A Wrinkle in Time

(Apologies to those whose adolescence was not shaped by Madeleine L'Engle, whose sci-fi classic this title references)

Being in the Occupied Palestinian Territories muddles one’s sense of distance and time. Traveling between Ramallah and Jerusalem in 1946 was a ten-kilometer bus ride south, a distance comparable to that between my apartment in Brooklyn and Midtown Manhattan. Today, the two cities are on opposite sides of the “Separation” Wall dividing the West Bank from Israel, although over two hundred thousand Palestinians still live in East Jerusalem.

I can’t envision a straight path from A to B when I set off from the Friends School in Ramallah. Instead, I see time: forty-five to ninety minutes of speed-bumps, vehicle-switching, checkpoints, and passport-showing. “Distance” as the crow flies no longer exists. It is as if you are not actually traveling through space but rather passing from one space-time continuum to another and losing an unpredictable amount of time in between. As if you sometimes got stuck when Apparating and appeared an hour later at your destination. As if you were crossing a tesseract.

At first it does feel like you are on your way somewhere. You turn off of al-Nahda Street from Friends and head through al-Bireh, a city older than Ramallah that has now become part of one extended metropolitan area. The usual series of Arab shops files out, then repeats: mini-market fronted with icebox of frozen treats, bakery with open oven and racks of various shaped loaves, odds n’ ends store adorned with hanging tricycles, backpacks and shoes, dark window of moneychanger office, the miniature screens of a cell phone store. The sidewalks swarm with multicolored veils above and the dark curls of children below. You swerve to avoid the old women in traditional embroidered dresses who toddle into the streets with their purchases balanced on their heads. You are in an Arab city. It could be downtown Amman, Cairo or Damascus.

As you leave the city center behind, the streets widen and empty of pedestrians and the prices in shop windows fall. You make slow progress because of the speed bumps striping the road every few meters. Every driver I have ridden with knows the location of these “sleeping policemen” by heart, even though they are unmarked and seem to be placed at random.

When you get out of town and onto the highway, the speed bumps taper off. The driver, regardless of his character, then floors the gas and tears forward with the gleeful recklessness of a teenager in a convertible on the first day of summer vacation. But the sudden freedom of the highway brings with it the first evidence that you are not traveling through an Arab country: the road signs announce the names of the places along the highway in Hebrew, then English, then Arabic. You are still in the West Bank, what would appear on a road map (no pun intended) to be the land allotted to Palestinians. But none of the places on the signs are Arab: Bet El, Giva’at Zev, Ma’ale Adumim. Following the arrows up to the tops of the surrounding hills, where the Israeli settlements’ identical orange roofs twinkle in the sun.

Why are there no Arab places even mentioned? Because this is an Israeli highway, servicing only Israeli settlers. To get to Arab towns, you have to use the circuitous, speed-bump-infested back-roads. As hill after hill of orange roofs loom, the impression that you are traveling through the West Bank fades. But you aren’t in Israel yet either. You are on Camazotz. You have entered a time-wrinkle.

The entrance to Ma'ale Adumim, one of the largest Israeli settlements.

This surreal spree through no-man’s land ends as abrubtly as it began: concrete road blocks slam on your breaks and channel all traffic into the Qalandiya checkpoint. By now, all sense of distance and time is lost. If you are on a bus, you disembark and enter the netherworld described in my last entry. If you are in a car with yellow Israeli plates and have an Israeli, East Jerusalemite or foreign passport, you join the queue of cars awaiting cross-check. If you are driving a car with white or green Palestinian plates or have a West Bank ID, Jerusalem’s proximity is doubly meaningless for you. Your journey is over, unless you have a pass issued from the Israeli government for health or professional purposes.

But you would never have come that far anyway; to you, Jerusalem is a mere legend, a place known through family stories but about as accessible from your home as Seattle or Mars. Mazen, a teacher of history with a PhD who speaks fluent Russian and makes wine, can’t remember the last time he went to Jerusalem, but he’s sure it was in the nineties. Adil, the director of a Palestinian cultural center who studied archaeology in Berlin and taught at Toronto University, recently turned down a speaking engagement at the American Consulate in Jerusalem when Israeli Security would only issue him a three-hour pass. Rashid, a sixteen-year-old student at the Friends School who speaks fluent English and has traveled to Europe and the States, has never been to Jerusalem. “I think I may just not go, ever,” he shrugs.

But those who can pull up to the gateway, under surveillance of mammoth watchtowers whose square eyes seem to move with you. The guardians who determine whether or not you pass back into real time are heavily armed college-age Israeli soldiers, who peer in your windows and flip purposefully through your passports. They do not search your car or interrogate you; an American passport, accent and smile seem to give you a free license to bring whatever you want through the wall. They merely reserve the right to intimidate.

Once you’re through, you speed alongside the wall towards the city. All the license plates are yellow now, and there are no more speed-bumps. The signs continue in three languages. When you hit the periphery, Arab shops begin to file out again, this time with advertisements in Hebrew as well as Arabic, and the veils and and head-balancing acts reappear. But as you approach the city, indications of Israeli infrastructure begin to multiply, emblazoned with blocky Hebrew letters – city buses, schools, gas stations – as well as Israelis, carrying suitcases, wearing miniskirts, walking quickly.

The suburbs expand into highway bypasses towards different parts of Jerusalem, and the old city emerges on the right. As you turn in on Jaffa Street, modern Jerusalem’s main drag, the veils and street sellers are replaced with yamakas, shin-length skirts and beards. Stars of David twinkle proudly in shop windows. Children’s wispy side-curls blow back from their faces as they run up and down the sidewalks after their parents. On the left, Ben Yehuda Street climbs through chi-chi wine stores and cafes; hippies dance in the sun and teenage girls flaunt their summer dresses, while soldiers in fatigues and Orthodox families weave through them.

“Ramallah? No, never been over there!” says the American Methodist pastor who has been living in Jerusalem, working at the Christ Church Guesthouse for the past two months. “Gonna try to make it though, when I get some time to travel.”

Ramallah really isn't ten kilometers away. It belongs to a different world, accessible only to those who willing to brave a wrinkle in time.

No (hu)man's land

For those of you who have encountered the West Bank checkpoints, this story should be no news to you. For those of you who haven't . . . read on.

The "Separation Wall" being built between the West Bank and Israel.

I thought I had learned the drill at the infamous Qalandiya Checkpoint, having been through once before. When the busses from Ramallah (or anywhere else in the West Bank) to Jerusalem arrive at the checkpoint, they pull over and let everyone off. The dispatched passengers then make their way across a parking lot full of Palestinian drivers with Israeli license plates crying “al-‘uds, al-‘uds!” (“Jerusalem”) and over to a mammoth hangar. Temporarily incarcerated, the travelers fall into a snaking line up to a wall of metal bars. The line bunches up around the one entrance, which is barely as wide as a man’s shoulders and squeezes the crush of people into single file as they pass through a tunnel to a body-length turnstile like the New York subways. The turnstile opens long enough to let a few dozen people through, then locks again.

When you finally get past the stile, you find yourself in an inner chamber with walls twenty feet high and a new wall of bars, this time with six turnstiles in separate compartments. You join one of the crowds of Palestinians pressing up against the bars and wait again. The turnstile allows three people through at a time, then locks shut. Nonetheless, the fourth person invariably tries to lunge through as the stile clicks locked and rattles their bodies back to stillness. The rhythm of the door’s three-turns-and-a-lock – shlick . . . shlick . . . shlick . . . ka-CHUNK – establishes a ruthless regularity as you inch forward. No single file here – it’s each man, child and little old lady for him or herself, although there does seem to be a consensus that the little old ladies should be given right of way when they are noticed underfoot.

Sometimes inexplicable pauses arise between openings and people begin to mutter. But their stunning powerlessness has become a default state of being. Those waiting with friends and family chat, gossiping or planning their errands on the other side. Children weave between bodies until a parent’s hand reaches through to snatch them back. Teenage girls lean inside the stile, each with a foot on the lowest bar. They swing mindlessly back and forth as they chatter. Then it clicks open and they tumble through giggling, place their purses on a conveyer belt, and step up to a double window with their travel documents (Palestinians do not have passports – depending on whether they live in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem, annexed in 1967, they carry varying levels of residency papers).

After showing documents, you pass through yet another turnstile to freedom, which begins with a second parking lot where the busses wait to recuperate their passengers. You show your ticket, board, and wait for the bus to fill. Then you go the remaining few minutes to Jerusalem. Total distance: about 12 kilometers. Total time: an hour and a half.

**************

I had been warned that the morning crowds of commuters could make for longer lines at Qalandiya, but my traveling companions, a British Quaker couple, and I arrived with plenty of time to get to the tour agency in Jerusalem. It was their first experience with Qalandiya, and they were adamant about toughing it out. This time, there was no waiting at the first turnstile, but the antechamber before the actual checkpoint teemed with at least two hundred people. It occurred to me that the “system” I thought I had witnessed a few days before may not have been a system at all, but merely one random manifestation of how the checkpoint is run on any given day. The grim reality of arbitrary rule chilled the blood even more than a predictable system of control. I warned the couple, Alan and Elspeth, that there was no telling how long the checkpoint would take and that perhaps we should consider getting a car from one of the eager drivers outside, who enter Jerusalem via one of the known holes in the “Separation Wall.” But they demurred, claiming that we had plenty of time, and reminding me that our governments were responsible for funding and allowing this monstrosity in the first place.

