A Woman’s Wisdom: Commentary

“So, women’s tales…” OPNO said.

“Ladies are not allowed to talk to each other, they’ll get ideas,” I said.

“This is a terrible story,” she said.

“You can tell it’s being told by men.”

I had thought, before I finished reading the last paragraph, that the story would end with them all living together and the men the women had talked to finding wives to live with them as well and so they would all have other people to talk to, especially the women, who weren’t allowed to go out, but they would not have too many people to handle.  That would be a reasonable solution.

But no.  The husbands got even more jealous and went even farther in isolating their wives and did not learn from their mistakes.  The message of the story is not ‘too much solitude and too much togetherness cause trouble, so find a middle ground,’ as I thought it would be; rather, it’s ‘jealous, controlling men will try to solve their relationship problems by becoming more controlling and will blame everyone but themselves when it doesn’t work.’

OPNO has a relative who divorced five wives for trivial things like singing once while they ironed and others could hear, and finally nobody would marry their daughters to him.  I don’t know if he learned and took responsibility for his behaviour, but going on personal experience, I doubt it.  I have been the woman in relationships with men who isolated me and tried to prevent me from talking to anyone, and they still blame those untrustworthy women for all their problems and also for not dating them now.

I really hope this is being told by men as a cautionary tale, but given that it had a happy ending and the sort of ending that is seen as normal by a lot of people (excepting the castle), I rather doubt it.

Renting stories

(I wrote this post a while ago, at the height of the landlord troubles.  He's since smartened up a bit, because he realised I would actually move if he kept it up.  He also offered me a five rial reduction in rent, which in someone else would be a clear insult but in him is probably just laziness.  I would move to somewhere less overpriced and run down but I haven't been able to find anywhere and it's been months.  Way it goes.

 

Feel free to contribute your own renting stories!)

 

I realised about twenty-four hours after I moved into this place that I hadn't lucked out in the landlord department.

My landlord is officially terrible.   He lies a lot and overcharges me and never fixes anything, but most recently, he killed a goat and dumped the guts on the pavement outside my room.

I know it was his goat because he bought it a few days ago and has been keeping it in the backyard (stinking up my bathroom, but I’ll put up with that). It was still bleating when I left at dawn this morning, and I recognised the markings from the skin and head, which were also about six inches from the wall of my tiny courtyard. My kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom all open off the courtyard, so they were all full of flies and stinking of rotten meat when I got home from work. Which they still are.

I called the landlord and told him about it and that if it continued, I would have to move, and he was all oh…uh…well, just wait for the garbage collectors to come get it. It’s fine.

They only come a few times a week, and it’s been raining off and on. There’s a storm coming, parts of town are flooded, and it’s almost the weekend. The garbage truck is not coming. And it’s not fine, it’s revolting.

I insisted that he clean it up and he sent his ten year old and six year old boys to…I’m not sure what he expected them to do, but they rang my bell. He has a habit of making his children take responsibility for his behaviour. The ten year old told me that it was indeed their goat, and they put the guts there. He didn’t see a problem with it, but there’s a reason why people don’t keep the guts in their own kitchens while they wait for garbage pickup. So I shooed the crows away, picked up the offal (with my hands, yes. I didn’t have anything else) and put it in plastic bags and tossed them in the garbage bin, which it was sitting right next to it all. It’s still there, still stinking, and now it’s stopped raining and the sun’s come out.  It's heating up and stinking even worse.

This isn’t the first time he’s done this, and other people do it too. Yesterday, it was fish heads and guts, and it was at least forty celcius. My landlord brushed me off like I was just an oversensitive foreign ladyperson being unreasonably picky, but friend’s husband saw the guts when he dropped me off today. He reacted way more strongly than I did, because he’s not used to living in these conditions, and he’s not used to people treating him like they treat me.

It’s only going to get hotter, and I have no reason to believe that my landlord will change. And the rent is high, and I am tired of living in the flies and the stench (that bin is always full of garbage) and being treated like a free on-call English teacher and childminder. I will be looking for another flat – which always sucks while female-bodied and foreign. I’m not looking forward to more men condescending to me and trying to scam me. I hope I have better luck next time.

