she wasn't lonely. Eventually, she caved in to the suggestion, and the rest is history.

She seemed disappointed when she returned from the veterinarian that morning. She was in the kitchen making kibbeh with Emily, and I overheard the dialogue from the living room.

"He didn't castrate him. Simba has psychology. You know what is psychology?"
"Yes, Madame."
"He says he keep Simba to examine him. But he did not castrate him. He did the echo, but no castrating him."

Cheney undergoes heart treatment

english.aljazeera.net

Dick Cheney, the US vice president, has been treated with electric shock treatment for an irregular heartbeat discovered during a doctor's visit. Cheney who was sedated for the procedure on Monday, later returned home and will resume his normal schedule at the White House on Tuesday, his office said.

"An electrical impulse was used to restore the upper chambers to normal rhythm," the statement said. "The procedure went smoothly and without complication."

Cheney, who had gone to see doctors because of a lingering cough from a cold, was found to have "atrial fibrillation, an abnormal rhythm involving the upper chambers of the heart," Megan Mitchell, his spokeswoman, said earlier on Monday.

History of problems

He went to the hospital later in the day for the outpatient procedure. Atrial fibrillation is a disorder becoming increasingly common. The heart's two small upper chambers quiver instead of beating effectively and blood is not pumped out completely, so it may pool and clot, putting the person at risk of a stroke.

Cheney, a close aide to George Bush, the US president, has had a history of heart problems. He survived four heart attacks before he became vice president. The last one, shortly after the November 2000 election, was considered mild. More recently he was treated for a blood clot in his leg that was discovered after a trip to Asia and the Middle East. He underwent quadruple bypass surgery in 1988 and he has also had angioplasty to reopen a partially blocked artery.

...
Gosh darn it, working for peace is stressful!

3ajami

No, life here was very nice. Let me tell you why.
Wafic was a guy who loved life. I mean, for one, he never liked staying at home, and, two, he'd call me from the office: 'Get dressed. I'm picking you up.'

Five-thirty, we'd go to a house party. Then, there'd be a cocktail, so we'd go to the cocktail. We'd come back home. He'd change and then say to me, 'Get some sleep.'
'Why sleep? I just got back from the cocktail party, why sleep now?'
'I have to meet my buddy at Cape des Rois, then we're meeting some friends at the Mocombo around eleven, twelve, one.'
'We're going together.'
We were a Lebanese group, and we always went out together.
At the end of the night, there's this place called 3ajami, in the Souq el Taweeleh, on a paved street, a really narrow lane, half the width of a bedroom. The best stores were in Souq el Taweeleh. On both sides there were shops, and at the end a tiny little spot called 3ajami. They sold drinks, food, fool emdemmas, akel libanais.

It was in Centre Ville. Now, il n'existe plus. It's nothing now. They destroyed it, built it up again, put in a road, I don't know. There's nothing left of 3ajami.

De l'Orient le Jour, 24 novembre 2007

Upping the Anty on Internet Censorship: Ma3 al Salameh, Fbook

They blocked Facebook.

Gone are the days of profile updates, wall messages, and poking. 
Farewell to clicking "Not Attending" for events in America. 
Adieu Scrabulous.

Just two months ago, my friend O and I were chatting about Facebook as a public sphere.  We were saying how it was one of the only--if not the only--public spaces for free association.  Sure, the bodies and the language are digital; nonetheless, it is a revolutionary public sphere where individuals can assemble into groups and express their thoughts in an open forum.

Given that the Assad regime isn't so fond of free association/assembly and of unregulated expression in general, it doesn't really surprise me that the government has blocked Facebook.  However, I am shocked that they were perceptive enough to realize what a major role it plays in everyday life here.

The government has knocked my-facebook-self into a coma.

Wikipedia writes,

"A notable ancillary effect of social networking websites, particularly Facebook, is the ability for participants to mourn publicly for a deceased individual. On Facebook, students often leave messages of sadness, grief, or hope on the individual's page, transforming it into a sort of public book of condolences. This particular phenomenon has been documented at a number of schools. Previously, Facebook had stated that its official policy on the matter was to remove the profile of the deceased one month after he or she has died,preventing the profile from being used for communal mourning, citing privacy concerns. Due to user response, Facebook amended its policy. Its new policy is to place deceased members' profiles in a "memorialization state".

Additional usage of Facebook as a tool of remembrance is expressed in group memberships on the site. Now that groups are community-wide and available among all networks, many users create Facebook groups to remember not only a deceased friend or individual, but also as a source of support in response to an occurrence such as 9/11 or the Virginia Tech massacre in April 2007."

How will Facebook respond to all of us comatose Syrians?
Our profiles are now memorials.  Does that mean we're dead?

Fondly, from opera-syria.org

Welcome to Dar Al-Assad for Culture Culture and Arts

Scouring through hundreds of websites

You visited us

To let our friendship start here

How?

By being with us in our free creations

To let our friendship start

For

Culture is the spirit of civilization

&

Art is the expression of its rise

We create love & peace

We follow the profession of happiness

Surpassing frontiers & races

Yet

Our Syrian human being is looking for world's human beings

You're welcome again

You're with us & we're with you

The Sword

I envision my death when I walk to the theatre.

Dar al Assad, the National Theatre, sits on Sahat el Oumayeen, a giant roundabout a la Paris's Place de l'Etoile. Instead of the Arc de Triomphe, there is a wide fountain with dozens of jets that glimmer neon blue at night. It's far from majestic, but you can't help but giggle when you see that much water shooting into the desert air.

A concrete monolith accented by a sliver of windows, the Assad library and Syria's equivalent of the Pentagon hold the fort on the Eastern flank of the Sahat. To the West lies another concrete monolith, the Sheraton Hotel...although it's more of a modernist ruin than anything else.

One of the few memories I have from my trip to Damascus fifteen years ago is indulging in a banana split at the Sheraton pool. It still hosts a chic crowd during the summer (the prostitutes go to Le Meridien). The 80s glam of the sunbathers juxtaposes with the heinous architecture reminiscent of ammunition igloos at Fort Dix. Southwest, you've got a nondescript Ministry barricaded by a colonnade, and due South is Dar al Assad which is a perfectly shaven, concrete rectangular prism. Literally.

Charming as the fountains may be, the real axis of this space is the towering seven-story sword (probably the Assad Sword), whose pseudo-stained glass facade lights up at night. Rooted off-center in a concrete island near the Dar al Assad, it reminds all cars and pedestrians that--make no mistake--this phallus lays down the law of the land.

Approaching the Sahat is like stepping into a vortex of nationalism, totalitarian authoritarianism, and patriarchy...and concrete. Time after time, I'm floored by how boldly the architecture and geometry of this cityspace embody a politics of monism. And, time after time, I pass a row of kalishnikovs aimed at my liver as I stroll past the Ministry of Defense. There's an exasperated soldier hanging out every twenty meters or so. He's got his gun draped perpendicular to his torso and directed right at the passers-by.

I know these guns are probably not even loaded. And I doubt that these guys are even conscious of where their guns are pointed. And even though kalashnikovs and tanks were ubiquitous in Cairo and Beirut, I can't quite get used to walking past a barrel aimed straight at my body. Without fail, as I'm approaching the target range of these guns, I think to myself, "This is it. It's going to shoot accidentally. Something's going to happen, and it's going to shoot. This is it. I'm going to be shot. I'm going to be killed. And I'm going to collapse dead at the feet of a towering polychromatic phallus in Damascus, Syria."

