In Spite of Everything, Yes
“On his wise
shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves
the sun flung spangles, dancing
coins.”
James Joyce, Ulysses
James Joyce supposed that most people’s lives were made
unhappy through the lack of fulfillment of their idealistic and romantic goals
or ideations about how their lives would or should turn out to be. That a reasonable
and thus proper temperament, therefore, for an individual to possess may be a
non-idealistic and a non-romantic one—don’t aim for the stars, in other words,
don’t expect the best, because to do so is to set oneself up for
disappointment. I say bullocks. I say dream and dream large, lo aim for the
furthest moon, the bluest sky. Joyce lived as part of the modernist movement,
experimenting with life, with language, striving to reconcile the rapid change
in culture that bridged that age whence the engine replaced the horse, whence
modern weapons of war slaughtered millions in the mud yuck trenches of that
monumental stalemate called the First Great War.
Realism meant, at that time, to a large degree, pessimism
and disillusionment. Twas indeed the end of the gilded age. Out with Byron, out
with Marvell and his Coy Mistress. No, make no mistake, the modern age had
arrived with the sturm and drang and the cacophony of a steam locomotive
blustering and thumping through the London fog. The nihilistic cloud that
descended upon the great cities of the western, industrializing world was not
misplaced. Cultural change could in no way keep up, and the resulting malaise
gripped the many like a nueraly transmitted bubonic plague. Fair enough. If
nothing else man is a learning animal.
Yet at some point the task becomes not to numb oneself down,
but rather to raise oneself up. For God or no God, the fact of the matter is
that it really comes down to a choice. A single choice. One that each of us is
faced with on a more or less daily basis. As the immortal bard inserted into
the mouth of his equally unkillable Prince of Denmark, it boils down in the end
to the most famous of lines, to be or not to be: “Whether is nobler in the mind
to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or, to take arms against
a sea of trouble, and, by opposing, end them.”
In other words, in spite of everything, yes.
Am sitting in the Sky Bar on the fourth floor of the
Bahraini International Airport, my wallet laden with riyals, dinars, dollars,
and euros, awaiting my 1:25 am flight to London. It is the start of the Eid al-Adha break, the
holiday that celebrates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his first born,
Isaac, in the hopes of pleasing his God, the same story and the same God that
reigns over the followers of all the three biggies in the
Judeo-Christian-Muslim triad. This very story and the fact that it is
celebrated seems to me to be very much in keeping with the realist
mentality—sacrifice, give up one’s happiness in order to assuage the dark
interests of the universe. The closest I can do at this time is to suck down
the Foster’s lager in front of me and see if that pleases anyone, other, that
is, than me. It seems to be already working. God really does work in mysterious
ways.
My trip here got started in a bit of a frenzy as I had the
darndest time trying to get a cab set up to take me to the hotel in Dammam, the
Carlton Al Mubaid, from which my Gulf Air bus would leave to cross the King
Fahad Causeway and bring me here, meaning, of course, to BIA, not so specifically
to the Sky Bar. As a newbie here in these parts I hadn’t understood the
necessity of arranging a driver to pick me up so many days before I actually
needed to go. So I found myself getting more and more frustrated over the past
seventy-two hours as driver after driver, service after service, explained to
me in the poorly inflected and therefore very hard to understand, Indian
accented English that given the multitudes of people, especially students,
leaving for break, the drivers availability was limited. It was very, very
limited. I finally found one yesterday who agreed to pick me up at seven pm and
I was set, until about eleven this morning when he called to say he was
canceling on me. Damn. Stress. Press on.
I had been given a list of about ten drivers from a seventy
something year old colleague from Ireland after he heard me bitching yesterday,
and I began calling, starting at the top, well, second from the top as the
bloke at the top had been the one who had just cancelled. I finally got a hold
of a man named Ansar who said that he could come for me at seven. Great. I
spent the rest of my day doing laundry, cleaning, reading, shooting hoops,
getting some items from the co-op, and packing. I had decided to call Ansar at
five to see if he was really coming, as that might still give me enough time to
find someone else if he too vanished, morphed into a desert djin. Good thing I
called. He said that as we agreed, he would be at my place at six. I gotta say,
there is something odd that happens in this part of the world; things just do
not happen as one expects. So, rather than cause a fracas and risk his not coming
at seven, as I had worked so hard to arrange, I just sucked it up, jumped in
the shower, finished packing, and was ready to go when he arrived.
When I first came to the Kingdom I had a few goals. Making
the money that I needed to both help my two boys finish their college lives and
to pay off my current debts was certainly one of them. The others were to see
the world, to learn to speak passable Arabic, and to befriend a local family.
Well the first two are underway and as of two days ago, the last two are as
well. My team teaching partner, an American man named Tom, originally from the
Chicago suburbs by way of nine years spent in Jordan, a fluent Arabic speaker
himself, mentioned to me that his wife knew a Saudi woman who was looking for a
tutor for her twenty year old son, Abdullah. I let Tom know that I was
interested and Abdullah’s mother ended up calling me. We arranged for me to
come by their house in the Ferdaws neighborhood located in the southern part of
the KFUPM campus.
