See him! Does he not offend thee? Does such iniquity not rise stinking to the very heavens? The viperous evangelist reared up, his elbows cocked and goat's eyes smoking, and thrust a bony finger down. Die! he screamed. Perish a terrible death with thy bowels blown open and black blood boiling from thy nether eye, God save your soul amen.
-From McCarthy's Suttree
The night before last I was in the hotel bar with Ian and Patra, logisticians over a beer. We were discussing the road agead when I started to notice a CNN International Edition newscast on the satellite TV. The hour’s grim tidings began with a report on Iraqi refugees. After eliding any talk of ultimate responsibility, the show moved on to a segment that centered on the material losses incurred by Orange County homeowners as a result of wildfires with arson as the suspected cause. As I listened to the reporter rattle off how many millions of dollars had gone up in smoke, and as I watched a wholesome and well-heeled looking white family wail over the cinders of what had been their dream home, it occurred to me that the segment was being broadcast in the service of a religious rite, however unconsciously. What we were watching was an elaborately coded ritual to mourn the loss, not only of material possessions, but of the sanitized atomistic disentropy of the American dream. Never mind that the family was entirely unscathed in life and limb (even the fucking dog made it); never mind that, pending the insurance disbursement, they were about to embark on a million dollar shopping spree; never mind that the privileged strata of our society (of which these people eminently were a part) have transcended any true dependence on their material goods as a function of insurance policies and financial instruments—what CNN had put together was a hypocritical and atavistic dirge where the tawdry bit players keened over a feigned loss of wealth, fungible chattel that they will promptly forget all about after picking out a new house and taking a few trips to the mall, with maybe a weekend in Acapulco thrown in for good measure. Alloying con artistry with myth, the program showed the family isolated amid the ruins of their gorgeous refuge, conspicuously omitting the social and financial institutions that would nullify their loss, so inviting us to take part in a mourning ritual that was as offensive as it was meaningless. The gall.
As hinted earlier, the ritual's second function was to lay bare a rupture in the mail of the American dream—unguessed, I guess, by its orchestrators. Look at this family, formerly so secure in their home nestled in the woods away from everything and everybody. Who righteously were reenacting their innocent roles as settlers on the frontier, these proud, standardbearing, insular encapsulators of that original taming and of all that is white and godly, carbons to a tee of their forebears save his commutes to Burbank and her online shopping. When what foul heathen should set a satanic FIRE and destroy all they had accomplished at a stroke. The reactions seem neatly scripted: “I can’t believe it.” “Who would do this to people they don't even know?" “I never thought it would happen to us.” Read: People like us are not supposed to be affected by the outside world, or be vulnerable to disaster. It’s their own little 9-11. And just like 9-11, fragments of the shattered myth must be reconstructed using a scaffolding of righteousness, a mortar of vengeance. And then, when the shackled perpetrator is brought before wrathful Justice and sentenced and dragged off, the whole charade can start from the top.
I think being in Ethiopia helped key me into the absurdity of the segment somewhat. I imagine that on the very evening the report was shown, there were dozens of people throughout this impoverished country who were silently starving, shitting themselves to death, or succumbing to the final inert throes of malaria or AIDS. I wonder: How would a poor Ethiopian audience member react when made to understand that these people had not really lost anything? Not that I claim any kind of novelty for my observation. I would hope that there might be millions of Americans who might—should they pause to really consider it—be offended by that dirge to material lost. And more millions of intelligent Americans who would fail to understand why insurers and government should be obliged to defray the losses suffered by fools who choose to live on beaches and floodplains and faultlines or on southern California’s tinderbox chaparral. It is a mockery of the human intelligence to beg pity for a disaster without a victim (though our vindictive pseudobiblical legal system is expert at prosecuting crimes with no victim other than the wrathful deity of the old testament)—or, more properly, a disaster whose victim is the majority who subsidize the vain and wasteful 'lifestyle' choices that are the ordained prerogative of the hood-winking, forest-and-beachland-dwelling minority, America's Saxon elect, of whose depredations and hypocrisy the continent’s modern history is but a long blotter.
