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.

Dimashq #7: A Winter Day in Shēm

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 Damascus are well into the after-noon part of the day, yet my roommate Ed still lies frozen in sleep on the Bedouin padding in the living room, poisoned a bit from last night’s whiskey, obscure Arabic literature beside him. His two guests, a wicked-smart Brit and his Syrian Kurdish girlfriend, lie coughing and ill and semi-somnolent in his bedroom, just down the darkish hallways from me. The eternal drip from the shower echoes from the bathroom, and makes this apartment sound like a cavernous dungeon when everyone’s quiet.

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 12^th, 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 South America. I look both ways on the main drag, shēri3 yarmūk, past all the clothing shops that look snappish and clean and newer ‘an a baby against the aged camp sidewalks, ALL of which seem to have “New Collection” scribbled on their windows (new collection of what? Who’s supposed to read that?), and witness every single female in a tight hijab, many of the older ones wearing a lot more than that, including some fierce World War II-looking winter jackets. A land of squeeze, whether from the clothes people dawn, or by the hand of this sternly undemocratic government. Then I get a brief flash in my mind’s eye of the pictures that I just saw on the internet of my gorgeous acquaintance Nabou Gaye off in sunny Senegal land, all colorful and hijab-less, and again wonder what is it that keeps me in this region of the world. Why can’t I make things easy on myself and just settle in Cancún, get my tourism Spanish together, and spend the rest of my life writing for a hotel magazine, making the extent of my activism improving the working conditions for luggage porters?
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 New York, asks me, alarmed, in perfect English, “What are you doing?”
“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 Somalia for several decades), I snake back through the pretty little side streets of Mesēkin Berza, out to the always-humming highway, and grab a servīce. Within, we all shiver, steam rises off my damp clothes squeezed between other bodies, and some people wear plastic bags on their feet. Brave the cold in this stripped down van, strain to stay awake amid the soft lull of gear-shifting rhythms and easy stops and starts for mounting passengers along the way. Struggle back up the chilly steps of the apartment building, throw backpack down amid living room mess, and throw off wet clothes for nakedness in the cool air of the apartment, as the last bits of early blue sunset fade away from windows’ edge.


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 Saudi Arabia on a cheap bus for Christmas. I got to do the dishes, put this entry onto the internet, stuff my scarf and dictionary into my bag, and get to bed. Last night in town, and I got a plane to catch in the morning. Curtis Mayfield plays on my computer, and he’s singing “The key to our success is we gotta see each other through…”

Peace, Syria.

Dimashq #4: KURDISTAN. traveling with a Napolitano and no tourists in sight.

toilet at Syrian/Turkish border post

KURDISTAN. traveling with a Napolitano and no tourists in sight.

