c'est parti mon kiki

2007-08-16T21:36:00.000+03:00

'Round the decay of that colossal wreck. Cairo--16 Aug. 2007

A Turkish Girl

Note: The Zabbaleen are Cairo’s garbage collectors

Shelley provides the best titles for any writing on Egypt.

On my second day in Cairo I moved into the only apartment I had been able to find available on short notice for a short-term lease. My roomates were a struggling Egyptian young professional and a German student who was never there. It was musty-smelling, dusty, dark, and saunalike, on this record-hot Cairo summer. I was the third to move in so my room was, predictably, the worst. It had some government-auction metal shelves in one corner, three broken bedframes in another, a thin, stained mattress on the floor and—my only real need—a desk.

For light it had a single incandescent bulb wired up to an electrical cord that used to power a fluorescent light in the ceiling. The fluorescent lighting had, for some reason Mohammed tried to explain but I did not grasp, been disconnected to permit the jerry-rigging of the light bulb by the previous occupant. The bulb was strung up on its cord to a small nail pounded into the wall, and dangled above the desk, giving off about the light of an oil-lamp, and about the same heat too. Given, however, the worn wooden desk and the gray, dust-covered and above all empty-of-books metal shelves, the place already looked enough like one of the dreaded offices of the Egyptian bureaucracy that I was glad not to have a fluorescent light twitching overhead. God a I hate government and fear the police, most of all when I have done nothing wrong.

The place, as I saw it, had two principal advantages. The first was that it was cheap enough—about 100 Canadian Dollars a month—that if something else came up I could pay my two months rent and leave without a second thought. You get, as they say, what you pay for. The second was that in the tradition of the anthropologist researchers I admired and sought to emulate on this trip, it would be a trial to live in.

I had just come from Turkey, where I adjudicated at the European Universities Debating Championships. The Turks were trying so hard to impress their western European guests that they failed to show us anything of real Turkey, opting instead for a sanitized, safe, and extraordinarily boring gated-compound-type experience in the seclusion of their finest--and blandest--university. We were bussed from spleandour to spleandour of a world gone by. Where was Istanbul of today in all this?

Two Turkish Girls

The first time they released us from this confinement I fled the group to an orange juice stand and immediately ordered a fresh pressed juice, with ice—as you are told by travel doctors, who have never left their office, never to do. A girl I had met at the tournament and would make love to later that night motioned to me ‘what are you doing? We’re leaving’ and I waved her on, as in ‘go, go’ and answered the question to myself by thinking: ‘I am making myself sick.’ ‘I am making myself sick,’ I thought. This is what I do in foreign countries—I make myself sick. I eat all the food, drink all the water, try everything until, inevitably, I fall ill. I have never totally understood this—is it to purge my system of the world I know? To break myself down, suffer, destroy my sense of ease and comfort, so that I can know that life is not so easy—and then build myself back up again?

When I emerged from the orange juice shop I had lost the group, as one does immediately in cities, especially Muslim ones. In a single door, down and single alley, up a single staircase, and a group of 20 people are gone forever from sight. I felt a flutter in of excitement my stomach at being alone, finally. I also felt an unease at having lost so rapidly the protective bubble that had surrounded me for 4 or 5 days. I never feel such apprehension at being alone, for it is my normal way of being, and it thrust upon me the realization of just how totally pampered I had been, how much being taken care of had penetrated even me, who is so guarded against it. Imagine those who make a life of being waited on—how quickly they can be thrust down in the gutter, and how ill at ease they are with themselves, in the world.

Pondering my new apartment, in the spirit of making myself sick, I cherished in a bizarre way the thought of labouring away at night by the dim light in this unbearable apartment, sweat flowing down my sides and my back from my armpits and shoulder blades, and running in my scalp, as I laboured each night to keep my fieldnotes. I needed somehow to suffer here in Egypt if I were to get anything from it of value.

And to think that this apartment is of a luxury that the Zabbaleen could never afford! And that when I am sick I can see the doctor, and take medicines, and be cured! What a mockery, my meagre authenticity.

Mohammed, pleasedly, invited me to open the tall shutters out on to ‘my balcony.’ My own balcony! Once encased in the sort of opaque glass used for bathroom windows—what purpose a greenhouse-balcony of that kind might serve totally escaped me—the balcony now had the benefit of a view and some ventilation, since a number of the panes had been put out over the years and never replaced. Looking down into the alley behind, I had a view of a typical Cairo rooftop scene of garbage thrown from windows, unfinished construction, ventilation outlets and the like, all covered with a layer of dust as thick as that on the moon, but a dirty and sooty grey-brown, like what you get when you clean the air filter of a diesel generator. ‘This is nice,’ I said, smiling, and pointing to a tiny patch of garden visible out of the corner of the eye to the left of the balcony.

My first night in the apartment I took out my desk onto the balcony, which it almost entirely occupied, and read a few pages from Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. I was in need of some inspiration for my fieldwork, and thought I might find it here. It was not that I was unenthusiastic about my work—on the contrary, I had an entrepreneurial energy and degree of organization, thrust and momentum I rarely feel. It wasn’t discipline imposed, but rather a genuine desire and need to accomplish things—to just get them done—that came from having ownership over and interest in my project, as I did in my writing about Lebanon, when I would stay up all night, or my work in Malaysia, when I would stay up all night. It's all about what keeps you up at night.

In fact, this reading was procrastination, since I was in desperate need of reading specifically about the Zabbaleen to prepare for my interviews. Yet I wanted the connection to this young anthropologist, a student of Geertz, as I so wanted to be, who was setting out for the first time to do fieldwork in the Middle East. And I wished at this time, I must say, that my fieldwork were for six or twelve or eighteen months, and I thought a lot about writing to the University immediately to tell them that I wanted to be accepted directly into the D.Phil or to hell with them and I would just stay on my own and make a book of it.
Rabinow spoke in his 2006 introduction to the thirty year-old work, of one of my favourite topics—the imaginary other and uncontacted peoples of the Amazon—calling Levi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques the ‘great masterpiece of what Susan Sontag calls “the antropologist as hero” setting out to witness the supposed “world one the wane”.’ To witness the world on the wane was also what I sought.

Long before I knew of Levi-Strauss--except his quotation that perhaps we travel to explore the deserts in ourselves rather than those that surround us--and in much less beautiful and less wholly theorized a manner, I too had seen the world on the wane—my triste arctique, or triste nord—and wished somehow to see it, just see it, before it was all gone. Indeed to not share it was a specific condition of my effort, for I could not bear contributing to its downfall, even if that were inevitable with or without my contribution. Like Zhivago in Barikinow, when asked what I would do, I would reply ‘just live’—and hope that meant I would at least not harm others, as so few in this world succeed in; the modest first duty imposed by Hypocrates, do no harm, is harder to respect and more often violated than almost anyone realizes.

Jealousy raged inside me when I read Hugh Brody’s accounts of the 1970s arctic, and Dawn Chatty’s Oman of the 1980s. Why was all the world gone up in smoke? Why was I born when no Tibet lay yet unvisited? Like Richard in Rabinow's reflections, generationally, I was a failure: born too late. As little as just one generation too late. I hated them for having been the last to see these things, having in some way taken them from me. And I hated the world too, that inexorable, advancing juggernaut of ‘progress,’ or in my mind, merely change, for things seemed as likely to me to be regressing, digressing, or devolving—whichever term you prefer—as progressing.

Yet at some point—again with an intuition far exceeding the grasp of conscious mind—I felt that this had been done, that I was on a path by now so well trodden as to have become cliché, which has always been the inner sanctum, so to speak, in my personal hierarchy of hells. To live with the Inuit, the Bedouin—it seems almost laughable now. Are their worlds not by now gone and gone? I think what drove this home was when Chatty mentioned to me in October how Hugh Brody had turned in his later years to the Bushmen of the Kalahari. ‘The Bushmen?’ I sneered. Those quintessentially stone-age people, those caricatures of the displaced, ill-treated, paleolithic remnants of human existence as it once was? It was just too predictable, and too overdone. Although I suppose I did take from it, as I did from Fergusson’s work in Zambia, reassurance that just because something has been done and done doesn’t mean that you cannot achieve prominence by redoing it—as long as you are novel in your approach.

I needed something else for my critique of civilization. I explained once to Kate Harris (who is mad about science and space) that while she was interested in pushing forward the scope of human experience by existing on its leading edge, I was interested in what was left behind and extinguished on its trailing end, as the world moved on, leaving behind peoples and ways of life. That she was interested in what we gained through progress, and I in what we lost. 'For something to be born, something has to die.' I suppose that is still true, but I do not know what besides nostalgia can thus be produced, or why I assumed that there were not equally saddening refutations of this advance to be found on the leading edge.

And so I came somehow to intuit that if I was to write against cities, against civilization, against progress, against industry, mechanization, urbanization, too many people, too much noise and all the shit that human beings produce every day we are alive, by our great ingenuity and indefeasible science, that there were not just one, but two ways to do it. I had so far been thinking about critiquing it by writing about what it was not. I had long before envisaged an aesthetic refutation of progress by demonstrating the beauty of a world devoid of it. I had wanted to attempt to write about the beauty of different life. The failed poet turned academic, seeking to convey a deeper truth through beauty. The secular Buddhist turned academic, seeking to avoid harming any living thing by journeying in the mind only, where your may walk a thousand miles without crushing even a blade of grass. But this is for real poets, real buddhists, of which I am neither.

As Rabinow put it ‘the world of the Other was an imaginary site—hence Rousseau—in which the alienation of modern man was unknown’ (xiii) and in a footnote explaining the reference to Rousseau, ‘Rousseau was clear, in his famous description of “the state of nature,” that this was a critique of civilization.’ This was correct and has mostly so far—from Rousseau to Edward Abbey—been the approach to the critique of civilization: l’éloge de la nature. As though the alienation of modern life were plain enough for all to see, at least when an unalienated life with which to contrast it is sketched.

But why critique civilization by writing about what it is not? Why not critique it by writing about what it is? That, I understood as I read Rabinow, is what I sought to do in Cairo—a place I would not want to live in—amongst the Zabbaleen—a people who live in a way I would not want to live. Theirs is a rare glimpse of an extreme expression of urban modernity. They are a purely urban, purely modern caste of fallen, untouchable people whose life evidences a topsy-turvy, Kafkaesque existence where nothing—not even garbage—is free, and human dignity reaches a sad and darkly comedic nadir as people are forced to survive by stealing spoiled, stinking and broken stuff that others pay to get out of their lives.

To hell with the unspoilt, if it still exists, which I greatly doubt. I am not concerned, at least for now, with describing how beautiful and simple I think life can be. I am concerned with showing how complicated, unjust, and ugly it can be. The fact that it is impossible to decide whether the development projects improve or destroy the lives of the Zabbaleen is not due to our failure to understand them. It is systemic, it is inherent, it is embedded. The uncertainty of this post-modern garbage-world is the moral and ethical equivalent of the quantum uncertainty that beset physics some decades ago--with similar philosophic implications. There is something inherent to this universe that makes it impossible to do good in this situation, and that is a key to opening very deep vaults containing very ancient secrets.

A Turkish Boy

I met with Karin Grimlund, who was working on the Zabbaleen, and she conveyed an experience both unsettled and unsettling. Unsettled because the tension remained unresolved, and she had not yet crystallized her experience into what she hoped to write about. Unsettling because nothing in the Zabbaleen’s story was as it seemed, and nothing was as it should be. Consider the squalor in which the Zabbaleen live. They are affected by blood bourne disease, high infant mortality; many children work sorting garbage rather than attending school. The men labour like a beast of burden, like the Volga boatmen, in 40° C heat. Is this a lifestyle worth preserving? Are the Copts—a disadvantaged religious minority in Egypt—not forced into this marginal livelihood in the first place, and if so, why should they or others defend it? Would it not be an improvement to the human condition—a worthwhile ‘development’ project—to mechanize and modernize the garbage collection process and force the Zabbalin into other livelihoods?

Yet, they have resisted these projects. When they leave their community, they express the desire to return to it, and show a certain happiness there, Karin told me. Their idendity, and dignity—what little of it they have—are tied up in this lifestyle. They are better recyclers than the best of the mechanized world, and as such stand as a triumph of the low-tech over the engineering-obsessed culture of the west.

This moral ambiguity is irresolvable, I believe, as it is inherent in the urban slum-world and general post-modernity the Zabbaleen epitomize.

There is something about the image of human beings living amongst moutains of garbage, living from that garbage—the rubble of a crumbling, once great but now fallen civilization: Egypt—with a backdrop of rising smoke, surrounded by feral swine, that gives a glimpse of the future. It is post-apocalyptic avant la lettre, a glimpse of what is to come.

Thus, with the same goal as Edward Abbey, as Rousseau, as others, but with opposite methods, I would write about civilization as a way of writing against civilization. By embedding myself in civilization’s deepest, most degenerate core, and projecting forward, rather than withdrawing to civilization’s outer, untouched edge and projecting backward in time.

It is a baroque (a mishappen pearl) or perhaps the baroque (a complex, ornate and ugly extreme form of a thing) that I’m looking for, and, in the Zabbaleen, may have found

2006-09-20T10:22:00.000+03:00

I prefer to be in the field

Cairo, August 24, 2006.

When Churchill was about my age he traveled to revolutionary Cuba. After a bullet passed between his mouth and a drumstick of chicken we wished to eat, he remarked that "there is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at without effect."

The first afternoon we arrived in Beirut, photographer Jonathan Giesen and I traveled – although we did not realize it at the time – to what was the epicentre of Hizballah activity in Beirut. As we contemplated driving down a barricaded road, armed but un-uniformed men arrived by scooter and asked for journalistic credentials, which we did not yet have. We fumbled nervously for our passports; a cell phone call to some headquarters was placed.