A fair point. We waited.

For fifteen minutes, no one moved, but people kept coming in from behind and surging past us. I tried to urge Alan and Elspeth to relinquish their politesse and push forward with everyone else, but eventually the tide of bodies separated us. We pressed into the same turnstile line at least, and waited. No one was going through. People began to mutter, then complain, then shout and press the “call” button into the office on the other side. No response. The gate remained locked.

After another twenty minutes, it began to allow one person through at a time, then lock again for unpredictable intermissions. “One at a time!” indignant shouts rose. Perhaps this was unnatural even for Qalandiya. A few announcements came through in blaring, staticky Hebrew: first they closed the window we were standing at (bodies stampede to the right), then reopened it five minutes later (bodies stampede back to the left). Well-dressed Palestinians bypassed the line and barged in front with minimal comment from the monotony-dulled crowd. One man did grumble as a suited, sun-glassed man swept from the back right into the turnstile. The newcomer screamed back that he had been there the whole time and pushed through. People started crowding into the stile two and three at a time.

At last my turn came. Dazed after an hour and a half in a mob of oppressed, angry humans, I walked through the turnstile in front of me and turned right towards the busses.

But on the right was a wall topped with spikes. To the left was a corridor leading through a turnstile into another parking lot, disconnected from the busses. I had gone through the wrong gate.

I ran back to the turnstile I had gone through. Of course, it was locked. The trickle of travelers coming through inform me that that gate was only for the post office (yes, Palestinians have to go through the Qalandiya checkpoint to mail a letter). I run back and forth in the corridor in a panic, eying the walls and trying to imagine myself vaulting over them. Impossible. I would be shot. Oh shit. I pressed the call button again and again and finally earned a stream of screaming Hebrew, then silence.

A couple of Arabs finally came through the corridor that had become my prison. They told me I would have to go out and back around through the checkpoint again. No! My spirit fluttered fiercely against the bars of my trapped body. Then I saw an Israeli guard outside. I leaned against the stile and called to him in English, and he came over. A tanned, rugged middle-aged man with a white-blond ponytail.

“Hi, listen, I went through the wrong gate,” I panted, trying on a disarming smile over my tensed muscles. “Is there any way you can put me back through?”

He sized me up and chuckled. “Where you from?” he asked.

“American,” I sighed with relief for a change, handing over my passport. “New York.”

He nodded and smiled, flipping through the pages. “Ah, New York . . . Welcome to Israel. Why you come through this gate, girlie?”

“I didn’t know it made a difference. I can’t read Arabic,” I lied, offering a rueful shrug.

He raised his eyebrows, amused. “There was no one there to direct you?”

I shook my head.

“Okay,” he handed me back my passport and said reassuringly, “I’m going to call and see if I can get you through. Don’t worry – just be patient.” He disappeared.

It is impossible to be patient and not to worry when you are stuck in a walled corridor in heat approaching 90 degrees facing an empty parking lot and a huge army complex into which your sole chance of escape has vanished. I pushed against the first gate again, recalling my yoga teacher’s frequent reminder: the definition of madness is to attempt the same thing the same way over and over again and expect a different result. Then a man appeared on the other side and magically let me through, then vanished. My body melting in relief, I charged at the gate to the busses.

Ka-CHUNK. Locked.

I ran back to the turnstile into the checkpoint window and called out. No reply. Were their windows soundproof? Probably. Why let explanations and excuses be even a remote possibility? A man passing through informed me that this gate was now closed for travelers to Jerusalem, and was open only for the post office. Now made reckless with fear and frustration, I stamped back through the post office gate, out into the deceptively open parking lot and into the complex, where I found the kindly Israeli guard at the desk.

“Ah, they send you back to me. Why you not wait? I tell you be patient. Okay, I see what I can do."

A languid phone call in Hebrew ensued, out of which I distinguish only the word “Amrikai.” He hung up and grinned.

“Come with me now, I’ll take you back over there and someone’s gonna let you in. So relax!”

Two Palestinians were coming out of the turnstile as the officer buzzed me back through. The look of shock on their faces confirmed that such an exception would never have been made for them. At the next stile, two Israeli soldiers, a boy and a girl barely more than teenagers, had materialized, in fatigues and heavily armed. I showed them my passport and they smiled at me and shook their heads.

“Why you go through this gate?” the boy asked, his voice teasing, with an almost flirtatious twinkle in his eye.

“I couldn’t read the sign, sorry!” I stuck to my lie. Their smiles widened and they buzzed me in.

“Hey, you be careful, okay?” the girl warned. “It’s dangerous over there.” She cocked her head back at the swarm of waiting Palestinians (along with poor polite Alan and Elspeth) as she buzzed me through the final gate to freedom.

“Yeah I will, thanks.” I gave my captors-turned-saviors a real smile. “You should make some signs in English!” Somewhere in the mixture of relief to be escaping and to be suddenly joking with peers rather than trying to talk sense to a screaming intercom, I liked them.

Young Israeli soldiers in downtown Jerusalem. They are actually watching a bunch of Israeli hippies dancing around shirtless to some tribal drumbeat.

As the 18-bus rolled on towards Jerusalem, the aftershocks of my brush with Palestinian reality crumbled my thoughts and opinions into an indecipherable mush. Images sparred and splattered against one another: the hunched old ladies in traditional Palestinian embroidered dresses smashed into turnstiles, the high spiked walls, the Arab men smoking and pressing up on all sides, the grinning Israeli soldiers with whom I immediately felt a shared cultural bond, the conveyer belts, the guns, the teenage girls swinging against on the gates, the fatherly Israeli guard, the indecipherable Hebrew screeching on the intercom, my own voice in English saying, in so many words, “Hey, I’m American, we’re allies, buddies, friends! You don’t have to treat me like you treat them! My country funds this whole operation, so it’s cool, I’m not upset. Just new here, sorry!”

So it’s less obvious than I would like to dictate my gut responses to these conflicting encounters. But I also realize that as a foreigner I enjoy a tremendous privilege that few West Bankers or Israelis enjoy: being able to see humans on both sides of that checkpoint. Interaction in the netherworld of Qalandiya forces both Israelis and Palestinians to see one another as animals.

Ramzi reflects

Ramzi has been blind all his life. His eyelids and lashes, which stretch across the hollows beneath his eyebrows, still twitch, as if protecting phantom eyes from the dusty air. Those “eyes” still seem to light up with his wide, snaggle-toothed smile. These frequent smiles have creased his cinnamon-brown skin into darker folds, the hue of his brown-black hair and grimy knuckles. Ramzi’s hunching, groping walk further diminishes his short stature, making him appear boy-like from behind, even though to look at him dead-on one would place him at around forty. When I told Ramzi my age, his eyeless smile erupted and he crowed, “Then you were born in 1981, like me!” We were, in fact, born ten days apart.

I met Ramzi at a classical music concert at the Friends Boys School. I had invited Nassar, an acquaintance via ArteEast whose writing I had translated with a friend earlier that year. He brought Ramzi, and introduced him to me at intermission. Ramzi attempted a phrase or two in English, then launched into his life story without further ado in eloquent, earnest Arabic. The words poured from him in no general direction, his speech devoid of gestures, his empty eye-sockets gazing past me. He had escaped from Gaza with a day pass two years ago and had been hiding in the West Bank ever since. He had no West Bank ID and couldn’t get one, so he couldn’t pass any of the checkpoints. His wife and children were still in Gaza. He had tried to get them out but to no avail. “My people have suffered so much, and all because of the Israelis, all because of the occupation,” he repeated rhythmically in between each verse of his story. Nassar stood by with an unreadable expression on his face. Had he introduced me to Ramzi to drive home even further the desperate plight of the Palestinians? Or had he perhaps not realized that Ramzi would impart this diatribe? I murmured sympathetic responses, increasingly aware that he required none. Eventually another man standing by listening – perhaps another Gazan – intervened and whispered to him,. They clasped hands and drifted back towards the auditorium with barely a dip in Ramzi’s monologue.

I sit behind the three of them, Ramzi, Nassar and the new man, watching them listening to Brahms Piano Trio No. 3. Ramzi’s head cocked in concentration. My friend Emile and I had discussed the waking dreams that classical music can inspire; what mental images, or impressions rather, could Brahms bring to the mind of a blind Gazan? I didn’t get a chance to ask Ramzi, because when we left the concert hall, the second movement of his concerto of memories and opinions began.

