Dimashq #5: A Month & Some: Vignettes of the daily Damascene routine and a trip to Iraq

A Month & Some: Vignettes of the daily Damascene routine and a trip to Iraq

Of course, I’m not really sure where to begin. I got over 6 weeks of experience, ideas, and questions racing through my dome, and I want to get some of it across to you. I’m sorry for not having written in such a long time. But level 5 at the University was intense, and my life outpaced me.

I’m listening to Toumani Diabaté at the moment, and his kora and high, nasal moan are real heartbreakers. It makes me want to go to Mali and hear more West African bards like him sing the truth right to my center. One of my new Syrian roommates, Dariin, is sitting out in the courtyard acting heartbroken as well, since I’m eating breakfast in my room this morning in order to get started on this writing project, instead of out at the common table with her. But, that’s her way of acting 9 years-old when she’s actually 31.

1
It’s only a few days since I’ve returned from my Turkish Kurdistan journey. I can’t remember how much time, since I’m actually writing this well over a month removed from the happening. The last days of Ramadan are upon the city, and I’m feeling the urgent need to fast and break fast just like most of the rest of the country (the Muslim part, anyway). Lucky for me, though, because I’m sitting in the warm early evening sunlight in a square in the quiet neighborhood of Mesēkin Berza in the outer reaches of Damascus proper, waiting for my friend Sēmia to pick me up and take me to her home, where we will break fast and have what I predict will be a soul-quenching ifTār meal when the sun sets. I haven’t consumed a thing since 3a.m. last night, except for some water to keep from perishing, and my stomach is so empty that it doesn’t have energy enough to complain anymore. It’s quiet around here, and I like it. Peaceful. It’s even as if the two-and three-story square white apartment blocks are hushing up and taking a break, just like the line of Somalian men in button-up shirts and dress pants and the occasional baseball cap sitting against the wall opposite me, not doing much except talking a bit, their red-black skin a rare contrast against the dull white of the shop walls behind them.
Sēmia shows up, looking every which way to locate me, wrapped in thin black and red fabric that covers her 50 year-old form and her hair, which sadly is a necessary bit in this conservative immigrant neighborhood. We meet, shake hands that haven’t clasped in several weeks, and she leads me off through the orderly streets of her ‘hood, Syrian kids playing soccer and joyfully screeching in the open spaces, and other Somalian women walking the sidewalks quietly, wrapped in subtly colorful hijabs. Make a little left turn into a building that, on the outside, looks like it was abandoned in some long-ago firebombing, and enter Sēmia’s apartment, a little piece of tidy heaven. Polished tile floors and glowing lights in every corner. I take a seat on the couch near, but not too close to, Sēmia’s roommate, the actual owner of the joint, the large and lovely Hendam, another Somalian who acts shy as hell around me, but whose glasses, ability to understand English and speak Arabic, and subversively creative hijab ensemble betray her burning intelligence. Naturally, though, she’s suspicious of this young, white, male gringo sitting in her living room, watching the dopey Arab cartoons on her TV and expecting food, since she’s been through plenty of up-and-down, having to leave her homeland to escape the carnage of a civil war, knowing the weight of intense racism from her Muslim “brothers and sisters” after living a decade and a half in Saudi Arabia, and having to constantly worry about the conservative Syrians in her ‘hood poking their noses around in her business, including the national secret police. So I just try not to act toooo curious, sing the one line I know from a famous Somalian singer Maryam Mursal over and over, and I’m moved into the “Non-threat” category.
After a few more minutes watching Saudi Arabian cartoons, and asking if and how I can help cook, the ladies are deep into the ifTār duties: Hendam’s rolling out dough on a little table, fabricating meat-and spice-filled dumplings, bringing them back to the kitchen where Sēmia is coating them in egg yolk and seeds, and dropping them into the frying pot, which is really the heart of this whole greasy meal, where every substantial element is fried. Hendam is like a factory, spittin’ out dozens of circular, ball-esque, and square-shaped dumplings, soon to meet their delicious end in the fryer. A pot of water boils and a bowl of coffee and cardamom, cumin, and some other spicy stuff sit beside. Bring on the spicy Somalian coffee, pride of the Horn of Africa, and the result of thousands of years of culinary exchange with Arabia and India.
So, food comes out on huge trays, the dumplings steaming, Sprite and lemonade and coffee are placed beside, the muezzin’s call to evening prayer starts up, and we get going. You know what it’s like to eat a huge, oily meal that’s so tasty you make yourself sick, so I’ll leave it at that. But minutes later, the ashtray is crowded with the butts of Sēmia’s cigarettes, and my stomach is crowded too, and Sēmia and I sit discussing heavy things.
Before I know it, Hendam’s huge frame has booted us out of the living room so she can clean up a bit, and we sit in the air-conditioned quiet of Sēmia’s bedroom—small but well kept. The conversation climbs the stairs of the average into the honest as we discuss religion, me perusing Sēmia’s copy of the Holy Qor’an with an English translation, and Sēmia divulging her angry sentiments about Muslims in the communities she’s lived in who feel they have the right to scold her behavior and tell her what they think is more godly. She cites the example of other Somalian women, friends of Hendam, who come in the house and, piously shocked that Sēmia does not have her hair or head covered, call upon Allah for her salvation. Even I scoff a little at that. Who do they think they are? Sēmia also regales me with details of her personal connection with God (or Allah, as you like….) that she feels every time she prays and reads passages from the Qor’an. But when she smokes, or walks around with her arms uncovered and hair curly and bouncin’, whether at home in Canada, here in Syria, or long ago in her homeland, she feels no shame. Why should she? It’s her goddamn choice how she relates to her God and her community.
Whew! Anyhow, she goes on, and very soon I’m receiving large chunks of deeply private information about Sēmia’s actual mission here in Syria. She reminds me of her thin, crooked-toothed and intense brother I met a while back, who’s since returned to his reluctant refuge place in Yemen. What they had been doing all those times, when I had curiously watched them speak rapidly in Somali in the courtyard of my hotel, was planning the tehrīb (I don’t know how to translate it properly. “Smuggling” or “escape” perhaps?) for another, younger brother who I never met, from Syria to Turkey, and finally on to Greece, where he will hang low until he can find transport to northern Europe—Norway or Sweden—and get proper asylum as a refugee. She spills the lowdown on destinations scoped out, smugglers paid off, documents crafted, and the like, over the course of years in order to make sure that her little brother, who she hadn’t seen in the painfully long period of 20 years, gets out of whatever limbo nowhere place—probably Yemen as well—that he had been stagnating in since his escape from Somalia. Next on the list is the big crooked-toothed brother who I met, Umar. I understood that she felt it was her duty to help them, having made it safely to Canada herself two decades ago and, relatively speaking, having prospered since then.
As we sipped on glasses of Somali coffee so wide they resembled bowls, I asked, honored, why she would share such sensitive information with me. “You are like my son, Sam.” That tugged some heart strings, and I felt elated that this woman had seen something in me that deserved such frankness. Her face was pained, bent with little creases of nostalgia and I-had-it-and-now-it’s-gone on her red-brown skin under her big eyes as she spoke, inserting little clips of what life was like back in Somalia during her childhood, when she and her family weren’t spread out over the world as refugees, and her government was stable. She talked about the jokes they used to make in the family, and the little lullabies they used to sing, if I remember correctly. She talked about the tolerance of those days, the lack of religious persecution (it must be mentioned that her grandfather was a Jewish trader from Yemen who settled in Somalia and married a woman from the Darod clan), and the abundance of intellectuals and professionals in the land. Situations often look better than they actually were in hindsight, but still I could tell the pain of a homeland lost to invasion from without and anarchy within was true. And the pain is shared: during our last meeting before she left Syria, in a loud, obnoxious café, she told me that her and all her fellow refugee girlfriends in Canada would stay up drinking wine and laughing together, talking about the better days in Somalia, when they lived with their families in peace, tears of yearning for the homeland “then” tumbling from their laughing cheeks in the exiled “now”.



