“Free Hugs”

My mother lost her job yesterday so I was in a pretty fretful mood as I distractedly trudged down 14th street in Columbia Heights last night.   I almost stumbled into a young man standing in the middle of the sidewalk. He was holding a cardboard sign, the kind of placard that would normally read “homeless, please help,” “judgment day hath come,” or some other plea for help or harbinger of doom. In other words, the type of sign that my mom and I will be sporting soon. There are always several people asking for at least literal change at this corner, outside of the Target and the Washington Sports Club in this gentrifying neighborhood. Recently I’ve been investing heavily in this crowd, the microfinance division of the Karma Bank, with very little return but to my surprise this man’s sign instead said, “Free Hugs.” As I approached he opened his arms wide and asked quizically, “Spread the love?” With befuddled amusement I thought,  Who is this guy? And what am I doing with my life? And sure, I could use a hug today. As I leaned into his embrace, our two puffy coats collided in a squish that sent a couple stray down feathers into the air. We stayed like that for a couple of awkward moments outside of the Target before I pried, “So, what’s your deal?” He just chuckled. “No deal! Just, why not?” “Well,” I pointed out, “it’s cold out, for one.” With a wink he quipped, “Yeah but I feel so much warmer now!”

It’s Christmastime in the Suburbs

One might not anticipate a rousing night at the Elmwood Community Center, a squat, middle school-esque brick building in the West Hartford suburbs. I surely did not expect much excitement when I tagged along with my aunt to a holiday party hosted by her senior center’s line dancing class.

Missing the more manageable Syrian winter and unacclimated to the stinging, bitter, New England cold, I miserably tread as quickly as I dared across the icy parking lot with my coat collar pulled tightly around my numb ears and heaved the double, fall-out-shelter-weight, metal doors of the community center shut against the piercing wind. Before I had a chance to enjoy the relief of warmth I was assaulted by a tide of blaring Christmas music with a Latin beat. The Macarena flooded the empty expanse of linoleum at maximum volume. Younger than most by half a century, I suspected I was one of the few people in the room who could without difficulty hear the music pouring from the speakers.

Stark fluorescent lights showcased a gaggle of girls aged six to twelve in identical dazzling glittery dresses and tights running around without abandon between the stage and the clusters of card tables on the sides of the vast space. One of these girls would occasionally pause from sliding across the linoleum and perch on the edge of a folding chair long enough to send text messages on her brightly colored cell phone. I learned she was the daughter of one of the dance teachers, a perky woman with a long straight blonde ponytail and thick eyeliner who strode around clapping her hands, trying in vain to convince the throng of preteens to sit and be still while she encouraged the octogenarians to get up and dance.

At that point I steeled my reserve to not take up my high school friend’s mother’s well meaning suggestion that I move back to Idaho and teach ballet classes. It had crossed my mind as a backup option when she had exclaimed, “Melodee is retiring! Now no one in the whole area is teaching dance. You would be so good at it!” Melodee, who curiously enough also sported a long straight blonde ponytail and a hefty dose of perkiness, taught ballet for years in a studio in her basement in the middle of the windswept prairie near the Nez Perce Indian reservation. I took class with Melodee for two years, during which time I frequently misspelled her unique name when making out checks, and was often forced to drive the forty-five minutes across the prairie in a blinding snowstorm (…uphill both ways…obviously). One night I recall feeling the rear tires slowly slide out of the straight tracks left by the last car. It was impossible to discern the edge of the road through the infinite polka dotted blackness and snow flurries, but with resigned anxiety I felt the car glide left then right then around in a slow circle before I felt it gradually slither off of the road into a ditch. I recall waiting on the empty road with, well, my coat collar pulled tightly around my numb ears against the howling wind for an interminably long time before another car ventured across the lonely prairie.

Something told me that Elsie might appreciate this story. Talking above the Macarena and Jingle Bells, my aunt introduced me to her line dancing partner Elsie. Elsie was a spry ninety year old woman originally from Kentucky. I admired her style. She was wearing heels and black stretch pants, and had bright orange hair. She had also brought her own bottle of wine and was drinking it out of red plastic cups while she surveyed the dance floor. Though a botched knee operation that she hadn’t allowed to heal properly had forced her to switch from salsa to line dancing, she proudly told me that she continued to split her own firewood.

