Yemen #3: Dela Dela (Slowly Slowly)

She was not quite as stunning as I thought she would be. Her whole form was covered in a black balto, a long shiny black dress, and hijab. Quite pale skin actually, and her face was globe-like, as a baby’s. Half Kuwaiti, half Yemeni, you would think she’d have that olive color made by millennia of ancestors living under a harsh sun, but no. And no English either, even though our absent-minded landlord Husein said she speaks English better than any of us.

When she walked falteringly up the broad stone castle-like steps to our apartment, with a predatory-looking Husein behind her urging her on, I greeted her in casual English when she entered the room. She looked blankly at us: me, Tom Finn, and war correspondent Casey L. Coombs©, sitting at the kitchen table, and so I threw her another chunk of English. Nothing.

“bil 3arabi,” (“In Arabic”) Tom said, and I let my halting Yemeni dialect rip on her, and she responded to my dull questions with reservation. “What’s your name? Oh, Ghaida. Cool.” (I fudged it up. It’s Ghinē’.) “So, you’re from Kuwait? I heard you speak English really well. What, you don’t? But the Kuwaitis are like the British. I thought they all spoke English! What brings you here? Oh, you’re working at Yemenia Airlines, huh?”

I didn’t understand a whole lot of what she was saying because I’ve never been very good at understanding people, and because her Kuwaiti dialect is more different than I thought it would be. So ummi (“mother”) is coming out kind of like mmwi. Anyhow, she doesn’t look very present in the kitchen with us, and is not impressed with the plate of wilted spaghetti with sautéed vegetables that me and the boys placed in front of her. Black-toothed Husein, grinning and chuckling like a snake, squeezes lime all over her food, acting like sexual favors are imminent in return for his insincere courtesy. She picked through the spaghetti like a dissected frog in science class before letting the whole effort go.

Somehow, in the course of my friendly pestering, I found out that the parents of Ghinē’ separated, and it sounded like her mother is now living down in the city of Ibb, to the south. Not entirely sure if I got that right though. That, and the fact that she was on her own for the first time in the Arab world’s poorest country, coming from one of its richest, living in a house with a creeper of a landlord and a bunch of chatty Westerners, and about to start a job she seemed to have no interest in, appeared to be the things keeping her eyes low and her smile elusive.

Me, Tom, and war correspondent Casey L. Coombs© continued to talk amongst each other about Husein’s creepiness while Husein, with his huge belly and clammy brown skin, continued to chat up poor Ghinē’. A tossed a few other less-prying questions towards Ghinē’, she responded weakly, and it was not long before she was quietly moving out the door, her balto trailing after her, with Husein guiding her like a father does a small child.

We decided, with the evening’s first hint of seriousness, that we’d do what we could to help out this young lady, so out of place in our little castle of foreign folks. Then Tom, in his thin blondness, went up to his place to finish a piece for Reuters, abounding as he does in work after journalizing for nearly two years in Yemen. Casey retired to his room after his long ritual of applying skin-care products, and I got caught up in cleaning various parts of our new apartment, not completing any of the bits I set out to make tidy. It stayed up later than it should have, and I went to bed.

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BEEEEP. My alarm clock hit me like a hammer in the face. It was 6a.m., and I hadn’t gotten my full 8 hours of beauty sleep. Shards of orange light aplenty were already coming in my windows, and the walled-in agricultural plot/garden out my window was glowing green in the dawn light. Slow as a sloth, I headed to the bathroom downstairs which is not clogged as ours is, came back up, and breathed and meditated my stress away for an hour.

Out into the kitchen, where roommate Jacqueline had prepared a smattering of sliced vegetables and boiled eggs. I consumed them, and as she left, Jacqueline chided me for constantly talking about visiting other countries, about how excited I am to see my girlfriend again, about making plans for other times, and told me to take a deep breath, and be where I am. People have been telling me to do that my whole life, a key critique of one of the principle causes of discontent in my life. I grabbed my bag, snaked out the door and through a maze of crumbling stone alleys where tiny children played with deflated balls, and out to the screaming bus station where men in skirts yelled constantly for no reason at all, and we all packed into vans too small for our dignity.

As we sped along and I read Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes, it was strange to think that I hadn’t left the city limits of Sana'a since the end of March, when I came back from a two-day trip in Thulaa', a friend's home city about 50km northwest of Sana'a. Almost 5 weeks now I have been shuttling to and fro' on foot and in taxis and minibuses, entirely within the cracked embrace of Yemen's capital city.

Strange, also, to think that between my return into the eternity embrace of Sana'a so long ago, I've found steady employment. These days the municipal mini-buses roll me to the office of Yemen Times newspaper every morning, 5 days a week, Saturday through Wednesday.

I hopped out along a hissing highway, scramble across the highway trying to avoid the violent rush of cars, and into the office. It’s almost empty these days, what with all the new pretty college grads off for reporter training in Egypt. Only Fatima the Ethiopian secretary at her desk, Bessam the translator at a desk next to mine, Ali the stick-like managing editor hunched over his computer, and a few other employees whose names I don’t yet know remain.

Thank god, the fluorescent lights were not yet on. Shards of light crept past the backs of ugly buildings outside, and around the partially drawn curtains. The Yemenis in the office get enough sun, I guess, and don’t want it invading their working hours. I muttered Șabāħ l Ķheir (“Good morning”) under my breath, but everyone caught it, as they always do, and muttered Șabāħ n nūr automatically back at me.

Sit down at the desk, turn on the computer, and yell to Ali’s desk across from me, “Good morning Ali. You got something for me?”

With heavily-rolled cat R’s, “Yes OK I have something for you in 10 minutes.”

And so on and so forth like this for hours, me editing grammar and asking the translators, bewildered, what some of their Arabic-like eternal run-on sentences (like mine, I suppose) mean. Long spans of time between some articles, me not fulfilling my creative duties of creating story ideas, reworking the submission deadlines, redesigning the page layout of the paper, nor sitting with the journalists to discuss their beats. I read articles about the old “socialist” republic of south Yemen on Wikipedia instead.

Lunchtime comes, and me and the fellas, Ali, Muaadh, and, well, no one else head down the highway to a little joint tucked in a tired side street serving roiling pots of feħsa. I talk English with Ali, and Arabic with Muaadh, the brown-skinned communist from the southern city of Ta’iz, yet long stretches of quiet break our conversation about stories and journalists and Muaadh’s incomprehensible jokes. Pull feħsa from the hot iron bowl with hunks of bread, wash hands with laundry detergent, and we’re out again on the empty street. Take a comfortable full-belly seat at the desk and begin copy editing with renewed vigor.

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Up in Asmir’s apartment, the high energy and always immaculately groomed student from Montenegro living a couple of levels above us. To commemorate Tom’s coming departure from Yemen, after what I call a damn successful stint of almost two years’ writing and reporting, Asmir spent all day cooking up heavy and deeply fried foods for us whose roots lay in his native eastern Europe. He said they’re all original recipes, but they've got more than a hint of Tito’s Yugoslavia to them. Fried liver, fried breaded chicken, fried breaded zucchini, and on and on.