2
How I’ve seen both sides of the coin today. It was a good start over at the jēmi3at dimashq (University of Damascus). I cruise into class, acting like I own the joint, the fluorescent lighting in the basement-level classroom coating me and my classmates in a shade of boredom that is impenetrable without that bit of sunlight we usually get from the little windows up top. Usual routine: hang out for a few minutes before our teacher, Semēħ, comes in, speaking to one another (mostly) in our stilted literary Arabic (called fuşħa), me and a Danish friend with really unique rust-red hair managing to tease one another about our respective home cultures in said tongue, and me suffering through the tremendously ungrammatical and badly-pronounced, yet sincere, Arabic of one of my American compatriots in baseball cap and plaid shirt. Somewhere in the conversation, another American, Alia, this one a young Muslim from Georgia clad in the hijab, jumps in and offers some cool anecdote from her time as an intern in Yemen in excellent Arabic accent. By this point the class has just about filled, and the two Chinese women chatter with each other in native idiom, and the two usually mouse-quiet Korean women in the back corner do the same. Majida, the dark, shy French woman of Moroccan origin and such intense skinniness it’s startling, clad all in black with those now-fashionable-for-females baggy Aladdin pants, strides swiftly in and takes her seat. Emel, the other French woman of Moroccan/Algerian origin, stands on the other side of the blank white room speaking in loud, colloquial English just so we know how sharp she is. She’s sharp alright, but there’s something lonely and insecure deep within.
Semēħ steps in the class with that eternal semi-smirk of a confident approaching-middle-age Syrian woman, şabāħ l ķeir’s (Good Morning’s) us, and asks for the news. I didn’t read a damn thing from the newspaper yesterday… too caught up in grocery shopping and my other intense homework to translate yet another article about how great the Syrian president is, so I just sit up straight and try to appear like I’m on top of things. Sure enough, Semēħ picks a Korean woman in back, one of the most sheepish humans I’ve ever seen, to read her news. It’s read so quietly, no one understands a thing. That’s OK. It will come. Someday.
Moving on to grammar that would be comprehensible if Semēħ didn’t go through it so quick, with that expectant yea-it’s-like-that-get-it? look and the swaggering smile. El mebni lilmejhūl, really just a complicated grammatical process for making an action passive, which exists in no actual spoken Arabic dialect as far as I know. Pretty obscure. “Here’s how to form it in the present tense. Voilà. And now in the past tense. Get it?” Nope. The German woman next to me, Manuela, is scribbling notes so fast she can’t possibly be absorbing what’s going up on the board.
Serious moments of caffeine withdrawal exhaustion settle on me and consequently a total incomprehension of the new grammar. Gotta quit it with those cheap espressos sold from that little machine out in the shadowy basement hallway, cuz when I crash on those, I reeeeaaaally crash, you get me? Head on desk and eyes barely open—like that. But it’s not just fatigue though. The sky outside, for the first time since I arrived, is grey with a dust cloud moving up from Jordan, and something about my soul state is making me feel like a proper social pariah around other people, and I have an uncomfortable weight inside.
Break time: The hip and multi-ethnic foreigners, a huge new batch of Brits from three top English universities among them, stand around me chatting contentedly while I sit on the stairs by the entrance reading La Civilisation, ma Mère!…, feeling isolated, and a slab growing in my throat, but preferring to continue reading. There’s something less tiring about just sinking the mind into a book than attempting to make all that social effort. My friends Heny from Québéc, Faisal from San Francisco, and the gorgeous and sweet Karina from Ontario pass me by on the steps, Karina giving a face that begs you to come along, trying to gather me up, but I return my tired eyes to my book. The lovely and colorfully dressed Danish/Somali woman in the group stands behind me, making my mind wander from the book. The sky is brown and grey and filled with dust, and the air is thick with stagnant moisture.
Back to class, and more of the same from above. Except, for the next three sessions, we discuss another ultra-nationalistic one-page text. I don’t know how they fit so much overt pro-Syrian jive into such a little reading, moreover into a reading intended for foreigners, who are going to look at this Syria is jenniet allah 3ale el arđtwo mother countries: their country of birth, and Syria. That’s because the Phoenicians, they say, were all from Syria, and they inspired the Chinese writing system and gave the alphabet to Europe and created medicine and discovered Brazil, and who, in short, because of their Syrian qualities, stirred the whole of the world to develop culture, to put it simply. Over and over. If the Syrian students in this university believe such poo, as our teacher does, it may be no wonder I’ve not seen any obvious political resistance activity in this country. That and the repression of the muķabarāt, the secret police.
(“God’s paradise on Earth”) silliness with a more critical eye. This text starts by saying that all people in the world can say they have The clock strikes 1pm and I still feel agitated, alone, and severally socially crippled. I pour out of the building with the other students, standing around in the crowd on the stairs, and I hope somebody kind will come along and figure me out. I push my way out the university gate, and mope through the crowds of Syrian students in greased-back hair or tight jeans and T-shirts with silly logos, and feel that slab in my throat growing. Tears would be a relief. Push like a person escaping from a burning theatre onto the insultingly overcrowded bus. Humans all around and barely even space enough to stand. More people push aboard and I want to scream “Hey you fuckin’ fools! Wait for the next fucking bus that’s right behind us! What’s the hurry?” As the honking in the snail traffic increases, violent thoughts frequently enter my mind about how to end the honking and the traffic, including yelling and fistfights and special traffic-clearing bombs. Hop off at my stop, repressing tears along the crowded avenue by the dirty park where men lay sprawled out in the green grass. Get home, and Aħmed, smoking shisha in the courtyard, greets me with that polite smile. Kīfak Sam? I push out mēshi l ħēl. Kīfak int?, and try to move nonchalantly into my room, and nearly weep, frustrated and incapable-feeling. Meditate, homework for hours, sleep.
Then I meet tall and scruffy Josh and, sitting in plastic chairs out front of a cheap little hummus and beans place on a cobblestoned street, we talk about travel plans to Iraq and journalism ideas and I feel right at home again. Hmmm… how quickly the coin spins.

3

My mind turns on, my eyes still closed. Wow. So I did sleep. Well that’s good. Open my eyes and look around: Just Karina’s room, no one here but me, the door open and the late afternoon air breathing in and out, and the orange light of that time of day building up outside the doorway. I sit up. Man, this bed is terrible. Shuffling out of the room, I realize Karina is actually curled up on her side on a blanket at the foot of the bed, like a little Palestinian kitten with a master’s degree in International Relations. That’s just a-goddamn-dorable. But why couldn’t she just be courageous and hop into bed next to me? She could push me over on the red bedspread and nonchalantly say “Make room, rafī’i (“buddy”).” I mean, her roommate’s home. She doesn’t have to worry. Whatever.
Push out onto the open-air stairway outside her room, and up the feeble wooden planks to the roof. If this building were anywhere in New York City it would instantly be taken over by some hip artist, all its funky deterioration and dysfunction preserved. There’s a concrete and glass wall around the roof, and many of the glass panels are broken or simply absent. Down below, there’s a few grayish collapsed buildings that are seriously soulful, a garbage dump (?), and farther out on one side a 1970’s-looking attempted art deco apartment building, on the other, a beautiful Shi3ite mosque.
The sun’s getting pretty low. I position a plastic chair behind some laundry hanging out on a clothesline, and get going with the meditation, trying to meet the real me deep down inside. Shit, that’s a mistake then: there should be no trying at all in this type of meditation.






a slight breeze ruffles the laundry.









a call from down in the street






A gentle sound like a squirrel up on the roof with me. Ah, it must
be Karina quietly bringing up coffee.