At the next table was a more uptight looking woman. She wore her gray hair in a high tight bun and a gray shirt with a high tight collar. Her skirt was more colorful but garishly patterned and reached to her ankles. My aunt giggled and asked me sarcastically, “Who invited the refugee from Bavaria?” Then she turned and introduced me to Charlie, who was actually a priest. “But,” my aunt confided somewhat gleefully, “His favorite song in our line dancing class is ‘All My Exes Live in Texas!’”

The evening was already more amusing than I had predicted when George Clooney waltzed across the linoleum and extended his hand to me. “Would you care to dance?” he asked me, while I blinked and realized that he was not actually George Clooney but the other dance instructor, a devastatingly handsome man with perfect posture, salt and pepper hair, and astonishingly similar to George Clooney. Or, perhaps everything is relative. He led me to the center of the dance floor and I smiled as a Christmas rhumba started and we spun around and around the other couples. Inspired by the George Clooney look alike’s strong hand on my back I diligently turned into him, away from him, and around him. I confessed that I had no idea what I was doing, mostly for something to say, true as it was. The great thing about a proficient lead is that if a woman can keep her back straight and her shoulders down and her eyes trained on his eyes, he can make you look amazing. Ginger Rogers famously said that “women have to do everything that men do, except backwards and in high heels.” I love this phrase and I love that at least while dancing women get the credit for it, whether or not they deserve it. When the rhumba ended I thanked Mr. Clooney of the Arthur Murray studio, and as I ambled back to my seat next to Elsie I realized that the audience was whistling and clapping.

Hunters Road, Connecticut

I used to sort of date a boy who delights in making overblown portentous statements. We were chatting this afternoon and he concluded that, “all of Connecticut is just a suburb of New York City,” but he has no idea what he’s talking about. I realized this this evening as I was driving through the woods to  see a guy I’d sort of like to date. I drove gleefully and shifted gears enthusiastically in time with my blaring Afro-pop music as the West Hartford suburbs faded into Farmington and then smaller towns and then collections of houses and I struggled to read my hurriedly-scrawled directions by the dim glow of the blinking yellow traffic lights. The dark forest seemed to envelope the road.  I hugged the snaking guardrail that followed the river, admired the bright moonlight reflected on the ice-covered water, playfully drummed the steering wheel to the beat of the Afro-pop with my free hand, and admitted to and reveled in being lost. In the forest! In Connecticut! When I finally arrived at my friend’s house atop a precipitous corkscrew road  he offered to make dinner. “Are you hungry?” He opened the refrigerator and paused. “We have…deer steak.” “Really? That’s awesome.” “Yeah, my father shot it himself.” He looked at me quizzically and added, “That freaks most people out.” A few hours later I was leaving just as his parents were coming home and his father asked me pointedly, “Now where are you from originally? Are you from Connecticut?” “No, I’m actually originally from Idaho.” He raised his eyebrows in what seemed like happy surprise. “Idaho! Wow, now there is a place I wouldn’t mind going someday.” “John’s into hunting, you see,” my friend’s mother explained sweetly. “Yes, I admired the white-tail hanging on the wall in there.” My friend’s mother smiled and burst out, “Oh, so that doesn’t bother you?! Yes, you must be used to that sort of thing!” She jabbed her husband in the ribs and assured me, “He likes you already.” Well, that’s something.

Disorientalism

I was attacked this morning by my aunt’s showerhead. I’m back in the US and it’s strange to have such strong water pressure. I’ve also been showered with questions about Syria, swathed as it is in so much misinformation here. Did I have to wear the hejab? It’s difficult to explain how much I miss the bars full of students in the Christian quarter of the Old City or how wistful I felt when I read (via facebook) that my friend “Found Christmas in Damascus complete with American teeny-bopper pop music being blasted in the Zeitoun Church courtyard, lights galore, free Milo, the church (military-esque) marching band renditions of ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘Angels We Have Heard on High,’ tarateel [hymns] and Midnight Mass :).”