Text from a Placemat in La Casa in Abu Rummaneh, Damascus, Syria

When was the last time you had Asian?

of the ginseng herb

Cleansing the body of stress.
Ginseng has a long history of helping increase libido or sexual energy and desire.
Ginseng is considered one of the only safe natural herbs for sexual health.

www.visitlacasa.com

Under my Umbrella

I nearly exploded when I heard the rain.  I was in the shower when it started, and so it probably took me a while to perceive the relatively soft pattering outside.

Yesterday, in the car on the road to Beirut, the woman squeezed to my right relayed the news of the rain.  I thought she was pleasant at first.  After we veered off the Chtoura highway forty minutes deep into the belly of the Lebanon Mountains to the end of the road (literally) of the village Shbiah, I was ready to shove her out of the Chevy.

Mama Hiam gave me a giant aquamarine umbrella, and I hurried off to the Goethe Institute to attend a conference.  The service dropped me off just after the AUB on Bliss, and I walked the rest in the downpour.  Past Snack Faysal--it sits at the base of a civil war ruin, one of the few on Bliss that hasn't been replaced with a concrete atrocity or a fast-food workshop.  Past Siniora's house, past Salon Khalil Mike, and past Heo's doctor's office, who, it turns out, is a distant relative of mine.  It was Sunday.  The streets were empty, which was lucky because my umbrella proved to be too big for the sidewalks, so I took to the road.

But, actually, come to think of it I never really walk on sidewalks anymore.  My walk this afternoon was exceptional because of the umbrella, that's all.

Hot Hands

I am writing a message in a bottle.  I used to be able to sit at one of the few snobby cafes in my neighborhood and surf the net without any restrictions, but that is not the case anymore.  Yesterday, I ordered a cappuccino at In-House Cafe and stationed myself in a corner expecting to pour some thoughts into this forum, but, lo and behold, ACCESS FORBIDDEN!  It's now virtually impossible to visit major blogging sites, such as blogspot, from any place in Damascus.  Gone is the narcissistic pleasure of reading my own blurbs.

However, as the very presence of these words indicates, it is still possible to post via email.  And I ought to continue.

The wind is violent today, and patches of clouds cross through the sky.  Evenings are cool and dry--sweater and scarf weather.

When I was in the Istanbul airport about ten days ago, I stumbled upon a cache of memories from elementary school at Woodward Academy, and ever since I've been working actively to excavate these images and stories and what not because I'm so afraid of losing them.  Also, I have a new penpal (we were peers at Woodward), and I think our correspondences have also contributed to this surge of interest in the WA days.

Generally, "Lower School" was a horrible and miserable experience, peppered with moments of gratification.  Like the time I won $50 in Bingo on the fourth grade trip to Savannah, Georgia (I kept that fifty dollar bill clenched in my fist under my pillow that night), or the time that I won second place and a check for $750 in the National Invention Convention for "Hot Hands."

Three of us from the fifth grade were among the top sixteen young American entrepreneurs invited to Kansas City (which, I learned, straddles the border of Kansas and Missouri...which, I learned, is pronounced MissourAH).  We were driven around in Limousines and stayed at the Ritz Carlton (for free!), and I had to buy a bulky, gray Eddie Bauer sweater because it was so damn cold.

My invention was "Hot Hands," a pair of gloves which heated up when you shook them.  On my tri-fold poster board, there was a picture of my brother--sporting a pair of shit-brown Hot Hands.  His head was turned to the right, and he was looking at his (warm) hand with an expression of incredulous shock.  Underneath, the caption read, "The Glove Fits!"  Probably in the font, Impact.

I didn't come up with "The Glove Fits!"  My mother did.  The OJ Trial was still fresh on everyone's mind, and so the photo + caption indicated that I qua entrepreneur not only had a grasp of current events but also a biting sense of humor.

We had to make a commercial, too.  Like the tri-fold poster board, this item also featured my brother.  We stood in a harshly lit corner, and there was a tree behind us that, if you squinted hard enough, resembled a palm.  Donning our recently purchased neon ski jackets, my brother sang a specially-crafted rendition of Bobby McFarrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy!" while my father whistled the melody from behind the camera lens.

My role in the commercial was to fill the half-note rest between "Don't Worry" and "Be Happy."  Flashing my jazz-hands to the camera in rhythm, I interjected, "Hot Hands!  Hot Hands!" just off-rhythm.

We thought it was clever.

When it played on the giant screen in the dining room of the Ritz Carlton in Kansas City on that fateful March evening, we knew: it was a gem, and, boy, were we happy.

Ray Close on the Israeli Sept. 6 Air Raid on Syria

This from Ray Close (ex-CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia)

Dear Friends:

More thoughts about the ongoing mystery surrounding the Israeli air raid on Syria of September 6, 2007:

I still believe that the final truth, whenever it is revealed, will prove to be a major embarrassment for both the Bush administration and the Israelis — and possibly some Arabs. There MUST have been a colossal screw-up by some or all of those who planned, approved and implemented the action. I can think of no other plausible explanation for Bush's angry and petulant refusal to give the White House press corps a polite and informative reply to their repeated questions — and for the administration's apparent failure so far to brief many of the key members of the appropriate committees of Congress —— of either party. If it could be represented as a necessity, and as the successful treatment of a real and imminent threat to the vital national interests of either the United States or Israel, then why the hell not step up and explain your actions and the reasons that justified it?

As an aside: I hope the rumors are false that the Jordanians, Egyptians and Saudis all approved of the Israeli raid when they were (allegedly) briefed in advance (possibly by Dick Cheney in person, without the knowledge of Condi Rice and Bob Gates) that it was coming. How foolish it would have been for any Arab government to approve such an Israeli action, because they should all know from sad experience that sooner or later the secret would leak out, to their acute distress.

In my mind, the biggest question remains the degree of American involvement in the planning and implementation of the raid. Even if the target was really the beginnings of a nuclear weapons plant, the justification for preemptive military action would be very weak, considering the fact that it would be many years before we could justifiably claim that Syria posed an imminent nuclear threat to Israel. Much more important, in the full measure of things, is the damage that another unjustified preemptive attack would do to the critical objective of fortifying the weak and wobbling system of international rules and controls to prevent widescale proliferation of nuclear weapons. Today, destroying a pathetically crude and ill-advised Syrian attempt to begin a nuclear program might impress some people as striking a blow for freedom, but it would in fact be a major defeat for the larger goal of supporting civilized implementation of an international rule of law. If George Bush and Dick Cheney have helped to undermine that vitally important overarching objective by involving America in another unjustified and unwarranted violation of international law in this case, then they will have done us all a disservice of major historical importance.

(By the way, if the goal was to send a warning signal to Iran, then that message has been thoroughly obscured in the fog of Foggy Bottom. Yesterday, in speaking of the Israeli raid, Condi Rice said archly: "Iran, take note!" Take note of WHAT, Madam Secretary? If your own Senate Foreign Relations Committee has not been given a coherent explanation of what happened, how to you expect Ahmedinajad to know what you're talking about? Are you saying that if Iran misbehaves, we will send the Israeli Air Force to teach them a lesson? What does that tell the world about the quality of the American president's world leadership role?)