At the end of the broadcast there was talk of a $250,000 bounty for information leading to the arrest of the putative arsonist. Would that I had $250,000 of my own to offer up to a copycat. Fuck you, Orange County.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
My day at the Sudanese embassy: A sketch in 4 quarters
Pregame:
I arrive at the embassy gate at 9 in the morning, dropped off by the Land Rover. I skitter up to a signboard proclaiming the function of the place, and its hours, texted in Amharic and English. It is not a board, but a series of square metal tubes welded at intervals onto a mast. Except for the topmost one, the informational tubes end bluntnosed and open. But the top tube, the one that identifies the place as the Sudanese embassy, ends in an arrow pointing its beholder toward a derelict cinderblock wall across the street. The outside of the embassy is guarded by a mutilated tin-and-plank-built sentry box where guards sit smoking. Ranged along the wall leading up to the gate are today's supplicants, eagerly clutching their folders and plastic document sleeves. Most, it will turn out, are Somalis. I am the sole mzungu. There is also a young woman who looks Chinese. In the minutes to kickoff, a door built into the gate swings open periodically to emit a guard. The first of these guards looks harmless enough, but after three or four swings of the door, the guards being turned out look positively ferocious. They survey the crowd scornfully before striding on long legs up the street. Is this place a guard factory? If I go in there, how will I end up looking when I come out?
Kickoff:
At just past 9:30, the door is opened by a small man in a jean jacket. He smiles mockingly to reveal teeth stained by tobacco. I take him for an Ethiopian. At a casual flip of this man's head, entire supplicant crowd swarms the gate and clamors through. Jean-jacket man seizes a man in front of me (a Somali?) and pushes him back out onto the sidewalk. "Imshi!" he yells (this is Arabic for go! or get out!). I proceed inside the compound. There is an inside gatehouse, a largish main building with a large corrugated-and-galvanized-tin roofed awning where we are to wait, and a smaller building off in the back left corner.
I walk toward the awning and see Tom, an Englishman I’d met earlier at the Egyptian embassy (you need a preexisting Egyptian visa in order to apply for a Sudan transit visa). We shake hands and he tells me he is there to pick his up. How had he managed that, I wonder. He says he applied the day before, on the Thursday. But they claim to be closed on Thursday, I say. Well, they had let him in. What could he say? I wish then that I had either not seen or blithely disregarded the information in the Lonely Planet about the embassy only being open for business on M-W-F. Which would have allowed me to accompany Ian and Patra on the first leg of their journey up north, to Bahir Dar. They already have their visas, and as they are raring to go, I will have to fly up to meet them once I have the visa in hand. I might add that Tom is flouting the embassy's posted admonition that visas are to be collected at 3 o'clock. No matter. Barely five minutes later the blithe young fellow is walking out with his freshly minted Sudanese transit visa.
First quarter:
I am sitting on a wooden bench and am tightly wedged between an elderly Ethiopian lady with a headscarf and leathery, knotted hands on one side, and a younger one on the other. Outside the lady on my right, there are not too many gray hairs to be found under this awning. The people here are young and youngish hopefuls. I look around and ascertain that, as is the case with Addis in general, the majority of those present are women. Christians among them are neatly turned out in western garb, makeup, and the occasional scarf; the Muslim women dress more modestly, but also well. Some of the Somali women are adorned by tribal tattoos that run in wreaths from forehead to throat. I can hear Somali, Amharic and Arabic spoken. I wait. I read my book about the Puritans' diabolical Indian conquests, occasionally darting my eyes off the page to steal glances at the most luxuriously beautiful of the women. In the interstices of my thinking I confirm that Africa's post-independence violence is inseparable from the rapacity of the continent’s colonizers, with special mention owed to the cowardly and cruel Belgians (may the country break in half an no longer tarnish the annals of history). And I wait. Occasionally there is some hubbub when a rejected application is returned to a defeated supplicant. At one point, a crowd of people rushes out from the shelter and mills around jean jacket man. To what end I have no idea.
