Damascus - Amman - Damascus

26th February, in the ‘Service’(*) Damascus – Amman

(*) Service [serfees] is a shared taxi on a fixed route, either between two points within a town or between two towns.

“By God Almighty, I tell you, I lived in Germany for one year back in the sixties, I even speak German. One day we went to the mountains near Essen, which is near Frankfurt, and stayed overnight in a hotel. The next morning, when we wanted to pay, the owner didn’t want a single penny from us, because we were Arabs. Things were different at that time – the German loved the Arabs. Now we’re the source of all evil – crime, unemployment and terrorism.”

As olives groves whizzed past the car window on our way to the Jordanian border, my eyes followed the Bedouin sheep grazing between the olive trees and the ‘autostrada’. The bearded man, who filled more than just the front seat, was preaching the poor driver about the status of the Muslim world, going back to Saladdin and the crusaders, about how killing children, women and old people is un-islamic, about all the liars and hypocrites who call themselves Muslims and the shame they bring upon Islam, about the Jews having taken all Jordan’s water, about how many times a month he travels back & forth between Syria and Jordan, about all his friends who used to be ministers, but have now retired and about all the sheikhs from Hezbollah he knows and a dozen other things, leaving the driver speechless and with hardly any time to even express agreement.
The other passenger on the backseat, a Syrian toy merchant with a slightly asymmetric face, looked at me in silence and rolled up is eyes, before turning back to his mobile phone.
We approached a bridge under which a motorbike was parked with a young man waiting next to it. As he slowed down, our driver explained that he was going to swap with the man under the bridge.
“Sorry if I talked a lot” said the bearded man in the front.
“No no, your words are full of truth and wisdom, thank you for enlightening me!”

The new driver was a crook. Between the two borders, he stuffed every corner of the car with duty free cigarette packets – the glove box, the space under the seats, the doors’ side pockets, the compartment for the First Aid Kit in the boot etc.
“Is this legal?” I asked him.
“Legal? What is legal in this world?”
I looked around at all the other cars parked in front of the hideously chique, white duty free ‘palace’… sure enough every other driver was doing the same thing: tearing up the wholesale boxes and their plastic wrappers, tossing them on the ground or into the wind, before stowing away the individual Marlboro, Kent, Safir or Davidoff packets in the cars’ interiors.
Our driver was mighty nervous when we got to the Jordanian customs checkpoint. He was mumbling all sorts of oaths and religious phrases with a lot of mentions of Allah. It turned out the customs officer at the checkpoint was a friend of the self-important man in the front seat and we were just waved through. The driver was relieved – Allah had helped him to smuggle cigarettes into Jordan – a miracle!


27th February 2008, in the Service Amman – Damascus

I love public transport, especially ‘services’. Today I’m in the front seat, going back to Damascus. The Syrian driver is from the border town of Dera’a, of Bedu origin, like most people from that area. Behind me sits what they call a ‘Hajji’ – an old man. With a lean body, his scruffy grey beard grows randomly around and out of the deep crevices of his stern face. His voice is similarly scruffy and whenever he has something important to say, he nearly shouts. Next to him, in the middle of the backbench, sits his wife, or possibly cousin – he made a joke about this because of her much younger age, but I couldn’t tell which of the two he was joking about. She is about twice the width of her husband or relative and has a kinder face. They are both from around Damascus and have brown rims around their teeth.
Behind the driver, next to the Damascene lady, sits a pretty, young Bedouin woman. Like all Bedus, she pronounces every “k”-sound (like in planK or Cat) as a “ch” (like in CHeese), plus a few other anomalies, which takes some getting used to. Although she can’t read or write and appears quite naïve, she is unusually talkative, direct and almost provocatively bold …well, provocative for this region. She has big brown eyes and full cheeks. Her hejab is thin and constantly falling, often revealing her straight black hair tied back in a purple ribbon.
“I’m just going to Damascus for the day to buy a few things, everything’s much cheaper there”, she says.

During a short break the full-bodied lady sitting next to her tells me “We in Syria wouldn’t let a girl like that travel alone.” The look on her face said as much as “You know what I mean!”

The conversation in the car was lively, although besides the two Damascenes nobody new each other. Favourite topics: prices of rice, tomatoes and petrol and whether fair or dark skin colour was preferable on Jordanian and Syrian men. The Bedu woman tells us she’s engaged with a fair-skinned guy. Straight away the Damascene lady asks her if she wouldn’t prefer a foreigner… She shakes her head vehemently and talks about how nice her fiancée is – I’m not convinced.
Later on, we talk about restaurants and food in Damascus, I mention how much I like Kepse, an Arab dish I also managed to cook once before – both women in the back look at me astonishedly and ask: “You can cook?”
I sort of nod and look at the Bedu woman: “See, I’m sure you’d be better off with a German husband!”
Everybody laughs.

