The Blog and the Shower

A sign at the Bab Sharqi bus and service stop announcing renovations in Midhat Pasha:

The responsible parties left the start and end date blank, so it seems that a passerby helpfully filled them in for them. Start date: God knows. Period of completion: until whenever God wants.

It is difficult to convey to speakers of English just how varied the Arabic language is. The Arab world, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf, is unified by its use of a single written language. To get some idea of what this language is like, imagine that the entire English-speaking world today wrote its books, newspapers, and official documents in a language that resembled the Old English in which something like Beowulf are written—not exactly the same language, but close enough to render those texts comprehensible without translation. The Modern Standard Arabic written today is dissimilar enough to medieval Arabic texts and to the Qur’an, a 7^th-century document, to make reading them hard—but close enough that one can instantly recognize a common vocabulary and grammar.

Recently, I wondered exactly how difficult it would be to read the original Beowulf text, which is actually of more recent provenance than the Qur’an. Here’s how it begins:

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,

Yep. Pretty hard.

Now imagine that spoken English had still evolved to its present form, despite the low level of change in the written language, but that the ways that English was spoken were much more divergent than they actually are. American English, at least, is remarkably uniform geographically, such that when teenagers from different parts of the U.S. are lumped together for summer camp or student conferences, it becomes a perpetual source of laughter that some Americans refer to flavored carbonated water as “soda,” some say “pop,” and some call it all “Coke,” and the buck of language variation seems to stop there. American English, British English, Former British Settler Colony English, (Indian) Hinglish, Ebonics (unless you’re among those who consider it a separate language), high discourse, street slang—all of the differences that the English language contains are dwarfed by the differences in Arabic dialects, where vocabulary and pronunciation reflect social class, sect, and geography. Most Arabic speakers can understand the Egyptian dialect (which really means that spoken in Cairo and Alexandria) well, since Egypt has been the center of Arabic film production for decades, and the music videos and television serials coming out of Lebanon and Syria are leaving “Levantine” Arabic widely understood, but Lebanese, Syrians, and Egyptians usually have trouble understanding an Arabic speaker from North Africa, particularly Morocco; my Lebanese roommate, for example, when faced with a Moroccan, prefers to converse in French.

In fact, Syrians sometimes have trouble understanding native speakers from their own country. The Syrian television series “The Lost Village” (الضيعة الضائة”) used a Syrian dialect so far removed from the dominant Damascene dialect that every few minutes a definition in Modern Standard for a dialect term appears at the bottom of the screen. I also once went to see a Syrian film called The Box of the World (صندوق الدنيا) in which the sound quality was a bit fuzzy and the dialect was that of the coastal mountains; luckily for me, there were subtitles in English, but during a Q-and-A with the director afterwards, one Syrian woman complained that she’d had trouble understanding a bit of dialogue that was central to the plot. The director confessed that he’d considered adding subtitles in Modern Standard Arabic for just that reason—but unfortunately for her, he’d apparently decided not to do so. All this is one of the things that makes Arabic so difficult for foreigners: I think I’ve got a good grasp of Damascene Arabic by now, as well as MSA, but I’m easily lost watching Egyptian movies and in the impossible event that I did agree to work with them, I’d be of limited use to the occupation forces in Iraq. So what does it mean, really, to speak “Arabic” well? In the end, the difference between a dialect and a language is politically defined, and since politics and ideology (especially here in Syria) tells us that the Arabs are one people, their variegated tongues are also one language. If and when they cease to be so—I’ll leave that to the “Arabs” themselves to decide.

Today, the River Barada that runs through Damascus looks like this:

But men in their forties can tell you that they remember swimming as children in the river on Friday outings with their families, when, they say, the water so clear that you could drink it straight from the riverbed.

Several decades before that the river used to flood, like this:

So what happened to all the water? Some say it’s due to the exploding water demands of a capital city in an urbanizing country, but crotchety and conservative old men disagree: actually, they say, God took away the water in order to punish Damascus for the moral degeneration of its inhabitants.

If there’s a more precise explanation of the water disappearance, it seems it won’t be forthcoming for a while. A friend of mine proposed to write a paper on water usage in Syria—a silly, ten-page paper in Arabic for one of our classes—but the proposal was nixed by a government official at the Language Center. Apparently it’s not okay to seriously research such a topic, along with many others; its better if we busy ourselves with silly moral squabbles, while the river dips lower and lower.

