The Blog and the Shower

My roommates and I seem to deserve each other.

Before I moved into my new house in Bab Tuma, the Christian quarter of the Old City, I was homeless for a few days, so I stayed with a Syrian friend in the neighborhood of Jeramana, on the relative outskirts of Damascus. I couldn’t move all my belongings to their new home at once, so I dragged them over in stages and one night I went back to see my friend and get more of my things. When I reached her house, I realized that I had left my house keys inside my new house in the Old City. I sent a message to my roommate asking when she would get home that night in the hope that I could arrive after her so she could let me in. She called me back immediately. “Are you in Jeramana?” she asked. “Great, I’m also in Jeramana. If you can meet me somewhere I’ll give you the house key.” I had difficulty understanding the name of the place she wanted me to meet her, however, and since she’s lived in Syria for years and speaks excellent Arabic, the fault was probably mine. She repeated the name several times and I decided that I had probably heard correctly by the end.

“Have you heard of a place called saram al-a’liya?” I asked my friend, who had grown up in Jeramana.

“What is it?” she asked, furrowing her brow in confusion.

“I think it’s a restaurant,” I said, “or maybe a bar.” I actually had no idea, but my roommate had said she was going to have a drink with friends, so I assume it must be something like that.

“Never heard of it,” she said. “But anyway, saram sounds like you’re saying a bad word in Arabic. Tell people you’re looking for sallam al-a’liya instead.”

I made it several blocks on my roommate’s directions, but faltered when no one I talked with seemed have heard of this “restaurant sallam al-aliya.” Finally a group of men buying falafel sandwiches persuaded me to call my roommate back and let them talk to her, upon which one of them quickly figured out where I was supposed to be going. He hopped into his truck and drove me the last few blocks there, stopping at a subsidized bakery with a long line trailing from the small window through which bakery workers passed flat bread that they’d only just grabbed off the turning belt that cools the loaves after they emerge from of the oven. “This is furun al-a’liya,” he said—the high bakery.

Aha. A bakery.

I called my roommate and she walked to the bakery from the house she turned out to be with her friends. She looked surprisingly cheerful for someone who had been bothered about loaning keys with several phone calls and a walk, but when she pulled a set of keys out her pocket, she paused.

“You know, I do not have my keys with me either,” she said. “These are the keys to my parents’ house in Istanbul.”

There was nothing to do but laugh so animatedly and for so long that we drew stares from the bread line. Without either of our keys we could not go home, since the only other person in the house was our third roommate, a French woman in her sixties who would already have fallen asleep.

I slept at my friend’s house in Jeramana; my roommate stayed with her friends. In the morning, I got up early so that I could go home before I went to school and get my homework for the day. Standing on the doorstep of my new house, I rang the bell for a quarter of an hour until the electricity went out and I was reduced to banging loudly on the door for a few more minutes before deciding that the French woman was sleeping or had gone out at an unusual time. I was just dialing one of my teachers to explain why I was already unable to turn in my homework on what happened to be the second day of class, when the door opened.

“Mon dieu!” my third roommate exclaimed. “It is you! I thought you were the milkman!” It was the first time I had heard that there were milkmen in Syria.

I thought I’d do a quick update on the way I actually spend my time these days.

For the last semester of CASA we were given a choice in the classes we take (or rather we were given the chance to form classes based on our interests, in a process that resembled the backroom horse-trading of U.S. political party prior to the use of primary elections), so in addition to the mandatory writing class I enrolled in another Colloquial Arabic class, as well as Modern Literature and History of Syria and Lebanon. The first two classes are taught by CASA teachers, who are excellent as usual, while the last two are taught by Syrian University professors, who seem to be a rather hit-or-miss crowd. As such, I feel quite lucky that I ended up with one excellent professor for Modern Literature, in order to balance out the three hours of torture each week that is my history class. In the literature class we’ve been focusing on Syrian literature, and have so far finished The Gypsy Notebooks by Khalid Khalifa and The Epic of the Mirage by Sa’dallah Wannous in addition to a few short stories by Ibrahim Samwa’iil. The five-person class is thankfully built around discussions, which is somewhat out of the ordinary for a professor  here since typical University classes tend to be far too large to allow for much student participation, and it seems that certain professors I’ve met quite like playing the dictator in and out of the classroom and have become far too used to having their word become the only one on any given subject. Once I sat in a Damascus University professor’s office for over an hour while he lectured me about how much he liked to have student participation in class; since he cut me off when I tried to pronounce perhaps five different sentences during the whole hour, I wondered whether he’d like the reality of having to listen to students as much as he liked to talk about the idea. At any rate, my literature professor breaks away from this mold in leading discussion and asking for our input on what we’d like to read, which makes all the work for the class well worth it.