Without warning, there was a massive detonation down the road we had wished to take. The windows on Liban Poste across the street oscillated violently. The Hizballah men ran for the middle of the intersection and I followed them: They had experience under fire. When after 15 seconds there was no further blast, they ran back to their scooter. Just before he sped off, my eyes met those of the driver. For a split-second we understood each other: We both wanted to survive.

It was my first time under fire and I was indeed exhilarated. Fate – for it certainly was nothing I had done – spared me. Hizballah had stopped us from going down a road where we might have been struck by a shell. The shell then saved us from whoever was on the other end of the telephone line. Of course, when the effects are felt – by people other than me on that day – they are far from exhilarating.

It is hard to describe this exhilaration without seeming crass, voyeuristic or unethical. Imagine there is a flow of energy, time and outcomes that shapes our lives but with which we are normally only in indirect contact. War is violent and painful, but like exposure to all risks, it brings us closer to this unknown world. It is like being cut deeply then plunging the raw, white nerve endings into that flow. You feel a throbbing, painful, but electrifying connection to a realm that injects mere minutes with a lifetime’s possibilities for destruction and escape. It leaves a deep scar, but you feel so alive.

Two weeks later, Jonathan left Lebanon, headed to Georgia. There was no reason to stay in Lebanon; things were over. We heard there might soon be fighting over Abkhazia, Georgia’s new breakaway republic.

As he accelerated down the road, my emotion was stronger than it should have been at the parting of two men of such short acquaintance. A shared, challenging purpose, however, is to people what a magnetic field is to iron filings – it aligns us in unexpected and beautiful patterns.

It is not that it is lasting. Later, having lost the engine that drove them, these relationships often only go on as reminiscences. But while they last, they have a fleeting, present intensity that makes other forms of connection to human beings seem trivial. It was not the prospect of being apart, but rather the knowledge of just how close it is possible to be to another person – and the realization that most of life is not lived in that way – that was the source of my sadness.

The evening of Jonathan’s departure, I had dinner with two Greek relief workers from an organization called Médecins du Monde. They had arrived one day before the cease-fire. Were you disappointed, I asked their logistician.

"No, how can you be disappointed at the end of a war?" I pressed her: Come on, you weren’t just a little bit disappointed?

"Well, OK, maybe a little bit. But I am still glad the war is over," she said finally.
The medical doctor who was with her had come for only two weeks. I asked if this was long enough to do important work.

"To do something really significant, probably not. However, it is long enough to see some patients and give out some medications. I only have four weeks of holiday per year and I have already used one. I must keep at least one more to rest, so I could only come for two weeks."
It is great to take a break from work and do some good at the same time, but you always have to save some vacation for yourself too.

The two Greeks planned to travel to the south the following day, but I suggested that she should instead stay in Beirut and enjoy themselves. Hizballah, I suggested, did not want their aid in any case, nor did they probably need it.

"Well, I prefer to be in the field," said the logistician. I prefer to be in the field, she said. Undoubtedly this was true, more true, perhaps, than any desire to make a difference in Lebanon.

The next day, Middle East Airlines claimed to have re-established daily flights from Beirut to Amman. With me in the travel agency when I booked my ticket was another Canadian journalist, who wanted to travel to Japan. He sipped a Starbucks coffee and complained that it would take two days to get from Beirut to Tokyo. Things were really getting back to normal.

I was not prepared to believe that there would indeed be a flight until I boarded the aircraft. But Monday evening I was in Cairo. There were 11 other flights, including one from Amsterdam, on the arrivals and departures screen at the airport. My plane was not even two thirds full.
I fell asleep on the plane and it took the stewardess some effort to rouse me for the meal. I was very tired. As I ate my little triangular sandwich with the crusts cut off, as the British like it, I thought of what Robert Fisk had told me.

Robert Fisk is one of the longest-standing and most famous modern Middle East correspondents. The day before the ceasefire he met two friends and me for tea at his apartment overlooking the Mediterranean. He had recently returned to Beirut after spending 17 months in Ireland working on his latest book, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East.

He told us how tired he had become while in Ireland working on the book. But now that he was back in Lebanon, going out to get the news every day like he had always done, he felt energized again. He too preferred to be in the field.

When I got back to Cairo – a place I had thought not a city but a sensory bomb when I first arrived – all seemed quiet. Where had everyone gone? I collapsed and slept for twelve hours.

2006-09-20T10:18:00.000+03:00

The text below first appeared in similar form in the Yukon News, Aug. 25 2006

The Colour of Lebanon

I drew a line
I drew a line for you
Oh what a thing to do
And it was all yellow
Your skin
Oh yeah your skin and bones
Turn into something beautiful
Do you know for you I bleed myself dry
For you I bleed myself dry
– Coldplay, "Yellow"

Cairo, 23 August 2006. On my final day in Lebanon, I traveled throughout the south, to the places where four fifths of the homes are destroyed and the rest are damaged.

"I’ve never seen it so yellow before," said Samer Karam, my Lebanese companion.

I assumed he meant the colour of the land. The plants were yellow-brown, their twigs shriveled and brittle for lack of water, and the earth was dry and dusty. This seems normal for a country in the Middle East – until you see Israel.

Maroun er Ras was a village on mountain. Now it is breadcrumbs. An almighty palm ground it into the hilltop. The border is less than a kilometer away, where brown and yellow meet green. Where plants grow, and water flows, is Israel.

The contrasting colours made the border appear as though nature – not people – separated these lands. As though the lines on maps and razor-wire fences only ratified and enforced Divine will. But the transition was too abrupt to be natural. Irrigated, pruned, geometric orchards stood within fifty feet of fallow Lebanon, with only a dirt track and metal between them. It was a gash, like where old forest meets clear-cut.

From across the border my eye caught the sun’s glint from the surface of a stream or an unshattered pane of glass. It was too calm; too many flies landed everywhere on me. Through the shimmering air Israel looked like a desert mirage of the sweet, luscious gardens of light described in the Qur’an. Like those gardens – the promise of Allah to one who chooses martyrdom – there was only one way for the people whose homes lay ruined in Maroun er Ras to reach the verdant place: Through death.

I saw only two buildings in a usable state in Maroun er Ras: a UN observation point, and the town mosque.

The UN was pock-marked from shells or shrapnel and a large chunk was missing from the corner of the building, as though a giant had taken a bite out of it. A threadbare flag of white flew above the forlorn observation tower. I could not tell if the UN blue had been bleached out by the sun – if so, a sign that the facilities were abandoned since long before – or if the frightened peacekeepers had raised a flag of surrender in a bid to save themselves during the fighting.

The mosque was standing also. Perhaps it was left undisturbed to prove the West’s sincerity in claiming that "terrorists", not Islam, were the target in this war. While the villagers would surely appreciate the necessity of destroying their homes in order to flush out Hizballah, they might be angered by the wanton, unnecessary leveling of their place of worship.

If only someone were left in Maroun er Ras to witness this gesture. But where would they live now – the mosque?

We met only one man in the village. His name was Aisa. He was with a male relative who spoke no English. He was inspecting a pile of rubble. Was your home damaged?

"This is my home," he said, pointing at the rubble. I asked if I could take a picture of him next to his home, and he agreed. The photo shows him smiling slightly through drawn lips, looking sideways at the camera out of the corners of his eyes – a still polite, but weary, skeptical and sad man. His complexion looked unhealthy, perhaps a little yellow.

I wondered which of these two symbols of the forces that will shape the future of the area – the UN and the mosque – would prevail. The UN’s observation tower, bristling with communication antennae and satellite dishes, looked like the bridge of a battered battle ship, a 21st century Noah’s Ark run aground on a mountaintop. Perhaps inside was a perfect microcosm of humanity, tinted blue: Two exemplars of every human variety, saved from the deluge to repopulate the earth. But they would not come out when we approached. The mosque, on the other hand, was built low to the ground, of humble, solid stone, like the people of Maroun er Ras.

Samer was referring, however, not to the earth, but to the thousands of yellow Hizballah flags and banners that have been strung from every arch-way and telephone pole still standing in South Lebanon. They are the shroud that has been draped on the country’s shattered and bloody body.

Yellow is not always a bad colour. Yellow ribbons were used in America in the 1980s by those waiting for the return of loved ones kidnapped in the Iran hostage crisis. Since then, the yellow ribbon has taken on a more general significance and is displayed in the US by those who await the return of family who serve in the armed forces.

But Hizballah did not choose its shade wisely. It is not a soft, warm, golden yellow like you might see in a Van Gogh. There is something shrill and aggressive to it. The symbolism of this yellow comports too well with the Western image of the "terrorist".

For yellow is the colour of phlegm and jaundice. In the Middle Ages it was hung above areas with the plague. And again today, where the flag hangs there is – in the eyes of Israel and the West – a terrorist "plague."

"Terrorists", according to our imagination, are cowardly and dangerous. They are "yellow bellied". To Western eyes, the indecipherable Arabic writing and outline of a Kalashnikov on the Hizballah flag makes it look like it belongs to the family of geometric warning labels set to yellow backgrounds. Biohazard, nuclear waste, Hizballah: Danger.

Yellow is treachery also. The ecclesiastical colour ascribed to Judas was yellow, and his garment is often portrayed that colour, for example in paintings of the Last Supper by Giotto Bondone, Juan Juanes and Philippe de Champaigne.

Ironically, in Nazi Germany the Star of David insignia identifying Jews – the supposed betrayers of Christ – was yellow.

Many Lebanese will say that it is Israel who is cowardly, relying almost entirely on its unassailable air force to destroy Lebanon’s economy, while never engaging with Hizballah’s fighters on the ground. In the West we know that it is the "terrorists" who are cowardly and treasonous. They could be defeated if they would face us in open, fair combat. But in their weakness they employ deceit, which leads to their frightening, shadowy, suicidal dangerousness.

The irony that yellow is the colour of the suicide prevention "Ribbon Campaign" in North America could not have been lost on Hizballah.

But after visiting the south, only two images of yellow remained in my mind.

In French the expression "rire jaune" means mirthless laughter. It is the laughter of one who has reason to be angry or offended, but out of fear, politeness or caution forces himself to laugh.
The yellow of the rire jaune comes from the concentration, in the face, of yellow bile. Those who used to study the humours called sufferers of the yellow bile choleric and described them as irascible and bad tempered, but also charismatic, and inclined toward political or military leadership.

I thought also of the Coldplay song Yellow: "And it was all yellow. Your skin, Oh yeah your skin and bones, Turn into something beautiful. Do you know for you I bleed myself dry? For you I bleed myself dry."

I visited the south of Lebanon, and it was all yellow. It was bled dry. But can skin and bone really turn into something beautiful?

2006-09-20T10:12:00.000+03:00

A similar text to that below first appeared in the Yukon News, Aug. 16 2006

Nous passons par les coeurs des gens

Beirut, 16 August 2006.

At 0800 local time on Monday 14 August, a cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon went into effect. Hizballah promptly declared victory.

Within hours, tens of thousands of Lebanese – bunkered down for the past month in public schools, mountain villages or relatives’ homes – flooded the streets of Beirut’s suburbs and the highway to the south of the country.

In the southern suburb of Haret Hreik, one of the worst hit urban areas, hundreds of awe-struck observers strolled amid collapsed buildings in streets where no car can now pass, their neighbourhood transformed into a bizarre pedestrian mall of destruction.

A man named Ahmed Khatib, who appeared to be waiting for something, asked if we were from the BBC. No, the Yukon News. Perhaps you’ve heard of it also?

"Then I hope that you can ask Mr. Tony Blair why he has taken away my home again. I lost one home already in the 80s. I have come again today and found that my apartment is gone." Did you lose any family? "No." Well, perhaps things could be worse then?

"I did not lose any family today because I am the only one left. I already lost 9 members of my family in the 80s," replied Khatib.

"I am Palestinian, from Haifa. My family used to have a home there. I pray to God that Hassan Nassrallah will hit my home in Haifa and whoever lives there now. If I see a Jew I will hug him. But if you tell me you are from Israel, I want to kill you."

Ahmed Khatib, it seemed, had lost.

In another sector of the suburbs called Bourj el Barajneh, we came upon the smoldering wreckage of a massive apartment block being worked over by backhoes, bulldozers and a bobcat. Water containers, ventilation fans, and other fixtures normally on rooftops twenty storeys up were strewn on the ground.

Shouts erupted as the backhoe uncovered something. A body. According to an observer, there were nine the day before; this was the first on this day. As it was dug out, rescue crews immediately covered the cadaver with a shroud. There were shouts to the journalists not to take pictures of the body itself – a gesture of respect for the dead, I presumed.

More shouts. Two bodies this time. Caged in twisted rebar, they could not be freed. A firefighter produced bolt cutters and began chopping them out.

The second body was covered as it was removed, as the first had been. And again, workers again inched up an improvised shroud (a garish multi-coloured bath towel) on the third body as they dug.

The feet of the third body stuck out, but his torso and head were buried. When an arm was loosed from the rubble, I saw that it was small, and that this was a boy, not a man. I prayed that the workers not pull on the arm to try and dislodge the boy – if the body was rotten it might tear off. Mercifully, they continued digging. My gruesome prediction would not have come true, however: The death was too fresh and the body had not yet begun to decompose. The blood on the arm was only half-coagulated and still red, not black.

When finally the boy was extracted, he was not wrapped in the towel. Instead, one of the workers grasped the dead boy and held him up by the armpits to the crowd, like the monkey-shaman in ‘The Lion King’ presenting the newborn cub to the trumpeting and braying animal kingdom.

Another worker ran his latex-gloved hand through the boy’s dusty black hair and pulled his slumped head upward to show his face to the crowd, as they did in the French revolution, displaying the severed heads of the decapitated. The shutters of journalists and bystanders went wild.