It seems so. To some of them, anyway.

Last year, everyone in CASA applied for year-long residency. Everyone’s applications were rejected. This year we all applied again; we completed the papers in July and were interviewed by security officials in August and early September. The officer who came to interview me looked quite miserable, as he had no cell phone and instead had made the long trek up the hill to my apartment and then to the fourth floor of my building numerous times before finally catching me at home. He was breathing hard when I answered the door and hunched uncomfortably on my couch for less than half an hour, not looking me in the eye as he asked me a series of questions that I’d already answer in triplicate and more on the forms I’d submitted.

Since he left on that hot September afternoon, we’d heard nothing about the residency status until our office assistant informed us recently that we had to go to the Ministry of Passports and Emigration and submit a few forms in order to renew our applications, seeing as it had been quite a while since we’d finished them. Accordingly, a friend and I passed by a few days ago and finally located the official to whom we had to submit our forms, a balding man in the same olive green uniform as his colleagues, with yellow braid on the shoulders and tired creases. He looked at our passports and took down a large beige canvas bag off of a shelf, one of dozens of identical bags bursting with white papers on shelves that covered an entire wall. They were distinguished by numbers scrawled in black marker, but I was surprised that he’d gotten the right bag on the first try.

My friend’s paperwork surfaced quickly, but the official looked through the messy sheaf he’d pulled out several times slowly without finding mine. I wasn’t sure he was making fun of me or not, as he asked my name at least ten times at regular intervals without registering any sign that he knew he’d asked me before, and pulled out applications seemingly at random to ask if they were mine. Multiple personal photos were stapled to each set of forms, so it was easy to tell immediately that they weren’t: This was had brown hair and glasses. That one, red curls. Another looked to be of South Asian descent. He pulled out more and more files with photos that didn’t resemble me in the least. “Is this yours?” he asked mechanically. And a few minutes later, in the same tone, “Is this yours?”

“Those aren’t me. I’m blond,” I pointed out. He acted as though he hadn’t heard me although I’d spoken quite loudly, continuing to flip through the messy stack of paperwork with difficulty, since each residency application contained at least a dozen forms of various sizes and sometimes more than one person’s forms had been stapled together by accident. When this happened, he pulled the papers apart one by one, paying no mind if he mutilated the forms in the process.

Finally he turned to us. “You need to bring more paperwork from the mokhtar,” he said, naming a very low-level local government official, and writing that on the backs of the forms we’d brought to remind us.

I knew we wouldn’t be able to bring the forms that he was demanding since the mokhtar would require a six-month housing contract, something none of us had any more. “We don’t need any more forms,” I told the official in exasperation. “We got that form already. Look, it’s in our files.”

“You need to get another one,” he told us expressionlessly.

“All our friends came here and did this procedure, and they didn’t need any more paperwork. Why do we need more papers and they didn’t?” I demanded. I assumed that most students in CASA had already come by to do the same thing, and I hadn’t heard of anyone having problems.

He continued to ignore me, but whether he was persuaded by my words or merely tired of hearing me talk, something in his attitude changed. He pulled out a small box some nine inches wide, filled with stiff white cards with personal photos stapled to them, then instructed me to look through and find mine. When I had done so another official sitting next to him took over, ripping out the “proof of residency application in progress” paper that had been stabled into my passport and throwing it on the floor behind him. I was speechless, unsure of what was going on and whether I should ask him to pick it up and return it to me. He stamped something in my passport, then handed it and the card to me.

“You’re done,” he said, “and you don’t need any more paperwork.”

“But what about her?” I asked, gesturing to my friend.

“She needs to bring the paperwork from the mokhtar,” he rejoined.

We exchanged confused looks and walked away. I examined the card he had given me, which seemed to be proclaiming that I had the right to reside in Syria until a certain date. I had gotten residency, three months before I planned to leave. I later learned that of my fellow CASA students had completed the renewal paperwork with no change in their status, some had been asked for more paperwork, and one other had also gotten residency, a few hours after I did. She’s blond, like me. Is residency now only for blond Americans? I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but in the tangled world of bureaucracy, one doesn’t have much more to go on.