What’s this? I know those voices wafting up the stairway: Alia, Abdullah, and Heny. Don’t come up here. Well, a minute passes and they’re up here. Loud greetings and slow, basic talk in Arabic, and it takes a surprisingly long time before they notice me. In Arabic: “What’s he doing?” Karina, defensively in English: “He’s meditating.” No response. The dopes have no idea what that means. More time, and loud, inconsiderate conversation passes. They’re talking about me. Heny says, amazed, “ma biħarrak ibnūb!” (“He’s not moving at all!”) Yea fool, no kidding.
After a while, without checking the time, I just bring myself out of the meditation, made shallow and ineffective by the grace of my three Damascene friends up on the roof with me sipping coffee. Basic greetings with Abd, who I’ve not seen in a while, in his native tongue. I give Alia the obligatory cheek-kisses, trying to avoid smudging her heavy makeup, and I give Heny a distant handshake. By this time, the breeze is stronger, the sun’s a weak orange-gold, and Karina’s roommate, Edmund, is up on the roof moving right along in Syrian Arabic dialect, albeit with a British accent. Abd and Heny and Alia go on in private little conversations about work. I like Abd, with his big pug face and Bob Marley T-shirts and never-ending shorts and flip-flops. He always treats me well, and makes compliments on my Arabic, and his eternally naïve stories about drunken parties from the nights past make a funny routine. But come on man—get a clue. Meditating means don’t sit right next to the person talking loudly.
We carry on, me trying not to get out of place in the chilly breeze coming in over the rooftops of the walled Old City just a few blocks off. The roof is growing dark-ish, and I move over on to the natty little mattress against the wall right where Karina is sitting, speak a bit with Heny about his U.N. internship, and I make Abd promise we can do Arabic speaking circles over at a local café with his Syrian mates. We’ve yet to realize our agreement. More talk that is nothing more than crude little jokes and such, and Alia, in headband and high-top sneakers, guides our two boys down the stairs and out.
Me and Edmund and Karina stay up on the roof in the cool blue edge-of-night, Edmund making hilarious jokes about the “quiet suppression” of the British psyche, and me teasing Karina, arms wrapped around her knees and shivering slightly, saying “Yalla, kūni murtēħa, ya bint sefīr” (“Hey, relax a little, ambassador’s daughter”). I call her bint sefīr (“ambassador’s daughter”) because when we first met, I thought she was one of those elite jet-set diplomat’s kids who zoom around the world on wings of wealth. Turned out to be not quite the case. Her wavy black Levantine hair and big eyes and everything else give her the most adorable little-kid qualities, but simultaneously an eye-opening near-flawless beauty. Add: a large dose of humble naïveté, a thick coating of intelligence and curiosity, and a liberal sprinkling of tomboy sensibility, and allow to heat for 24 years. Take that from the oven of life and you’ve got an awesome woman. Or, that’s what I’m beginning to feel, as she’s been steadily melting through my defenses against sociable, gorgeous females who seem too comfortable around me. All those weeks ago, when she first arrived, I put up the wall. “Nu-uh. She’s too friendly. Too worldly. Something’s fishy.” But you cook for a guy, you buy him little things, you ask him out to study every other night and instead talk about Middle Eastern everything with him, you sidle up next to him on the university stairs and when he teases you for getting too close you tell him quietly “But I enjoy your company…”, and the guy starts to feel differently. Hell, she took me and Ed swimming today, and insisted that I come straight to her house right after the pool. Am I being misled? I hope not. I’m so far from home, I don’t need any tricks.
But, she’s off in the shower now, and Edmund’s down in his room studying, as Karina and I should be for our final exam, and I got the roof to my lonesome.
It’s quiet and I try to be with that quiet. Get my spirit to quit with all that jumping around.
Many minutes pass, and Karina’s back up top with me, with wet hair wrapped up in a bun, and falafel in hand. One for me, one for her, and she plops own on the ratty-rat mattress right next to me. Eating… Joking… Teaching me words in Palestinian Arabic… God you have amazing teeth and face and skin. Eyes to eyes. Closer. More cozy…
“I don’t suspect you’ve all eaten yet, have you?” sings Edmund, coming up the creaky stairs. Thanks Ed. The vibe was just getting really nice up here. Fully. Well, he didn’t know. Compliant talk with our short blond British companion, and in moments we’ve finished our falafel and moved down to Edmund’s chamber, which we lock ourselves into, armed with textbooks and dictionaries. ēďēn, call to prayer, comes drifting in the window, and I am only absorbing el mebni lilmejhūl and el mef3ūl el muţlaq on a surface level. What does it do? In what grammatical case do you use this? Is it at all necessary? The long, flat couch is mildly uncomfortable, like this last minute studying before the big test. All these new words are so exciting and potentially useful, but I mustn’t get caught up in my overly-detailed dictionary, which can teach you any number of obscure Arabic words from history if you’re simply looking up “bread”, and I gotta ignore Edmund’s loud deliberations about the meanings of such words. Focus.


OK I think this conjugation is mefhūm, understood.





I just want to be near her.


45 minutes of desire and attempted focusing, and I gotta roll back to mine’s for a shower and beauty rest before the test. Sorry, Karina, I can’t stay up drinking wine with you and Edmund to celebrate your last night in town. And, thought to myself silently: Sorry, Sam, for missing yet another opportunity to lay it on her. But as soon as I rise and throw my dusty pack on, she says “Oh, so you are leaving. I’ll walk you out.” I’m happier than a kid in a candy shop.
She puts purse on shoulder, I make goodbyes to brilliant new British friend, and I follow that beautiful lass down the creaking open-air stairs in the dark, and quietly past Alia’s room, where she sits listening thoughtfully to some brand of emo music. Like mice, we move out the door, into the crumbling, low alleyway, and out to the main drag where a breeze blows and we chatter about what we think makes us different from so many other students abroad, and what she’s gonna do when she makes her way out of the country tomorrow after the final exam. The moment is coming. We keep on along the narrow sidewalk, ‘til we reach a brightly lit liquor store in a street that’s intense and populous and unromantic.
“Uuuugh last night in town. Ah, well, I had a really good time today…”
I respond in kind, but move on to tell her what a special person she is, how much I will miss her, and that I hope she’ll always let people see the down-to-earth qualities that I think make her such an awesome heart.
A cute puppy-pout face, she says she’s going to miss me, and she comes in for the goodbye kisses on the cheek. I gently lift her head and aim for the lips, but she pulls away.
Reluctantly: “I can’t. You know my situation. I may be a bint sefīr, but I’m an honest bint sefīr.”
What’s your situation? You got a ħebīb (“loved one”) in Lebanon that I’ve only heard about through the grapevine and who you avoid talking anything about? I don’t see why that should be a problem, especially after the great time we’ve been having together. But, she so cool in how she deflects my advance that I feel, well, comfortable about it all. Had to try. Feel good that I did.
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning, huh? Good luck on the test. And hey, let’s stay in touch.”
“Thanks. We will. I’ll see you tomorrow. Good luck, Sam!”
Nice. I wouldn’t really call it a failed attempt, I’d just say she’s not my lover yet. I do feel teary though, but only because I’m so glad someone opened up to me that much under such circumstances, and was so sweet with me in this strange country among strange people. I walk down the ave, staying stable, over a little bridge on a canal of rank water and rubbish that runs the length of Damascus, past a giant, thousand year-old stone gate, into the denseness of the Old City, towards home.