I knew that somewhere, someone was happy about this death, for it sent a thousand gruesome images of Israeli barbarity around the world. This boy, indeed, everyone in this building, had contributed to the "victory" Hizballah now declared. They needed him to be killed – and the Israelis had obliged.

The boy, I imagined, did not want to die. He had lost, but it did not matter. He was part of something bigger, something that, frighteningly, the man holding him up seemed to grasp, while my pitiful and only precedent for the morbid spectacle came from a Disney film.
Leaving that place, I saw a teenager looking stoically on. He had Roman, statuesque features. His arms were held firm and straight by his sides; his chin was slightly upturned. On a blue T-Shirt, these words appeared: "Freedom. You can wish for future happiness but the only time you can be happy is now."

Did he know what the words meant? "No." I asked a bystander to translate them to him. He listened, then smiled, sweetly. But I could see how big and moist his eyes were now, as a crack appeared where there was a flaw in the marble.

On Tuesday we traveled south toward Marjayoun, a city close to the border from which Israeli troops had withdrawn only a half-day before.

Although the ceasefire is unproven and, many believe, fragile, the people displaced by the conflict were returning in droves to the places they are from.

"No one expected so many to return so quickly," said a Lebanese doctor. "But [Hassan] Nassrallah has told them to return, so they do."

Southbound buses, cars and trucks filled both sides of the divided Beirut—Sidon highway. In the previous weeks, two overpasses (in addition to numerous bridges) between Beirut and Sidon were bombed. At each collapsed overpass, the 8 southbound lanes bottlenecked into a single track, resulting in heavy traffic jams. Many vehicles had to be pushed up and over the steep incline, further slowing the progress of the massive millipede.

"Where is the government of Lebanon?" complained one man, referring to the absence of any construction equipment to clear the road. While the cabinet has yet to meet since the beginning of the ceasefire, Hassan Nassrallah made promises of money for reconstruction in a televised broadcast Monday evening. Numerous Hizballah flags and posters made clear the crowd’s allegiance.

Some of the returnees, expecting to find their homes destroyed, tied foam mattresses on the roofs of their cars. At least they will have something to sleep on when they arrive. They reminded me of people who return to the Mississippi valley after a flood: They have lost everything and know they will lose it again, yet still they return.

The Lebanese have an attachment to places, to the land, that is difficult for North Americans to understand. Our Lebanese hosts explained one evening that when they build a new house, they build it for one hundred years.

"We never move. We are born in one place, and we die in that same place. This is not a matter choice."

At last, a few kilometers from Marjayoun, we could go no further. A bridge over a cool blue creek had been bombed and there was no alternative route. Approximately 100 people were waiting as a work-crew slowly rebuilt the bridge.

The creek flowed in an idyllic valley where people might have lived, at another time, without knowledge of victory or defeat. Children tossed stones in the water; a man waded across carrying a watermelon. The sun was setting and, overwhelmed by the peacefulness of this place, I wanted to stay forever. I tried to convince my photographer to sleep the night, but he wished to return to Beirut. With the sense of having missed the chance to understand Lebanon for the first time, infuriating rationality prevailed.

On the road home, our motorcycle was rear-ended at a stop. As we inspected for damage, I turned and saw a banner stretched across the road. It read: "Vous avez détruit les ponts. Nous passons par les coeurs des gens."

You destroyed the bridges, but we pass through people’s hearts. So it is. Hizballah has won – the first round at least.

2006-08-06T03:59:00.000+03:00

Beirut or Bust, Or, There have been six power outages while I have been writing this piece…

Normally, travelers and trade between Damascus and Beirut flow over the anti-Lebanon Range, through the Bekaa valley and down to the Mediterranean. However, the Israeli Air Force has bombarded the road and border crossing along this route. As a result, it has been impassable since approximately August 2nd.

The alternative, and now only, route follows the coast northward through Tripoli to Daboussiyeh in Western Syria. On August 4th we traveled upstream on this road, against the heavy ebb of traffic escaping the war.

Despite a sign with an arrow and the word “Lebanon” in English and Arabic script, the turn off the Syrian highway is easy to miss. It seems too small and too poorly maintained to be the road to Lebanon. Instead of an artery capable of conveying a country’s lifeblood, we find a capillary.

A short distance from the highway, where the road begins in earnest, the track in a state of severe disrepair – or has it been bombed? Just beyond this rough patch, three piles of earth have been mounded up in the middle of the road. There is no difficulty circumventing them on a motorcycle; automobile traffic has also been passing. The northbound heavy trucks and buses, however, cannot pass.

Dozens of trucks are parked between the dirt mounds and the Syrian Border, a space of about 5 kilometres. Many have containers or are tarped over, concealing their contents. Are these weapons awaiting transshipment?

Further down the line of trucks is a series of three eighteen wheelers with flatbed trailers. Three large metal boxes are loaded on each. They appear to be unused diesel generators. Industrial equipment is not weaponry, but so far the smuggling paradigm still essentially fits.

Then, two large yellowish water pumps; piping; more generators. Next is a series of automobile lorries loaded with new cars of various makes and models, covered in dust from the trip. Now these clearly are not weapons.

It becomes apparent that the trucks are being used to evacuate movable assets to avoid their destruction. Once the trucks arrive in Syria, the earth mounds on the road prevent them from traveling any further. (Perhaps the road has been blocked precisely to prevent the goods from being sold in Syria). As a result, the trucks have been parked just a few miles north of the border, their drivers apparently having returned to Lebanon to ferry up more trucks. The trucks continue in a long line. There are 40 or more in total.

Exiting Syria is relatively painless. They allow photographs of the large line-up of northbound traffic while we wait to have our passports stamped. One other group of foreign eccentrics is also trying to enter the country. A skinny, older chain-smoker; a chubby man with a greasy pony-tail wearing a vest with 23 pockets; a pretty and unusually tall young girl with too much makeup, fifteen bracelets and Syrian colours draped around her: journalists.

After clearing Syria we cross a river on a still-intact bridge. A massive line of trucks is backed up across it. We stop to take pictures at a small shack flying a Lebanese flag, but are told to stop by the Lebanese guards.

An Arab man approaches wearing a golf shirt embroidered with the words “Sydney, Australia.” He asks where we are from. I reply, then return the question, offering as a joking reply “Australia?”

“Yes, how did you guess?” He replies. I point to the shirt and he smiles, seeming to have forgotten that he was wearing it. He tells us that the river marks the border. We are now on Lebanese soil. He adds that the Israelis have been thinking of destroying the bridge. Probably this is a guess based on the air traffic in the past days.

I look back. The bridge is long enough that two or three trucks are stopped on it in the unmoving line of traffic. Even with a fly-by prior to the bombing run, the trucks would not have time to move. The drivers might try to flee on foot, but I doubted they would make it before the fighter returned on its bombing run. Anyway, with targeted weapons, I’m not certain pilots make “passes” any longer. Many of the strikes have also been carried out by unmanned drone, probably flown by remote control from Israel.

Is the shack with Lebanese soldiers the “border control” I wonder? These are times of war after all, and the usual formalities and controls on life disintegrate. It is partly for that reason that I have come. Who cares about a few extra bottles of whisky in my bag when the country is facing destruction?

In fact, we find the border crossing a few kilometers ahead, functioning quite as usual. The Lebanese are accustomed to war, and things must get far worse before life as usual shuts down. Disappointingly, the only question the border guard asks is whether I would like a 15 day visa for 25,000 Lebanese Lira, or a 30 day visa for 50,000. There is no suggestion that this is an unusual time to travel, nor any interrogatories about the purpose of our visit.

The final step for entry is to clear the motorcycle. This requires the purchase of insurance, followed by a stamp of the carnet de passage en douanes, a kind of special passport for vehicles that controls their import and export. While it is impossible to be certain, the insurance appears to be selling at the usual price. I am reassured that those who live by assessing risk have not yet placed a premium on us. Then I remember contracts: probably there is an exclusionary clause for Acts of War. Anyway, they’re not selling life insurance.

While Jon, the owner of the bike, takes care of papers, I sit in the area where vehicles pass and are inspected, writing in my journal. My writing is in fits and starts as I am distracted by the faces of the people in the vehicles passing through. One after another, they pull up with windows down and hand over their papers. Most of the drivers are men, and most smoke cigarettes.

The children, more than the adults, make eye contact. The adults don’t seem curious to see the redhead writing in his journal in such an improbable place. Something else must be on their minds – or they have seen much stranger sights. The children do seem curious. They look neither happy nor sad. They are serene, and far too serious for their age. Without understanding it, they know that something important is happening, and that very likely their lives while not again be the same.

As we leave I ask the customs officer how many foreigners have crossed today and he says: “Two,” which I understand to mean one Texan, and one Yukonner.

Lebanon is beautiful. The first stretch of road after crossing the border is overhung by tall, old trees that form a solid canopy, like those to be found in peaceful, rural places where people have been living for a long time. Their shade is soft and soothing.

We soon make Tripoli. The port was hit, but we bypass it and follow the coastal road for a few kilometers beyond the city, then climb onto the highway. The highway is almost entirely free of traffic, and Jon opens up the throttle a bit, enjoying two lanes all of our own. It is not far, however, before we reach the first of four detours.

Between 7 and 8 a.m. in the morning the Israeli Air Force struck three or perhaps four main bridges on the northern highway. At the last exit before each hit, people have placed tires, barricades and tape to signal that the road ahead is impassable. At the first of these we take the detour. At the second, third, and fourth, however, we slip under the tape and drive out to the scene of the destruction.

We are not the only ones who want a look: at each bridge we find many Lebanese photographing the destruction with digital cameras and cell phones. Most look very calm, and some even amused or cheerful. Some are throwing rocks over the edge to see how long they take to hit the valley floor below; a few cover their mouths in shock; I see only one woman fighting back tears.

The first exploded bridge to which we come (the second detour) is a scene of massive destruction. The span was approximately 200 yards. The entire surface of the road now lies in a twisted mess at the bottom of the valley, perhaps 150 feet below. On the seaward side just off the edge of the roadway, smoke is still rising from the wreckage of a small flatbed truck. It is not immediately recognizable as such: the bed has been separated from the cab, like an ant whose abdomen has been severed from its head.

Not knowing that the bridges had been struck that morning, I wonder if the wreckage of the truck has already been reclaimed as a kind of shelter for refugees. Perhaps the smoke is from a cooking fire. However, speaking to a woman in French (this is a Christian district) I learn that this truck was crossing the bridge as the missiles struck only hours before. The vehicle is still smoldering. The driver, of course, is dead. There may also have been one passenger.

On the north side of the collapsed bridge is a billboard quite common in Lebanon. It depicts a person eating a massive bacon, cheese and mushroom burger from the Hardee’s fast-food restaurants. The slogan reads “Don’t bother me, I’m eating.” The sign is riddled with holes.

I assume the holes they are shrapnel. However, on closer examination, one can make out distinct, relatively small holes in the north side of the sign. On the south side, a single large chunk has been torn out at each place where the sign was hit. Bullet holes are always larger at the point of exit than entry. If this is true of shrapnel too then the sign could not have been damaged by shrapnel from the bridge, which would have flown northward. It appears that the pilot laid down machine gun fire in a north to south direction before bombarding the bridge. However, I was not able to find any eyewitnesses to verify this conjecture.

The second bridge to be hit is near Casino du Liban. The damage is much less severe. The bridge is still sound. Only the southbound lane has been hit, seemingly only damaging the roadway. The rebar and concrete around have exploded upward and stand like frozen splashes of water from the surface of a swimming pool just after someone has canon-balled off the diving board. We are able to pass on right shoulder with the motorcycle.

The third bridge has also only been hit in the southward lane. The missile struck just in front of an unfortunate van that plunged into the crater. Its front wheels now hang in the void underneath the bridge; its rear end protrudes up. Sky News has a satellite uplink and is broadcasting live with the van in the background. I hear the anchor say that the driver later died of injuries in hospital. They go to a retired Israeli military commander in Tel Aviv and I listen to the half of a debate/interview between the anchor and the Israeli military man. The broadcast wraps up just in time: a tow-truck has arrived to extricate the vehicle.

The strikes in the southbound lane are consistent with a desire to destroy only Hizbullah’s capacity to import weapons, and not the ability of the Lebanese to flee danger. Of course, the premise itself is flawed: borders are porous and there is almost always another road. With the highway damaged, the Lebanese have merely resorted to the coastal roads. We passed six or eight large liners transporting unwitting cattle southward on these roads, so there is no trouble with heavy traffic. In any case, where there are mountains there will always be smugglers.

The bombardment does add to the cost of doing business. It adds time, danger and difficulty premiums. This can be an effective strategy insofar as it diverts resources and effort toward mere survival rather than aggression, and it may diminish the return on terrorist investment and the rate of flow of weapons.

Even in the conventional battlefield, victory rarely comes in the form of a checkmate. It is normally conceded once the outcome is made clear. A fortiori, social movements and guerilla fighters are rarely if ever defeated by direct confrontation resulting in defeat. They must be convinced ideologically, militarily or economically, or by a combination of all three, to surrender. Indeed, destroying these bridges was clearly not capable of placing Hizbullah in checkmate. Nor did it appear to bring the movement any closer to capitulating. The strikes took place in Christian areas, generating Christian casualties. The principle effect is to damage the Lebanese economy during and after the war (by creating massive reconstruction costs), and perhaps to foment solidarity between the Christians and Muslims.

Before leaving the last bridge, we meet a retired British military commander who is a security consultant for Sky News. We learn that they are staying at the Movenpick resort. Lovely place, apparently. He has just finished two years in Iraq and this is a holiday in comparison.

“How much is beer here?” Asks Jon.