As we separated from the noise and crush of the crowd, Ramzi began to direct his narration towards me more specifically, and registered for the first time, with delight, that I could speak Arabic. Another theme thus wove its way into his streaming solo (as with the other themes, he first devoted a whole verse to developing it, then recapitulated it every few minutes): how wonderful it was to meet an American who spoke Arabic! what a lovely person I must be! and a Sagittarius born in the same year at that! and what did I think of Palestine? and did I find it beautiful? and was I happy here? and he hoped I was “happy” in his beautiful country. (This, mind you, mixed in with the continuing themes of his hardships.) Nassar held Ramzi’s elbow on the other side and whispered an ostinato of “daraj . . . daraj . . . daraj” (“step”) alerting Ramzi of changes in elevation. Ramzi’s feet stumbled through the instructions as if disconnected from his rhythmic, gushing speech.

Ramzi has never seen his country, but was resolute in his frequent declarations that it is the most beautiful in the world. He began a litany of places that we must visit together, describing each as more enticing than the next.

“You know, you are speaking with a beautiful woman,” Nassar informs Ramzi.
“I know, I can tell that she is beautiful,” Ramzi nearly giggles with joy, his smile twitching with a brief shyness. I am beginning to wonder what impressions the notion of ‘beauty’ makes on his mind, and what particular elements inspire it – voices, kind words, smells, warmth, breezes, descriptions of visual attributes from other processed in his own private language. Later, sitting at Zan, a bar in downtown Ramallah, Ramzi explains.

“I have never seen color, of course. But I don’t need to; I know colors from having heard so much about them. I know when I hear green that it is associated with trees and plants, when I hear blue that it is associated with the heavens and purity, red is the heart and love, white is peace and innocence . . . I have learned all of these. All colors register “signifieds” (he uses the Saussurian term, in Arabic: “madluul”) in my mind the same way it does for others, without having seen them. You know that you don’t have to see something or someone to know them, or have a feeling of knowing them. For example, I have never met Barack Obama but I know him through his words and his actions, from what people say about him, from the feeling that he gives me. I love this man, I think he will do good in my country and everywhere. He is kind and intelligent, and respects Islam. I would like to write him a letter about my situation, do you think he would read my letter? I think he would have to read it, because he is a good man. I know these things, and I think of them when I hear the words, ‘Barack Obama.’ But I have never seen him. Colors are like this to me, I know them, and have known them all my life, but only in what they signify to me.”

Ramzi lives and thinks in a pure Saussurian world of signifiers and signifieds, without images, without visual memories. While the rest of us are beholden to images’ impact on our reasoning and understanding, Ramzi inhabits a world of symbols. Even his name, “ramzi”, means “symbolic”.

In his blindness, Ramzi has mastered one of the most complex systems of symbols I know of: classical Arabic. Without having ever seen the sloping script, the short vowel symbols floating above the stream of connected letters, he speaks the ancient language with a clarity unparalleled in most Arabs I have met anywhere, on the level of university professors. It occurred to him at some point in our conversation to switch to classical or “Modern Standard” Arabic, called fuS-Ha (“the most eloquent”), which he supposed might be easier for a foreign student of the language. He explained that his background as a radio announcer accounted for his mastery of spoken fuS-Ha, and set off on a lengthy cadenza to prove it.
“If I have correctly understood the situation, it is good and right that we speak only fuS-Ha! What is your opinion of this proposition of mine? I find it to be a most excellent and suitable plan, but only if it pleases my lovely new friend, and she finds it to be as excellent and as suitable as I in my humble opinion have found it to be.”

After a few more minutes of such oration, I manage to interject in passable fuS-Ha that I did indeed find it to be an excellent and suitable proposition, and he began a new speech expressing his joy in all of the flowery locutions that high classical Arabic has to offer (“I am delighted a great delighting, it pleases me a great pleasing, what a joy of all joys it is to . . .”). Despite the repetition, I had to remain vigilant, for he would suddenly direct a trick question at me to test my knowledge of Arabic grammar. When I answered correctly, the thrill would send him off on a lengthy reflection on my mastery of Arabic, although I had likely only uttered twenty full sentences, albeit containing the constructions that Ramzi considered to belong to the highest possible level of fluency. Eventually, his interest in hearing me speak fuS-Ha induced him to give me the floor more often, but he monitored my speech for points to correct or praise. His responses thus consisted of linguistic observations rather than reactions to content, but I suppose one could call it a conversation.

As Ramzi’s enthusiasm for our ceremonial exchange escalated, I realized how much it must mean to him to be demonstrating his prowess in formal Arabic. In Gaza, his education and resolve had allowed him to found and host a radio program for the handicapped. Here in the West Bank, his isolated and uncertain situation had relegated him to the bottom of the employment chain: a street tamarind juice-seller. These unfortunate men wander the streets downtown during the high shopping hours with heavy metal canisters of syrupy brown juice strapped to their backs, their plaintive cries of “tamar-hindi bi-shaykl, tamar-hindi bi-shaykl!” ("tamarind juice for a shekel!") blending with the bustle of traffic. To boot, tradition dictates that they wear the clownish dress of bygone Ottoman courts – shiny red, gold-tasseled shirts with puffy sleeves, matching pantaloons and “tarboushes,” cup-shaped tasseled hats.

Ramzi refused to admit to any shame about his most recent line of work. “People should work at all different levels of society,” he avowed. “Otherwise how can they know and respect their fellow men? They cannot. ‘I am thankful to my God’ (he says this phrase in English for emphasis) that I have had the chance to work at many different jobs. Yes, my current job, selling tamarind juice, may not make a lot of money. At times, it is tiring. But thanks to my God, I have work and I am serving my society. Thanks be to God. And tomorrow, if you find yourself downtown on an errand, perhaps, perhaps, you will happen upon me at work – what a lovely surprise that would be, if you were to happen upon me at work! – and I could give you some tamarind juice.”

I assured Ramzi that I would keep an eye out for him the next day, but picturing him feeling his way through the merciless crush of bodies and cars with his walking stick in a clown-suit at high noon was uncomfortable to imagine.

The next day as I elbowed through the crowd with my laptop (the internet in my apartment on the blink, on my way to an internet café), the tamarind sellers’ cries echoed with particular stridency. I told myself I couldn’t bear to see Ramzi humiliating himself this way, but my eyes disobeyed and flitted past the identical costumes to the faces. Eyes popped back at me.

Until there he was, feeling his way on the corner of al-Nahda and al-Quds Streets, calling with as a lusty a shout as any, “tamar hindi bi-shaykl!”, his tarboush cocked on his head. But then I was walking by, without stopping, in a moment of revelation that he would never know I had passed.

I made it about seven steps then turned around and went back. “Ramzi,” I called him, lightly touching his shoulder. “It’s Anna.”

It took a moment for this to register, then delight and greetings abounded. Before I could protest, he was fumbling for his plastic cups to pour me a cup of tamarind juice. He successfully topped off a glass and extended it shakily towards me, smiling with all the pride and encouragement of a mother presenting her child with a birthday cake ablaze with candles. Shoppers stared at the spectacle as they passed: a white girl with a laptop receiving a lecture in formal Arabic on the salutary qualities of tamarind from a blind street vendor.

I sipped at the would-be elixir, listened to the lecture, and considered the possibility that Ramzi enjoyed his job. Perhaps in not being able to “see” the things we do – the silly tarboushes, the busy, annoyed faces of the crowds – Ramzi is able to “see” himself as providing a service that people need. And go home with money in his pocket, knowing that he has worked and supported himself another day.

“You only have the right to work, not to the fruits of your labor.”

-Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

A free lunch in Palestine

The view down the hill from Ramallah, Palestine

MY new friend Nassar promised me that I would not have to haggle for my vegetables in Palestine. The frequent battles waged over half-kilograms of cucumbers during my Cairo days weighed heavily against this opinion however. Memories of astronomical prices mumbled with averted eyes, then shouted indignantly with finger raised, then confirmed by the vendor’s phalanx of male family members dampened my confidence, and I steeled myself as I approached Ramallah’s teeming produce market. Not that I was looking for a fight; truth be told, I have found myself loathe to contest prices quoted to me in Ramallah, likely due to my well-meant but ineffectual notion that Americans deserve to pay double in Palestine. No, the fact of overpaying itself did not chafe so much as the unpleasantness of a dishonest interaction, even one that did not escalate into an argument. It makes the stuff taste worse.

The familiar cacophony of whooping vendors rose through the noon haze as I descended into the tarpaulin-covered market, just to the south of Manara Square in the center of Ramallah. Shoppers had first to pass through an aisle of “durable” goods (items of clothing and cleaning supplies that looked like they might last a week) before reaching a wider square filled with produce stands.

As my Obama tee shirt and light skin began to come into focus amidst the mass of Palestinian shoppers, the closest voices began to add, “wel-cahm!” “helloooooo!” as well as the Arabic “ahlan, marHaba, itfaDDali!” (“Welcome, hello, help yourself!”) to the streaming chant of prices and products. Keeping eye contact with these eager salesmen to a minimum, I opened ceremonies by purchasing a bundle of mint from a hunched old lady out front. One shekel (about 25 cents). This boded well, so I entered the market with buoyed confidence.

As my ears grew accustomed to the welcoming shouts, now in surround sound, the eyes could take over, devouring the feast of colors arrayed on row upon row of stalls. Against the crumbling gray background of Ramallah, these fruits and vegetables glowed with the brilliance of colors before a storm in Tornado Alley – their life force heightened against the volatile air. The gleaming reds, greens and purples vied for my eye with seductive power far more potent than their harvesters’ cajoling.