One cannot minimize the fact that American collusion with Israel in such an offensive act would be a disastrous blow to our relationships with our few remaining Arab friends. We got away with that many years ago at the time of the Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear facility at Osirak (which, we should be reminded, the United States officially condemned as illegal at the time), but today it's a different Middle East, and we have no reserve of goodwill capital to fall back on. How would the Egyptian, Jordanian and Saudi governments, for example, explain and justify such action today by its so-called US ally?

Finally, we might all hold out some hope that the Bush administration's refusal to be transparent on this issue is because they attach a higher priority to keeping alive the prospects of a constructive peace conference on Palestine-Israel scheduled to be held sometime next month at Annapolis.

However, if that is the case, then it tells us three very significant things:

1. The Israeli leadership attaches a higher priority to restoring the credibility of its military dominance over its neighbors than it does to supporting American diplomatic efforts to advance the peace process — on which Israel's real security ultimately depends;

2. The (supposedly) most powerful and influential leader is the whole world is unable or unwilling to persuade the leader of tiny little Israel that reaching a viable peace settlement in the region deserves a higher priority than obliterating an empty building hundreds of miles from anywhere in the remote Syrian desert. George Bush, in other words, lacks the political courage and the moral stature to say to his Israeli friend: "Cool it, Ehud. I have more important problems to deal with right now. Don't ask for my help in undertaking a spectacular diversion of strictly minor significance, for your personal political benefit, just at a time when I am involved in much more critical and delicate undertakings."

3. The Bush administration is too cowardly to admit to the American people and to the world the truth of the two points just mentioned above.

Ray Close

From www.joshualandis.com/blog

Melody Tunes: All English, All the Time

Some friends told me to check out these YouTube clips two weeks ago, but the internet connection in Damascus is so damn slow that it would have taken me weeks to download them. I'm thankful for the DSL in Paris.

Melody Tunes Promo Madonna
Melody Tunes Promo Shakira
Melody Tunes Promo 50 Cent
Melody Tunes Promo Britney Spears
Melody Tunes Promo PussyCat Dolls

Landings

October 19 @ 3.20am

I had a haircut before I left Damascus. There are eight salons on my street (note: my street is at best five blocks long). Most of the salons boast opaque glass walls, and just outside the door there's usually a rack with about a dozen towels hanging to dry. Rocco's uses only black towels; Ziad's got blue and yellow.

It was almost eight-thirty when I stepped out the door. I felt proud that I was going to the salon at night. It was a first.

Ziad remembered me. Stacked all throughout his place are containers of gel with Swedish Adonises gazing at you with distant allure. The speakers buzzed with the new Timbaland featuring Keri Hilson while Ziad began to straighten my hair. This happens in Beirut too. Before the cut begins--no, even before the pre-haircut discussion begins, the stylist gets to ironing out your hair with the scalding, concentrated heat of a blowdryer. Digging into your scalp with a cylindrical brush, he aims his incinerator at the brush and holds the heat just long enough so that it burns with a jolt.

I'm starving. I want to eat the fur coat on the Turkish woman in front of me.

After a brief layover in Istanbul, my flight lands mid-morning in Paris.

I landed in Paris just over a year ago from London. It was the final leg of my evacuation from Lebanon, and I remember pulling up to Porte Maillot in the Air France Bus and catching my mother standing in the shade. She was leaning slightly to her right, and her hands were entwined in the rope of her purse.

---Yikes: time to board the plane! STAMPEDE!!!

Expatriate Expatriate

I went to the Ministry of Expatriates a couple days ago to obtain travel clearance. In addition to being an American expatriate, I discovered that I am also a Syrian expatriate even though I live in Damascus. Working through this conundrum, I found the Ministry at the end of a shiny tree-lined road in Dumar, a booming and vapid suburb of Damascus. The Ministry is an anomaly relative to the other bureaucratic structures: the interior is spacious; there is a Welcome Desk with a guard (shockingly not asleep!); there are COPY MACHINES (!) and PRINTERS (!!) and post-1992 computers.

Because I'm a Syrian male national, I'm required to serve in the military. In an attempt to squander money from its subjects, the government provides an alternate route: in lieu of service, you can pay a fee. Once you pay this fee, you get what's called daftar el khadmeh (Service Notebook), which allows you to enter and exit the country, no problem.

I am pursuing this route, or rather my father is pursuing this route while I observe from the sidelines. We've spent roughly five months plodding through the bog that is Syrian bureaucracy. Still no daftar.

On the plus side, I discovered that I don't need my daftar to go to Lebanon! This is of course because Lebanon isn't really another nation-state from Syria's perspective. This is also evidenced by the marked absence of a Syrian Embassy in Beirut.

The drive to Beirut took longer than usual. It was Friday and the last day of Ramadan, so the streets in Syria were absolutely empty. The woman in thick glasses spent about forty-five minutes at the Duty Free store near the border, and then, after we crossed the border, it took her about twenty minutes to buy labneh in Chtoura. We sat stewing in the car, honking occasionally with the hopes that she might hurry the hell up.

Although it wasn't Eid in Syria, it was Eid in Lebanon. As we drove into the city, dudes on motorcycles peeked into our taxi three times and asked, "Ta3aeedo el Soureyeen?" (Did the Syrian's celebrate Eid [yet]?)

Mama Hiam's bangs were curled with flare. We ate lunch just after I arrived and then passed out for a couple hours. I woke up to a symphony of fireworks, which twenty-seven hours later, is still going strong.

We made the pilgrimage to the airport to pick up D, my uncle's wife, who flew in from Dubai. It was packed and noisy. Whereas picking up friends and family from the airport in the states works kind of like a drive-by shooting or a hit and run accident, in Beirut (and Cairo and Damascus) it is a major social event featuring all generations of the family, at least 4 kids per adult running around and falling flat on their faces, and metallic balloons.

Earlier this afternoon, there was a flock of birds migrating south, reshaping their V every so often. I took a last sip of my Turkish coffee, and the conversation on the balcony froze in deference.

My uncle stood up and leaned against the balustrade.

"They're headed South, they'll follow the breeze down to Gaza, follow the Nile down into Africa. The hunting in Egypt is great, but these birds, these ducks, their meat stinks, tastes like fish. Better to shoot them when they return."

Lady Wise

I didn't go to the moon. I went much further--for time is the longest distance between two places.
-Tom in The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

I've been thinking about Mrs. Wise lately.

Her eyelashes were fake, and the shape of her body echoed a giant jelly bean.  During rehearsal, she'd down bags of popcorn while plopped at her throne.  Her voice, textured with years of smoke, gripped you in the gut.  Almost everyone in the high school was afraid of her, and it is a fact that she made the majority of her female actors cry.

I thought she was brilliant.  Her office was tucked in the backstage of the theatre at Woodward Academy, and I spent countless hours sitting across from her in that delicate ebony chair: she, overflowing in every sense of the word, and I, spellbinded.  I loved her.  Very much.

The summer just before I left to Yale, we were cruising in her Cadillac down Main Street in College Park and stopped by the Krystal, or maybe it was the Dairy Queen.  She had a milkshake craving.  We had been at her home and were on our way to school when she told me that she could feel something was wrong.  She pressed her hand into her kidney, and her voice wavered slightly with concern.

My friend S called me as I was passing Davenport on York Street in New Haven.  She told me Mrs. Wise had passed away.  I continued walking, past the rank smell of the Au Bon Pain and past the begging Vietnam veteran's cyclical, "Any change today?"

I didn't go to the funeral.  And, when I began writing this a few minutes ago, I could remember neither the season nor the year of her death.

