Dimashq #2: I'm thinkin

8/12/10
I’m thinkin. I’m usually thinkin, but today I’ve got a little bit more space in the schedule to allow some clarity of thought. I got out of class at the Jēmi3at Damashq, the University of Damascus, just a few hours ago.

What is special about this place? An important question to ask, considering I still have not left the city limits of Damascus since that day I recounted in my last post. That was nearly a month ago. The critical reader will exclaim aloud, “What’s special about living in Damascus?! You spoiled little punk! Living in Damascus is the special part!”
What I mean, however, is that there are moments like this one—as I sit on the beat and tacky furniture in the living room of my, relatively speaking, awesome apartment, situated directly across from the tomb of a saint whose name I don’t know, listening to Miles Davis on my laptop, slowly developing diabetes from biscuits with sugary jam and sweet Turkish coffee—that’s to say, moments of considerable comfort, when life here seems just too average. It happens to all of us though, I think, when one is constantly moving along in the ruts of a track of daily activity and one yearns to make a turn, and take the path less traveled by. Props to Bobby Frost on that line. The path is becoming well-worn, because the past two weeks have been school. School. School.
Wake up to the uncomfortable vibrating, irregularly-beeping phone alarm at 5:45am, the air in the ancient, dusty room finally cool by that time, lay in bed, struggling to keep eyes open as you stare up at the ceiling of the room, constructed of crooked branches and planks of wood that must date back centuries, the wallpaper at the ceiling’s edges peeling tremendously, and purple morning light filtering over the soil and stucco walls facing your window across the alleyway. You rise with difficulty, dress in the shabbiest of fashions, make a visit to the tiny, humid (why?) bathroom in your apartment, and return to room, where you ceremoniously arrange pillows on the floor and direct the fan at your already sweating body. Then you engage in an hour of disciplined breathing followed by a period of sahaj samadhi meditation. Then you yank your tired self up from the ‘60s-style linoleum floor of your room, and start piling dishes, cartons of juice, silverware, cheese, bread, various fruits, and jam onto your low living room table. Anton steps slowly out of the shower, dresses, and like a highly-trained Olympic breakfast team, you two organize the elements of food on the table, unwrap the bread, and begin chowing down on jam, fruit, tea, and other awesome stuff in such a sharp, systematized way that it would put Swiss watchmakers to shame. Between bites you make puns and mindless bathroom jokes in Arabic, like bukhsh et-tīz (“hole of ass”). The clock strikes 8:05a.m. and you remove plates and teacups and bags of grapes from the table and restore them to their places, brush teeth, and you out.
Mosey out the door, complain or sing praises of the current temperature, and slip through the silent alleyways of dust, meaningful Arabic graffiti, beautiful wooden doorways, and high walls, out to Qaimariyya street, one of the main drags in the Old Town, usually ripe with droning European tourists, but empty at that hour, save for bearded street sweepers wrapped in orange uniforms laboring over gum wrappers and cigarette butts. Along the cobblestones, up the steps, and a long walk around the gargantuan Jēmi3 el Umuwiyyīn mosque, the largest in Syria, its high minaret looking down at you like a wise old grandfather. Walk under a few pillars from an old Roman temple to Jupiter, and maybe as far as a quarter mile through an enormous suuq (market), just beginning to open its well-kept eyes at that time. Out into the ugly reality of the New Town, which is most of Damascus, past a giant fortress that traps tourists like flies on tape, past ancient women from far villages clad in black with mysterious tattoos on their faces setting up bags of veggies to sell on the sidewalk, through visible pollution, under an ugly grey highway overpass called Bridge of the Revolution (it’s a laughable name), up and over Revolution Street on a beat old footbridge, down, wait for the bus, hop on, pay the equivalent of less than 1 cent for the ride, and look around the bus for other gringo students from the University who usually don’t look back, just as they would do in Europe. The bus gets crowded. Immerse yourself in the scents of ripe man bodies wearing thick shirts standing around you in the morning heat. Look curiously at the two Somalian kids holding on to straps, their unique brown-red-black skin and curly-kinky hair and thin features making you wonder about the Horn of Africa, and listen closely to find out what language they are speaking with one another. Is it Somali? Or Arabic? What do you think? Tell me.