I deeply enjoyed the massive hunks of chicken for the rare nutrition they gave in this country leeched of protein, and a couple of other Americans at the other end of the candle-lit table heartily talked up my roommate Jacquelyn about how much they love her home country of China. “Guong Jo. I loved that place. I taught at the experimental high school there. It was like, so cheap. Oh dude, it was niiiice,” or something similar, is what spiled from one Californian guy, who latched on approvingly to a few things I said about Chicanos, his people.

Tom and Casey’s eyes shifted to the ground behind me, and I turned to notice that Ghinē’ joined us, accompanied by a well-dressed old Yemeni in thawb, a long smooth white robe, his skin browned and leathery by years of Arabian UV. The guy sat next to me and uttered things in old-fashioned English. He told me that the parents of Ghinē’ divorced, and that she came here because her mother is in Yemen, if I heard him right.

The guy was a little humorless, and I remember him as quite a bore, though that might not be right on. Ghinē’ sat by his side in her hijab and black balto, looking dejected and unmoved as ever, her eyes far away from us. A few smiles cracked her face, and she made pale glances at people whose conversation drifted in her direction. Not much I could think of to say to the old fella, nor Ghinē’, so I turned back to the Californian, and Tom and Casey at the other end of the table, sipping Pepsi to make the heavy Balkan cooking settle in my stomach. In the middle of a conversation on freelancing and the how-to-dos of the whole thing, I was gripped by diarrheic spasms in my gut and jumped up straight as a scarecrow, frantically grabbed some tissues from the table, and tiptoed stiffly to the bathroom, Tom and Casey crying with laughter.

Back on the scene, at the dinner table, a woman in tight sweatpants and died hair with tremendously grown-out roots crept into my vision, joining a group of gringos at the table. Tom noticed how my eyes leapt wide when I realized it was Ghinē’, bare of balto and hijab. Voluptuous, dressed like a young woman from Orange County might in the fall, but still ill at ease. I kept glancing over at her while talking to others. It was so strange to see a woman, usually covered, uncovered among a bunch of people she didn’t know. I couldn’t really believe it. Dinner went on, folks started drinking alcohol smuggled in from Djibouti across the Red Sea, and a few of them tried their Arabic on Ghinē’, who would nod and speak with them like she was in an interview on the news. Then the power shut off, and we all applauded broken old Yemen in the dark dark dark.

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Climbing up the big stone steps in the dark, using a lighter with a flashlight on it to help me find my way, I could hear the hard clack of high heels on the steps a flight above me. Huffing and puffing, I slowed down. I could tell those high heels were Ghinē’s. It was only us in the stairwell, and it seemed like she was headed up to the roof like me. It was so quiet; it felt like a murder mystery. I didn’t want to catch up to her in the stairs because I was kind of scared of that, and so I stopped a few times to let gain a little distance. I was sure she knew I was behind her, but she didn’t seem to pay me any mind—just continued on deliberately.

Finally, the sound of the heels clacking disappeared onto the roof. I took my time going up the stairs. When I got out onto the roof white with moonlight, Ghinē’ was sitting on one end of it, facing the dark old city of Sana’a, dotted with light from generators in a few places. I took a look around on the other side of the roof, and looked out over the ancient brown and white building around me, and Casey appeared on the roof with me. Coming out to my end, he said “What’s going on with our lady over there?” said he.

“I don’t know man. But it felt like a scary movie coming up the stairs behind her. Ominous.”

We chatted for a while, making dumb jokes and inventing whole scenarios like little kids do just for laughs. But our energy, like the lights of the old city, died off, and we tired of looking out into the dark. We began to migrate back to the stairs, to head back down to Asmir’s apartment, from which we could hear the obnoxious drunken voices all the way up here. Before stepping into the stairs, Casey looked over at Ghinē’ still with her arms wrapped around her knees on the end of the roof, and asked me, “Can you say something to her in Arabic to help her out?”

“Me 3aterja3īš le nēzil tēkuli ħilwiyēt ma3na?” (“You’re not going to come downstairs and have desert with us?”)

She turned her head, big tears muddled with eyeliner rolling over her baby cheeks. “Le, šukran.” (“No, thanks.”)
The tears kept rolling, and she turned her head again to look out over the dark city.

Yemen #2: NO HOME IN ABYAN, NO HOME IN ADEN

NO HOME IN ABYAN, NO HOME IN ADEN

The faaSuuliya, as usual, was mud on my tongue, and the bread I shoveled it off the pan with was not crispy the way they make it at the little joint I go to almost every day in Sana'a. But the red tea was just right, and I was getting my breakfast fill as the young, tired looking guy in purple ma3wūz, the fine cloth skirt wrapped around the waist which men wear in areas on both sides of the Red Sea, brought me a second pan of bubbling hot faaSuuliya. I continued scribbling questions into my little journal, ones I hoped to pose to IDPs (Internally Displaced People) from Abyan, the far southern province just to the right of the city of Aden on any map of Yemen. I had no idea what their situation was, how many of them there were, but I'd spoken to the high-energy Laura Kasinof, reporting for the NY Times, on the phone yesterday, she said there were new IDPs fleeing the renewed fighting between the Yemeni military and al Qaeda in Abyan, and that they were easy to find, so damn it, I was going to see them.


Dropping some Yemeni Ryal on the counter of the well-ventilated little joint and grabbing a toothpick from the tray, I just gave it a try: "3afwan shebēb, ta3rifū wein fi lēji'īn min Abyan?" (Pardon guys, do you all know where there are refugees from Abyan?). They scratched their heads for a moment as though I had just asked them where I could buy a pack of smokes, and then recommended I go to a particular school down the road. "You sure?" I asked. "Yea yea, everybody knows this," they replied.


Out I went across the broad parking lot in front of the little restaurant, which sat in a building that looked like any tumble-down strip mall on the edge of a small Midwestern city. In other words, it was a dull, soulless-feeling place, perpetually filled with Somalis, mostly young men black as arctic night who sat around and waited for a car to wash for the price of pennies, and a few beautiful women who guided their children around as they begged for money from anyone who would give it. I stuck my hand out on the street, a van came to a rolling halt, I pulled myself up, and we rode towards krītr, the center of old Aden, built in the crater of a collapsed volcano, which gives onto the sea.


..........


It took some riding back and forth between schools, marching through the red dust of courtyards with friendly soldiers at my side, asking where, if they did in fact exist, could I find recently arrived refugees from Jaar, a city in Abyan province under Al Qaeda control. I battled the humidity, and the growing weight of the seaside sun, and finally made it to a provincial military post right next to my hotel. The big guy with beret and sweat pouring off his pale brow, the chief, told me I needed armed guys to escort me to the refugee camp. Told me to wait a while he had a meeting. I stood around under a terrace, took pictures of submissive Somali men washing army trucks, which I was promptly ordered to erase, and chatted a bit with tired guys in skirts, sporting Kalishnakovs. An hour or so passed, the chief finally emerged from his meeting, and I found I didn't need escorts at all.