“To be honest I don’t know – Sky News picks up the tab on everything. We just charge it.”

We begin talking about the war.

“I don’t know why they don’t just stop this thing. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Hizbullah are good, but the whole goddam thing is so fucking stupid. I don’t know why Bush and Blair don’t at least say that this fighting should fucking stop.”

We exchange a few more thoughts before the conversation ends as such conversations always do, without any kind of resolution. The security consultant then puts his finger on the preposterousness of his (our?) presence in a war zone, although I am not sure if he understands his words quite as I do:

“But hey, it’s room service for me tonight. [Pause] He said caringly.”

We laugh. The sun is setting over the Mediterranean and the light has been perfect for pictures this evening.

(Check bloggingbeirut.com for photos -- I'll try to post some here later)

2006-08-03T18:54:00.000+03:00

Classes are out!

I didn't hang around Cairo long.

Over the summer I met a Texan classmate named Jonathan in a roundabout way. We began with the Yukon in common: he had visited on a trip up the Alaska Highway to go roughneck in Dead Horse, Alaska.

Anyone who has travelled to the Yukon -- or whose first cousin once did -- tells me about it. This is supposed, I gather, to make us friends. Perhaps it is a way of telling me that they too come from hardy stock, or that we share the frontier spirit? They are just like me, because once they set foot on the permafrost out of which I grew.

But they don't know that the Yukon is not a place. It never has been: It is an idea; the spirit of an age. This age is an age long past. So the Yukon attracts old souls, those who have lived many lives. These are they who congregate at the ends of the earth, finding in finis terrae australis the echo of the aurora borealis.

Let me give an example. The Canadian beaver was imported to Tierra del Fuego in the early 1900s in order to create a fur trade. It was so successful that today it has flooded the forests around Ushuaia and completely destroyed them. It is a bane and the locals seek -- in vain -- to destroy it. I do not know whether they have begun dynamiting the lodges, which is the best method, based on our experience in the Yukon. But what I mean is this: the beaver must have felt as I did arriving in Ushuaia. In going to the furthest point on the globe from its origins, it had, in spirit, returned home. And it prospered.

This spirit cannot be acquired by setting foot in a place. It cannot be tamed, bottled and sold for mass consumption, as they do the "mud of the Alaska highway". As the Singaporean military propaganda reads: that mud on your face is the soil of your nation. The only place that mud does anything is on your face, not in a can on the bookshelp at home.

That is why it means nothing to me when people tell me they have been to the Yukon. This idea, which I struggle to express, is encompassed succinctly in the distinction between Cheechakos and Sourdoughs. They are two worlds apart, though both have been to the same places. But when the Trappers and Gold miners didn't realize is that Cheechako and Sourdough are states of mind, not mere matters of time spent in a place. Some people born in the Yukon are still Cheechakos, and some people are Sourdoughs before they ever arrive, though they have never heard the word. That is why many people I knew growing up struggled to leave, while I dream only of returning.

Generally, two kinds of people visit the Yukon: retirees, and hippies. Both come as Cheechakos, and leave as Cheechakos.

The retirees, needless to say, have a style of travel that is approximately 10 to the power 15 degrees removed from mine. Of course, like everyone, I think my way of doing things is best, and therefore I cannot agree with them. Floating casinos and restaurants with a view to Glacier Bay? 160 ft. land yachts towing hummers as their "town car"? No thank you.

The hippies I resent too, although I find the girls cute, especially in Dawson. Predictably, they are all from large cities and have bourgeois upbringings that embedded the angst they now seek to dissipate through travel and closeness to the real people and places of the earth. Usually they have a sibling who is an investment banker or lawyer. They will give you a URL where you can see some sweet digital pictures of their friend wearing peasant dress in Guatamala, showing solidarity with the salt of the earth. Predictably, they fall in love with the Yukon (which they think they understand better than the locals), go home to Toronto, and make webpages telling others exactly how to go to the places where they too can find themselves. All of the best mountaintops for Yoga, I'm sure, are listed.

It is like writing about Bedouin hospitality in the Lonely Planet. The Bedouin are famous for their hospitality because offering of food and water to strangers is essential to survival in the desert. In search of an authentic Middle Eastern experience, innumerable "desert travelers" have taken minibuses out of town for the day to experience this and write home: "Dear Mother, on his way to Dimascus Lawrence of Arabia stopped here just like we did. That's where we're going too, mother." (read with British accent for full effect)

Now you'll find the Lonely Planet still telling of Bedouin hospitality, but with a useless warning not to abuse this hospitality. The warning is a moral disclaimer so that the editors won't feel bad about ruining this place and that tradition. Full stop.

Confession: I have a lonly planet. However, my rule of thumb in Cairo was to focus on visiting anything NOT in it. And I didn't tell anyone about it later, as I have taken to no longer telling much about the Yukon except the long winters and killer mosquitos. I cannot reconcile love for a place with the fact that sharing it will ruin it. I cannot reconcile having travelled to many places thanks to lonely planet with my hatred of being able to tell immediately upon visiting a place whether it is in a guidebook or not by the number of foreigners there.

What happens to a very few souls when they travel North, or to other ends of the earth, is that they open a line of communication with their previous selves. It is a sudden, tingling connectivity across eons of time and light years of space. I cannot explain it except to liken it to a feeling of deja vu on a level thousand times more profound than the experiences with which that phrase is usually associated. It is an inexplicable belonging; the sensation of a massive presence -- so large and unmistakable, yet completely indescribable.

An artist looks at a stone and knows that in it lies the statue of David. How can it be gotten out? Travelling to the North may be a glimpse of the David. I have uncomfortably incubated emotions without expression then read a poem that hatched them in a few inspired and infuriating lines. Travelling to the North may be like reading that poem.

Until that time, these things are an itch that one desires to soothe but does not know how to scratch. It is like having, as Blaise Pascal said, a God-shaped hole in your heart, but the hole is filled by empty space, silence, and nothingness.

Having referred in a previous post to Louis L'Amour, maybe now I can added to my gilded list of sources Jean M. Auel, who wrote the Clan of the Cave Bear series. I read these books by headlamp on the school bus at around age 11 or 12 (it is dark in the morning and after school in the Yukon in winter). You will understand shortly why, along with cowboy novels, I remember these books so vividly.

In the Valley of the Horses, the protagonist Ayla is to have her first rites with the cave-man Jondalar. He is an expert in this art, and very experienced. He has made many girls tremble with pleasure on her first night where others would only have inflicted pain (keep in mind, according to the story they are cave-men).

Ayla is not a virgin (in fact she has been a mother), but she has never had an orgasm. As the slow, passionate evening evolves under the heavy warm furs of their cave, Ayla cries out to Jondalar: "I want -- I want, something..." She cannot finish the sentence because she does not know the word for what she wants. She has never had it and she grew up with the mute Neanderthal.

Travelling to the ends of the earth may be like finding release after crying out your whole life: "I want -- I want, something..." Growing up in the city, you never had it. Surrounded by civilization, we live amidst a neanderthal world with no word for ecstasy -- with no knowledge of the most profound expression of human nature. But you need not find the words: as the act alone suffices, so too does the silence, the open spaces, the nothingness. Thus, for a few travellers, travelling to one of these places is necessary to recognize something in themselves: The Wilderness.

These are the Sourdoughs.

I realized, I know not how, that Jonathan was a Sourdough. So I thought it might be good if we did some travelling together, and he apparently felt the same way about me.

Jon had imported his BMW motorcycle from Texas earlier in the year, as the license plates clearly revealed (indeed a little too clearly, considering where we aimed to drive -- without, I should add, the usual .12 gauge that only a Texan or a Yukonner carries as a matter of course). I couldn't have dreamt anything so preposterous, but a Yukon-Dallas motor-cycle team crossing the Middle East on a bike with Texan plates seemed just right to me. Though the trip itself would prove less glamorous, the idea at least would burn down civilization and all its categories. From the wreckage the wreckage, we would rebuild a kinetic Utopia known only to us, and existing only as long as we kept moving. Like the Masai, if we were captured and held, we would die.

So after a twenty four hour setback due to a brake failure (the brake light still flashes from time to time, but Jon assures me he had it fixed) we set out across the Sinai to Nuweiba. From Nuweiba, a ferry to Aqaba allows you to circumvent Israel (necessary for entry into Syria). We then headed up through Jordan, and yesterday crossed the Syrian Border.

There have been many incidents along the way to which only my journal shall bear witness. I wish to tell for now only one.

Sometimes there are Visa problems, crossing into Syria. You have to get the visa through the embassy in your country if Syria has diplomatic representation there. However, FedEx-ing my passport to Ottawa was impossible. It would have taken too long and would have nailed me to Cairo since, as in all police states, travel internally in Egypt is impossible without a passport. I had heard, however, of people who did not have the visa entering legally (perhaps the policy set internationally has not trickled down) or with bribes.

Bypassing Amman entirely, we stopped a few kilometres from the border to eat a massive amount of fatty food (in anticipation of the wait) and discuss the options. First try all border crossings. Second, I thought I was prepared to walk across if I was denied and meet Jon in a Syrian town on the other side. The other option, if sanity prevailed on that given day (never known until the morning of) was to take a plane to Cyprus or mainland Turkey from Amman. A distant fourth was my original plan: scuba diving in Sinai. (I don't know whether I subconciously don't like diving, but every time I plan a diving holiday I hatch elaborate and impromptu schemes to involve myself in whatever local events are making headlines). We also discussed how one bribes border officials discreetly, a matter with which I had no experience.

Clearing out of Jordan with us were three Yellow dukes of hazard cars with Syrain plates: the Amman Damascus taxi service, Est. 1971, and operating with the same vehicles since. We saw two disheartening sights in the no-man's land between Jordan and Syria.

First, the line of traffic back into Jordan was massive. Every car was getting the automobile version of a cavity search, slowing things down to a crawl and leaving us wondering what the passengers and driver were being subjected to indoors. It would take hours to get back through if we were turned around, and all we would do is head for the next border crossing to try again.

Second, observation towers were visible on hills to the east. Under a powerline lay a distinctly well-groomed tract of land with no vegetation, about 40 m wide. Jonathan shouted: "mine field." I was looking for the signs. I had told him earlier why I thought the tactical value of a minefield at a border, unlike in a combat situation, was increased by signs. In Tierra del Fuego there were minefields near the ferry port, and they were marked in Spanish, English and German. I told Jon I thought it would be the same here. There were no signs, but this was clearly a minefield.

We waved at the humvee with .50 calibre machine gun mounted on top and they waved back, smiling.

The two kilometres between the exit and entry points are full of beautiful olive orchards. I recognized them as olives from my visit to the Olave farm in Chile. I said to Jon:

"This is where you would have to get out, on the Syrian side of the minefield, and try to pick your way through the orchard." I knew, though, that this was not an option any longer and we would have to make it be proper means. I was just fantasizing about my missed career in the special forces as forward recon. No one would ever have been better, tougher, more capable of learning local languages or E&E (Escape and Evasion in SAS jargon), but my file would have shown a lengthy record of discriplinary problems and clashes with superiors.

We missed taking a picture of the "Welcome to Syria" sign. Jon said,

"Should we go back?" But we both knew the answer was no: this wasn't tourism.

"They don't really like pictures here, I heard."

I got out my camera though, and kept it handy but out of sight. There were two more "welcome" signs along the way. Having missed the first, I said to hell with the second as well. By the time the third came I took a picture, thinking that if I didn't there might be a forth. It was getting kind of weird to have so many signs, but I guess the Syrians are really friendly people. Maybe that's why they didn't make the Axis of Evil cut. (Axes, like the Trinity, lose something of their mystical attraction if they have more than three components). I was sure the friendliness would soon be gone and we would see blood flowing in the streets once we cleared the border.

The border was a relatively orderly, if bureaucratic place. I couldn't smell the smoke of funeral pyres where babies are burned yet, but was sure they were just around the corner. We went in to get our passport stamps. I asked Jon what my story was, so that we'd be straight if they questioned us separately. He just smiled and said, "see what comes to you man." Total improv: I love it. I remember when a girl from work at the Supreme Court was trying to sneak her boyfriend across the border to the States. They had plans A-F all worked out, ahand contacted relatives as far away as South Africa to go over the cover story in case customs called. It was clever, and a better job than I could have done, but totally banalized the one bad thing she ever did in her entire life, and made the one chance we had of being friends so uninteresting to me. But that's the thing about lawyers: they brake the law, they just do it in extraordinarily boring ways.

But I had a bothersome rational streak myself that caused me to show Jon a false marriage certificate (I was married in Whitehorse two years ago). It was necessary to stay in the same room when travelling with Elizabeth in Egypt.

"I'm going to visit my wife in Damascus. She was working in Lebanon but has been left homeless by the Israeli aggression and is in a hotel in need of my help." I thought this might strike the appropriate chord: married good, girlfriends bad; Lebanon good, Israel bad.

We met Americans who had been waiting 3 hours (6.5 by the time we left; probably were turned back later that night). They were of Arab descent (or so I thought), but it didn't really seem to be helping their case. In fact, I later learned that one of them was Michael Perez, a Cuban immigrant who "accepted" (the word has the correct religious inevitability to it: you might as well just give up and recognize Truth) Islam in Miami 9 years ago and then married a Moroccan girl in Michingan. Since, he has become an activist in favour of Palestinian rights, and was deported from Israel. Wow, I thought I was struggling with my identity.

Yet, all of this planning for the worst proved to be farfetched imagination: nothing but an attempt to make my life more interesting and fraught with peril and hardship than it really is. The whole thing reminded me of a much sexier but equally unnecessary night crossing of the border to Tibet I recently read about on the Internet. Within a record-breaking 3.5 hours -- and for less than the cost of the visa from the Embassy in Canada, not including FedEx fees -- I had a single entry visa into Syria.

