Like they say on Avenue Q
As Wall Street investment firms collapse, I cannot help but feel a slight sense of schadenfreude for the many students I met whose highest aspirations seemed to be to make tens of thousands of dollars a few years out of college in these very firms, then spend it all on high-priced drinks schmoozing after work in trendy bars (as I’ve complained about before). Perhaps I’m being unkind. But I hope that now a few of those recent graduates take a moment to re-evaluate, and then decide to do something a bit more imaginative with their lives.
Quite tired
It’ll be an exhausting semester: it’s just begun, and I’m tired. Modern Standard Arabic has definitely always been my forte, but now my colloquial homework is starting to look much more attractive since it involves watching TV serials and chatting with people rather than slogging through difficult texts. The most exciting thing that had happened to me in the past few days was seeing one of the actors from the television serial we’re watching for class hanging out in a cafe. My friend and I worked up the courage to say hi to him, and he politely chatted with us for a few minutes, although he seemed somewhat on guard–perhaps he was confused at having been recognized by two Americans.
New York is supposed to be full of celebrities, but in four years there I saw precious few of them (I also don’t watch much TV and friends have “spotted” people whom I’ve never heard of). By far the best place I’ve been in for local celebrity-spotting is Beirut. A friend and I watched a rather bad Lebanese movie, Al-Bosta (The Bus, about a troupe of actors who reinvent a folk dance to techno music) while in Beirut, and within the next two days we had seen three of the principle actors in restaurants around the city. Damascus is a bit larger, but my colloquial Arabic teacher still instructed me to try to run into the television serial actor again: I should ask for his phone number, she said, and invite him to talk to the class.
A new semester
Thursday was the orientation day for CASA’s fall semester, and it looks like we’ll have just about as much Arabic homework as we can possibly stand—although the texts we’re reading also seem like they’ll present a marked improvement over some of what we read in the summer. The fall semester’s rubric contains four different classes: Colloquial Arabic, Reading and Vocabulary, Speaking and Listening, and Independent Reading. In colloquial, we’ll be continuing on with the interrupted summer syllabus that became truncated when our teacher’s shoulder got smashed (thankfully, she seems fine now), along with watching episodes from the Syrian serial “The Difficulty of Crying” (عصي الدمع). In Reading and Vocabulary, we will attempt to absorb pages and pages of reading—the entirety of Abdul Rahman Munif’s The Trees and the Assassination of Marzuq and Hoda Barakat’s Stone of Laughter, as well one classical text and multiple modern texts per week, including excerpts from other books. Speaking and Listening will involve listening to various recorded television broadcasts and—surprise—talking about them. For Independent Reading, we were asked to read choose any book to read on our own throughout the semester and discuss our progress weekly with a professor. I chose Mohammad al-Maghout’s I Will Betray My Homeland, a long collection of prose-poem-essays, which I’m excited about for several reasons: I wanted to read something that dealt with Syrian culture, history, and politics since I’m here in Damascus, and I wanted it to be something whose language I could admire and enjoy. Maghout was a poet as well as a novelist and screenwriter, so each of the short pieces in the book are well-crafted with a great attention to detail, and his book is highly critical of Syrian society and Arab nationalism—though with the critical eye of one who loves his country enough to want it to be better, not the estranged malevolence of some neo-con expats I could think of.
I’m sure I’ll learn a great deal this semester, but for now I just foresee myself being bent prone like a slender willow branch under the weight of my homework, and I’m feeling quite apprehensive.
Being a stranger means never having to say…
Tonight my friend and I went to have a late-night treat at a coffee shop in the up-and-coming area of Sha’lan. When the waiter, who knew my friend from a previous visit, brought the crepe we’d ordered, we saw writing dribbled in chocolate sauce on the top:
With some prompting from our waiter, we realized that the script said “Sorry 9/11,” with the date written from right to left as per the direction of Arabic script.
Stricken with horror that the café staff had thought us the kind of Americans who might have believed that Syria was behind the September 11th attacks, I gasped, “But—it wasn’t your fault!”
“No, no,” the waiter rushed to assure me. “We only wanted to say that we’re sorry it happened.”
Returning to Ramadan
I’ve returned to Ramadan in Syria: decorative lights (much like Christmas lights, only with crescent moons hanging on them) sparkle in windows and on eves; the sidewalks have bloomed with hawkers of tamr hindi and other juices in recycled water bottles and plastic bags, as well as flatbreads and traditional Ramadan sweets; cafes and restaurants close or risk appearing anemic versions of their usual lively selves during the day; and streets empty out during the breaking of the fast around 7:00 pm so that one can walk down the middle of even the biggest thoroughfares without fear of traffic.
