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.
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Friday, September 21, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
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 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.
Friday, September 14, 2007
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
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