In the History of Syria and Lebanon, however, it seems that time has never passed so slowly, since an otherwise fascinating history is reduced to a dizzying series of names and dates. For reading outside of class, the professor provides us with only his notes, which consist of more of the same. In a move that I imagine would gladden the heart of most professors, one of my classmates asked the teacher if he could assign us more readings from outside sources, but the professor refused, saying he didn’t know of a single acceptable book he could assign in Arabic.  He’s also not big on student participation, so I spend class practicing note taking in Arabic and not really understand the relationship between the successions of political party formations, conferences, elections and the like I’m told occurred.

Still, I’m lucky to have two more classes I quite enjoy.  In Colloquial Arabic, we’ve been following our usual format of watching successive episodes of a Syrian TV show, which is a fun and effective way to learn.  In writing class, well, we write–a lot.  And then we correct.  My teacher demands that we correct and re-correct each assignment and turn it in over and over until it’s free of mistakes.  It’s a good exercise, but time consuming, especially when I put it off for too long and end up with a backlog of twelve 500-word essays to fix.

My classmates this semester are mainly the same classmates I’ve had for the past eight months, which is lovely as I like and respect them all, but can have amusing results.  My writing teacher, who is new to CASA and didn’t realize quite how well we knew each other, recently announced a new technique to be used in class: we would send him our assignments by email, whereupon he would remove our names from our essays and distribute them for anonymous discussion in class.  The idea was that we would be honest with our criticism and no feelings would be hurt since we wouldn’t know which piece of writing belonged to whom.  Of course, the strategy failed miserably: for each essay we read, I knew after the first paragraph which of my classmates had written it, not only because of the subjects they’d chosen but because their writing styles reflected the way they spoke in Arabic to an astonishing degree.  After reading the first few sentences, I felt as if I could hear each classmate shouting his or her written sentences in my ear: it’s what comes of doing nothing but talk to each other in Arabic every day, five hours a day, for eight months.

I’ve never visited Israel/Palestine, but a friend’s father told me it only took him five minutes after arriving in the West Bank to realize that the two-state solution was a sick joke.

Now, 60 Minutes is close to coming to the same conclusion, which is something I never would have expected from the American media: Time Running Out for a Two-State Solution?

An excerpt summarizing the conclusions, courtesy of Mondoweiss:

“Demographers predict that within ten years Arabs will outnumber Jews in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Without a separate Palestinian state the Israelis would have three options, none of them good. They could try ethnic cleansing, drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank, or they could give the Palestinians the vote. That would be the democratic option but it would mean the end of the Jewish state. Or they could try apartheid – have the minority Israelis rule the majority Palestinians, but apartheid regimes don’t have a very long life.”

My internet connection is too slow to watch this. If you’re enjoying a nice, fast connection in the U.S. or elsewhere, then you can watch it for me.

I really, really like living in Syria–as a foreigner. Periodically (or rather, just about every day), I’m reminded in some form or another how much less I would like it if I were a Syrian girl.

I’ve been trying to help a Syrian friend of mine look for a room to rent since many young Damascenes, used to living with their families until marriage, are less familiar than foreigners with the difficulties of the rental market here—but while Syrians may be able negotiate lower prices than foreigners, it’s been a great challenge so far to find a landlord who doesn’t mind letting a Syrian female tenant have male friends over. At the first house, my friend admitted that she was Syrian and was immediately grilled about herself, her family, why she could possibly want to move out of her family’s house, and her habits.

“Who would come to visit you?” the potential landlord asked.

“Um…my siblings…” she answered hesitantly.

“You have brothers? How many?”