Diyarbakir is intense in its initial difficulty. Bus speeds into some kind of boring clean city highways and we exit the bus and hop onto a minibus that rolls us under the humungous grey-black stone wall around the center of the city, crumbling in certain spots where I fantasize that some kind of great artillery battle occurred. We spy orderly European-wannabe streets of shops and stores and cafés plastered with info and ads in the totally bizarre Turkish language which I don’t understand at all, except for its multitude of loanwords from Arabic. Me and Andrea—my new homeboy hailing from Napoli, Italy, who seeks that unsaid spirit-thing too—find our hotel only after intense English-less searching. Yet, we don’t check in just yet, and continue on with our heavy bags, meandering through a crowded covered market street with butchers and fruit sellers and the like, much cleaner than in Syria, which takes us deep into the Old City, which is much less glamorous than in Syria. Muddy water on cobblestone streets, crowds of playful Kurdish children shouting “Allo!” with brown skin and bad haircuts, women in un-revealing dresses and headscarves, and houses of different colors piled one on the other.
We walked around the high, thick, somber city wall that surrounds the epicenter of this “capital” of Turkish Kurdistan. Some fellas mount the wall via some crumbly, huge-gap stairs. Passed a square stone building filled with children splashing loudly in a big warm pool. Alleyways to homes filled with poverty and trash. Walk up the steep forest hill just outside old city gates, up the steps past little quiet girls in headscarves, and through the courtyard of a mosque where children play and old men with long beards and skullcaps are wise. Back through the city wall, along the main street where we unexpectedly encounter a jovial barber speaking R-rolling French who offers to give me an unneeded shave, and back to hotel.
A little cool-off and meditation, then I meet Andrea downstairs where hotel workers watch sad music videos in Kurdish showing PKK fighters killed by Turkish soldiers. Andrea and I both have headaches ringing through our skulls from our unintended all-day fast. My debit card doesn’t work at any bank and I am nearly moneyless and hungry.
We wander once more through the streets of the Old City, and come upon a huge mosque that’s like the murmuring holy heart of the town, built of stone and glass and polished marble by the Ottoman Turks (so I heard) ages ago. The sun is low and the light is dim and children play around the spigots used to wash the body before prayer, set in a circle below a glorious sloping pointed gazebo structure in the courtyard of the mosque complex. Men sit and stand around the entrance speaking thick consonants and tight vowels of the awesome Kurdish language, a relative (and perhaps the mother) of Farsi. Lots of sh and ch and kh sounds. Within the mosque, we pad around the spacious carpeted main chamber, pillars around us and marble dome with Arabic calligraphy above us, and we both sit at the stone window sills reading (or maybe just sounding out) words from the Holy Qor’an. Two older man having an animated debate outside the window.
Looking for a place for food, which is a faaaar distant memory at this point—the last time we ate something of substance having been the black night before on a bus zipping through the scary Syrian desert—we see tiny wooden seats being set up around low tables in the main square of Diyarbakir. Beside the square, huge tents are erected with some folks in hairnets prepping food in big metal tubs for an ifTaar dinner (the meal breaking the fast during Ramadan). Damn it smells good and my head hurts from hunger, but we decide to wait for ifTaar and break fast with the rest of these benevolent mountain people.
An hour later, we get on line for food, much as one might in a homeless shelter soup kitchen, and watch portions of food plop onto our Styrofoam trays in the fading purple-orange light consuming all just before sunset. The food is free of charge and I’m greatly relieved. Andrea and I are seated at a long table with a bunch of scruffy men (the women eating ifTaar in an adjacent tent), including two deaf guys actually singing in Kurdish, which is awesome. People play with the food on their plates, mixing and dividing and staring with desire at the food that is just minutes away from their bellies. I play with my water bottle. The muezzin begins to call the last prayer and BAM, everyone gets on with chowing down. We gulp down bread and potatoes and chicken and soup and rice, and the fella across from me puts some of his bread on my plate, for generous is he and understanding of my feeble body not used to fasting. After we finally swallow the last of our meal, he also gives us cigarettes and smiles.
So after a moment we slip back out into the square, where we are invited to sit with three bearded, smiling Kurdish cats of middle-age in button-down shirts at their tiny table with seats. They wave the waiter kid over and in a flash we are sipping wholesome brown Kurdish tea from little curvy glasses with itty-bitty mixing spoons. The men speak to us rapidly in their heavy guttural tongue, asking us (I think) where we hail from and if we like Diyarbakir. Of course we do. We try to ask questions about other cities in Kurdistan and about their language, and after trying a few words in Standard Arabic, we switch to sign language. They smile and roll strong cigarettes for us and keep hissing slightly to get our attention. The dude on my right, with heavy scruff and yellow teeth and mountain strength, keeps kissing my cheek, and squeezes my shoulders so hard I feel that might cry. The guy is simply overjoyed that I am existing right next to him, it seems. Andrea snaps a few photos and impresses the guys with his knowledge of Kurdish numbers, which are almost the same as the Farsi he studies back at his Escola del Oriente or something like that, in Napoli.
We sit for a whiiiile with these guys, and when we stand and try to pay for the tea, they all tilt heads back slightly and click tongue-tips—which simply means “Na-uh, no” in Turkey—and wag fingers like, “Twouldn’t be right. You’re our guests. Hope you enjoyed the tea.”