We cleared the bike with the Carnet de Passage and revved up down the open road to Dimascus. I let out a "YEEHAA!" that I thought Jon would appreciate. And he must have, because he joined me in wailing the same off-key call of the open trail.

We didn't realize there was one more police check, about 100m down the road. No problems, but hitting the breaks and having to show our passports again was a crushing anti-climax. As we cleared through, another "Yeeha" seemed too embarassingly preposterous.

It was dark now. In silence, we turned onto the road to Damascus.

2006-07-30T01:33:00.000+03:00

July 26

“Egyptians basically have freedom of expression.”

“I mean, apart from a few things, like directly criticizing Mubarak, they can say just about anything they want.”

The pronouncement was so earnest and natural as to make it unclear whether the speaker was employing dead-pan sarcasm or was blissfully naïve about Egypt and totally unaware of the contradictions of the statement itself, even taken apart from the facts. He was an acquaintance of ten minutes who described himself to me as an amateur journalist from Barcelona. Amateur indeed, I thought, if he considers freedom of expression, or its subset freedom of the press, to be essentially respected in a country that allows you to say anything you want – unless it is directly critical of the government.

We were standing together on some electrical transformer boxes on the northeast side of Midan Tahrir, downtown Cairo. We met as all strangers meet, with a meeting of the eyes. Foreigners at political protests in Egypt are prone to looking at one another enquiringly: what are you doing here, making me seem less adventurous and brazen for ignoring the embassy’s warnings not to come? There were many foreigners at this protest, in fact. Since this was a rally in support of Lebanon and therefore not critical of the Eyptian government, it could be expected to be relatively safe.

Our eyes met just after failing to find a way up to the second floor of a building overlooking the square. The Spaniard looked at me, then, as an alternative to the stairs, tipped his eyes toward the transformers laughingly. Not sure if it was a dare or a joke, and equally eager either way, I climbed up, and he followed.

From here we could see the miniscule rump of protesters – five to six hundred in a city of 15-20 million (no one knows for sure how many live in Cairo) – surrounded by twice as many police officers. Usually, uniformed police outnumber protesters four or five to one in Egypt, so this seemed a surprisingly modest and measured show of force. But after the crowds had dissipated I realized it was not: fully one quarter to one third of the “protesters” were plainclothes police officers.

With semi-concealed radios and 8-10” clubs, or simply prying ears, the plainclothes percolate through the protest and mingle with bystanders. Everyone knows this and the police opt not to make a mockery of themselves by trying to keep the undercover presence secret once the protest is over.

Once things had wound down, the uniformed commanders shouted a few orders, waved a few hands, and like droplets of oil coalescing out of the unstable emulsion, hundreds of men emerged from the crowd to muster points in the Midan. They formed what looked like four or five columns of about one-hundred men each. Later, there was one further group of roughly thirty-six stragglers (about nine rows, four men in each row). The sea of people had parted into police on one side and citizens on the other in the blink of an eye.

The gathering of the plainclothes was striking. First because there were far fewer protesters – and far more police officers – than I had imagined. Second, because they drew out of the crowd so quickly. Everything, especially the clubbing and running, seems to happen so fast at a protest. But with the plainclothes, it didn’t look like military discipline or raw, pulsating fear that moved them. Watching them, one had the distinct impression they just wanted to go home. This impression comes from seeing the type of men these are, and the way they act.

The contrast between the boots and the officers is striking. If you had told me before going to the protest that the two were to be different, I would have bet on the bigger, tougher men in the lines, the slighter ones calling the shots.

Why? Because these are our myths. That un-tough men seem to throw themselves into the calmer, more intellectual pursuits, sometimes finding masculinity in control exercised over the lives of others. There is something very creepy about such men, perhaps a hidden homosexuality that causes them to submit others in retaliation for their own submission – which they hate, but towards which they are inexorably drawn. They are the ones from whom you fear treachery. All of the treacherous, deviant animals (metaphors for men) are little animals: the rat, the snake, the fox, the hyena. You do not expect them. Often you do not see them – until it is too late. They could never win in open confrontation, so they resort to connivance, plotting and subterfuge. There is something chilling and reptilian about these men – like the clammy sweat on their pale bluish brows – that makes their capacity for evil far greater than that of a big man. Their oppression flows only from the mind, not from muscle, making it exponentially more frightening. The mind is infinitely more powerful than muscle; the imagination may plunge to depths no mere diver has ever reached.

These are but our myths. They were not true of these men. Here the little ones stand at the front. Most are conscripts. Most are just boys. You could see it in their faces and their bodies, dwarfed under their hand-me-down helmets and vests, which have probably been used by generations of conscripts, beginning even before they were born.

Most of the boys could have gone three days or more without shaving before attracting reprimand from a superior. Many were growing the thin little moustaches that adolescents sometimes grow in countries where they make an early entry into manhood. You never see them in North America where the High School’s keep us boys longer, and the mockery keeps us clean shaven.

The length of these boys’ mustaches testified to the earnestness and desire with which they desired to be men. But will alone would not suffice: they remained soft and straight, like mere hair combed downward from the nose to the upper lip. It will be many years still before they have the attractive roughness of stubble, or the richness, warmth and strength of a full beard.

The officers, on the other hand, are huge. They appear to tower behind their conscripts like giants. They are all big-boned (not meant euphemistically). Many also have bellies bulging out just the right amount to nicely complement their aviator sunglasses. None, however are really fat. They are the baton swinging equivalents of Jeopardy’s tournament of Champions line-up. These look like anti-social, bullying assholes that never would have made it in other calling but one where you had to scream at people and hit them.

At one point, early in the evening, my friend from Kentucky and I push into the crowd to photograph a Lebanese boy perched on a man’s shoulders. I know he is Lebanese, and not Egyptian, because of his beautiful, long eyelashes. He wears what for a boy of his age in North America would be a Karate-Kid headband. Except on this band the rising sun has bled out into the white fabric, making the band solid red. Magic-markered on top is an Arabic slogan I cannot read. He has a Lebanese flag tied around his shoulders and is waving another in his right hand. In his left hand he has a toy M-16 (There is no such thing as a toy Kalashnikov, but that hasn’t stopped children from playing with them).

We wander over to the line of little men. They encircled the entire crowd of protesters and with bent arms interlocked at the elbows prevented the crowd from moving at all, let alone marching. This uterus-of-the-State was two to six rows thick, depending on the location. It soon began to operate like a diode: the arms would part for anyone in the middle who wanted to leave, but not for anyone on the outside who wanted to get in. By gently squeezing in on the crowd, the police where able to whittle down the size of the protest over the course of the evening.

I stood face to face with a similar line once in Ottawa (I missed the anti-globalization boat, despite being close to both Seattle and Quebec City at the right times). There, the closer I got, the more intimidating it was. Canadian riot police are accessorized to bionic levels, have expressionless faces, and stand in geometrically perfect formations. Their inhumanity is all the more chilling for its aberrance in Canada: we actually have guys like this? It’s like they brought them out of the freezer just for this event, and will shortly put them back in to preserve them for the next protest, scheduled to take place in three years.

In Egypt my impression was reversed. Riot police here never walk; they run everywhere. Their approach is thus announced by the chilling sound of 200 heavy-soled boots hitting pavement synchronously. The sound tightens a spot deep in my gut, somewhere between the navel and the pubic bone. And I like it, because I think, “this is it man, this is it”, and I feel like crouching down and touching the bare earth before making my move. It all happens so fast.

But now they were not running, but rather standing in a kind of loose, undisciplined formation. And the closer I got, the less I felt that these people could club me to death. They yawn. They look around. One man’s cupped hand moves down to readjust himself in his pants (maybe his mind was wandering to the places it does when one must stand at boring events for hours on end).

We see their eyes. They are expressive, which makes them human. They look alternatively bored or scared. I’m not sure how I can tell this. Their eyes are not like the eyes I am used to staring into. Staring into them is like sighting through peep-sight: at the centre of a white background lies a black circle. I cannot distinguish the iris from the pupil. I think it is the size of the white that I see that tells me they are scared or tired: it is an estimation of how far back the eyelids are pulled, or how heavy and drooping they look.

Yet I am not totally reassured: scared and bored creatures can be among the most vicious. When children are bored, they burn ants with magnifying glasses. Were the kids of Columbine vicious or scared and bored? Lindy England and Charles Graner were just bored. Fear leads to disproportionate responses, and boredom to imagination and the employment of the devices in one’s control.

I would see that this was true later when some psychological tension crystallized suddenly and their was a bout of clubbing and running. No one could tell why it started – it happened so fast. I was up against the waist-high wall of the stairs down to the metro talking to a middle-aged human rights lawyer who trains activists. She tells them what their rights are when they are arrested and the like. But she said, “interestingly, a lot of the NGO’s are asking for more practical advice”. Of course: a pair of running shoes, a phone call to the right person, and techniques for resisting torture are more useful in avoiding problems here than knowledge of one’s due process rights.

The hitting erupts right in front of us, sending people flying like sparks from exploding fireworks. She mumbles “oh, shit” and scurries off to the right. Now the human rights worker is taking off – is this my cue, I wonder? I jump up on the wall and ready myself to jump down 12 feet onto a stairway leading into the metro if necessary, but it subsides. Then the gate to the metro is closed and I imagine what would happen if a crowd of people tried to escape down with the gate closed.

You would only notice one or two steps in. By then, those behind would be falling and pushing and the whole crowd, not knowing the gate is closed, would keep converging on the stairway, pushing the front line until they hit the mesh. They would then try to climb up a few feet, and back over the heads of those who would continue to be compacted down the stairs against the gate.

Better not try and escape the next explosion by jumping, I think. It was after this that I made my way to the building, to try to view the crowd from a safe distance. On the transformer, peering over the crowd, I said to my Spanish journalist friend:

“How can you say that there is adequate freedom of expression in this country when these people, gathered here to express themselves, are being squeezed and totally contained by riot police?”

“Oh, well, en espanol we call this “libertad de associacion”, rather than “libertad de expresion,” he answered me.

“Igual en ingles,” I replied, adding, however, that I thought his notion of freedom of expression was too narrowly constrained to freedom of the press. Even at that, it did not impress me. Are newspapers to palliate us with endless entertainment and sports columns?

This was neither in difference in language, nor a European-North American difference. I thought of the phrase popular in the European Court of Human Right’s jurisprudence on section 10 of the European Convention: freedom of the press is the “watchdog of democracy.” The fifth column naturally sets itself up – or where it does not, it should – as an adversary to government. It is the gadfly of the society too large to be kept in line by a single ambulatory philosopher.

My frustration was with the failure of categorization. Categories, in law especially, aid in comprehension and ease analysis. Often, like much of legal process, they are gross oversimplifications made necessary by limitations in the human ability to know, understand, and reason.

In short, variety and possibility are infinite whereas we are finite; our lives are more complex than we are. Or: the human brain cannot understand the human brain. So we must use categories to translate ourselves to ourselves. We cannot understand phenomena for which we ourselves are responsible without simplifying them through caricature (i.e. category).

The categories are unavoidable and more than that, useful and enlightening, but they are not things unto themselves. My Spanish friend, however, had swallowed them whole. Now he could look at a country with a fetid political climate and say that there was no real problem with freedom of expression, but perhaps there was one with freedom of association.

The failure of categories was mostly directly proved in the second half of the night, which I spent talking to police officers. I spent the first half amidst the protesters, recording their thoughts on the events. Many spoke English, and seeing me with a pad they thought I was a journalist. One woman came over to speak to me, or shout as it turned out.

“Look at how they are pushing closed the circle. Look at how the police are pushing us. This is democracy in the Middle East. I am outraged.”

I looked around. I wondered if the police understood what she was saying. If I sympathized, even nodded my head, I was afraid I might be “corrected” with a baton. I kept looking at the woman, who was about my mother’s age I think, and taking notes silently.

“Tell your people abroad that Bush and Blair are creating terrorism here. My children, when they see other children slaughtered, they are so angry. I am sure half of our country will join Al Qaeda.”

“Tell them to stop the bombing. We don’t want your bullshit aid, just stop the bombing.”

This capacity to criticize both her own country and the West in the same breath gave a complexity and texture to the message that wasn’t present in the slogans chanted by the crowd. This I liked. The woman was a person of thought. And her conviction impressed me. Her face was red and veins were bulging in her temples and neck. This wasn’t tear gas and adrenaline, this was her life, and her children’s lives.

She told me to tell the people in my country, and so I am telling you.

I met another young man with a poster in English and Arabic. He translated some of the slogans for me. They don’t have quite the nuance, but slogans never do.

“Hosni Mubarak sad el nom”, or wake up. “Hosni Mubarak el abdallah”, a sell-out. (That means a sell-out to the USA, Ezz adds, just to be sure I understand).

A chant of “Allah Akbar” erupts from the crowd spontaneously and carries on for a few minutes. I’ve got that one, no need to translate I say to Ezz.

“Ya Nasrallah, Ya Habib, dammar Tel Aviv”, which means Nasrallah, our friend, destroy Tel Aviv. They chanted the same thing when the war in Iraq was beginning, but with Ya Saddam, ya habib, he tells me.

These people must be mad if they’re calling Saddam and Nasrallah their friends, I thought. Their perception of reality is completely warped. They are the other, the militants who will never understand me, and whom I will never understand. But I realized: the reason they chanted it with Saddam in 2003 and with Nasrallah now is because Habib and Tel Aviv rhyme in Arabic. It’s just a slogan. It’s meant to be provocative. Protests are not debates.

