"Please don't stop the music."

7th June 2009
“Please don’t stop the music!”

My time in Jerusalem was not the Holy Land expedition I always anticipated. Perhaps, had I been traveling alone, I could have walked the various historical sites in deep introspection; as it was, I was in Palestine not on my own terms, tagging along after two Americans I had just met and their Palestinian friends. Speeding around Jerusalem while blasting “Please Don’t Stop the Music” with intermittent Palestinian commentary was not conducive to pilgrimage. That said, just being in Jerusalem was still moving. I was glad to be with these new friends and grateful to hear so many opinions and histories, and I was glad to be seeing the city from many sides.

The Old City with its maze of markets descending from the Jaffa Gate reminded me of Khan-al-Khalili in old Cairo, and was decidedly Arabesque, brimming with a mish-mash of Arab and Israeli tourist kitsch: from yarmulkes custom embroidered with one’s name to t-shirts which read everything from “Israel: Uzi does it” to the superman emblem labeled “Super Jew”, to tributes to Arafat and Palestine. We sifted through racks of postcards circa 1960 and laughed over their dated peculiarities; ran our fingers over exquisite textiles; discovered a new smell every few feet wafting from barrels overflowing with a rainbow of candy, nuts, raw meat, beautiful fabrics, spices, chemicals – sweet and foul all at once.

(The Church of the Holy Sepulchre)

From this bazaar, we emerged at the entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, considered to be Calvary, or the site of Christ’s crucifixion and burial. The church viewed from the outside is not an impressive structure, especially as it is shrouded in the Old City. But inside, it is a cavernous and cool, bedecked in precious metals glittering in candlelight, flames flickering in a motion like lips moving in whispers and prayers, fingertips wiping moist eyes, heads nodding, figures pausing in reflection in dim corners, kneeling. Orthodox men in full regalia kept a weary eye on those snap happy tourists quickly passing through and passing their hands over artifacts like grave robbers. “Here’s where the earthquake cracked the foundations, here’s where they found the crosses, here’s where they found the tomb, here’s where they…”

Nidal, a Palestinian who attended Catholic school in Jerusalem, led us through this unceasing tour of artifacts. My head was dizzied by the ever ascending architecture, the stone steps worn down in the middle from tour groups crowding up and down them and into dim corners, straining to hear tour guides speaking in so many languages. Bump into something in that place and it was sure to be holy.
(Shrine)
Shabbat had begun while we were in the Church, and so we would not be visiting the Dome of the Rock (Temple Mount) or the Western Wall; maybe I’ll return one day to visit those sites. We emerged from the Church and back into the blinding heat. Nidal persuaded us to try the fresh squeezed orange juice at a small kiosk outside the bazaar, saying quietly that these oranges were from the area where his grandparents once lived; we sipped it beneath the Tower of David. As we surveyed the Old City and sipped the juice, there was a tinge of sadness: the battle in Jerusalem is fought everyday through such small tragedies: the best hamburgers in town are made (supposedly) by extremist Israelis; the Palestinians we were with constantly made wisecracks about Jews and admitted as to not having a single Israeli friend, refusing to get to know any Israelis; the best oranges, hommus and Taybeh beer brewed in Ramallah are popular with (if not claimed by) Israelis while Palestinians must purchase Israeli products almost exclusively. These small, daily tragedies foment the hatred, the sadness, the regret on both sides.

At night, the wind swept across the Mount of Olives and over hundreds of graves. I stood at the brink, staring down at the Dome of the Rock and across the sleeping city, wondering what the sunrise will be like.

(The Dome of the Rock, as seen from the Mount of Olives)

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often I would have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!” Matthew 24: 37

“Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.” Isaiah 40: 1-2

"They wear their astonishment."

6 June 2009

The sunlight pushed through the slit in my left eye, and I rolled onto my side on the bare mattress. The bleating and tinkling of a goat herd pushing through the brush on the terraced hillside below my window tricked me into thinking that I was back in my homestay from SIT Fall 2008; there, in Dahiat al-Rasheed, goats or sheep wandering through the scrubby valley had awakened me most mornings. I sat up and pushed off the blanket, which surprisingly was necessary in this cooler mountainous region 900 meters above sea level. I was in Omar’s house in Ramallah, and it was late afternoon.