..........


The bus raced along a causeway throughout one of the many sea inlets perforating this city like potholes, then through a quarter called Skeikh Uthman, filled with industrial space and shattered apartments, half-buildings everywhere, bleached bone white by the sun and fine dust. BOOM. "Hey young guy! This is it. This is the school," yelled the driver.


I loped from the bus' sliding door, and skipped up to the gate. An old black woman, face uncovered and draped in maroon cloth, seemed undisturbed by my presence--wisely calm, in fact. Two men in conversation, also looking like they'd been plucked straight from the depths of Ethiopia, responded reverently when I greeted them gravely: "esselēmu 3aleikum." "wa 3aleikum selēm." I told the guys, and the old wise-woman, my mission in my stammering Arabic which I strain to conform to the rhythms of Yemeni speech, and they guided me by the hand to the dirt courtyard within.


A small man, composed, and also of the color that suggests the highlands of Ethiopia, half wrapped in a ma3wūz, approached me like a statesman. I told him I was here to speak to people who'd fled from Jaar, from the recently ratcheted-up bombing campaign of the American-backed Yemeni military. He affirmed, slowly, that all the people crammed into rooms in the school-turned-shelter behind him were from Jaar. I was so psyched to have found my target, I never thought through what he uttered then: "Yes, we're all from Jaar. We fled last summer during the military's offensive." Looking back, I wince a bit thinking that I was looking for IDPs from Jaar, at the behest of Laura Kasinof of the NY Times, because they'd arrived the most recently. Thought I could write a news piece. But they'd also arrived in waves over the last 9 or 10 months. These people were those who had arrived long ago, not recently. Not news, sadly.


I stood around talking to the little man, whose speech, though controlled, often evaded my comprehension, under the high metal roof, like a plane hangar, that gave shade to a slice of the courtyard. Young men, and the old woman who seemed curious now, built upon around me as coral does over a rock foundation while I spoke with the little man . Another man sauntered up, body moving more with passion and nervous thought, darker still in color and squinting eyes like a leopard's.


The man with the leopard eyes, named Abdulqadir, lead me into the yawning opening to the school-shelter behind the dirt courtyard and the strange hangar-roof above the courtyard. In we went, the crowd which had formed around me having dispersed minutes before. Through the wide passage, into the courtyard of the school, and sights which excited my eye and made my heart swell and soften. Children running at me like soldiers in a charge, many of them dark brown like burned grassland, some olive in color, all of them smiling, some with little bullet holes in the teeth formed by the lethal too-much-flouride gun. Women walked around in heavy covering, but brightly colored and flowing, unlike the black khimmār covering that has become the fashion for many urban Yemeni women. The women, many of whom were lightly colored, carried bright green ħenna designs on their faces. A beautiful sight.


I don't know what made these people have such dark, Ethiopic features other than the fact large pockets of the southern coast must have been settled by people from the Horn of Africa. Whether in the time of Ethiopian empire rule over the rich lands of Yemen in millennia past, or from more recent migrations of aħbēsh (people from ħebesh, or Abyssinia, the fertile highlands of Ethiopia and Eritrea), I don't know. But it was clear they are not from the akhdēm ("servants") class, black Yemenis of distant Ethiopian origin, who live in devastating poverty, and have virtually no rights in Yemen, and who never mix with non-black Yemenis. 


They did not come from crushing poverty, though this is what they find in the camps here in Aden and elsewhere in Yemen's south. They tell me that Jaar, their town, is fertile, and one can easily find a livelihood in agriculture. They lived well in their town before the crisis, they say. And they mix. White and black Abyani children playing and bleeding in and out of crowds of white and brown Abyani women attest to this. All of the light-colored women were linked in marriages, or some other relation, to the black members of the group.


I stepped through the open courtyard of the school, and towels and dirty laundry hung from the railing of the second floor. A light-skinned man with epic rock-star hair in ma3wūz brought me up the stairs to the upper level. With an excited outrage, as though happy to show off the deplorable conditions they lived in, he spat at me hasty Arabic in his rough native accent, motioning hurriedly for me to enter one of the little classrooms now bedrooms. I stepped in, confronted with bunks that looked too small for human occupation crammed together in the middle of the room. A tiny child layer on the bare floor, sleeping. When I went to photograph the baby, a mass of little kids rushed to stand in the frame of the photo, with flat smiles. It's nice to be in a country where most (men, at least) like to have their picture taken, but it gets maddeningly old and pointless seeming when people call out to you, beseech you, to take their picture, make some boring pose, and then walk away without caring to see the photo, satisfied that their image has been recorded.

The Abyanis kept the rooms in nice order, but 15-20 humans were not meant to inhabit 20x20 foot classrooms. The man with rock-star hair spoke to me with incredulity, condemning the NGOs and local Adeni government for forcing them into such humiliating conditions. The man rushed me into another room, where a shirtless guy lay under a blanket against the wall, his arm over his face, blocking out the sun. My rock-star friend told me the guy on the floor was sick, waiting for treatment. I went to the other side of the bunks, trying to snap pictures that conveyed the miniature conditions they lead their lives in. A few young Abyani women stood against the wall, smooth-skinned and black and beautiful. They pulled bright fabric over their faces when the shutter flapped. 


Back downstairs, I went out to the back of the building where women cooked a single small fish over a throw-together grill made of tires and old tin. They tried to make poses that looked natural, as I captured the poverty with my eyes and camera. 

Somewhere along the line, I reconnected with the leopard-eyed Abdulqadir. He took me to an ancient-looking outbuilding of the school, all cube-ish and grey concrete. He tapped the clingy metal door, and yelled a greeting (or warning) to the ghosts inside. Enter. A dim room, vast and open and naked, windows mostly covered, divided only by a small partition of laundry hanging on wires. In the far corner behind it, a woman built of cloth folds crouches by a little stove, preparing some of the inadequate and irregular supply of rice and flour that UNHCR and other org's provide them, looking over her shoulder at the pale intruder with a face that says, "Alright, but I'm busy now." I step under clothes lines, around stacks of foodstuffs, and greet the two women. A coffee-skinned man with smāTa (light scarf/head-wrap) with big belly saunters up, and talks lighting Arabic about his deplorable conditions. Deplorable indeed, though I wonder how he and his family got this whole building to themselves. He has about nine children, he said, and the two quiet women behind him are both his wives.

The sun continued to cook there little refuge for these limbo people, and my energy bled from my steadily like water might from a boiling teapot with a hole in the bottom. I ended my hours with my one-day Abyan friends with fast, frustration-and-spittle filled interview with Abdelqadir. As his leopard-eyes squinted and he painted pictures of bombs and bullets of the Yemeni army finding a home in his hometown, where Al Qaeda had settled in, I asked him if he thought of returning to Jaar. Selim, a tubby friend of his, jumped in between us before he could respond, shouting: “If there was security and stability, we would return even to a camp.”