I realized the importance of this point later when I was reading Yahoo news. The report was on a similar rally in front of Al-Azhar Mosque. Al-Azhar is the oldest university in the world, pre-dating the early Italian and Spanish and English universities by several hundred years in most cases. However, like most things in Egypt, it’s days of glory are faintly remembered relics of the past. I have heard it still functions, but the Al-Azhar name belongs in the Egyptian museum in Midan Tahrir along with the Sphinxes and sarcophagi. Maybe one day the University will again be worthy of that great name, and its students will be able to march on the museum and reclaim what is rightfully theirs.

The piece reported that the chant I have translated above was chanted by the crowd. There was no explanation, it was merely stated as a fact. Facts speak for themselves, right? I’m not so sure. What do endlessly looped newsclips, of dead people or explosions teach us? They are facts, but we do not have the tools for assimilating them. To me this kind of news is like reading the phonebook, except that it is entertaining. All of those numbers, all of those facts, exist, but mean nothing to me until I must call on one of them. I will never remember them all since they appear random and unconnected to me. Some web of meaning – such as my network of friends and family – could allow me to assemble and remember those that are important to me. Taken in bulk, however, the material is overwhelming and unhelpful – totally unhelpful.

So it was with this news piece. The fact that people chanted “Ya Nasrallah, Ya Habib, dammar Tel Aviv” tells very little on its own. It is a more violent choice than “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido” as a chant, but it is not a spoken sentence, and cannot be seen as a quotation.

Later I did speak with some people and they frightened far more than the chants did. I asked what they thought of Hizbollah. I had told them what I thought: that they sadly dragged their whole country, much of it unwilling, into a conflict that would bring only suffering to all. The one fellow replied:

“It [Hizbollah] is nice. Every day they kill at least two. I think if they get more, everyone, not just me, will be very happy.”

I write this down, then ask, “what do you think of this protest?”

“I think this will stop nothing. I want police to leave people to do what they want. They say we are protecting buildings, property, other bullshit.”

Suddenly he stops. A man is walking nearby us. After he passes, the speaker explains,

“He could be police. Everything is police here.”

I write this down. And pause. Then my friend says,

“It’s nice to get what you want, isn’t it.”

“Huh?”

“It’s nice to get what you want. But that was just a bullshit. Egyptians are not stupid people.”

I realize that he is referring to what he has just said. He means that he has told me what I want. I must have understood from the hands, because seeing the transcription of his words in my notebook later I see it doesn’t give this impression

I think: again! Thank goodness I didn’t tear out that page of my notebook and run off holding it up like a winning ticket at company Christmas raffle. Some journalists might sent it right down the wire to be published, making these people look extreme when in fact they are very reasonable. I was looking for my story: “If they kill more than two everyone will be happy” is a great boxed quotation.

I ask if he means that he does not believe Hizbollah is nice. He replies,

“No, that is a bullshit. It is small compared to what I think.”

And our conversation ends with me staring at him, wondering what it is, exactly, that he thinks. But I can’t see tell his iris from his pupil, and I feel like without that, I’ll never know.

The second half of the evening I spent talking with police officers. I first tried to talk to the guys with interlocked arms, the ones who were my age or younger. I asked a couple in Arabic where they where from and how old they were. They wouldn’t talk. I got only one to tell me he was from Alexandria. At first many seemed to not realize I was talking to them. Either I didn’t realize I wasn’t supposed to talk to them, or didn’t realize that they weren’t supposed to talk to me, but they looked as if they had been awakened from their wandering mental state by a slap when they realized I wanted to talk to them. Their faces would go suddenly stern like real military men. But still they showed their age: their eyes would drop and avoid mine rather than staring proudly ahead.

So I tried the officers. Many of them spoke English, but unlike the protesters, they did not come to me to talk – I had to go to them. I opened with the first officer by asking him what he thought of the protest. Wrong. They don’t have opinions on the protest; they are there to do a job.

I said, “May I ask you factual questions”. He nodded. “How many police officers are here tonight?” Wrong. That information is part of the job we are here to do and cannot be disclosed. “Five hundred?” I ask. He smiles and shrugs. Later I would meet another officer and say “One thousand?” He gave a nod that somehow told me I was getting warmer. I never had the chance to try fifteen hundred. But I’d have know if I was over, because they would have given a different nod. When people cannot confirm or deny the veracity of a fact, chances are its true. If it is actually untrue the temptation to negate is too great to be contained.

“Am I in danger here as a Westerner?” No he says. I had asked this question at another protest about two weeks earlier when I started taking pictures. I asked a protester with whom I was walking and his reply was disconcertingly vague. “Take them,” he simply said.

In the course of the night we met a number of officers, all of whom were friendly, and many of whom joked with us and offered us cigarettes. I did not accept the cigarettes, but they sure seemed nice to offer.

There was one particularly large fellow. Mustachioed, but not in the Turkish/Arabic style. More like a route 66 traffic cop. He typified the description I gave earlier and I suspected he would survive at least the first two to three rounds in an ultimate fighting ladder tournament. He was a mean mofo.

I went over and asked in Arabic if he spoke English. He replied in English that he did. As it turned out his English was impeccable. This immediately threw me off. It was like seeing the lovely, perfect handwriting our roughest guide, Bill Rankins. Bill Rankins had been in the Pen on at least one occasion. His handwriting was too pretty to come from a man like him. Similarly, the officer’s English was unsettling because it couldn’t emanate from someone in the category in which I had already placed him.

He was very nice, and oh so polite. He saw the bag slung across me had a Canadian flag sewn on and said,

“I have a friend from Edmonton, Alberta, here in Cairo.” He began telling me about all the wonderful things they did together. How could a man with a friend from Edmonton Alberta ram a baton into skulls?

“You see that we are here unarmed tonight.”

“But it is not like that at other protests,” I reply. “Could I be beaten if I attended one of those protests?”

“No, we have instructions not to harm foreigners.”

Pause.

“But if you are in the middle of – excuse me – that shit [referring to the body of the protest] doing something, then you can expect something too.”

As my friend from Kentucky put it later, even oppression has a human face.

This friend has a spirit that missed its time, and was born too late, and we seem naturally to understand one another. Later, I gave him a leather bound notebook from an ancient atelier de reliure in the Bazaar. I was happy about this because men don’t so often give each other gifts. I haven’t seen anything like it in fifty years, so I wrote “To David Degner, a book from another time for a journalist from another time. Cairo, 2006, +jamie”

You can find photos taken of the protest by David at bloggingcairo.com, posted by me. I have been having trouble posting my photos on here.

2006-07-23T12:39:00.000+03:00

From Soweto to the Southern Suburbs of Beirut

The South African townships (especially Soweto, which is primo inter pares) have, as a result of their place in history, acquired a mythical aura. The word itself, especially in the definite plural “the Townships”, is immediately identifiable as referring to South Africa. It is synonymous with poverty, uprising, and the struggle for justice – all nice, easy, powerful metaphors. Yet, the Townships have layers and subtleties that make them awkward to assimilate: they’re not bite-size like Ellis Island, for example. Succinctly: they are not yet museum pieces; they are living communities that still exist.

The Townships have caught the attention of tourists and backpackers – and tour providers. Visiting the Townships is a chance to see the “real” South Africa (or ease the consciences the day after their wine tour in Stellenbosch). Lonely Planet (I don’t know about the Concierge at the Hilton) will tell you just where to reserve a bus that will take you into the township. There, your guide (a bona fide township resident himself) will show you around. Some tours include visiting a family in the township and having a meal with them. At the end of your day, you climb onboard the bus and ride back to the parts of town where the banks have are two guards with pump-action .12 gauges and german-shepherds at the door and the streets are surveilled by CCTV cameras.

When I was in South Africa, I did not take a township tour. And heaven knows, I did not venture into the townships on my own.

I did not take the tour because it seemed to me like a bizarre form of poverty tourism. It seemed voyeuristic and all too easy. By design, it is a painless moral adventure. At its highest, the experience is merely vicarious. In many cases I suspect the visitors do not experience in any way what is significant about the Townships.

Second, there is always something off-putting about participant observation. What I mean is that it is much tidier to become acquainted with and visit things that are finished, such as Nelson Mandela’s prison, Ellis Island. This is the usual approach; our paradigm of visitation and of study operates in the past tense. We visit pyramids, not construction sites. Visits to living things connote that they are museum pieces. The insult is quite real, in many cases, since we only know one way of observing things, and that is ex post facto.

But there are still people living in the Townships, and their lives suck. Who wants to visit that?

The townships came back to me as a result of a recent conversation with an Oxford M.Phil student in Development (my chosen programme for next year) who is studying Arabic with me here in Cairo.

We were discussing travel to Lebanon at this time of conflict. She came out of the corner swinging at the idea: it’s offensive; it’s insulting; it’s stupidly dangerous; Oxford would call it unethical. She said the last point with particular gravitas. Clearly it should much impress me. Not only did Oxford say so, but I would soon be a student there, either thinking that too, or being told to I should.

In short, to travel with a purpose, such as journalism, might be acceptable, but not to go merely to “check out the war” could never be.

There is, a bit like poverty tourism, a new form of conflict tourism. One could add disaster and protest tourism. How many people at WTO protests are there for tear gas and adrenaline (the soundtrack to their sexy lives courtesy of iPod, which never skips while running from the cops), and how many because they genuinely want to influence the meetings? The banality of urban life is so mind-numbing that young people seek temporary, and (they believe) safe exposure to anarchy, disaster or war just to remind themselves that they are alive.

Last year some students from the Summer Course at the American University in Cairo decided to go to Iraq to “check out the war” after exams. What else is there to do before school starts? Mercifully, they met coalition troops a short time after crossing the border. The soldiers gave them taps on the bum and sent them scurrying back home, undoubtedly giggling to one another about having the coolest story ever. “My summer in Iraq” is about the best material imaginable for picking up in frosh week.

These kids were idiots. Their attitude was wrong. But (as someone with a genetic need to take risks)I began to wonder about what “purpose” one should have in doing dangerous things? What might be the adequate purpose my friend was referring to?

She argued that it was not our place to remain in or enter zones of conflict. Foreign students at the American University in Beirut who wanted to stay as an act of solidarity were offending rather than comforting. Those Lebanese to whom they wished to show their support might not be able to get out because they did not have foreign citizenship or financial means. How would they be happy at some rich American kid giving up their ticket out on a cruise-ship in the name of some naïve form of solidarity?

There is something disquieting about Western countries’ ability to call a time-out on the field of war, obtain certificates of safe-passage, and evacuate their fawn-eyed citizens, trembling like startled woodland creatures, before the killing resumes. I suspect there is a card with this power in the game Magic (e.g. “returns all creatures to hand; can be played at any time”) – but in life?

That, however, is a problem of nationalities and wealth. To refuse to leave when given this chance is in fact a resounding rebuke of that injustice – as long as the consequences are accepted. What is more offensive is the expectation that the Embassy can and always will play the “get out jail free” card. It’s like relying on the existence of the Coast Guard or Search & Rescue as an excuse to be unprepared while boating; on doctors and technology as an excuse for bad health. The Coast Guard and hospitals are indispensable – but it is always preferable to take responsibility for one’s self and rely upon one’s own resources first. The nonchalance and sense of entitlement flowing from nationality and wealth are worse than nationality and wealth themselves, because they are easier to abolish. Indeed, they can be eliminated immediately by fiat of will alone.

That I think deals with the foreigners who choose to stay in contrast with Lebanese who choose to stay. What about when those who possess the means choose not leave while many who wish to go lack them? It is a simple matter of personal freedom of choice. A less loaded example, I think, makes the point more clearly.

Say I am traveling on budget of 25 USD a day. This budget obliges me to stay in very modest, shared lodging. In reality, I want very much to stay in the fanciest hotels. In my dorm room I meet another traveler who tells me that she just sold her business for 200 million USD and is backpacking around the world to find herself. I am enraged: she has the means to stay in all the hotels I dream about, but chooses the same roach-motel that I am forced to stay in. Can I blame her for this choice, and ask reproachingly: “why do you stay here when you don’t have to? It is not your place.”

Just as every person has a different tolerance of discomfort and uncleanliness in their accommodation, so too does every person have a different tolerance of risk. What seems suicidally dangerous to one, may be quite normal to another (e.g. mountaineering). The coexistence of the fact of differential means and the principle of autonomy or freedom of choice compel me to accept the roach-motel millionaire and the willing refusenik backpackers who are in Beirut as of today.

If that result is repugnant, then one must seek an equilibrium of means, not an elimination of choice. The choice of a person who can leave to stay will not inherently or always be offensive or reprehensible in my view.

However, I don’t think it is a contradiction to then say that there can be enquiry into the basis for that choice to stay in a zone of conflict. The simple statement “yes, you can, but I don’t think you should” expresses how I believe this second, softer line analysis can be accommodated within the first more categorical point that people have a right to stay. The judgement is esthetic, however. One person’s reason may be distasteful, and another’s honourable, but there is no basis there for stopping the former.

My friend from the United States, as I have said, sought to base her judgment on whether there was a “purpose” to being in a conflict zone. Her concept of purpose was essentially articulated around an ethic of altruism: Self-sacrifice (i.e. putting one’s self in the line of fire) is justifiable when it serves others (for example, by educating them about the situation through journalistic writing). Acts of solidarity, the mere desire to bear witness, and (worst of all) any personal sense of excitement could not justify remaining in or traveling to a war zone.

I found this idea of purpose puzzling. Defined in this way, purpose seemed to me a measure of the extent to which an act benefits others (society), but not the self. From the perspective of each person, “society” was humanity minus one – one’s self. But to every person other than me whose view of society is constructed in this way, I am a part of society. Unless I am a solipsist, and without making the argument “6 billion people minus one can’t be wrong”, it seems to me more plausible that I am a part of society, than to say that I am not.

