Crappy news coverage
Here’s the latest New York Times article on the Syrian response to the attack: “As If On Cue, Syrians Protest U.S. Incursion On Their Soil.” The article only exemplifies the rather distorted coverage of the event in the Western media.
Graham Bowley, the author of the article, writes “It would be highly unusual for a spontaneous demonstration to arise in Damascus [...]. Judging by other news accounts and images shown on television, it seemed likely that the government had orchestrated the protest, which looked precisely timed and organized.”
While literally true, I find this extremely misleading, because it suggests that Syrians don’t share the sentiment being expressed in the protest. I am sure that the protest was not “spontaneous,” but just because it enjoyed government sponsorship doesn’t mean that it wasn’t an expression of real anger. However, it would be difficult for Mr. Bowley to know this since he wasn’t in Damascus, as indicated by his repeated reference to the television programs by way of which he apparently formed his impression of events. Of course, it’s not easy to get a journalists’ visa to work in Damascus, which in this case does the Syrian point of view a disservice, but that’s no excuse for misleading writing.
Mr. Bowley also continued on to say, “The strike into Syria was by far the boldest by American commandos in the five years since the United States invaded Iraq and began to condemn Syria’s role in stoking the Iraqi insurgency.” Boldest? Perhaps the boldest in breaking international law and violating national sovereignty. But to choose such a word in this context makes the American forces sound like brave comic-book heroes.
I also wouldn’t mind knowing who all these unnamed “American officials” are, since most of the Western press is using them as their main sources.
More developments
The American embassy is closed today–just temporarily. According to Al-Jazeera, there were protests throughout Damascus which remained peaceful.
Most Damascenes that I’ve spoken to continue to distinguish, as they always have in my experience, between a people and their government. But Syrians are also extremely angry at this violation of state soveriegnty, and rightfully so, so it’s always better to stay away from demonstrations and the like.
Today one of our teachers asked us how America could commit an act like this and still criticize Syria for atrocities the government committed in the past. At first the question surprised me, because I long ago stopped thinking that American foreign policy in the Middle East had anything to do with notions of justice or any other kind of logic that I can recognize. Then I remembered that even though America’s international reputation is in shreds, some sheen still remains to the values my country claims to promote, and the government seems intent on scratching that sheen off as quickly as possible.
Americans abroad…
Please remember to vote! Even if you haven’t recieved your absentee ballot, you can participate in the presidential elections via a Federal Write-In ballot, available at your local embassy. The embassy will send it for you through the diplomatic post, so it will still arrive in time if you go now!
Minarets at Sunset
This is my favorite minaret of all the ones I can see from my window, because rather than the usual green lights it also uses purplish-pink and blue to announce itself at night.
Idiocy. Pure idiocy.
What gave the U.S. the right to attack Syria yesterday?
I opened the New York Times a number of times today to see if there were any new developments in this story. There weren’t, but there were developments in the headlines they used to announce the article.
First: “Syria blames U.S. for attack.” (Did they actually say ‘attack’? Maybe they said ‘border clash’ or something like that. I’m having a hard time remembering now. They may just have said ‘clash’ or something more innocuous.)
Second: “Syria and Iran blame U.S. for attack.” (Or clash, etc.)
Now: “Syria and Iran Condemn U.S. in Iraq Border Blast.”
Presumably, the word “blame” was initially chosen because the U.S. didn’t officially own up to the attack until later.
The al-Jazeera English article on the attack is titled, “Syria says raid is ‘terrorist’ act.” This is also a new headline, but I don’t remember the previous one. I don’t think ‘terrorist’ is a wholly inappropriate word here, since the raid didn’t hit any military targets (or so it seems). Normally, the word ‘terrorist’ is reserved for a non-state actor, but if the U.S. feels free to designate parts of Iran’s army as a ‘terrorist organization,’ then I suppose it opens itself to the same accusation.
Nonetheless, I doubt much will come of this. Syria will complain about a violation of sovereignty. The U.S. will complain about terrorists entering Iraq through Syria. The U.S. will not apologize. Syria will not mount any significant response.
Still, it may have escaped the notice of U.S. politicians that any violation of Syria’s sovereignty only serves to give credibility to the perpetual claim that Syria is a country under attack. One would think, given the U.S.’s apparent vehement dislike of the government here, that it would behoove them not to validate its main pillar of support. Then again, subtlety was never their strong point.