Although, I used the word قتل instead of ذبح because I was annoyed and forgot. So it would have sounded like I repeatedly said that someone killed/murdered a goat. Funnier than intended :P

*

My friend moved around the same time I did, and the last resident of her flat was a cattle thief - in his off time, we’re guessing. You can’t get a residency visa if you list ‘cattle rustler’ on your application.

 

Beef cattle (source)

 

He would drive out to the country at night and kill a cow (or a goat on slow nights) in the field, load the pieces into his car (or his friend’s car. We’re not sure), and drive back to his flat in the city with a car full of hot, reeking meat. Anyone who’s worked in a slaughterhouse knows how awful that smells. 

And then he’d haul the sides of beef up six flights of stairs to his flat and finish cleaning and cutting it all. Apparently he had a black-market beef business going on out of his apartment. 

He would shove bones - whole cow femurs! and once a whole goat skull - into the kitchen pipes, because if he tossed it in the trash bin, someone would notice that there were far more animal bones than there should be unless someone was running a slaughterhouse on the down low.  If I were him I would have tossed them into the ocean or buried them on the beach, but I guess he was lazy.  He did finally got caught and went to jail, with eight months' rent unpaid.   

 

My friend moved in and nothing in the damn flat would drain. She couldn’t do laundry or bathe. He couldn’t do laundry or bathe either, for years, apparently. *shudder* It took a team of Pakistani labourers (who I don’t believe were actually plumbers, but close enough) several days to pull all the bones out, and my God the stench.

Nobody was surprised when the cattle rustler stole the air conditioners when he left, leaving gaping holes in the walls for pigeons to fly in through.  They were really mad when my friend moved in and the holes got blocked up, so they stood on the new air conditioners jumping up and down and squawking at four in the morning and woke the baby up.

Roses

I suddenly have a craving for pink roses, I have no idea why.  Just pink ones, no other colour will do.  It's not true that I've always loved roses, it just came on suddenly this week.  They're nice enough flowers but that's all I usually feel for them.

Rosa centifolia from Les Roses (1817) (Country Garden Roses)

My grandmother did love roses and worked hard at growing them in a climate that was not really suitable for them. 

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

 - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

I suppose there is a narrative in which I do love roses and always have, but it's a story someone else might tell about me, not one I would say is true of myself:  When I was a little kid, my grandmother had a cabbage rose bush. 

Unidentified pink cabbage rose (source).

I remember scooping petals up off the lawn and putting them in a shoebox.  I think I also put my grama's Siamese cat in the box and then piled rose petals on top - picture the cat hunkering down like grumpy cat.  I filled my orange plastic pumpkin from Halloween which I used as a handbag with petals and took them home, spending the long car trip up the island ruffling the petals and putting my face into the pumpkin to smell them. 

“But he who dares not grasp the thorn

Should never crave the rose.”

― Anne Bronte

David Austin rose 'Spirit of Freedom' (source)

I was five or six and roses didn't grow where we lived.  It was too cold and wet.  Petunias didn't grow there either, they melted.  Not much besides fir trees and ferns grew.  Maybe that's why I love tropical plants and now suddenly roses so much - as much as it's possible to find a reason. 

“An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it makes a better soup.”

― H.L. Mencken, A Book of Burlesques  

(source)

My grandmother had a huge stack of Herb Digest or something like that which I read through in her bathroom when I was in elementary school.  I read about monastery gardens and medieval herbal medicine and nuns.  I tried making rosary beads - despite not being Christian.  I was a complete heathen, never baptised or christened or confirmed or churched, but I have always liked ritual.  The burgundy and green carpets and incense and calligraphy and salaah five times a day and tasbeeh are some of the things I like about being Muslim, although they're trappings.  They're not the heart of the religion.

I chopped up rose petals and mixed them into a flour dough and rolled them into balls and painstakingly poked holes through them and laid them in the weak summer sun and turned them several times a day.  I eventually ended up with a string of crude musty-smelling brown beads.  I sometimes think about trying to do that again, now that I'm not ten years old and could produce something of better quality, if I had rose petals.

“Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? 

Proving nature's laws wrong, it learned to walk without having feet.  

Funny, it seems to by keeping it's dreams; it learned to breathe fresh air.  

Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else even cared.”

― Tupac Shakur, The Rose That Grew from Concrete

Iskwew's Images

O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem

By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!

The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem

For that sweet odour which doth in it live.

The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye

As the perfumed tincture of the roses,

Hang on such thorns and play as wantonly

When summer's breath their masked buds discloses:

But, for their virtue only is their show,

They live unwoo'd and unrespected fade,

Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;

Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:

And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,

When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth. 

 - Shakespeare's Sonnet 54

source

 I don't even like the roses that much in person, and I wouldn't want to have to grow them, but I like the idea of them and I like looking at pictures of them.

Merchant, keep your attar of roses,
your ambers, your oud,
your myrrh and sandalwood. I need
nothing but this dust
palmed in my hand’s cup
like a coin, like a mustard seed,
like a rusted key.

I need

no more than this, this earth

that isn’t earth, but breath,

the exhalation of a living city, the song

of a flute-boned woman,

air and marrow on her lips.

 - Amal el-Mohtar, 'Song for an Ancient City.'

Passport renewal

Whaaaat a clusterfuck.

The Canadian Embassy in Riyadh (Oman no longer has a Canadian consulate) told me I need to send my passport and renewal forms and bank order etc by Amex, which is in al-Qurum.  So I walked and took a taxi and took another very expensive taxi and then spent two hours walking around in the sun trying to find the damn office.  It was 48C that day.  My map was wrong.  Nobody knew where the Ernst and Young Building was and when I finally found it it was on the wrong side of the highway and I couldn't get a taxi.

I called Amex twice to ask for directions, which would have worked if I was driving a car, but not on foot.  There was no way I could take exits or cross the highway and I called twice begging the office not to close, I was almost there.  I didn’t have a lot of dignity left by that point.

I got there, fucking finally, and someone was waiting outside the Amex office for me and let me in the back.  He may actually have been an angel.  I continued having a meltdown in the office.  At least it was air conditioned, and they gave me a glass of water.  Having to do major stuff while autistic really sucks sometimes; I only have so much go and when I run out of go, that's it.  He asked me how much I needed to send and I told him I needed to send my passport renewal forms, the embassy told me to do it here, and he told me I needed the *Aramex* office.  Which is in Khuweir, and I don’t know where Khuweir is much less how to find the office.

Two very kind Amex employees, a Syrian and a Pakistani, took me to Khuweir, where I paid fifty-five rials to send my application.  That’s like 15% of my monthly salary.  I hope they don’t charge me on the return trip too.  And I really pray that nothing else goes wrong because I need a passport to renew my work visa and I have to start doing that in July or August at the latest.

The guys were trying to immigrate to Canada, since work in Oman has gotten worse and worse and they can't change jobs here (neither can I), and had a lot of questions about immigration which I couldn’t begin to answer because I was born a citizen.  They were puzzled about how I ended up in Oman, and I didn't want to discourage them, but I told them I came here to work, and people aren't always accepting of Muslims in Canada (bit of an understatement, where I come from.  I did not mention fascists or Nazis).  But their situation is not the same as mine - they're able young men with business degrees and good English and the whole world before them.  If they're lucky and they work hard - which they clearly do - they could make it.  You'll never make it if you stop hoping.

They seemed cool.  I would like to be their friend, but I am a lady, so that can't happen.  Which always seems stupid and wasteful to me, but it's how it is.

I saw what must be the largest pedestrian bridge in Creation, you could drive two cars along it if you could get them up the stairs and avoid the square holes down the middle where trees were supposed to go but aren't.  I'd be surprised if nobody's tried it. This picture doesn't show how it arches or do it justice, but:

The Qurum shopping centre had some cool mosaics mixed in with a lot of ones that didn't work so well:

Hadith 19 from the Imam an-Nawawi's 40 hadith is always a comfort to me.  It's one of my favourite books and one of the few that I own in paper:

(Translation:)  In a version other than that of al-Tirmidhi it reads:

"..Be mindful of Allah, you will find Him before you. Get to know Allah in prosperity and He will know you in adversity. Know that what has passed you by was not going to befall you; and that what has befallen you was not going to pass you by. And know that victory comes with patience, relief with affliction, and ease with hardship."