It’s hard to describe the ambiance of Saif wa Shitta, a bar typically filled with expat Italians. The name means “Summer and Winter” and the owner told me he chose it from the lyrics of a Fayrouz song. One of the last nights I was in Damascus I went to meet my friend there. The place is loud, made of old timber, cinderblock, and arched wooden door frames. The small space is filled with wooden tables and long benches like a Viking tavern, but a Viking tavern with free wi-fi. As usual, I was drinking wine, working on my laptop, and talking with the attractive Syrian who owns the place.

Speaking Arabish (some combination of English, Arabic, and wine), I discovered he was 26 and I did a double take. Whoa. My age? I have a type, and it seems to be the older than me emotionally intelligent gentle but sarcastically critical intellectual. It was hard for me to judge this guy, my age, with our not-quite-shared-language. He offered me a cigarette and a giant plate of spaghetti, which was hot and delicious and on the house. The sauce, like all sauces on everything that’s not traditional Syrian food, tasted like ketchup.

“What is this on your jeans?” he asked me, pointing to the chlorine that I had spilled on them while cleaning the bathroom (read: trying in vain to unclog the perpetually clogged toilet). He flattered me by saying, “Oh, it’s okay, it’s moda, fashionable…lots of girls, they are having this on their jeans intentionally…or like this,” as he made a slashing gesture at the cloth above the knees.

Someone at the long Viking tables was practicing the oud, then suddenly the rowdy crowd burst into  singing “Ring of Fire.” The attractive owner tried in vain to get them to quiet down. “Is it always like this?” I asked him. “No, not always, but right now I have to make sure to keep the noise down because now I’m fighting with my neighbor, an American man, he’s an old man and he’s, he’s fucking selfish man.”

There was a football match on TV, fast Italian being spoken at the table behind me, and a laptop on a bench in the corner, with a screensaver that read “Fucking Technology.”

When I walked out of the smoke filled tavern into the winding empty streets of the Old City I paused on the cobblestones and listened…it was absolutely quiet. No one was awake. Only the creaky wooden balconies stretched out into the space above the street.

I walked farther and got into a cab. The driver had long hair. As the car sped off past the old gate of the city he turned on the radio and the Eagles’ Hotel California played softly. I smiled in recognition of the song and he noticed in the rearview mirror. He received a text from a friend and started laughing uncontrollably. I watched him try to text back and drive at the same time and I smiled when he got a response and laughed more, because I know the feeling well. He cranked up the music, almost as loud as it would go, and we both sang along quietly to the song, my off-key notes fortunately drowned out by the volume. The streets were empty as we drove past sahat al-tahrir, or liberation square, and the large fountain in front of the National Bank. No one else was around as we sped past the low green light of the mosque by jisr al abiad. I don’t know why that area is called jisr al-abiad, or white bridge. There is no white bridge; no bridge at all in fact. Apparently there was a bridge a long time ago. The name has remained but the bridge is gone. The cab stopped at a red light and the Eagles sang, “This could be heaven, or this could be hell…You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave….”

My rant from “the Arab street”

Okay, so this is two rants rolled into one feeling of general frustration. The first is with the now ubiquitously trite idea of “the Arab Street” or worse, “the pulse of the Arab street” (since when do streets have pulses?).  Generally I think it’s valuable to try to gauge public opinion whatever one’s goals are: in order to prevent conflict, escalate conflict, sell products, etc. Personally I think it’s important to try to recognize the concerns of common people (*hums Pulp song*), because I think individuals should do what they can to improve the lives of people on the periphery of power and opportunity.  But I’m so irritated by the stated desire of many op-ed columnists and policy wonks to understand the anxieties and aspirations of people “on the Arab street” because often driving that desire is fear, implicit in article titles (even of very good articles like this one) such as “Courting and Containing the Arab Street…” If historical precedent is any guide, even when the opinions and burdens of non-elites are well known very little is done to alleviate them; in fact, more often than not policies with the opposite effect are pursued. Moreover, I’m irritated by the intimation that the beliefs of ordinary people can be divined through parachute reporting or by relaying vignettes and anecdotes (much like this blog, ha! I am not immune to the temptation to jump to conclusions based on conversations with taxi drivers).