Maybe it’s the heat that makes the night-life here so vibrant. Our hosts regularly awakened mid-afternoon and stayed up until 4am, and I soon found myself in this reverse schedule, one night on a rooftop of an old evangelical boys school in Ramallah with a motley crew watching the distant lights of Tel Aviv twinkle on the horizon. The rooftop had the air of an expatriate gathering, despite the Palestinian majority, as most of the Palestinians present had spent much of their lives abroad: Omar and his brother were born in England and lived in the States; Sara, our Palestinian-British host spending her gap year in Ramallah, was English through and through; I’m fairly certain there was a quiet Jewish kid on the fringe. Muslim, Christian, Jew, agnostic, devout, skeptical, optimistic, discouraged – here was a real interfaith dialogue, a roundtable, a panel:
“But you Americans,” Sara was saying in her English drawl, “are such imperialists!”
“And who do you think we learned it from?” Wes contested.
“But what do you think about Obama’s speech in Cairo?” Sharook, puffing on the hookah, leaned in and asked. She had this sophisticated way of brushing her loose curls of rich, dark hair away from her heavily made-up face, her metallic jewelry glinting in the darkness. She continued, saying, “Obama said something about America breaking away from an empire…”
“It’s just words…” began another Palestinian.
“But to have him, to have an American president acknowledge the record in the Middle East, now that’s promising,” began Sharif. Nidal took the hookah from Sharook, shaking his head. Wes, Faye and I had watched Obama’s speech at Rami’s house in Jerusalem, and I suspect Nidal had felt ambivalent about Obama’s allusions to the “clash of cultures” – especially the conflation of Arab and Muslim. As Palestinian Christians, Nidal and Rami shook their heads and clicked their tongues at phrases like “the Muslim world”.
“The best part was when he said our women wear the ‘haajib’, and the people in the audience were like what did he say?” said Sharif, laughing.
“The haajib?” asked Wes. “You mean the hijab, the veil, right?”
“Yeah, haajib means ‘astonishment’, so rather than saying that the women cover themselves with the veil, Obama said women cover themselves with astonishment!”
“Yeah, but when he said as-salemu alaykum at the beginning, that was pretty intense,” Faye contested. “He got that right!”

The rooftop discussion went back and forth like this, until the lights twinkling toward Tel Aviv quieted themselves and the pink ribbon of dawn unfurled across the horizon.
(From a rooftop in Ramallah, Tel Aviv in the distance)

"We're kidnapping you!"

5th June 2009



(The wall, behind it are the rooftops of an Israeli settlement)


“We’re kidnapping you!” The Palestinian man pulled me and the two Americans into the backseat of a dark car and we sped away…to a trendy Ramallah restaurant.

(Did that opener send up any red flags?)

The wall separating Palestine from Israel flew past Sharif’s car, the graffiti melting into a continuous stream of colors of pain and hope. Sharif’s music rattled his tiny Asian-make car, and we Americans settled into the backseat; I let my eyes roam over the streaming wall, rising and falling with the roadway speeding beneath. It was one of those timeless moments I sought to internalize, until Sharif interrupted our reverie by pointing out an architecturally unusual section of the wall: “Look, the Israelis are trying to get all creative with building the wall!"




(Graffiti on the wall - "free Palestine, from Palestine with love", etc.)

Later, at Rami’s house in Jerusalem, he and his friend Nidal showed us mock terrorist videos they made in high school: young Nidal and Rami stood defiantly in front of a Palestinian flag draped in the background, hattas (koffiyas) and flags wrapped around their faces to disguise their identity. Holding a shaking piece of paper to the camera, Nidal read his last testament as a soon-to-be martyr, and Rami offered an occasional rousing “Allahu akbar!” In the dozens of outtakes, they doubled over in laughter or broke into dance moves. In one spoof, Rami huddled behind Nidal’s desk, pressing a yarmulke to his scalp, speaking to the camera as if he were an Israeli reporter while Nidal, off-camera, pelted him with various bedroom objects – pillows, crumpled pieces of paper, school textbooks.

