A couple weeks ago, my friend and I lamented the fact that, as young women, we could not engage taxi drivers in conversation without seeming to have ulterior motives. Taxi drivers are notoriously well-informed and, for their ease in extracting information, would make for good informants. Who else overhears innumerable phone conversations daily, and knows the lay of the land as well as they?
Today, it was I who had a chance to overhear and now I shall play the informant. (That makes you, dear reader, the mukhabarat, the secret intelligence service.)
One of the cab drivers this afternoon was what my aunt’s husband calls a human train, puffing up smoke like it was his business. Thanks to a small car crash, traffic was at a standstill and the grey plumes wafted leisurely around my face. What’s more, the rain outside had subsided, and the smell of fresh car exhaust made me believe once more in the virtues of horse and buggy.
As we inched along, my taxi driver noticed an elderly Palestinian man awaiting a cab. Without asking my permission — a courtesy I’d twice before enjoyed — he offered his next client the passenger seat.
As he drove us through a small river, the frustration pent up within him burst. ”What is this?! You know, hajj,” he addressed himself to the old man, “I’ve seen Malaysia. It rains there one hour every day, come summer or winter. But look right, look left, and you can’t find any water.”
“But Malaysia’s not like here. It’s a resort.” The man in the thobe, suit jacket, white hatta and ‘i’gal replied.
“I’ve been to America, too.” The taxi driver continued. “It rains, but the water runs down the side of the street. No, hajj, it’s not because it’s a resort. It’s because it’s organized. Here, there’s no order. No infrastructure.”
“It’s cleaner than Damascus.”
“Leave us from Damascus.” The driver insisted. “Look at this. It rains here one hour and we’re all drowning.”
“You know, Jordan is a nation that profits off of other people’s problems.” (If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right?)
“The S.O.S. nation.”
“Yes. Where are you from?” The old man leaned in to ask.
“Yafa.”
“I’m from al-Khalil. Muhammad Abed Yunus.” He proudly rattled off some tertiary name, presumably his own or that of some famous person from his village. They were now members of that fraternity called Palestinian Diaspora, brothers in refugeehood. “And I tell you, Jordan wouldn’t even be a country worth a fils (piaster) if it weren’t for the Palestinians. Your people, my people from Khalil, we built it. It wouldn’t be anything. It profits by others’ problems, I tell you.”
“You know they say a monkey went to Syria. It cried and cried and said take me to my home. I can’t live here. So they took it to Malaysia. Cried and cried. Take me home, take me home. They took it to the U.S., to Egypt, to India — it cried and cried. Then they took it to Jordan and it was happy here, surrounded by all the other monkeys. This is a country for sa’adeen (little monkeys and, in slang, mischievous people).”
For all their impassioned political tirades, I couldn’t help but think how mundane, how recycled the conversation felt. (All except for the monkey business; that “joke” was new to me.) I’d heard many a Jordanian resident slam this country that played host for refugees and itinerant workers since its inception. I understand that individuals can easily pin their disappointments on a country, on an idea. The uneven pavement, the poor drainage system, even the weather — all could be Jordan’s fault. That is the convenient, expedient way to go.
Last year, when I visited my aunt, I watched as a handful of workers laid cement on the path between our place and the adjacent business building. After a hard day’s labor leveling the wet cement, a couple of the men walked over their newly finished work. What remained in their wake were shoeprints that, to this day, evidence their indiscretion and irresponsibility.
Jordan is like a big slab of cement covered in shoeprints of all shapes and sizes. It’s easy to damn the cement and the shoes that walked on it. It’s much harder, however, to recognize those shoeprints as our own.