But then I latched onto something--a letter I sent to my actors.  In February 2006:

I spent the last two weeks of my time in Cairo in upper class coffee shops with free wireless internet trying to translate Camus.  I'd plant myself at Beano's or Cilantro in Zamalek–sure to get the seat by the electrical output–and indulge in a pricey cafe au lait.

The patrons of Cilantro and Beano's were generally all from the Zamalek upper crust and from all age groups.  In the states, we rarely see a group of six or so wrinkled folks getting coffee.  Not the case in Cairo–groups of old people would sit and smoke and coffee it up next to the group of American-esque Cairene tweenagers.

The waiters began to expect me.  On any given day, there would probably be about six or so waiters in Cilantro--one to open the door for you, one to take your order, three to complete the order, one to deliver, and one to bid farewell.  I was the strange white kid with the laptop.

On one not so special day in Cilantro, I ordered a double espresso, sipped it up, asked for the check, and signed the bill.  Underneath the receipt was a faded pink folded notecard.  In sloppy blue pen, it read:

Everywhere
I go to there
I see your face
you Body your eyes
all of you your smile

I had an admirer.  I took the customer receipt and wondered what to do with the notecard.  Was she watching me?  Is she behind me?  Was this note meant as a joke?  Was it for the person before me?

I stuffed it in my leather messenger bag and scurried off.

I'm a foolish collector of useless pieces of paper--notes, post-cards, tickets, playbills, letters, and even tags from designer clothing.  Every paper collector has his own way of organizing and storing these precious memory documents.

When I returned to New Haven in August, I opened the flat pocket of my messenger and pulled out dozens of moments--and, one by one, I plucked a book or play from my bookshelf, opened it to a random page, stuck in the receipt or postcard, and reshelved the book.  I am proud of my arbitrary and efficient memento-storage system.

Tonight, after the rehearsals, the teas, the cakes, the ices, I plucked Death of a Salesman from the shelf.  And so fell the pink notecard from Cilantro.

Page 130 was held safe by a large paper clip.  Starred and numbered by Mrs. Wise were Biff's lines, beginning with "You're going to hear the truth, Willy, --what you are and what I am!  We never told the truth for ten minutes in this house!  And I'm through with it.  Now hear this, Willy, this is me..."

I presented this Biff monologue with great success at the Georgia Thespian Conference one pubescent high school year.  The conference itself was an insignificant event--an orgy of dozens of bi-curious high schoolers.  The rehearsal I had with Mrs. Wise in her office, however,...

...was something else all together.

"I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you.  You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them!  I'm one dollar an hour, Willy!  A buck an hour!  Pop, I'm nothing!  I'm nothing, Pop.  Can't you understand that?  There's no spite in it anymore.  I'm just what I am, that's all."

My eyeballs just flopped and plopped, and I was shaking, snot and it all–it was the first time I had viscerally connected with a text, an earthquake in College Park, GA.  My body purged and depleted.  Mrs. Wise my witness, yes, yes, I found and spewed myself into Biff's confrontation with Willy, and I have never been so raw.

Mrs. Wise and I would always refer to the Biff moment: "Oh, then...yes," or  "Hm...yah...a dime a dozen."  All it took was a couple words, and we were transfixed.  The time was ours, a secret, she the only one ever to have felt, heard, seen me there, my face, my body, my eyes, all of me.

And now I learn what happens to a secret memory when one of the keepers dies.

Rifts

Once upon a time, I had a story to tell.

Soap Bubbles

There were thirty something people in the In-House cafe watching a Ramadan Egyptian soap opera.  No one was speaking.  In the corner office supply store, five guys were lounging on plastic chairs in front of the mechanical pencil shelf watching the same series, and in the Extra Supermarket down the street four mecs were glued to the flat screen above the pasta.

I'm sad to say this, but I'm not (yet) inspired or stimulated by this place.  I've been here now three weeks, and the excitement and curiosity that has colored my previous experiences in Cairo and Beirut is lacking here.  This dispassionate relationship to place is probably partly due to the fact that this is the third city in the region that I have inhabited.  The fluorescent streets, the crystal hair gel, the Arabic, the police rule, and the manaqeesh--it's all familiar (with the exception of the hilarious Soviet architecture).

The fact that I perceive the visible culture of this city as commonplace worries me.  I've become a lazy resident, and there is no burning desire to excavate the nuances of this city.  I'm not making Damascus my research project.  Instead, I'm waiting around for it to challenge me and to knock me into consciousness like Beirut and Cairo did.

On the other hand, whereas Cairo and Beirut seemed somehow transparent, I venture to assert that Damascene society is opaque.  Although the economy is extremely vulnerable and inequality probably as extreme as in Lebanon and Egypt, the totalitarian state here does a mighty efficient job of clearing the streets of beggars and the homeless, so I do not encounter the manifestations of poverty in my daily life.  And generally speaking, the average standard living seems much higher throughout the city than in Cairo.

Secondly, sure--there are 1.5 to 2 million Iraqi refugees in the country, but it feels like the effects of the crisis have yet to surface (which may or may not be the case).  Today at the Embassy, we received a briefing from the chief political officer, and he said that throughout the next couple months this is going to change as a majority of the Iraqi refugees will have worn out their savings, leading to an unprecedented population of unemployed refugees, none of whom have the right to employment.  From a political perspective, any sort of minimal dissension or quandary that does exist is obviously contained and concealed from the reach of the press, so you get the sense that the regime is stable and that the political landscape is static.

While the cultural institutions of Cairo and Beirut have digitized their agendas and disseminate their information through a number of online forums and newspapers, the cultural life of Damascus is, from my brief experience, primarily based on word of mouth and chance.  For instance, it was a coincidence that I stumbled into the Iraqi theatre last week and found out about Amreekan al Bustan--it definitely wasn't listed in any of the magazines I've encountered, be they in Arabic or English (this might also be an indication of an attempt to erase the nascent cultural sphere of Iraqi refugees in Syria).

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, the dynamics of the Damascene social elite make the rigidity of Cairo and Beirut public life seem lax.  There is something Victorian about the decorum that governs the few restaurants, bars, and cafes that host the cultural elite.  The intensity of the 1980s fashion, Bangles makeup, and platinum highlights serves as a thermometer for the fluidity of a social space.  Sure, whatever, everyone is exceptionally nice and bends over backwards to extend their hospitality and all that bullshit.  But I'm looking for more than this perfunctory culture of ahlan wa sahlen.  It does not charm me.

I'm denying something important: my Arabic is weak, weak, weak, and my knowledge of the contemporary cultural and political sphere is even more pathetic.  Moreover, the texts that I should be reading and internalizing are not translated into English (and very few of them into French), which makes building a knowledge base all the more difficult.

I've met many academics, researchers, journalists, and so on the past few weeks, and they rave about how fantastic the city is...without exception, they refer to the Old City--thousand year old buildings and winding alleyways punctuated with modest doors that give way to gorgeous and packed Damascene houses-turned-restaurants.  It is beautiful and uncanny, but it doesn't move me.

My account exudes dissatisfaction and apathy.  And I'm reducing my psycho-emotional state to a question of location and in so doing conveniently ignoring the fact that I'm living my first "real" September beyond the boundaries of school.  This is a new temporality whose influence, although latent, must be as significant as that of place.