I exchanged “marhabas” with a vendor and began selecting tomatoes. He immediately thrust a black plastic bag out, which I refused, showing him my handy “green” (also literally green) cloth shopping bag. He cocked his head, nonplussed, and offered me the bag again. “La, la la, li Himaayit al-bi’a,” I explained. (“No no, it’s to protect the environment!”) He still looked unimpressed, but withdrew the bag, shaking his head as if I had asked to have schwarma meat scooped straight into my hands without bread. My four tomatoes also cost a shekel. I began to feel like I was passively ripping them of, and considered reenacting a scene from Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity! In which the narrator, in an attempt to divest himself of his sudden fortune, haggles up the price of a key ring in Morocco to forty times the vendor’s original quote. My tomato man had already turned to the next customer though, so I moved on.

When the next vendor, a younger man with black curls loosening from the wave gelled over his forehead, refused to let me pay for three cucumbers however, I had to protest. He smiled and shook his head, said, “ahlan!” and cast my measly handful of cucumbers a bemused – really, belittling – glance. It seemed to be an affront to accept payment for such a trifling amount, especially if I wouldn’t even take a bag. I begged and begged but he retreated back behind the pile of cucumbers away from my reaching handful of coins. I shrugged, thanked him, and moved on. True, most of the shoppers were Palestinian matriarchs purchasing enough cucumbers to feed a family of seven for a week. But with my unpredictable schedule, even three cucumbers and four tomatoes would be a challenge for me to get through before they went bad.

Attempts to buy one pepper, four baby eggplants, five baby peaches and two lemon-limes (they are all hybrid species here), all without bags, also met with affectionate derision. The only few shekels I managed to pay for anything were disbursed in furtive layups over piles of produce into makeshift cash registers, which drew retaliation of additional veggies lobbed back at me. Far from the Cairenes’ mendacious oaths and threats, each transaction in Ramallah ended in mutual bemusement and good will. “But you guys,” I wanted to plead with them. “I want YOU to charge me more! I can pay! I have an American salary, it’s nothing to me, it’s okay!” But if decades of occupation and subhuman treatment and living standards can’t extinguish these people’s sense of pride, hospitality and generosity, far be it from me to compromise their standards.



Steaming flatbreads just off the sizzling iron domes the bakers spread the dough on also cost a shekel, and crumpled warmly into the top of my now bulging shopping bag. One item left on the list: olive oil, the essence of one of Palestine’s most recognized and poignant symbols, the olive tree. I imagined that the shelves would abound with different regional varieties.

Back on the street, I squeezed through the line of shoppers and bins of nuts and fruits into a small grocery shop and surveyed the merchandise. The sight of Hebrew lettering all over the packaged products, the only evidence to the naked eye that your are not in any other Arab city, still makes me do a double take every time. In Egypt or Syria, the only place you would see Hebrew writing in the marketplace is marching in menacing fonts across the covers of books preaching the evils of Zionism. I realized the taboo status Hebrew has thus achieved in my sensibilities -- it actually looks sinister. Need to work on that. Maybe seeing it on my soap and butter wrappers will help.

Meanwhile, after three scans of the rows of bottles of various oils, I still couldn't find olive oil. How could this be? Suddenly I was afraid to ask anyone. Had Israeli destruction of olive trees advanced so far as to decimate Palestinian olive oil production? Or was it simply a staple so rarefied and abundant that there was a whole olive oil store somewhere? At last one of the store employees asked what I was looking for and I told him.

“Ah, yes,” he replied immediately, and ducked through the open door into the dank, cluttered backroom. He fished a two-liter juice bottle out of a pile of flotsam and handed it to me. Seeing my puzzlement, he explained, “This is our olive oil. We make it ourselves and bring it in to sell by the kilo.”

Ah. I swished the viscous liquid around in the bottle. It’s olive oil all right. I lost myself momentarily in an attempt to imagine this boy and his family harvesting and pressing these olives in the countryside somewhere nearby. I hoped their farm was safe from the "natural growth" of Israeli settlements.

“Okay,” I told him. “But I just need a little, I’m only here for three weeks. Do you have a smaller bottle?”

He popped into the backroom again, rooted around on the lower shelves and produced a half-liter water bottle. He shook out the remaining water onto the floor, filled it with olive oil, weighed it on the decrepit scale in the corner and handed it up to the cashier, who re-weighed it and handed it to me. Thirteen shekels (not quite three and a half dollars). I planned silently to come back before I leave and buy out their whole stock to bring home, and offer to bring them all with me.


Being in Palestine gives me fantasies of being a fabulously wealthy benefactor, or having superpowers that would allow me to change their plight with one wave of a benevolent hand.

Sap and Censorship

Rarely does an Egyptian movie sound not-ridiculous enough to tempt Aaron and me to try it out. Most advertise their absurdity with garish pride: chaotic and impassioned collages on posters promise hours of slapstick comedy and mawkish love stories. Two so far have somehow penetrated our firewall however, only to turn out equally preposterous.

We suffered our first hoodwinking with Halim, the biographical film of one of Egypt’s most beloved musical stars, Abdel Halim Hafez. Our appreciation for his music and interest in the historical period his life encompassed convinced us that the film, however schmaltzy, must merit some esteem.

Three and a half hours later, we emerged convinced that Halim was the very worst movie either of us had ever seen.

(below: the real Abdel Halim Hafez)
Halim was to be played by the famous Egyptian actor Ahmed Zaki, but as the latter unfortunately died during the filming, his son completed the role. Consequently the film contained a few rather jarring hops between generations, as well as some disconcerting footage from the late actor’s actual funeral at the tear-jerking conclusion.

For seemingly unrelated reasons, the narrative had been arranged in a puzzling two-part structure. The first half adhered to a saccharine and increasingly familiar narrative of Egyptian history, marking the
most significant moments in Halim’s life as the 1952 Revolution and the 1967 and 1973 Wars. This section provided many golden opportunities to stream nationalist refrains through Halim’s divinely talented lips (this is, in fact, how Halim got famous in the first place). The second half then rewound time and retraced it along the peaks and pitfalls of Halim’s tortured love life. None of the aristocratic girls he went after could stoop to marrying a mere musician, but all entertained many a passionate encounter with the dreamy songster before rejecting him in the end (or standing by complicit to their fathers’ rejections). Egypt's national treasure dies corrupted by disappointment and drug addiction. Ya lil-‘aar!

Our second cinematic deception occurred just last night when an online review piqued our interest: Dunya, in which Hanan Turk, the recently withdrawn Egyptian superstar, plays a belly dancer/poet getting a degree in Sufi literature. We have not yet met any Egyptian girls like this. Are intrigued. “Tackles such universal issues as female circumcision,” the blurb added. Unheard of. “Really?” I exclaimed. “Universal?” Aaron grimaced. We were hooked.

(below: the radiant MM)

Apparently these “universal issues” did not hold universal appeal for Egyptians; Aaron and I had the theater to ourselves. Hanan Turk appeared on the screen, competing in a dance competition while her adoring teacher watches from the wings with a male companion: none other than “the voice of Egypt” (this prefaced his name in the opening credits) Mohamed Mounir. I was delighted, since one of Mounir’s sunny anthems enjoyed a brief reign as my Favorite Song this summer (Alb Fadi). The daughter of a legendary dancer, young Dunya refuses to dance for the judges, but instead submits them to her performance poetry, in which she curls up on the floor and claims never to have seen herself naked. Hmm. Very modern. Very Soilent Green.

From here characters of vague relation to the heroine make disjointed appearances that defy plot progression: a spunky female taxi driver (never before seen in Cairo) seems to be a close friend; Mohamed Mounir plays a famous professor of classical Arabic literature with whom Dunya has begun a study of ecstasy in Sufi poetry – sexual tension abounds; a handsome boyfriend who follows Dunya around, unperturbed by her cold – although constantly and atypically exposed – shoulder; a matriarchy living in her building, composed of a saucy single mother refuses to obey the traditional grandmother hell-bent on circumcising precocious granddaughter; Dunya’s flamboyant male dance teacher, also the teacher of her much-invoked absent mother.

After the first forty-five minutes of sap we realize that things are only getting worse. Our initial confusion regarding the relationships between these personalities was not to be alleviated, but rather complicated further. Scenes threatening illumination broke off at inexplicable junctures, giving way to cryptic, sensual interludes, often between characters with no other perceptible function in the film. As this (at best) impressionistic structure soon succeeded in thwarting our attempts to make sense of the plot, we resigned ourselves to appreciating the sheer ludicrousness of the film’s collaged fragments. I shall provide here two of the most memorable.

First the funny.