Clash of two worlds (and not civilizations)
I recently saw a play performed in a bunker, and it wasn’t just a postmodern ploy to break the dominance of the 
traditional picture-frame stage. “The Immigrants,” as it was called–an Arabic translation of a Polish play by Slawomir Mrozek–was staged in an underground shelter near Baghdad Street that couldn’t have matched the context and content better: two and a half hours of the interactions between two immigrants—originally two Polish emigres in Paris, although it could just as well have been Syrians in any Western country—one highly educated and politically conscious, the other an uneducated laborer. No stage could have more effectively evoked the dismal conditions in a windowless basement apartment, the intense claustrophobia and isolation of two emmigrants sharing a room who have little in common save their country of origin in an unfriendly world, and the “underground” nature of some critical literature—and the contrast that it presents with this play which, though obliquely critical, was presented as part of the “Damascus, Capital of Arab Culture” program under a governmental umbrella. The two characters in the play teased, confessed, threatened, toyed with each other, lied, reminisced, drank, chain-smoked until the air was thick and the unventilated room reeked of cigarettes, and fought to the point of violence, until at the end of the play one fell drunkenly asleep on his bed and the other gently pulled a blanket over him, illuminating in the process not only the personal relationship of the two characters but also the predicament of the emigrant and the differing priorities of two different socio-economic classes.
At one point the more educated of the two men says to his roommate, who is genuinely startled and frightened by the discovery that his comrade-in-basement is a political refugee, “But don’t you want the freedom to say what you think?”
The other man replies, “To say what I think? I don’t think that much…or actually, I do think all day. I think about my wife. I think about my kids and I think about my job. I think about when I’m going to get to have my next cigarette. I don’t really think anything that I can’t say.”
Of course, this view of the political consciousness of uneducated citizens is highly debatable, but something about it rang true in the moment (for an alternate view, try Weapons of the Weak by James C. Scott). After all, this wasn’t a play about symbols, but about two people and their particularities. And for its acting, writing, and staging, some people who have seen many more plays that I have here called it the best play they’ve seen in Syria. After giving the actors a standing ovation, the audience filed up the pitch-black stairwell to the door we had entered by, only to find that it was locked. Small squares of yellow light and pinpricks of orange winked into being as we pulled out cell phones to see by and lit cigarettes, waiting for someone to liberate us from the basement existence that we didn’t want to live any longer. Eventually it appeared that this door couldn’t be opened from the inside (a strange sort of shelter), and we were led out an alternate route into the fresh, clear night air.
Photos from Aleppo
Here are some of the photos I took in the Old City of Aleppo on a deserted Friday. I’ve decided to put them after the jump so that it won’t take so long to load the main page.
The Things We Carried Away
Last weekend I returned to Damascus from the trip that constituted my vacation traveling for the days I had off for
Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan. This three-day holiday is typically marked by a special prayer at the mosque in the morning of the first day, followed by at least day of passing from one set of relatives to another, with children dressed in new outfits and adults wearing their best. Each new set of visitors is greeted with, at the very least, a plate of sweets and tea or coffee—so along with the copious smoking that accompanies such occasions, it constitutes a reclaiming of everything that Ramadan deprived fasters of during daylight hours in addition to an opportunity to spend time with the extended family. I experienced this celebration of the Eid in Jordan two years ago, and this year I had the chance to live it again as my friend Rachel and I spend the second day of the holiday with a Syrian family in the coastal city of Latakia. After I’d had my fill of the long chain of rotating family visits that are only possible when your parents, your siblings, and their children, and your children’s children all live in the same neighborhood of the same city, I set off by myself early the next morning to spend a day and night in Aleppo. It wasn’t quite the relaxing break that I perhaps should have given myself after CASA, but it was certainly more interesting than a typical vacation. Here are some of the things I learned:
Babies are more resilient than Americans think. I’ve been around plenty of kids in the Middle East, but I never noticed differences in how they were treated that could be chalked up to anything more than the naturally large difference in parenting styles among families inside any culture. One thing that doesn’t seem to differ across the U.S., though, is the way that people deal with babies, which I don’t think I’ve seen treated as anything other than highly breakable and fragile creatures who might be scarred by the slightest misstep of adults. In Latakia, however, Rachel and I were surprised by a visit to the home of our host’s friend, the mother of a two-year-old and a six-month-old baby, where the adults’ dealings with their children seemed to violate all the rules of baby-handling that had trickled down to us from the vast industry of child-rearing books. Read the rest of this entry »
Storytelling
It seems that foreigners writing from Damascus are almost always doomed to mention a trip to Nawfara, a cafe behind the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus’s Old City, to listen to the city’s last hakawati, or storyteller, relate part of a tale–so here’s my contribution to the numerous mentions of this rather charming and amusing old man. Abu Shadi, as he’s called, is the last professional storyteller here, and while I don’t know how widespread his kind once were, they’ve certainly been supplanted a new kind of Syrian storyteller: the telivision serials produced here that have proved popular far beyond the country’s borders (in terms of cultural production, Egypt is best-known for its films, Lebanon for its music videos and publishing industry, and Syria for its television shows).
