On dying for one's beliefs, and on living.

There's an image going around Facebook and Tumblr (in Arabic, I don't know if there's one in English) of a woman in niqab and a man in a beard.  Yellow on black, like a yield sign, except the caption is to never yield and never give up your niqab/beard, not even if it costs you your life, because your fate is written.  This is in relation to the massacres in Egypt, where people have been killed who don't display those observances, but the ones who do are targeted especially.

The people I know who are sharing this are outside Egypt, and a few of them have put on niqab recently, and are encouraging others to do so.  I'm happy for them; I love my niqab and I understand how they feel about it.

I have to take my niqab off.

It's easy, to say that you would die for your beliefs, and it's exciting to resist, especially if you're young and the danger isn't immediate.  I understand.  I also understand that upper middle class girls in Amman aren't really risking anything when they put on niqab, except their neighbours' disapproval, and their families' puzzlement.  They won't lose their jobs, if they have them, or their housing, and they won't be shot.

I would gladly die for my beliefs, if it was a quick death, and if it would mean something.  What I won't do is give up my livelihood or accept a marriage I don't want.  I won't live a life of servitude or give up my autonomy. 

Given the choice between a beloved article of clothing and my larger principles, in this case, the clothing will have to go.

I feel guilty for thinking all of these things, when people are dying, but I don't think I've made the wrong choice.

Both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords

I was backing up my files and found a pdf of J.R.R. Tolkien's On Fairy Stories on my external hard drive.  I didn't like The Lord of the Rings as much as I wanted to (as much as I like The Hobbit), I don't think I read it at the right age, but at its best, Tolkien's prose is lovely.  Here are some excerpts:

The realm of fairy-story is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: all manner of beasts and birds are found there; shoreless seas and stars uncounted; beauty that is an enchantment, and an ever-present peril; both joy and sorrow as sharp as swords. In that realm a man may, perhaps, count himself fortunate to have wandered, but its very richness and strangeness tie the tongue of a traveller who would report them. And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.

Tolkien excludes fantastical travellers' tales, such as Gulliver's Travels, from the category of fairy-story, because "Such tales report many marvels, but they are marvels to be seen in this mortal world in some region of our own time and space; distance alone conceals them."

With respect to Tolkien, I think some of the above quote can be applied to travellers to foreign parts.  As far as our families are concerned, we peripatetics are in a perilous land.  They do not know the rules of the place, or where it's located to any degree of accuracy.  For all they know, we might be swallowed up or enchanted and never return.  We might as well be in faerie. 

We know the perils, and to us they are very ordinary - dishonest employers, landlords, corrupt officials, ever-changing immigration laws, annoyingly persistent matchmakers, stalkers in pointy boots and tight pants and too much hair oil.  No fairy lords here.  But there has been joy and sorrow as sharp as swords, and we will never be able to fully explain it to anyone who wasn't here with us. 

Tolkien wasn't fond of Shakespeare's pretty but dull fairies, or of the saccharine, moralising Victorian flower fairies.  He theorises about how this transformation from the wild fae of old happened:

Yet I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of “rationalization,” which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass. It seems to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves; when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood.

And there's that thread from the LotR: the wonder that goes out of the world at the end of the age of elves and and the beginning of the age of men.

I think that's the right note to end on.  We are fortunate to have wandered, even if it won't last forever.  Nothing does.

Dreaming: Ice-Cream

All I remember now is that people were pointing at me and saying I was a huge ice-cream cone.  I may have actually been a huge swirly soft-serve ice-cream, but I'm not sure anymore.

It's hot and dusty and often late at night in Ramadan I walked down to the baqalah and got an ice-cream. 

You can get a good one for ten to thirty qirsh, a vanilla bar coated in brown chocolate-like product or a tube of fruit sherbet.  They're not real ice-cream, they're milk and vegetable oil and fillers, but we're used to it.  Everything in this country is a cheap imitation, unless you're rich, but it's been so long since we've tasted the real thing that we wouldn't recognise it any more.  It's cold and it's sweet and it's affordable and that's all we wanted.

Ramadan's over now, and I think the midnight ice-cream runs are too. 

