Wednesday 26 February 2014

Junk Mail: Syrian Edition

السلام عليكم و رحمه الله و بركاته
انا ارمله من سوريا دمشق , و قد تأثرت عائلتى و زوجى بسبب الاسلحه الكيميائيه مما ادى الى وفاه زوجى و اولادى انا احتاج الى شخص يخاف الله اقدر اثق فيه مشان يساعدنى بأستلام صناديق زوجى ياللى بها 7,2 مليون دولار محفوظين بمكتب الامم المتحده أغراض عائليه و هو حفظهم قبل وفاته بالولايات المتحده بسبب تأثره بالأسلحه الكيميائيه . ارجوك اخى راح اكون سعيده كتير اذا بتقدر تساعدنى .

This is an email from a woman claiming to be from Damascus, a widow who had lost her husband and children to chemical weapons (victim of recent well-publicised war or disaster: check).  She wants someone trustworthy and God-fearing (appeal to decency and morality and religious duty to help: check) to help her get boxes of her husband’s containing 7.2 million dollars (need help getting huge amount of money from somewhere: check) which he’d stored in the office of the United Nations (fabulously wealthy person dead due to war stores crates full of cash at…which UN office?  There are lots and lots.  Besides, nobody does that), and their family possessions which he’d stored in the United States (what, where,and with whom?) before his death (good planning, sir!) from the effects of chemical weapons (repeat the sad bits again after mentioning the supposed millions: check).  She will be very happy if anyone can help her.

It’s obviously a 411 scam; the letter was written by a real person somewhere.  The dialect looks accurate enough – a little uneven, could be a Syrian toning down their dialect so that other Arabs can understand - but anyone who’d watched Syrian soap operas could write that.   

But.  This was written by a real person somewhere, who might be Syrian, and even if they’re not, there are a lot of poor and displaced Arabic speakers who could write for 411 scams.  They’re not going to be earning much working that gig, and they might be getting into bigger trouble.  But all this is speculation: I don't know this hypothetical person's situation.

و عليكم السلام يا كاتبة الرسالة.
 سامحيني, ما بقدر أساعدك بمشكلة هذي الخيالية أو بمشاكلك الحقيقية.  الله يعينكم جميعا و ينصركم إذا كنتم على الحق.  و الله يرحم أقاربك اللي ماتوا, لأن كل شخص منا عنده حبايب ميت, خاصة انتو أهل سوريا (إذا هذا كان جنسيتك الحقيقية, و حتى إذا ما كان), و يعطيهم جنة الفردوس و يفتح عليكم.

الله معكم

No I didn't send it.  It's just another 411 scam. And a dua is not meaningful help.


Saturday 22 February 2014

أعرف أنك في عمري ضيف الفرح العابر

أحبك وحتى هذه اللحظة
                                   لا يزال حبنا ناصعاً 
                              كثلج فوق قمة لم تطأها قدم 
                                .. أحبك واشتعل سعادة 
                                    لانك لاتزال معي ..
                                وأعرف ان عمر الوفاء 
                     كعمر قصور الرمال على شاطئ بحر هائج .. 
                     وأعرف انك في عمري ضيف الفرح العابر 
                               لكنني في هذه اللحظة احبك 
                               بكل ما في جسدي من طاقة 

                                        
غادة السمان

I love you and up until this moment
Our love is still fresh
Like untrammelled snow on a mountaintop
I love you and I burn with happiness...
...because you are still with me.
I know that the life of loyalty
Is like the life of sandcastles on the shore of a rough sea
I know that you are a guest passing joyously through my life**
But in this moment I love you
With all the power in my body.

 - Ghada al-Samman (source)

**I can't come up with a good way to translate this line.

N.B. I do not love anyone romantically and this is not in reference to anyone.  I just liked the sentiment and the language.  Most loves don't last forever, or don't always stay the same.

I don't know when this poem was written or who al-Samman might have been referring to.  Her lover Ghassan Kanafani was killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1972 - after their affair ended, as far as I know - but the poem is sadder when read with that knowledge.  Ghada al-Samman published his love letters to her twenty years later.  I obtained a copy of the book recently and keep meaning to read it but other things have to come first.  But they're two of my favourite writers in Arabic, and two of the first I read.  