We arrive somewhere on the edge of Damascus, where the services always stop and the passengers get into taxis. As we unload our bags and say goodbye, the Bedu woman already drives off in a taxi and waves at me goodbye with a smile on her face. At that moment I notice two things: one, this gesture – so open and free – is very rare and unusual among the vast majority of people in this region. Strange, such a simple thing, such a common thing – here, it will lead to people putting her straight into a very simple category: “Bitch”.
Secondly, I notice I am worried about her – the way people look at her and might seek to restrict her free spirit or try to take advantage of it.

Statistics

Usually I use the left side of my little desk to work on. Hence the right side has come to act as a put-down-surface, where everything that doesn’t have a specific place gets put down. In an effort this morning to clean up all that has accumulated on the right side of my desk over the last half year, I discovered a folded A5 page torn out of a former travel-diary of mine that I had quite forgotten about. It was titled ‘Statistics’ and lists a number of things that I did during my journey from Germany to Syria at the end of 2006.

It turns out that during the one-month trip I took 4 trains (of which 2 were overnight), 3 ferries, 16 buses (2 overnight) and 18 trams. I hitched a ride with 16 cars and 2 lorries and took 6 taxis.
I visited 12 museums, 10 mosques, 15 churches and 1 synagogue (incidentally the first one I ever visited in my life – in Dubrovnik).
For accommodation, I stayed in 8 different Ho(s)tels a total of 11 nights, spent 9 nights at 4 different private houses (through hospitalityclub.org) and camped out 8 nights in 4 different locations (on an island off the coast of Croatia, on a forlorn hill at the edge of Dubrovnik, in a park in the Bosnian pilgrim town of Medugorje and in an open cave in central Anatolia). Regarding food, the chart says I ate in only 21 restaurants (I preferred to sit somewhere outside with a view, I think).
Finally, I crossed 8 international borders plus two borders in and out of the UN-protected zone of Kosovo.

Violence

“Often have I heard you speak of one who commits a wrong
as though he were not one of you, but a stranger unto you
and an intruder upon your world.
But I say that even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond
the highest which is in each one of you,
so the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower
than the lowest which is in you also.”

Kahlil Gibran, “The Prophet”



I want to write about violence.
About rage –
in men, fighting each other.
Not with tanks or guns, but with their naked fists.

A few days ago, I experienced it closer than I could wish for. Thank God it wasn’t directed against me, but I was no more than a meter away from it. The following thoughts are ‘inspired’ by that experience.

Maybe the most powerful of human conditions, rage knows no laws, no logic, no justice and once unleashed, it will laugh at any form of self-restraint and leave reason far behind.
Hatred boils over into a seemingly uncontrollable, raw force that feeds on the sight of blood on the other man’s face. A force that will not stop because that other man is helpless, wounded or on the ground; in fact, too often it will stop nothing short of killing and cold-blooded death.

Insatiable and contagious, it tires not – only the bodies executing it may tire, or expire.


Through our media, we see or hear of people like that every day – enraged, committing brutal atrocities. At this very moment, tribes in Kenia’s Rift Valley are splitting each other’s skulls in ruthless acts of revenge and hatred with the poor excuse of ‘tribal differences’. Violent rage has taken hold of them and they cannot shake it off.
When we do see or hear of people like that, who seem to have surrendered themselves to this force, we tend to describe them with words such as ‘inhuman’ or even ‘animalistic’. I find this quite insulting to our fellow creatures – have you ever seen an animal fuming with rage or killing for the joy of killing or for the sake of brutality? Maybe it is this, which differentiates us most from the beings further down in the food chain: our ability to take physical force out of its natural context, in which it serves to maintain a livelihood.
So physical force is natural and violence is human?

We might also describe people who commit such acts as ‘possessed’, ‘under a spell’ or ‘out of control’. The beloved thesaurus gives me ‘beside oneself’ as a synonym for ‘enraged’ – these are examples of what seems like a desire to externalise this very compelling force and deny its origin within ourselves. If gentleness and intimacy are the physical manifestation of love – one extreme of human interaction, then surely violent rage is the embodiment of the other: hate.
Especially in an institutionalised moral context, which most of us live in one way or another, it is essential to at least keep up the image of a ‘good person’, not only to others, but also to oneself. And hence it is useful (if not necessary) to have a way of dealing with the ultimate wrong – violence – as something outside ourselves, beyond our control, giving us a chance to lessen the blame and the guilt that comes with it. And although some people might walk around proud of their violent acts and with full conviction that what they did was right (hence no blame or guilt), the majority of us will see such people as ‘criminals’, different to ourselves. This links to the quote at the beginning, arguing that violence is in the very nature of our existence as much as more favourable human conditions are. This is hard to admit for most of us, I believe. An exception to this might be the British author JG Ballard, who has witnessed a lot of violence as a boy, when he was caught up in the in south-east Asian part of World War Two (“Empire of the Sun” is Steven Spielberg’s 1987 Hollywood version of these events, with an incredible first performance of a young Christian Slater). In a recent interview on the BBC, Ballard said the following:

