This place fucking cracks me up. I don’t mean that Syria is a joke to be laughed at and ridiculed. I assure you, Syrians find this country as amusing as I do. Perhaps I do see Syria as a joke, though in a way that must be carefully understood. I don’t want to lead any of you to believe that this is a backwards or violent or silly place, however it does carry those traits at one time or another. But really, that must be said of all places. Syria is just really funny. I do have examples, and maybe this will make things clearer. Or maybe if my writing doesn’t suck too much things will be clearer, that is a more appropriate clause.
Ayuha Umm Khalid’s conservatism should not be judged too harshly. Despite the comments she made about Alia and the many more offensive thoughts she’s kept private, her values belong to another generation and do not necessarily shine when viewed through the lens of ours. They come from a culture that created them in earnest. Umm Khalid was the daughter of one of the few secluded women in Damascus, married to a university-educated son of a Sheikh from Homs. She grew up under the loving but watchful eyes of her parents who permitted her to attend school along side her peers when she was young, but was married off to a second cousin before she turned twenty. While her husband was a satisfactorily pious man, he had abandoned the strict religious habits his father had raised him upon. However she maintained a certain decorum completely unfamiliar to her husband. It required a level of independence that he gladly permitted but was overwhelmingly imbued with a severe religious fanaticism. Next to sleeping and eating, prayer was her most steadily observed habit. This of course meant that her husband suffered slightly when he was less than attentive to her religious duties. But of course he grew accustomed to this as his suffering was not limited only to occasions of impiety. The issue was that Umm Khalid is bitch.
I believe it was this that was said to Jocelyn, her tenant and a close friend of Alia, several weeks ago in the stairwell of our friend’s old apartment:
‘I cannot believe you let her in here and she washes your clothing? You touch and wear the clothing after she washes it too? I won’t let her in anymore, you know that. I tell you I don’t want her around anymore, but I keep seeing her at the door, she buzzes my apartment and wants to come inside to visit you, but I’m not letting her in anymore. If she keeps coming here the police will be putting up red tape all around my house and everyone will think I’m running some kind of other house here. No one will talk to me ever again; I’ll go to jail and have to leave my home. No, no that can’t happen, keep your friend, your slut away. Don’t say anything, this is my house, you are paying me to live here, this is my place. No, I don’t want her. The way she dresses…she shows so much we’ll have all shabab of Damascus who think they can pay for her following her to this house, and then what will we do? And always with Americans! She brings that friend of yours, we know he is CIA, with the tattoos covering his arms. She thinks she can make the world love Syria by sleeping with all its men? This is unacceptable and I won’t stand for it.’
These are indeed harsh words, and poor Alia is the last to deserve them. She’s rather pretty, with short, wryly styled hair and an aggressive frame. Her demeanor distinguishes her from her Syrian peers. While she is not the only Syrian girl who’s adopted this outward appearance, yet she never fails to catch and keep the eyes of most male passersby. She wears not-quite-so pants and sleeveless shirts, tennis shoes in a style which for lack of a better word may be referred to as “Western”. To any Syrian man she is someone he may be able to fuck, the poor girl. I first noticed this at a pool party held seven kilometers outside of Damascus in a town whose population is mostly made up of the Palestinians living at its refugee camp. Everyone attending the party met outside Bab Touma to catch the service out of the city, each with the alcohol donation he or she had begun impatiently working at. It seemed every foreigner living in Bab Touma had come, though there was a satisfactorily Syrian delegation. We crowded into three service buses and headed out on a rather unnerving ride to our destination. The cramped interior of our service was loud and brimming with indiscernible Arabic chatter. Alia in no way showed any reserve, handing out bottles of al-Maza and reaching out of the window to throw the empties through the windows of the bus riding alongside. We reached our destination, and filed into the pool club area after handing over our six dollar cover. After getting quite intoxicated the shabab and fataat jumped into the pool and began to show signs of real enjoyment, through their sexual pursuits and drunken shouts or whatever assortment of social or physical activity they could produce. It seemed that it was the preference of the foreign girls to land a semi-built, attractive and educated Syrian man. Those who were unable to do so settled on what foreign men retained one exotic trait or another. Alia was the object of desire for those who had not found a girlfriend who had been previously ‘broken’ for them (as well as those who had though their pursuits were not as public).
