The essentialism of shawerma
A classmate in CASA who studied at Princeton, host to the questionable Middle East expert Bernard Lewis, told me a funny anecdote about the man. Lewis, who is over 90 years old and pretty much universally despised at Columbia’s MEALAC department, told my classmate that he believed that one could understand the essence of a culture through its food.
“So how do you explain the rise of mayonnaise culture in the Middle East?” asked my classmate.
Lewis didn’t reply, and walked away.
Things I Like About Damascus
I’ve known for a while that if I came back to live in the Middle East, I wanted to live in Damascus. Of course, this may have been because my first visit to Syria came after living in Amman, Jordan, and after three and a half months straight of that city, any other country was bound to look like paradise. It’s not really heaven on earth, of course, but my first few weeks here have born out my assumption that Damascus would be a thoroughly pleasant place for me to live. Here are just a few of the reasons why:
1. It’s a city I can walk in. I hate driving and going places in cars, so sidewalks and street life are important to me.
2. Good city planning (or lack of stringent city planning). In many U.S. cities, zoning ordinances prevent mixed-used neighborhoods: a given block is usually designated as residential or commercial, and not both. In Damascus, as in the rest of the Middle East, most neighborhoods contain several of the kind of tiny stores that sell whatever I might need in daily life. Just on the short walk from the main road to my apartment, I pass a cheese/milk/olives/bread store, a vegetable store, a pharmacy, a stand selling baked bread with various toppings (called mana’ish), and a tiny stand with just soda, ice cream, and chips. Having most basic goods just a short walk away makes life indescribably better.
3. Relative lack of harassment. Harassment of women in particular and foreigners in general has reached epidemic levels in Egypt, where I first studied. Ranging from common hissing and catcalls to the rarer groping, it made going anywhere alone somewhat daunting. Perhaps I shouldn’t complain; while my blond hair drew attention to my presence, it also protect me from the worst harassment that fell on the Ethiopian, Eritrean, Sudanese and other refugees there. In Jordan and Morocco, where I’ve also lived, harassment was much less intense but still existed at a higher level than what I’ve found here. Harassment exists everywhere in the world, of course, including New York, but it’s not a daily worry here.
4. A plethora of parks and other public spaces. I love being able to meet a friend at the tiny park located at the convergence of three streets near my house to eat hummus and fuul (fava beans in oil) outside.
5. Public transportation. A system of public buses and shared taxis or minibuses (one is called a service, pronounced serveess, and the plural is seravis) makes it easy to get to and from school. The service routes are clearly marked and at peak hours they come by several times per minute.
6. A friendly atmosphere. I cannot emphasize enough how many genuinely nice and welcoming people I’ve met here, or how much easier of a time I’ve had making friends than in other places I’ve studied. Of course, there are plenty of nasty ones, too, but overall the atmosphere does remind me more of my hometown of Portland, Oregon than anywhere else.
7. Relatively cheap cost of living…for me, at least. Here’s one of the many places in which my privilege as a foreigner enters the bargain; Syria remains affordable for Americans despite a declining dollar, but it’s significantly less affordable for Syrians themselves, a great many of whom work two or three jobs. Occasionally a shop clerk still insists on giving me something for free (and on a cultural note, I still haven’t figured out how many times I’m supposed to resist such an offer), and when I ran into two girls I recently met at Damascus University while waiting for a service, one immediately presented me with the bottle of guava juice she’d just bought. It was not the juice, of course, that made an impression me, but her eagerness to make some welcoming gesture to a foreigner.
8. A mix of new and old. The presence of the past in Damascus is one of those rather cliched topics that guidebooks love to expound on, but I have to concur: the architecture that dates back hundreds of years mixing with much newer buildings does give the city an undeniable charm (and I hope it’s not just some orientalist mindset at work).
For now, I’m quite content to be living here.
The oldest ambition
This article from the New York Times about the allure of investment banking and similar careers focuses on Harvard, but it rings too true with my experience at Barnard and Columbia. It always disappoints me to learn that someone I consider smart and capable is going to work on Wall Street; perhaps the only thing more disheartening is to hear that they’re going into the army or intelligence, but such ambitions are relatively rare. If anything, I imagine that Wall Street is a more common destination for Columbia grads that other universities; it’s just down town, after all, and it can be hard to live in Manhattan without money, especially in the amounts that many people have it there.