4
Round 1- Absolutely racing through the black, far-away night and grey sand eastway of Damascus, on a bus ride that costs about $11 to cross the whole of Syria. Not a bad deal. Little babies just behind me on the back bench seat are screaming so blood-curdlingly loud that it makes me think they have some deep incurable infection that their mother, wrapped in unnecessarily thick black cloth hijab, may be ignorant of, as she arranges screaming babies and bags in like manner of 0% tenderness.
I speak rapidly with great thought and intellectual excitedness with blond, small, proper Edmund, student from London and now-former roommate of Karina. We speak of languages, love, politics, and kindergarten-style bathroom talk. He tells me, with an astounding level of frankness, about the one (I think it was just one) proper girlfriend he has had, an Eritrean immigrant who settled in Sweden and then moved to England for study, who, he claims, was so deeply conflicted over their romance and her family’s deeply-conservative Muslim values, that their relationship could never have lasted long.
Yet the next moment, he is analyzing the class-based guilt that he thinks runs deep in British society, which compels middle-class students at his university to kind-of “feign” political leftness in order to combat the sentiments of guilt they have that their class is the cause of injustice in their country, feeling that they can exorcise themselves of this guilt through overtly “lefty” behavior. His analyses of British psychology are legion, yet really funny because a Yank like me just thinks, “Those Limies are just thinking about it too much! Or, are they?”
He also lets me peek the story of his great-uncle, still living to this day, who “got bored” of England in the 1950’s, and moved to Iranian Kurdistan to be a farmer. He’s been in Middle East/Central Asia ever since, and speaks Kurdish, Farsi, and Turkish fluently, with a smattering of Arabic, and probably some Uzbek now, because he’s currently residing in Northern Afghanistan. This is of note, because later we will find this is the cause of some deep competitive complex within Edmund to outdo his great-unc. Edmund also claims that some disgusting U.S.military creeps tried to get a little pre-invasion-of-Afghanistan-advice out of him, back before they went in to “get Osama”. I think he said something like: “Well, first of all it’s wrong. And you will fail.” That’s pretty spot-on.
A terrible collapse of a Syrian comedy plays on the bus’ single video screen, blurred, with harsh, not-funny-sounding Arabic. Always the crying babies, who, I would later learn, were sprawled out on the floor of the bus. I engage in sporadic, twisted sleep. Josh and Hayden are no more comfortable than I, just one row ahead.

Round 2 – I awake to the crisp semi-desert early morning cool of Qamishli in NE Syria. Scraggly settlements along the roadside, then the wild fringes of town, then the small, open-air bus station that’s got character written all over it.
After descending from the bus, me and the fellas watch a 7:15am shouting match with a amusingly aggressive coffee-skinned guy with black mustache in the station’s parking lot. The mustachioed man is shouting up at a bus driver leaning out his window five feet above him, and making those you-better-hold-me-back-or-I’m-gonna-kill-him movements. This is common, I’ve noticed, in this country. A lot of deep-voiced hollering and warning between men in a conflict, a lot of “hold me back”, a bunch of collar-grabbing, but only a bit of insincere fist-swinging. Not a whole lot of actual get-down fighting. It has something to do with the local macho complex, interesting enough to observe all day and maybe write a PhD thesis on. Every region’s got one. But all the same, Josh is making some cracks about how this must be the mustachioed man’s replacement for a strong cup of morning coffee. “Aaaah, nothing like a good collar grab, cursing a guy’s mother, and threatening to dismember him early in the morning. Bring on life, I’m ready to go!”
We take two rounds of Kurdish tea in little curvy glasses at the bus station, shivering in the morning crisp. Then we hop in a cab that takes us to the border station, and I feel like THE MAN sitting up front, asking the driver to turn up the Arabic hip-hop he’s playing to the level “Obnoxiously Loud”, and we just go cruising down the battered, empty avenues of the town with the windows down, our smiles wide, the music bursting storefront windows as we go by.
We bullshikky at the border post (“What is name of your father? Mother name? Why you are going Turkey? Are you like Syria?”) for about an hour, standing in the line specifically designated for gringos (“ajēnib”), and cleaning up a bit in the most disastrously gross bathroom in all of eastern Syria, complete with toilets that don’t flush, poo-water around the toilets, and broken windows stuffed up with cardboard. Like a little souvenir of the country before we leave its boundaries. We slip like molasses over to the Turkish side, and it’s instantly more developed—on the surface—the natural environment is healthier, and not a soul speaks Arabic. We wander into town, and get ripped off in a Turkish restaurant where we meet an elderly English-speaking Kurd who “have five language” and who used to live in Turkmenistan.
Much to do, with local communal buses and taxis, then we mount a bus that takes us through Turkish frontier towns, across the accumulating grey flatness of this region, over a bridge on the Euphrates river, stopping at some pretty orderly-yet-dirty Kurdish towns, and into a bizarre khaki-grey moonscape of plains rising into dry, featureless and very smooth hills. After all this, and much negotiating over prices (taxis are not cheap, and we only got $250 bucks each for the whole trip) at a pretty sleek new bus station, we switch into a modern taxi with a stone-faced yet brotherly driver who utterly flies along the wide, open highways, constantly switching lanes to get around cars. This would be the de facto driving method for the next five days. Significantly, we observe endless lines of 18-wheeler transport trucks hauling concrete, pipes, rebar, and industrial parts along the autoroutes. I had heard of this phenomenon before from other travelers to the region, who claimed it is a sign of the rapid manufacturing and infrastructure development going on in Iraqi Kurdistan due to the heavy foreign investment and newly-found semi-autonomy of the Iraqi Kurds, as a result of the violent, American-led occupation. We will see if this development brings more benefit to the well-being of the general Kurdish population, or to international investors. Keep an eye out.
Edmund, by this point, has whipped out a notebook with dozens of phrases written in Kurdish that he snatched from the internet, and he is using them to very little effect on the taxi driver, because of dialectal variation and poor transcription.
We’ve passed the Iraqi border, and mount yet another taxi at the growing border town of Zakho. Speeding again, we are amid mountains with verdure and gold afternoon light. A bit like Northern California, and I just can’t believe I’m in this region called the Middle East, which I’ve been trained to believe is barren and violent, like many of my fellow Westerners. We all zip along, with another driver whose Arabic is shaky and English is even shakier and who speeds like his life depended on it, through the growing awesomeness of purple-pink evening sunset mountain hill peeks. Finally, after much twisting through the Swiss-like mountain passes, we arrive in a glowing city on the summit of a mountain, Al Amadiya. The town itself is intensely non-descript, with a lot of drab colors, a few streets, and a statue of some Kurdish war-leader of old, but its elite location among the mountains of God’s Country and fresh air make it worth the trip.
It’s quite cold, and, no regular hotel rooms open (seriously?), we stay in an expensive spot pretty much like a spiffy private house down the hill from town. The owner of the joint, in his benevolence, has his friend ferry us up the hill in a station wagon. It takes searching, waiting, and failing, but finally we locate a local joint with a really big friendly bearded waiter who actually speaks Arabic, and who brings us plates of tremendous meat kebabs, veggies, and bread, and gorge ourselves and smoke cigarettes as some loud fellas behind us play dominoes. Things are lookin’ up, and they begin to look even upper when we meet a young English-speaking Kurdish guy with bright eyes and black goatee who says some sweet things, gives us some info, and then leaves it at that, instead of performing that when-and-where-can-I-see-you-next? routine so common in Damascus. In addition, me and Hayden, my fellow American traveler who hails from New Jersey, find an inexpensive liquor store, we grab some Heinekens and whisky, and Hayden starts to snap his fingers and sing, he’s so happy. “Man, I’m really diggin’ Iraq”, he says. Hell yes. Me too. We’re then ferried back down the hill, Josh teaching us all new Syrian Arabic idioms on the way down, and we stay up half the night consuming that booze and joking culture, politics, and sex, and take the first hot showers in a whiiile. Blessings.

