A Woman’s Wisdom

[From “Intention is Gold: Traditional Emirati Stories” by ‘Abd al-Aziz al-Musellim]

  In one of the countries there lived a good man, who became famous for his bad luck with women.  All of his marriages ended in abject failure after only a short time, which to those around him he attributed to his very bad luck.

One day, after the failure of his ninth marriage, for which he had been hoping nothing but good, this good man decided to leave the city and live in the desert, on the edges of the land.

The man departed for the country, and there found a suitable spot to build his new house, and truly he set about building with care and deliberateness, which made it possible for him to build a large palace in the shape of a castle, and he looked to the fortification of its four corners, but the strange thing is that he didn’t build a door for the castle; instead he hung a rope from the high window to the ground.

After the man finished building the castle, and made sure of the strength of his fortification and its durability, he approached a new wife; he married a good girl and took her to his far castle, and they lived together in happiness and bliss in that castle far from people’s eyes.

source

 After a while had passed, the man was struck by boredom because of his isolation from other people, and as well the food cupboard in the castle was empty, which forced the man to leave and seek the city.  The man descended in a basket attached to a rope, with the help of his wife in the one window which looked out on the road, and he went to the souq.

There at the souq the master of the castle bought a great deal of things they needed at the castle, and after he was finished buying, he was struck by pain and fatigue, which rendered him unable to carry the things and go with them to the castle.  He had to call a man who was passing by and ask him to carry all of those things and go with him to the castle.

After the master of the castle had come to an agreement with the man, he told him of the one road leading to his castle, just as he told him that he would not be able to enter the castle, but that he should call “O people of the house” and a basket would be let down to him by rope.  He must put in it the things and pull on it a little and the basket would be raised.

The man set off in the direction of the castle, and after a time arrived there and called “O people of the house” and a rope was let down and on it a basket and he put the things in it and pulled on it a little and the basket was raised, but the basket had not remained long in the castle before it returned and a beautiful girl appeared at the window.  She was the wife of the master of the castle and she said to him “I implore you, get in the basket and I will pull you up.”

The man got into the basket and the wife of the master of the castle pulled him up, and then prepared food for him, and sat with him pulling on the edges of conversation, then said to him “Tell me women’s tales” and he told her many stories.  When he had finished telling stories he was struck by tiredness and asked the wife of the master of the castle if he could rest, and he lay on his back and fell asleep for a little while.  When he awoke he did not find the wife of the master of the castle there.  He stared at the ceiling of the room and then spat with force towards the ceiling.  

 The wife returned from the kitchen and while she was asking the man to tell her more stories about women, she heard her husband calling “O people of the house” and was afraid!  So she asked the young man to hide in a large wooden box in the room.

The girl pulled her husband up and greeted him with the most beautiful greetings, then prepared for him food.  After the man was finished his food, he lay down in his place and stared at the ceiling and caught sight of the glob of spit on the ceiling and with impulsive speed called his wife and asked her to play a simple game, which was that each of them should spit up towards the ceiling and whoever hit it first would win.

The wife tried but she could not, and here the husband knew that she had let that man in, and that perhaps she had heard from his some women’s stories which caused her behaviour to be ruined, and he was extremely sad about this bad luck.

On the morning of the next day, the master of the castle left his house aimlessly, and took to wandering in the desert without knowing where he was going.  Then when he felt tired he sat under a lush tree which cast a shade, but when sleep came over him he feared falling asleep under that tree because a wild animal might attack him in that desert, so he climbed the tree and slept on some of its branches.

While he was trying to sleep he glimpsed a small caravan coming from far away, and the caravan arrived at the place where he was and he saw that it consisted of three camels carrying baggage, and that there was nobody with the caravan except a man driving it.

The man got off his mount and took the baggage off the rest of the animals.  The he took from the outside of his mount a basket and opened the basket and took out of it an orange, and opened the orange and took out of it a beautiful girl, and that beautiful girl was his wife.  The girl got out of the orange and prepared food for him and they ate it together, then they talked until the man was overcome by sleep.  When the man was asleep, the girl got up and took off her birqa and took a needle from the birqa, and took from the eye of the needle another man and prepared for him food and fed him.  Then he sat and told her women’s stories, and before her husband woke up, she returned the man who was telling her stories to the eye of the needle, and returned the needle to her birqa, and put the birqa back on as though nothing had happened.  