A nice reminder of New York
I’ve been staying with a friend in her new apartment until mine clears out. On our first night there, I we hoped desperately that the first cockroach we saw was the kind of stray that sometimes passed by the Barnard dorms. During the next few hours, it became clear that this was not the case; the place was suffering from a low-level infestation, mostly of those bugs on the smaller end of the range that their kind spans. We bought jars of boric acid and some sort of cockroach-killing spray, treated the place with what we thought was a thorough layer, and cleared out for the night. I was shocked by my own eagerness to kill the things, and I hoped feverishly that when we returned to the apartment we would find legions of cockroach corpses lying prone on the floor. I wondered if this was the sort of mentality that soldiers slipped into before going into battle. I wondered if I could ever learn to think this way about legions of humans.
I hope I never have the chance to find out. After a few days, the problem seems to have lightened considerably–but I’m not sure if the cockroaches that still seem to make it through the lines of white dust that now encircle most of the rooms and cupboards have found a secret entrance into the apartment or are mutants, immune to the poisonous traps we’ve laid. The rather senile landlord refuses to do anything about the issue (sometimes he seems to be on the verge of death, and asked my friend to massage his shoulders when he tired from walking in the street), so I’m not sure how to get rid of the last few varmints. I think I’m still quite a wimp at heart, though, since I know that I don’t have the temerity to follow the approach my friend Leah takes toward her own infestation in New York: she smashes them with her bare hands.
It’s a bird, it’s a plane…
When I was young, my mother and other caretakers used to point out simple objects for my amusement. “Look, an airplane!” they used to say. “Look, a squirrel!” I think it’s a fairly common practice, but until tonight I’d never been its object.
I was riding a shared taxi home in the evening after a long dinner and shisha-smoking in the Old City, and when we stopped for a light I happened to glance into the car beside us. Two women were sitting in front and making faces a two- or three-year old toddler standing between the seats (no, not very safe, I know). When the driver noticed me, she said to the child in Arabic, “Look, a foreigner! Say ‘hiii!’” I smiled at the kid and replied in Arabic, in the voice reserved for toddlers and perfected through hundreds of Barnard Babysitting Service jobs, “Hello, I’m a foreigner! Hello, hello!”
“She speaks Arabic!” The two women shrieked with laugher and managed to ask me, “Where are you from?” as the light changed.
“America…” I called out as our taxi pulled away.
Just trying to be a good cultural ambassador.
Why I’m really here
This is our first week of class. Along with seven other students (since the 17 CASA students are split into two groups), I have a lesson in Modern Standard Arabic and Syrian Spoken Arabic each day. I’ve had many good MSA teachers, but not one worthwhile class in spoken Arabic, so it’s a relief to finally have one. Once a week, we have a class on novels; for now, we’re reading the book دمشق, يا بسمة الحزن [Damascus, Smile of Sadness] by Ulfat Idilby. Here’s what my book on Syrian writers by Miriam Cooke says about her:
“Ulfat Idilbi is considered the grande dame of Syrian literature and women’s culture. […] Her stories memorialize a lost past when women were strong. She wanted women to know their own strengths and weaknesses, rather than blaming men without understanding why they act as they do.” (So are women not strong now? Hmmm. I beg to differ.)
However, Damascus, Smile of Sadness is set during the French Mandate in Syria (1920-1946) and relates the story of a woman whose lover is killed in the struggle for independence, after which she suffers at the hands of her male relatives until finally hanging herself (sounds great, right?). As Cooke says, “In this rewriting of the people’s struggle to shake off the French, the fight for freedom consumed the good men, those who sacrificed their loves and lives for the nation, and spared the bad and the stupid.” And what, we might ask, did the fight for freedom do to the women? Well, I’ll let you know what I think after reading the novel.
On a happier note about women, all of my teachers as well as the program’s regional director are female, and I couldn’t have asked for kinder, more dedicated, more energetic, or more enthusiastic instructors. My MSA teacher also has a wicked sense of humor. When she came into our classroom the other day, she asked us how we were doing. When we gave the traditional Arabic reply of “Thank god,” she smiled slyly and asked us, “‘Thank god,’ really? Or should it be, ‘thank Satan?’” I am thoroughly looking forward to many more classes with them, those on depressing novels notwithstanding.
