al-Badia part II: "This is living history."

Al-Badia, part II: “This is living history.”

“See that village, far to the left?” I’m not looking for the village, I’m clenching the dusty glass mango juice bottle in my hand, watching in my peripheral vision my backpack sitting on the rock several feet away from me, out of reach, wondering about many unrelated things like how to trim the string trailing from my abaya sleeve and the production of mango juice, yet in the back of my mind trying to remember the location of my phone inside that bag. “Do you see it?”
“Yes.”
“That’s in Jordan. See that village just beyond?” Go up this mountain. O.k., I’m on this mountain in the middle of nowhere; now how do I get out of this?
“Yes.”
“That is in Syria. That’s where we’re going.”
“Just to the border, you mean.” My guide hesitates dramatically. Does he think this is funny?
“Of course. But the border is still very dangerous.” Right. “Very dangerous”. My academic advisor said we could see the border if we wanted, that our families might even offer to take us since we live so close. My guide is trying to impress me.
“O.k., let’s go.”

*****

The front gates of the K through 12 school in Naefa, the previous day: my black abaya flaps and furls around me in the strong wind. I pull my hijab lower and invite myself inside. In the courtyard, around 20 children circle in play around two teachers, also in dark, billowing abayas, who turn in my direction. As I stride toward them, faces appear in the windows of the three, bleak, utilitarian, sun-bleached buildings, the separate buildings for girls and boys. “Hello! Hello!” Children push through doorways and open windows to see me. My disguise is worthless; they have spotted my foreignness from across the courtyard. After introducing myself to the two women, one who speaks English well shows me around the school. While many of the younger students greet me with enthusiasm and curiosity, many of the older students, perhaps weary of fasting at the end of Ramadan, greet me mechanically, reciting the Islamic welcome rehearsed for guests regarding me with a haggard, almost hostile, look. As I felt like my presence was disruptive to the school, I ducked in a seventh grade math class for a while; the girls were studying decimals with Arabic numbers (not Arabic numbers as we know them), and that old fear of being called on in math class fluttered in my stomach and rose up in my throat. Realizing some of the teachers and students thought I was a prospective teacher, I was terrified at the possibility of being asked to demonstrate my knowledge of math, even simple math, for the class, even more than I was terrified of demonstrating my lack of Arabic. Alhamduillah, my math skills were not solicited, but my interest in Jordan was. Why would anyone from America travel all the way to Jordan to study, the girls asked; everyone in Jordan wants to study in America, the teacher explained. The class seemed unconvinced by my explanation about thaqafa (culture); I suppose if I were in one of those stiff desks and uniforms in a dreary school in a bleak landscape I might be unconvinced, too, even if that (what seemed to me dreary and bleak) setting was all I ever knew. A bell rang; a girl, who I later learned was a relative of my Badia home-stay family, appeared in the doorway and reached up to my hand, intending to lead me the half mile back to my house. At all times I needed an escort; even my four year old host-brother was preferable to me walking alone. But maybe this was better, after all.

*****
The clerk puts his cigarette down beside the identification documents on the rickety table to motion “discretely” to me; his glittering eyes met those of the men huddled around him. I start to get up from my observation place on the stool, but he must think my movement is too conspicuous; he motions for me to stay. Sitting up tall to see past the crowd of Bedu at the counter, he spots the old man entering the post office; he turns to me and makes a motion like taking a photo with a camera. One of the post office employees leans in from the open office window behind me, startling me with his whisper. “You see that old man?” he asks rather slyly. The old man, with a leathery tanned face scrunched into so many wrinkles and squinting, perhaps unable to see clearly, shuffles toward the counter in dirty, wrinkled thob, assisted by several men from the crowd. “That ,” he says triumphantly, “is living history.” Truly, the man looks like a veteran of the Arab Revolt.
“Are you sure it’s o.k. if I take photographs?” I ask, knowing full well they all want me to photograph not just their respected elderly, but everything – livestock, homes, university diplomas, road signs, and each other posing with all of the above and more. One boy insisted I photograph him holding each of the family chickens in turn. With only my notebook and pen in hand, I might be an unwelcome government worker; raising my camera to my face, several in the crowd straighten up and stare confidently into the lens. I wonder how and when the residents of al-Badia came to revere the camera, the photographer, and the photograph. Perhaps the photograph is a medium they can see and discuss in an oral culture, unlike handwritten notes. Despite being a woman and a student, the camera endowed me with access and authority among the Bedu which was unparalleled (and perhaps unnecessary) in Amman.
I perched on my stool, holding my camera up long after I had finished documenting the scene only to appease the eager post office employees and visitors. It wasn’t until I was leaving that the system was explained (or attempted at least) to me as a sort of welfare program. Before stepping back into the hot wind, I lingered for a moment, inwardly delighted at the abundance of red and white checkered kofiyahs (head-scarves) of the men and the facial tattoos of the old women. This was al-Badia.

*****
“Over that way…boom!” My guide chuckled, pointing to the area surrounding this snaking dirt road in the desert. Maybe it was dangerous, but my Academic Advisor had said it was fine to visit the border as long as we didn’t cross it. I checked my cellphone to ensure I hadn’t received a “welcome to Syria” message as I had received a “welcome to Palestine” when passing the Dead Sea several weeks prior.
“Uh huh, land mines?” I asked skeptically, though I had heard something about livestock wandering into the no man’s land between Jordan and Syria and meeting their demise, not in the traditional mansef dish but by stepping on explosive devices. But maybe that was a rumor. The car crept to a standstill, engine rumbling. We leaned forward into the dashboard and stared through the windshield at the red, rocky landscape before us, and beyond that, the lone guard tower. The land between us and the guard tower and the land beyond that looked no different; no lines in the sand, no fences, no ominous warning signs, only the guard tower rippling in the heat. And was life so different ten, twenty kilometers beyond? From the mountain’s viewpoint earlier that day, nothing had separated the two countries; somehow I still subconsciously expected black lines as on a map to appear on the landscape. In that moment and in the days after that, I began to understand the concept of nation-states as “imagined communities”; borders signify everything and nothing. After some moments, we turned the car around and headed back to Naefa. It was not the end of my story in al-Badia or Jordan, but that chapter in al-Badia remains unfinished. The possible conclusions are endless.