Since an email I received a few days earlier addressed to myself and the other CASA fellows had informed that the dinner we were being invited to was “upon a formal request from the president of the University of Damascus,” I had imagined that this would be some kind of small dinner with American students similar to the ones the President of Barnard had hosted in her home to meet with various student groups, and had hoped to spend most of my time chatting with my friends and avoiding conversation with what I imagined would be dry Syrian government officials. My first clue that I was wrong appeared when I approached the restaurant in Mezze from the parking lot and was greeted by a long row of black, perfectly polished BMWs and their expensive peers, all of which appeared to have been parked by a parking service and not their owners since every singe one had been backed into its parking spot so that it could be easily driven away. My second clue that I was wrong came immediately after I entered the restaurant and saw that it was filled with dozens of men in black suits and rather few women in black business attire. My third clue that I was wrong materialized in the form of a short, energetic British woman whose job appeared to be to prevent new arrivals from standing around awkwardly: she swooped over, asked my name, and introduced me to the closest unattached black suit, which sported a very fleshy face and turned out to be the former American ambassador to Syria.

It turned out that I was actually at a dinner for an American delegation to Syria sent by the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress and attended by the delegation and various Syrian notables, very few of whom seemed to be still living in Syria; rather, London appeared to be the primary residence of choice. The first one of these that I was introduced to after it seemed that the former ambassador didn’t have much time for me was a man in his sixties with an impeccable comb-over and an elegant, well-fitting pinstriped suit who turned out to be the son of the founder of Damascus University, and hence a member of a family that had been prominent for a very long time. “During the revolution the state confiscated all my family’s assets,” he reminisced, “but no matter, it turned out all right anyway.” I’ll say it did: he lived in London, had a flat in one of Damascus’s nicest neighborhoods, still got invited to fancy dinners, and I imagined that one of the cars outside was his.

The dinner we were treated to was delicious, but the social atmosphere reminded me why I should be very, very reluctant to work in Washington with foreign policy wonks. The stated goal of the delegation, according to one member I talked to as well as their press release, was to increase  scientific exchange between Syria and the United States. No one gave me a plausible explanation of how there could be scientific exchange between the U.S. and a country subject to unilateral U.S. sanctions. Nor did any of the Americans I talked with seem very interested in the question, in the state of science in Syria, or in the country itself. Perhaps my experience was unduly shaped by my table-mates at dinner, whom I had initially been grateful were some of the younger members of the delegation, but who ultimately reminded me of what Rory Stewart wrote about the policy elite that worked in Afghanistan after the American invasion:

“I now had half a dozen friends working in Afghanistan in embassies, think tanks, international development agencies, the United Nations, and the Afghan government, controlling projects worth millions of dollars. A year before, they had been in Kosovo or East Timor and a year later they would be in Iraq or offices in New York or Washington. […] They were mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, with at least two degrees—often in international law, economics, or development. They came from middle-class backgrounds in Western countries, and in the evenings they dined with each other and swapped anecdotes about corruption in the government and the incompetence of the United Nations. […] Some […] were experienced and well informed about the conditions in rural Afghanistan. But they were barely fifty out of many thousands. Most of the policy makers knew next to nothing about the villages where 90% of the Afghan population lived. They came from postmodern, secular, globalized states with liberal traditions in law and government. It was natural for them to initiate projects on urban design, women’s rights, and fiber-optic cable networks […].”

Thankfully, the Western world has not recently had the chance to send its hoards of policy experts to govern Syria, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that if they did, they wouldn’t be any better informed about the country than the people I was sitting with. The delegation had invited the American students from CASA, but they hadn’t invited any of the program’s Syrian employees. Looking around the room, I understood why, but felt irritated nonetheless. Our teachers were the kind of smart, well-educated people bearing lots of experience with foreigners whom it should have been relatively easy for these educated Americans to connect with, but it wouldn’t have been. Syrians who live in Syria, it seemed, were not the focus of the initiative. The delegation was housed in the Four Seasons Hotel and whisked from sight to sight and meeting to meeting in a large tour bus. My American tablemates didn’t seem to have much expertise on Syria; the delegation member I sat next to was a senior at Georgetown who, while undoubtedly educated and intelligent, appeared to have gotten his seat and years of internships and fellowships through a relative who held a prominent position at the organization. He was currently working on the think-tank’s Syria policy recommendations, but he studied Chinese at school and a few months ago at the same institution he’d been studying NATO. He explained that one of his professors was looking at relative instability through the local price of a Kalashnikov, which cost $80 in Somalia and $550 in the U.S. That sounded like an interesting approach, leaving out the fact that foreign funding aside, it might well be harder for a Somalian to spend $80 on a gun than for an American to spare $550. Then he asked me how much a Kalashnikov cost in Syria.