Dubai, 1971 (Eve Arnold)

The master of the castle was watching everything that happened in astonishment from the top of the tree, and the master of the orange had no sooner left than the master of the castle followed him, and there in the souq the master of the castle blocked the path of the master of the orange and greeted him with a beautiful greeting then invited him accompany him to lunch at his castle.

The master of the orange accepted and the two agreed to meet at the end of the day at the outer road.

The master of the castle hurried and bought six fish, and six onions, and six lemons, and six apples, and went to his wife and said to her that he had invited guests to the castle to eat lunch with them and that the number of guests was six.

The wife was surprised at her husband, for he had never invited guests to the castle since her marriage, but how things change.

Noon, and at lunchtime exactly, the master of the castle and with him the master of the orange came to the castle.  The wife of the master of the castle was shocked because the guests were not six, and she said to her husband: where are your guests, and he said to her: they are coming, wait a little. 

She prepared the table for six people, and the master of the castle sat opposite the other man, and here the master of the castle asked his guest to bring his wife out from the orange, and the man was shocked and asked his host how he knew of the matter, and he told him.  So he took out the orange and then took out of it his wife, and here the master of the castle surprised his guest a second time, for he asked the man to order his wife to bring out the man who was hidden in the eye of the needle which was in her birqa and she brought him out.  

The master of the castle looked to his wife and said to her: here are the guests, and she said: but their number now is four, and he said: and you make five, and his wife replied: but we are still less than six, and the husband said to her to take out the man who was in the box so that we will be six.  The wife was shocked but she carried out the order with great amazement.  

After they had finished eating lunch, the master of the castle said: what do you think of our stories, and he [the master of the orange] said to him: are you contracting with me that we live together in this castle according to your desire without anyone entering so that we may not regret our luck and may not blame anyone.

Each husband expelled his wife just as they expelled the other men who had told their wives women’s tales, which are the tales that contributed to changing the behaviour of their wives.

The two men pledged to live in the castle together, and married two other girls, and agreed that if one of them went out to do something for the house, then the other would remain in the house to protect it from others entering so that their lives would not be spoiled, and in this way they lived a happy life after they were able to discover the cause of their bad luck.

Original teller of the story: Sultan bin ‘Abeed al-Habasee, from the city of ash-Shaarqah.

  

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.

Around the Coasts of Arabia

Here's a piece of vintage orientalism I came across while looking for sources on seafaring in the Indian Ocean in times past: an essay by Alan Villiers, author of Sons of Sindbad.  That latter book is his account of his voyage with an Arab trading dhow in 1938-39, with the north-east monsoon from the Gulf of Aden down the East African coast to Zanzibar and back to Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait, where he spent some time with pearl divers.  I haven't tracked down a copy of this yet either; most of Villiers' books are out of print or very expensive and Not Available In My Region.  But the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has put Villier's spectacular photographs from that trip and others online.  You can even buy prints.
  

Excerpted from 'Around the Coasts of Arabia,' published in the Marine Corps Gazette, May 1949:

Muscat, in Oman, is a port of importance in world steamship routes. It is on the regular mail route between Bombay and Basra, and the Indian government, under British rule, maintained a post and telegraph office there. Native craft generally used the smaller, more open port of Mutrah, immediately to the north of Muscat harbor.  

Muscat, Oman 1913 (source)

Badans at Mutrah. The larger of these typically Omani craft could make the voyage to East Africa, while the smaller ones were used for fishing.

Alan Villiers

Here there is the usual covered bazaar, and fish market most unhygienic - on the beach beneath the hot sun. Many of the inhabitants are Baluchi, from Baluchistan across the Gulf of Oman. At Mutrah bay I have seen some of the most primitive sailing-vessels still using the deep sea, some of them dating back, surely, to Phoenician days. Incredibly small and inefficient vessels sail from there down to Zanzibar, in the good season, and frequently also sail back again.