“Violence in many ways is quite seductive, particularly when
you’re in your teens. It’s not the glamour of violence that you see in
Hollywood films, violence very clearly defines itself. Brutality […] is
really a matter of routine. […]
Violence is very sort of settling, there’s no disputing it. It’s seductive
in that it has a logic of its own. One always misses it when it’s gone –
a terrible thing to say, but there’s an element of truth in that. One tries
to recreate episodes of violence, because they do tell a sort of final truth
about human beings and what we are.”
[JG Ballard in BBC Radio Three’s “Arts and Ideas”, 4th February 2008]

Seductive. Strong word. But how else could we explain the huge popularity of violent action films? I will not go into the discussion of TV/film influence on violence, except for one aspect that I am sure most of us have all witnessed at some point, which very well illustrates the seductive nature of violence:
A child, playing alone in the sunshine. When you look closer, you see it is fighting. With invisible swords or guns against invisible enemies. Butchering them brutally, making awful grimaces and ghastly sounds as it stabs its sword into the enemy’s chest, lying at its feet.

Violence is cool.

I think there is an argument that this might be more the case for (straight) men than for women, generally speaking, although this is again another discussion. But I do wonder: why is this? Is it purely genetical/evolutionary?
Maybe someone else has some thoughts on that.


---------------------------

Why this philosophical abstract about violence?

I witnessed a big fight outside a nightclub in one of Amman’s most central locations about a week ago, where enraged young men were hitting each other in a totally non-sensical dispute that probably broke out over something as meaningful as one person’s remark about another man’s sister and then turned into a matter of honour, allegiance and revenge.
I could see them arguing near the bar with a bit of 'soft' shoving going on. A typical kind of scene. A handful of them took it outside the club, where it got more physical. Then there were shots from a gun – probably blank bullets – and soon about 25 men poured out of the club, joining in the fight. Totally non-involved guys – maybe some of whom were drunk – quickly took sides (based on WHAT decisions?) and started hitting whoever seemed guilty of they-didn’t-even-know-what. It turned nasty, there was blood in the snow sludge that still covered most of Amman, heavy bodies landing on the wet, slippery ground and being kicked with feet by aggressors, even in the face.
At first I just stood wordless with some friends at a safe distance. Within a matter of minutes, the police arrived and this was when I went a lot closer, because much to my surprise at the time: the police didn’t focus all its efforts on just stopping the violence and taking fighting parties apart, but did much of what previously non-involved civilian individuals had done: they asked somebody what hat happened, quickly made a crude estimation of who was to blame (based on an obviously biased opinion) and then joined in to attack a man that was already lying on the ground, bleeding and defenceless, surrounded by a pack of enraged men, hitting and kicking him.
They finally did try to pull people out of the fighting, but all in all the police’s behaviour was more than unacceptable and would in any European country have led to a massive scandal and public outrage. A lot of them were hitting people with fists and sticks and were quite happy to let some relentless men continue approaching and attacking the ones who they were pulling out and who they were supposed to ‘protect’.

And then there was two blond Europeans – a German (me) and a Norwegian working for his country’s embassy – who became sudden partners in what now seems a rather ridiculous undertaking: we were walking around, tapping policemen who were engaged in the fighting on the shoulders and shouting at them in English or Arabic: “Are you ‘the Police’? What are you doing? Is this what you call ‘serving the people’? Look what you’re doing!” or even “Wow. Jordan is such a beautiful country! Really, I feel so safe here, now that I know the police is on my side to help me!!”
I guess we were only causing confusion and when the Norwegian fellow tried to explain to the head of the police that he will report to his embassy that he witnessed police beating up civilians, the officer said: “If you were in this situation, maybe you would do much worse things.”

Of course we can see this sort of thing on TV every day and maybe I should not have been so surprised to see it. But to be there, right next to it happening is totally different. And this was Jordan – a ‘modern’ country with an outwardly western, even American appeal that has been a haven of peace while around it wars are raging. And also a country that is trying so hard to portray itself as a liberal, civilised and advanced country – we’re not talking about Saudi Arabia, Syria or Iran here.
The most extreme situation was standing next to a man who was kicking the bleeding face of someone else who was lying on the ground, helpless. I could literally feel this total and incomprehensible irrationality of rage and its overpowering drive to brutality. And now guess what my inert reaction was, or rather, what I had to restrain myself from doing: to beat him up.

In the end, when it was all over, the crowd had dispersed and the police had driven off, I stood under a nearby tree – still shocked – when a guy and a girl, who had also witnessed the fight, approached me and asked me what had actually happened. We talked for a little while and I expressed severe disappointment at the actions of the Jordanian police. The guy – a Jordanian cartoonist with a broad and kind American accent – said: “A donkey will only understand if you beat him.”

New point of view?

If you care to read an interesting point of view on Arab Nationalism and 'the Palestine issue', you'll find one here:

http://www.mideastyouth.com/2008/01/31/the-arab-obsession-with-palestine/

Good?

"Figures released by Iraqi ministries on Friday suggested that the number of civilians and security forces killed across Iraq in January - 541 - was the lowest monthly total for nearly two years."
BBC, 1st Feb 2008