At the bottom of the shelter are two windows for bureaucrat-supplicant interface and interrogation. For nearly two hours, neither of them are cracked, and nothing behind them stirs. Occasionally jean jacket man enters the shelter with a cluck to exhort the crowd to silence behind his mysteriously mocking smile. I see what appears to be a southern Sudanese dwarf enter the main gate and exchange salaams with a tall, turbaned Arab. I keep thinking about the business of the other people here. They are not itinerants or adventurers. In their lives they have somehow come to a conjuncture where they have had to set course for Sudan as the way forward—whether to engage in contract labor or to press on for Egypt and what lies beyond the Mediterranean I can only guess.
The first quarter ends when the Chinese girl approaches me to ask if I have any idea what is going on, in an Australian accent. I tell her what I know by way of Ian and Patra's experience: That we can expect to pick up the application forms from the left teller sometime soon; that after submitting the completed application with two photographs and copies of both our passports and onward Egyptian visas, the reviewed forms will be returned to us by the left teller with the word "neg" written down the margin in a calligraphic scrawl, something that should occasion no concern; that the application will then need to be submitted to the ultimate authority behind the right counter for further review, and that we should not be overly concerned if it takes an hour or more to get the attention of this ultimate authority; and that, barring any complications, it will then be time to pay. I tell her that my friends were here for a total of four hours. And that jean jacket man wields more power than you might expect, and should be approached in a pinch. What I do not tell her, for lack of knowledge, is that in the quarters or acts remaining, some bona fide dramas will be played out before us.
Second quarter:
I have moved to sit by the Australian girl when the window behind the left counter swings open to reveal an inoffensive-looking Sudanese bureaucrat. This is the man who hands out applications. Because most of those present are already somewhere in the middle of the process—back for their second or third go—there is only a minor tussle to get at the window. I recall that during the tussle, a strong wind scoured the canopies of whatever alien trees stood outside the gate, sending streams of seared fragmentary foliage trickling through the sunlight, a hissing reel of mortal decay. For a moment I forget the window, listening into the wind: Empty-handed messenger.
As we jostle for the applications being handed through the window I converse with a Somali (Moxammed I think) who like me is seeking a Sudanese transit visa. I ask him is he transiting to Egypt, to which he says in his harsh Somali voice, no, to South Africa. Which doesn’t exactly check out—but what tactics might you not employ if you were a Somali seeking a better life? The Aussie girl and I, having formed a natural faranji league, eventually manage to shove our passports through the window (they need to see the Egyptian visa before they will relinquish the precious form) and get our applications. We fill them out and fall to talking. She has been on the Africa circuit for six months, from South Africa on up. Much like Ian and Patra, with the difference that she is 21, and traveling on her own. Which speaks not only to her determination and courage (and affluence!), but also to the generosity and kindness of Africa's many peoples. Especially given the kinds of stories I hear about the reception Africans sometimes give people who they assume to be Chinese.
I tell her that I have shared her experience of such and such a place, but I am loath to qualify my errand in Africa, having found it to be usually more expedient to leave off disclaimers of project or purpose when palavering with fellow travelers. I don’t think I enjoy attention for my plans, preferring when it attaches to occupation of the moment, to charisma (is that condition any different to the full occupation and enjoyment of the present?). The second quarter ends when we hand in the completed applications to the man behind window number 1, and get them back in hand almost as quickly.
Third quarter:
By now it is perhaps 11:30. We are gripping our applications and conversing to pass the time. Window number 2 suddenly swings open to reveal a most severe Sudanese interrogator. From the south, from central Africa, his skin tone is at the far end of the human spectrum whose other extreme is occupied by the English and some of the pale peoples dotting the Baltic. His is a black alloyed with purple and cobalt. A name is called out by an officious Ethiopian in a pinstriped dinner jacket who sits on a desk between window number 2 and the crowd. The interrogator's lower lip is extended in a pout of displeasure and disapproval even before he begins questioning these people for whom there is actually something hanging in the balance of the visa application process. He conducts his interviews in a mixture of Arabic and English, and in Amharic through the agency of the man in the dinner jacket, whose position ensures that interrogator and supplicant are separated by six feet and one intermediate official.