Yemen #1: The Crush of Self and Support of Others

"No, ekhi. No, no I don't want a taxi. Go on," I mumbled to myself with increasing volume as I walked down a shaded side street in Sana'a today, peering ahead at a taxi that'd stopped at the intersection to desperately await a fare from a foreigner in sunglasses." I shook my head and the white and yellow taxi pulled out into the trickle of other cars and floated away mournfully.

I felt alright, actually, my belly almost full with authentic Ethiopian food that I inhaled while Atiaf Wazir, the well-respected Yemeni-American blogger, took respectful little bites. My mind was full, too, of a little hope and a lot of calm. How could it not have been? Atiaf had just taken me out for lunch, and as I pulled bits of t'ibs off of a hot metal goblet with hunks of injera bread, she listened to me go on about my block: the paralysis that takes grip in my stomach, keeping me from taking a task  in manageable pieces, which makes me want to crumple up in depression and go to sleep.

She listened, and without a hint of impatience or frustration, excitedly threw out small steps for me to put on a list: Go chew qat (the stimulant leaf so deeply enshrined in Yemeni social rituals) with regular old Yemeni folks in Change Square and ask their opinions on politics and Yemeni current events, start working on my blog, let news outlets know I'm in Yemen and ready to do whatever for them, read Yemeni politics 'til my eyes hurt, network with expats, get working with a local newspaper, and so on. She actually waited as I wrote them down in my Arabic lesson notebook. Sometime before all that, she'd suggested I reach out to Ben, her husband, and get him to connect me with France24.

We wrapped up talking about Yemeni politics, about the necessity of a deeper revolutionary process that expels the old vested interests from the regime, and the omnipresence of foreign interests, like the US especially, in Yemeni affairs. She knows so much more than I do, I GOT to get on the books. As she spouted analysis of Yemen's rainbow politics main opposition party, Islah (Reform), her hijab's many folds and rolls came undone one by one, and as the fabric collapsed on her head, she folded it back up and adjusted her glasses with small fingers automatically.

Out on the street as she waited to hop on a debbēb (communal city transport van), I let a story spill about a taxi I took yesterday. I told Atiaf about the woman in the back seat, wearing a completely black unrevealing khimmār, who despite her attire spoke flintily with me, joked constantly, and kept putting her arms around the neck of the cab driver while he let go of the wheel for seconds at a time while we burned along traffic trenches in the Old City. It turns out she was a prostitute, according to Atiaf's analysis. A strange encounter for me on a Friday afternoon in Sana'a.

Hopefully that's just the beginning of the unusual encounters that get me under the surface of this place.

Tuunis #2: RCD, DÉGAGE!

RCD, DÉGAGE!

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(“3” as I use it in transcriptions, represents the
tightening of the throat one hears when Kermit
The Frog speaks.)

May 4, 2011

The coming and going of guys in the room woke me. Course and quick shuffling on the dead linoleum, turning on and off the lights as they got their clothes on at 6:30a.m. and faces washed for work, off to the mdīna (“old city”) to suffer their dignity and sell cheap plastic jewelry or cigarettes all day. Brāhim with his cardboard box of trinkets, Şāliħ off to teach home design classes, I believe, and Bilēl, unemployed, still frozen on his pad on the floor. I rose at 7a.m. from the floor of the dingy apartment I shared—deciding to let my body adjust to the new schedule of this new country with a slightly later start—and am all the better for it.
I got a late start too to the interview with the semi-spokesman of the unemployed union. Sat waiting on the steps of the theatre for a half hour, dotted with red revolutionary graffiti in French and Arabic, the temporary wall around the construction project across from me splashed with the familiar slogan RCD, dégage! (“RCD, Get Out!” – RCD is the Rassemblement Constitutionnel Democratique, or Democratic Constitutional Rally, the party of Ben Ali and his cronies, said to still haunt Tunisia under different party names). Called my contact, reset our meeting, and grabbed a seat at the fancy café of Hôtel International. Belkacem was his name, came running up to my bourgeois perch under the umbrella, sweating in the 11a.m. breeze and never taking off his sunglasses. We talked about some important stuff regarding the Leftists in Tunisia, the spread of committees for the diplômés chômeurs—those with college degrees and no suitable work to speak of—since the December/January uprising, and the protests in which the unemployed have been vital in organizing. Yet, we never finished the interview, as he scurried off heavily while spitting thick Tunisian dialect into his phone, telling me we’d finish tomorrow, and I didn’t get all of what he said, because of his Arabic accent in French, and my distraction at his sunglasses and badly rotted teeth.
After that, I met my thin, humble roommate Bilēl over at Bēb Bħar, the imposing gate to the mdīna standing alone in a square filled with cafés and a dribble of tourists in awful shorts and tank-tops. We meandered over to the sūq (“market”) and bargained down a pair of fake Adidas for me to about twenty Dinar. Walked a ways, and so far no sores on the bottom of my toes. A good start for these sneakers. Then onwards through the alleys of polished stone, and hanging bras, towels, and rolls of cloth, out past an old mesjid (“mosque”), and on to the Université Neuf Avril. There, I called Nasrin, the beauty I’d met a few days before, several times in the windy courtyard of the austere college and got only the boîte vocale, to my dismay. Met a couple leaders of student groups and other activists, told ‘em my mission in French, and we met again inside the office of the recently deposed school secret police, just inside the main door to the campus.
These kids were smart, and had a lot of analysis to give—albeit full of uncertainty—in response to my questions. They interrupted each other here and there, and all pulled out cigarettes and smoked in unison like young communists in Paris. Yet, none of them could offer too many confident statements about the future when I asked, which I guess few Tunisians really can at this point. Pretty militant and full of life they were, though, which was a breath of fresh air, after so much of the political staleness in people’s minds that I encountered while living in Syria.
One of the guys in the interview could understand my questions in French, but stumbled some when speaking French (no worse than me, certainly), and so responded in Standard Arabic, most of the words of which I was understanding, but I wasn’t able to put it all together into a meaningful statement. I guess I’m still at that level in Arabic. Shucks.
At one point, the girl to my left started to speak to me about student organizing in English with a British accent, and then POOF! They were all speaking advanced-level English. But then I would say something in Standard Arabic to the guy having a little linguistic trouble, and they would all start speaking and arguing in Standard Arabic. Same for French. Incredible.
Afterwards, I watched some videos of the revolution here in the capital that they had put together, and they all jumped at the chance to give me their contact info. One brown-skinned woman (3azza was her name, I think?) said she’d accompany me to Sidi Bou Zid when I go, the place from which the Tunisian revolution spread. That’s where she’s from, she said. Nice.
Then me and Bilēl wandered out of the spot, and I felt a huge lump in my throat and chest as if I was going to cry, and I felt tired, homesick, and pessimistic about this whole journalism thing, despite the great meeting. Back through the mdīna, and me and Bilēl grabbed some sandwiches in a hole-in-the-wall near Enīs’ internet shop, and I felt just fine again after eating. But, as I sat at Enīs’ cyber café making calls to City College to check for job options (not looking so great there), calling Dick Hull about NYU financing, and writing a letter in French pleading the Université Libre de Bruxelles to still let me apply despite my missing the deadline, the enormous weight I felt before returned, and I felt like crying.
The sky became grey and flat, and I went across the street, home to the fellas’ apartment, and called Mom for a little wisdom and relief. I did get some, but couldn’t bring myself to cook any shūrbit l 3adis (“lentil soup”) for the boys, as I’d planned. They cooked instead, and we sat around watching TV and talking simple Arabic, chowing down on macaroni. The weight left me, and I slept.