Abu Shadi read-recited a story which seemed to be that of Aladdin–although I had a great difficulty understanding his accent and style of speaking, so it was hard to be sure of the details. He banged a scepter on a metal tray when he felt that his audience wasn’t paying attention, and laughed jovially at the startled looks on our faces. The cafe was packed with both foreigners and Syrians, and afterwards a television crew that had been filming his speech interviewed me and two of my classmates in order to find out the foreigner’s reaction to the hakawati. I spoke for perhaps thirty seconds, stumbled over my words a little, and wished that I knew more about what a hakawati might once, in his heyday, have meant to his listeners.
In pursuit of duty…does it have quite the same ring?
We finished Damascus, Smile of Sadness easily last semester: it wasn’t a hard novel, and proved reasonably enjoyable until about fifty pages before the end, when the heroine, Sabriya, was removed from school by her parents for a minor offense, then cast into a deep depression by the murder of her sweetheart. It’s surely a situation that would darken the soul of even the most hearty optimist, but I still found Sabriya’s response a little overblown: after considering suicide, she resolves to live in order to spare her parents any trauma and serve them—but to kill herself once they’ve passed away naturally. For the nearly two decades that this takes, she lives as a zombie-like servant to her family by day and communes with the imaginary ghosts of her beloved and her martyred brother by night. She spurns her remorseful parents’ offer of a return to school, and likewise refuses almost all contact with her community save her father and mother, then becomes enraged when her only friend, subjected to an unwanted marriage for her family’s sake, flees the country with an illicit sweetheart. Then, when her father dies following a decade of semi-paralysis demanding Sabriya’s constant attention and care, she carries out her promise of suicide.
Discussing the end of the book in class, we ran into what seemed to be difficulties in cross-cultural understanding. My classmates and I railed against Sabriya. She gave in, we said, and it made her a terrible heroine. A Greek hero might have been doomed by his virtues as well as his flaws, but Sabriya had none: she was nothing more or less than passive. When she had chances to improve her life—returning to school, for example she refused them, and while she might have been wholly depressed about the death of a loved one for several years, did a boy she barely knew really deserve two decades of mourning? For that long, she had no one to blame but herself for her misery.
Our teacher didn’t seem to view it quite the way we did. “I see Sabriya as helpless,” she said. “I think she did the best she could in the circumstances in which she found herself in.”
It was a standpoint we found incomprehensible, and as we continued to insist (at certain points nearly shouting) that Sabriya was far from helpless, that she could have taken steps to change her life at any number of moments, I wondered what it was that made our perspectives so different. Was it our relative youth that made us so sure that our lives would always be fully in our own hands? Was it that our teacher could imagine herself in Sabriya’s position, and saw as real certain constraints that we viewed as trivial? She thought of Sabriya as bound to her fate by a duty to care for her ailing parents, though she didn’t blame her for doing so unhappily, given her circumstances; but whereas none of us students would have openly advocated that the girl abandon her parents, we all seemed to think that she should have valued her own happiness above all other constraints and duties. It reminded me of the moments when friends of mine in Egypt and Jordan had asked me why the divorce rate in the U.S. was so high, and had appeared almost disbelieving when I subsequently confirmed that yes, couples very often divorced after they had had children (divorce happens here, of course, but it’s much rarer). I’m not a sociologist and I don’t know why the divorce rate is so high, of course, but their questions made me privately wonder if it had something to do with this American belief in the pursuit of chimerical happiness that we assume should be our right.