Book Review: From Pharaoh's Lips

(Posting this here for now because I can't get Goodreads or Amazon to load and if I don't post it I will forget about it).

From Pharaoh's Lips: Ancient Egyptian Language in the Arabic of Today

A fun introduction to Ancient Egyptian and Coptic words in modern Arabic, which tells the story of a day in the life of an Egyptian family in a manner suitable for elementary school children, using several Egyptian Arabic expressions per sentence.  On the pages facing the story are lists of the expressions used, in English transliteration, Arabic, Coptic, Greek, and hieroglyphs.  The book also provides lists of the letters of the Arabic and Coptic alphabets and hieroglyphs and brief instructions on how to read and pronounce them, and glossaries of expressions in those languages.

The main problem with this book is that it can't decide whether to be a children's book, or an academic text, and so it fails at both.  The authors state that a word or phrase comes from a particular language, but they don't show the etymology, or justify their statements, or provide any citations, or list more than one or two sources in the bibliography beyond basic language texts and dictionaries.

Written by an Egyptologist at al-Azhar, this book had a lot of potential, but it didn't live up to it.  Scholars of the languages concerned will want a more in-depth book, and children will not understand much of this one.

EDIT:  Many of the phrases in this book are also listed in this excerpt from Georgy Sobhy Bey's 1950 article 'Common Words in the Spoken Arabic of Egypt of Greek or Coptic Origin.'  It's difficult to be certain without citations, but Youssef appears to have drawn heavily on Bey's work.  I talked to an Egyptologist who said that some of the hieroglyphs in Bey were wrong, but it's an interesting read for anyone familiar with modern Arabic (my apologies to those who aren't!  But have a look at it anyway, it's visually interesting).

Copticsounds' resource page has an extensive bibliography of scholarly articles on Coptic Language, many of which deal with the Ancient Egyptian-Coptic-Arabic etymology, with links to PDFs.

End of an era

It took me a long time to write this post.  I have a habit of hoping that if I just carry on and do the best I can and don't acknowledge that there's a problem I can't solve, it will work out okay, but that's not always true.  Pretending everything's perfectly fine when it isn't is not a good problem solving strategy. 

So, it looks like Jordan is no longer feasible for me.

I was taking (completely unnecessary) Arabic as a second language classes in the summer semester.  Or not taking, as happened more often, I registered and attended for a few weeks and then taking the bus and being around people and noise and sitting on a hard chair all day trying to pay attention with my back screaming at me and then taking the bus again and doing homework and then doing actual work and dealing with the usual bullpucky at home took their toll and I was no longer able to drag my carcass out of the house, which was not that big a deal because I graduated with honours from the last level at the language centre a few years ago.  I kept registering in the courses one semester (the shortest one) per year so I could renew my student visa and make contacts, I did a number of translations for teachers at the colleges I attended. 

The courses cost JD150 per semester, then JD250, and now JD750 (around a thousand dollars), and I would have to sign up for two semesters and actually attend, which is impossible for several reasons:

1. That is a stunning amount of money.  I have not made that much in all the time I've been here.  To put it into perspective, I have a decent apartment in a nice area in a quiet building close to a major university, and it costs me JD100 per month, utilities included.

2. I work, freelance, but I do work, and I have demonstrated several times that I am unable to work and attend school at the same time, and if I don't work I don't get paid and can't survive.

3. I was previously attending college classes, despite not being registered, because it's what I came here to do.  I wouldn't be able to do that if I had to go to classes at the language centre, and even if I had enormous amounts of money, I am not interested in sitting through basic Arabic lessons full time all year.

There are a few other options for renewing my visa in Jordan:

1. Enroll in university.  Not currently possible, because I have not been able to get the ministry of foreign affairs in Ottawa to authenticate my diplomas.  I have no idea what their problem even is, all they have to do is stamp them, this is not that difficult.  It was previously possible to register with unauthenticated documents while waiting for the documents to be authenticated, because it is a ridiculously byzantine process and commonly takes years, but the rules have apparently changed and Jordanian universities/colleges will not do that anymore.

Enrolling in university would also require me to find a scholarship, of which there do not appear to be any at this time.  Everyone I've talked to says they don't have any more to give out, partially because Jordan has been flooded with even more refugees in the past few years and non-Jordanian Arabs qualify for scholarships for foreign students.  Which I don't begrudge them at all.