May 8^th, 2011

Woke at 7am, eyes embarrassingly heavy at this hour, which is a slovenly one for my new up-and-at-‘em-at-daybreak schedule. Because of the heavy dinner last night prepared by Kefi’s wife Ħannān, had trouble getting out of bed. But, I got my shower on (I thank the universe), got my kriya on, then wolfed down a breakfast of baguettes and jam and café au lait from the low table in Kefi’s arab-style living room with cushions on the floor. It’s pretty high living in the care of this man who I only met yesterday. I’m amazed how far some money one saves while an immigrant, working as a cab driver in Philadelphia, will get one in this destitute little town of Menzil Bou Zian.
We sauntered in the sun, out through the decrepit concrete portal around Kefi’s property, and hopped in the car with smiling Fādil, Kefi’s brother—or cousin?—who really knows great sayings and expressions in English, and we sped out of Menzil Bou Zian alongside the old French train tracks. As we cruised along, Kefi, his eyes peeking out slightly from under the brim of his eternal baseball cap, told me in his high, joyful-sounding voice, about his illiterate father, who started fighting the French occupation in 1946 as a young man. He told me how many great rebels against French colonization came from this town, this area, this little peach pit at the middle of this country ripe with radicalism—yes, radicalism. It’s that popular liberating impulse that can force off the hand that squeezes the throat of a society. But, be very careful about equating “radicalism” as I use it with the blind, angry, Islamophobic word which much of the mainstream American media uses to frighten us about the world beyond our borders.
The land spreading out around our car was semi-arid, and flat, but for tiny bare mountains of brown and grey off in the distance. The sky was frighteningly clear.
We drove a long way, picking up a motley crew of simple Tunisian hitchhikers, and dropping them off along the way, and after a long stretch of kilometers along the highway, now surrounded by feeble agriculture, Fādil dropped us in the middle of Sidi Bou Zid. It’s interesting how I had a preconceived notion of Sidi Bou Zid, this small town where Muhammed Bou Azizi burned himself alive in protest, sparking a revolution, as being a place physically mangled by poverty. Yet, it looked like simply another dull town of the interior, save for the revolutionary spray paint graffiti in Arabic, French, and English on the white walls of the town.
I talked to Kefi at a café about general problems of corruption, regional favoritism of the past regimes, and the absolute lack of any industry or commerce development in the area, while I composed interview questions in French. I thought I would be pushing for interviews with local bureaucrats, but Kefi unceremoniously grabbed three young guys from the café, and we embarked upon a great trilingual discussion. In hindsight, of course I wanted to talk to the regular unemployed people of this town, not some fat administrator behind a desk.
The young men, two of them former students of tourism who commanded the basics in English, seemed on the edge of tears from frustration at the state of things, one of them looking the whole time as if he’d just been beat in a fight. They talked about the corruption that remains, the etbē3 (cronies) of the old regime who hang on in the provincial administration, the lack of any job prospects. “Anyone who can help, come! We need help… from America, OK? From anybody. I have dreams. I have no hope,” said the beaten young guy with thick beard scruff. When asked if they thought the revolution would bring something better, something that lasts, to Sidi Bou Zid, they winced like I’d just put a finger in their would. “No,” was the answer in short. “Moi, j’irai en France” (“Me, I’m going to France”) said the only one of them who had some means to escape.
Afterwards, Kefi and I checked out a local minister’s office, burned from the inside out yesterday by unknown assailants. Black wings of soot on the walls spread out from the windows. Beside us, an aging taxi driver, seemingly out of nowhere, recounted to me from his car window his days with the Tunisian secret police in the 1980’s. He had been trained by—guess who—the CIA. He showed me the lapel pin that signified his unit, given to him by America’s bravest torture trainers. He seemed to have little fear of reprisal as he spoke. Either he had resigned to the inevitability of future punishment, or his acts had already been recognized by past victims.
We took a bit of rest and fruit juice in Fādil’s tidy, gardened home just down the street. Then, headed out, we toddled down the main avenue, approaching some old cats standing out front of a dry cleaners. After intense conversation that I understood little of, they pointed us to a local police office smashed and disheveled and burned by marauding shebēb (young men). Within, the bookcases were overturned and sat in piles of ash and black water. The entrance door was dark with soot. The quietly outraged family living above the station came down and told us how they had averted an attack on their home upstairs only by firing a gun when the vandals approached. Several acts of arson and vandalism in one small town in one day. Who did this? Do they work for somebody? The beginning of a counter-revolution terrorist movement?
Then the long, hot drive along the cracked road back to Menzil Bou Zian.
After a nap and a meditation, I headed over to a sha3bi (popular/working-class) coffee shop, men and only men shriveled like prunes laid out to dry on its terrace. I drank tea and smoked a disgusting hookah that burned my throat with Kefi, Fādil, and other local fellas who sat around smiling at this foreigner who struggled like a baby with their dialect. I learned some great expressions in the Tunisian idiom, though, like “Just when 3idi is getting married, the grain goes bad,” meaning that sometimes the rarest of misfortunes will happen at the worst moments, and be ready for it. Then, I did the briefest, most concise interview hitherto with Fādil, in English. He gave me a lot more specific information about the people in the area, but in the end, he said he too was almost hopeless for real change post-revolution. “Maybe, maybe, after the elections [in July] we’ll see change,” he closed, wincing.
The sun taking its last purple-orange breathes over the dry and deserted avenue at the center of town, I walked over the barren railroad tracks behind the café, talking in French with a café waiter about racism in the U.S., the gravel crunching under our feet, and I went to the half-built house of Kefi’s brother to use internet. I spoke with Kefi’s brother—pious, curious, a bit hard-headed—and a few hijab-sporting women with light skin and piercing faces about religion, in my uncomfortable, tedious Arabic. We argued about the assassination of Bin Laden, they said he was a great leader, and I spoke to my mother about this place on the phone.

Tuunis #1: Libyan Refugees In Limbo in Tunisia’s South

Libyan Refugees In Limbo in Tunisia’s South
by Sam Kimball

Dehiba, Tunisia—Salih sits in loose brown traditional qamis and sirwal in the middle of a mosque still under construction, prayer rugs covering the unfinished concrete floor. He’s surrounded by other men clad in long robes and skull caps—refugees as well, from the Libyan town of Nalut—who work on the mosque by day as volunteers, work they say, which helps them “forget the problems at home.”