Becalmed off the Swahili coast (Alan Villiers)

Ready for auction, freshly caught tuna await buyers at Sur, Oman’s chief fishing center. From the 7th to the 19th centuries Sur was a hub for the slave trade that stretched from East Africa to India. (NatGeo)

Around the whole of the southern coasts of Arabia and in the Gulf of Oman, the good season is the northeast season. There are two annual monsoons, northeast and southwest. The northeast lasts from October to the middle of April or some time in May; the southwest blows during most of the rest of the year. From the beginning of November to the end of February, the northeast monsoon prevails as a steady moderate breeze with fine, settled clear weather and a smooth sea. These are the conditions which the dhows revel in, both coastwise and deepsea. It is not at all uncommon to find 50 in together at a place like Ma'alla. The area of greatest regularity in this northeast wind is to the eastward and southeastward of the island of Socotra. In March the winds are variable, and now the big dhows begin to come home from Zanzibar and across the Indian Ocean, for they do not like to be out in the southwest monsoon. The weather then is often thick, hot, and extremely unpleasant, and the wind may reach gale force with a nasty sea. The southwest season is no time for amphibious exercises. [...]

A boom under full sail often carried a jib to take full advantage of the wind, like this one probably off the south Arabian coast. (Alan Villiers)

A fine baggala, probably the 'Bedri' of Kuwait, having her hull cleaned, Kwale Island.

Alan Villiers

The most trying conditions for personnel travelling in the Red Sea are to be found aboard transports going either north or south, with the wind following them at the same speed as the ship, and insufficient or no air conditioning. These conditions cause heat prostration, for which the Red Sea is notorious. But ashore the climate is not so bad, especially if people learn quickly to gear their lives to the existing climatic conditions and not those they knew back home. The busiest time in the Arab day is from dawn to about 10:30 am. The Arab eats lightly at dawn, generally breakfasting on a little unleavened bread and some strong tea, heavily sweetened: at 10:30 he has his mid-morning meal, and does not eat again until the early evening. His robes are cool and comfortable; his house, though lacking in sanitation and almost always without even running water, is cool, and well ventilated. He sleeps in the open, whether he be Beduin or Sheikh. He wears his picturesque head-cloth so that he can wrap up his face against severe dust storms, and his head-ropes are to keep his headgear on. He has learned to live properly under the conditions of his country; it would be a good idea to study how he does it, if so be you ever get the opportunity.

Nejdi had come on ahead to the Hadhramaut coast to drum up custom for his boom. These prospective passengers were trekking to Mukalla from the hinterland.

Alan Villiers

While the Bedouin still herd camels and goats and move camp every three or four months to find forage, they no longer depend on them for subsistence. (NatGeo)

On the whole, though trying, the climate is by no means as bad as it is reported to be. Up in the mountains, of course, it is cool enough. The local Beduin have a curious belief that indigo dye will keep them warm. I have seen them coming down from the interior into the roads of Shihr with no clothing other than a brief, black sarong, long matted hair thick with ghee, and black indigo smeared heavily on their lithe and almost fleshless bodies, though they had come straight from the hills. [...]

Now that the age-old seclusion of much of Arabia is becoming a thing of the past, the standard of local government, and services, is improving almost everywhere. But there still are bad spots. On the coast near the Kuria Buria Islands, there are tribes of pirates who are still held in awe by date-laden dhows: in many parts of Oman, the locals would sooner take a pot shot at the stranger than hang out any flags. Policing much of South Arabia was from the air, mainly by the Royal Air Force; when a tribe of Beduin break the raiding rules with persistent carelessness, sometimes they must be bombed. But on the whole there is more peace now than there has been for many years, and the influx of wealth and western ideas is making for good government. [...]

