End Notes
The year is coming to a close. So is my time here, in this country that doesn’t seem to move, but through which I’ve moved a lot during the last five months.
I just finished lunch-fast out on the terrace of my room, my fingers getting sticky from the orange dribblings running off the rinds, my tongue burning a bit from the bread dipped in hommus spiced with some “oriental” pepper concoction, and my thoughts gaining speed, fueled by the lukewarm coffee I’m pouring from the rekwe (Arabic coffee pot). There’s no chair out there, so I sat with my ass on the dusty terrace, and pulled hunks of bread and fruit from plates I placed upon a stool. The little wall obstructed my view of the street, so I looked upwards, towards the clotheslines crisscrossing the terraces above me, the tired branches of a tree, some unimaginative, beat apartment buildings across from me, and the winter sun, edging around grey-white clouds. Car horns and bus engines rumbled anciently from the main street, shēri3 yarmūk, behind me, and the sharp nasal cries of butane hawkers and their clanging of wrenches against tanks, down in the alley below.
Me and everyone else in
Out on the terrace, just a few minutes ago, I had space to consider the splinters of reality that have been pressing into my mind over the last few weeks: I need a goddamn job, and one that furthers my aim of becoming a globally savvy, well-rounded journalist. I’ve been so unbearably fortunate all of my life to not only receive financial support from my family on many of my ambitious undertakings, but also to receive their moral, emotional, and intellectual support, but despite such fortune, I must start floating the boat myself. And that ain’t cliché, man, that’s me… that’s cliREAL. “Independent journalist” is not so independent when a non-employer has got the tab on your expenses. And, the key question: how to get that first foot in the door, in the first place, while there’s a crack, wrench it open with all your strength, and jump into that realm of a subject you’re passionate about and get PAID to document it, analyze it, and disseminate info about it? Right, most people who know a little bit about the game will say “Well, just get out there, start writing, and keep sending out your articles. Somebody will pick you up along the way.” Or, with a bit more awareness, someone like Vince, our wicked-smart British guest, says to me in our chat last night that the friends he has who are now making it as journalists, some working for sweet publications like The Guardian, just kept writing articles on a topic and sent them out over and over to publications, beating them over the head with writing until someone got the hint, read their work, and employed them, though he admits it’s a rare thing in a competitive world. OK, I guess I can do that. I just need to work on my assertiveness,
But what’s the first question I want to ask to guide an article or piece? Should I interview, research, fact-find, or investigate? Who do I talk to? What is that issue, in that place, that I want the world to know about and pay attention to? How can I make the issues that I focus on part of a larger struggle for democracy and justice? How can I make my work count for something larger than just my cultural interests and my paycheck? Some practical questions, and a couple BIG questions that take life experience to answer.
Sigh.
A Winter Day in Shēm
Well, I haven’t left the broad, crumbled arms of this city and ancient Arab capital since my last post, when I gave the scoop on Sweida and the Shatila camp in Beirut. But the last month has been plenty full, and there’s been no long bus rides across the breadth of countries or national borders—can you believe it? Just the daily routine.
December 12th, 2010
Awoke today in my new apartment to the crisp grey wet sad of Yarmouk, my new neighborhood. The ‘a3da beduwiya (Bedouin seating) in this living room, composed of simple green pads arranged around the edge of the room, with back padding and arm rests, is an incredibly comfy place to sleep. Besides, Ed and Tray got the two bedrooms, and I’m paying less for my arrangement in the living room, so it’s all good.
The sky light, kind of dripping through the window at this morning hour, is grey—the first time I’ve not woken to crisp December sunblades jumping in the window since I moved a week & ½ ago to this neighborhood built on a Palestinian refugee camp (thus the full name used when asking directions is muķeyyim yarmūk: the Yarmouk camp), in a lot healthier-looking shape than the Palestinian Shatila camp in Beirut I saw last month. Damn, the air in the living room is so cold I can see specks of fog in my breath, and the daylight is so dim I just want to slip back into the padding… NO. Up and at ‘em. Morning routine, including brushing teeth over a white sink striped with grey stains and polluted with an eternal leak, and jump into the bathroom which is your average Palestinian all-in-one: cheap Chinese washing machine, shower, sink, and toilet. Back to the padding, set the pillows and tacky blankets up, and get into that hour of self-seeking meditating,
I open my eyes. Look out the window behind me and WHAT?! Huge snow hunks, like snowballs tossed down from the gods above. They’ve already coated the little street below the window in frosting, covering up the mild but permanent layer of trash strewn here and there, covered up the everlasting potholes in the asphalt and the chinks in the sidewalk concrete, and obscuring my view of the Yasir Arafat posters pasted to every other surface, his mediocre smile and Palestinian head scarf on display for all to see. I run into Ed’s bedroom and wake the sleeping beast.
