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.