Where the Sidewalk Ends

Ever since I moved into my apartment, I've been using dial-up internet, which is far more reliable and faster than the miserable connection in Beirut. The only problem is that the Syrian government forbids access to blogspot.com (and probably a number of other sites as well). However, when hooked up to a wireless connection in a posh cafe as I am now, I encounter no limits to my movement through the web. Sure, the Bryan Adams does get tiring, but I've learned to forgive him. HA.

The city is in Ramadan mode. Shortly before sunset, everyone floods the market in Sha3lan, hoarding bags of tamarind juice and plaques of sabara, or cactus fruit. At maghreb (sundown), the muezzins take over Damascus, and the wind kneads the layers of adhans into polyphony. Then, streets empty; shops close; and people eat. By eight or nine or so, the fluorescents and the neon are blaring, and the sidewalks teem with gelled teenagers in pseudo-D&G.

With the exception of the mosques, there is a dearth of venues in which people can gather. Cafes, restaurants, bars, and clubs are especially hard to come by. Unlike Cairo and Beirut, the very structure of the city limits association. Consequently, sidewalks, streets, and parks--all monitored by lazy soldiers playing with their cellphones--become the major arenas for socializing.

Amreekan bil Bstan

After signing up for a gym membership early yesterday, I was walking back home and decided haphazardly to scope out two of the theatres on 29 May Street, one of them being the Cinema Ambassador. It was covered in posters of Egyptian comedic films, featuring Adel Imam, but I went ahead and stepped inside. The box office manager told me that there was a theatre downstairs--an Iraqi theatre--and that the show, Amreekan bil Bstan (American in the Garden), started at 9.30pm.

The theatre was pounding with fluorescent lights and live digital music when we stepped inside. The audience consisted largely of tri-generational families, munching on bizr and popcorn. A collage of nine floating headshots against a blue background, the poster suggested that Amreekan bil Bstan would be very much like a slapstick popular Egyptian comedy. Indeed, the dialogue bounced like a ping-pong match; there was a lot of shouting and physical comedy; and the sleazy dwarf broke out in belly dance every so often.

When I was standing in the ticket line, a man speaking in delicate English asked me, "You understand Iraqi Arabic?" I responded in Arabic, and as usual he was surprised and asked me where I was from, etc, blah blah blah.

Turns out, the Iraqi dialect is about as foreign to my ears as the Egyptian dialect: I doubt I understood more than 3% of the language. But I did gather that the play was about Iraqi refugees in a Syrian city (surprise, surprise), the dilemmas of being a refugee, and the disjoint between Syrian and Iraqi language and culture.

Needless to say, we were the only foreigners in the audience of around 300 Arabs, probably most of them Iraqi refugee families. According to a local journal I read last week, there are 1.5-2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria, compared to the 750,000 in Jordan. When I was hunting for an apartment, every single real estate broker would begin the conversation by telling me how the refugee crisis has resulted in a boom in the real estate market.

Just before the lights went down, I experienced a brief moment of horror: there I was in a room full of Iraqi refugees, who had been displaced from their homes, lost their jobs, and left family and histories behind due to the American invasion and occupation and the subsequent civil war. There I was in a room full of Iraqi refugees thanks to a scholarship from the American government.

The same institution that funds me ruined their lives.

And so the show began.

The Martyrdom of the Colonizer

After my wife killed me, Lady Hester Stanhope stood on the stage and unrolled a table-sized portrait of Sir C. Donald Gaston Hammami-Disraeli III. In a periwinkle Afghani burka, my wife held her baby in front of the portrait, the spectre of the father, and squeezed his tummy.

The doll burbled into the microphone: "Dada! Dada!"

Sour horror blood still trickling from my mouth, I was lying dead on the grass somewhere among the bare feet of the audience. They splashed some vodka tonic on my face, half-laughing at the whole affair.

Aborting what had the potential to become a deliciously awkward silence, the DJ chimed in with a drowsy transitional beat. I quickly rose from the dead and bowed with my wife and Lady Hester, bringing the colonization campaign to an end.

It's a Party

We sat on lounge chairs and watched the rest of candidates perform from the sidelines: the stand-up comedian, the rap duo, and the black-power capoeira act. The tipsy audience was a potpourri of Beirut's artists, film-makers, actors, designers, writers, and hipsters. They clustered on the grass around the stage, the elevated rocky terrain adjacent to the bar and just in front of the pool.

It was well past midnight—palm trees illuminated by footlights framed the horizon. Allegedly, La Voile Bleue is a beach club, but the beach seemed to be more of a forgotten circumstance than a place.

When the capoeira act finally ended, Hatem and Samar, the organizers of Sahra Khat Ahmar (Party OFF-LIMITS), rallied the party-goers to vote. Ballots in hand, the polity slowly headed to the polls to elect a candidate. The winner was to receive $5 of each $30 entry ticket.

It was an election. With performances by the candidates. At a beach club. In Southern Lebanon. A month before the hotly contested presidential elections.

Moreover, because the event was a party, it eschewed the gaze of the censor, which had just recently banned a contentious performance because it supposedly raised sectarian tensions.

I was in my bathing suit enjoying a pathetic daiquiri at the pool bar when the winner was announced: Salamander, the trio of comic book artists who pledged to use the funds to launch their publication. They performed right before we took the stage, and—by the by—they were the only candidate to speak in Arabic.

"You missed your audience, just missed 'em," the burly guy at the bar told me. "You should have played for your audience--I mean, you were good and funny, performance and acting and all, but no one got it."

The water was a murky aqua. When I climbed out and dried off, a young woman on her way to the bathroom stopped and asked me, "Now, really, what were you on?"

Take up the White Man's burden

We were late to arrive because we had to stop by the All-American Store to pick up the pink and blue balloons. Heading south on the coastal highway, I opened my blue folder and shared the poems I had printed with Lea and Anna: "Ozymandias" by Shelley, "Kubla Khan: Or, Vision in a Dream. A Fragment." by Coleridge, and last but certainly not least "The White Man's Burden" by Kipling. The image of Sir C. Donald Gaston Hammami-Disraeli III was stamped on the top right corner of every sheet. Underneath: "Courtesy Sir C. Donald Gaston Hammami Disraeli III."

I was a charming agent of empire, a colonizer. And I wanted the polity to vote for colonization.

We reviewed the sequence of events: Wife and I stand from afar, observing the natives and waving wildly at them upon arrival. Lady Hester would roam among the peoples and study their mating habits and ancient customs. Wife and I would descend upon the indigenous inhabitants.

Greet the natives (they are all Ahmad or Fatima).
Wife never speaks. Ever.
Remember and recognize all of them as if from a forgotten dream.
Fetishize and exoticize them.
Poetry recitation and instruction.
Granting of balloons to successful poetry recitations.
Lady Hester gives tour of native society.
Every object is an artifact, a specimen.
Marvel at skin, hair, voice, clothes, social configurations, gestural vocabulary.
Use magnifying glass when necessary.
Ballroom dancing and instruction.
Lady Hester and Sir C. Donald Gaston Hammami-Disraeli III kiss.
Wife screams, laceratingly, for at least 5 seconds.
She does not move.
Change into burka for speeches.
Towards very end of speech, Wife pops last balloon in hand (killing me).
Crawl to Lady Hester, collapsing at her feet.
...
O children of Lebanon, what serendipity! What fortune!
Radiant and glorious, the sun penetrates your crescent sky!
How marvelous! Dreams once chimeric, today real as flesh!
Les deux extrémités du globe se rapprochent; en se rapprochant, elle se reconnaissent; en se reconnaissant, tous les hommes éprouvent le tressaillement joyeux de leur mutuelle fraternité!
O Orient!
Rapprochez! Regardez! Reconnaissez! Saluez!
Étreignez-moi!
...
It felt so good to be on the stage, like a stale tree's roots finally reaching water.