 

HM Taimur bin Turki, Sultan of Oman, 1913 (source)



The typical Arab has two things which very greatly sustain him, no matter what he might otherwise lackand these things are his calm philosophical outlook, the growth of much contemplation in an existence very close to a harsh and unforgiving Nature; and his Moslem religion. To him, both these are very real things indeed. He may know little of mass production and his greatest industry may be concerned with the production of some indifferent tobacco or good coffee beans, or queerly flavored honey. He likes to rub some perfume on his forehead, in the evenings, and to waft the fumes of burning incense into his wide nostrils. He eats in silence, crouching and using the right hand only; womenfolk are neither present nor discussed: he is at home on a strip of rough carpet beneath the stars, or upon a camel's back, or seated cross-legged hour after hour in the stern sheets of a dhow. He may have slaves, concubines, vast possessions (some of the wealthiest property-holders in Singapore are Arabs, and in Java) ; or he may not have a change of indigo. He may trade in pearls or sheep from Berbera, dates from Basra, cotton-goods in the cheap bazaar at the Crater in rainless Aden. He may speak no language the average Westerner understands, though the business man is often at home in four or five difficult Eastern tongues. He may wear a dagger, carry an ancient rifle (not quite so out of date as it may appear), ride a racing camel, fondle his amber rosary.

A old man resting outside a shop in Muttrah Souq. (Times of Oman)

All these things he may well do; but one thing also you may depend upon. He will comport himself with quiet dignity like a man, and a man he is, and was, and always will be. A man's man, at home in a tough man's country. It is a country, too, where we can learn a lot.

I won't say much about 'quiet dignity.'  But I take it Villiers never saw men shouting at each other, sitting around talking and laughing.  Or he just forgot about it.  Confirmation bias and all.  That's a very narrow and Noble Savage view of Omani men.

The Sheikh of Kais, 1913 (source)

And Villers seems to have forgotten that Oman contains as many women as men. 

A picture from September 1955 showing women carrying waterpots in Muttrah with the office of the “Wali” in the background. (Andy in Oman)

'A crowded market in Fanja' undated photo (Every Culture)

Women who live and work and give birth to children and raise them in what were and sometimes still are tough conditions.  He must have encountered women at some point; they were around doing things, but it strikes me how much he and Thesiger and other European travellers considered Oman and the Arabian Peninsula masculine countries inhabited by very masculine men, and rarely mention women or their contributions.  It's not just that women were frequently segregated and they mostly dealt with men, but also how endurance and going on trips involving hardship, especially in foreign lands, are gendered masculine and seen as things men do, and the experiences and contributions of other genders dismissed and discounted.

Most of the sources I found when I searched for "oman women in history" talked about how oppressed Omani women were/are by their culture, the need for Western organisations to liberate them, and the great strides they've made since Westernisation. It's all very colonial.  The introduction to the 'Women in Oman' Wikipedia article (the first hit for that search) pretty much sums up that narrative:

Women in Oman were historically excluded from the forums of everyday life. But with the dispersal of Omanis in the early 1900s and their return in the early 1970s, a more contemporary population of Omanis that were influenced by the British colonial values during their time abroad have slowly challenged many traditions of gender segregation. Women now pursue careers and professional training, slowly moving from their previous household confinement to the public sphere.^[2] In Oman, 17 October is celebrated every year as the Omani Women's Day with various pro-female events.^[3] (Wikipedia)

That whole article is terrible, and I do not recommend it.  It's written by people who fully believe in the development narrative - the modern form of the old colonial civilising mission; their rhetoric's just less obviously racist than it was in Kipling's time.  It's not that there weren't ever major problems in Omani society or aren't still, it's that Omani women are portrayed as victims of their backwards culture who need to be saved by the enlightened West.  Which is totally not misogynistic or exploiting the rest of the world for its own gain, nope.  The past was very different, and great changes have happened in the last forty years, but this narrative of Western influence liberating the world rather than local women and people around them working to change their own society from the inside while dealing with imperialist pressures and using foreign resources as they see fit is racist and ethnocentric, and covers up the real purposes of imperialist projects.