Now, tracing the line of purpose around the sphere of the self makes less sense. Even if the goal is benefiting “society”, I can do so by benefiting myself. For example, my friend would be acting “purposefully” if she did something for me. It seems clear, then, that if I were to do for myself what she would otherwise do for me, from her perspective it must be good. How then, by changing point of view and adopting my perspective could it be bad?

Unwilling to accept that an action could be good or bad merely based on this shift in perspective, I see only one alternative for defending this view of “purpose”. The question become one of impact: If one could do more good when labouring for others than for one’s self, it might be wrong to serve one’s self. Because although in absolute terms a person doing something for himself would do good, he would do less good than if he worked for others. Thus, he would be underperforming, so to speak, relative to the good he could do for the world.

Amusingly, if the same were true of others, then it would also be in everyone’s self-interest to work for the benefit of others since if they did the same, each person would benefit more than if he worked for himself. However, every so-called altruistic act could potentially be rationalized as self-interest. The normative argument is not advanced and the question is transformed to be what is the basic nature of human beings?

Even accepting the utilitarian premise – that good to “society”, where society includes one’s self, should be maximized – there are two stumbling blocks to the “others” orientation.

First, I suspect that people’s efforts on behalf of others are not greater than those on behalf of themselves. On the contrary, I fear that when people are shamed by this ethic of purpose into not doing things for themselves any longer, the result is lethargy. It is a hope – more than a belief – of mine that the positive emotions motivate more than the negative ones.

I could be wrong in my assessment of human nature. I just finished a book about Dr. Paul Farmer called Mountains Behind Mountains, subtitled “A man who would cure the world”. Farmer’s energy exceeds that of any living human being of whom I am aware, with one possible exception in Jim Palardy. He says, about what makes him tick, that “if you’re making sacrifices…you’re trying to lessen some psychic discomfort.” Most of my nuits blanches have been spent with the sword of Damocles hanging over me…

Second, especially when thinking societally, it is difficult to estimate effects. For example, my friend said that in this moment she could have more impact in southern Lebanon by writing her Congressman than by being there. I don’t know, but there might have been better examples: this didn’t seem like an example where a letter would have much effect.

The statement impressed me, however, with its exceeding humility. A young, energetic, driven and intelligent American woman focusing on the Middle East in her studies believed that her biggest impact is through a letter writing campaign to her Congressman. I would have expected her to consider at least possible the prospect of one day becoming a policy-maker, a professor, the next Robert Fisk, or a Congresswoman. Then, remembering the horrors she would have seen with her own eyes in Lebanon, she could act accordingly.

“We know what we are, but we know not what we may be”. It would be an error to excuse one’s self from the present in the name of the future, but, a person’s full impact will not be made in a day. Most powerfully of all, they may reverberate after their death along the walls of the deep canyon of the centuries.

So I am compelled to provide my standard. I have already suggested that there may be good and bad attitudes in making the choice, the good being self-reliance, and the bad being expectation of rescue and sense of entitlement. I would be content – amazed, even – if people simply took responsibility for their actions.

Responsibility requires assumption of risk. Assumption of risk requires understanding and information about the risk one is assuming, lest obliviousness be taken for courage. Laika, the first dog in space was not courageous; Yuri Gargarin, the first man, was. I hasten to add that assuming great risks is not prima facie evidence of not understanding or appreciating them. It may be madness (of a sort), but it is not ignorance or stupidity, although those are very soothing lies.

It is on the basis of that principle that I couldn’t bring myself to respect the students who went to Iraq. It seemed clear to me that they neither understood the risks nor were prepared to assume the consequences for their actions.

In fact, I wondered if one of the reasons they did not take responsibility for themselves wasn’t precisely because they assumed others exist to serve them. Like children at a movie theater who leave the drink and half-finished popcorn on the floor when they would be so easy to carry to the bin, saying “the janitor is paid to clean that up after me”, I wondered if they didn’t go saying “it’s alright, my government exists to take after me”.

There comes a point where it no longer suffices to live vicariously through books, museums or the internet, letting others take care of our education – or lives. When this point comes, many think: now others will live vicariously through me, as I live through others. They become teachers, writers, parents – whatever they wish – and lead meaningful lives because they are depended upon. For them, the progression is from dependence to being depended upon, and not to independence. It’s no wonder, if that is all they knew, as slaves will own slaves if given the chance.

I am indebted to all the teachers I have had – both in and out of the classroom. When I know something that others do not (this experience is infrequent, but has occurred) I have always tried to teach them. But learning, I think, has its own finality distinct from teaching. Learning precedes teaching, and may be justified without it.

This left me asking: who among us is living? How many are in contact with the raw materials of human existence, and how many are devoted to its infinite refinement and recycling? Have you seen a river, a tree, a mountain, or a knife with blood on it? Have you walked or paddled or pulled a trigger? Have you carried a corpse, smelled burning rubber or heard 200 black boots on hot black tarmac?

As Robert Service asks in his poem The Call of the Wild “Have you … ‘Done things’ just for the doing, letting the babblers tell the story”? There is a purpose to things that begin – and end – within the self.

My mind returned to the example of the townships. I still thought it was crass in most cases. But it was the attitude, not the act, which made it crass. Even so, I would, I think, rather see people in Soweto than at the BMV pavilion on the Cape Town waterfront. Maybe one or two them will be moved – even if only by their own preposterousness.

Rather that than what my friend from Oxford would have me do – stick to the places where I belong, where the prices are high and the tourists abound, typing letters to my congressman from my laptop before dinner.

2006-07-21T17:34:00.000+03:00

Eating at Banquets

Today was the Arabic Language Institute’s end of year party.

There were little sketches, recitations and performances put by the students who had taken electives – the music elective sang or played ‘ud, the Qur’an and Bible electives read some of their favourite verses, and so on. My group did a short play with word games in colloquial Egyptian.

The gates to the banquet – tantalizingly laid out next to the entrance, and near my table – were flung open after the show. This was mandatory. Egyptians are a ravenous lot and won’t stay for long at any event once the food is served. I am told – for I haven’t yet been to one – that dinner is often served after midnight at Egyptian weddings for precisely this reason.

I have attended several banquets here (they are a favourite for group events, as in North America) and I have noticed three things.

First, Egyptians are as shy about ravishing the banquet as university students in North America. In Canada, all (except university students) hang back a bit from the buffet after the lids are lifted. No one knows just why, but something unknown causes North Americans to want to show that they’re not too hungry, that they’re a light eaters, or that they don’t need the food.

I’m not sure whether it is to be expected or if it is surprising that eating is shunned in an obese culture such as mine. It is a psychological phenomenon roughly equivalent to closing one’s eyes to hide. Weight is seen on the waistline, not the dinner plate. (Although if others never see you eat it might strengthen the case when saying “I never eat – it’s the curse of my slow metabolism”)

One American girl at our table wanted to go for more vine leaves but confessed she was embarrassed: “I don’t want them to think I’m a fatty.” She was thin as a rail. You wouldn’t hear an Egyptian say that, thin or not. (In fact, until today I thought that after about 1970 or grade 5, whichever came first, you wouldn’t hear a North American say “fatty” either).

I should say that this desire not be seen eating is only present in a certain class of North Americans. The Polaroids immortalizing those who a) managed to get their meal free at the 72 oz. steak place (by finishing it) or b) ate the most at Pizza Hut’s all-you-can-eat Tuesday caution me against over-generalizing.

In any case, there is no shame in eating here: the administrative staff swarmed the table like killer bees. The thirty of them could be found in the first thirty-five spaces in line, and I can assure you it wasn’t our politeness that let them go ahead.

Second, banquets are devoured incredibly quickly here. I consider myself, to my regret, a fast eater. I am also a big eater. But I do not rival the Egyptians with whom I have eaten at banquets.

I was generously invited to an end of year banquet of all Cairo Rotary clubs. The speeches seemed interminable. It was shortly after my arrival and about the only words I could catch were “giddan” and “yaani”. Imagine listening to two hours of speeches in which all you understand is “very” and what would translate into Canadian English as “eh.” (for non Canadians, it means something like: “you know what I’m saying?”)

Blah blah very blah blah, eh? (repeat, ad nauseam)

But I was happy to be there and take in this event. You start noticing the neatest little details when you hear people talk without understanding the meaning of the words. It is like music in a foreign language: as pure sound it takes on a different and purely esthetic quality. There are some compositions based on this principle – the sung portions are merely syllables, or consist of counting from one to one-hundred.

I have some recordings of such works by the Pearson College choir (of which I was sadly not a part) and they are very beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that they have moved me to tears. Actually, I have never cried listening to them, but rather than the music’s inability, it was my own that kept them from flowing. Socrates is the only man of whom I know who is said to have been able to move to tears in this way with speech alone. It is said that he was so expressive and rhetorical that he could cause a crowd to cry reciting to them the alphabet!

Perhaps by the time food was served at the Rotary banquet people were ready to leave, but I have never see a whole table of middle-aged people wolf down food so fast. Toward the end of the meal I reached for a plate of salad in the middle of the table. Before I could get it a waiter swooped in and carried it away. Sensing my disappointment, the Rotarian next to me called the waiter to have him bring it back. Embarrassingly, long after everyone else’s plates were cleared, the salad was brought back from the brink of garburator – for me. I didn’t know if it was worse to take it or leave it. So I took it.

I wondered why I ate so fast compared to most North Americans. I think these traits were acquired eating around the campfire and the table of cook-shacks in the Bush. The first axiom – big – is necessary because you enjoy the good meals while you can get them. The second axiom – fast – is a product of the first: you need to get down as much food as possible before others beat you to it, or you have to hit the trail. A good cook (and she is the best) will bury the table in rich dishes, but it still has a way of disappearing quickly.

Only in this context (speaking of how hunters, wranglers and cowboys eat) do I feel like can I quote Louis L’Amour without feeling like I am inviting the rejection of my whole message as fanciful. L’Amour always makes a point in his books where the characters go hungry of saying that those who haven’t eaten in a very long time eat slowly – not quickly – when food is put before them. I, like most, have never verified the truth of that proposition. But I can say that those who expect not to eat for a very long time eat quickly.

I never recovered from those first meals. I still eat every meal like a meal on hunter-change day, or as if it were my last (the latter simile being less accurate, but more accessible). And I cannot waste food – I physically cannot see food wasted. I would sooner eat to the point of pain and lie like a wolf, its belly physically swelled with meat, for three days in rest, than waste. In my mind it may be weeks before I eat again. Of course, this is especially ill-adapted to civilized life: when do we ever miss a meal?

Secretly, I confess to longing to miss one. Adaptation to hardship, strangely, is destructive in times of plenty.

Why do Egyptians eat quickly? It would be wrong to say that Egyptians – at least those at the banquets I’ve been to – run any risk of hardship. Yet there is a little remnant of it flowing in their veins. (A topic I hope to discuss later) Apart from that, I don’t know.

The Bedu, I should say (Bedouin is in fact singular), do not eat as the Cairenes do. When I ate with them in their gardens in Sinai, they would not themselves eat until we had completely finished our meal. I wasn’t sure why. Elizabeth told me that this was traditional hospitality: guests eat first and separately from the hosts, so that they may be offered the best food. Viewed in a certain way, I suppose, you might think the host does not wish to reveal their poverty by what they later eat. Although intended for the guest’s comfort, anyone not moved and put somewhat ill-at-ease by that combination of pride and poverty must have a very small hear indeed. Yet, it fosters something greater than comfort or pity: admiration.

I wondered, however, if the Bedu didn’t just keep different hours. By sundown after a day of hiking I was starved. They, on the other hand, are somewhere between the Spaniards and the Argentinians, and take their evening meal long after dark. Also, though they had had no foreign visitors in one month, I wondered if they didn’t prefer just to be alone. Conversation – difficult though it was at times with my Arabic – was an opening to our continued presence for a time; its cessation unmistakably invited us to retire to our corner of the Garden, leaving the family to eat together, alone.

Third constat re: banquets – important people get served at their seats. I can’t say that I know the buffet to be North American, or European innovation, but I have always thought it couldn’t have any other origin. And everyone knows: you get up and serve yourself at a buffet. A buffet at which you are served by waiters is only subtly different, and yet that seems to me to completely subvert its purpose and attractiveness.

This is one example of a large number of things that are so close but yet so far from home here in Egypt. Generally, imported things have that feeling to them. For you approach them with expectations: a sense of what they should, ought to, or must be. When experiencing something wholly foreign, I am unencumbered by the expectation that it be one way or another. On the contrary, it is sometimes disappointing when it is like something from home. All is new, and exciting to discover.

But when I am told: this is a banquet, and I see that it is not, it can be unnerving. This is why people often experience a greater culture shock in the seemingly familiar countries than in the vastly different ones. Consider Great Britain: they speak English, are white, and like beer, meat and potatoes. It looks like a match made in heaven for any North American. Upon discovering that the British are not like us at all, the shock is all the more profound for the lack of preparation and psychological defences erected against it. Thus, the traveler to Timbuktu is prepared for – and delighted by – the total foreignness of the place, whereas Americans in Oxford invariably (and annoyingly) complain incessantly.

Egyptian cafes provide a better example of what I mean than banquets.

They have some European cafes here, notably Costa Coffee. Mercifully, I haven’t seen a single Starbucks or anything with the word “Seattle” in it. (MacDonald’s, Pizza Hut and Hardees, however, are ubiquitous). There are also a number of Cafes, such as Cilantro, that are home grown but try to be European.

These places come close, but never quite succeed. They are missing that je ne sais quoi perfectionné par les Parisiens, mais jamais exporté. (One exception to that, I am told, may have been Beirut. But the past tense is obligatory in that sentence) It’s like a machine: you might program one to replicate every caress of the fingertip, flutter of the tongue and angle pelvis, but it could never make love. Rather than being warm, human and seductive, the experience is cold, mechanical and frequently unsettling.