To judge by their smiles and looks of relief, the interrogations seem to pass off successfully for the applicants concerned. Until a certain Ethiopian lady’s name is called. As she approaches, the man asks her to confirm her prospective address in Khartoum. She stumbles. Strike one. The next question concerns her kinship to a man indicated on her application. Was he her father? Husband? Brother? This is the crux of the interrogation. Again she faltered. She could not specify the relation. After trying to get her to specify who the man was another two or three times with something like patience, he handed her her application and passport in disgust, waving her away with a flip of the hand. For her part, because language and reason had failed her—who knows what sordid complexities lay behind the uncovered subterfuge—she was left with her face as the only effective means of suasion. As he was hacking away at her defenses, the expression grew ever more plaintive and desperate, until at last, like a master actress or caricaturist, she had her mien perched on the very edge of tears. When she was turned away she did not cry. Instead she went out to compose herself, and then returned to the shelter, standing in the “gallery” where she was on prominent display to the interrogator. There she managed masterfully to hold the verge-of-tears look for the better part of an hour. During which hour other women would emerge from their interview unscathed and elated, adding still more gravity to her affect.
After perhaps an hour and a half of these interrogations, I begin to think that I might try to make something happen on my account. I tap the dinner-jacketed interpreter to see when it might be my turn to submit to the visa section's ultimate authority, but he shrugs my hand off and fixes me with an acid stare. "Wait!" When, some minutes later, I approach jean jacket man to see if he can intercede to turn the crank of ultimate authority, he marches me right up to window 2 and is about to plead my case when the ultimate authority angrily tells him to leave, and me to sit down. So much for his pull.
Another hour passes. The girl and I talk lazily, perfunctorily. I doze briefly. She goes out to see if there is any food to be had. The 3rd quarter will not end. While she is gone I overhear two middle-aged Arabs (Syrians?) talking strategy. "Don't talk to that guy in Arabic. Talk to him in English, whatever you do. And don't tell him you work in my company. You're there on a visit." I'm not sure what that language caveat signifies—perhaps the assumption is that Syrian Arabic would make the Sudanese official feel somehow inferior and provoke a rejection out of spite.
It is also worth mentioning that the tutoring Arab, as well as a number of supplicant Somali men, periodically encourage me to make another move on window 2, thinking to sail in on my privileged coattails; and that whenever I heed their sage advice I am rebuffed by the pinstriped interpreter. When Pei returns (as the Aussie girl is named), we eat a couple of revivifying rolls. She says that she is considering withdrawing her application, taking the delay for a sign. I encourage her to wait it out, having come this far. At length the interrogations are concluded, at which point jean jacket man comes running in to silence everyone, then to pull them bodily away from window number 2, lest they should pollute the ultimate authority’s field of vision and so distract him from his delicate task. With the crowd reorganized and pacified, he collects our applications, as well as those of the strategerizing Arabs and some of the Somali men who had begun their long journey that day with me at window number 1. It is the endgame of the 3rd quarter, with the home team looking like it might pull off the shutout.