the Kurdish men


the mosque in Diyarbakir

reading the Qor'an in Diyarbakir

Şanlıurfa

Andrea

So, Diyarbakir is finished. Sad to no longer be there, in a way, among the nice people who don’t see many gringos, because it felt so intensely real in its remote Kurdishness and here-and-there poverty. Real has many sides to it though, and it can also be maddeningly lonesome, foreign, and dysfunctional. So it was in Diyarbakir, where, at many turns, you had intense Kurdish culture aright, but where nothing seemed to work and where I only communicated at any length with two locals: both brief conversations with sad-eyed tour guides.
But after a ride in a sweet, air-conditioned bus to the ancient city of Şanlıurfa, I am enjoying my Turkish séjour in a little less rough and rugged way. This town, which has various names in Greek, Turkish, Latin, Arabic, Kurdish, and Armenian, and has been the capital of innumerable empires, sits in low plains and rolling hills in fucking MESOPOTAMIA! (literally between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. You know... Cradle of Civilization stuff) in Southern Turkey, southeast of Diyarbakir. Cool town because it’s got life, anima, and breathe. Hot as Damascus, if not hotter, during the day, but pleasant when the sun gets low.
Yesterday, after a loooot of walking and some minibus rides along the Attatürk Bulvarı, Andrea and I found a lil’ hotel. Sadly, my Napolitano companion still had to pay for me because I was clean out of Turkish lira. We grabbed some kebap (or kebab in the English way), which was soul-filling and actually made the cranky, tense traveler I had become open up and enjoy my new surroundings. Food in my belly, and fasting no longer, I felt like “OK, well no one around here speaks my language but that’s just fine because I’m ready to learn Kurdish.”
I did get a lil’ cash exchanged though at a jewelry store. Then Andrea and I promenaded through glorious khaki stone gates into an outer courtyard of Şanlıurfa’s huge main mosque, where children yelped and laughed and splashed water in a pristine man-made stream. Then we cruised through a white marble garden, then airy courtyard outside the entrance to the mosque. Here, men with skull caps, vests, long beards, and very distinct baggy, low-crotch Turkish pants walked thoughtfully to and fro’ with hands counting prayer beads behind their backs. Entered the prayer room after de-shoeing , and again sounded out bitty passages from the Qor’an by the stone window sill, just like in Diyarbakir. Afterwards, more wandering through immaculate marble column courtyards that make you think of all the former beauty and greatness of the old Islamic empires that you hear about in high school, playing a little name game with some local kids, sitting at an outdoor café, and then we began our ascent of the tumbledown part of Şanlıurfa that had been calling our names all day.
The streets were immediately poor, and the concrete houses lining the steep steep steep hill were multicolored and very old-looking. We huffed and puffed up one of the cobblestoned main streets where a gentle little ditch in the center of the street led rivulets of water downhill, and where men gunned their sidecar motorcycles full throttle uphill. Women with facial tattoos and headscarves regarded us from the steps of their doorways. Before long, we had a posse of kids with smiles and pogs (remember those?) following us uphill. Ran into some tanned elder gentlemen in baggy pants that bade us welcome, and met the smiling, well-groomed, Central-Asian looking Murad (Was that his name?). He led us to the hill’s summit, where we met the sweet, dark-featured Redwan: the first fluent English speaker that we could relate to at all in Turkey. We climbed over the low wall outside his home and sat in the dirt amid some trees and ancient grave stones, where we spoke of our travels and possible future destinations in Kurdistan. Murad grinned, and said thick words to Redwan in Kurdish, with recognizable Arabic loanwords like kelima and qalam (“word” and “pen” respectively), complete with ع, ق , and ح sounds, just like in Arabic. Rock.
Kids encircled us and sat in the dust too. As the golden rays of sun-death shined over distant hills, Redwan showed us videos of the archeological site of Gölbeklıtepe and its before-time ruins and the Bedouin Arab town of Harran.