Salih came to Dehiba, a desert community in the south of Tunisia on the Libyan border, on April 10^th with his family, fleeing the fighting going on around Nalut, about 70 kilometers east of Dehiba. Now, he and his family are one of 302 registered families living in the Dehiba area, though according to various reports, there are many other unregistered Libyan families here. Since they have left, the fighting has intensified in the area surrounding Nalut, as the Libyan rebels and pro-Gaddafi forces vie for control over the Nefusa mountains and the strategic border crossings, such as Wazin, in Libya just outside of Dehiba. Border crossings like Wazin have allowed the Libyan rebels to resupply and to give refuge to their families.

The conditions in which Salih and his family live in Dehiba are the norm for more than half of the two to three thousand refugees estimated to be living in Dehiba and its immediate surroundings: inhabiting a home with five other Libyan families, six children to a room, his house and others like it giving cramped shelter to between twenty and twenty five people at a time. They rely on donated food, medicine, and money from local Tunisians in Dehiba, and other nearby towns like Tataouine and Ramada.

Many of the Libyans from Nalut were employed in white-collar jobs before fleeing the fighting in their home region. Salih himself was a school administrator, and before that worked in hospital administration. The Libyan refugee community in Dehiba holds to its traditionally conservative character, where the separation of the sexes in public spaces is rigid, women spend much of the day doing domestic work, and finding a woman in the street is rare. Yet, Salih and his fellow Libyans working on the mosque report that many of the women fleeing from Nalut and surrounding cities were previously employed. Some, they claim, had degrees from higher institutes of education, and worked as teachers of English, chemistry, and biology.

Despite the purported middle class background of many of the Nalut refugees living outside the refugee camps, the financial straights grow tighter as time passes. Donations of money from local Tunisians are critical these days, as Salih reports that the refugees’ accounts in Libyan banks have been locked down. Allowances allotted to the refugee families by Libyan merchants, who make small deposits in local banks, have dwindled to one-hundred Libyan Dinar per family per month, the equivalent of about eighty-three American dollars. “No money to buy Benzine… no fuel to use to visit our relatives in Nalut. The only time we use a car is for an emergency, like bringing a woman giving birth to the hospital.”

Integrating into the local educational system, even temporarily, has proven an equal challenge. Libyan refugees in Dehiba have claimed that that their children are falling behind in their studies because there is no room left for them in Tunisian schools in small towns like Dehiba. Libyan parents also fear that even if their children find a place in local schools, because of the major differences with the Libyan educational system, their grades may not be recognized and they will be held back.

Those without a large family to care for find the conditions in Tunisia less straining. Fethi, a farmer who was working just outside Nalut who came to Tunisia over two weeks ago, and now a fighter in the Libyan rebel forces, lives with just his mother and father in a four-room house. The house, which had served as an investment property, was donated by Tunisians. He says, “The Tunisians give us houses, food, medicine. We have everything we need.”

Fethi reports that most able-bodied young men like him are still in Nalut, and spend most of their time there. He himself sometimes leaves Dehiba to return to Nalut for a couple of days at a time. In Libya, he and other young men continue to fight in the rebel forces or protect their property in their home towns.

Yet, Fethi does admit that despite the relatively comfortable conditions, his mother and father are scared by the heavy fighting over the border pass a few kilometers east of Dehiba. The explosions of the battles between pro-Qaddafi regiments and the Libyan rebels, as well as Tunisian military that guard against incursions into Tunisia, are heard from late-afternoon onwards. The flashes of rockets and machine gun fire can be seen from hilltops on a clear night.

The situation for Libyans living in the refugee camps inside the Tunisian border is different from those getting by in donated Tunisian homes just down the dusty streets of Dehiba. According to Tunisian military personnel, there are now seven refugee camps inside Tunisia. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) Red Crescent, which established a camp for Libyan refugees spilling into Dehiba at the end of March, has been one of four umbrella organizations said to be officially responsible for caring for Libyan refugees in Tunisia. The others—the U.N., Tunisian Red Cross, and Tunisian Red Crescent—have had a larger presence further north, at the Ras Jdir refugee camp on the coast, which gained prominence early in the Libyan conflict as the entry point for countless thousands of migrant workers from Libya.

At Ras Jdir, reports a doctor with the UAE Red Crescent in Dehiba, refugees of Libyan nationality were better-off financially than those entering here in southern Tunisia, and were able to make a comfortable place for themselves, staying in hotels and apartments, as opposed to tents.

Here, however, 890 Libyan refugees find themselves living in khaki tents arranged in neat rows, the Tunisian and Emirati flags flying above, guarded by Tunisian military personnel with automatic rifles. Their food and medical supply in stable, provided by the UAE Red Crescent, with assistance from Médecins Sans Frontières. The camp’s staff is composed mostly of Tunisian volunteers and day workers. By the looks of it, the camp is well-maintained and secure.

Yet, the Libyans in the camps are not unconcerned. One of the main worries for Libyans in the camp is the safety of their relatives still inside Libya, including many of the fathers and husbands of the camp’s families. Depending on the security situation at the border from day to day, reports a UAE Red Crescent doctor, some families from the camp move back and forth from Dehiba and its environs to their hometowns in Libya, hoping to reoccupy their homes and reunite with family members.

The other danger for families in the camps is that of saboteurs sent into camps posing as refugees. According to a Libyan doctor and a UAE Red Crescent doctor in Dehiba, Libyans as well as some Tunisians have been paid by Qaddafi forces to start trouble in the refugee camps. This is in the hope that the Tunisian authorities will eject the refugees and stop providing asylum to Libyan rebels. “But,” says the Libyan doctor regarding the saboteurs, “the Tunisians know now what is happening. They know these people don’t represent the refugees.”

The future is uncertain for the Libyans taking refuge in this small neighbor nation. Some, like Fethi, the Libyan rebel, are nonchalant when posed with the question of when he and his family will be able to return home permanently. “Gaddafi could go tomorrow; he could go in a month. I don’t know, but I’m not worried.”

Salih, however, is more wary. He knows that he and his family must return home to Nalut before the summer months begin in a few weeks to avoid the heat in Dehiba, which will make his family’s overcrowded accommodation unbearable. He says the situation here makes him and other refugees tense and anxious. As for if his family can return to Libya for good anytime soon, he says, “We hope. But, we don’t know if we will.”