There are plenty of people lining up with potential husbands for me, who they say would pay for my education (they frequently say that, and then don't.  I've seen this happen often enough.  Especially if they refuse access to birth control, and the girl gets pregnant immediately.  There goes that hope right out the window.  She could demand a divorce if she specified in the marriage contract that he would pay for her education and he didn't keep to the terms, but then she's divorced and has small children and no support, in a society that heavily stigmatises divorced women and has a huge surplus of poor unmarried girls). 

Marriage is my other option for renewing my visa, and my reaction to that is basically nopetopus.gif.  I am physically and constitutionally unable to fill that role, and I'm not interested in being treated like property again.  Been there, done that, ripped the T-shirt up for rags, it was a piece of junk anyhow.  If someone was willing to sign a marriage contract with me to put an end to my visa troubles, and let me live my life?  Maybe I'd do it, maybe we could be friends and partners, but people don't behave that way.  That's not what they want when they marry a lady.  Also, I'm not able to make enough money in Jordan to survive, nor am I able to go to college, so staying here would probably be locking myself into a dead end.

When I found out that the visa requirements had changed (without warning, as they always do), I began looking at options outside of Jordan.

 - Egypt: was tentatively planning on going there, but that's no longer an option.

 - Syria: hasn't been an option for a few years now.

 - Saudi Arabia: ahahahaha no, why do people keep suggesting this.


- Turkey: expensive, has actual standards and requires qualifications I don't have.

 - the UAE: had a couple job offers here, none of which I was qualified for or capable of doing.

 - Canada: I could possibly borrow money from family to go back, but I would have nowhere to go once I got there.  I can't go back to the places I used to live, the intelligence service there was a hassle, I have no means of financial support, there are people there who I'm very glad to be half a world away from. 

And I'm not ready to give up on my education and my beginnings of a career here.  I would feel terrible if I gave up and went back to a place where I wasn't safe and have no future.

This would be a lot easier if I was either wealthy, able-bodied and healthy, educated, or had Muslim family here.  As it is, I'm flat broke and not in good health and not interested in trading my body, so I've had to turn down all the offers I've had so far.  Yes, I could take a job I'm not capable of doing and hope it takes them a while to fire and deport me, but that is really a terrible idea (which hasn't stopped several people from suggesting it.  No, the problem is not that I'm not trying hard enough to succeed).  Also, I don't have money to travel.

And my visa expired nearly two months ago.  Damnit.

Dreaming: Pirates

I dreamed I was riding in an empty Greyhound-type bus around the logging roads of the town where I grew up, which were now paved, and empty of logging equipment and vehicles.  I had a little black cat clinging to my shirt.  The bus driver was a woman and speaking English.  People rarely speak English in my dreams anymore. 

I got off the bus and went through one cramped room after another in the little corner groceries on the outskirts of that town; they'd added on quite a few rooms since I'd last been there, with no obvious planning, and crammed them full of drygoods, mostly tins of fava beans and cellophane-wrapped yellow boxes of al-Ghazaleyn tea bags.

There were pirates, in the drygood stores, all of them male with multicoloured dandelion hair and sparkly teal eyeliner.  I wish I could pull off coloured eyeliner.  I only remember one pirate clearly, but he was a gentleman and a scholar and agreed with me that al-Ghazaleyn was way better than Lipton, even though it was cheaper.  Lipton is weak and insipid no matter how long you steep it, and it doesn't cover up the taste of the alkali in the water.  And to hell with supporting American brands anyhow.

I believe they were book pirates, rather than the maritime robbery sort of pirates.

I have no idea why I keep dreaming about riding in vehicles on the logging roads outside Bigotsville.  Those flamboyantly gender-presentation-ignoring pirates would definitely not have survived long there.  A shame.

Someone passed me a baby today, and after a while he started to cry, so I set him down figuring he would crawl around a bit.  He weighed about twenty pounds, they can crawl by that point, right?

 But he just lay there facedown on the rug like a piece of toast that landed peanut butter-side-down and started to cry even harder, and the whole room full of women turned and looked at me like what the hell did she just do to that baby.  He couldn’t even push himself up on his arms yet, or sit unsupported.