Alright. The second installment of the rant is specific to Damascus and only tangentially related to the first. Damascus has recently become an enormously popular place for foreign students to study Arabic, a mecca, if you will, of Arabic language centers, tutors, and institutes. Oft-cited advantages to studying in Damascus include an affordable cost of living and a relative lack of English language penetration in Syria [author’s emphasis on all of the power dynamics of the  sexual implication of that language intended].  What this means is that actually students have a wonderful opportunity to meet a lot of other interesting, engaging foreign students and speak a lot of English. Nonetheless, students, study abroad programs, professors, and language fellowships tout the total immersion experience of studying in Syria, in part because, the narrative goes, students have the chance to learn Arabic by interacting with normal people “on the Arab street.” Disdain is reserved for students who go to Jordan or Egypt, the thinking being that one couldn’t possibly learn the language in those places because too many people speak English “on the street” (this isn’t, in my experience, true anyway).

The important thing this conviction fails to recognize is that I don’t want to learn Arabic from people “on the street” because I don’t want to have lengthy conversations with strangers on the street! I don’t do this in English and I don’t have much intention of doing it in Arabic, or any other language (blame my time in the UK for my reserve, I don’t know). Even more importantly, this approach works much better for men than it does for women. Now, I go out of my way to avoid talking to people “on the street” because the conversation, more often than not, degenerates into an uncomfortable or offensive discussion of my supposed beauty or marital status, or else completely degenerates from a conversation into a lewd stare in my direction. I can usually shrug this off because my conception of self-respect is pretty isolated from, well, other people’s perceptions and actions. However, a couple of weeks ago (yes, weeks…I’ve been thinking about this for awhile but am only making time to write anything a few days before I’m leaving the Middle East) I suffered through a particularly infuriating encounter with “the Arab street.”

I was headed home and hopped into the backseat of a taxi by myself (of course the backseat, though men sit in the front), greeted the driver, told him where I wanted to go, and proceeded to have the following conversation.

Me: “Hello, how are you. I’d like to go to Hamra street, please, near the Blue Tower hotel.”

Taxi driver: “Okay. Where are you from?”

Me: “From America.”

Taxi driver: “Really? America? Not Italy? Not Russia?”

Me: “No, from America.”

Taxi driver: “Oh. You are sure, your background is not Italian, Russian, Arab?”

Me. “I’m sure.” It’s odd, I get the impression that there is a strong stereotype in Syria that American women must all be blonde in order to be truly American.

Taxi driver: “What are you doing in Damascus?”

Me: “Studying Arabic, at the University, in Meze.”

Taxi driver: “Oh, that’s good, do you like it? How do you like Syria?”

I told him I liked Syria a lot. I was relieved that the conversation was normal so far. Then…

Taxi driver: “Are you married?”

Me: “No.” Annoyed, I leaned back in my seat, looked intently out the window, and prepared to pretend not to understand the rest of the gentleman’s questions.

Silence. The trees rush by out the window. The taxi flies under a tunnel and the car is filled with a pleasantly noisy, conversation-obscuring wind. A few minutes go by like this.

Taxi driver: “You know, if you want to learn Arabic you have to practice talking to people.”

Me: “I know.”

Taxi driver: “So, have you been up to the top of Jebel al-Qasioun [the mountain overlooking Damascus] yet?”

Me: “No. Not yet.”

Taxi driver: “There is a beautiful view of the city from the top!”

Me: “Yes, I’ve heard that.”

Taxi driver: “Do you want to go up there now?”

Me: “Um, no. I want to go to Hamra street.”

Taxi driver: “No, it’s beautiful! I’ll take you there now!”

Me: “Um, NO. Thank you, but I want to go to Hamra street.”

Taxi driver: “We’ll go, we’ll go now, I’ll take you to the top. It’s a very nice view.”

I am seething, and almost screaming at him now.

Me: “NO. I want to go to Hamra Street!” (asshole)

Silence.

Then he starts chuckling.

Taxi driver: “Okay, okay, I get it. You want to go to Hamra Street.”

