Procrastinet

Amman, Jordan - 10/30/04: Talk Dirty To Me

filed under: Despatches

A continuing series of periodic Procrastinet Despatches from Amman, Jordan. By Nicholas Seeley.

There are numerous little challenges to life here. Like finding something to friggin’ eat during Ramadan. Living in a town where everyone is fasting can be a real bitch.

Eating in public during the Muslim holy month can get you held up, ticketed, or even arrested. I hear they are unlikely to arrest foreigners, but you will certainly get hassled, and possibly fined – not to mention reaping plenty of ugly looks. The Ramadan fast is not commemorative like Lent or Passover, it is an act of conscious austerity; apparently “fasting” means abstaining from anything you put in your mouth, so you can’t smoke or chew gum in public either. (I know what some of you are thinking; but you can’t do that ever. Not to say that there aren’t plenty of folks who do in the alleys around Rainbow street. I wonder what Islam says about cocaine?)

Ramadan isn’t just a fast, though, you’re also supposed to be nicer to people. It seems a bit contradictory, since after a day of no food and no booze, I’m not particularly pleasant to be around. Still, there are unconfirmed rumors that Jordan’s already close-to-nonexistent crime rates drop during Ramadan.

This may, of course, be due to exhaustion.

At any rate, restaurants aren’t open during the day, so if you want to eat, you have to stock up and cook at home. If you’re working, you fill your pockets with crackers and candy bars to devour out of the sight of your Muslim co-workers. A Christian friend was telling me how she sneaked into a back room at work for a cup of forbidden tea. The room had a small window that faced out onto an otherwise closed-off stairway, and she watched as outside a bunch of local school kids peeled off from their classmates into this secluded nook, and produced stashes of sodas and potato chips from their backpacks. Kids are about the same everywhere, I guess.

Radio is another thing. Foreign TV and radio have always intrigued me, because of the bizarre blend of stations and cultures they present. American media is such a monolith. It’s all one language, it’s all made in two towns, by identical robot-people with identical non-opinions about identical trivia (Probably because they all went to the same journalism schools where they learned how to talk into a microphone, do their make-up and obscure pertinent facts).

Cable in Jordan includes stations from the US, Britain, Lebanon, and Quatar, which air programming from all over the region. You can tell which are the Saudi commercials because all the men wear white dishtashas, and because the subtexts are so grotesquely sexual. These guys could teach Madison Avenue something about how to make eating a candy bar look like a sex act.

Of course we also get al-Hurra, the U.S. propaganda network. The Jordanians have a nickname for it. Hurra, pronounced “Hoo-ra,” means “freedom,” (typical state department truth-in-advertising) however, the word pronounced“huhrruh,” which is extraordinarily similar, means “shit.”

You see commercials made in Beirut for American products airing during Egyptian soap operas – and Egyptian Arabic is quite different from Jordanian Arabic. In fact the profusion of different languages and regional dialects means that many of the programs on TV here are only going to be really understood by a handful of viewers.

Coming back in the car from the Jordan Valley, I caught Israeli radio stations broadcasting in Russian, playing songs from Spain and Tajikistan. Shreds of Radio Lebanon filtered down from Beirut, while Radio Jordan aired news programming in French. Other Amman stations feature Jordanian pop, whiny atonal Gulf music, and North African ballads.

Finally, after obsessive channel flipping, one staticky station came through with something that sounded like American music – a drum kit beat – rock and roll – an opening riff I recognized –

“What’s got me so jumpy? Why can’t you sit still, yeah,”

And I’m thinking, you’ve got to be kidding right?

“Like gasoline you’re gonna pump me,”

No way…

“And leave me when you get your fill, yeah…”

Fuck yeah! How about this country? You can’t say “hello” to a woman in the street, or chew gum in public, but you can play UNSKINNY BOP at six in the evening on Radio Free Amman?

Well of course you can. Because Poison’s magnum opus, riotously obscene though it is, contains no actual, overt references to such taboo concepts as sex, love, dating, masturbation, pornography, holding hands, Satan, bedrooms, or communism. It’s all a metaphor -- as thinly veiled as a bride in a Mississippi trailer park – but it can get past the censors.

Now that’s freedom.

- Nicholas Seeley, 10/30/04

Posted by rjt at November 1, 2004 10:18 AM