Procrastinet

Amman, Jordan - 10/20/04

filed under: Despatches , Procrastinet Guests

The first in a series of periodic Procrastinet Despatches from Amman, Jordan. By Nicholas Seeley.

Today was the first clear day since I arrived in Amman. There’s a place on the street where I’m staying where a vacant lot cuts a gap in the wall of buildings, and you can look out over the rooftops of low stucco buildings rolling up and down the sides of the surrounding hills, wrapped in a heavy orange fog of gasoline and dust.

It’s actually a lot like L.A.

Read the rest after the break below. I can't describe how pleased I am to have Nick on board.

Today, however, the haze had lifted, and I could see for miles: the thin lines of roads cutting patterns through the white blocks of buildings, the slender minarets of the mosques, and the shadow of the orange desert over the hills. It was pretty.

A little background. Jordan is a country a little smaller than Kentucky, bordered on the west by Israel and the much-disputed Palestinian territories, on the north by Syria, the East by Iraq, and the south by Saudi Arabia. Some three quarters of the country is uninhabitable desert. Water is shockingly scarce, and pretty much nonrenewable. Holy sites are rare, and there’s not a drop of oil.

What this means is that, despite being situated in what’s pretty much the South Bronx of world politics, Jordan is in the enviable position of not having a damn thing that anyone wants. What this means is that, despite many conflicts and insurgencies arising from its deep involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian war, Jordan’s undesirability has spared it the worst of the pain and suffering that has been the lot of the oil despotisms and cold war client states that surround it. The country has also benefited from a series of very savvy and forward thinking (inasmuch as that’s a synonym for pro-western) monarchs. The current ruler, King Abdullah, is close to the definition of an enlightened monarch, and like his father, King Hussein, has tried to pull his country kicking and screaming into the twentieth century, all the while walking a diplomatic tightrope through his rogue’s gallery of unstable, psychopathic and unsanitary neighbors. (Think about it: that metaphor’s not really as mixed as it sounds.) The country is overwhelmingly Muslim and Arab, but fundamentalism here is far from at a fever pitch, though if the American Crusaders continue their holy war, that could change. But kidnapping and terrorism are not yet on the table here, and other crime is virtually unheard of.

The first night, I ended up drinking in a café with a Jordanian deejay who would rather be any thing than be Jordanian. He travels the world, celebrates the variety of drugs he has tried, changes his image. He trashes Islam, and takes another drink. This night, he was showing off his dreadlocks, drinking whisky, telling stories about how police at Q.A. immigration would try to direct him into the “non-residents” line because of his hair and his looks.

Of course, the thing he wants he can’t have.

And there I was, at a table full of expats and aid workers, thinking “isn’t that what we all want?” To get out. Especially now, with our own country running full tilt down the roman road to empire, our government paralyzed by partisanship and growing less and less capable of governing by any means other than handing the reigns over to mega-corporations and transnational conglomerates. It’s always easier to clean someone else’s house than your own. It is easier to deal with problems that, at the end, you do not have an emotional stake in. The problems we try to solve are not our own. We hope we’re fighting the good fight, but we’re also opting out of something.

The other people I’ve encountered in a few days include Jews who pretend not to be Jews so they can do aid work here, homosexuals who play straight so they can stay alive, Palestinians trying to be Jordanians, and vice-versa, a Saudi who’s really a Palestinian who wants me to write the story of how he was exiled from his adopted country, and a dozen others who would rather wear anyone’s heartaches than their own.

I guess that means it’s no different here from any place else.

Still, there was something that happened when I got off the plane. A moment when the burden lifted, and things didn’t seem so terrible anymore. I think it was when I finally smelled this place.

Every city has it’s own scent, the olfactory evidence of everything its inhabitants have left behind. Even on sunny days New York smells like the rainwater that pools in the gutters and the hot murky steam that issues from subway grates. Phnom Penh smells of fried food and motorcycle exhaust and the odor of excrement that floats on the breeze off the Tonle Sap river. Sometimes these things are easy to define, to separate into components. Sometimes they are unidentifiable. Paris only smells like Paris.

The air of Amman is dry and full of dust, and smells of night-blooming jasmine flowers, over-ripe pomegranates, coffee and saffron. That smell came wafting in through the Arabian Nights windows of the airport, and I knew I had arrived. Not home, but somewhere, at least.

- Nicholas Seeley, 10/20/04

Posted by rjt at October 21, 2004 11:34 AM