Round 3 – Awaken to the sunny morning chill. Sleepily prep showers and I get locked into the Turkish toilet. Only Josh, with the aid of a big spoon, unlocks the door and sets me free. I meditate for an hour, then we head up the winding, dry mountain road in that station wagon to the center of town. Up top, we seat ourselves in a café filled with old men who are dressed in traditional Iraqi Kurdish get-ups, with thick grey woven waist belts, checkered headdresses, baggy olive trousers and tops, and prayer beads in hand, which to my eyes make them look like Afghan militia fighters. They’re truly badass costumes, and I desire one for myself. The café supplies us with bread and yogurt for breakfast, which doesn’t really suffice, but I’m sated at heart because of the view: the café sits upon an epic cliff edge overlooking a rolling, forested valley of grasses and pines and mountains all around.
We then make our visit to a thousand year-old mosque with a high brown stone minaret, and a courtyard where old men sit counting prayer beads and seeming slightly scornful of our presence. We ask one of the head mu3allim (“Master”, “educator”, various translations) guys in white robes if we can climb the minaret. Sorry, it’s memnū3 (“forbidden”). So instead we stand on the roof of one of the prayer rooms and look out over the hilltop town in the clear air. Little girls down in the cobblestoned street point up to us and say “Haaallo!” and giggle, but their mothers are not as bold, and duck into doorways when we bring our cameras into view. You must be sensitive out here. Then we walk around with a young, dark-featured schoolkid in his blue school uniform, and I peek his geography book for school. Very interesting: much of the book is filled with maps—economic, climatic, topographic, ethnic, and so on—but each map ONLY shows the northern region of Iraq (Kurdistan), and every town is labeled with its Kurdish name, as if it were already its own country. I see none that show the whole of, what I believed is, Iraq. The Iraqi Kurds, it seems, are really hopping onto opportunities for independence from Arab Iraq, and they’re clearly moving towards that goal in the realm of education. Edmund, by the way, is walking along in synchronized stride with nearly every Kurd who accompanies us for more than a minute, asking him or her about basic phrases and how to conjugate verbs from his little notebook, and systematically transcribing everything into that book. I watch, amused, knowing that I am usually in that position, dwelling with each person as much as possible and trying to understand the workings of their bizarre tongue. I was known for this in Morocco. This time around, however, I’ve taken a bit more of a back-seat position, and I watch with pride as Edmund of Kurdistan: Explorer Extraordinaire, bravely advances his knowledge of the local Kurdish tongue, as the rest of us stagnate in our cultural acclimatization, like tourists.
Then, the schoolboy takes us to THE DOPEST house with a vine-covered stone veranda overhanging yet another majestic forested valley. An old, one-eyed man with messy teeth in the badass Kurdish outfit with the headwrap, the apparent owner of the house, approaches us and speaks to us in thick Iraqi Arabic and we make the basic introduction exchange. He tells us Marħaba (“Welcome”) over and over, offers us cigarettes, and sits quietly with us out on the veranda, patient as a lion that has just killed and eaten a whole gazelle. It is a beautiful spot, and if we have to die right here,
well, so be it.



Me and the chaps, walking briskly and joking about American TV shows, head over to the main road out of town, and determined to hitch-hike to the Kurdish capital, Hewler, or at least halfway to Dahuk, we stand on the roadside, in the dust, accompanied by two local boys, with our thumbs out. Hitch-hiking doesn’t seem to be the most popular concept around here, because most drivers just zip past us, putting their thumbs up and smiling hugely. The ones who do stop look uncomfortable and displeased after we run up to their pick-up truck asking if we can ride in the back to some other town, and they speed away faster than they approach. Finally, one guy says “OK, Hewler? Fine. Hop in.” Overjoyed, we throw bags and bodies in the back and start cruising down the hill. The wind whips and the sun shines beams of golden glass, I hang my arm over the side, and we are on the road. For about one minute. At the bottom on the hill, the guy pulls over and tells us to dismount, pointing to some police officers and basically saying “See? They’ll get you a taxi to Hewler. Have a great day!” We are demoralized from failed hitching, but the policemen, of dark skin and thick accents when they speak to us in Arabic, act jolly and ring up their friend. The taxi arrives, and simultaneously, so does a young local guy who speaks impeccable English and wears a suit, who helps us negotiate a bit of a reduced price for the looong ride halfway across Kurdistan to the capital.


…


Round 4 – All but me awake to mean hangovers from cheap whiskey in Kurdistan’s developing-at-an-uncomfortably-quick-pace capital, Hewler (Arabic: Arbil). Memories of last night’s search for lodging come upon me, when we stumbled up the pitch-black stairs of the ultimately raggedy little spot called Dār es Selēm (“House of Peace”). Not a mouse stirred, and I wondered what the hell this dark hole of a five-dollar hotel could offer. Not much, for we strode up to the second level, where the hotel’s office was to be found, and the only other soul we could see in the place was an old man in sweater asleep in his office chair by a desk lit with, yes… an old-fashioned glass oil lamp. We woke him, asked him if there were any rooms available, or space on the roof, for that matter, and his massively confused, frustrated response in rough Arabic was “Le! Maku! Maku!” (“No! There’s nothing! There’s nothing!) Well, damn, old man. So we lurched back down the dark stairs over to another joint, it was too expensive, and so we decided to give it another hilarious try. Back to Dār es Selēm, Edmund got out his Kurdish notebook, we pushed him up the stairs, giggling, and finding the old man now reposing semi-somnolent on a bench in the nighttime hallway, Edmund bravely read Article 1 of the Declaration of Human Rights to the old man—in trembling Kurdish. The man was bewildered and wide-eyed and said again “Maku!”, so we had to head back to the more pricey place.
Anyhow, this morning we are languishing about the hotel, struggling through cold showers, but we finally get out into the sad dusty grey sky of the afternoon. We stagger, led by the tall, commanding Josh, through some bustling streets that I imagine must resemble those of small cities in China, I photograph and speak briefly with two smiling, timid Ethiopians (What?! They must feel stranger than strange in this strange place!), and we find a spot to sit down. We eat next to stern-faced men chowing down on meat-skewers at 10:30a.m., thus confirming the fears of Damascenes that Iraqis are brute ruffians who do, indeed, eat meat for breakfast. Who’s the wimp, though, and who’s the barbarian, when Damascenes can’t handle more than bread, olives, and yogurt early in the day?