 Whoops.

 Moral of the story: don't give me your baby, I am clueless and might break it.

Pirates of Barbary and Racism

I'm reading Pirates of Barbary: Corsairs, Conquests, and Captivity in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean by Adrian Tinniswood.  It's related to something I'm writing; I know a fair bit about how piracy in the Caribbean and privateering in the Atlantic worked, but next to nothing about piracy in the Middle East and North Africa.  I was looking for information about piracy and (incense) smuggling in the Red Sea specifically, but this book was the closest I could find.

It's a book by a non-Muslim white British man about piracy by mostly Muslim North Africans and Turks against Christian Europeans, so I didn't have terribly high hopes on the Western-gaze front.  On page 14, we have:

That winter, the winter of 2008-2009, marine insurers from all over the world gathered in London to discuss the problem of African piracy. Senior figures condemned the Somali pirates as the scourge of modern shipping, calling them “vermin” and demanding a concerted response from the international community—just as they had in seventeenth-century London.  [...]  Iranian and Pakistani nationals were reported to be joining the Somalis, raising the specter of jihad and links with al-Qaeda. In the summer of 2009 a Republican congressman introduced a bill into the U.S. House of Representatives giving immunity to any American merchant sailor who wounded or killed a pirate in response to an attack.

Mention of jihad and links with al-Qaeda.  Uh-oh.  I don't really want to know what this author thinks about jihad.  It's not likely to be balanced or informed or realistic, and I'm only reading this book for historical information, and to figure out the economic system in that thing I'm writing.  Carrying on.

There is another parallel between the Barbary Coast corsairs of the seventeenth century and their twenty-first-century comrades in Somalia. In the West (although not in their own homelands) neither group has been able to boast the glamour of the buccaneers of the Caribbean—the Henry Morgans and the Captain Kidds, the swashbuckling Errol Flynns of old romance. Those pirates have been held up by historians as heroic rebels without a cause, cheerful anarchists or ardent democrats, proto-Marxists or proto-capitalists, promoters of gay rights and racial equality, praiseworthy dissidents rather than villains.

The pirates of Africa, past and present, have not. The white West regards them as the irreconcilable Other—not rebels against authority but plain criminals, not brave Robin Hoods (that would make us the Sheriff of Nottingham), but cowardly thieves. When the old pirates of Barbary described themselves as mujahideen on a sea-jihad against encroaching Christendom, Christendom portrayed them as demons bent on world domination; when modern-day Somali pirate chiefs say that the real sea-bandits are those who steal their fish stocks and pollute their coastal waters, we patronize them and then send a gunboat. An underlying racism and a more overt anti-Islamism make it hard to imagine Captain Blood or Jack Sparrow as North African Muslims, spilling over into contemporary popular culture. It would be difficult to imagine a modern-day pirate movie about a plucky little band of Somalis taking on the combined might of the world’s navies. We’re much more likely to see another Black Hawk Down, with the military battling against underwhelming odds in the Gulf of Aden.

The author makes accurate comments about racism and othering.  I was not expecting that at all.

I'm translating a book by an Orientalist about Islamic law, and I do a lot of related and unrelated reading.  I encounter so much blatant racism and bigotry passed off as enlightenment in academic writing  that I've come to expect it.  It's even worse when I encounter it in person from people I otherwise respect and care about. This happens so frequently that it seems like the default, I see it everywhere and so I expect it, and sometimes that's not fair to other people, sometimes when I least expect it I'm surprised by how decent they are.

Sometimes people who've never been dehumanised or marginalised do understand what it is and how it happens and that it's wrong.  That restores a little bit of my faith in humanity.

I took a stand today

I took a stand today. Just a little one.

I was in the kitchen squeezing the soapy grey water out of my laundry. An older woman was unlocking occupied rooms and showing them to two girls. I think I've seen the woman before, but I don't know who she is.

"You're in the private room?" She asked.

"Yep."

"I'm going to show it to these girls." She threw another door open. There were scarves on the unmade beds and open books on the floor. Dorm rooms never have desks.

The girls peered into the room. I looked away. I know the girls who live there. "Nope. It's occupied."