Dimashq #11ː More of the Lebanese Beat

More of the Lebanese Beat

April 23^rd, 2011

Yesterday I awoke in the misty grey chill of Zahlé in my hotel room with two beds. No traffic noises at that early hour, just a few voices drifting through the dark green shutters from the street below. Probably some staff at the MASSIVE hospital facing the old hotel. I rose from the saggy softness of the bed, used that gloriously clean bathroom that I’ve come not to expect in the Middle East, did my meditation routine, and that was that. Downstairs in the huge parlor room that probably once welcomed family members coming from all around the provinces back in the Ottoman Empire days, before the mansion became a hotel, I unceremoniously handed over my key to Nada. She was smiling, sleepily, as we talked about where I could get breakfast and how much I should pay for transport out of Zahlé, and was speaking Arabic in a way a little less Lebanese and a little more Damasc-ish for my benefit. Yet she was nonplussed about my departure all the same. “Merci. Ma3a salēma,” and I slipped out onto the cold drizzle street on the hill.
What a barren place in this season, human-wise. I shivered in the cold wet on the street alone, growling inside when an old guy walking past said assumingly “Hello!” But, I did snap some shots of imposing old 19^th-century mansions, all grey stone, green shutters, terraces, and orange tile roofs, with that highly French look, to the point where one aesthetic is indistinguishable from the other.
Found the “bakery,” really more of a new, chi-chi café, where I was able to great workers with “Bonjour” and have it mirrored right back at me. If the French iħtilēl (occupation) of so many years ago left anything, it’s this repressed awkward distance between those who don’t know each other, and a desire to culturally one-up everybody else, for I felt little human warmth, and sensed my “coolness” decrease upon entering. Funny, though, that I had been speaking Arabic with the black-haired woman at the coffee press, but when she brought a café au lait to the table and saw me reading a book in French, she said “You’re welcome” in response to my “Merci.” What are we trying to prove here? Tasty breakfast of bread and za3tar and croissant, but too light.
And I kept walking down the light slope, making an important observation: that I felt much more at ease—mentally and physically—when actually moving along down the avenue. I think it it’s because I felt that I wouldn’t have to worry about engaging anyone in a language I might falter in, like Arabic or French (getting people to speak to me in the language I want them to always has, and does, make me really tense), and that I didn’t worry that I was somehow wasting time by sitting around somewhere. It’s all part of my difficulty being in the moment. On the way down, the signage was getting more eclectic and bold, with shop names in French like “Jean Saliba & Fils,” “Toutes Choses,” but also huge billboards of sectarian political leaders, and a big nationalist banner reading “Let’s get back to our roots, back to our values, back to LEBANON.”
Got down to the دوّار (duwwār: “roundabout”) and after talking to a shopkeeper about where to grab a servīs (public minibus), took one out to Ba3lbek. Nice and cheap. The road was straight, and we rose out of the tangle of unfinished apartment buildings at the edge of town, and through pine forest that reminded me of New England. Soon we entered the valley where Ba3lbek sits, and the fields on either side of the highway rolled away in rich black soil, up to the hilt of mountains on both sides topped with snow and mist… fancifully beautiful.
Hopped off in front of epic ruins, rising from behind fences and foliage in the distance, and dove right in—for the equally epic price of 10,000 Lebanese lira. But after dodging old guys saying “Monsieur, you need guide? Est-ce que vous voulez un guide?” And walking around the high walls, columns, and massive space a Roman courtyard, I was impressed. Huge arches, and neatly carved hollows in the walls of the Temple of Jupiter where idols must once have stood were bright despite their grayness. I toddled around fallen column heads with faces of old gods carved into them. Tour groups of French and German and Lebanese walked around the high walls guffawing at the jokes of their guides, looking afraid somehow. It appears that though the temple complex, as it stands, was originally Roman, and subsequently used by a slew of Arab chiefs as a fortress, it was likely built on top of something much older, from the Phoenicians perhaps.
The size and intricacy of these 2,000 year-old remains was more than anything I’d seen, and at the end of the ruins there was a slick museum of pictures, sculpture, and quadrilingual signage. I enjoyed checking out photographs of Ba3lbek back in the late 19^th century, when apparently the German Kaiser made a visit, because so much was different: intense “oriental” clothing of Fes caps and vests and baggy sirwāl pants, and architecture of stone arches and drainage canals and domes. None of the brand new, yet crumbling and hollow apartment buildings everywhere built on torn earth. And no tight jeans, leather jackets, and semi-mullets, as was the modern attire of the shebēb (young men) in Ba3lbek. What I dug heavily too was the shots of nomadic Turkomen tribesmen outside the town, with tents and head wraps and flutes and smiling, barefaced women. The crazy medieval-ness and naked ethnic diversity of tongues and tribes is something I miss here, something perhaps yet to be found, but something I felt, at least, that I was encountering in North Africa. Siiiigh.
After all that, I walked and I walked and finally found a kebab sandwich for 3,000 lira in a little butcher street. This is not a cheap country. There I sat out front of the butcher shop and ate my sandwich, watching men fan coals under kebab skewers with pieces of cardboard, the shitty mopeds try to pass sleek two-door coups in the little street, the huge dry carcasses swinging lightly. I spoke to a few guys who were amazed that I could speak Arabic, despite my stumbling.
Then I walked all the way up to a sweet, windy park where families picnicked, and hijab-wearing moms called out to little kids. Restaurants and cafés full of locals bustled despite the windy chill. Took a seat at a near-deserted café and attempted the poem below. Certainly not my proudest work, but there might be something worth keeping in it:





A teapot and a teaglass
A spoon and bits of sugar
That cling like sand

“Ey? Shu hiyye?”
The one woman in
Shadow-black hijab asks her son
And the grains of green
Tree leaf and seed pods like pebbles
Tap my table and
Roll down the front of my blue kenze
Slipping from the grip
Of the tree overhead
Its stiff fingers pushing
Through the café roof

The kids keep playing
In the park between me
And the crack-dry streets
And the mothers keep scolding
“Sma3ti shu ‘ilit?”

No one knows the mountains we’re in
Or this town hung on their edge
They might only say the name
If Hezbollah here starts a war
Or if the old temple here tumbles down

Today it’s just us
The argilé pipe
The sweetness of the tea
And the sun.

I walked back to the butcher street, on the way stopping at a sha3bi (popular) internet joint. There, finally, I got a little rooted in this country, in some regular Lebanese people after I stopped fighting and pretending. Upon entering, I speak to the fellas in Arabic. They smile and answer in bumpy English. I talk back in English, and they get curious. After reading some e-mails—one e-mail of which declaring my acceptance to NYU Gallatin School with a fifteen-grand scholarship—and bullshitting a bunch, I got talking to the chattering shebēb in English, then meaningful Arabic, and a bit of French. “Why are you live in Syria, no Lebanon? Life is too much better here,” one says. I found out that most of them spoke the Gaulish tongue, but a couple of them had studied English more recently at the university and felt stronger in it. Thus their initial linguistic inclinations. But it was great connecting a bit in whatever tongue. It made me feel more settled.
On that note, though, French in the Levant, it’s starting to seem, is becoming a relic, only surviving in Lebanon, it seems, because of an official status. Kicked out of Syria without mercy through the Arab nationalist program. It’s odd—I consider myself a devout anti-imperialist, but I’m fascinated by, even intellectually trapped by, the layering of some imperial language on top of another culture. I think the existence of French beside other tongues around the world is so cool, that I get wounded when I see things moving to favor English more, as might be the case here. My fellow activists are gonna kill me for such old fashioned, if-only-the-natives-spoke-French talk, but it’s a big part of how I see the world.
Anyhow, I hauled my tired body and heavy backpack towards the ruins, past the men trying to hawk me T-shirts and guidebooks, and stood on the highway shivering in the wind. I grabbed a servīs that hauled me and bunch of locals back down through the fields, a sharper green now with the darkening sky and cloud-cover, and we stopped at any and all beat, nowhere corners to pick up more passengers. Down, down to the main highway to Beirut, made a right, and we began to climb. Up through the mess of apartments and banks, up into the treeless mountains. The road was steep, and the traffic ahead stretched to infinity. Soon we ascended into the mist at the mountains’ tops. Another few minutes, and we began to descend. The mist let go of the servīs, and steep gorges fell away on either side, their slopes dotted with pimples of poorly-placed apartment buildings. Then the sun, shining in from the sea, was all red and orange, and we passed a peak astride the highway where a fancy new church jutted out into the air, like a fist. Everything folded down towards the sea, towards the last golden sun. The packed disorder of roadside buildings signaling the Beirut suburbs began. I had no idea where to find my friend Ali, living in that big bad city, but I knew he was down there.