“You cannot buy a Kalashnikov in Syria,” I told him. The very thought was absurd. The army, of course, could purchase them, but such things were not available for private citizens.

He looked slightly taken aback. “What about in the tribal areas?” he asked.

“There are no tribal areas,” I said. Was he thinking of Pakistan?

“Not even the Bedouin…” he suggested. I’d never contemplated the question of what weapons the Bedouin carried, but I found it impossible to fathom that they could own Kalashnikovs. The Syrian Londonite sitting nearest us opined that they probably used rusted Ottoman-era rifles.  I doubt he had any more practical experience in the area than I did. I suggested to the American that if he wanted to pursue the question, he could talk to one of the organizations designated “terrorist” by the U.S. that were here on the goodwill of the Syrian government, and ask how they got their guns into Syria and how much they had cost. He looked unimpressed by the idea and told me his professor had asked him to inquire about this after he found out he was visiting the country. I didn’t say anything. A student who was visiting Syria for the first time could be forgiven, but I rather thought his professor should have known better. The dinner ended soon after that, and a friend and I took a taxi back to the Old City; the delegation filed back to its bus and returned to their hotel, while the black BMWs were filled and driven away.

Last week I wandered around Jeramana looking for an Internet café with working Internet, and it was a relief that the fourth one I tried, despite the fact that its dusty computers all looked at least ten years old, had a connection. I was the only patron so the proprietor, a very thin man with lank dark hair and thin beard, had to start up one of the computers for me when I arrived, and the long delay provided an opportunity for him to chat me up in stilted English. He asked where I was from, I said America, and he said, “Ah! I am from Iraq!”

“I’m sorry,” I told him. I find it difficult to know what to say to Iraqis.

“No, no,” he said, “I like America very much. In Iraq I worked as a translator for the Marines. But now I have been in Syria for four years and I cannot go back to Iraq because people there want to kill me.”

That wasn’t a huge surprise, given the fate of other Iraqis who worked with the American forces. I wondered briefly how much they’d paid him for a year of work that turned him into a permanent exile. Ads I’d seen on the Internet in English advertised salaries starting at $120,000 a year for translators willing to work in Iraq, but I doubt they gave the Iraqis themselves that much. It’s quite something to imagine having that much money after living on $400 a month, but I definitely wouldn’t want to work in Iraq while the occupation is still in full swing, or in any kind of swing, for that matter.

“Well, I’m sorry the invasion destroyed your country,” I clarified.

“No,” he disagreed, “Iraqis themselves destroyed the country. Iraqis and foreign fighters coming into Iraq.”

I didn’t feel like arguing with him; Saddam Hussein & cronies certainly did their bit in making Iraq unlivable, and it was his country to judge, after all, but it seemed rather far-fetched to argue that “foreign fighters” and not U.S. troops were the problem. How did he classify American soldiers, then? Local fighters? It wasn’t a point of view I’d heard from many Iraqis here; most of the handful I’ve met very politely told me that they understood I was not responsible for the invasion, but they didn’t differ from my general assessment of the damage. Syria hosts over a million and a half Iraqi refugees, but they are concentrated in areas that I don’t regularly visit so I don’t know many, and don’t know any very well. By comparison, the U.S. has only accepted the visa applications of a few thousand Iraqi asylum-seekers; Jordan has a comparable number of refugees to Syria; and next in terms of numbers is Sweden, with some 70,000 Iraqis resettled there.

As I chatted with the lanky proprietor who talked too quickly and smashed his words up against each other, I started to get the feeling that what he liked even more than American troops was the idea of an American wife and a green card, as he forthrightly but apologetically asked my age and my opinion of him. I told him I didn’t have an opinion since I didn’t know him.

“I am trying to get asylum,” he continued, “and I registered with the U.N. three years ago. But I have heard nothing from them, nothing.”

I was truly sorry to hear that.