Dunya’s dance teacher may be the most barefacedly gay Egyptian I have ever seen on the screen. Petite and wiry, he wears a svelte silver and black leotard-like number and a modish coiffure, featuring highlighted, side-parted wisps. He looks like a mod elf. He clips out meticulous orders and manipulates his student’s limbs with fastidiousness, but even his painstaking efforts cannot make Hanan Turk a good dancer (although she is acclaimed as such in the film). Aaron and I wonder how an Egyptian audience would react to this elephant in the room: was Hanan famous enough to star in a dancing movie despite her wooden, anemic interpretations of moves I have seen better rendered by Jane Doe? It would seem so -- “artistic” shots of her bland gyrations add a good half hour to the already mercilessly long film. Dunya should have stuck with performance poetry. At least then she would not have such obvious superiors amongst us most Egyptian women; in fact, she would probably have no competition at all.

Somewhere in the second half of the movie, we find ourselves in the stadium-sized dance studio. Dunya is getting yet another earful from her instructor. As he caresses her delicate jawbone to punctuate his severe but breathy encouragement, a street child appears out of nowhere with a bouquet of red roses. The teacher takes one and thrusts it into his charge’s ever-dreamy face (she tends to field his slings and arrows in pouty, pensive silence).

“You aren’t dancing with feeling, my dear . . . You must smell the rose, and feel!” he commands as she leans in, eyelids fluttering, lips trembling. Seizing the moment, he ups the ante:
“Eat the rose!” he hisses. “Eat it, and become your true self!”

After a moment’s hesitation, the demure Dunya bites the unlucky flower with startling, if kitten-like, ferocity.

I couldn’t fucking believe it. She ate the rose.

Cut to another scene. No further mention or instance of flower-eating.

Now the tragic.

Scheming Grandma has at last managed to spirit away the unlucky little girl and croons to her as their meaningful guest, a middle-aged woman in full black wrap and burka, sets up shop on the floor. Grandma is to have her way at last: “Come along, my lovely, we’re just going to take off a little piece of skin that you don’t need anyway . . .” The girl whimpers and cowers, and rightly so: we watch in shock as the sinister midwife brandishes a razor and reaches to spread her patient’s trembling legs. They cannot show this. They cannot show this. Egypt is not ready for this. I am not ready for this.

They do not show it: the scene cuts away just before the crucial moment, and we find ourselves in the stairwell with Dunya listening to the child’s screams. Our heroine’s feminine intuition alerts her to the cause and she bursts into the macabre apartment, where the little girl lies in a faint next to a bloody towel. Dunya accuses the treacherous grandmother of ruining the girl’s life: “You extinguished her – now she’ll be cold forever!” I gather from this that Dunya must have suffered a similar operation as a child, on which she now seems to be blaming her nonexistent sexual appetite.

Tearful scenes follow, in which the girl’s mother clutches her bereft daughter weeping, “Now you are just like me, my dearest . . . How I hoped for you to turn out better than I . . . !” This event has galvanized Dunya into action, however: she goes straight to Professor Mounir to awaken her sexual potency at last. This, I presume, is meant to be our happy ending, although we do not witness the consummation. For all its daring, the film resorts to the traditional replacement for sex scenes in Arabic movies: yet another endless dance number, performed by the incompetent Hanan Turk herself.

Forget it, Hanan.

Despite our initial infuriation over having wasted our time and money on a second nonsensical film, our overarching judgment of Dunya was “silly.” However, I later discovered that it had incited a fair amount of serious dispute in Egypt. It took Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab a year even to obtain permission to film this controversial screenplay, which she achieved only when high-profile campaigners supporting women's rights intervened. Then, like Da Vinci Code (Shafrit da Vinci), after having been advertised the film was banned from Egyptian theaters. According to Al-Ahram Weekly, an Egyptian English language newspaper, the director of the Egyptian Censorship Bureau Ali Abu Shadi denied that the film had been banned because of content, although he had requested that Saab remove the circumcision scene. To make matters worse, Dunya turned out to be Hanan Turk’s last film before she took the veil, after which she may well have attempted to prevent screenings of all films in which she had appeared unveiled.

When Dunya was banned from the 2005 Cairo Film Festival despite its international acclaim, it sparked a lively debate between the film’s supporters and detractors. The most problematic element for most was not the film’s insistent and even to my brash American sensibilities vulgar sensual scenes; Egyptian audiences have long since numbed themselves to such displays due to the ubiquity of raunchy music videos, despite the absence of any such suggestive seductresses in their actual lives. But the vast majority objected to the scene depicting khitaan al-anaath, or female circumcision. Some deny the prevalence of female circumcision in Egypt (some estimates postulate upwards of 70% of Egyptian women have been mutilated, although to varying degrees)) and see the scene as an exaggeration; others regard al-khitaan as a private matter and thus balk at such blunt representations. But even those who believe that the issue is pressing and should be addressed publicly objected to a Lebanese director doing it. Here in Egypt, it is indeed possible to succeed in pleasing no one all of the time.

In the midst of all this hullaballoo, I am not sure how Aaron and I managed to clap eyes on the daring Dunya. Although it had been marked "adults only," no one at the Nile City Renaissance Theater warned us. In retrospect, I wish they would have. I mean really, no one should be watching that movie. For so many reasons. One would think, of course, that a banned film would have attracted a larger audience. I suppose I am thus obliged to congratulate our fellow Cairenes for knowing better.

Never thought I would end up siding with the Censorship Board; but based on my experiences in Egyptian cinema thus far, it may not be the last time.

Fastest Service in Egypt? Organ Removal

Despite the rather preoccupying pain in my side, a droll thought occurred to me as I waited outside the As-Salaam Hospital emergency room: I had actually had an easier time communicating with the staff here in Cairo than with the heavily African-American staff at the Brooklyn Hospital Center right down my block in Fort Greene last year. To be fair, my visit to the latter had been for sudden loss of hearing in one ear, which may have had an effect; but linguistic comparisons aside, As-Salaam Hospital looked all-around cleaner and less chaotic then the zoo at the BHC. I tentatively relaxed.

Then my summoned boyfriend Aaron wheeled in, looking much more worried than I had yet allowed myself to get. He had originally guessed that the odd pain in my side might be appendicitis, and had no doubt been working himself up about it all morning while I stubbornly prepared to have a normal day at class. A stop by the university clinic had however revealed that such was not to be:

“So it might be appendicitis?”
The doctor shuffled papers and blinked at me with the lackadaisical expression that was to define my day of seeking diagnosis.
“Well . . . either it is an appendicitis . . . or it is something else.”
“So I should go to the hospital.”
“Yes . . . you will go to As-Salaam Hospital, in Mohandisin. A very good hospital.”
“Okay . . . and um, when should I go?”
“Oh . . . right away, of course . . . But do not worry!”

So it seems the Egyptian tradition of sugar-coating, the culture of ma‘lesh (meaning both “Sorry about that” and “No big deal”) extends even to the realm of medical emergencies. Perhaps it is very American of me to want to hear a suitable degree of urgency in the voices of my caretakers, but I found this persistent nonchalance quite unnerving.

Of course Aaron’s presence in the waiting room shattered the outer defenses I had summoned up in my solitude. I crumpled into his shoulder and sniffled. Fortunately, we didn’t have too much time for boo-hooing because they called my name almost immediately.

A skinny, mustached doctor offered us chairs and, gathering that we were American, began questioning me in clipped, business-like English. I didn’t protest; this was no time to show off. He then became the second of what turned out to be many medical employees who needed to press down on the sensitive spot on my abdomen just to make sure it really hurt. In this and in all following check-ups, there was no ritual donning of hospital robe; indeed, there was no removal of clothing at all. When I moved to pull down my skirt he nipped it in the bud: “Ah ah ah! That won’t be necessary.”

Still making no certain proposals as to what might be causing the pain in my side, the doctor dismissed us to get a blood test, which required another hour’s wait, and revealed nothing. Befuddled, the doctor called in his senior (both in age and mustache growth). Taking a more jovial approach to his foreign charge, Doctor Number Two (Bushy Mustache) addressed me in Arabic. When I responded, First Doctor (Skinny Mustache) did a double take.

“But . . . you speak Arabic?”
“Well, yes, I just . . . I’m not at my best today,” I accompanied this excuse with a broad gesture that I hoped would express my general state of disrepair.
“Lovely! Let’s speak Arabic then,” tinkled Bushy Mustache, and escorted me to the bed to run the same series of pokes and questions, now bil-'arabiyya. As I responded in kind, Skinny Mustache quipped to Aaron that I spoke Arabic better than English. It may indeed have seemed so, since somehow speaking about such personal things as your insides can be easier when concentrating on relaying it in code. Bushy Mustache decided that I needed an ultrasound, although I had sworn before Skinny Mustache’s doubtful eyes that I was not pregnant or suffering from any venereal diseases.

The giggling gatekeeper of the ultrasound room let us in after another hour’s excruciating wait, throughout which she provided mild entertainment by flirting with a lone older man, also ostensibly "waiting" although for no apparent reason. The ulstrasound medic did not see fit to remove any of my clothing for the ultrasound either; instead, his young female assistant pulled back both shirt and skirt as far as possible without revealing anything PG-13, then tucked a white towel modestly around my waist. Woe betide the loose woman who dares to show her panties during her ultrasound! Not here at As-Salaam.