Friday 14 February 2014

Rain and change in Oman

When it rains here, it rains in torrents.  It hammers my the corrugated aluminum roof and washes all the blown dirt that accumulated on it down into my courtyard.  Rain makes things less clean, not more.  It comes in the windows; everyone has at least one room in their house that leaks.  It batters palm trees, shreds the petunias the city planted, soaks the banana fields and the date groves.  Waves crash down the wadis, full of dead trees and mud from the mountains, and wayward cars, and assorted detritus.  Somebody usually decides to swim in the wadi or try to cross it in their car while it's raining, and they often die.

British traveller Wilfred Thesiger wrote of a storm on his journey from Sulaiyil to Abu Dhabi in the late forties:

One night there was a terrific storm, which started soon after dark and revolved around us until dawn. On that bare plain there was no sort of shelter. We could only lie cowering on the ground while the lightning slashed through the darkness of driven clouds, and the thunder crashed about our ears. I had placed my rug and sheepskin over my sleeping-bag. On other nights these had kept me fairly dry, but tonight the weight of water was too great to be turned aside. It flowed over me like an icy torrent. Sometimes the rain stopped and I peered out to see, silhouetted against the night by the almost continuous flashes of lightning, the dark shapes where the others lay beneath their coverings, like grave-mounds on a wet seashore; and the group of sodden animals, squatting tail to storm. [...]
Next day was fine and sunny and our spirit rose as the sun dried our clothes and warmed our bodies. My companions sang as we rode across sands which looked as if they had been uncovered by an outgoing tide. They were Bedu and it had rained, not scattered showers, but downpours which might well have covered all the desert. ‘God’s bounty’ they called it, and rejoiced at the prospect of rich grazing that would last for years. As I rode across these interminable naked sands it seemed incredible that in three months’ time they would be covered with flowering shrubs. Eskimos enduring the cold and the darkness of the arctic winter can count the days till the sun appears, but here in southern Arabia the Bedu have no certainty of spring. Often there is no rain, and even if there is, it may fall at any time of the year. Generally the bitter winters turn to blazing summers over a parched and lifeless land. Bin Kabina told me now that he only remembered three springs in his life. Occasional spring times such as these were all the Bedu ever knew of the gentleness of life. A few years’ relief from the anxiety of want was the most they ever hoped for. It seemed to me pathetically little and yet I knew that magnificently it was enough.
As we rode along, the others spoke of years when it had rained, and bin Kabina told me that never in his life had he known such rain as this. Then inevitably they spoke of the great flood in Dhaufar of sixty years ago. I had myself seen palm-trunks which had been jammed by this flood eighteen feet up among the rocks in the cliffs of the Wadi Aidam, where the valley was more man a thousand yards wide. We speculated as to how many days it must have rained to produce this flood, which had occurred in summer when it was warm. I wondered how long a man could survive such rain in winter before he died of exposure. It rained again in the evening and continued to do so intermittently for the next three days - Arabian Sands, Penguin edition, p. 256.

People are happy when it rains.

People are somewhat less happy when they get wet and their stuff gets wet and the streets are impassible and their car is possibly underwater, but still grateful for the rain, and it's an excuse to take the day off work.



It doesn't need to rain like this for long before stuff starts floating by my office window and the floors are wet and the handful of other people who showed up for work ask me why the heck I came in (I had a meeting.  Our projects wait for no one.  There was thunder and lightning and our windshield wipers don't work).

I posted the picture above on Instagram, worried about how I'd get home, and a friend said, بركة, يقال أن الدعاء تحت المطر مستجاب ("Blessings, they say that a dua made under the rain will be answered").  And also, "You can tell I grew up in the desert ."

This isn't the high desert Wilfred Thesiger - loved isn't a strong enough word.  عشق, شغف, شهوة, هيام, maybe.  He craved it and returned again and again to be consumed by it and in a sense he tried to possess it and keep it from changing - which I cannot abide, because I love this country too and because I have been the object of a more powerful person's love.  Object is the key word there.  That sort of 'love' doesn't allow the object to be fully human and changeable with a will and desires of their own, just an idealised image and an experience centered around the subject.  Orientalism and that sort of possessive, controlling love alike are all about the viewer, not the viewed, much as the viewer likes to pretend otherwise. Cf. chivalry.

Thesiger records in Arabian Sands that the Omani bedouin and other Arabs who helped him were often without food or clothing or medical care or education or hope of a better life.  It annoyed Thesiger that the Arabs were constantly sponging food off him, but they did it because they were hungry.  They were improving their lot through him.  That is why it's (still) traditional to feed visitors so much; they might starve otherwise (they may not starve these days, but I have so many times been glad to be fed a hot meal when I'd been living for so long on not enough dry bread and tea).  Ibn Kabina, Thesiger's orphaned teenage companion, gave another man his loincloth because he had nothing, but bin Kabina at least had Thesiger and so a way to support his family.