“You’re beautiful, why don’t you come talk to me?”
“No thank you, I’d like to swim.”
“But you are so beautiful, where you work, do you go to school?”
“…”
“Let me get you a drink.”
“Don’t touch me. I think it best you stay far away.”
“I can get you food, how about a kiss. You are as pretty as the moon.”
“No thank you, please stay away.”
At the break in this conversation Alia indicated that is was my job to make her attention unavailable and protect her from his sexual pursuits.
It had been suggested that I “hit that” but, as I had grown feeble and inept as far as my sexual pursuits were concerned and since I held a genuine respect for this girl, I declined to follow such advice.
I would not have found an apartment without Alia’s help. The process of finding an apartment depended on finding a Maktab ‘Aqari that would not rip you off, and fluency in the Syrian dialect was an important tool in doing so. It took only several hours to find a satisfactory place in Muhajareen at the base of the mountain overlooking Damascus. Before deciding on our splendid bayt, we passed on two others, both in a rather droll neighborhood and both severely decorated. Two bedrooms, one for myself and my roommate, a Brit named Jess, a kitchen, toilet, dining room and living room. At night the view from our window lights up the houses thickly splattered on the mountainside, stretching above and between the tops of the houses and markets of the Souq. At day we can watch the shadows crawl around the ancient alleys that lay below our window and spread west towards Lebanon.
The apartment was obviously occupied for some time by its owner, a pervert, before he let it to us and moved to his house outside Damascus. Pasted on his mirror was a 90’s pinup girl baring her ass, and specially ordered on our satellite television was over 20 channels of 24 hour softcore porn. Tucked between the wall and the mattress was a bottle of Vaseline brand moisturizing cream, spanning the hallway was a pull-up bar I’m sure he couldn’t reach. Most strange were the contents of the oven, the subject of much debate and clandestine inquiry.
Best of all was the location of this apartment, in the lively and all-Arab neighborhood Muhajareen. Within a five minute walk we have an entire souq offering everything from clothing and electronics to the best fruits and vegetables of the city. Every block is offers at least one shwarma stand, though most have more, as well as a bakery, several convenience stores, and assortments of trades, from laborers to doctors. Below us is, in fact, a gynecologist who referred me to a dermatologist when I thought I had developed melanoma.
I can, at any point, walk from my door and buy whatever it is I need, and the close proximity leads to my regular patronage of all the local merchants. After only week merely leaving my apartment becomes a social endeavor.
Syria is one of the funniest places to live, even as a Syrian. Pictures of the President, Bashar al-Assad are found in every home, every store, every bare side of a building, on billboards every half block, on cars, buses, newspapers but not internet cafes. Assad was recently was re-elected, beating out the other two jailed candidates. Before Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father as president of Syria, he had trained as an eye surgeon for several years in London. It was his brother who had been pampered and constructed with the presidency in mind; however his untimely death in a car accident meant that his brother, a doctor with no real political background or aspirations, was Syria’s only viable option for leadership. Though Bashar al-Assad was in his early thirties, the Syrian government lowered the minimum age for the presidency from forty years, the traditional age of wisdom in the Islamic tradition, to accommodate their new glorious leader.
The government continues to amuse us. To run an internet café, one must have a permit from the government. But in order to obtain a permit from the government an internet café must run a three month period. No internet café is actually legal. The government requires that internet cafes record the passport numbers, names, etc. of all foreign customers. No one ever does this.