After much wandering, we stop at an English-language bookstore, speak with some older, wise-type cats, and Ed and I buy Kurdish-Arabic-English dictionaries. Outside a falafel shop, we meet a clean-shaven Kurdish guy from Syria in tight T-shirt, who has studied in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. The fella is nerdy-awkward yet amicable, and takes us to a sweet tea spot with more wisened men, dominoes, and old wooden pew-type benches. Nice of him, but he is one of those romantic intellectual idealists who thinks that just because of his tremendous education he can make confident generalizations about Westerners after we snap some pictures within the café, and he claims that we hide behind the lenses of our cameras instead of truly experiencing things, and he let’s us know that he doesn’t even possess a camera. Well, good for you, man. However, his theory is so simplistic and untrue that it just pisses us off.
Then we explore the massive qala3a (“Fortress”) atop the peak of a hill here in the center of Hewler, which, Ed claims, was built under the command of the famous Şalāħ ed dīn, or Saladin, a Kurd himself. Sadly, except for a huge stone statue of some ancient Kurdish Islamic scholar who wrote a history of Hewler, the inside of the qala3aqala3a, though. From here, we make an uncomfortable farewell to our brainy Kurdish companion. Then we chat with the manager of our hotel, a Kurdish refugee recently returned from life in England and Holland, who also “have five language”, and, on his advice, we grab bags and zip out to the office of the Kurdish Democratic Party office, where we’ve been told we can find free transport to Laleish. None of the heavily armed guards of dark-features in beret caps out front of the parliament building have any idea what were talking about, and besides, they remind us, “it’s yom el jum3a, foreign friends” (“Friday”, the day of rest around here), so we shouldn’t expect much bending over backwards for us. Thus, another expensive taxi ensues.

is surprisingly uninteresting, mostly because much of the brownish stone and brick is crumbling, and all the rooms and semi-houses within are screaming for repair. A badass view of Hewler from some of the verandas around the edge of the .
.
.
We are in the taxi an hour outside of Hewler, in the dry, swelling plains south of the mountains of northern Kurdistan. The sky is overcast, grey, and forlorn. The wind blows, and we roll, speedily, through shitty side-of-highway towns where everything looks like a bomb has recently damaged it. Josh is up front, next to the driver, who’s rapping away in a grungy Arabic I have not the energy or ability to understand.
Josh opens up his wise ears and comprehends, however, what the husky driver has to tell him as we ride through this particular side-of-highway town: Four years ago, a Muslim man from this town tried to marry a Yazidi woman (Yazidism is a distant offshoot of Shi3a Islam which, I’ve heard, was founded in Yemen many centuries ago, that has taken hold among many Kurds in Iraq/Iran/Caucasus region, which has incorporated strong elements of Persian Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and even Buddhism I’ve been told, in addition to an admixture of Kurdish pre-Islamic traditions. They also claim no one holy book for themselves, like Jews do the Torah, or other Muslims the Qor’an). The family of the Yazidi woman rejected the marriage (Also, Yazidis can not marry outside of their religion), as they felt it would bring dishonor on the town or clan or whatever group. To cleanse themselves of such a potential dishonor, the Yazidis got together, and stoned the woman to death. In addition, Yazidis violently attacked the town to avenge her death. Since then, the townspeople have blocked up the all the roads leading to the town but for the main one, with huge piles of dirt and rock, to avoid another surprise attack. I can see the rock piles. Fucking ugly stuff.
And, just for a moment, I understand danger in a new, more sinister way. We had always rode past these towns and asked the drivers to stop so we could use the bathroom and grab some food. The towns looked pretty average to us, but the driver’s would refuse, claiming they were ķaţīr (“dangerous”). I didn’t see anyone carrying weapons, or any sings saying “foreigners beware”, or any craters at roadside, so I would think, “what do they mean, ‘dangerous’?!” But now I see that danger is more often a thing that lurks below the immediate surface of a situation, whether it simply stems from fear or anger or resentment, and the invisibility ofthis potential danger can lure the unaware participant into such a situation, and leave him or her vulnerable at the wrong time. I get a shiver in the bottom of my gut.