I could not begin to recall and relate all the wisecracks and parodies my new Palestinian friends related to me, with a bewildering mixture of good humor and melancholy. As Omar, our host in Ramallah, ran his finger along the trench cut by a stray Israeli bullet through the stone framing his bedroom window (his house adjoins a military service road), or where a car bomb had exploded across the valley, or related events of the second Intifada as we drove through the city, it was with this strange mixture of enthusiasm and sadness.

There was no laughter, however, at Arafat’s tomb. Noisy Ramallah disappeared behind us through the gates as we stepped onto the eerily silent tile platform. A quote by Darwish, the late Palestinian poet, was engraved on a granite slab near the entrance. A solitary building, modeled after the Kaabah, but in the smoothest white stone rather than gleaming obsidian, rose before a reflection pool. Inside, we stood before the tomb guarded by two Palestinian soldiers, and we were silent, our various political beliefs put to rest. The only sound was the gentle flapping of three Palestinian flags billowing in the breeze, pressing outward like soldiers’ chests thrust forward and collapsing back into one another, inhaling, exhaling.





To learn more about the Separation Wall, check out NPR's four-part series "Israel's Barrier" at http://www.npr.org/news/specials/2009/israelbarrier/part4.html

Checkpoint. Checkmate.

4th June 2009

Checkpoint. Checkmate.

“What are you doing in Israel?” Wiping the sweat from the back of my neck, I strained to understand the heavily accented Israeli woman with her thinly penciled, arched eyebrows staring at me with some mix of boredom and hostility. I am pressed against the passport control counter, the crest of a wave of tired, angry travellers poised to break out of the narrow queue line at the border crossing from Jordan to Israel.
“I’m a tourist.”
“Are you here alone?”'
“No, with two other students.”
“Students? Where do you study?”
“In Amman.”
“Where are you going?”
I hesitate. I’m with two American students I just met, going to Ramallah, the de facto capital of Palestine, to carouse with some Palestinians for a few days. I’m not going to tell her this. I glance at Faye, one of the two American students who are my ticket to the West Bank, and say, “We’re going to Jerusalem”. At the time, we didn’t know if we would make it to Al-Quds (Jerusalem); we did, but that’s a story for a later entry. It was safer to say Jerusalem.
“And where are you staying in Jerusalem?”
“We haven’t made reservations.” I study the insignia on her uniform and glance over at the next window where Wes is flirting with a considerably more attractive guard; she quickly stamps his passport, half-smiles, and Wes grins smugly as he passes through the checkpoint. Faye and I groan.
“No reservations? And how long will you stay?”
“Three of four days.”
“Three or four days. And have you booked a flight out of Israel?”
“No, I’ve booked a flight out of Amman in August. That’s where I’m living, Amman.” I told her this already. I push closer to the hole in the glass. My voice is rising, my tone strained, rising to join the other heated voices in the crowded checkpoint. She calmly holds my passport up as if to compare my present appearance with the 2006 passport photo, and stares blankly, unimpressed, stalling as she surveys the crowded checkpoint; then a quick stamp and shove under the window. “Next.”
“Can you stamp this piece of paper, not in the passport?” asks Faye. Countries like Lebanon and Syria deny entry to persons with an Israeli visa in their passport.
“I have to stamp the passport,” says the guard. Faye and I share a knowing look. Refusing to stamp a separate piece of paper is arbitrary on the part of this testy guard, not a uniform policy.
“But I have a piece of paper, just stamp that,” Faye protests.
The Israeli woman looks up at Faye pressed against the checkpoint glass, theatrically raises the stamp above the passport, and says pointedly as she snaps it downward, “I am stamping your passport now”.