(In this photo one can see the Belltower, KFUPM's iconic center of campus, Academic Ring Road, which circles the 4 square kilometer campus, and the security wall of the edge of the Saudi Aramco compound, the island of America in the peninsula, movie theater, church, golf course, and all.)
I walked down to Ferdaws, quite unfamiliar with this part of
campus, never having reason to venture this far south, and promptly came to
understand that I could not locate the family’s residence, nor the street even
upon which it lay, Abha Street. The humid evening air was still this night, my
thoughts hurling to and fro, alive with ideas about what it was that I was
about to do. What would these people be like? Would Abdullah be a spoiled
twenty year old who needed help because he just did not care enough about his
schooling to study, preferring jet setting, video games, and youtube instead?
What would it be like, what would it mean to interact with a married Saudi
woman, would it lead to something strained or borderline culturally uncouth
given the restrictions on communications between married women and any man not
their husband or non-marriageable kin? How would her husband, Abdullah’s
father, feel about her contacting me, talking to me on the phone, texting me?
I called, not wanting my lateness to be misinterpreted as a
sign of sloth or of uncaring, and was informed that Abdullah would sally forth
in a car to find me, which he promptly did. He immediately struck me as a sweet
kid, kind of goofy, shy. Abdullah wears glasses, which make his eyes appear
slightly larger than they really are, his hair is black, short, somewhat
fluffy. His speech soft and smiley.
It is with not a small amount of anxious anticipation that I
step out of his car with him and walk to their door. They live in the family
housing for the staff at KFUPM. Sort of a hodgepodge clustering of units piled
together in a bit of a maze like a claustrophobic conglomeration of concrete clusters,
all angels and overhangs and myriad small sets of stairs going in various
directions. We walk into the foyer, one door leading left and another right,
take off our shoes, as is customary in this part of the world, and go into the
room on the right, a room set up for hosting, what is referred to as the majlis in the Arab world, a word which
means both the room for hosting gatherings and also for official or
semi-official gatherings, especially when those gatherings are for civic or
tribal purposes. Three tall backed, carved wooden couches with plush, brown
fabric covering both the seat and the back, a low table in the u shaped space
between them and a large, a large and ornately framed mirror on the wall, and a
short threaded, oriental patterned carpet made up the furnishings. Two small
plates of sweets and a thermos-styled carafe of Arabic coffee set on the table
with the small, white, two-ounce porcelain cups that are used to serve it were
placed on the table in anticipation of my arrival. I am wiping the greasy sweat
that accrued during my walk down in the ninety degree, wet evening air, from my
forehead and my eyebrows. First impressions and all that.
Abdullah’s father, Mohammed, comes in, my age, a bit of a
greying comb over happening, a gap between his upper front teeth, smiling,
wearing slacks and a button shirt. Having received a Masters Degree in Business
at a small university in southern Illinois, Abu Abdullah (meaning the father of
Abdullah) is a Vice Rector at KFUPM, and is in charge of the campus newspaper,
both the Arabic and the English versions. We two sit and Abdullah pours us
coffee and brings me two plates of sweets, one consisting of small balls about
the size of doughnut holes but sort of crunchy on the outside and holding a
honey flavored cakey confection on the inside; the other plate holds squares of
a sweet, nutty consistency, something akin to pecan pie but without the pecans
and with a bit more of a cardamom, coconut, vaguely allspice flavor—“lazeez!” I say (delicious!), “shukran invijilan” (thank you very
much). After some minutes of introductions and pleasantries, how long have you
been here, do you like it here, etc., we discuss Abdullah and the desires of
his parents for helping Abdullah to pass his courses in English.
Forty minutes or so later, after his father leaves, Abdullah
explains how his grandfather (his two grandfathers, incidentally, are brothers,
a common cultural practice in this region which holds tightly to
tribal/familial affiliation) slapped him upside his head in the process of
teaching him just the right way to hold the pitcher of coffee and the small cups
when serving guests. “Like this,” he says, which, by the way, is an
exceptionally common phrase for Saudis to say.
Meeting Abdullah and his family, interacting with his
mother, mostly by text, breaching the believer-infidel wall, invigorates me.
Living in the west has created within me a lurking uneasiness with the Muslim
world. Though I resist the pull, CNN and Fox News and their ilk do an effective
job of creating fear and anxiety about the dastardly aims that lie within the
breast of the varied nations of Islam. But I was born into this world with a
smile and a glint as my shield. I was created to test the boundaries of
difference and of discomfort. I have roamed far and into places both real and
imagined, both geographical and psychological, that have tested and bruised my
ability to shine. I have aimed for far ports and for simple goals, new friends,
stunning vistas, have worked to break through barriers and to blaze trails of
personal achievement and relationship. I can’t say or know what may transpire
in my future as it relates to befriending the Al Shehri family, but I do know
that it shall not be by my hand that the friendship will end.