Rewan is a tourism guy, so we agreed to meet later by the holy fish stream beside the main mosque to plan future adventures, and then we moseyed out the gate of the cemetery we were sitting in, and after many goodbye handshakes, we loped down the steep hill of the neighborhood with Şanlıurfa spread out before us and little kids yelling “Money! Money!” behind us.
Me and Andrea mounted endless stairs on an adjacent hill to reach the huge, brown, and famous Cala (from Arabic قلعة/qal3a : “castle”) at the peak of the hill. Never quite got there. Instead we met some wild little kids who played nicely at first, then smirked like madmen and demanded we take their picture, took my voice recorder—which Andrea retrieved—from my man-purse, and who commanded “Money!” and hit and kicked and threw rocks at us while giggling joyfully as we retreated back down. The only thing that saved us from destruction was a beautiful green-eyed girl of about eleven years who commanded them to relent.



part ii
The beat Toyota or whatever inexpensive Japanese-make automobile we’re riding in takes the rough road surprisingly well after we turn off the main highway out of the shabby outskirts of Şanlıurfa, birthplace of the Prophet Abraham (Yea… father of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. That Abraham). The road leads us through vast green, then brown, then yellow fields of agricultural bounty that keep pace with our little speeding car for at least 10 minutes, all the while I hang my arm out the window and actually feel relaxed (?) as longing, sorrowful, stretched-out Kurdish melodies and poetry rattle from the car’s stereo. I tell Ridvan, who is hunched over the steering wheel, how much I dig Kurdish traditional music, how deep I think it is, and how I find that mainstream Turkish stuff to be a bit of a bore. He elaborates on my complaints, shitting verbally on Turkish music. His complaints spread into the realm of linguistics and politics, and he begins telling us how it is illegal for media to be broadcast in any language but Turkish, or any signs to be written in any language but Turkish, and if his kinfolk want to tune into a good TV station in their own language, they gotta search for a Kurdish channel broadcast from Northern Europe. “Stupid Turkish government. They say only we have one country, one flag, one ethnic,” he says. There are a handful of local broadcasts in Kurdish, he says, but the Turkish government limits them in their entirety to 45 minutes a day. Something like that.
We begin the ascent out of the well-irrigated fields and up into a dry plateau region. The dusty road grows wavier, and we must slow the humming engine in order to keep the suspension from being torn out from under the car by the steadily increasing number of bumps, potholes, and ancient rocks coming up from below the dirt-gravel road for air. At first the surroundings turn to dry grass, but then the grass is absent altogether, and instead I look upon fields of stones and shards, and then the vast emptinesses of the land below us, for we are now quite high up. Make some absurdly huge bending turns crisscrossing the road, see some more huge boulders, and stop in an open area. Look around you and witness the Cradle of Civilization resting in the fertile fields below the plateau.
Me and Andrea hop out, make some greetings to a serious, thin boy with sharp features and hair black as mystery who wears a Palestinian kifeya, and waltz over to another kid of reddish hair who’s taking care of some camels that are tied up inhumanely—bored, and restless. As Ridvan stands next to the camels, chatting with the kids in his serious and timeless tongue, the camels continuously try to sneak heads over to Ridvan’s feet and eat him. Over and over. Both Andrea and I give whatever money we can spare to the reddish-hair kid to help feed the camels. The sharp-featured boy who I suppose is the de jure groundskeeper for this holy and land-before-time site, leads us along a dirt path, and voilà: Gölbeklıtepe (which means su’in like “Hill like a belly” in Turkish), a 12,000 year-old Neolithic hunter-gatherer place of worship. I stare down through some meager wire fence around the dig spot, and regard the eight and ten-foot high stone pillars. They are arranged in circles, some not fully unearthed yet, placed around a center pillar. Beautifully carved and smoothed in sharp rectangular shapes, some with another square stone placed—balanced perhaps—atop. The whole complex must have been divided into chambers, because the pillar circles are surrounded by partly destroyed walls of little round stones, and if one looks closely one can see the gap in the wall that leads into what was another chamber with another circle of pillars. It looks like there were little places for people to sit, too. Shadows stretching from the pillars and the little walls and their hollows and recesses are rich at this late afternoon hour. Soulful. Can you see it? What were these people from so long ago worshipping? What did they ask for? What words did they use? A few questions.