When the checkpoint was behind us and our frustration subsided (although Faye will need to apply for a new passport to gain entry to Lebanon or Syria), we could laugh. We imitated the guard’s curt “I’m stamping your passport now,” over and over. Granted, it’s a serious conflict, and sure, several months of being on the Palestinian-Jordanian sides of things does skew one’s view. I fully acknowledge that. But it was something about my initial impression of unrelenting Israeli seriousness juxtaposed with having the time of my life with new-found Palestinian friends, a contrast which by degrees would convince me of the power of laughter in the face of oppression.

West Bank Bound

Headed to Ramallah for the weekend with two other American students. Expect some posts next week about Palestine/Israel!

No w(h)ining allowed

3 June 2009

No w(h)ining allowed

Like sentinels guarding my plane seat, the two matronly Jordanian women looked up at me quizzically if not rather hostilely as I stood there in the aisle, studying my boarding pass, hoping that my seat was not 22E. One woman bounced a screaming, red-faced infant spewing saliva while the other rummaged through a diaper bag, clicking her tongue disapprovingly. Yes, it definitely says 22E. Three children ran in circles around the center aisle seats and around me, while an older girl, presumably their relative and appointed to keep watch over this zoo, shooed them away and laughed loudly into her trendy mobile phone while she covered her free ear to dampen the chaos:
“Oh, but Lila, do you know how we got the sleeping pills so Ahmed could sleep on the flight? We put those in with the shampoo in our bag, and they made us put it in the other bag that’s in the plane. So now Ahmed is not going to sleep – he can’t sleep on planes! Funny, right?”
At the mention of his name, the ringleader of the chaos paused his chase and leaned into the girl’s phone, triumphantly proclaiming, “I’m going to stay up all night!”
“La! Halas. Go away, Ahmad!” the girl protested, transferring her phone to the other ear. Meanwhile, the sentinels were using my seat as a diaper changing station, while I continued standing dejectedly in the aisle, kicking myself for choosing 22E on a 12 hour non-stop flight from JFK to Amman.
I turned toward the front of the plane; in both aisles as far as I could see, flight attendants frantically crammed overflowing carry-on luggage into the overhead bins, checked the bags which wouldn’t fit, and warded off protesting passengers refusing to be separated from their American souvenirs.
Accepting that 22E was indeed my seat, I was crushed – literally. I quickly regretted relinquishing my aisle seat so that one of the sentinels could stretch her legs in the aisle. This can’t be too bad once the plane takes off and everyone falls asleep; it is almost 10:30 P.M.. And then the two kids behind me began pounding their balled fists into my seat, shouting, “Yallah! Yallah!” (Let’s go! Let’s go!), and I wondered what sort of crime against humanity deserved this exceptional punishment that is 22E.
It was in this state that I gladly accepted a complementary mini-bottle of red wine when offered to me by the flight attendant. Anticipating the warmth in my arms and legs and welcome drowsiness, I poured a full cup for myself and placed it on the edge of my tray table, brushing away the thought that it was a precarious spot. A minute later, the infant arm shot out, and I saw myself in slow motion reaching for the cup, too late, as red wine spilled onto my legs, feet, pillow and book. The sentinels merely looked on, unphased (and perhaps unfamiliar with the smell of alcohol). Across the aisle a woman surveyed the mess and asked, “What it all that?”
“It’s wine,” I said.
Raising an eyebrow, she replied, “I thought I smelled something. You know why that happened to you, don’t you?”
I knew what she was going to say. “Yeah,” I said, “it’s haram (forbidden).” She smiled and nodded, satisfied by my answer, and I half-believed it myself. Finally, the flight attendant appeared. I sheepishly handed my purplish pillow over and apologized for the mess.
“Unfortunately we don’t have replacement pillows,” he said and I accepted grimly, knowing I wouldn’t need one anyhow since Ahmed and his tribe wouldn’t be sleeping.
“I’m awfully sorry for the mess,” I began again, but he smiled and disappeared into the flight attendant nook adjacent to my aisle, reemerging with a new bottle and cup. “Here, you can drink away your shame,” he said good-naturedly.
I didn’t drink away my shame, but I did drink away this flying island of Jordanians and too much Arabic too fast, the screaming infant and Ahmed and his posse – until an hour later a strong shaking of my shoulder awakened me and startled, I found myself accepting a request to switch seats with one of the sentinels. “Her legs are hurting,” explained the woman whose suspicions I earlier had confirmed about the dangers of alcohol (namely, falling fast asleep). Squeezing into 22D, I reclined my chair only to have the kids behind me renew their fist-pounding. I looked enviously at the sleeping baby next to me, now wrapped around her relative’s shoulder like one of those neck-pillows. The saying slept like a baby never seemed truer than in the following ten hours of bleary-eyed reading and dozing.
What happened after those some 24 hours of traveling until now, sitting in this café, is a bit foggy. In a zombie-state I staggered off the plane, procured my visa and my baggage, and searched in vain for an open mobile phone kiosk where I could purchase minutes for my Jordanian mobile phone. Realizing I wasn’t going to be able to use my phone, I borrowed one from a private-taxi driver, allowing him to think I would shortly thereafter be using his taxi. I called Lawrence, a fellow Sewanee student who is traveling through the Middle East this summer, to meet up near the apartment, and as soon as the driver heard the word bus, he grabbed his phone. I quickly headed for the yellow bus to Amman, the taxi driver harassing me all through the terminal and down the sidewalk. At the bus station I bought minutes, and called Lawrence back (only to find out he had called the taxi driver back thinking it was my phone; apparently the rejected driver answered in a devilish tone with a “Hello, Lawrence”). We met, I got a whirlwind tour of the rather spartan apartment, the friends and family. We headed to Hashem resturaunt and a spread of typical Jordanian food, especially some excellent falafel. It was their nostalgic last night of touring Amman; it was my starkly real first night of two months of research, not play. I felt displaced among sightseers. I lagged behind them through familiar streets until once again we were at the apartment, where I rolled onto, or rather into, a collapsing mattress and slept, almost as well as a baby.