To our partial relief, the ultrasound revealed nothing decisive as to the source of the pain. However, we were not yet free: leave from the ultrasound wing was only granted upon receipt of ones “official” folder of internal photographs. We had seen multiple exemplars painstakingly assembled by Giggles and her ever-shifting Girl Crew; although as far as we could tell this task consisted only in a bit of cut and paste, the artistes performed it with evident pomp and relish. My file was no exception. Giggles laid out her implements (photos, scissors, gluestick) one at a time, chattering away all the while with the omnipresent Lone Dude. Snip, snip. I felt each unskillful clip as if nicking away at my now very besotted nerves. Snip, snip. My appendix is going to explode! Let me do the arts and crafts for the love of Allah!

Oblivious to my mounting ire, Giggles abandoned the task entirely to exchange travel agent numbers with Loner. Rather than stop the conversation to expedite this process, the blithe pair continued their banter, such that the digits botched and piecemeal in its midst required multiple repetitions. I watched the glue dry on the back of one of my pictures. With the slowness of a sleepy or perhaps disabled child, the charged receptionist resumed her snipping, noticed the dried glue, and in bewilderment laid her work aside once again, just in time to intercept a phone call (“Izayyak? Winta izayyak? Al-humdu-lillah, al humdu-lillah, izayyak inta, ‘amal eh? Al-humdu-lillah, kwoyiss . . .” and variations thereof, forever).

Just when my will to restrain myself from ripping the photographs away from their incompetent captor had dwindled almost to nothing, the final piece appeared: a printout from the ultrasound medic, which apparently had been the hold-up all along. Oops. Sorry I hated you, Giggles. We made good our escape.

Back downstairs with my new photo album, we still had no conclusive evidence of what might have gone wrong in my lower right abdomen.
“In this case,” mused Bushy Mustache with a whimsical smile, “I suppose we cannot rule out appendicitis.”
“So it is appendicitis.”
“Well . . . probably . . .”
“And what does that mean? I need surgery? When? Here?” By this point I was finally in tears, surrounded by the quizzical faces of B. Mustache’s team.
“Hmmm, yes. Do not worry. Why are you worrying? Do not cry.”

Still smiling pleasantly to himself, Bushy Mustache began dialing up surgeons’ numbers. Each contact triggered the obligatory litany of greetings, queries after children and wives, a few inside jokes, and ended on a ma‘lesh, sorry, no can do. But somewhere in this light-hearted chattering Bushy found his man, and sent me off to be admitted.

“You must not worry,” he implored me once more. “He will do a lathroscopy, an exploratory surgery to see if the appendix is really the problem. If it is, we take it out, khalass!”

And if it isn’t? “Exploratory” surgery? I have never before had any kind of surgery, much less an ambiguous reconnaissance mission of my still mysteriously embroiled organs.

Fortunately, I was so glad to be done waiting that I didn’t really care. One Egyptian surgery, coming up. In the meantime, I discovered that my otherwise impeccable hospital room had no toilet paper.

***

Nasim Gerges, my surgeon, strode in flanked with assistants (admirers? minstrels? there were a lot of them). Tall, clean-shaven, and clad in a black button-up shirt, his presence demanded confidence and credibility. Upon a brusque reprise of the now-familiar jabs to the abdomen, he declared that indeed I was suffering from acute appendicitis and must be operated upon at once. He swept from the room with an order that I must not eat or drink. Someone handed me a hospital robe and told me to suit up.

All systems finally appeared to be “go,” but by this point the director of my Arabic program and my friend Justin had arrived, and much fretting and catching up ensued. After a whole day of waiting around, I had at last slowed my nerves to a less excitable pace. However, someone behind the scenes must have turned the green light on the As-Salaam staff, because suddenly we were the obstruction to progress. The nurse who had given me my robe and cap poked his head into our room for the third time, only to find me still in street clothes gabbing with my visitors.

“Yella! We’re ready!”

Wow, I guess he’s serious. I donned the hospital robe with characteristic lack of skill and hoisted myself onto the waiting mobile bed.

Perhaps the responsibles at As-Salaam Hospital had not bothered to measure the actual width of their hallways and elevators before ordering the wheely beds, because we had quite a rugged ride to the operating room. A fellow at once tall and roly-poly had gotten the job as transporter, and he navigated my unwieldy vehicle as well as he could. After each big bump he would grunt or ask if I was okay, then interrupt himself to intone, “Bismillah alrahman alrahiiiiim” whenever we passed through a doorway. I could not decide whether I found this reassuring. Once we were on less treacherous ground, he began to chat down to me with warm, fatherly interest.

“Amrikiyya! Wi tikkalammi il-‘arabiyya!”
“Yes, I am trying to learn Arabic.”
“You live in Egypt then? How long have you been here? Almost six months! Well my dear, you must go out, must see Egypt! Egypt is beautiful! What have you seen in Egypt?”

One would almost think he was reproaching me for wasting my time in this boring old hospital when such marvels awaited. I began telling him about my trip to Luxor and Aswan to reassure him, but he had worked himself into high fervor and cut me off.

“Ah, Luxor! Wonderful, isn’t it wonderful? But there is so much more! Hurry, you must get out and see Egypt!”

I tried to express enthusiasm and promise to fulfill this vague task from my prostrate position on the bed, now being wheeled into the operating room proper. My escort’s jolly face was joined by a team of others, peering down and murmuring until they realized I could understand.

“An American who speaks Arabic! I don’t believe it!”
“And look at her, what are the men supposed to do with her around? She’s zay al-amar, lovely as the full moon!”

Since I had not eaten all day, was suffering from an unprecedented pain in my side and was dressed all in white, this traditional idiom had probably never been truer of me. I gave my admirers a wan smile. Still exclaiming and gossiping about their exotic patient, they transferred me onto the operating bed and began to examine my abdomen. A robust, grandfatherly fellow, introduced to me as Sharif, fingered my navel piercing.

“Eh da, what is this? This needs to come out.”

I began trying to unscrew it, and explained that I had never tried to remove it before. Members of the surgery team took turns leaning in to peer at this latest evidence of American oddity. I joked sheepishly that it had been a sort of eighteen-year-old rebellion thing. Well, now it was rebelling against us. Sharif boomed that I should relax, he would give it a try. He brandished his thick fingers and began twisting.

The crowds were starting to turn on my raciest piece of jewelry. The surgery needed to begin; this little thing wasn’t expensive, was it? Couldn’t we just cut it off? But Sharif, now deaf to them in his determination, renewed his efforts. When at last he held the little bugger aloft, I fear his colleagues did not empathize with his sense of triumph.

“Ha HA! Who got it out? Sharif got it out! Miss Anna, I expect you’ll be needing me when the time comes to put it back in! Either way, look: she’s got the incision already for us in the right place!”

I laughed and liked Sharif a whole lot. The next thing I remember they were showing me my appendix.
“They put it in a kohsery container!” I heard someone guffawing. Figures.

This is koshery, a popular Egyptian streetfood that comes in a distinctive plastic bowl.
While many disagree, I think that an infected appendix thrown in this putrid mix may even constitute and improvement.

Back upstairs in my room, I tried through a haze of drugs to assure a full room of well-wishers that I felt great, then (rather stupidly) to wrestle past Aaron to get a drink of still-forbidden water. Then they were gone and I was left starring in my first but strangely familiar hospital-room scene. Dripping I.V.; iodine-stained-sheets; fading in and out. You know, Bushy Mustache was right: what was I so worried about? Maybe Egypt isn’t so different. They seem to have figured out surgery, anyway; nothing to turn one’s nose up at.

Throughout the night, a veritable gaggle of adolescent-looking nurses filed through my patchy consciousness, changing my IV bags and asking me how I was doing. Then suddenly, two of them doubled up to oust me from my bed so they could change it. I could barely move. They shoved me into a chair and proceeded to turn the bed-making into a doozy of a brainteaser. Then they urged me to use the bathroom, a trip that I pointed out with a mute gesture to my arm would require unhooking the I.V. After some whispered conferring, one of them unscrewed the tube strapped to my vein. I watched with some interest as blood began immediately to spurt from the opening. After a few more moments’ flutter and argument, my ladies-in-waiting stanched the flow and I hobbled wordless into the bathroom.

Moments later, one of them bustled in and proceeded to fiddle with my arm tube again and tie a clean hospital robe on me before I could rise from the toilet. Throughout these exchanges I made a futile intra-lingual sounds of surprise and objection, but I didn’t really seek to protest. The Egyptian health care system had gotten me this far, after all; I may as well see it through to the end.

But as those bickering youngsters jerked my bleeding arm back and forth, I couldn’t help but surmise that the folks down at As-Salaam Hospital have some details to iron out. I hope they do; I may just want to come back next time I need a shotgun surgery.

Madam Afaf Strikes Again

When the landline rings at 8 a.m. on the 2nd of the month, one can be fairly certain who’s calling.
However, I feigned delighted surprise through my morning gravelliness to hear Madam Afaf, our landlady, on the other end.

“Izzayyik?”
“Winti izayyik?”
“Al-humdulillah, bikhayr!”
“Al-humdulillah.”

As the cordialities unfurled and ran their normal gamut of repetition and variation, I began to prepare myself for the inevitable question. Where was the rent money? My answer: Tomorrow. But it turned out Madam Afaf had other fish to fry.