He still smiling, me still seething, he turned the car towards Hamra.

Sha’alaan crossroads

The view from my flat:

along the autostrade, Damascus

The “Arab Rambo”

At the risk of sounding like a Lonely Planet travel guidebook or an orientalist (these two dovetail pretty well, by the way), the old souq in Aleppo is a labyrinth of sights, smells, and sounds. Any traditional souq—and the souq in Aleppo is one of the biggest—is, depending on one’s personality, a delight or an assault on all five senses.

As one walks through the souq the wave after wave of colors displayed is mesmerizing. It seems without end and I usually end up meandering along in a trance (or is that my normal state?), much like strolling along a beach gazing at the surf rolling and crashing, rolling and crashing, rolling and crashing, rolling and crashing…infinitely. There is gold, gold, and more gold, yards of multihued fabric in every pattern, neon-colored sweat suits, sequined underwear, a rainbow of hejab wrapped on a rank of vacant-eyed mannequins, flashing lights racing around kids’ toy guns and trucks, and strings of blinking lights over the entrances of shops and on the dashboards and grilles of trucks. The colored lights on the trucks swirl around in hypnotizing circles, making it all the more difficult to remember to step out of the path of their turning wheels.

There is something captivating about symmetric displays. When I was on the high school dance team I realized that it didn’t matter how cheap a step was, when everyone danced in unison it looked amazing, and I feel the same way about the wares in the souq: the rows and rows of scarves, garden trowels, stacks of blocks of brown olive oil soap, packets of tissues, rolled rugs, squares of sweets, and giant barrels of chamomile, coffee, peanuts, and a fluffy white gel that upon asking I realized was Vaseline. The smells in the souq range from the pleasantly aromatic, like coffee (my favorite), cardamom, and cumin, to the less pleasant, such as cigarette smoke and people sweating too near each other.

Three other foreign students and I were wandering through this maze of shops, nibbling pistachio candies and listening to the honking horns, ringing mobiles, and little kids crying, when out of this cacophony a tall man with a shaved head in a blue sweatshirt called out to us, “Hello! Where are you from?” I turned my head away and attempted to scuttle off into the crowd but a wall of people and my naïve travel companions thwarted my escape. “From America!’ I heard my friend answer him. My heart sank and I tried to flee again but heard the man call after us, “I have a friend in America!” That’s great, I thought. Perhaps I know him? No, I don’t want to buy any of your jewelry. It’s beautiful, but I don’t have any money. No, really I don’t have any money. The man caught up to our group, “I have a friend in California, his name is Arnold Schwarzenegger.” Uh-huh. By this time we found ourselves delivered to the entrance of his—that’s right—silverwork jewelry store. I was aggravated at my peers’ gullibility and also with my lack of money (his jewelry really was beautiful). I was cynically slouching in the doorframe when he placed an aged photo album on the counter and proudly urged us to flip through it. It was filled with decades of snapshots from bodybuilding competitions.

In page after page of photographs, our silversmith friend was posed on the champion’s podium, wearing only the tiniest piece of narrow leather loincloth, with his colossal muscles bulging and gleaming with a slathering of bronzing crème. I recognized his titanic form in the Syrian championships, the Mediterranean championships, the Spanish championships, etc. (Incongruously, there was also a photo of his three-year-old daughter smoking a water pipe. It was taller than she was). I was astonished. My friend Charles exclaimed, “Holy shit man! I thought you were full of shit!” The Syrian man gleefully removed a long coral and silver necklace from his case and modeled it on his own neck. Once it was fastened, he playfully flexed his pecs, hurling the necklace ten inches into the air off his chest. We all jumped in shock and then burst out laughing. My skepticism vanished, and for the next two hours I sat smiling as we drank cups of tea and coffee and he and Charles excitedly discussed bodybuilding. He told us that starting ten months before his competitions he ate nothing but “breast of chicken,” or else a high-protein shake of water and puréed chicken breast. He told us he was known in the souq as the “Arab Rambo,” and if we ever came back through town he urged us to ask anyone where Rambo’s store is, and they would point us in the right direction.