This is my second Ramadan in the Middle East, but it will be quite a different experience from my previous one: while this one is more of a distraction, Ramadan became a way of life when I lived with a Jordanian family in fall 2006 and fasted with them (I didn’t complete the month of fasting because I became sick). Rather than reinventing the Ramadan-explanation wheel, I’d like to refer everyone who’d like to know more specifics to a nice post by Syrian blogger Abu Fares.
Why do people fast during Ramadan?–other than religious imperatives, that is. My host family, neighbors and friends in Jordan offered different explanations: some said they wanted to better focus their minds on the divine, while others said that they like the sense of community that came out of fasting and then breaking that fast together, and some mentioned that they felt fasting gave them more compassion for the poor. Of all of these, the second best described the way I felt about Ramadan that year (for another personal perspective on fasting, I suggest Syrian blogger Wassim’s great post on the matter). I’m not religious, so I didn’t find that fasting prompted me to contemplate god, and although it was certainly difficult at first not to eat or drink during the day, I soon got used to the feeling and since I was able to eat as much as I wanted at night, I didn’t think that fasting replicated for me what it might feel like to genuinely not have enough food. Instead, I fasted out respect for my host family and out of a desire to try to understand what it might be like to be part of this tradition. And, in fact, the sense of community that I experienced, as well as the the appreciation that Jordanians expressed when they found out I was fasting, was wonderful. I also found the (unfortunately temporary) change in my relationship to food (with which I think Americans have a particularly unhealthy way of dealing)–finding that I could, after all, do without it for a while–was welcome. Since I’m living on my own this year, I decided not to fast. But if I found myself in the same situation, I’d do it all over again.
Flying back
It was jarring to be informed, as I was trying to check into my Delta flight from Portland to New York, that I
would not be allowed to board because I did not have a return ticket from Syria, and something (U.S. law? regulations? Syrian law?) prohibited Americans from flying to Syria without carrying a ticket out–especially since I’d flow to Damascus on a one-way ticket in June without any problem. After several insistences that I was a student whose return date was too far in the future to warrant buying a ticket now, and consultation with a colleague, the Delta ticket agent finally relented, commenting sourly that her airline could be fined $10,000 if I returned on it, which made no sense since Delta doesn’t fly to Syria anyway. I wondered if this was yet another inane provision of the Syrian Accountability Act, but didn’t see any reference to such rules in the the law’s text. It may just another child of the silly tit-for-tat reprisals that Syria and the U.S. are engaged in, as happened when both simultaneously raised the fee for a visa application from $100 to $130 last January.
Otherwise, my flights back have been markedly more pleasant than my flights to the U.S., most notably because a friend’s father took advantage of my long layover in NY to come into the city and take me to a Japanese restaurant in Queens, which made it feel like two separate trips separated by one very abbreviated visit rather than one long, hellish slog. I’d also realized that frugality in packing doesn’t pay on transatlantic flights and brought along a pair of soft, fuzzy slippers in my carry-on to wear on the plane.I also spent some time chatting with an American UN employee who’d studied in Jordan and Syria and a mildly retarded Palestinian-American woman sitting near me. Gregarious and enthusiastic, the woman had made friends with everyone sitting anywhere near before the plane took off, and then chatted with the UN employee and I for the first hour and a half of the flight. Although she said she was thirty, she had the sensibility of a thirteen-year old girl, swooning over Freddie Prinz Junior and showing us a discman decorated with “BSB” stickers to prove that the Backstreet Boys were in fact her favorite band.
“Are you fasting?” she asked me as we wondered aloud when the food would arrive. Ramadan began several days ago.
“No,” I said. “I’m not Muslim.”
“Do you want to be Muslim?” she asked.
“No,” I said, slightly wary. “I’m not religious, and I don’t want to be a part of any religion.”
“No way, definitely don’t be Muslim!” she told me. “If you’re Muslim then you can’t talk to boys or go out at night!”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “I think that’s just your family’s tradition,” I said. “There are lots of Muslim girls who talk to boys and go out at night.”
The UN employee chimed in supportively, telling her that the Prophet Mohammad’s first wife was a successful business woman who must have talked with lots of men even before she was married.
“No way, just ask my mother, you definitely can’t talk to boys if you’re Muslim,” the woman insisted.
Looking over at her mother, who was sitting a few seats away and actually looked younger than her plainly dressed daughter as she wore a low-cut shirt, rhinestoned jeans jacket and bright eye makeup, I decided to drop the subject.
After disembarking for my layover in Jordan, I’ve opted to stay in the airport and use the wireless internet even though I probably could have headed down to Abdilly and caught a shared taxi to Damascus in less than the time I’ll spend sitting in this airport cafe. Nonetheless, my bag was heavy with gear to get me through what I foresee being a long winter, and it’s much easier to relax with easy access to facebook and blogspot for a little while longer.