Fourth quarter:
It is 2:30 in the afternoon. It does not seem that jean jacket man has been able to hand the documents over to the ultimate authority, who appears to have either left the office or retreated into some murky corner of his official’s lair—so I feel my heart sink when jean jacket man draws near to hand them back. But it's not as I fear. Come back at 3:00, he says. Visa OK. Pay cashier then. Now we take lunch. So Pei and I go up the road for a quick njera sampler. Given the emotional drainage of the wait, I do not presently recall what we discussed. Emotional exhaustion! What vanity, I now feel, to cite the experience of the embassy as grounds for emotional exhaustion. What right to I the vagabond-itinerant possess in the face of all these people for whom love and livelihood are at stake—what right, I repeat, have I to be affected on my own behalf in the face of all this? Seeing how most of the world lives makes me want, in spite of myself, to occupy no space, to command no empathy, to merit no respect. None at all. What a contradictory sentiment to be seen in one who wants everything from the world! Well. I may want to squeeze the last gritty droplet of experience out of this thing, but I wish to go about it quietly, unobtrusively—by disappearing.
But—chaff!—this is a game summary, and I need to get on with the fourth quarter. Done breaking the fermented flapjacks that pass for bread here, we shuffle back to the embassy. It is five of three, the supplicants are ranged with patience and good grace against the wall, and the shadows of posts and palings are playing longer on their faces than before. The woman with the plaintive expression is not among the waiting. After 10 minutes or so, the gate opens and we are permitted to storm inside. Because I am utterly ineffective at African-style clamoring (being too much of a gentleman, you see), I end up near the rear of the line snaking from the cashier’s counter. Suddenly inspired to chivalrous pageantry, the Arab who had been advising his friend admonishes the women to form their own queue. "Lady first!" he says. Yet because the cashier alternates between the two lines in his processing of payments, the segregation is really no more than that. It is not to the women's advantage. But the important thing is that it was an arrangement that the consigliore could be content with. After some minutes Pei makes her payment and flees. See you Monday when the visas are ready. See you Monday.
It takes about half an hour to get to the head of the line, by which time I have the beginnings of a sunburn. Just as it is my turn to hand my materials to jean jacket man, who will in turn pass them to the cashier, he is approached by the Somali who featured in the second quarter—the one who was obtaining a Sudanese transit visa so that he could head for South Africa. "Please my friend. Please help me. I have been here 8 times and nobody has helped me. Please.” Jean jacket man takes his materials and makes no show of considering them before handing them back. The mocking grin turned malevolent, he orders the man to leave: "Imshi!" The defeated Somali trudges back to the tin-roofed waiting area, no doubt to enter a futile plea at window number 2. The dwarf is looking on from the shadows. He is grinning.
It is now my turn to pay. Never have I had to go through more for the honor of forking over $61. Of course, this process has been much easier than getting into the DRC, but at least that was free. The process is complete. The clock has expired. Payment filed, jean jacket man places my certified application and passport at his feet with the rest of them. I open my mouth to thank him, but have lost my voice and can manage little more than a croak.
I arrive at the embassy gate at 9 in the morning, dropped off by the Land Rover. I skitter up to a signboard proclaiming the function of the place, and its hours, texted in Amharic and English. It is not a board, but a series of square metal tubes welded at intervals onto a mast. Except for the topmost one, the informational tubes end bluntnosed and open. But the top tube, the one that identifies the place as the Sudanese embassy, ends in an arrow pointing its beholder toward a derelict cinderblock wall across the street. The outside of the embassy is guarded by a mutilated tin-and-plank-built sentry box where guards sit smoking. Ranged along the wall leading up to the gate are today's supplicants, eagerly clutching their folders and plastic document sleeves. Most, it will turn out, are Somalis. I am the sole mzungu. There is also a young woman who looks Chinese. In the minutes to kickoff, a door built into the gate swings open periodically to emit a guard. The first of these guards looks harmless enough, but after three or four swings of the door, the guards being turned out look positively ferocious. They survey the crowd scornfully before striding on long legs up the street. Is this place a guard factory? If I go in there, how will I end up looking when I come out?
Kickoff:
At just past 9:30, the door is opened by a small man in a jean jacket. He smiles mockingly to reveal teeth stained by tobacco. I take him for an Ethiopian. At a casual flip of this man's head, entire supplicant crowd swarms the gate and clamors through. Jean-jacket man seizes a man in front of me (a Somali?) and pushes him back out onto the sidewalk. "Imshi!" he yells (this is Arabic for go! or get out!). I proceed inside the compound. There is an inside gatehouse, a largish main building with a large corrugated-and-galvanized-tin roofed awning where we are to wait, and a smaller building off in the back left corner.