“No, fuck off Sam. You’re not serious.”
I prance into Tray’s room and do the same. He moves, and mumbles, and is still again. Only after a good half hour of me in the kitchen putting eggs, veggies, mint, and black tea to work, do both of the young Brits ascend from their bedrooms, covered in long green Bedouin-style gelabiya robes, clashing with Tray’s red hair and Ed’s blond, chuckling and “Yea dat’s brilliant snow, in’t bruv?” at the unusual weather.
Breakfast cooked, I run off to the window, grab my video camera, and document the snow anomaly while it lasts, wishing a Merry Christmas to all the Christian Palestinians in the area. I commence and complete my breakfast, dress warmly, throw books into shitty torn backpack, and I push down the echoing stairs, past the walls of chipped concrete, and past the humming water pump motor and out into the awful cold, wet, slushy grey. It’s the kind of weather that, as my new sneakers become reeeaaal moist inside just crossing the street, makes me wonder why I haven’t chosen a more humor-giving, happy place to make my own, like my friend Sam Steinberger has done with green, fertile
Stick hand out, step back to avoid fumes and splashing slush from passing automobiles, and hop onto the little white van, es-servīs, that rolls to a stop ahead of me. Within, I squeeze bag close to me as I pack into benches with the rest of the discontented travelers around me: a soldier in camouflage fatigues and low hat, and a man in jeans with a scar by his eye, his hand casually rested on the knee of the soldier beside him, and several women in hijabs and those World War II jackets. Staring out at the passing buildings, I realize that I’ve forgotten a lot of the seventy-five or so vocabulary words for my lesson coming up, and so I frantically yank the list of words from my bag and chant them over and over to myself amid the cramped servīs, making every passenger around me wonder just what language this gringo is speaking to himself.
“qal,” said with force. “OK, that means ‘slaughter’. ‘foox’ is a special incense from the Puntland region. Got it.”
I hop out, trying to absorb the vocab and their meanings from the list even as I cross the street, pass the hot sweet corn soup vendors and smoking men with heads wrapped in red and white Bedouin scarves, and hop onto another servīs, handing the driver another ten Syrian lira. Five minutes later I’ve descended from the little white van, and stand with the list of vocab, shivering under a shop’s awning, chanting the words like a rabbi at the Wailing Wall, as the snow continues to fall. The hour arrives, and I move through the little side streets of Mesēkin Berza, the ‘hood where I ate ifTār with that Somali friend of mine and wrote about all those months ago, and children persist with their street games, even in the snow. As I approach the little purple door of Yūsef, my teacher, and poke my head around looking for a doorbell, a young man in beanie cap, likely a Somali, but skin like a Jamaican immigrant to
“Meeting my friend.”
“Yūsef?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, OK.”
Yūsef comes to the door, his dark, Yemeni-looking eyebrows scrunch, and he whisks me through the massive curtains keeping the little warmth there is in his apartment, and shuts the metallic door to his windowless cavern home. I seat myself with commando speed at the little couch with the little desk, observe the real old-fashioned black oil furnace with chimney pipe going up to the ceiling, result of electric heating being far too expensive for this man of humble means, and I pull out my notebook. Even as he heads back to the kitchen to cook up some special Somali tea, Yūsef says with his stern accent, “OK, so as not lose any time, we start about the new words. Now, tell me about what is būr?”
“Mountain.”
“Mmm, and rāħo?”
“Umm, luxury.”
“Gooood!”
And so on and so on.
I sit there at the desk, my feet hovering above the floor for fear of them touching its venomously cold surface, writing every word he says loudly from the kitchen in Somali, and then its English counterpart, my bitty voice recorder sitting beside my papers. He comes shuffling back in with a tray with glasses and a jalmad (kettle) full of tea, pours some for both of us, offers me sugar, but then drops some tiny sweetener pills in his tea.
“I cannot take sugar, you know? I have diabetes.” He mixes in the fizzing pills.
I only put one spoonful of sugar in my glass, all of a sudden hyperconscious of the tremendous amount of sugar I’ve been taking in over the last five months, and this precious thing I’m still holding on to called good health. So many fellas in this region of the world, poor or rich, educated or streetucated, wheeze for breathe, got rotten teeth and skin, are bald, and got a well-formed belly by the time they got thirty years, and I don’t want to slip into that, despite all my trying to just blend in with the crowd.