It is very easy to fall in love with a place and want it to stay just the way it was when you first saw it, if you are a foreigner with foreign financing for food and camels and you don't have to suffer under local conditions permanently, or as much as the locals do.  You can leave, even if you don't want to and would lose something beloved in leaving.  The world is larger, for you.  Yes, heritage has been lost and Oman has paved roads and hospitals now and Dubai has morphed into a science-fiction dystopia city with an  uncertain future - but quality of life has been gained. 

He writes in the prologue to Arabian Sands:
A cloud gathers, rain falls, men live: the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die.  In the deserts of southern Arabia, there is no rhythm of the seasons, no rise and fall of sap, but empty wastes where only the changing temperature marks the passage of the year.  Is is a bitter, desiccated land which knows nothing of gentleness or ease.  Yet men have lived there since the earliest times.  Passing generations have left fire-blackened stones at camping sites, a few faint tracks polished on the gravel plains.  Elsewhere the winds wipe out their footprints.  Men live there because it is the world into which they were born; the life they lead is the life their forefathers led before them; they accept hardships and privations; they know no other way.
The Omanis I know are mostly from villages, but living in the city; the old village with its date palms and banana and papaya trees and maize and irrigation channels still exist, but they don't depend on agriculture to feed themselves anymore.  Rain does not mean life or starvation for as many people as it used to, or not as directly and immediately as it used to now that they live in the city, but it's still very important.  As everywhere.

The courtyard of the hospital has water features, designed I believe to look like irrigation channels:


They even have beds of (decorative) plants next to them, like in the village:


These canna lilies are standing in three inches of water.  When it's not cold and muddy and drowned, it looks very clean and inviting, especially when it's above forty celcius and people have travelled a long way and waited a long time.  A lot of patients come here from the provinces, where the health care isn't as good.  I've seen bedouin families camping in the outer parking lots.

I have never seen anyone bathing in the fountains or drinking from them, but there are signs up to discourage people.  The water may look pretty and blue and clean, but it's chlorinated and not clean at all, especially now, after the rain, when it's full of mud.


They're addressing both men and women for once so I guess I'll have to find somewhere else to make wudhu, darn.

A popular dua for rain:


(source)

اللهم اسقينا غيثاً مغيثاً مريئاً نافعاً غير ضار

Allah quench us with helpful, healthy rain, beneficial and not harmful (sometimes added: now and not later).

When it rains, simply:

اللَّهُمَّ صَيِّبَاً نَافِعَاً

Allah may they be beneficial rain clouds.

And if it rains too much:

اللَّهُمَّ حَوَالَيْنَا وَلَا عَلَيْنَا اللَّهُمَّ عَلَى الْأَكَامِ وَالْأَجَامِ وَالظِّرَابِ وَالْأَدْوِيَةِ وَمَنَابِةِ الشَّجَرِ

Allah let it rain around us and not upon us.  Allah let it rain upon the hills and mountains and forests.

There are many others.

Tuesday 11 February 2014

Of his bones are coral made

I saw these skulls carved of white coral on Tumblr:

(skullis.com)


And thought of that verse from The Tempest:

    Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
(In Elizabethan and modern English on No Fear Shakespeare)

Is that not a perfect reconstruction of what the King of Naples' skull might look like?  Years and years after the shipwreck.  What are you talking about Ariel, nobody's corpse becomes a baroque artificial reef in one day unless magic is involved.  (Was magic involved?  In that play, could be). (I know coral doesn't work that way.  It's a fantasy).

I originally read The Tempest because of how much I loved that verse and the image it conjures up.  I'm very slowly re-reading it on breaks from work and I can't help but think that Prospero shouldn't have been Duke of Milan because as he says, 'my library / was dukedom large enough.'  Of his own accord he gave over the government of Milan to his brother, who was clearly successful in politics and actually wanted the role.  Why didn't Prospero just abdicate in favour of his brother and concentrate on his studies? (Because then there would have been no plot).  Then his brother wouldn't have gone to the King of Naples for help usurping the throne, wouldn't have cast Prospero and Miranda out to sea in a derelict boat (with food and water and fancy clothes and books, provided by Gonzalo, who was in charge of that part of the plan):
Prospero didn't want the dukedom, and his brother wasn't really trying to kill him very hard.  If he was, he could have quietly assassinated him and told the people of Milan whom Prospero claims loved him so much (really, Prospero?  When you were involved with nothing but your books?) that the old duke had 'gone on a trip' or to study somewhere.  It wouldn't have been hard, and by the time people figured out that the previous duke wasn't coming back and was perhaps dead, welp, too late, Antonio's been established as duke for some time and has the support of the king and is probably an effective ruler.

