Syria, Syria

Jack Foley

         My wife Adelle and I have just returned from a ten-day trip to Syria (October 18 - 28, 2003). We stayed in Damascus (described by an inhabitant as Arab) but made excursions to Hama and Aleppo--a beautiful, rather European city whose call to prayer is one of the most haunting I have ever heard. We saw many ruins. I gave a talk and performed some poetry at the University of Damascus. Thanks to my son Sean’s ability with Arabic, I was able to speak with a wide range of people: intellectuals, students, shop owners, tour drivers. Though everyone understood that my wife and I were Americans, we had no problems of any kind. Syrians are a hospitable people, and I felt comfortable, safe, and welcome the entire time. Indeed, the Syrians I met were concerned that I might be fearful or uneasy; they hoped that I would feel safe visiting their country. (Friends in the United States had the same concern: some advised us not to go.) One Syrian man, serving me tea and smiling, pointedly remarked, “We are not terrorists.” I mistakenly heard what he said as “tourists,” and everyone laughed.

       We stayed at Al Amer, a comfortable Damascus hotel, and were awakened most mornings at 5 a.m. by the call to prayer from a near-by mosque. Now that I have returned after the immensely long plane trip--nearly twenty-four hours--I find myself awakening at 5 a.m. and thinking of Syria. I am still disoriented, my body not yet back into its regular patterns. I am hungry at odd times; suddenly exhausted.

       I am also confused as to what I can say about Syria: I have no special insight into the country and wish to avoid its much-discussed political stances, which I regard as the purview of people more knowledgeable than I. I was really an “accidental tourist” in Syria--visiting it because our son was there on a Fulbright. It was he who arranged the reading at the university, working through the good offices of the American Cultural Center, and it was he and his wife Kerry (who also speaks Arabic) who hosted us and guided us throughout the visit. I saw Sean and Kerry in their neighborhood--a “rather hip” one, Sean tells me--in which they moved with ease through the narrow streets, walking quickly and often called to in a friendly manner by the shopkeepers and neighbors. Sean introduced us to these people as his parents, and we were greeted with a warm ah.

       Ahmed Barakat--a friend of Sean’s and a scholar and teacher--invited us to dinner the first night. It was a wonderful way to begin: a feast! The food Ahmed served us--some of cooked by his mother (at the time away visiting) and some of it cooked by him--was absolutely splendid, as good as anything we ate later. (Eating was one of the particular pleasures of this trip!) Ahmed and his family (his two sisters, Reem and Maha, also attended) spoke excellent English, and I was able to speak freely about art and poetry with them. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is a popular and significant poem in Arab literary consciousness, and we spoke about that as well as other things. Ahmed’s home was beautiful and carefully furnished, with books everywhere. As we sat on the balcony sipping tea and eating some delicious desserts (cakes and ice cream) we talked about translations. I said, quoting, “Translations are like mistresses: the more beautiful they are, the less faithful.” Ahmed--who had never heard the quotation--said, “That’s true!” I immediately asked, “True about mistresses or true about translations?” Reem, a bubbly and charming teenager, laughed and exclaimed, “Oh! I would never have said that!”

       In the Lonely Planet’s excellent guide to Syria, Andrew Humphreys and Damien Simonis remark that “Writing a history of the modern Syrian state is difficult because it only came into being little more than 50 years ago”:

       The name Syria is believed to have first been applied by the Greeks, and by Roman times, in the form of Provincia Syria, it had come to mean that part of the empire that lay between Egypt in the south and Anatolia in the north. Therefore, any history of Syria has also to deal with the regions now known as Lebanon and Jordan, both of which only came into being this century, and Palestine, which first appears as a name around the 13th century BC...
       Although the modern state of Syria is a creation of the 20th century, the region it encompasses can lay claim to having one of the oldest civilisations in the world.

       For many Muslims...and particularly for those in the Middle East, Islam is stability in a very unstable world. Many of them are keenly aware that Muslims are seen as a threat by the west and are divided in their own perceptions of western countries. Not without justification, they regard the west’s policies, especially towards the Arab world, as aggressive and they often compare its attitudes to them with those of the medieval Crusaders. Despite this view that western culture is dangerous to Muslim values, and despite the growing influence of anti-western religious groups, many Muslims still admire the west. It is common to hear people say they like it, but that they are perplexed by its treatment of them...
       Just as the west receives a distorted view of Muslim society, so too are western values misread in Islamic societies. The glamour of the west has lured those able to compete (usually the young, rich and well educated) but for others, it represents the bastion of moral decline.
       These misunderstandings have long contributed to a general feeling of unease and distrust between nations of the west and the Muslim world, and often between individuals of those countries.

       Sammy was a visible bridge between the west and the east. Yet, for all his openness to the west, he wished to insist upon his status as a believing Muslim. Christ, he told me, would appear in Damascus at the end of the world--though the end of the world might be a very long time away, “perhaps not in my lifetime, or my sons’ lifetime.” “We Muslims,” he said, “do not believe Christ died on the cross. He was still living when his body was taken down from the cross--which is how he was able to appear to people later. His tomb was empty because there was no dead man in it.”