“Habibti, you speak such good Arabic. Listen: a man will be coming around to take the census,” she began. “He will want to know how many people are living in the apartment and who it belongs to.”

How sweet of Madam to make sure that her half-wit foreign tenants got an advance warning to reflect on these puzzles. I eagerly solved them on the spot to put her soul at ease:
“Well, there are still just three of us . . . and the apartment belongs to you.”
Not so fast. As it turns out, all is, as usual, not as it seems.
“No, no habibti . . . Tell him, this apartment belongs to Mohammad Fahim, but he is traveling and you are guests in his home.” She spoke as clearly as possible. I was not to fuck this up.

Huh?

“Do not say you are residents. You are guests. He will be traveling for a few months, then he will be back.” I detected a shade of affected conspiratorial hush.

Duh, okay. My sluggish morning brain, fully charged with the task of linguistic decoding, did not manage to articulate any of the rather obvious relevant questions regarding this enigma (e.g. Who on earth is this absent and endlessly generous Mohammad Fahim?). Instead, I repeated back the command to her evident delight, as if we had plotted out this grand government trumping (or tax evasion, or whatever) together. Well, lucky you, Afaf. This one follows directions. As our chat was going quite swimmingly so far, she threw out what she now staged as an incidental interest: our paying the three months of rent we owed her.

Last time we had been late too. I had explained to her that as soon as my other roommates returned from America we would pay immediately, to which she cooed that she certainly hoped so, or we would have to leave the apartment at once. Madam Afaf doesn’t mess around. Then she showed up a day before we had agreed upon, only to be greeted at the door by one of the Italian boys I had met in Dahab and was harboring during their stay in Cairo. Shirtless and singing, as was his wont, Umberto slung the door wide, then ran off to fetch me with his tail between his legs. By the time I got there, Afaf had already turned on her heel and informed me primly over her shoulder that she would return tomorrow. Now, she implied when I protested, I was quite ostentatiously indisposed.

The next day as she sat in our de-Italianoed and re-ladied living room, I blubbered an explanation for my rambunctious and plentiful male company, but the impeccable, fashionable-purse-clutching Afaf seemed unfazed. Her voice still honeyed beneath what just might have been a derisive curl of her lip, she prounounced,
“Inti hurra.”
"You are free." You are free to commit whatever sins you want on the old-lady couches I bought for your apartment.
“As long as you give me the money!” she snipped, then forced an accompanying gale of titters at once both girlish and shrewd, in which we were invited to join. The fat wad of bills exchanged hands amidst this eruption of shared mirth.

This time around, I offered my landlady yet another viable excuse: I had been in the hospital getting my appendix out and hadn’t left the house all week. Madam Afaf was properly horrified and pledged readiness to bring me anything I might need. I assured her that I was well taken care of, that I had a substitute family (Aaron-the-Supermom, for those that know him) here in Cairo and would be just fine.
“But I’m a mother too,” she reminded me, in her sugariest tones. Right, Mama Afaf. As long as we give you the money.
What bothered Afaf most in my tale of woe however was not that I had had emergency surgery but that I had not thought to have her brother, my upstairs neighbor, do it.
“Why did you go through all that trouble? Doctor Sharif was right upstairs, he could have taken care of it right away!”

I have visited Doctor Sharif’s drawing room, in search of a cure for a nasty, face-deforming bugbite. I do not remember seeing sufficient machinery for removing an appendix. Rather than pursue her logic on this one, I decided to simply express my confidence that had I thought more quickly before mincing off to the hospital, Doctor Sharif could have performed an exemplary surgery. His devout sister agreed whole-heartedly. Once again, family connections trump all other rationale. Was I not as good as Doctor Sharif’s territory, living as I did in such convenient range?

The rent now decisively relegated to a comfortably auxiliary role in our conversation, we agreed in passing that I would leave it downstairs with Nabil, tomorrow at 4. We said a cheery goodbye amidst her refrain of “Alfi salaama”s to quicken my healing. It occurred to me as I puzzled through this new shade of sketch shed on our habitation of 40 Sharia‘ Mesaha by the mysterious Mohamad Fahim that I might ought to work my way deeper into Madam Afaf's enigmatic ring, and further master its accompanying rules of etiquette and trickery. For the discussion effecting the retrieval of my security deposit will require an epic performance indeed.

Rock Like an Egyptian

It struck me as a bit strange that Egypt’s most famous pop-rock group, Wust el-Beled (Egyptian slang for “downtown”) would elect to perform at such a stiff venue as the Gomhoriyya Theater. They looked a bit out of their element scattered across the wide stage, playing for an audience trapped in plush folding chairs. What I did not know, until later developments in their set prompted Aaron to inform me, was that a member of Wust el-Beled had recently made a public announcement: his commitment to Islamic morals no longer allowed him to play in venues serving alcohol. Which narrowed down their options to such elegant joints as the Gomhoriyya Theater.

To be fair, the theater’s old-timey sophistication could be interpreted as “hip” if you were looking for it. And many attendees of the Wust el-Beled concert probably were: the high percentage of baggy pants and funny hats and the lower percentage of veils marked a significant divergence from the style of the Cairo masses. However, as I noted the prevalence of English smattered stylishly across their conversations and the decidedly expensive look to their digs, I gathered that these fashion plates had most likely not drawn inspiration to embrace a bohemian lifestyle from a sparse and humble upbringing; no, much like Williamsburg’s “trust-fund hipsters,” most of these cats had probably inherited their access to coolness along with the many privileges of belonging to Cairo’s richest, most Westernized, and incidentally smallest social class.

Fashionable youngsters aside, the large number of elderly concert-goers sparked my curiosity. Do Egyptian music groups tend to cater to all generations, or do these folks simply have season passes to the Gomhoriyya? Either way, their visible enjoyment of the music attested to their capacity to enjoy Egypt’s latest brand of “cool.” And as I was to find out, Wust el-Beled is geared to please adherents to all manner of musical tastes.

The band boasts seven musicians, appearing to range in age from twenties to forties (it’s hard to gauge age around here – people seem to go from nineteen to fifty in one fell swoop), and in skin tones from olive-toned white to dredlocks-black. Wust el-Beled’s three guitarists affirm the Egyptian scene’s adoption of the guitar-heavy ratio ubiquitous in American rock groups. The remaining breakdown: an‘oud, a kind of Oriental lute, an electric bass, two percussionists and a vocalist, although one of the guitarists actually did more of the singing. Half of the group arrived late.

Together they struck a portrait that invoked at once a jam band and a traditional Oriental ensemble. They wore casual clothes, tee shirts, jackets, and jeans, and with the exception of the bongo-player, remained seated and concentrated throughout the performance. The frontman, if he could be interpreted as such (criteria: best-looking, highest voice, most convincing sneer), muttered commentary into his microphone between every song while the members conducted extended whispered conferences about what they might play next. From time to time the audience laughed and someone would shout out his commentary. A group of girls called out his name (Ismaïl) and squealed at the boldness of their anonymity as he squinted into the dark with a permissive smile. As the evening advanced and the band’s conduct less formal, shouted requests for favorite tunes grew more insistent. Basically like a regular rock concert.

Well, sort of. I quickly discovered that Wust el-Beled exemplifies the modern musical identity crisis. They covered styles ranging from Latino rock (inspiring Aaron’s snide nomer “the E-gipsy Kings”) to reggae to schmaltzty Arab pop to traditional Oriental pieces. However, it still came as a surprise when, toward the end of the first set, an upbeat number melted into a meditative and all-too-familiar drone. Is it? could it be? It is:

“Allaaaaaaaaaaaaahu akbar.”

The crowd went wild.

A long, brooding piece followed, in which singing members of Wust el-Beled showcased their prowess in ululation. The concert had transformed in full into a traditional interaction of performer and participant characteristic of Oriental musical occasions. These occasions are of course not concerts, but usually family or community celebrations in which all present have a role to play and certainly join in on the chorus. Yet at the same time the battling soloists and the varying responsive cheers also invoked the interaction at a jazz performance. Either way, I am no expert in Islamic law, but I know that in its most severe interpretations there was some bit about “no music for pleasure,” much less perversion of the fatiHa in rock and roll concerts, however devout the rockers. Such considerations did not seem to concern the members of Wust el-Beled or their fans, who were eating it up.

In the midst of this sacred moment, a rather comical parallel occurred to me, with a Christian rock show I had attended in high school. The concert took place in St. Cloud Technical High School’s South Auditorium, and featured a group of my classmates who called themselves “Manna-fest.” Beneath their searing electric guitars and pounding bass lines, one could make out such inspired rhymes as “Oh baby you know whenever you’re in danger/you’ve got a friend who was born in a manger” and the like. At the conclusion of the show, one of the musicians invited all willing audience members to come up to the stage and welcome Jesus into their hearts, to the accompaniment of a last, heart-wrenching number. Crowds of demonstrative teenagers swarmed to the front of South Auditorium, nno longer the territory of discordant pep band concerts but rather a holy space bathed in the stagelights’ divine beams. Tears flowed and enthused avowals fought to pierce through the amplifiers’ combined roar.