Dancing in Damascus

Beit al-Fan, or “House of Art,” is a non-descript building in the Meze suburbs sandwiched amidst a boutique that sells saccharine Valentine’s Day trinkets year round, an ice cream shop, and a long row of stores specializing in up market pens.

Every Monday and Wednesday evening I have been taking belly dance classes at Beit al-Fan with my Syrian-American friend, her three cousins, and several other women. The studios at Beit al-Fan offer ballet classes, jazz, some kind of aerobics (the poster says “raqs sporty”), yoga, and raqs al-sharqi, literally eastern dance but better known as belly dance.

Before the first class we crowded six women into a single car and excitedly careened around the chaotic traffic circles, over the heaving overpasses, and down the autostraude at breakneck speed. The highways in Damascus are full to overflowing with honking cars, just as Marwah’s little black Chinese-manufactured Chery was bursting at the seams with giggling girls. Marwah’s cousin was sitting between the two front seats on the gearshift with her back to the windshield, one hand braced against the roof of the car, animatedly talking to the three of us in the backseat.

When we arrived at Beit al-Fan I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I had been holding, thankful as always that we hadn’t died in a traffic accident. We walked down the white granite steps to a wrought iron gate, where a sign on the door warned that men were forbidden to enter. The studio was small but warm and brightly lit, with two walls of mirrors and a barre. I am always overjoyed to dance in such a nice space. I remember the basement room in the dingy Elks Lodge in Idaho where I taught dance classes didn’t have a proper barre, and I recall something that had me doubled over in laughter at the time. Once one of the eight or nine year old girls in my class asked her friend, “What’s a barre?” and her friend replied matter of factly, as only a poor child from Grangeville, Idaho, might, “You know, like Oscar’s or the Triangle, where you go to get drunk.”

I thought about how many of the Syrian women packed into the Beit al-Fan studio would never touch a drop of alcohol, as I watched them shed their hejab and throw their scarves onto the large pile of jackets, shoes, and purses in the corner, and I delighted in the fact that nonetheless I felt instantly comfortable there in that studio on the other side of the world. That’s the beauty of any modern dance class: it’s familiar regardless of language or place. Someday I’d like to organize some kind of cultural exchange program with dance as its focus.

And there are cultural differences: notably, whenever anyone’s mobile phone rang during the middle of the instructor’s explanations, the recipient would eagerly bound to the back of the room and for several minutes ardently carry on a loud conversation whilst pacing back and forth, weaving in and out of the women still attempting to follow the routine.

Our teacher has black hair dyed blonde and permed. She always wears thick pink lipstick, and chastises us in melodious Syrian Arabic, “Moooohaik! Not like that! You’re women; not kick boxers! Why so stiff?” Often she’ll smile approvingly through the pink lipstick and softly offer a heartening, “Eeiiii like that.” If the praise is directed at me, often the other astonished women look at me in shocked surprise and exclaim, “How do YOU move like THAT? You’re not even Arab!” How to explain it’s not in one’s blood but a matter of practice, enthusiasm, and also the culmination of countless late nights in a Turkish bar in Washington, D.C., when, encouraged by lots of rum and coke, I was inspired to diligently emulate my Palestinian friend’s gorgeous dancing.

In the car on the way back from the first class, the girls were laughing and talking as before. They were talking about how much anxiety they felt about work, commuting, and upcoming engagements. Marwah nodded her head so vigorously in agreement that she almost dislodged herself from her gearshift perch and said seriously, “I have so much stress, andi katir stress…” It seemed apropos that she said “stress” in English, as the culture of the English-speaking world has certainly perfected the concept. I also have “katir stress” from the uncertainty of learning my way around a new place, worrying about money and needing to find a job, and being convinced that I’ll never learn this language, but this dance class mostly banishes my worry and nervous tension. It makes me feel marvelously energized and accomplished, so much so that even the strain of the harrowing car ride home fails to disturb my gleeful contentment.

Ma’aluula

A couple of weeks ago I visited Ma’aluula, a small Christian village set between the mountains north of Damascus. The community there still speaks Aramaic. I had learned about these villages a few years ago when I was writing my history thesis about the Assyrian Christians, and I had always wanted to see them.