There was one result on the first page of Google result that talks about a few Omani women who were prominent in recorded history:

Indeed, the history of Oman also includes its share of women noted and recognized for their various contributions to public life.  To name a few, based on Al Balushi (2000), Seyyida Moza bint Al Imam Ahmad bin San Said was a top military strategist in the early eighteenth century, while Seyyida Khawla bint Seyyid Said bin Sultan, the daughter of the Sultan who ruled Oman from 1856 to 1857, was a known thinker, planner, and the most reliable member of the ruling family.  Shamsaa bint Al Alama Said bin Khalfan Al Khalili was a well-respected scholar and thinker in Islamic jurisprudence who was consulted to interpret some of the most difficult issues of the early nineteenth century.  Aisha bint Sheikh Issa Al Harthy was a famous poet of her time.  Al Ghalia bint Nasser bin Hmeid played a major role in national unity and social cohesion in Oman in the early 1900s.  The list is long and diverse, and continues from the noted late-nineteenth-century book author Seyyida Salma bint Sultan Al Seyyid Said bin Sultan to the more contemporary scholarly contributions of Nagiya bint Amer Al Hijriya, Sheikha bint Hilal Al Hinaiya, and Nasira bint Suroor Al Riyamiya, to mention only a few.

(Women in the Middle East and North Africa: Agents of Change,  by Fatima Sadiqi and Moha Ennaji, Routledge (2013) pg. 217 on Google Books)

I'm not going to do the research right now, but it's clear just from one source that there are many more, and countless other women who were not members of the ruling family or upper classes who lived ordinary lives and were never recorded.  But they were there, and they contributed. (I haven't read the whole book, but the section I quoted from is titled 'Omani women: the journey to empowerment'; it goes on to talk about outside influence empowering Omani women, which is also a pretty problematic narrative.  Empowerment in general is.  It can be hard to find sources in English on topics like this that aren't problematic to some degree.)

The world outside Europe was not only populated and participated in and at times ruled by local women as well as local men, it was explored and colonised and Christianised by Western women as well as Western men.  Women participated in imperialist exploration and mapping projects - quite a few of them.  There were a lot more than I realised before I went looking for lists.  Women were there, on both sides.  But they get left out of accounts, and left out of history.

Explorer Gertrude Bell in Iraq in 1909 (Wikipedia).  She explored and mapped parts of Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Arabia, and wrote about her travels.

Here's a long list of Western female travellers and explorers of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.  Here's another one.  Their imperialism and ethnocentrism and sense of superiority to other races weren't good things, but they were part of history and they should be included in history when we write about it.

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."

Wadi Dayqah Dam

A lady started visiting me last week.  She came several times, often more than once a day, and brought a few relatives with her.  I was glad to see her, but a little apprehensive because in Jordan there would be a 98% chance she had someone whom she wanted me to marry.  This is not Jordan and people here are not as fired up about all ladies getting married asap, and most people know that it's illegal for Omanis to marry foreigners - although it's not quite that simple.  I'm sometimes selfishly relieved that law exists, although it causes other people a lot of trouble.

But it turns out, she's the imam's wife and wanted to be welcoming to a foreigner and no a3rees has come out of the woodwork yet, which is the best outcome I'd hoped for, alH.

She and her husband took me and their two kids on a day-trip to Wadi Dayqah last Friday.  It was a great trip overall.  We had long conversations, the kids slept part of the way, and there was only one vomiting incident. 

Wadi Dayqah Dam is reputed to be the biggest dam in the Middle East, and it is the biggest dam in Oman and an important part of Oman's water projects.  The research was begun on the dam, which traps winter flood water so that it can be used year-round, in 1978, but the dam was only opened to the public in 2012.

The storage lake covers an area of about 350 hectares and extends to about 6km from the main body of the dam.

The observation post. 

There's a walkway with rails for visitors to walk about halfway out along the dam, although it's somewhat messy due to construction right now.  There is a grassed area with gazebos for visitors to sit in in the shade by the reservoir, but we only walked across it and I didn't want to take pictures of other people.  You can find pictures of it if you Google the wadi name, there's lots available in English.

Water flows down the wall in flood season.

Men swimming in the basin at the bottom of the wadi.

Wadi Dayqah is one of the few that flow year-round, but it's massively reduced in summer.

Villages in the valley.

Wadi Dayqah currently provides agricultural water free of charge to villages in Qureiyat, and is part of a US$ 120 million water supply scheme that aims to provide potable water to Muscat and Qureiyat.  I haven't found any projected completion dates for that, but they wouldn't likely be very useful anyhow.