Step off the bus, through the dimly-lit tunnel under the highway, past the innocent young guard with an AK-47 at the University entrance, and past clots of Italians, Dutch, and French, with a few Syrians around the fringes, sitting on the steps, smoking in ethnically exclusive squads. Through the outdated hallways of stale air, 1970’s aesthetic, and fake marble, and up to the classroom. Look around you. French, Korean, Taiwanese, British, Spanish, and Turkish students sit in a semi-circle, ready for the 4 hours-worth of learning coming their way, sweating before the air conditioning is finally turned on. 5 minutes later the young, round-faced teacher, her head wrapped in a white hijab and body wrapped in waaaay too many layers to be comfortable in that heat, enters the classroom, hits you with a little Sabāħ l kheir, and you get going. 55 minutes of questions about what you did yesterday, review of the latest news in halting Arabic, questions about the homework, group vocab activities, then a 10 minute break.
You step out, hoping to speak in French to Fatima, the Muslim Algerian woman from France wrapped in full black hijab, and learn more about the country of her ancestors, but she is already on the couch in the hallway speaking to her young, bearded husband. You rush like a river with all the other knowledge seekers from around the globe over to the coffee machine, find that its still broken, and then out to the steps where the students come together in groups of conversation, falafel, and cigarettes, like oil droplets coming together in water, hiding from the bullying sun in patches of shade. You sit on the steps and just watch everybody, speaking not even a single word to any human sometimes, allowing the sun to bake you a bit on the marble steps as you gaze across the street to the school of dentistry, where serious Syrian students, all fasting because it is Ramadan, sit and lounge with books in hand. Maybe you will see Anton and you will get to talking, or maybe Lucia (pronounced Luthia), the pretty and flirtatious Spanish PhD student, will wave to you from the other side of the steps and say “Hola señor el americano…” But usually not, though you would like that to happen. So you sit on the steps, and if it’s a good day, you’ll feel an amazing sense of detachment and just watch everything, desiring nothing. True power. Then the students, clad in the hippest garb (except for these trendy new Aladin-pants all the women seem to be wearing), start to reverse leak back inside, you move with them, up the steps, into the classroom, back to your ancient desk, and repeat. This continues three more times, till the clock finally strikes 13h, and then you’re free to go home, buy some groceries in the intensely hot, dirty, yet very inexpensive market street, and do homework until its time to go to bed, because you have another busy day tomorrow.
So that’s been the routine of late. Sometimes I just wonder: when am I gonna break through? Through this language, in both its written form stamped onto the pages of national newspapers, and its oral form—quite different—sung from the mouths of Damascenes in a way that makes them sound like they are always asking a question. Through the social bonds and nets that tie language groups and personality types together during break time between class at the University. Through the borders of this country, not to mention simply this city, that have been cradling me for such a long time now. Yea it seems like a grand adventure everyday according to the way I tell it, but that’s cuz I got a special eye for the everyday. It is an adventure. But this adventure is getting old. Put my feet on some other streets.



ADVENTURE. small but necessary.
8/13/2010

“A huge carbomb exploded right here in February 2006, and killed the prime minister. Biggest carbomb I’ve ever seen. It actually blew out the windows at the American University up on the hill over there.” Yusef spits out all this information with an unimpressed matter-of-fact air about him, as you zip up and down hilly streets, towards and away from the calm Mediterranean Sea, in a giant 4x4 jeep that has no place except in American suburbs. He seems—though I know this is not so—to be almost happy to recount all of the dates and names as he gives me the Beirut Civil War and Political Assassination Tour, which I find fascinating. I think that’s why he’s into it, because I’m listening. I can’t capture all the names, nor the dates, nor the reason each person was killed, because the list is long and rapid-fire. As our red jeep swings through the dusk streets of the newly-constructed Beirut downtown, sitting quietly by the sea, built up in the last few years with the help of some multi-billion dollar foreign investment, where the avenues are often soulless and lined with more Prada shops than the Upper East Side, I see for the first time the war-town face of this place that I have been hearing about for literally my entire life, trying to hide under the heavy makeup of corporate reconstruction.