When we were suffusing the minds of the natives with the truth of Imperialist poetry, some audience members delighted in the satire and orated with ironic passion stanzas from the poems. At one point, an Ahmad and a Fatima paired up and recited "Ozymandias" for me, Wife, and another Fatima. Desperately sincere, I thanked them and urged them to keep the poems and share them with their people. Wife smiled and nodded.

Carnival!

Southern Lebanon contains a fresh and palpable memory of last summer's war: scorched hills, maimed towns, and battered roadways. The beach is no exception, its waters and rocks still heavily polluted with oil from a tanker bombed by the Israeli military.

La Voile Bleue lies in the string of beach clubs that line the southern coast. They are major summer destinations, attracting the upper classes, tourists, and hoards of Lebanese from the diaspora. Beach club culture consists mainly of sunbathing around a swanky pool with an Al Mezza beer—mixed with lemon juice and rimmed with salt. These clubs are not vibrant markets of public discourse.

On the one hand, Sahra Khat Ahmar reclaimed this place. Under the guise of night, it channeled the public sphere of Beirut southwards into an intellectually vapid party zone. Where, hours earlier, bodies had been stewing in the sun, there was now theatre. In that theatrical moment, the pool, the palm trees, and the dim lights spotting the coastal mountains in the distance coalesced to form a mise-en-scène. Similar to Bernard Khoury's club B018 (an underground after hours night club full of coffins), Sahra Khat Ahmar defamiliarized the beach club as place, rendering La Voile Bleue an arena for a communal consciousness.

On the other hand, staging the event in a beach club ridiculed the very substance and meaning of elections, reducing the political process to little more than a pretext to perform and to party.

After all, it was a carnival: a comic book hero sported a white body suit; poetry recitations peppered a non-theatrical social matrix; trance rhythms gave way to capoeira cadences and dance; pink and blue balloons floated about; and the fool had the chance to play king for the day.

So, elections became a moment to suspend socio-political norms, an opportunity to unbound performance from reality, a chance to transgress presupposed frames. No longer a formalized process perpetuating the systems of power in the body politic, the election begot an almost anarchic state of being, a carnival.

But in all that what truth will there be?

Sir C. Donald Gaston Hammami-Disraeli III emerged from the literature of empire. Inspired by the layers of satire already contained within the event itself, I hoped to inquire into why elections serve as a categorical moral justification for the distribution of power. If a body politic were to vote for colonization, would colonization be morally legitimate?

Of paramount importance, I played the colonizer not as a fool or a tyrant, but rather as a gentle, humorous, and inquisitive gent—I avoided judging him. By suffusing the performance with humor and lightheartedness, Sir C. Donald Gaston Hammami-Disraeli III's imperialist perspective and colonizing behaviors held an air of moral neutrality, which allowed me to open the question, Exactly wherein lies the immorality of the colonizer's power?

Well, according to the burly guy at the bar, little came through.

But he liked the moment with the baby in front of the ghost portrait because it echoed the political reality in Beirut. The cityscape is plastered with the ghosts of dead politicians—Hariri, Aido, Gemayel. There are hundreds of posters featuring Saad el Hariri alongside his assassinated father, Rafiq. Likewise, Amin Gemayel always appears on TV with a portrait of his assassinated son, Pierre. In Lebanon, the living and the dead feature prominently in politics.

He continued: “I laughed when she came out in the burka, it looked good, but I didn't get it.”

After nodding and contemplating my response, I uttered, “What is there to get?”

I had tried to mimic the role that religion plays in the political landscape. Wife's religiosity as reified by her burka was not why she killed me. It in and of itself had nothing to do with the murder. It was not the immediate cause of the political violence. The reasons were social, personal, and religion was merely a circumstance, almost trivial.

I think I was attracted to this character pulled from Orientalist texts because it's true. I feel like a colonizer, but I wish to be welcomed and received by the intellectual and artistic communities here. I also feel like an Orientalist. For years, the Levant has been an imaginary place that I've romanticized:

You ask me whether the Orient is up to what I had imagined it to be.
Yes, yes it is. And more than that, it extends far beyond the narrow idea I had of it.
Facts have taken the place of suppositions—so excellently that it is often as though I were suddenly returning to old forgotten dreams. My time here has been a gift of eternity; indeed, I feel as if I have finally come home.
...
Terrifying as it is, this character was my surrogate. I am desperate for these communities to rapprocher, regarder, reconnaisser, saluer, and étreigner-moi. Maybe winning the election in Sahra Khat Ahmar would have signaled that, yes, I will be able to transcend the politics of my identity.

That, yes, I have a place here.

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remain remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Damascus

I am making an apartment in Damascus my home.

Lunettes

Moi, je porte des lunettes pour voir mes reves en couleur.

Rush Hour

A black Mercedes hit me when I was on my way to the theatre. I had just left the All American shop to order twenty balloons, pink and blue, for the performance tomorrow when my mind wandered to the crying clerk. Earlier, I stepped into her kitschy jewelry shop to ask for directions. She was on the phone and hurriedly put it down, wiping away tears from both her cheeks. I stood in the frame of the doorway, in complete shock, and gargled, "Do you know where the All American shop is?"

I was wearing long, tan leather shoes from Cairo, and the Mercedes ran over my right foot. There are actually tire marks over the laces. I think I crashed against the right door or something. A soldier came up to me, the two guys hopped out of the car, shook my hand, everyone was asking me if I was okay. I kept saying, "Ana majdoub! Ana majdoub! Ma shefit!"

Abu Fadi pulled the Renault aside, just meters away from that tank near City Cafe, and came up to me. "Ana majdoub! Ana majdoub!" I repeated as we got into the car.

I think I was in acute shock (maybe?). My hands were jittery, and I remember having to relax my cheek muscles from a frozen expression of glee. He scolded me for calling myself an idiot in front of all those people.

"They're the idiots! Not you! It's a bad word! Don't call yourself an idiot! Yella, I'll take you home, put some ice on your foot and your knee, forget the theatre."

Not a half an hour later, I was sitting in the second row of Masah al Medinah, notebook on lap and pen in hand, for HOW NANCY WISHED THAT EVERYTHING WAS AN APRIL FOOL'S JOKE by Rabih Mroue and Fadi Toufic with Ziad Antar, Lina Saneh, Hatem Imam, and Rabih Mroue. I've been following the work of Lina and Rabih for over a year now, brooding over their texts and videorecordings of past performances. I was exactly where I needed to be.

The Satisfaction of Mourning

My brother told me that my uncles were standing in the grave as the others handed down Nena's body. Bare feet in the mud and slacks rolled up to their knees, they reached for her body, wrapped in white gauze, and laid it in the wet earth.

My brother also told me that he told Nena that I loved and missed her and wished I could be there with her. My mother also did this. After the funeral, my sister read the piece that I wrote in memory of Nena to my extended family under the roof of my uncle's suburban house.

Nena had a severe stroke and was comatose for a few days before she passed away on the evening of Thursday, August 16. My aunts, uncles, and cousins were all at the hospital, and shortly after her passing each person entered the room in solitude. I imagine my brother Z holding her hand, her chiseled veins now asleep, and speaking softly with his head bowed down.