"We're going to go see it now."

"No. I live there."

"I'm showing them the dorm."

"They don't need to see my room. I'm not moving."

"No, I'm showing it to them." She puffed her chest out and glared at me. This could go on and on.

"It's not clean."

"Oh." They went and looked at more rooms.

I left my wet clothes in the tub, went back to my room, and locked the door behind me. I left the key in the lock.

This is the first time in three years that I've had any privacy. It's not that I couldn't afford my own room before, just that dorm supervisors would never allow me to have one, regardless of how many rooms there were and how few residents. We were not allowed keys to our own rooms, and subject to search at any time. Anyone could invade my space at any time, and I couldn't stop them. And so I spent two, nearly three years basically a houseplant, not talking to anyone, not writing, barely even thinking. I got myself into a bad situation and couldn't escape, so I withdrew.

I finally managed to pry myself loose and got out. I found this tiny room, and I pay more for it than some of my friends in other towns pay for their apartments, but I don't even care. It used to be the men's washroom - the dorm supervisors say it didn't, but the tiling and the sawed-off plumbing and the fixtures and the painted-over sign on the door and the women's washroom right next to it reveal their lie. I don't care.

Because it's mine, and I will not let anyone invade my space if I can help it. Little power struggles like this are just one more way that dorm supervisors - and older women and people of higher status in general - impress on young women that they have no control over their own situations and no right to refusal. It's a lot like prison.

So when something large and heavy slammed into my locked door, I smiled. The door handle rattled violently, and metal scraped against the keyhole, but my clunky old skeleton key didn't even budge.

I expected the woman to pound on the door and shout at me to open it. I was going to refuse, and throw myself against the door if need be, and probably be evicted.

But she went away silently. I won't win them all, but I won that one.

A never-ending stream of bloated corpses

I've been struggling for some time, trying to find a polite and socially acceptable way to say this, but I don't think there is one. I think this is one of those things that you must not say, but it bothers me, and I think it needs to be examined. So I'll just say it.

Please forgive me if I offend you, it's not intentional, and I'm probably not talking about you.

A number of people have been flooding my Facebook wall with images of corpses from the war in Syria (and some from Burma). Usually corpses of children or infants, or adults with young children crying over them, or just piles of corpses. Bloating and rotting and covered in blood and dirt and shredded clothing.

They all have two things in common: they're as graphic as possible, and they're posted by people who do not live in the Middle East.

I'm not sure why the posters post them. They seem to be trying to raise awareness, which is a valid concern in North America or Europe or Turkey. People in those countries might forget about the atrocities happening in Syria, because they don't deal with the survivors on a daily basis.

I do. I donate my time and knowledge to teach them English, and give them clothes and food and what money I can. I've been to the refugee camps near the Syrian border and I know that even though I do everything I can, it has little or no impact on the daily lives of refugees in Jordan, much less people in Syria. Or Gaza. Or Somalia. Or Burma. Jordan is flooded with refugees, and I see their desperate situation and confront my own helplessness in the face of it every day.

I don't want to go on Facebook and see a continuous wall of corpses reminding me of these things. That may be selfish. So be it. No one else is going to look out for my mental health. So I deleted a few people who posted nothing but dead babies and unsubscribed from quite a few others, without warning or discussion. Those pictures still come up, but it's not continuous anymore. I'm not advocating pretending the conflict doesn't exist, I just need a break from it.

There's an even bigger problem with these photos and Muslim chain letters: they're graphic to the point of voyeurism, and devoid of context. They're not attached to articles about the conflict, or commentary from people who survived. It's just gore.

And here's where my understanding breaks down. Why do people in other countries post disaster porn? What purpose does it serve, for the posters or the people caught in the conflict, and how does it help? People far from the conflict see the images, slow down and gawk like motorists passing a pileup on the highway, and then move on. They don't stop to help, they just want to have a look at the damage.

I don't entirely buy the 'raising awareness' justification. People think that's why they do it, but I don't believe it's the real, complete reason. This is one of those dark corners of human psychology that we'd rather not look too closely at.

Somebody do a study on this, because I just don't understand.

I'd appreciate comment, but please keep it civil.