“But I really like the Americans,” he continued, “I think Iraqis naturally get along very well with them because we have the same nature. Iraqis and Americans are both brave and romantic.”

I didn’t tell him that I didn’t think that described many Americans I knew. Instead, I sipped the coffee that he had offered me, checked my email, and tried to ignore the succession of American oldies about finding true love that he had begun playing on his computer. As I left, he wrote down his phone number on a piece of paper and said he hoped we could have coffee some time. I was grateful that he was polite enough not to ask for own number, and told him that I didn’t live in Jeramana but maybe I would see him around sometime. In reality, his obvious interest in me meant that I would have to avoid him from now on. I would have been happy to chat with him more, but not if it encouraged impossible fantasies: I couldn’t marry every Iraqi who wanted asylum, and even though I do fault the U.S. invasion for creating the current refugee crisis and think that facilitating resettlement is the least that America can do, I cannot myself fix this impossible situation.

Last night I saw what may be one of the most bizarre plays I’ve been to in my entire life, a Shakespeare medley mixed with dance-offs, bursts of flame, pre-filmed video content that didn’t quite sync with what was happening on stage.  Picture this: the play begins as a voice over who doubles as an on stage drummer tells us that at the end of his life, Shakespeare became very depressed until a night he spent alone in the theater became a love story that revived his interest in life.  This, we are told, is the story of that night.  As characters appear on stage reciting well-known Shakespearean monologues that sound jarring and uninspiring when translated into Arabic, it becomes clear that Shakespeare is not actually a character in the play.  Instead, in unfolds that Romeo has fallen in love with Ophelia and Hamlet is into Juliet.  Then Ophelia and Juliet engage in a belly-dancing competition over their men (it’s not entirely clear why since they don’t even want the same one), while Romeo and Hamlet engage in a more manly sword-fight.   The ghost of Hamlet’s father appears in a video projected onto a giant screen and asks Hamlet to kill Juliet’s nurse, who has appeared as a blond French woman named Chantal, so that he can enjoy himself with her ghost.  Horatio and three other side-kicks also are in love with Chantal, and therefore compete for her love through a dance-off, a improvised poetry competition, a go-cart race, and a gun battle that ends with Chantal’s death and union with Hamlet’s father’s ghost.  Huh?

All of this strange and vapid content unfolded in a stiff Modern Standard Arabic and was interspersed with bursts of overly loud rock music or dance numbers, as well as English interjections: “Okay, Romeo!” “Okay, Ophelia!”  There was no suspense, since I didn’t really care which one of the identical side-kicks ended up with Chantal, whose death didn’t do quite enough to end her weak dance moves and lines delivered in a squeaky, high-pitched voice.  The comedy created by the intentional Shakespearean character mix-up quickly evaporated.    And all that was left was something that resembled the novels we’d been reading for my lit class, and for that matter a great number of speeches by Arab League officials, Abu Mazen, and you-fill-in-the-blank politician, Middle Eastern or otherwise: theatrics and rhetorical flourishes without content or meaning.  At least the play threw in a few dance numbers.

After my History of Syria and Lebanon teacher withdrew from his post under mysterious circumstances, my classmates and I unanimously decided to cancel the class rather than looking for a new history professor.  I elected, after perhaps an equally mysterious thought process, to join an 8 am grammar class.  It proved to be a huge improvement over the history class, which is saying something since the grammar class, though perversely enjoyable, consists of learning grammatic rules so arcane that I have to create two categories in my mind: grammar for the grammar class and grammar professor, and grammar for everyone else.  The professor is obsessed with what he considers to be Widespread Grammatical Mistakes that include such “neologisms” as في نفس الوقت, في الوقت ذاته, بشكل عام، بشكل خاص, and many more that most college-educated Syrians consider perfectly acceptable, provoking regular academic arguments among the CASA teachers as to just which usages they should allow in our writing assignments.  Its sort of the equivalent of an English teacher stringently preventing her or his students from splitting infinitives, only much worse, since all the guy’s proof of his grammatical rules come from sources that are at least 1000 years old, literally.  Oh, Arabic.

And the Arabist said it most recently:

“Just in case you forget, the Likud and Bibi Netanyahu do not recognize Palestine’s right to exist. Funny how you don’t see that mentioned too often in the New York Times, which reminds its readers of the Hamas charter’s stance on Israel every time the group is mentioned.”

Yup…