I walk toward the awning and see Tom, an Englishman I’d met earlier at the Egyptian embassy (you need a preexisting Egyptian visa in order to apply for a Sudan transit visa). We shake hands and he tells me he is there to pick his up. How had he managed that, I wonder. He says he applied the day before, on the Thursday. But they claim to be closed on Thursday, I say. Well, they had let him in. What could he say? I wish then that I had either not seen or blithely disregarded the information in the Lonely Planet about the embassy only being open for business on M-W-F. Which would have allowed me to accompany Ian and Patra on the first leg of their journey up north, to Bahir Dar. They already have their visas, and as they are raring to go, I will have to fly up to meet them once I have the visa in hand. I might add that Tom is flouting the embassy's posted admonition that visas are to be collected at 3 o'clock. No matter. Barely five minutes later the blithe young fellow is walking out with his freshly minted Sudanese transit visa.
First quarter:
I am sitting on a wooden bench and am tightly wedged between an elderly Ethiopian lady with a headscarf and leathery, knotted hands on one side, and a younger one on the other. Outside the lady on my right, there are not too many gray hairs to be found under this awning. The people here are young and youngish hopefuls. I look around and ascertain that, as is the case with Addis in general, the majority of those present are women. Christians among them are neatly turned out in western garb, makeup, and the occasional scarf; the Muslim women dress more modestly, but also well. Some of the Somali women are adorned by tribal tattoos that run in wreaths from forehead to throat. I can hear Somali, Amharic and Arabic spoken. I wait. I read my book about the Puritans' diabolical Indian conquests, occasionally darting my eyes off the page to steal glances at the most luxuriously beautiful of the women. In the interstices of my thinking I confirm that Africa's post-independence violence is inseparable from the rapacity of the continent’s colonizers, with special mention owed to the cowardly and cruel Belgians (may the country break in half an no longer tarnish the annals of history). And I wait. Occasionally there is some hubbub when a rejected application is returned to a defeated supplicant. At one point, a crowd of people rushes out from the shelter and mills around jean jacket man. To what end I have no idea.
At the bottom of the shelter are two windows for bureaucrat-supplicant interface and interrogation. For nearly two hours, neither of them are cracked, and nothing behind them stirs. Occasionally jean jacket man enters the shelter with a cluck to exhort the crowd to silence behind his mysteriously mocking smile. I see what appears to be a southern Sudanese dwarf enter the main gate and exchange salaams with a tall, turbaned Arab. I keep thinking about the business of the other people here. They are not itinerants or adventurers. In their lives they have somehow come to a conjuncture where they have had to set course for Sudan as the way forward—whether to engage in contract labor or to press on for Egypt and what lies beyond the Mediterranean I can only guess.
The first quarter ends when the Chinese girl approaches me to ask if I have any idea what is going on, in an Australian accent. I tell her what I know by way of Ian and Patra's experience: That we can expect to pick up the application forms from the left teller sometime soon; that after submitting the completed application with two photographs and copies of both our passports and onward Egyptian visas, the reviewed forms will be returned to us by the left teller with the word "neg" written down the margin in a calligraphic scrawl, something that should occasion no concern; that the application will then need to be submitted to the ultimate authority behind the right counter for further review, and that we should not be overly concerned if it takes an hour or more to get the attention of this ultimate authority; and that, barring any complications, it will then be time to pay. I tell her that my friends were here for a total of four hours. And that jean jacket man wields more power than you might expect, and should be approached in a pinch. What I do not tell her, for lack of knowledge, is that in the quarters or acts remaining, some bona fide dramas will be played out before us.