Back so soon?

Why am I going back to Amman, Jordan this summer? Didn't I get my fill of dust, falafel and strange looks?

Supported by my University, I'm continuing a research project I began last semester while studying in Amman about women migrant workers, popularly known as "maids" or "housekeepers". Jordanians employ some estimated (legal) 70,000 women mainly from the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, as domestic workers (cleaning, food preparation, caring for family members, etc.), typically on two year contracts settled through private labor recruitment agencies. For a good summary of issues concerning women migrant workers, I've added a link (on the right margin of this blog) to UNIFEM's website. The brief explanation on that link, which I would encourage those interested to spend five minutes reading, summarizes the issues well, at least from the humanitarian perspective.

I suppose Jordan "maid" a good first impression (sorry, I couldn't resist the pun), or a bad one considering popular Jordanian cartoonist Abu Mahjoob's critique (below):




Roughly translated, the Jordanian employer chastises his Indonesian housekeeper over the abundance of expensive phone calls home...regarding the (then) recent Tsunami. Ouch.

Even after having witnessed abuse of domestic workers last semester, I can still smile at Mahjoob's biting humor, if not a little bitterly, because I know the situation of women migrant workers in Jordan is not one of hopeless, vulnerable victims - abroad, alone and abused as news media and some humanitarian discourse stereotype them. (Even UNIFEM in a recent forum concerning migrant workers commissioned Mahjoob to produce a series of cartoons to raise awareness about housekeepers in Jordan .) As an anthropology student, I did a lot of observation and a good deal of thinking about what I saw, and what I saw was potential for improvement. The conclusion I reached in my 50 page report included incorporating women migrant workers into the Jordanian labor legislation, and I'm optimistic about the Ministry of Labor's recent revisions of the Labor Law - especially the inclusion of unions representing women migrant workers.

But I've had my fill of bureaucracy - of ministries, embassies and labor recruitment agencies. While these organizations and their representatives informed my initial report, I hope to get past the official discourse about women migrant workers (maids) and into the lived experiences of these women. What exactly that entails...we'll both have to wait and see.

Feel free to send your questions or comments throughout the summer - the more critical thinking/discussion the better. Well, I'm off to bed, or at least to lie awake thinking about all this for a few hours before my early morning flight.