At Costa Coffee, cakes are sold whole, rather than pieces. The price in the display case is for a whole cake. If you would like a piece, please divide this price by twelve, roughly. And the items under the glass are not actually for sale. In the great Egyptian tradition, they have been embalmed and sit permanently on display, giving you a shriveled and somewhat unappetizing (but highly durable) sense of what you might get brought out to you if you order a croissant.

The other day I ordered steamed milk at Cilantro (which was on the menu, lest I be blamed of making an unfamiliar request). After about five minutes the waiter came back: sir, we just want to make sure whether you want that steamed milk hot or cold. But hey, I’m glad he checked.

The biggest problem with the cafes is the omnipresence of the waiters. Many cafes seem to have a 1:1 ratio of waiters to people sipping coffee. They maddeningly open the door for you any time you come within a ten foot radius of it, inside our outside the café. If you so much as look in the window to see if a friend is there, or come down from upstairs to talk with someone you know, the three nearest waiters will spring into action and fling the door open, just in case. The very instant you finish the last drop of your drink (sometimes before) the cup is whisked away, leaving the distinct feeling that your every movement was being watched the whole time.

In order to maintain uniform quality, all of Cilantro’s food is centrally packaged (I am tempted to say manufactured). The sandwiches are the kind that come in triangular plastic boxes with expiry dates on stamped on them by the machine that seals them. The salads too. If you order one to stay, they dump it, head first, into a porcelain bowl. All the garnishes, nicely arranged on the top in the plastic container, find themselves buried under a mound of unusually pale romaine lettuce. You are left staring down at a salad that looks like it consists entirely of the base of the inner leaves of the head of lettuce, the ones that are left after you strip off anything responsible for the plant’s photosynthesis. It’s barely cafeteria food really, but it’s some of the most expensive of this genre you can find in Egypt.

In short, it’s sterile. But since most occidentals’ barometers are located in their (sheltered) duodenums, sterility is good.

2006-07-14T18:43:00.000+03:00

From Cairo, you go down to Alexandria, or up to Aswan. In Egypt, up is south and down is north: that is how the River Nile flows. This was not hard for me to get used to as Upper Canada and le Bas-Canada were similarly named according to the flow of the St. Lawrence. Encore aujourd’hui, de Montréal on descend à Québec.

I asked around at school about going to Alexandria. “Oh, you mean Alex,” somebody said.

Only the rickety mini-buses and shared taxis leaving from the unpaved lots under the bridge near the Hilton Ramses still go to Iskandaria. All the kids at the American University call Alexandria “Alex”. Saying Alex is to them what acronyms are to the NGO business and vogue-words are to management consultants. “Alex” is Egypt sanitized, simplified and westernized, just the way they like it.

On a recent weekend I took a trip down from Cairo to Alexandria. We took the French train, which is very slow. The Egyptians chose to call their worst train the French train, and their best train the Spanish train, for reasons that are left to the traveler’s imagination. There is no English train, but there is one called TurboTrain. Apart from SuperJet, the buses generally are not named.

Alexandria’s Eastern harbour is protected from the sea by a narrow peninsula that juts out exactly West to East. On the west tip of the peninsula is a citadel named Fort Qaitbey. The citadel was meant as a human complement to the peninsula. The one guards the harbour from invaders, and the other from the waves.

We walked out onto the peninsula to see the citadel. I imagine, although I can’t be certain, that the prevailing winds are northerly there. On that day, at least, there was a strong northerly wind. The Peninsula was being battered, but holding. The fort stood tall and looked not worse for wear, though in reality it had failed long ago. A felucca – let alone a tank or a plane – is sufficient to circumvent it.

If you look closely though, there are signs that the peninsula is failing too. The north side has had to be built up with big blocks of concrete. They are poured with loops of rebar imbedded in them so that a crane can lift them into place.

One day no one will come to put more blocks where the others no longer stand. The citadel will join Cleopatra’s palace, the Great Library and the Lighthouse, at the bottom of the sea: Another fallen Ozymandias in an antique land.

It’s like Blackjack: The player’s only got one advantage, and that’s deciding when to quit. In the long run, the House always wins. The waves are the House in a game we can’t get up and walk away from, and no matter how good our run, the waves will flatten us with patience.

All along the shoreline, on the blocks of concrete, are men fishing. I was speaking in French with Elizabeth and one of the fishermen overheard us and came over. Apparently he had understood some of what we were saying, or at least recognized the language (Many people don’t recognize the Canadian French – just today an American girl at school asked “Are you speaking Argentinian?”).

The fisherman spoke to us in French. I imagined he was dredging up the remnants of grammar school drills. Today, not many Egyptians learn French. It is interesting, however, to see how French has percolated into Egyptian Arabic. Gournal is a newspaper (Journal – J is pronounced G in Egyptian Arabic); kanaba is couch (canapé); dush is shower (douche), mersi is thank you, and so on.

The commonalities between Spanish and Arabic are also interesting. The indefinite article el or al is the same, as are some words. Zeit Zaytoon is Olive oil (aceite de aceituna, at least in Latin America) for example.

One potential parallel I have recently come across is between the Arabic verb ‘and and the Spanish andar. Andar is a flexible word and I never completely understood it, even after my time in Chile. The meaning in Arabic is close to the “to be” sense of andar in Spanish (e.g. Silvia hoy anda por los 23 años). When the Arabic verb was explained to me I felt as though I suddenly understood a branch of the Spanish verb that had been troubling me. Perhaps the original meaning of andar (walk) in Spanish was fused with the Arabic homophone producing the wide range of meaning of the verb in modern Spanish usage.

There are other such oblique parallels. For example a frying pan is sometimes called sarten in Spanish. Pronounced quickly, it’s very close to the Lebanese (perhaps other dialects too) equivalent of Bon Appetit.

Notwithstanding these parallels, the languages remain extraordinarily different. Communication with the fisherman was easier in French than it would have been with me speaking Arabic, but our exchanges remained elementary. Through gringo-style noun-adjective-unconjugated verb juxtapositions we understood that he had been living and working in France.

“Combien de temps ça fait que vous êtes là?” We asked, thinking it must have been a recent thing – that he hadn’t yet had the chance to really pick up the language.

“Onze ans,” our friend replied.

He had been working eleven years in construction in France. His wife and children were back there now, and he had returned to Alexandria for a month to fish on the concrete blocks propping up the peninsula guarding the western side of Eastern Harbour.

He told us he arrived every day midmorning and would leave around sunset. The only real difference between him and the other fisherman on the shoreline is that at the end of the day he ate his fish rather than selling them.

“Ils les vendent?” Without waiting for his reply I deployed the most well-oiled phrase in my underwhelming arsenal of Arabic:

“Bikam il kilu?”

“Ishreen Gineeh,” he replied. Twenty Egyptian pounds a kilo…that’s about four Canadian dollars.

The fish were tiny. I reckoned ungutted it would take 6-8 to make a kilo. Our friend had about 4 in his basket. It was four thirty in the afternoon. Maybe he’d lost his touch mixing concrete in la Banlieue Nord for eleven years, but even doubling his catch would have been a pretty meager day’s wage.

Four Canadian dollars can get you a lot around here, although I can’t say exactly how much, because I don’t know what the Eyptians themselves pay for most things. Let me give you an example.

The other day I had a fresh squeezed orange juice. There are little juice bars all over Cairo. They have large sacks of whatever fruit’s juice is on offer hanging at the entrance. The bars don’t generally have sitting room. Your juice is pressed your juice into a mug and you gulp it down at the counter, pay, and leave. In one and half seconds the mug is rinsed and ready for the next client.

My Aseer burtuan kabeer (large orange juice) cost me four pounds. As usual, I didn’t have exact change, which is a fatal error in Egypt (the worst is with taxi drivers). Somehow they never have change and you end up having to pay five times the price. In this case, however, it lead to an interesting discovery.

The owner opened his till and pulled out about three one-pound notes. For the rest, he had to give me 50 piastre notes (half-pounds), of which he had a wad as thick as Das Kapital. Five pounds says the most expensive juice in that shop was one pound.

An Egyptian, however, can get some mileage out of twenty pounds. Of course, the fishermen have to subtract overhead. Leaving aside the capital investment in the fishing equipment, daily operating costs are mostly of two kinds: bait and tea.

Bait is bought in the morning. It consists of little shrimps caught in nets by other fisherman. Thread a bare, barbed hook through the body of one of the little shrimps and you won’t need anything like the fancy blue fox and pixie lures we pay five dollars for in Canada. A day’s supply might cost a few pounds.

Tea you buy throughout the day. It is impossible for Egyptian men to talk, sit, and fish – that is, to live – without tea. I imagined that perhaps out on the peninsula they would be forced into forbearance. Our friend’s hospitality wouldn’t have it.

He insisted that we have tea. I objected. It might require walking back into town and therefore take a very long time. However, realizing – difficult though it is when accustomed to a certain lifestyle – that in that moment there was no more productive thing I ought to be doing, I accepted.

A silver platter with hot water, sugar and half a dozen glasses was almost instantaneously conjured – there, where we sat, on the peninsula.

Here, the glass is normally filled about one quarter full of sugar before tea is poured. In an effort to avoid returning to Canada a diabetic, my second most ready phrase is “min gheer sukkar,” or, “without sugar.”

You have to keep this phrase well-polished and ready to be drawn and fired any moment, otherwise your tea will be made up and thrust into your hands, after which it would be impolite to protest. I’m so quick Annie Oakley would be proud of me; my tea never has sugar.

We took our tea mostly in silence. I say silence though waves were crashing around us. Silence – in the sense of the opposite of noise – is not the absence of all sound, but the absence of human sound. Nature has her sounds – some of them deafening – but these are not noise.

The forced silence was good, for we speak too much and think too little. I thought of something I had once read about the British concept of friendship – that it consisted of knowing when to leave others alone. I look forward to this over the next two years in England.

Away from the constant noise of Cairo, my mind began to wander. Place me next to the most crushing waterfall, or in the midst of the fiercest electric storm: this is not noise. They clear my mind, wash my soul, quicken my pulse and tighten my sinews. Tight like a strung re-curve bow or an exploding spinnaker flown in heavy winds.

When I see soft, bulging comfort I feel something is missing from it. It fails to inspire me. In its ease, its essence remains unrealized. Some things are made to be pulled taught and to bear forces. It may wear on them, but it is better than preserving them below their dignity.

But I fear more the anger of others in this discovery than I regret my sadness in witnessing it, so I leave be. My sadness is a double-sadness – first at the sight of things wasted, and second (perhaps a more profound sadness) at their innocence in not knowing this about themselves.

The fisherman spoke of how hard he worked in France. He worked eleven months of the year so that for one month he could come back to where he was from. Was that one month made so much better by being able to eat rather than sell his fish that it was worth giving up the other eleven? If he worked in Alexandria eleven months of the year, he probably could not afford to go fishing in France for one month a year, but I wondered if he would mind.

Did he go to France to dream for eleven months of returning to the place he had left? Fulfillment is surely more satisfying after deprivation, but I suspected the real reason was a combination of being able to fee like he “made it” in some way, and the desire to provide his children with opportunities and make a better life.

A small-town boy goes to the big city to muck out a life. Making it consists of that moment when he returns home a prince and spins tales for family and friends about marvelous things only he understands. Only he doesn’t understand them – they are too big – and he doesn’t control them – they control him.

When he comes back to show everyone just how big he made it, he can say what he wants: no one else knows the truth. It’s a marvelous show, although sometimes it can be ruined – say by a father’s visit to the city. In Cry the Beloved Country even the father, on the path to revealing the fraud, cannot resist romanticizing and aggrandizing his existence when the chance comes: on the train to Johannesburg he pretends to have made the trip many times, when in fact it is his first. It’s so alluringly easy to appear sophisticated in the eyes of the unsophisticated.

I wondered how much better – and how much freer – the lives of the fisherman’s children might be in France than in Egypt. Often, the further from the centre the stronger one’s attachment to it.

The most fervently Catholic countries are furthest from Rome. In Europe one thinks of Poland and Spain more than France, Switzerland or Italy itself. Parts of Africa, most of Latin America and the Philippines are in a league of their own. Or, to take a an example from the Middle East, many of the feuds and allegiances at the base of the Lebanese civil war are stronger today in Ottawa and Montreal than in Beirut.

Like Lt. Hiroo Onoda, the outposts have kept the conflict alive long after it perished at home. And the suggestion that it has died (in Onoda’s case, in the form of pamphlets air-dropped by the US military) serves only to strengthen the resolve, and redouble the will to resist – as if to single-handedly prove its untruth.

For a Muslim family living in France, the feeling of isolation and the sense of loss of culture and language may paradoxically strengthen these traditions. The elders in particular may try to circle the wagons as they feel increasingly cut off from their own children and grand-children with whom they are unable to relate, or even to communicate.

The process is inexorable, but full of hemorrhaging. A generation – or a few generations – may be sacrificed along the way. Rarely, I think, would one find that a person genuinely desires to cease to be like themselves and to become like others. Yet that is the only thing that might avoid the upheaval.

There was only one woman among the fishermen. I caught her holding her child in one arm, and her husband’s fishing pole in the other. I stared at her and time imploded on itself, history was short-circuited and a momentary electric arc spanned a gap of millennia, followed by aching silence. Was this her child, or one of the lost sheep of Israel? And the rod a fishing pole or Moses’ scepter?

The silence faded and I awoke from my reverie, which had almost caused me to miss this moment. I quickly switched my brand-new digital camera to video-capture mode so as not to miss the miracle. When after about fifteen minutes the waters had not yet parted, I decided to move on. There were still so many museums to see and souvenirs to buy!