On the knoll above the pillar pit, there’s a board with a map and some suuuper-vague information. It mentions hunter-gatherers, 12,000 years, worshipping, and a number of other more or less significant sights around the region. Not much else. I think that’s because it’s a project with no government backing (at least not from the Turkish government), handled entirely by a German team with sparse time to dig because of limited resources from their financiers. Seriously? This is Mesopotamia folks. Let’s discover this awesome shit, shall we?
A holy wind blows and it’s quiet as grace up on this little knoll, with one strong tree for shade in the late-day sun. I look out to the fields of dry gold and moist green, square patches of richness stretching off to the horizon, and imagine that this must have been what the pastures of Palestine looked like almost a hundred years back, around the time the British army wrested it from Ottoman control, and before the followers of Theodore Herzl’s Zionist scheme came to devour the beautiful land, colonize and rewrite history. I imagine this is very much what it looked like.
Back in the car, we slide back down the crisp, dusty road, off of the plateau and its hills of rocky dry. Andrea and I recollect our souls back at base, and go to play dominos with Ridvan and some other Kurds in a big bustling courtyard with tea slurping, dominos slapping table, and Ramadan laughs.



Harran. we want to stay with them in their homes.

I look up at the stone dome above my head and wonder how long it will hold. Andrea probably wonders the same thing too, as he looks up at the cone-shaped ceiling of this chamber in a home built like a honeycomb. A little hole in the top to let smoke out perhaps, like in the stereotypical teepee. Earthen walls around us, soft and orange-brown and dry, with low square doors cut in them leading to adjacent chambers. The walls and almost every available space are covered with some kind of touristy knickknack of low-quality, like a set of shells on strings hanging from something like a clothes hanger, that I guess at one time was used by the inhabitants to keep away evil spirits. These cheap reproductions, though, are only keeping away my money. Some spaces in the chambers are filled, almost tastefully, with skin bags for liquids and really old cooking implements and cosmetic tools, so as to show how the home might have been arranged eighty or a hundred or however many years ago these honeycomb-dome houses were inhabited, but it always has a Museum Village in America kind of look to me.
Outside, sitting under a tent on one of those signature tiny wooden chairs, I watch Ridvan as he exchanges rapid words in Turkish with a local Bedouin Arab guy with black hair in tight T-shirt, the son of generations of Arabs that have been trapped within the Turkish state after their wanderings and followings took them to places like Harran, probably during the Ottoman Empire days, and then the borders were fixed behind them as the empire was broken up and new states solidified. Games of power. And voilà: you have Bedouin Arabs who live on the far southern fringe of Turkey, guarding their mother tongue for all these years while also becoming masters in the Turkish language impressed upon them, and rocking these really cool purple turban head wraps to distinguish themselves from the boiling pot of ethnicities around them.
So I watch, and after a little while an extremely dorky German guy with a video camera comes sauntering up. Him and us gotta be the only tourists around here right about now, and so the locals try to speak to him in Tourism-English as he approaches, but he doesn’t comprehend. He gives one of those classic Middle-Eastern tongue clicks that mean “Uh-uuuuh. Nope,” and goes blasting off in perfect Turkish, though even I can hear his German accent when he speaks. I’m awed, and lean over and spill admiration for this guy’s skills on Andrea in English and French, but he’s been observing more closely and says, “No, I no like this man. He, ah, want to change them. He want to give dem religion.”