Before I leave their home, Abdullah’s mother brings a brown
paper bag with home cooked Arabic food for me to take home. Then she sends me a
text later in the evening, after I return to my home. In it she asks me how
much I will charge them for the tutoring of their son, informing me that as
they have a large family—there are eight children, Abdullah being the
eldest—that they will need to budget for it. My colleagues charge, depending on
who the client is, between 150 and 200 rats (Saudi riyals) per hour. I respond
and tell her simply that I am happy to have a new friend and am interested in
learning Arabic and will happily trade these experiences for the service. I also write that if she wants to give me
food sometimes that that would be terrific and that if they find that they have
extra money at the end of any month that I will accept some payment so long as
it is a small amount.
Four beers and a cognac later, a fine dish of lamb moushcush
supped, I walk out of the Sky Bar to find Gate 11, three hours of airport time
met head on and bested, my eight hour flight to London about to begin. The
flight is not bad. It runs about seven and a half hours and as it departs at
one-thirty in the morning Dhahran time, I sleep for all but about an hour and a
half of it, waking at some point drowsily to ingest a decent breakie of
scrambled eggs, potatoes, orange juice, a croissant, before falling sideways again
down into the murky corridors of sleep. In London I check through customs
quickly, grab my bag, go outside to find a bus to Galway City, as they often
call Galway in these parts.
I befriend the driver, a Hungarian immigrant who speaks good
English after ten years of driving buses here in Ireland. We two chat it up for
a solid twenty minutes before the bus leaves, standing alongside a metal
railing which borders the sidewalk where the bus is parked. Passengers come up,
pay him the nineteen euros for the one way passage, place their luggage under
the bus and then climb on up as we two blather on about how he learned his
English, about 1980s music, about country singers like Shania Twain whom he has
always loved and that formed the foundation for his learning to speak English
to begin with. He is a solidly built bloke, a squarish face with a bit of a
buzz cut, about forty-two or forty-three years old, a nose a bit like a
boxer’s, dressed in the short sleeve, white button shirt and navy slacks of a
bus driver.
He encourages me to sit in the left front seat on the bus so
that he, in his right side driving position, and I, are almost sitting next to
each other, with my position being the row behind, but far enough to his left
so that as he drives he turns his head and converses. They really do drive on
the opposite side of the road. It really is green, green here, with small
farms, shallow hills, copses of round, fertile trees. The road signs all are
written both in the Queen’s English and in Gaelic, what is called here, Irish.
The ride is two hours and forty-five minutes in length, and spans the waist of
the small nation, from the Irish Sea in the east to Galway Bay, which lies on
the Atlantic Ocean, on the west. The entire country of Ireland is roughly equivalent
to half of the size of the state of Washington.
Soon we are talking immigration policies, and he gets fired
up about the thousands of middle easterners literally pushing over the fences
at the Hungarian border and stampeding in. Dammit! He came to Ireland legally,
yeah? There is a process, there are rules to follow. The Polish man sitting
opposite me and therefore directly behind the driver, and also like me about
two steps above the driver, chimes in. His accent is heavy, and he is a bit
pudgy, has a thin and wispy beard and a round face and head, almost no hair. He
too has serious concerns about the foreigners pouring into the EU. He suggests
that instead of sending tax money and rules to those who live near the borders
and who try to protect them, that instead the governments of these countries should
send guns and bullets and that that would be a much more effective manner of
securing the borders.
It’s ISIS. It’s those people. It’s the mess that is the
cauldron, the crucible of the Middle East. It is again the modern age, the
calamity of the changes that are evolving in the world around us. And how do we
face this? What frame of mind do we adopt? Are we fearful of the other? Is the
other a man with a skin that is either lighter or darker than our own, does he
have a sword or gun in his hand or a murderous hatred in his heart? Or is the
other man just a man, as we are, just a person who desires for his children to
have a home to come back to after school at day’s end, a home that contains a
mother to prepare food for them and to hug them and a father who has a job that
gives him enough compensation so that he can hold his head high enough when he
passes his neighbor at the market to look him evenly and assuredly in the eye?
As for me, I believe that the world’s great teachers, the
Christ, the Buddha, they are enshrined in the hallowed halls of perceived
greatness precisely because they looked at each trouble that they encountered,
be it personal or cultural or international, and they believed that it was not
a problem that they beheld, but rather that the situation simply called for a
plan. Tolerance, acceptance, the desire to work through challenges and to seek
out the solution to any event instead of simply retreating and building thicker
and higher walls, be they figurative or literal, is an act of faith and history
shows us over and over again that when one leads with faith and with a smile
and a certain bravery built on the understanding that we can do so much more
than we often think that we can, good things happen. To hell with the
“realists.” To hell with shedding your own optimism in preparation for the
broken glass and indecency of this modern world collapsing around us.
“The blue fuse burns
deadly between hands and burns clear. Loose tobacco shreds catch fire: a flame
and acrid smoke light our corner. Raw facebones under his peep of day boy’s hat. How the head centre got away, authentic version. Got up as a young bride,
man, veil, orange-blossoms, drove out the road to Malahide. Did, faith. Of lost
leaders, the betrayed, wild escapes. Disguises, clutched at, gone, not here.”
James Joyce
In spite of everything, yes.
No comments:
Post a Comment