       For a laid-back Californian, traffic in Damascus was nothing less than amazing and, at first, terrifying. The space between cars is far less than we are accustomed to--side mirrors are often clipped--and traffic moves extremely quickly, even frantically, horns blaring constantly. An old joke about New York City- “New York City traffic divides people into the quick and the dead”--describes it fairly well. Once you realize that the drivers are not actively trying to hit you (as they might be in an Alfred Hitchcock movie) you feel a little safer. “Welcome to weaving, Dad,” said my son as I followed him into the midst of it. Finally, you took a kind of macho pride in the mere ability to cross the street: made it again! We were in Syria for only ten days, but part of our stay coincided with the beginning of the holy month, Ramadan. Suddenly, all that traffic vanished. To be sure, people made a mad rush home--the horns were like a cry of “Get out of my way now!”--but once there, they didn’t venture out, and all was quiet. “It’s like your Christmas,” said the man who cleaned our room: “people are friendly, do things for one another. It’s wonderful.”

       And then there is the matter of the toilette Arabe or “Turkish toilet,” as the French call it. Facing it, a Westerner is likely to say a silent prayer for the repose of the spirits of Thomas Crapper and Albert Giblin, marketer and inventor of the flush toilet. The Turkish toilet is a hole in the ground. Over this hole you squat in an ancient manner. (There is nothing to sit on.) Afterwards, you use the near-by hose to wash everything down the hole. Our modern hotel had a flush toilet, but it also had a hose for those guests who found the crapper a barbarity. Sometimes, as in our hotel, toilet paper is available, but not always. (The Lonely Planet guide discreetly suggests carrying a package of tissue paper with you at all times.) Even when the paper is available, however, you are not to flush it down the toilet (if you are lucky enough to have a flush toilet). A little tin or basket is placed near-by, and the paper goes in there. These containers are collected regularly and disposed of; this practice, which seems bizarre to Westerners, is not very different from the Western practice of placing little tins in women’s rooms for the discarding of tampons.

       Some of the finest Roman ruins in the world exist in Syria. Early on, we visited Palmyra (“City of Palms,” as the Romans named it) or Tadmor (“City of Dates,” as the locals called it), one of the world’s great historical sites. Palmyra was the home of the notorious third-century Queen Zenobia, a descendent of Cleopatra who successfully (albeit briefly) defied the Roman Empire. Zenobia, write Humphreys and Simonis, was “fluent in Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Egyptian”: “she effectively turned Palmyra into an independent empire, wresting control of Egypt from Rome and marching deep into Asia Minor--although in doing so, she also assured her city’s eventual destruction.” The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon wrote of her in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,

She equalled in beauty her ancestor Cleopatra and far surpassed that princess in chastity and valour. Zenobia was esteemed the most lovely as well as the most heroic of her sex. She was of dark complexion. Her teeth were of a pearly whiteness and her large black eyes sparkled with an uncommon fire, tempered by the most attractive sweetness. Her voice was strong and harmonious. Her manly understanding was strengthened and adorned by study.

       We lunched at a near-by restaurant: as always the meal was preceded by so many delicious appetizers, we could barely eat the main course. Cats came to the table, begging for food. (Though you see cats in Syria, they tend to be feral cats--not pets. You rarely see dogs at all.) As we drove out to Palmyra in a mini-van, I was struck by how much the dry landscape resembled what I had seen of Iraq in the television coverage of the US invasion of that country. We noted from a highway sign that we could have driven to Baghdad--not an option we wished to explore. The driver, Abu-Hani (“Father of Hani,” one of various names he took) remarked that the border between Syria and Lebanon kept shifting: “You drive along the same road and sometimes you are in Syria and sometimes you are in Lebanon.” He also made a remark about an “earthquake.” I thought he meant something that could be registered on a Richter Scale, but he soon corrected me: “This earthquake was made by Israel.”

       Back in Damascus we visited the Old City, where we saw the Souq al-Hamidiyya--an amazing bustle of shops. Sammy ran a little shop in the area and joined us in our wanderings. We also saw a tiny mosque, no more than a single room really, which radiated spirituality. An Iranian mosque was dismissed by Sammy as “too much like Las Vegas”: it was certainly an amazing, even extravagant building. We later visited the beautiful Umayyad Mosque. “It’s like a cathedral,” my son remarked, accurately. In the spaciousness of the prayer hall, people prayed, walked, held classes. Humphreys and Simonis remark,

Unlike the cathedrals of Christendom, mosques were never built to inspire awe or trepidation in their users but rather to provide for spiritual needs. And so it is that the Umayyad Mosque is a peaceful place with plenty of shade and serenity offering a welcome respite from the heat and bustle outside.

       My son is doing research on the life of a nineteenth-century figure, Sheikh Khalid Naqshbandi, and we took a long tram drive uphill to visit Sheikh Khalid’s shrine--another place of considerable spiritual beauty. The shrine’s friendly caretaker introduced my wife to his hundred-year-old mother, who invited Adelle into her home. Later, we visited a cafe for more delicious food and the sight of both men and women puffing away at fruit-flavored narjilehs (water pipes)--called “hubbly bubblies.”