Second quarter:
I have moved to sit by the Australian girl when the window behind the left counter swings open to reveal an inoffensive-looking Sudanese bureaucrat. This is the man who hands out applications. Because most of those present are already somewhere in the middle of the process—back for their second or third go—there is only a minor tussle to get at the window. I recall that during the tussle, a strong wind scoured the canopies of whatever alien trees stood outside the gate, sending streams of seared fragmentary foliage trickling through the sunlight, a hissing reel of mortal decay. For a moment I forget the window, listening into the wind: Empty-handed messenger.
As we jostle for the applications being handed through the window I converse with a Somali (Moxammed I think) who like me is seeking a Sudanese transit visa. I ask him is he transiting to Egypt, to which he says in his harsh Somali voice, no, to South Africa. Which doesn’t exactly check out—but what tactics might you not employ if you were a Somali seeking a better life? The Aussie girl and I, having formed a natural faranji league, eventually manage to shove our passports through the window (they need to see the Egyptian visa before they will relinquish the precious form) and get our applications. We fill them out and fall to talking. She has been on the Africa circuit for six months, from South Africa on up. Much like Ian and Patra, with the difference that she is 21, and traveling on her own. Which speaks not only to her determination and courage (and affluence!), but also to the generosity and kindness of Africa's many peoples. Especially given the kinds of stories I hear about the reception Africans sometimes give people who they assume to be Chinese.
I tell her that I have shared her experience of such and such a place, but I am loath to qualify my errand in Africa, having found it to be usually more expedient to leave off disclaimers of project or purpose when palavering with fellow travelers. I don’t think I enjoy attention for my plans, preferring when it attaches to occupation of the moment, to charisma (is that condition any different to the full occupation and enjoyment of the present?). The second quarter ends when we hand in the completed applications to the man behind window number 1, and get them back in hand almost as quickly.
Third quarter:
By now it is perhaps 11:30. We are gripping our applications and conversing to pass the time. Window number 2 suddenly swings open to reveal a most severe Sudanese interrogator. From the south, from central Africa, his skin tone is at the far end of the human spectrum whose other extreme is occupied by the English and some of the pale peoples dotting the Baltic. His is a black alloyed with purple and cobalt. A name is called out by an officious Ethiopian in a pinstriped dinner jacket who sits on a desk between window number 2 and the crowd. The interrogator's lower lip is extended in a pout of displeasure and disapproval even before he begins questioning these people for whom there is actually something hanging in the balance of the visa application process. He conducts his interviews in a mixture of Arabic and English, and in Amharic through the agency of the man in the dinner jacket, whose position ensures that interrogator and supplicant are separated by six feet and one intermediate official.
To judge by their smiles and looks of relief, the interrogations seem to pass off successfully for the applicants concerned. Until a certain Ethiopian lady’s name is called. As she approaches, the man asks her to confirm her prospective address in Khartoum. She stumbles. Strike one. The next question concerns her kinship to a man indicated on her application. Was he her father? Husband? Brother? This is the crux of the interrogation. Again she faltered. She could not specify the relation. After trying to get her to specify who the man was another two or three times with something like patience, he handed her her application and passport in disgust, waving her away with a flip of the hand. For her part, because language and reason had failed her—who knows what sordid complexities lay behind the uncovered subterfuge—she was left with her face as the only effective means of suasion. As he was hacking away at her defenses, the expression grew ever more plaintive and desperate, until at last, like a master actress or caricaturist, she had her mien perched on the very edge of tears. When she was turned away she did not cry. Instead she went out to compose herself, and then returned to the shelter, standing in the “gallery” where she was on prominent display to the interrogator. There she managed masterfully to hold the verge-of-tears look for the better part of an hour. During which hour other women would emerge from their interview unscathed and elated, adding still more gravity to her affect.
After perhaps an hour and a half of these interrogations, I begin to think that I might try to make something happen on my account. I tap the dinner-jacketed interpreter to see when it might be my turn to submit to the visa section's ultimate authority, but he shrugs my hand off and fixes me with an acid stare. "Wait!" When, some minutes later, I approach jean jacket man to see if he can intercede to turn the crank of ultimate authority, he marches me right up to window 2 and is about to plead my case when the ultimate authority angrily tells him to leave, and me to sit down. So much for his pull.