"You are Seeta. We give you the famous Bedu name."

12 October 2008 (with excerpts from 27 September 2008):

“You are Seeta. We give you the famous Bedu name.”

Al-Badia: the northern semi-desert land of the Bedu, the traditionally nomadic pastoralists of Jordan. In the early days of Transjordan, the Bedu filled the ranks of the Desert or “Arab” Army as T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) dubbed it, and to this day, Bedu dominate the armed forces. Attempts to settle them within the emerging nation-state have been long and largely avoided, as most Bedu, even those with substantial homes, continue to pitch their tents beside the house and occasionally move them with the sheep and seasons. No land is private land; even in Amman livestock occasionally graze on the hillside next to my apartment complex. Theirs was a beautiful, windswept plain dotted with rocks, shrubs, livestock, and tents – literally “houses of hair” in Arabic; beyond a horizon extended far and blue toward Syria in the north and Iraq in the northeast. Romanticizing about the freedom and nobility of the nomadic life, with its open spaces and fresh air away from Amman, was inevitable; reconciling this beauty with the despair of poverty and the lack of development in the region proved far more difficult, especially when compounded with my sickness and harassment (subjects on which I will not elaborate here).

The following excerpt is from my field notes. In the Badia I lived for three days in a village called Naefa in a fairly "modern" home with a family of five - a husband and wife with three boys ages 2 to 6 - but even in their seemingly modernized life I saw much of the traditional Badia I was I told to expect. I have so much I could share with you, but something about these observations concerning the conservation of resources and the maintenance of the household are a good summary of the sort of activities to which I (as a woman) was confined the first two days:

“…'My wife, she clean the house today,’ began my Badia home-stay father. I was taken aback that he spoke English; he broke my awkward silence: ‘You help.’ Thus, I quite literally stepped off the bus in Naefa and onto the inch-thick coating of soapy water in Umm Hashem’s house, looking back at Rob [another SIT student placed in a home-stay in the same village] who was standing hesitantly on the landing. I looked back at him with a mixture of amusement and despair. Was this going to be my Badia experience – sick and scrubbing floors…?
Now that I reflect, I see that I had the opportunity today not only to observe the maintenance of home and family, but also to participate as a fellow cleaner. I have never seen water so deftly used…when I’ve observed my Amman home being cleaned, the work is done, about ninety percent of the time, by the family maid who uses primarily a damp wipe to quickly swipe surfaces with some mixture of cleaning products in original containers. The furniture is rarely moved...here Umm Hashem entirely unassembled the floor furniture (cushions and pillows) and systematically moved from room to room…using a recycled bucket, Umm Hashem splashed water with a flick of her wrist into the corners of the room, filling the windowsills, and splashing the doors – all with a certain precision, directing the water from one end of the room with a floor sponge, moving it into the hallway and into the next room to be cleaned.
I stood in the soapy water, the hem of my abaya soaked, struggling to follow Umm Hashem’s rapid, guttural Arabic. Is this even Arabic? When Umm Hashem pointed to my abaya, saying “helua, bas…”, I scampered into the bedroom and changed into pants and shirt…Umm Hashem placed the floor tool in my hand and gestured to the hallway. As I fumbled with the cleaning, I realized I’d had this misconception that the traditional abaya was worn at all times in a society too simple to have different clothes for cleaning, that all the women probably wore the abaya and hijab at all times. But in the freedom of her home, Umm Hashem wore rolled up sweat pants, a t-shirt and no scarf. She approved of me doing the same, and I felt somewhat scandalous without my abaya and hijab…
As I waded through the soapy mess, wearing Abu Hashem’s cumbersome house slippers, Umm Hashem directed me to a back patio…the uneven tile on the back patio allowed water to collect, making “sweeping” water off difficult. Thinking the cleanliness of this back patio to be insignificant, I gave it a few broad strokes and returned to Umm Hashem. She peered out the window in the back door, laughing and shaking her head. “Moush qweyes (not good) ?” I asked.
“La, kul mayyeh (no, all the water),” she said, returning to her work inside. So I “swept” it again, only to have her come behind me with her rapid, precise strokes, leaving me wondering why anyone would be so concerned about the cleanliness of a back patio. (As I later observed, it was the main reception area for evening iftar or coffee guests, and the indoor cushions were placed directly on this surface, as was the food. In the Badia, as is the tradition, Bedu eat on a mat or blanket on the floor from communal dishes without utensils.) All the while Umm Hashem deftly fielded her three rowdy boys aged 2 to 6 as they interrupted her work with requests and complaints; I watched her with a mixture of appreciation for the versatility of space and conversation of resources and of sadness for the way her days seemed dominated by domestic duties leaving her hands rough, especially after observing how she more or less collapsed onto a cushion after our several hours of cleaning and cooking [she later asked me if I had any lotion and sorted through my toiletries with great interest]...I was feeling feverish and dropped onto a nearby cushion.”

It wasn’t until after my sickness improved on the third day that I, in my abaya and hijab, boldly stepped out from our small doorway alone into the blinding, open space before me in a scene befitting John Ford a la Stagecoach (only in this case the cowboys were Bedu and the horses were camels, which much to my disappointment were not common in Naefa.) That was when the adventure, for better or worse, really began.