This town again. Here we go.

Dimashq #10: "We're Not Sleeping"

"We're Not Sleeping"
I trotted down the old stone steps, the vegetable carts piled high with bright red tomatoes and the shoe repair shops to my back, and the big ugly highway splitting this part of the Old City in two, and the pink setting sun, ahead. "Ughhh, you have no idea what you're doing...." I grumbled, looking on with frustration at the procession of cars, vans, and taxis roaring up and down the highway, Syrian flags and huge posters with the stern and (dopey-looking, frankly) face of the president, and handfuls of young cheering Syrian men, hanging out the windows. They leaned on the horns, honking with the furry one might hear after a win in the World Cup. It went on like that until late in the chilly night, echoing around the paint-flaked walls.
I winced at the mad ignorance of the shebēb (“young guys”) waving Syrian flags, as if I was being cut with a bit of glass, who come out to say… what? That, “Goddamn, we’re so proud of our country for its stability and security (albeit muffling & repressive). And goodness, we’re so taken by that pride for our waTn (“motherland”) that we just had to come out into the gloriously dirty streets of our capital to share it. It’s just a coincidence that our outpouring of love comes at the moment rebellion is appearing in the country.” Is that the message? Or, is it, as my housemate said to me one night when I came home from work, weary from the horns of regime-supporting shebēb blaring on the highway beside me, that they’re just excited at the disturbances in the daily order of things and are coming out with the flags and placards as they might in a soccer match between Manchester United and Barcelona?

The question is worth asking: is this support genuine, or fabricated? And what does genuine support really mean, in this case? The question’s a fly buzzing in my skull for the rest of the five-minute walk under the highway and through the tattered Ottoman-era buildings all piled on top of one another, to my house.
As I watch intermittent reports on Al Jazeera on TV the next morning, switching between righteousness-ripe pro-reform protests in cities like Homs and Hama and Dar’a, and video clips of big crowds of flag-waving “We Love Asad” demonstrators, the question comes up again.
I think back to the party we had in our house last week, where I stood in the back nook of our florescent-lit kitchen, surrounded by a motley assortment of European college kids, and beside my friend Firas (see my post The Druze of Sweida from last November) and had my first meaningful political conversion in Syria about Syrian politics. It was as refreshing as a glass of milk after some cookies. Firas brought up the point that a lot of the seeming support for the ruling regime here comes from people’s assumption that any kind of disturbance in the political order threatens the thing they’ve been “trained”, as Firas put it, to value most: stability. Or, as least that’s what it’s called. What it means is a no-questions-asked one party government, supported by a deep network of secret police with nearly unlimited power due to special “State of Emergency” laws that have been in effect since 1963, which, I believe, is when the Baath party assumed power in Syria. Yet, because of the super-nationalistic rhetoric spewed in schools, something I can confirm from my days as a university student here, as well as all other major institutions, and no discourse in the public sphere to counter it, people begin to fear and, even worse, resent those who dare ask for greater freedom and opportunity in their country. That was me and Firas’ combined analysis of the state of regime support. Where we differ, though, is when Firas

"Long live the leader" beside my doorway. says, “But Bashar is not a bad guy. Actually, I kind of like him.”
Sure, I don’t think he’s got evil coursing through his veins by any measure, but he’s the face of the scummy cabal that runs this place, and it’s his responsibility to avoid the intimidation or killing of protesters if he’s not crazy about shooting at his own people. So I spare him no critique.
Something that entered the margins of the conversion, rolling off the tongue of a pretty Tunisian-German girl in front of me, who lives with a Christian Syrian family in the Old City, is the enduring political and social conservativism of the Syrian Christians. She talked about how her family basically interviews her about each person she’s going to bring to the house to find out whether they’re Christian or not. I believe she also mentioned that they were very anxious about any change in the regime that could occur in Syria, fearing it might usher in a government that oppresses them, the minority. I think this is a fear that’s been cultivated since the days of the French protectorate in Syria (1919ish-1946), the French having done a swell job of dividing-and-ruling along religious lines, which is still the cause of violence in Lebanon. It may have roots further back into Ottoman times, but I don’t know much about that. Just an informed guess.
But this question of genuine support is partly answered by a little anecdote another friend shines on me when I step in the door one day.
He says that, regarding the recent pro-regime demonstrations, a woman in his class at the university here in Damascus has a Syrian boyfriend. That boyfriend of hers was recently summoned to university on a Friday (normally the first day of the weekend around these parts), being told that there was an extremely important exam that day that he had to take or he would fail his course. Upon arriving at the university, he found it closed, with the doors locked. Yet, he and a number of others were collected (by who, it is not clear) and tossed into a bus that took them to a nearby pro-regime demonstration. They were sternly commanded to go out and participate in the Syrian flag fest. If that anecdote is at all typical of the current situation, we see that the apparent love of esh sha3b es sūri (“the Syrian people”) for its government is just a little inflated.
And the process of political awakening that is going on among former regime supporters, or at least those who accepted it, is an interesting one. Like my friend Fehemi, for example, whose face began to crumple with disappointment, and hints of anger crossed his brow, during our language exchange the other night. I always took him for a socially conservative guy, and this attitude popped
Church & mosque minaret in Sha3alaan, Damascus
up with strength during one language exchange a couple weeks back. With the first wave of violent repression of the protests in Dar’a, he had told me that he just wished the protesters would calm down, and that he was worried that because of the clan system widespread down in Dar’a, clans would come out and take revenge on those who killed their kinsmen. His disappointment with the ruling regime only came as a disappointment with the regime’s stupidity for violently repressing the protests, not because it was unjust and despicable to do so, but because it might spark further protests in other parts of Syria. Now, during our conversation in English, he let me know that his support built from fear was disappearing. He said “I feel like I can’t trust the President any more. I used to like him.” I pressed him a little on that last comment, and he said “I only ‘liked’ him because I knew there could be worse people in his place, like his Father Hafiz al Asad. But now, because of his lies, like saying he would remove the Emergency Laws, and because he kills his own people, I am disappointed.” I asked him if he felt angry. “Yes, I am angry. They made me believe something, but now I see that they, how do you say?” “Tricked?” I said. “Yes, they tricked me.”