.
.
.
Round 5 – Laleish: “Awesome!” I’m sure we all think in unison, nervously, as we roll past throngs of Yazidi pilgrims at roadside. We are in for more than we bargained. We had heard about a festival at Laleish, the “capital” of the Yazidi religion, from an Australian journalist friend of Josh’s two days before we left Syria. We had not a clue what the festival was about, assuming it must be some music event, and I had heard from an American soul-brother of mine who was here in May that it is a glorious place. So now, we’re here.
The sun shines brightly on the scrubby, semi-forested mountains not all that far north of the troubled Iraqi city of Mosul, and after the taxi pushes around loooooaaads of brightly dressed Yazidi Kurds, many of the women with far too much face-makeup, the quiet-but-cool driver gives us the drop, we hand him his due, we take some obligatory Coca Cola and cigarettes from some Kurdish guys seated by their truck, and we begin the ascent. Since my camera, by this point, has hit another major malfunction (meaning I, myself, have lost my pics and videos of this grand town), I try to use Edmund’s camera to capture some of the bizarre beauty of Kurdish women in black and gold, or red and black dresses, with hair so thick with finishing products your heart wilts. I snap pictures of barefooted men with colorful sashes around their necks under trees selling endless water bottles to the pilgrims, as we ascend the deepening incline of the road among thick streams of people.
Just before entering into the realm of the high stone buildings and carved rock stairs winding up the mountains on both sides, we stop for a moment, and a crowd of mostly young men accumulates around us quicker than ice on your nose when you’re riding a motorcycle through Alaska in February. Many of them speak English, because of the new Kurdish education system that favors Kurdish and English over Arabic, or because they’ve gladly worked with the occupying US forces as translators. One guy with perpetual sunglasses and earphones and a crazy smile gives us a bit of info on the situation: first of all, we are welcome in Laleish. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome… Welcome. Next, this is the Yazidi’s annual 7-day, annual religious festival, the most important event of their faith during the year. Finally, we got to take our shoes off before we enter the town. It’s funny because, despite all the question-asking and talking, we don’t really get an idea of what the aim of the festival is, aside from a giant reunion, really. We will learn, as we continue, that a majority, I would say, of these Yazidis hail from the powerfully-named Mount Chingar way to the west, a small highland area on the southern fringe of Iraqi Kurdistan that actually extends over the border a bit into Syria. Consequently, the Kurdish that Ed has been meticulously collecting in each Kurdistan locale has little effect here, because these folks speak basically their own ethnically and regionally distinct Yazidi dialect of Kurdish, under the sub-heading Kurmanji, as opposed to Sorani, like they speak over in Hewler (Ed, correct my classification if I’ve made an error, which is quite possible). Some day, though, I hope to see Mount Chingar.
We melt through the thick audience around us, each of us lead by a different excited Kurdish man, and already, my bare feet are hurting me, especially with the weight of my pack on. The other guys are doing fine, though. Damn, my feet are more baby-skin sensitive than my heart, which is saying a lot. We climb up a few stone steps, into the base of a white and grey stone temple complex. Countless lines of Yazidis push past, going every direction, and I try to find some pretty Yazidi girls. I repeatedly spot one from behind that I think must be the Queen of Kurdistan, but then she turns around and she’s either apparently less than 16 years-old, or has a bright coat of makeup on that repels me.
The sun is growing louder overhead. Each of us now has a proper group growing around us, separated as we are, and it’s less than ten minutes of people pushing in on me and getting eeeeendless pictures taken with me, and me asking where my friends are to no response, that I feel like both weeping and lashing out and saying “Hospitality is wonderful! But it can be deadly. Please be careful.”
Finally, after forcing the point that we must be reunited for what seems like hours, we finally come together. We are lead by our array of guides up to a stone portal inscribed around the edge with blessings in Arabic, beside which seated men in checkered headwraps handle snakes in their laps and ask for money, and we are told NOT to step on, but to step over, the marble block at the base of the portal. What would happen if we did, though? Old people, begging in Kurdish, line the walls of the short tunnel. It’s umm, too complex to call madness. But it’s so intense to my senses that I have to go silent and focus on my steps amid the asking, pushing, grabbing Kurdish caravan accompanying me. It does get wilder though, because we immediately enter into a courtyard where a mentally-disabled man comes around speaking to the clouds and shaking everyone’s hands, and where Baba Sheikh, leader of the Yazidi religion, who looks like a child of Santa Claus and Buddha in his white robes, long grey beard, big headwrap, and folded legs, reposes before a huge group of seated people under a marble gazebo. I angle some pictures of some important-looking clerics—excluding Baba Sheikh—and Hayden, Josh, and I regroup. We look for Edmund of Kurdistan, and see that the short blond man is but a few meters off, has his notebook out and is scribbling down Kurdish faster than fire, smiling and speaking and inquiring, and allowing himself to be swallowed up by the growing group of spectators.
“He’s home now. He’s found himself. Let’s go, fellas,” I say.
We leave happy Ed to his new family, and are lead up a series of winding stone, then earthen paths past temples, cafés, and flat patios of relaxation, to different little caves, filled with people, where we sit in the thick air drinking Kurdish tea and answering questions. After a quarter-hour of this, the three of us reconnect and are led further up to a high rocky point under a tree on the mountainside overlooking the pointed, sand-colored domes of the temples of Laleish below. Here, we smoke argila water pipe with a bunch of young guys with no shoes who look much older than they are, many of whom speak English and sport smartly-shaved facial hair. Some approach us with Texas accents, saying, “Yea man, I working translator with the American army. Good people, man. I did like those guy sooo much,” or others who, in essence, say, “Hey Americans! Welcome! I like to kill Arabs too. I work with the army.” Ugh. I don’t think you understand what you’re saying, friend, and I’m against the American army and its occupation. Let’s find some other common ground.
We are up on that lookout point for ages talking with the young men, asking them about where we might stay the night in the town, with who, etc., and hearing their commentary on people like Michael Jackson. Interestingly, we had immediately been invited to stay with one of the young guys when we inquired upon entering the town. This was confirmed by other men, who restated the invitation. By the time we got to this lookout point we were getting mixed messages, and are now hearing from some of our companions that we should not stay and that they would be happy to pay for a taxi back to Dahuk—the city we had come from—where we can spend the night in greater comfort. We must get this confusing and uncomfortable issue sorted out, because time is going… going!
I’m just relishing not walking through the painful grit and stones in my bare feet, as I’m obliged to here, taking my repose on my ass like any non-Yazidi might. The young men can’t seem to get our names on their tongues, and between punches of thick, guttural Kurdish spoken between each other, they ask us questions tipped with “Sir”, instead of our names. The sun is slowly falling, and Josh and Hayden, after taking some pictures from a ridge of lines of guys doing a traditional Kurdish dance, descend the mountain to go find our brother-in-travel and a bit of food. I stay up top on the rocky lookout, writing in my journal and looking at bugs and generally staying so quiet that the young Kurds get bored and just about give up with the infinite questions and comments. With a water bottle, I assault a fire ant that’s getting too close for comfort.
I loose track of the minutes, then graceful lumps of time that slip past, and before I know it I’m having a conversation in my rusty French with a Kurdish émigré recently returned from Germany, who, in his nice slacks and leather belt and sharp haircut, asks, “Don’t you think my girlfriend over there is beautiful?” Actually she’s the most attractive woman I’ve seen in the village, with her dark hair and her pretty pink coat, and I had been observing her fully for the past half-hour, so yes, definitely. He also says that if we want to stay, there are special houses for us gringos down at the edge of the village that we can use, but that we should ask Baba Sheikh for permission first. Merci, mon ami.
Finally, completely assembled, and carrying a roast chicken, smiles, and stories, my three ajēnib mates climb back up the path. We chow heavily on the bits of roast white meat with little Iraqi bread rolls as Edmund tells us what he learned down in the village, fully submerged. The most important of the many tidbits is that, according to what one self-appointed educator was telling him, Yazidis are actually a three-caste society, with one caste being most powerful, falling to kind-of-powerful, then to common folk with little power. This was the reason for the confusion over our lodging status in Laleish, because it was lower-caste people who had invited us, but when middle-and upper-caste Yazidis had gotten wind of this transgression of their authority, they sent word down the chain that we were not to stay the night. Aaaaah, ok.
So, we ready ourselves for another descent, but this one swift, quiet, and with purpose: to get the permission from Baba Sheikh to stay the night in Laleish. We pull packs on, shoes tied to the side straps, and wince back down the mountain path. We are detained for a while on a patio full of people talking, with women around the edges chopping vegetables for dinner, and are seated on a rug in the middle of a storm of humanity as young men and women take unending photos with us and tell us factoids, until Josh simply can’t take the crowding and we politely and firmly bust out. Quietly down the steep stone path, me in intense pain from my tender feet, and we wade around at the base of the mountain, another crowd of adolescents gathering around us in the building purple-black darkness. The athletic Hayden makes a push back through that weird portal from earlier, and is out of sight for ten long minutes. We wait, nervously, but the grand soul reemerges, telling us that he asked for Baba Sheikh, was guided to the fat man’s spot, knelt on one knee before him like a knight, dropped a bit of money in front of him, kissed his hand, and in a blur of Kurdish translation, was officially bestowed “You can stay” status. Great!
We rush back up the steep paths of stone and pain around numerous buildings, young Kurds walking alongside me telling me I have weak feet and I want to blast them away out of pain, and at one point on an earthen path I just sit down, grumbling and cursing resignedly like my pop does sometimes, and resolutely put sneakers on my feet. Walking in them, if felt strange not to have pain. Me and Ed locate Josh and Hayden, who’ve taken a seat on a stone patch on a brown, soily hill and are talking to a surprisingly laid-back 15 year-old of curly hair, named Mostafa. I jog over to a stone and concrete shack on the hill where some remarkably authentic old ladies are sitting, and take some amazing pictures of a line of them sitting in the dusky path soil, the last bit of sun crashing behind them and the beautiful young woman among them never smiling. Those pictures are lost, because of technical difficulties. Then, I struggle up onto the roof of the shack in the dark, and share big plates of rice and chicken, garlicky and oily and delicious, and some watermelon with five or six more-restrained-in-spirit mid-age men. They are generous, and ask what I think about Kurdistan and about what I want as a career. I tell the sage fellows I want to help work against violence and war through the truth of journalism, especially in places like Iraq, and they nod approvingly and basically say, “You got it, friend. We all want peace.”
Then me and the three pals, after thanking little Mostafa for his kind coolness, and promises to return soon, drag ourselves up through bushes to a height on the mountain, where we choose the place where we will sleep. It’s flat enough up here, right? We won’t roll to our deaths while sleeping? Amid the tall grass and rocks, we take big, repulsive gulps of whiskey and Josh makes jokes about the quirks of Syrian character and imitates the BBC reporter accent, and we listen to Yazidis clapping and howling like jackals in the town far below, its lights now shining like little stars thrown into the cracks of the mountains. Off to our left, a huge red-orange light from the flame at the top of an oil well spout illuminates part of the sky, and it’s surreal. A half-hour passes, we tuck our bags into secure rock-cradles, and we slowly descend the scrubby slope following flashlights on our cell phones.
Down in the heart of Laleish we’re moving quick to avoid crowd-accumulation, and it seems that if we steer clear of the lights from outdoor cafés and beverage vendors, and with the cover of night, people seem to assume that we’re not the amazing foreigners we are. I’m lovin’ my sneakers on my feet, but the boys decide they want to keep respecting the custom and disarm themselves of shoes. We end up speaking to some young, chic cats of high-level English just beyond the light of a house, and within minutes a crowd of grinning young men in jackets is gathering around us, and they take us up to the flat concrete roof of the house, where dozens of people have already laid out blankets and are sleeping.
We place ourselves in a line on the roof edge, and the each of us speaks with a different young guy who loves to use the words “man”, and “so cool”. Tea glasses are brought to us repeatedly on little saucers, and as I’m sipping the stuff, I’m speaking with a guy about my age who works with the US military as a translator. His black goatee and dark eyes and scarf all bob around quickly as he speaks about the American friends in the military he made. The dude is handsome, no doubt about that, and I wonder how quickly the foreigner Western girls over in Damascus who are hungering for somebody exotic but a little easier to relate to would just devour guys like him. He seems so proud of his work with the US military, and he relates his experiences with fondness and a little more that a hint of thoughtless anti-Arab racism. I ask him if he’s got Arab friends, maybe down in Mosul where he was working, and he says “Of course.” Then I ask him if they were good people: same answer. Then, if he’d want harm on them. “No way”, he says. Through such logic, I try to impress upon him the fact that his service for the US empire machine is only helping to a force that destroys the lives of countless people like those Arab friends of his. We talk about the nasty, murderous things the military does in Iraq everyday, which he admits without too much prying, and I tell him that’s why I’m against the US military. After a few minutes, his eyes fall, and he tells me not to exclaim that he works for the Americans so loudly around here, because in fact such service isn’t as popular among some of his fellow Kurds as he made it seem.
He then talks about his faith, and has little to say but for the fact that Yazidis have no holy book, have maaany saints, and that they must pray two times a day: at sunrise and sunset. He claims that he and his peers, in general, don’t know much of the doctrinal complexities of the religion. It’s just their identity, he says.
The little tea glasses with spoons are empty once more, and me and my travelling companions pull ourselves up from the mass of sweet young guys in dark clothes. We make extended goodbyes, Ed using the swath of new Kurdish phrases he’s just learned, and we run over to a shabby little outdoor café with a big uneven wooden table. Tea, cigarettes, shawarma, and sweet biscuits, and we out. Again we’re under the patchwork of lights and along the twisting paths that skirt courtyards and rooftops and streets where mounds of people lay wrapped up in blankets, breathing peacefully, like a huge living cemetery. Strange to see those animated people so quiet.
Back up at our secret spot on the mountain, we spread out a blanket that one of the young men down on the rooftop so graciously gave to us, weigh its edges down with our packs, and commence with the last half of the handle of whiskey. The brown liquid keeps our veins hot in the cold mountain air, and we are making the greatest jokes and arguing about racism and war, beatboxing and freestyle rapping and singing low, clever blues riffs, and the bond is setting in faster than Elmer’s glue between me and these boys, strangers like me wherever we go on this continent. In fact, the little musical mouth-jam we’re creating is so spontaneous and alive we can’t help but crack up in giggles here and there.
Quiet finally arrives upon us. Now I ask myself: Am I actually going to sleep on this cold mountainside? I hope there’s no animals that will eat us in the night. Damn that’s a scary though. OK, just get close to these guys to stay warm… It’s nippy up here… Boy that whiskey made me sleepy…