Take it and run
Vendors at food stands cook thin pieces of dough on this hemisphere of hot metal and spread various toppings on top, then remove them from the grill, fold them, and wrap them in paper. The result is called saj, and it’s my favorite kind of Levantine fast food. The saj in this picture are spread with zaatar, a mixture of olive oil, ground thyme, and sesame seeds. It’s one of my favorite fast foods here (and actually, there isn’t much fast food, American or otherwise, since eating quickly or on the go isn’t popular).
Full disclosure
I didn’t take this photo, but I wanted to put in a picture and show a small bit of Damascus’s Old City. It’s the area that most foreigners live in because it seems more “authentic;” I think that any part of Syria is logically just as authentic as the rest, but I have to admit that the Old City is quite cool, as most of it dates back hundreds of years and the streets are a complete maze in which I rarely fail to lose my way. The rest of the city looks quite modern, and is a mix of architectural styles ranging from the charming ( from ca. the French Mandate and before, I think? ) to the outright ugly (Soviet style). Then again, identifying architectural styles isn’t my strong point.
So it’s not just crazies in New York
Amusing post from one of my favorite Middle Eastern bloggers.
Where to live?
I’ve spent much of my time so far in Damascus searching for suitable housing, a task I hadn’t expected to undertake. To be fair, a CASA administrative employee did take us all over Damascus’s Old City looking at rooms in traditional Arab houses built in a square around a courtyard open to the sky, several of which were exceedingly beautiful with trees growing and fountains whispering in the middle of the yard. However, I was shut out of a house that eight Casawiin (that’s the Arabic plural of a person in CASA, by the way) took together because of an error on the part of a CASA employee; the next day, when I was all but ready to sign a contract with a landlord for a room in a different house, I found out that opposite-gender guests were forbidden to come anywhere in the place but the courtyard. My time living with a host family in Jordan exhausted my tolerance for these kinds of rules, so I gathered my bags and left. I was later told that such restrictions were a hallmark of the more conservative Old City.
Having drained the patience of the CASA employee, I set out to search on my own—or rather, with the help of a friend from Columbia who spend the last eight months studying at the Institut Francais du Proche-Orient here. Apartment hunting is particularly arduous in Damascus, it seems, as the expat community here lacks any sort of centralized mechanism for listing vacant living spaces. While in Cairo a hundreds-strong expatriate list serve provides help with all manner of problems, here one must ask friends, who will in turn ask their friends, if they know of any housing opening, or check the French Institute’s meager listings. If this fails, one can go to a real estate agent—for a fee. Quite luckily, my friend was able to put me in touch with a French student returning to France whose apartment I’ve verbally committed to taking.
The place has a single bedroom, which means I’ll be living alone—a first for me. The place’s downsides include its semi-automatic (and semi-functional) washing machine and Turkish toilet (yes, the kind you squat on), but I think they’re far outweighed by its pros: reasonable rent, a balcony, a great view, a nice big bed, a living room with two couches, and a convenient location in a calm area of the city (in contrast with the hectic Old City, where foreigners and tourists tend to live and congregate). The current tenant isn’t moving out for another two weeks, but she offered to let me move in a few days before she leaves, and her terms convinced me to assent: she first offered that I could sleep in the large double bed with her as long as I didn’t snore. When I politely deferred, saying that I would gladly sleep on one of the two couches, she declared that she would also sleep on a couch, then, so that neither of us would feel jealous of the other.
I met the landlord a few nights ago, and I felt lucky to be dealing with this very kind and circumspect man. A few minutes after meeting me, he was instructing me–quite sincerely, I think–to phone him if I had any problems in Syria, even if at three in the morning. Although I’ve met several less-than-hospitable landlords during my apartment search, Abu Rasheed seemed to exemplify some of the best in the tradition of Arab hospitality. I was reminded of him during a presentation in our orientation where a CASA student told us, “You will spend a lot of time this year wondering whether or not you deserve all the hospitality that you receive. In some respects, this is a waste of time. You will never be able to thank anyone enough for the hospitality that they give you, unbidden.”