I permitted myself to imagine the corresponding scene in the Gomhoriyya Theater, should Wust el-Beled so invite their fans. They did not, of course; true to its schizophrenic character, the band soon abandoned the sacred section of its concert for more love songs and a crowd-pleasing “Free Palestine” ballad (“You can steal houses/You can steal land/But you’ll never ever steal a nation”). No, unlike Manna-fest, Wust el-Beled did not seem interested in making their religiosity the main event of their performance. To my knowledge, this particular form of inspiring the young faithful, the religious rock concert, remains foreign to Islamic culture. But seeing those hip youngsters grooving to the call to prayer in the same breath as bopping to romantic reggae and rocking out to free-Palestine, one has to wonder whether such developments are much farther off. Perhaps the conservative mullahs issuing futile fatwas against music would change their tune if they could see the extraordinary effects of the religious rock concert. I may just pen a letter to one of the usual suspects with a translation of that exemplary and compelling Onion article, “That Teen Jesus Rally Totally Rocked” to get ‘em thinking. Although the idea of Christian teeny-bopper evangelism spreading throughout this already rather troubled land does not exactly seem like a step forward. Best leave the rock concerts with a tuneful and tasteful half-time prayer break for now.

Of Jews and slips and healing cracks: Addendum

A world-renowned professor from the St. Anthony’s College Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University delivered a series of lectures on British Imperialism in the Middle East on a visit to the American University in Cairo. Doubtless familiar with the intellectual climate awaiting him, the professor must have designed his comments accordingly. He divided his lecture equally between Transjordan, Iraq and Palestine, outlining the developments in each between 1920 and 1948, all the while providing juicy anecdotal details both cheery and chilling. The professor minced no words regarding British violence and greed in each case, nor did he bypass the opportunity to draw parallels between their policies and practices then and America’s today. But he also managed to lighten the load by slipping in priggish quotes from British missives with tongue appropriately in cheek (e.g. a message sent to Transjordan’s King Abdallah to inform him that Britain viewed his recent activism in the newly founded ‘Istiqlal (Independence) party with “grave displeasure”).

After the speaker brought his lecture to a polished close, the emcee invited the audience to pose their questions. It was the first time I had attended an academic lecture in Cairo, and I awaited the scholarly commentary with curiosity.

A woman raised her hand and took the microphone. After tapping it and giggling for a few moments, she asked, in broken English,
“So do you really think that Osama bin Laden was behind the September 11th bombings?”

My respect for the professor’s professionalism multiplied tenfold when he did not snort or laugh right in her upturned, lipsticked face. My boyfriend Aaron, the professor’s onetime student, has often referred to this unwavering poise, so characteristic in fact that it has led both admiring and resentful colleagues to compare him to Gilderoy Lockhart, the fulsome phony teacher/celebrity in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. His chiseled features, self-assurance and affable manner had affirmed these allegations in my mind from our first encounter; his grace in fielding the questions of this crowd was to reveal him as a veritable paragon of public composure. Without missing a beat or dropping his smile, he reasoned that since Osama bin Laden had declared himself responsible for the attacks and no one had found any evidence to the contrary, one can hardly question his guilt.

The woman, unsatisfied with his brevity, persisted: “Well have you seen the movie Fa, Faaren, Farheit 9-11? What do you think of that?”

Mutters spread throughout the room. The professor’s smile widened, and he assured her gently that he thought the movie provided interesting commentary on the decision-making of America’s current administration. Apparently under the impression that she and this nice man had established heart-to-heart status, the woman opened her mouth to pursue her chosen line of conversation, an initiative that the emcee mercifully quashed by filching the microphone. I examined the crowd in an attempt to assess other reactions to this little performance. To the naked eye, the participants resembled those at any academic lecture; patchy rows of aging academics of furrowed brow and eccentric attire, along with a smattering of the long-haired and/or -skirted variety as well as the buttoned-up and trimmed variety of grad student. Surely this woman must have tagged along with a friend, unaware of the customary etiquette at such events.

The following two questions, regarding specifics of pre-1948 Israeli land purchase in Palestine, reassured me somewhat as to the preservation of studious decorum. Then the middle-aged Egyptian woman next to me banished such hopes.

“So what is your opinion of the number six million, the supposed number of Jews killed in the ‘ho-lo-caust?’” she raised her fingers in exaggerated mock quotation marks. I sucked in my breath. She plunged ahead. “My son, a few years ago, he wrote a paper on the ‘ho-lo-caust’ and he did lots of research on the number of Jews in Europe at the time of World War Two. He checked lots of sources, archives . . . and . . . and, well, enough to be certain that there were never more than hundreds of thousands of Jews in any European country.” Someone stop her! Is this actually happening? “And the total number they found was no more than one, maybe two million. So what do you think of this number six million?”

The professor gave a slow, inexplicable nod and paced for a moment before placing both hands on the podium and replying with unaffected decisiveness,
“I do not dispute that number, and I refer to the Holocaust with a capital H, without quotation marks. Of course we cannot know the exact number of all who were killed, but that is not important. Maybe it was five million, five hundred thousand. Maybe it was six million, two hundred thousand, I don’t know. But I do know that it was a human tragedy, and I question the motives of anyone who tries to dispute the figure six million.”

My neighbor, however, was just getting warmed up. “But not only Jews were killed! Many others! Minorities, Christians . . . you know, probably Muslims too! Where are they in the six million? Why six million Jews?”

The professor attempted to reiterate his position but she railed on:
“I am not denying anyone else’s tragedy . . . but why exaggerate it? Why is the number so sacred?”

Other voices began to chime in and she continued her harangue even after the emcee finagled the mic away from her. As the conference room teetered toward mayhem and she lost her soapbox, the woman began to lean across my lap to snip along to the Egyptian girl next to me with haughty conviction. She was completely unmoved by the professor’s response, as she was by the plea a young Egyptian man directed toward her, that denying another’s human suffering in order to take revenge on one’s own was not the way forward. She continued to grumble “Mish aktar min itnayn milyoon” (“no more than two million”) with self-righteous shakes of her fat head. I wanted to slap her. I limited my reactions to a series of stifled noises in my throat.

The hijacking of the discussion was complete. The professor submitted to a pelting of questions spiraling downward toward the One: do you think Israel has a right to exist?
• Why must the Jews insist on having their own country? No other religion has insisted on having its own country! This is discrimination! In Islam we do not have this discrimination! (They had clearly managed to forget their Muslim brethren in Pakistan, a country which, as my Pakistani friend pointed out after the lecture, was founded precisely to be an Islamic country.)
• Why must the Muslim and the Jew be enemies? The Muslim and the Christian are not enemies.
• When did America get involved with Israel?
• Did any countries fund Jewish immigration to Palestine pre-1948? Who? Who is to blame?

The professor reminded his interrogators of various historical details politely to debunk the portrait of religious alliance and adversity taking shape between their comments (i.e. the Crusades) and observed that he in fact did not specialize in this area. A moot point in the present company, it would seem. And no one protested; on what grounds could they do so, within the usual confines of lecture etiquette? Would it not constitute a kind of surrender to stoop to the level of these uncouth maligners? Where would one start, anyway: “Your behavior is inappropriate. Please allow us to return to the subject of this evening’s lecture, or leave,” to say nothing of, “If you continue to belittle the massacre of a people who, perhaps unbeknownst to you, has many representatives in this lecture hall, someone may well get up and pound you and I will let them.” So no one said anything at all. The Jewish attendees sat silent with everyone else.

Now, the last thing I want to do here is use this occasion for an opportunity to support or challenge my own views on Israel-Palestine. Like the Oxford professor, this piece of history is not my area, and there are enough blind duelers on this battleground as it is. And as disturbing as I found this discussion, I have heard many a university lecture discussion in the states dominated by the strident voices from the other side of the issue, which make equally chilling comments regarding the Palestinians. This was simply the first time I had witnessed the extent of anger and denial reached by the opposing narrative.

Strange though: I felt hate in that room; but I also felt enjoyment. After all, nothing feels good like reciting a well-loved and oft-repeated line of argument with which you know your company will agree. None of these people are terrorists or active radicals as far as I know, nor are they Palestinian or necessarily invested in the Palestinian cause in anything but word; they are well-dressed and educated Anglophones, out on the town to participate in the popular debates of their day with a famous foreign professor.

It still chills one to the bone however, that this relished repitition could make a woman numb to the mass killing of innocent people. When the discussion finally ended, I found myself edging around my neighbor in order not so much as to brush her, so great was my revulsion. Moments later I saw her hugging and kissing friends and tinkling away about the everyday, which I found equally jarring. Must I succumb to this epic pettiness as well? Must I blame her for her attraction to this tempting grab-bag of powerful and popular things to say about a controversial issue that does not put her in political danger in her own country? Can I fault this woman personally for her participation in this national pastime?

In lieu of pursuing answers to these questions, I have made a mental note to self: when you are lecturing at AUC in twenty years, unless the tragedy of Israel-Palestine has been resolved, try to pick a topic like “migration patterns of tropical fish.” I’ll check out a book on that today, and read that instead of watching the news.