So why didn't Prospero and Antonio just solve this with negotiation instead of a coup?  I don't think the play ever addresses that and 'because power, popularity, and Prospero's inattention made Antonio evil' isn't a very good reason.  Antonio was good at politicking: he could have either killed Prospero or pressured him into doing the sensible thing and saved himself a lot of intrigue and tribute paid to the King of Naples.

The narrative seems to think that what Antonio did was wrong because Prospero was the legitimate ruler, even if he wasn't doing his job and Antonio was.  Legitimacy is considered a big deal by rulers who want to cement their right to rule with reasons other than 'I'm the best person for this job because I'm better at it than that other person would be,' but it doesn't hold any water with me.  I would be firmly on Antonio's side, except that the final stage of his coup was so ineffective - for which oversight I blame the author, because it would be out of character for someone who is as conniving as Prospero describes Antonio being.  As Arthurian legend taught us, if you cast your rivals into the sea in little boats instead of doing the necessary but unpleasant and killing them (or finding another solution, ffs), they will eventually return and kill you and take your throne.  Especially if they're related to you.  If you really want to be in power and stay there, you're going to have to be a certain amount of either ruthless or persuasive.  Preferably both.  (I forget what happens at the end of this play.  Don't spoil me, please).

If the plot could be solved/would never have happened if characters just talked about their problem or at least tried to solve it by talking about it, it's a pretty weak plot.  I still like The Tempest a lot.

Sunday 2 February 2014

Book Review: Some Chinese Ghosts

Some Chinese GhostsSome Chinese Ghosts by Lafcadio Hearn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While these stories are entertaining, I don't think they're very Chinese. The book was published in 1887, while Lafcadio Hearn was living in New Orleans and working as a journalist, years before he ever went to Japan - for which work he's best known. Hearn admits, in his notes at the end of the book, to basing these stories on translations of Chinese tales by early Orientalists, and on his own imagination. Mostly, I think, the latter.

Almost all of the ghosts (and other supernatural beings) are female, and they work miracles for those (men) who deserve them. A girl throws herself into a vat of molten metal for her father's sake and lives on; a young tutor falls in love with an enchantress, but is not punished for it; a young man is rewarded for his piety and selflessness with a supernatural wife and riches and a son. These stories remind me strongly of English translations of Alf Layla wa Layla (not Burton's, thank God. Mostly Lane's).

There are a few other stories that don't fit that mold: a faithful official's corpse, saint-like, does not decay; an origin story for the tea-plant (seemingly not a story known in China); an origin story for porcelain

The descriptions are vivid and flowery and the places and characters leap off the page. There are rather too many transliterated Chinese words which will mean nothing to readers who don't speak the language, but the Hearn cuts down on them after the first page or so of each story. He does give explanations of them in the glossary (this book is nearly one-third appendices); they don't add much and he needn't have included them, but he liked the sound and the exoticism.

From the opening of the first story, The Soul of the Great Bell:

The water-clock marks the hour in the Ta-chung sz',—in the Tower of the Great Bell: now the mallet is lifted to smite the lips of the metal monster,—the vast lips inscribed with Buddhist texts from the sacred Fa-hwa-King, from the chapters of the holy Ling-yen-King! Hear the great bell responding!—how mighty her voice, though tongueless!—KO-NGAI! All the little dragons on the high-tilted eaves of the green roofs shiver to the tips of their gilded tails under that deep wave of sound; all the porcelain gargoyles tremble on their carven perches; all the hundred little bells of the pagodas quiver with desire to speak. KO-NGAI!—all the green-and-gold tiles of the temple are vibrating; the wooden goldfish above them are writhing against the sky; the uplifted finger of Fo shakes high over the heads of the worshippers through the blue fog of incense! KO-NGAI!—What a thunder tone was that! All the lacquered goblins on the palace cornices wriggle their fire-colored tongues! And after each huge shock, how wondrous the multiple echo and the great golden moan and, at last, the sudden sibilant sobbing in the ears when the immense tone faints away in broken whispers of silver,—as though a woman should whisper, "Hiai!"
You can read the whole book for free via Project Gutenberg.  It's only a little over a hundred pages long.