girls just want to have front row seats

At Scripps College, there’s a beautiful tradition where students enter the doors of Denison Library upon matriculating, and exit the same doors four years later, on graduation day. With the exception of those bookend events — matriculation and graduation — the stately doors of Denison are always fastened shut.

The University of Jordan also bars its doors behind its graduating classes.

That’s why, when I told my aunt that I’d be auditing classes at her alma mater, she exclaimed: “Maybe we can come visit as your guests!”

“You — my guests? I‘m the guest here. You should be showing me around. You guys are Jordanians and, you, khalti (aunt) — you’re an alumna. When was the last time you visited?”

“I haven’t since I graduated.” My jaw fell. The University is just up our street. ”We’re not allowed on campus,” she explained. “Not even for a visit. They stop you at the gates. You have to have a school ID.”

“What? Why?”

She shrugged. “They’re weary of letting in strangers. You know, the University is crowded as it is and, when there are protests, they already have enough on their hands; they don’t need new people aggravating the situation. Everything has to be under control, you know, and there are tensions at the University.”

“Like what?”

“For example, when I was in college, and Israel did what it does, there’d be pro-Palestinian protests at the University, and many shabab (young men) would line up and do a Palestinian dabke. The Jordanian shabab, instead of reading all this as an act of defiance in the face of Israel read it as a challenge to Jordanian pride and nationalism. It was as if the Palestinians had slighted their host country. So the Jordanians, too, would line up and do their own dabke, each with their own songs and slogans. It was like a show down. Who would out-dabke the other.”

“And what did you guys do, the girls?”

“We’d just watch. Occasionally, it’d get aggressive. Shabab would insult or attack each other. Then the amn (security) folks would intervene and mete out punishments.”

These days, at the University, there is tension in the air, but this time its colors aren’t blue and white. It is election season for student government. So attendance indoors is low, the volume outdoors is high, the temperature is decreasing and the concentration of black-and-white or red-and-white keffiyehs is above average. The sounds of chanting and cheering marched their way into my second-story classroom, despite the closed windows, and I saw a professor ordering the immediate dispersal of a mob that had assembled below his class for a group photograph.

After our class ended, my Spanish friend C and I joined the students pooling at the University human highway. We passed a parked security car in the middle of the crowd and wondered at it. A few steps more and there was no wonder.

Jordanian students, many of them wearing the red-and-white lafha (keffiyeh) were lined hand-on-shoulder, doing a slow-step Jordanian dabke. The stubble-faced young man who led the circular procession doubled as the booming voice that the others echoed.

C shook her head as if to ask, what is it they’re saying. Since this was an election rally, I tuned in for words along that wavelength, but I found that the students were stomping a different tune. They hailed the kings of Jordan, all seven of them (even though, C pointed out, there are only five), declared their love for their country and threw in the traditional “tag tag tagiyeh” for good measure. Only at the end did they mention that they were rooting for that young man to represent the College of Arts.

Having proven loyalty to king and faithfulness to friend, the young men, like a snapped pearl necklace, broke up and scattered. That’s when I, too, snapped out of my reverie and saw myself standing there, watching as my aunt did before me, and realized that another thirty years may pass, but Jordan will be Jordan and girls will be girls.

calling all egyptians

Although Yasser Arafat played a very big part in Palestinian resistance and nation-building — a huge part, even — he never was as big as this hill that bears his name. This hill, which likes to think of itself as a mountain, has been Arafat long before its Palestinian namesake was conceived. If the man’s days of glory have come and gone, the mountain’s certainly have not.

Once a year, in hajj season, millions of white-clad pilgrims flock to Mount ‘Arafat. They perch on its every rock, with hands raised and heads bowed, seeking forgiveness from an All-Forgiving God. From the Saudi satellite station’s bird’s eye view, they look like seagulls on a sealess shore, daring the elements and hoping against hope.

Having said that, I want to tell you a little story that made me smile. (Because, really, why else would I tell you about Mount Arafat if I didn’t have ulterior motives?) My Sharia professor was urging us to use the ten days of Dhul-Hijja (the month of Hajj) to do extra good deeds: phone our parents, give a little charity, greet our neighbors.

My Sharia professor was on a bus when an Egyptian passenger beside him was feeling the Hajj spirit. The Egyptian picked up his phone and started dialing.

“Ya Ahmad, izzayyak? How are you? Insha’Allah issanaggaya fi Arafah! iA next year [we'll be] in Arafah!”

Then, “Ya Abu M’hammed! iA next year in Arafah!”

“Ya Ummi Zeinab…”

“Ya Abubraheem…”

“Ya wad ya Mahmood…”

He had made seven calls when a Jordanian passenger began to fret. Spaces on Arafah were filling up, and fast. And this man probably had a quarter of Cairo on speed dial.

“Hey man!” The Jordanian joked. “Enough already! You didn’t leave any room for us!”

What with the annual country-specific pilgrim quotas, it’s every country for itself. If Jordanians want to be well-represented on Arafah next year, they’d better start making those calls today. And perhaps they also ought to consider growing their population. For that, they’ll need nothing short of Miracle-Gro.

a walk in our own shoes

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.

darndest things

Although my grandparents lived in Saudi Arabia for over thirty years, they and their six children were like an island at sea. They felt mostly alienated from their surroundings, distant from their neighbors and, in the words of Edward Said, simply out of place.

Maybe it was the fact that, despite his long stay in Saudi, my grandfather Sido was denied Saudi citizenship and did not see raises in his salary because (a) he was originally from Gaza and (b) he had too many children.

Or maybe it was the fact that his eight-member family lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a struggling area, where many of the infants ambled about bare-bottomed and defacated in the street.

Or maybe it was that my blond and green-eyed Sido was widely considered a “foreigner.” (I never understood if this meant Westerner-foreigner or unwanted-poor-Arab-immigrant-foreigner). Once, as he cycled to work, Sido witnessed a car accident and a Saudi national immediately bore (false) witness against him. “Policeman, it was this foreigner’s fault. I saw it. It was all his fault.” The policeman, who’d witnessed the incident himself and saw that Sido was not at all responsible, thanked the man for his (unsolicited) testimony and sent him packing.

In any case, in the midst of Saudi’s sand dunes, there lied an emotional gulf between some refugees and Saudi locals.

Once, when they had settled into a house, my grandmother Tata had complained that the place was zay wijhuh (like his face), referring to the owner.

Now, in Palestinian dialect, if you say something is like someone’s face (ex. the food is like your face), that’s no good news for your face or for the the object of that simile. Implied is that your face ain’t that good lookin’. Tata’s mistake (arguably, apart from the insult itself) was saying it within earshot of her four year-old daughter.

Some days later, the owner came by. He found the blond, blue-eyed girl sitting near the threshold. “How did you find the house, ya shatra (you good girl)?”

“Zay wijhak (like your face),” came the straight unapologetic reply.

To Tata’s embarrassment, the owner repeated to her, in her own words, her assessment of the new home. My grandparents were duly reminded that they had among them embedded journalists who, despite their smallness, had big ears and big mouths. Kids do say the darndest things.