Round 6 – BAM. Awake. “OK, it’s 5:20a.m.,” I hear Hayden say as I open my eyes to the purple-pink consciousness of the morning just beginning to stand on its wobbly legs. Wow, I actually slept. But not very much, and my muscles ache and my feet are warm and swamp-like inside my thick sneakers.
After blowing a bit of the snot from our noses and making sure we’re all still alive, a quick walk, becoming a scramble, up the rocky, steepening side of the mountain begins. As often happens, I fall far behind, and soon the sound of Ed, Hayden, and Josh is lost on my ears but for the crashes they make over rocks and through underbrush, and I lose sight of them in the dull blue dawn light. Breath quickens. My head fills with blood and I become alert, and my heart pounds as I push myself like a crazed bull up the mountainside. This is great exercise, and good for the coordination too, I’m sure. Probably prevents Alzheimer’s disease.
The grey rocks and tall grass and thorn bushes are a lot like the vegetation on the trails I’ve hiked in New Jersey, except this is less dense and a paler green. Finally I reach a slanting, boulder-filled ravine that goes straight up to the summit, where I can hear the voices of my three mates in the morning cold. OK, place one hand in this crack. Pull yourself up. Watch that loose rock there. Put a foot under that. Secure? Now push up. At last I drag myself over the rough edge onto the flat, stony summit. Up here, in the growing light, I finally realize than Josh hasn’t been wearing some hip British outdoors hat as I thought he was, but actually a pair of underwear, on his head, to protect himself from the cold, and some boxer shorts over his pants. Creative.
The sun begins to gush orange-gold color into the cracks of the valley up ahead, and it looks strange behind the raging flame of that oil well down in the lowlands a few kilometers out. Color is starting to fill in the crease between the mountains where little Laleish is located, and we can hear, already, the excited voices of what sound like some old peasant folks saluting the rising sun down below. We take pictures, futz around, and realizing that we may not actually survive another heavy attack of hospitality and warmth, we scrabble back down the rocks and through the trees to our packs.
The sun is pretty well-risen by now and we hastily brush teeth and stuff packs with whatever lays around, and I can see below us some Yazidi youth are already beginning to occupy certain bits of the mountain slope at this early hour, and they’re getting closer. Pack that bottle into Hayden’s bag… zip myself up in my fleece… what about the blanket?
“Ah, now’s the moment,” I think.
Trying to hold my camera as stable as possible, I direct Josh to stand over out of the sun’s direct light, so we can see him better. He props an adventurous leg up on a rock, stiffens his spine and gets that posh British posture, and I say “3… 2… 1… action!”, and he begins the improvised skit we’ve been making jokes about during the whole trip, as a classic BBC foreign corresponded doing a broadcast. It’s hilarious. He uses all the same language, gestures, and his BBC accent is so precise that it forces laughs up and out of the most hardened souls. He does a report on a religious revolt growing against the Yazidis, pointing to the gnarly blanket we slept on and claiming that it’s evidence of the encampment of some anti-Baba Sheikh rebels who’re here to take control. Then he gives one of those ridiculously long sign-offs, ending it with “Steven Pilkington, BBC, Baghdad.” in that archetypal voice, even though he’s just said he’s in Kurdistan several times. You’d laugh if you were there.
Then it’s a beautiful rush down amid the shrubbery, along some footpaths, trying to avoid the small groups of Yazidis that are beginning to form in some of the clearings for fear of hospitality that may retard our advance. The sun, by this point, is beginning to roar a passionate red-gold, and I snap some photos of a motley crew of Yazidis sitting out on a patio, women in bright dresses, some with their hair wrapped up in cloth, and some of the men decked out in desert Bedouin gowns with headdresses and others in slacks and business shirts. As we push quickly past small groups of arm-linked women on the path, a few of the old ones dressed like nuns, I start shooting video of the Oriental Bazaar this village resembles, even at 7a.m, capturing the herds of people shifting along the stairs and pathways leading up to the temple buildings set in the mountains’ bases . All of those pictures and videos are lost now. My friends are, again, barefoot, but as we cruise down the last stone steps and past the little barricade to prevent car entry, they halt and daintily re-shoe themselves. We’re going against traffic now, because even at this eye-crust hour loads more queerly-dressed Yazidi pilgrims are pushing up the road with their things in hand, and we got to duck and weave around them like Mike Tyson in a fight.
We pass bearded guys in vests yelling with the utmost masculinity “Chingaaaar!” for taxis to the mountain of that name, and somehow little Mostafa, the bright, far-more-than-bearable young adolescent we met last night descends upon us like an angel-prophet, all smile and curly hair, and leads us, barefoot, down the road. After walking for a heavy 10 minutes, we come upon some taxis, and with the oil well spout flaming on a hill in the background, we drop our Laleish loads into the taxi’s trunk, and shake hands with Mostafa. “You are welcome in Laleish, guys.”
The sun’s shining loud and clear, illuminating the road back home. I grab the big, brown hand of the taxi driver in a friendly clasp. “Weyn tarūhūn?” (“Where are you headed?”) he asks, cigarette stuck to his lower lip. “Damascus,” we say. “Let’s go.”