Being an American in Syria brings all sorts of amusement. The Syrian border offered all sorts of difficulties. After struggling to understand the information on my entry application, which I had written out in both Latin and Arabic script, the border guard stuck behind the desk for non-Arab foreigners passed on my passport and application to his supervisor, who eying me suspiciously, asked me to repeat out loud all then information I had written on my application. Not satisfied, I was then taken to a room out of sight from non-military personnel where I was questioned for some time about my plans and intentions in Syria. Not fully satisfied, but unable to hold me any longer, my passport was returned and I was let go. However, once we crossed ‘no man’s land’, the title should not imply anything terrible, it is just an area in between two countries, a buffer zone, and got the actual Syrian border, I discovered that my passport have not been given an entry stamp. I yelled at the Syrian soldier who had boarded our bus, but eventually had to run back across the buffer zone to the immigration office where I demanded an entry stamp. My bus, with my luggage aboard, went on without me and I had to jump on a different bus with only the promise that I’d meet up with my possessions in Damascus. However we soon passed the first bus which had stopped for gas. The driver told me to get off and run over to my bus, but did not stop. Instead he opened the door and, to his credit, slowed down a bit. As I had no other option I jumped out, stumbled, but managed not to hurt myself, run across the freeway, and get to my bus with my things.
In the past two weeks the government has cut our power twice, each time for several hours, the longer being five hours. A friend, Clark who works at a lackluster English-language magazine in Damascus, often notes the process of censorship his magazine’s articles endure. The papers are mostly government run and I’ve found this thoroughly fascinating; a journalist from the Damascene paper “Revolution” has promised to give me a tour of the government offices where is produced. Clark’s most proudly censored article, not terribly well written or very interesting for that matter, dealt with men’s responsibility in relations among the sexes: while women are required to cover themselves because men are unable to control their sexual urges (shame on us), it is then contingent upon them to avert their gaze in the presence of women. Well, you have a sexually conservative culture that is suddenly confronted with a hegemonic sexual force, and suddenly the men of the region act much more openly about how horney the sexual lifestlye here makes them. Give it a couple generations, thought tits are wonderful, I am convinced that anyone can grow accustomed to cleavage.
As far as the sexual life of Syrians, or to fit the following account: people in Syria, I have come across some wonderful examples. First of all, I've noticed that when I hear of a Syrian man, or young boy (shab, Shabab) having sex, it is usually with some girl whose come to Damascus to study Arabic. A broken girl is always beneficial for the Syrian population. There is a universally disliked first generation immigrant Somolian girl from Canada who was, after a great amount of effort, talked out of what would have been a more terribly unfortunate sexual experience. You must understand first that she is deeply in love with this Syrian boy. Next I must inform you that she's a crazy kleptomaniac and generally insidious character.
To make this boy love her, she sought the help of a sheikh who could put a spell on him. Alas she found one who would, however the method by which he would cast the spell was a little strange. It involved sticking an egg up her ass, taking it out and cooking it, then leaving it on the boys doorstep. Afterwards, he would for some reason or another play with her vagina to officially cast the spell. She was, after much effort, talked out of this. I am fortunate enough to have spent very little time with this girl before my friends cut off relations with her.
This country continues to crack me up. Last night I attended a Jazz concert at the Citadel in the Old City. The music, with the exception of the final act, was terrible, but the company was quite pleasant. Late into the evening, after I had passed out spread eagle in my underwear on my bed, someone came knocking loudly at my door. I answered to find that Alia had come to pick up her phone, which she ha d forgotten the previous night, and to drag me to the Citadel to see the music. It was lovely, and I met a heavy metal musician who had been imprisoned by the Syrian government on three occasions for playing heavy metal in Syria.
I continue to be pleased with the people I meet outside of the Arabic program I attend. The night on which Alia left her cell phone saw a great amount of activity at our apartment. We were celebrating our recent acquisition, which knocked me out quite effectively. We've drawn a rather diverse crowd, from Syria's educated and generally rebellious youths to liberal but devout Muslims. Shi'is, Sunni's, Druzes and Christians most definitely can get along.
My classes are quite enjoyable, though I utterly loathe the other students for no good reason, it is all my own problem. No matter.
