Procrastinet

Amman, Jordan - 3/28/05: Like Fishing off the Empire State Building

filed under: Despatches

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

Some weeks ago I was observing an English class being taught by a friend. The word being studied was “typical.” The teacher explained that “typical” meant “the usual type” of something; for example, she said, someone might say “describe a typical Jordanian.”

One of the class looked up. “The typical Jordanian,” she says, “going to work, looks like this,” and made a face that was half scowl, half snarl, conveying unhappiness and disgust. The whole class laughed. The students were not high school kids, but members of a major Jordanian government bureau.

A few days later, I was talking with another friend, an Arab woman who has been trying to get backing for a film project in Jordan. “Jordanians complain about not having an entertainment industry,” she said, “but when you try to do something, it’s always ‘that could be difficult,’ meaning ‘No.’”

“Oliver Stone wanted to shoot part of Alexander here,” she went on – she would know – “but he needed to bring in horses from somewhere, and he went to the government, and they said ‘bringing horses here would be very difficult.’ How are they going to get anything happening if they won’t get behind anything?”

“It’s because of the attitude here,” she concluded. “You put a Syrian, a Jordanian, an Iraqi, a Saudi in a line, and ask them, is the glass half full or half empty, and all the others will say it’s half full, despite the fact that their countries are a mess. Jordan has the best deal going, but the Jordanian will be the one to say ‘half empty.’”

I can’t vouch for whether this last is true or not, but I can vouch for the fact that Jordanians, and other Arabs, will talk endlessly about how unpleasant Jordanians are. It’s as close to universal as anything I can recall seeing. It’s practically a sport. I have a half dozen more stories like this, easily.

What is it that makes Americans so proud of the disaster-on-wheels we call a country; while others, blessed with a profound lack of natural or national resources, who have managed to scratch a living from a worthless chunk of desert, nevertheless feel the need to constantly remind each other what a bunch of shmoes they are?

There are a lot of theories. Another of my friends says it’s because there’s no water here – or at least, very little, and little of it accessible. No great lakes, or beaches or forests. Nothing green for miles except the lights on the mosque minarets. When you can’t even look out at the gray mist across the water, your horizons get smaller.

Friends who have come back from Beirut lament the lack of “stuff to do” in Amman, a complaint I find factually inexplicable. There are dozens of bars and clubs here, in what is, frankly, a very small town. They range from glitzy nightclubs with names like Prana and Nai, where rich kids from powerful Ammani families hang out, to dive pubs under cheap hotels where foreigners booze themselves silly, to painted-up whorehouses off third circle where dreary eastern European women sell themselves underneath pictures of Britney Spears.

There are plenty of places to go and drink, but what’s missing, I often feel, is the sense of dialogue. Communities of people. Political parties. One problem with absolute monarchy is that it breeds apathy.

Maybe in America it’s a vicious circle – art comments on society, the government tries to ban art, the media comments on the art and then the artists turn around and make art criticizing the media and the government. And in the end, who cares, since all our art and free speech does not seem to have done much to get us a better government. In fact, if the U.S. were the only test case, I think I’d favor having all speech of any kind banned.

Here no one comments on anything. I met a girl the other day who does research for a local human-rights NGO. We were talking about how there was no art being made in Jordan. She told me she specialized in free speech issues. What use is free speech, I asked her, if no one is using it?

But why would they? What’s the point in making “Jordanian” art, after all? This is a young country. The artists here are short on capital, both intellectual and physical. They have to be very careful what they say. Is it any wonder people here feel they can’t compete with the art that’s being made in New York or London or Beirut, where things are a bit freer, patrons are a bit wealthier?

And even if you do make something, what’s the point when your nation is going to run out of water and become uninhabitable within twenty years? That’s cause for some depression, right there.

The horizons really do fit pretty tight across the shoulders for most people here. Americans can go anywhere, so few of us realize how many people in the world are virtual prisoners in their own countries. Who’s handing out visas to Palestinian Arabs these days, remind me?

“There’s nothing I can do to change anything,” one Jordanian friend told me, “so fuck it, you know? Whatever. There’s scotch, there’s weed, there’s chicks everywhere you go, so everywhere I’d just be doing the same thing anyway.”

“I want to do, like, concerts, in between the Israeli and Palestinian territories. Like, on the wall, I’d like to organize, so people, you know, on both sides could hear it. And get some great artists, and sing about peace. But what the fuck – I can’t even GO there, so how the fuck am I supposed to do that?”

Beats me, buddy. Beats me.

- Nicholas Seeley, 3/28/05

Posted by rjt at March 28, 2005 10:25 AM