       Sean had arranged for me to give a talk at the University of Damascus. There was some difficulty in finding a time for the talk, but, finally, it was scheduled. The students I addressed were advanced English students, and their command of the language was excellent. I read excerpts from a piece on American literature which I had written especially for the occasion and concluded with a choral poem, recited by Adelle and me.

OVERTURE: CHORUS
for two voices

that the hummingbird’s wings are of a remarkable rapidity he had noted often
            nothing could be done the shift of his breathing        had to begin
12 o’clock and he still hadn’t had a                 dermal sensation
           the block of the governor                          is therefore revealing
the muck of the plains living blues              a means of reversing
                        whereof is so manifest
such crooked crooked pathes, such ways this palace hides
                        wit and power, to study the travail
new adventures list he undertake
                        the way and its power             leading to the outside
in the eyes of the law                                  a long time, & ideas rise up
            toward toward gratification                 inhaling     exhaling      rise & fall
                                                etc.

       University officials had feared that the presence of an American might cause the students to ask angry questions about American policy, and I had prepared some responses to such questions. None were asked. The students were fascinated and excited by both the speech and the poem and asked me to teach again at the University of Damascus. One young woman remarked that she hadn’t quite “understood” the poem but she had experienced it powerfully: “It was strong,” she said, “...but...sweet.” Writing of early Arabic poetry, one critic remarks, “Arabic poetry at the time of the Jahiliyya (the pre-Islamic era in Arabia) was rooted in the oral and developed within an audio-vocal culture;...this poetry did not come down to us in written form but was ‘anthologized’ in the memory and preserved through oral transmission...Two basic principles of pre-Islamic poetry were that it should be recited aloud and that the poet himself should recite his own poem.” I think my choral piece, recited by “the poet himself,” touched something deep in the Arab understanding of poetry--a tradition which the more “writerly” west has to some degree abandoned.

       There are many things I remember about my visit to Syria: more than I can include here. The peaceful space of the lovely garden at the National Museum (an excellent place to visit); an artist in Hama who spoke no English but happily showed me his work (he painted doors which led nowhere but which were beautiful in themselves); the great water wheels (norias) of Hama; the amazing sight of The Citadel in Aleppo (a place which, write Humphreys and Simonis, “vies with Damascus for the title of the world’s oldest inhabited city”); the great fortress Krak des Cheveliers, with its massive defenses, including places for dropping boiling oil on invaders (“Shish-kabob,” remarked our guide); cotton fields which reminded me incongruously of places I had seen in Alabama; the little village of Maalula, most of whose inhabitants are Greek Catholics speaking a dialect of Aramaic--the language spoken by Jesus: our guide there recited the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic; the Christian town of Seidnayya, with its shrine and icon (a portrait of the Virgin Mary purportedly painted by Saint Luke); the remnants of the final pillar resided upon by the mad, misogynous, but holy Saint Simeon (myths, legends, stupendous neuroses abound here); the beehive houses one saw along the road--and the sunflowers, surprising in this arid country; some of the most delicious ice cream I have ever tasted (Damascus), some of the strangest ice cream I have ever tasted (Aleppo: the flavor might have been called “Cigarette Ash”); a scrumptious Aleppo dish called “Cherry Kabob,” which combined the sweetness of dessert and the heartiness of a main course. More.

       Each morning at the hotel we had the same breakfast spread out before us. There were croissants, Arab bread, various cheeses, delicious marmalade, “fuul” (made from fava beans), hard-boiled eggs and fried eggs in a steamer, black and green olives, a green apple, orange juice--what I was told was a “typical Arab breakfast.” (In Aleppo the spread included some of the finest bologna I have ever tasted.) One morning, I accidentally burned my arm at the steam table. The waiter--garçon--was quick to give me ice to put on the burn. Seeing my situation, a young Syrian woman came over to our table. In her excellent English, she advised me to apply ointment. Realizing that I had no idea how to obtain ointment, she went to a near-by pharmacy and bought me some. When I offered to give her money for the ointment, she refused. “I just want you to enjoy your stay in Syria,” she said. Still, I wanted to give her something. She was interested in literature, and I decided to give her a little combination of poetry texts and CD that I had put together for Syria. Fearing that she might find my work a little daunting--native speakers find my work a little daunting!--I talked to her about the various poems in the collection. To my surprise, she understood me very well. She told me that she came from Homs, still another Syrian city. Sean told me later that Homs had a reputation as a place of beautiful, intelligent women but rather dim-witted men. I have no idea whether the reputation is deserved, but I wrote this poem about the incident and about the “Homsi” I met:

FOR SAMIA, WHO BROUGHT ME OINTMENT FOR MY BURN

Afterwards,
you sat patiently
throughout my long (long-winded!) subtle
discourse, touching
on many aspects of my own
complex, multifaceted work--
interrupting
only to make intelligent, relevant comments.
My son tells me
that women of your town
are noted for intelligence
and beauty.
I told him,
“Yes,
I noticed.”

Salaam aleikum. Ma’a s-salaama.

Jack Foley