I've never seen a dead human body. I've never been to a funeral. And it was at once so very strange and somehow reassuring to know that my mourning family was compensating for my absence with speech, conjuring my bodily presence before, during, and after Nena's death.

Strange because I was not mourning in Beirut. Certainly, images of death were brewing: of Nena on her death bed, of my quaking aunt, of my family in black against a gloomy Atlanta sky peering down at a lifeless body while an anonymous sheikh spoke generically on death, heaven, and such. But I did not and am not grieving.

I am inclined to interpret this dearth of sadness as evidence of a broader sense of apathy--"Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas." Sometimes, I feel compelled to espouse some sort of deontological ethical practice and force myself to mourn. But I dismiss these thoughts without fail, repulsed by the immorality of falsity.

However, that leaves me stranded. Obviously, as evidenced by the fact of this entry, I am searching--publicly--for a way to respond. Even though it leaves me uneasy, perhaps this quest in and of itself is satisfactory.

In a Cairo cafe two years ago

Everywhere
I go to there
I see your face
you Body your eyes
all of you your smile





[It came with the check. Scribbled on a pink notecard.]

Cafards

I grew to tolerate the small cafards that reigned freely in my chambre de bonne in the 16eme. Sure, with their soft charcoal color and space age-esque design, they were quite comely as far as cockroaches go, but terrifying nonetheless. Every night, I'd comb my sheets for any critters before hermetically sealing my entire body with cheap cotton sheets. I was horrified by the prospect of a cafard inching along my face and creeping around my lips, but still my head remained exposed.

After my second night in the chambre de bonne, I asked Marie-Helene, the spacey landlord, about the cockroaches, and she chirped, "If you think your room is bad, you should see my kitchen at dawn!" It was unbearably sticky, so she gave me a fan, and that was that.

Naturally, my first response was to buy poison from the Monoprix. I set four landmines in the darkest corners of my chambre de bonne, all of which were within arms reach of the bed. I waited a few days, imagining a proud pawn roach carrying the poisonous "food" on his back to the queen's lair. Upon gobbling up the treat, she'd immediately dematerialize into metallic crimson ash, and all of her pawns would follow suit in a musical domino effect. In the end, however, I probably did more harm to my own health than to theirs given that I was practically inhaling the poison every night as I slept. Incidentally, the poison was ineffective.

The curative approach being a failure, I adopted preventative measures and began to blast-clean my room with bleach, lemon Pine-Sol, and such everyday. Sometimes, I'd squeeze a glob of neon blue gel directly onto the roaches that so happened to be in the way of my cleaning. They would die slowly, and I could simply flush them down the drain instead of having to crush their bodies and to squeeze the corpsed exoskeleton in a tissue between my fingers as I transfered it to the garbage.

Militaristic cleanliness was gratifying but did little to eradicate the cafards. Their resilience dwarfed my stamina, so I resigned to coexistence, a one state solution.

In 2015 I will be 68 years old and will have 100 children

DUBAI: A one-legged Emirati father of 78 children is lining up his next two wives in a bid to reach his target of 100 offspring by 2015.

Daad Mohammad Murad Abdel-Rahman, 60, has already had 15 brides although he has to divorce them as he goes along to remain within the legal limit of four wives at a time.

"In 2015 I will be 68 years old and will have 100 children," the local tabloid quoted Rahman as saying. "After that I will stop marrying. I have to have at least three more marriages to hit the century."

The UAE newspaper splashed its front page with a picture of Rahman surrounded by his children, the eldest of whom is 36 and the youngest is 20. Two of his current three wives are also pregnant. Rahman said his large family lives in 15 houses. He supports them with his military pension and the help of the government of Ajman, one of seven emirates that comprise the UAE. -AFP

In THE DAILY STAR - LEBANON
TUESDAY, AUGUST 21, 2007

In memory of Nena

There is a black and white photograph of Nena in the Alhambra. Draped in layers of embroidered silks, she poses like a lioness against a majestic background of columns and arches. She wears a Moorish headdress, and her dancer's feet extend from underneath the robe. Her face is long and regal, and she gazes at you with warm charm.

In her kitchen in the Malki, she used to cook lemon pound cake. In the dining room of her Alpharetta home, Scrabble letters and scattered puzzle pieces covered the glossed wooden table from Damascus. On Thanksgiving, she'd prepare apple sauce from scratch, and she was always the first to reach for the chocolate dessert.

During Z's wedding, I escorted Nena down the aisle. First in line, we stood waiting in anticipation behind the double doors for our cue. The humidity was building, and the Bach melody from the guitar was melting with the chatter of the guests. Her arm was clasped around mine, and I could sense her weight shifting slightly in an effort to maintain her own balance.

We had practiced the walk during the rehearsal the day before and knew exactly what to do. Together, we'd make the first entrance, turn right, and then I'd wait for Nena to take her seat before quickly sneaking behind-the-scenes upstairs to enter with the groom's party.

The hum of the crowd descrescendoed, and the doors opened. The digital cameras were snapping wildly, and the pops of flash bounced off Nena's glasses. Already blind in one eye, I was sure that she was going to lose her vision completely by the time we reached the front row.

Well, we made it through the fireworks, and then I snuck upstairs. But shit! I peered down below and saw that Nena had sat down in the wrong chair! I could sense my mother saying "Lalalalalalalalala" while she urged Nena to get up and move down five chairs. I had screwed it all up. I had embarrassed Nena. I had ruined the wedding. Meanwhile, the guests waited awkwardly while R and Y helped to shift Nena down.

Upon the closing of the ceremony, I rushed back down stairs and retrieved Nena from the front row. As we processed outside and smiled at the crowd, I apologized a thousand and one times.

"It's okay, ma sar shee! It's okay!" she laughed kindly. The pitch of her voice was always higher when she spoke English, and on this occasion she was practically a soprano. Anyways, her mind was set on stepping down the stairs to stand at the helm of her family for the giant group photo to celebrate her grandson's marriage in Atlanta, Georgia.

Decades and oceans mark the distance between these two moments--the Alhambra and the wedding. And the journey to both is remarkable. In the former, she is on a trip from Damascus with her Syrian husband Rifaat and her daughters, returning to her birthplace in Spain, where her French admiral father Gaston Chat was stationed during the Spanish Civil War.

In the latter, she is a widow, a naturalized American, a grandmother of ten. She is walking proudly with a cane, having overcome a paralyzing back surgery against all odds. And she is speaking English and Arabic.

Nena's story is one of migration and endurance. In the most impossible circumstances and the most foreign places, Nena found a home. May her place in the hereafter be the sweetest home yet.

Sojourn to the South

We were eating fried baby baracudas and drinking Ksara white wine when I said to V, "Is that a helicopter?"
"No," she replied, "We're on the sea, it's a fishing boat."

The sun had set, and there was no boat to be seen. Before long, the sound of the engine was coming from the sky, and we realized that there was a helicopter flying overhead. We thought it was the IDF sending a helicopter up the coast for a spy mission or something (their planes occasionally fly across the border to terrorize people). Naturally, we panicked.

The gentlemen sitting across from us put their arak down and laughed, "Not Israel!! Not Israel!! Unifil!!"