Of course. The German dude has been saying kitep dīn (from Arabic kitēb ed-dīn: “book of religion”) in Turkish over and over, and keeps saying something about Protestants. That much I get. So he’s a missionary. I do not like the mission of missionaries. I do not like them, Sam I Am. I would not convert for them in a box, with a fox, in a tree, by the sea. I do not like missionaries,Sam I Am.
Aaaah, this is why he seems so robotic and single-minded in his manners, and why he hands me a brochure on “relaxation”, which I toss when I find out it’s about how to relax through God and his relaxing love.
German god-bringer keeps zipping along in Turkish, and so I play a board game like Mankala on a carpet with one of the Arab fellas. He destroys both me and Andrea every time, saying “ghallabtik” (“I beat you”) matter-of-factly.
Me and the thin, patient Andrea wander out from under the tent and amid some low homes surrounding an open space of khaki-colored soil. These homes are much less snappy-looking than the historical honeycomb houses (most of which are in awful shape actually, and all uninhabited), and some with stone walls around a courtyard. A boy with his finger perpetually up his nose and intensely dirty everything peeks out from a courtyard and I snap a few proud pictures of him. Opposite the home is the famous qal3a
(Yup… remember? “Castle” in Arabic) around which the village is built. It’s probably the main attraction that the few tourists around here come to see, and drop tidbits of money on this terribly poor place to explore. It sits, orange-brown like everything else, nestled in a hill, with thick stone walls, and would be pretty glorious if it were not for the heavy decay it’s gone through. We crawl like bugs over the almost meaningless remains of some collapsed honeycomb houses. From up on top of the ruins of one, I can see that though this village is dry and dusty, it’s really an island of desert surrounded by lush agricultural fields, the result of a recent and impressive desert-reclamation project on the part of the government. How come they missed the village? We stride up a dusty track, and approach some kids playing by a wall. We hail them and are approached by their ringleader: a gruff, energetic girl of eleven years with hawk face and leader qualities within. She keeps asking us questions in her Arabic dialect, and she has to really explain every little thing for me to understand. The way they speak resembles that of Iraq, though the accent is even thicker and harsher, with no refinement of formal education in that language. Kind of like those kids in Bosra, but much more muddy sounding. Andrea tries to speak to them in his Standard Arabic of the classroom variety and they are pretty much bewildered. The young girl orders us to take pictures of certain kids, and drags them up before my camera. Some dig this, and actually push others out of the way so they can be in the middle. The dark, dirty faces of some other little kids just seem scared of this whole camera thing. Andrea continues crouching among them and trying to be one with their level, as I might do. Thank you. Adieu.
We wander back to the tent, where I take a picture of a proud old sheikh-type guy in traditional headdress, and then we fully recognize that, yearn as we might, Ridvan and the locals are asking too much money for us to stay the night in the village with the people, for we are both on our last financial threads. Damningly unfortunate.
So Ridvan carries us away in his automobile, over desert ruggedness and through pastures with the German bloke in front. Me and Andrea talk a little philosophical smack about the guy and his “holy mission” in French. The windows are open and the wind whips while the sun falls.
Ridvan drops the missionary off somewhere, and lets us go at the bus station in Şanlıurfa in the last rays of sunlight. The clean, super-modern station is to be Andrea’s departure point for exploration of Cappadocia on his way to Istanbul before leaving for Italy, and mine for the badly-needed return to Syria. Just as we are thanking Ridvan and getting our bills out to pay him for his services, he hits us with a hiiigh price, which, he explains, we somehow agreed upon before, but of which both Andrea and I are surprised and deflated. Ridvan insists. Our heads fall, for Andrea will now be unable to explore Cappadocia and will have to go, broke, straight to Istanbul, and I may not be able to get home. Whatever. Take your fuckin’money.
Waiting for our bus, while the driver is off eating ifTaar, watching the dusk be dusk, Andrea tells me how sad he is that Ridvan yanked our money like that. He tells me about the places he wants to go in the future, we argue about the meaning of “comfort” when traveling, and I compliment his multilingualism. I sense his incredible depth and almost weep when the fellow tells me that despite all the languages he speaks, he can still not express what he really has inside. “I cannot-a express. I-a have a fire inside-a me, and all the time when-a I try to say it, only water comes out. No one-a can understand me.” The burden of spiritual depth. We share cheap pastries and candy bars and Kurdish tea, and we are brotherly and knowing.
That night, I stay in the cheapest hotel in the saddest border city in Turkey. The next morning I find a taxi office and am given some biscuits and tea by a kindly Arab-Turk. I ride that taxi into my country of origin, broke as a smashed TV. Hungry, dirty in hair and skin, and actually grateful for Arabic language around me, I roll down the hills and into the lights of Damascus that night. Home.


Andrea made it to Istanbul. I hope to see him someday in the alleyways of Napoli.