We pass, in the lessening light, timthēl esh-shuhedē’ (Statue of the Martyrs), who I guess, fought and died while fighting French colonialism in Lebanon (though I could have that history totally mixed-up), and as we round it and make a second pass, Yusef points out that some of the limbs of the martyr statues are still missing. They were blown off in the Civil War between the country’s sects of Maronite Christians, Palestinian refugees, Sunnis, Shiites, Phalangists, and others that raged from 1975 to 1991, much of the fighting in Beirut concentrated in and around the central downtown district. Bullet marks riddle their figures like action figures poked with needles. In fact, bullet holes mark almost every building I see in West Beirut, whether apartment buildings in middle-class enclaves or office buildings in the downtown district. We round the statue again, and cruise past the headquarters of the Lebanese newspaper En-nahaar¬, which has a huge banner draped from one side, displaying the face of it’s former editor, whose name I can’t remember (Hariri, maybe?), who was also killed in a carbomb attack. We zip up a hill, away from the fancy downtown lit like a movie set, past a beautiful Maronite church, white and orange and looking Greek in style to my eyes, surrounded by the wrecks of several large building, up into the residential neighborhood where Yusef says the Green Line was located. This line separated the Muslim and Christian populations during the Civil War, according to my very basic knowledge. Here we enter a large swath of half-destroyed buildings, flanked by a huge, round, weird-looking cylindrical theatre, which I think Yusef told me he used to attend to see movies back in the day. It’s abandoned now. Yusef says that when the fighting got really bad, artillery was brought in. Only shells falling from the sky could have done such damage. We keep on moving, and as we edge up another hill not too far from the American University, Yusef points out the silhouette of the enormous, high-as-heaven, Holiday Inn, which I can barely make out in the rapidly arriving darkness. I see in the towering, empty building, huge holes from tank shells that landed on its concrete flanks, and not one window is intact. Yusef, my chum who grew up amid this destruction, says that the Holiday Inn was the strategic prize during the war, for whoever could put snipers at the top could control a giant area of Beirut, and could remain King of the Hill as long as they commanded that building. The air conditioning in the jeep is much too high, and I’m getting chilly, but it’s much preferable to rolling down the windows and soaking in the layers of sea humidity that cover everything west of the mountains in Lebanon.
We keep on rolling, and very soon we are moving through some tight backstreets where tiny shops selling ifTaar (the after-sundown meal during Ramadan) sweets with signs in French, English, and Arabic, look merry, and the city begins to take on a more popular, working-class, possibly affordable character. We slow down. Making a turn onto an even smaller street, Yusef nods towards a mass of clustered, white apartments that look like they were glued together really quickly. This is the entrance to the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp. Men sit on chairs around the edges of the zone, and children play in the street. Stalls at roadside sell I-don’t-know-what. As we approach, some powerful firecrackers start blasting behind a wall, and I hear the cracks and see flashes of blue light and wonder for a second “Holy shit. Is the Shatila massacre happening again?” But no. No one screams, because they’re just firecrackers, and besides, there’s no Israeli invasion at the moment, and no roving Christian Phalangist militias trying to kill “terrorists”. Complex violence. Fuck the French colonialists, Reagan, Eisenhower, Nettenyahu, the Israeli invasions of Lebanon, the PLO. Bush and Obama. Where’s democracy?
We make a tight u-turn. Yusef refuses to go inside the camp. His eyebrows are scrunched and his goateed face is concerned He seems to be a little unsure about our safety. I won’t argue. Not now, at least. Funny thing, though: as I ride a minibus back to Damascus the next day, packed with chatty Italian students from the University, some of the beautiful young women tell me, “Ah yes, Sabra e Shatila. The Palentinians. We walked in the camps-a. We did-a not have any-a-problems. Veeeery-a poor, though. Veeeery sad.” I asked them, “Would you call it a ghetto? I know the word has a different connotation in Italian but it’s…” “Yes-a. Definitely a ghetto,” they said, solemn-faced.