The following morning, we were in the car with Mohamed (32 and ADD), his wife Layal (sharp, charming, and into Hizbullah), and their son Qassam. Mohamed invited us into his home where, after serving us pineapple and mango juice, he showed us pictures of his brother who's in prison in the states. "His friend's car--full of drugs--was parked outside his house. He got 20 years. His friend got three. Not fair because really drugs are everywhere," he told us.

Together, we drove to Qana, Bint Jbeil, Bawabat Fatima, Nabatiyeh, and up to Saida. As Israel blasted many of the roads in the south last year, traveling through the terrain is like off-roading through a quarry. The scope of the destruction was jarring. I could hardly take three breaths without passing a building that had been completely demolished.

We stopped for some water in Qana, and Mohamed asked the fat lady with bad teeth if she knew any 30-40 year old women who might be interested in marrying his recently divorced father.

After Qana, we wanted to head to Bint Jbeil. In order to get to Bint Jbeil, foreigners need to obtain passes from the Lebanese military in Saida (which we didn't have), but Mohamed told us that he could get us there no problem. Before we knew it, we were traveling down the back of a mountain on a sketchy road, and to our right were about two dozen tents with yellow Hizbullah flags lining the path. Mohamed wanted to take us to 3ait el Shaab; we told him next time.

The destruction of Bint Jbeil is crippling. The war destroyed an entire quarter of the city, and the ruins have yet to be cleared. Staircases dislodged from homes, ceilings punctured with rocket holes, and living rooms turned to rubble.

Windows in Tripoli

Beit al Ankabout

There was a charred Israeli helicopter frozen in a nose dive in the middle of the gallery. Adjacent to the rows of six foot boards detailing the tank, aircraft, and helicopter arsenal of the Israeli military, a flat screen featured excerpts from SPECIAL FORCES 2. It's like the James Bond video game, except the setting is the Lebanese-Israeli border and there are tanks. Roasted TVs and a blasted mini-radio tower stood before a photographic backdrop of the blown-out Al Manar headquarters. The voice of a frantic journalist rang from the corpsed radio tower. Inside the fractured television set, there was another smaller TV reeling continuous Al Manar broadcasts from last summer's war. The time stamp was 3:56pm. I pulled out my cellphone: 3:58pm. At the center of this media peninsula in Beit al Ankabout (House of the Spider, or Spiderweb) was an architect's rendering of the Dubai-esque Al Manar headquarters—probably already under construction somewhere in Haret Hreik, much of which the IDF demolished last summer.

With massive limbs of Israeli tanks nestled into the ground and Hizbullah yellow banners festooned outside, the structure of the entrance outside echoes a kitschy Florida golf course. The path leads "underground" through bunkers with costumed mannequins in what amounts to a Hizbullah dorm room, complete with laptop, book shelf, and a poster(s) of Hassan Nasrallah. The floor of the main exhibition hall is spotted with windows into the earth: embedded glass cases with numbered Israeli helmets, guns, walkie talkies, uniforms, and camcorders. At eye level we gaze upon a series of photographs of protests against Israel's invasion of Lebanon in Paris and of a bride and groom forcing smiles as they pose before ruins of their home in post-war Dahyeh.

In Beit al Ankabout, the story of the Israeli military in the 2006 war is discrete and linear. It falls to Hizbullah, its ghosts entombed beneath our feet. On the other hand, the story of Hizbullah is teleological and multi-dimensional. We journey through the museum from training bunkers to media peninsula to SPECIAL FORCES 2 to the grand finale in the audio-visual hall: like spectators at the Bellagio watershow, we stand against a balustrade while clips of exploding tanks and grieving Israeli soldiers flash on the vast screen. Every so often, the screen would go to black while the booming sound and light show illuminated what was between us and the screen: another embedded Israeli tank, but this time with some faceless, left for dead uniformed mannequins. There was a full crowd of families, couples, friends (free admission); and, when the montage concluded with a crescendo of a victorious Nasrallah (only his 2nd appearance in the museum), everyone applauded.

The chills ran down my spine, and my stomach fell to gravity. I looked at my friend V, and she was recovering from a similar phenomenon. The exploding soundscape (and obviously the imagery) of the grand finale shook up a hurricane of war memories—visceral and fresh. The tension climaxes, and Nasrallah thunders into the scene. Just as he launches the emotional wave into a tsunami, he ends it.

He ends it. Nasrallah ends it.
And we walk back out into the humid sunlight to resume our normal lives.

Campusity

I used to take the school bus from Orchard Park.  In the parking lot in front of Los Rancheros, it waits rumbling in the mornings.  After a bowl of Banana Nut Crunch or syruped Eggos, I hop in the Volvo and flip on NPR.  We wind down Spalding Drive, a corridor lined with trees, subdivisions, and lawns coated in early morning dew.  Keep right at the fork and pass flowers strewn in memory of that high schooler who died in that car accident.

The drive from the northern Atlanta suburbs through concrete to College Park takes about forty-five minutes.  As we approach the Virginia Avenue exit just after the "Don't like the odds?  Don't have sex" billboard, we merge with the Woodward Academy traffic—regiments of yellow buses, Lexuses with a WA sticker on the bumper, and Ford Explorers with shaggy haired teenagers hotboxing inside.

The sticker was in the shape of a football.  And when they upgraded the sticker in '01, it was a singular white W on a black background.  That year, the Bush campaign also issued a sticker with a singular W on a black background.  Except that one was Palatino, one was Garamond.

For twelve years, I donned my Woodward Academy garb—polo shirt, tie, blazer, trash-bag grey slacks—and made the journey from the northern suburbs to the former military academy, south of the city.  When I was younger (1st to 6th grade), I would ride down during sunrise and return in the afternoon traffic.  As a teenager, however, I would steal to the theatre in Richardson Hall after the last bell and pull into the garage well after sunset.  Although the painting studio comes close, that stage carries more of my waking life than any other space I've inhabited.

I live in a city now.  Outside, there are motorcades blasting nationalistic music and waving pomegranate flags to rally people to vote for Amin Gemayel on Sunday (he's running against Michel Aoun for the vacated seat in the Metn in the Northeast Lebanon).  I take an old Mercedes service from Tele Liban which, like the majority of buildings in Beirut, boasts a number of bullet and rocket wounds from the civil war.  From Talet el Khayat to Hamra, there are no lawns or subdivisions but rather bundles of apartment buildings, the Center for Druze Social Welfare, the TWENTY-FOUR HOUR CANDY SHOP, construction cranes, Masjid Aicha Bakar, blown-out buildings canvased in images of political characters (dead or alive), Zara, manouche joints, and Gold Rush (a super night club).  Tanks and bored soldiers hang about the residences of politicians. The sidewalks are full of tight jeans, white sneakers, flashy sunglasses, and cigarettes.

I need to find the painting studio.  I need to find the rehearsal space.

This past weekend, I returned to Beirut after spending a month in hotels from Hama to Capetown to Cairo.  Two days after the whirlwind graduation experience at Yale, I was in line at JFK to board my flight to Lebanon.  Upon arrival, there was a horizon: presenting my paper at the conference in South Africa and producing the concert and party in Cairo.

Okay, so that's done.  And now there's no horizon, and I'm so disoriented.

I eat/sleep/shit/buy in a living organism. 
I do not work. 
Ostensibly, I'm researching and making theatre.
Theatre is a space that the city inhabits before itself.
The city precedes the theatre.
In order to enter the terrain of the theatre, I must first inhabit Beirut.
And that is quite a challenge.

Phenomenological Self

I haven't painted with acrylics in years.