We sit. He faces me, me hunched over my note papers—real master-pupil type stuff. Conversations about the subtle differences in the words for “Take this” and “spoon”, which sound exactly alike to me, and the various systems for forming plurals, and we take baby steps into the realm of wada sheekeesi (conversation). What an odd language: thick and throaty as a dog’s bark, yet with tiny vowels at the ends of words that clip to completion in quick guttural stops, like a lot of Japanese words do. Couple that sonic aesthetic with my trembling attempts at proper pronunciation, and I look like a white guy learning Japanese in preparation for a trip to the Horn of Africa—strange.
Now, I’m good, I know that, but despite that, Yūsef acts Yoda-like with me, folding his hands and holding his praise with great restraint, but giving those little smiles at certain comments I make that let me know we’re making progress. He tells me about his clan in Mogadishu—where he’s from—and the wide spread of dialects across the Somali-speaking regions, to my immense disappointment, me having begun the study of this queer tongue with the thought that it was relatively unified and homogenous. Not so. Well I just got to bite my intellectual lip, and keep going.
A knock at the door, and Yūsef looks up with the alertness of a frightened deer. He peeks through the curtains, opens it, and with a machine-gun fire of guttural greetings in Somali, lets his boy Maħmūd, rounder and taller and smoother dressed than him, inside. I shout my new word, gal (enter) at him, we exchange some light little Syrian Arabic greetings, and he slips into the obscurity of the little room beyond this one. Before Yūsef sits back down, a recorded call to prayer comes floating up from the speakers of his computer, like as if we got a little mosque right beside the house, and he takes a look at his computer reverently, and closes an open program before sitting down.
So the lesson goes on as before, Yūsef’s hands stay clasped, I stay hunched over the papers, my hands spread tensely over the surface of the desk. As we experiment with a little dialogue, the lesson’s time winding up tight as a spool of floss, we play with the line “waa maxay naaneystaadu?” (“What’s your nickname?”), and he responds slowly with “naaneystaydu waa san dheere”, and I burst out laughing: “My nickname is long nose.” No brilliant comedy, but you know that feeling of elation that makes you giggle when you’re understanding something in a new and unfamiliar language, right? Just thought it was worth writing about.
2:30 comes, we talk for a few minutes past the minute hand, and throwing jackets and scarves on, we crack the door to Yūsef’s curtained fortress, and he witnesses frozen water falling from the sky for one of, if not THE first time in his life. Totally unimpressed at the Middle Eastern snowstorm, he says “O so much snow. We Somalis don’t like so much about snow. So COLD.” Maħmūd comes tentatively out the door in slippers, takes the camera that I shove at him excitedly, and snaps some mediocre shots of us two standing amid the snowballs from heaven.
Then we part ways, shouting jao (from Italian “ciao”: remember, there was an Italian occupation of
SOMETHING EXTRA
So, I penned this poem on the spot in a park in my teacher Yūsef’s neighborhood, just observing the to and fro’ of the ‘hood. Much respect to Gaby Canales for quietly urging me to get back to the poetry. It’s just an impression, and needs a lot of work, so please let the comments and critiques fall like hail.
In the park
On the edge
Of the car-strained
Puddle-busted street
shēri3 mesēkin berza
In the shade,
The last blade of sunlight
Scraping just half the neighborhood.
There’s a rhythm here
And it swells beneath the sandal scuff
Of each Somali woman in black hijab
From the quiet hand of the young beggar girl—sheħħēda
“allah yeselemak ya ekhi”
From the little boy who brushes past
Coughing sandpaper sickness from little lungs
From the NAPKIN in the fingertips of the old man
In a white head dress, wiping his lip
The Somali men, fresh and stale
Bearded and talking holy with cups of tea
Bits of orange on the edge of their kinks
—closer to god.
The rhythm’s always here
The highway always hums
80 meters to my left
The park always specked with trash
The minaret always pointed
Towards the moon.
But we stand before darkness
On the backside of falling winter
And the refugees will have to wait to get asylum
The Arab vendors wait for more passersby
All the immigrants wait for jobs
When winter passes, and long days
And grey smog slide back in.
Until then, we watch the last blade of light
With the old men, perched on benches in the park
Standing before darkness, the backside of falling winter.
----
It’s quiet now. Tray left about five days ago, back to his native island. Edmund and Vince and Vince’s Syrian Kurdish girlfriend left the apartment this morning, Ed and Vince headed south to
Peace,