“Two,” my friend answered, and was greeted with a raised eyebrows and a suspicious, “I see…”

In short, the woman was already familiar with the ploy of claiming that male friends were brothers and wasn’t going to stand for it in her house.

At the second house, she improvised that she was half Syrian, half Belgian, relying on her Belgian residency card from her Master’s degree to back her story, but wasn’t quite quick enough with her answers or accented enough with her Arabic to evade suspicion from the next landlord, who was less harsh but still slightly aggressive about finding out where my friend was living currently and why she wanted to get her own room rather than staying with relatives. When she found out my friend’s last name, she enthusiastically announced that she knew two members of what turned out to be my friend’s extended family, leaving my friend more hesitant and stammering than ever.

“Erm, those are distant relatives…very, very distant…I’ve really hardly ever seen them,” she told her, before impressing upon her that it was too late to chat any more and that she had to leave.

As we walked away from the house, she pressed her hand to her temple. Everyone knew her family! It wouldn’t take long after renting a place whose owner knew her relatives for her true identity to come out, causing embarrassment to both herself and her parents, who had grudgingly agreed to let her rent the room as long as she didn’t spread the story around to their relatives and neighbors. It was probably a mistake to ask in a Christian neighborhood for a girl from a Christian family, but we’d tried this area because of the sheer volume of rooms available to rent and the proximity to the bus that would take her to work in the morning. In a newer area on the outskirts of Damascus, particularly one populated by more recent arrivals from the countryside who mix less with older Damascene families, her last name would be less recognizable but her commute would double and take her far from her friends and boyfriend in the city. Nothing can be done, too, about her Syrian passport, but she’s come up with a new plan to further remove herself from the circles of social control and expectations surrounding Syrian girls: she’ll claim that her family immigrated to Belgium when she was a baby and that she doesn’t speak Arabic, relying instead on a Syrian friend to translate between her and the landlords she speaks with. I have my own doubts about how long such a farce would hold up before she slips, but with the way things are going now, it seems that getting her a condition-free room for even a month will be a victory.

…in persuading Israel to back off a plan to bomb a meeting of high-level Hamas leaders in Damascus, according to this article.

Have they gone completely mad?  This has to be the most horrifying piece of news I’ve heard since the carnage in Gaza.  An airstrike on Damascus, and more specifically on the Palestinian camp of Yarmouk?  I know a few people in Yarmouk, actually, and go there fairly frequently (and by the way, it is not a ‘camp’ in the way that Americans tend to imagine a refugee camp: it’s not tents but apartment buildings, paved roads, restaurants and stores.)  Yarmouk is a densely populated area and, as seems to be the case with most airstrikes, I can’t imagine such an operation going down without significant civilian casualties–not to mention being another huge breach of international law.  But hey, this is just Syria’s sovereignty–who cares, right?

The article also included some James Bond-worthy details I hadn’t known about the life of Khalid Mesha’al, chief of Hamas’s political bureau:

“Meshaal has proved a particularly embarrassing thorn in Israel’s side. On Sept. 25, 1997, in Amman, the capital of Jordan, Meshaal was attacked by two men as he got out of his car. One of them jabbed a hypodermic needle behind his ear and the other stuck a needle in his arm. Meshaal, gravely poisoned, soon found himself in an emergency room fighting for his life, and Israel was frantically trying to dig its way out of a mountain of embarrassment.

Meshaal’s two attackers were agents of Israel’s Mossad, and both had been captured by Meshaal’s bodyguards in Jordan, a country with which Israel had a peace treaty. Jordan’s King Hussein quickly announced that the Israeli agents would be executed if an antidote wasn’t sent to Amman in 48 hours. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu quickly sent the antidote that would save Meshaal’s life.

[...]

As for Meshaal, Israeli had no intention of letting go. In 2004, Israel sent five agents into the camp at Yarmouk, where all were captured by the Hamas leader’s bodyguards and interrogated. They confessed they had been assigned by Mossad to assassinate Meshaal and had entered Syria through Jordan.

In July of 2006 again Mossad sent agents into Syria, disguised as aid workers, to kill the Hamas leader, but Meshaal was tipped off and escaped.”

Some please make this man’s life into a movie.  Now.