Another hour passes. The girl and I talk lazily, perfunctorily. I doze briefly. She goes out to see if there is any food to be had. The 3rd quarter will not end. While she is gone I overhear two middle-aged Arabs (Syrians?) talking strategy. "Don't talk to that guy in Arabic. Talk to him in English, whatever you do. And don't tell him you work in my company. You're there on a visit." I'm not sure what that language caveat signifies—perhaps the assumption is that Syrian Arabic would make the Sudanese official feel somehow inferior and provoke a rejection out of spite.
It is also worth mentioning that the tutoring Arab, as well as a number of supplicant Somali men, periodically encourage me to make another move on window 2, thinking to sail in on my privileged coattails; and that whenever I heed their sage advice I am rebuffed by the pinstriped interpreter. When Pei returns (as the Aussie girl is named), we eat a couple of revivifying rolls. She says that she is considering withdrawing her application, taking the delay for a sign. I encourage her to wait it out, having come this far. At length the interrogations are concluded, at which point jean jacket man comes running in to silence everyone, then to pull them bodily away from window number 2, lest they should pollute the ultimate authority’s field of vision and so distract him from his delicate task. With the crowd reorganized and pacified, he collects our applications, as well as those of the strategerizing Arabs and some of the Somali men who had begun their long journey that day with me at window number 1. It is the endgame of the 3rd quarter, with the home team looking like it might pull off the shutout.
Fourth quarter:
It is 2:30 in the afternoon. It does not seem that jean jacket man has been able to hand the documents over to the ultimate authority, who appears to have either left the office or retreated into some murky corner of his official’s lair—so I feel my heart sink when jean jacket man draws near to hand them back. But it's not as I fear. Come back at 3:00, he says. Visa OK. Pay cashier then. Now we take lunch. So Pei and I go up the road for a quick njera sampler. Given the emotional drainage of the wait, I do not presently recall what we discussed. Emotional exhaustion! What vanity, I now feel, to cite the experience of the embassy as grounds for emotional exhaustion. What right to I the vagabond-itinerant possess in the face of all these people for whom love and livelihood are at stake—what right, I repeat, have I to be affected on my own behalf in the face of all this? Seeing how most of the world lives makes me want, in spite of myself, to occupy no space, to command no empathy, to merit no respect. None at all. What a contradictory sentiment to be seen in one who wants everything from the world! Well. I may want to squeeze the last gritty droplet of experience out of this thing, but I wish to go about it quietly, unobtrusively—by disappearing.
But—chaff!—this is a game summary, and I need to get on with the fourth quarter. Done breaking the fermented flapjacks that pass for bread here, we shuffle back to the embassy. It is five of three, the supplicants are ranged with patience and good grace against the wall, and the shadows of posts and palings are playing longer on their faces than before. The woman with the plaintive expression is not among the waiting. After 10 minutes or so, the gate opens and we are permitted to storm inside. Because I am utterly ineffective at African-style clamoring (being too much of a gentleman, you see), I end up near the rear of the line snaking from the cashier’s counter. Suddenly inspired to chivalrous pageantry, the Arab who had been advising his friend admonishes the women to form their own queue. "Lady first!" he says. Yet because the cashier alternates between the two lines in his processing of payments, the segregation is really no more than that. It is not to the women's advantage. But the important thing is that it was an arrangement that the consigliore could be content with. After some minutes Pei makes her payment and flees. See you Monday when the visas are ready. See you Monday.
It takes about half an hour to get to the head of the line, by which time I have the beginnings of a sunburn. Just as it is my turn to hand my materials to jean jacket man, who will in turn pass them to the cashier, he is approached by the Somali who featured in the second quarter—the one who was obtaining a Sudanese transit visa so that he could head for South Africa. "Please my friend. Please help me. I have been here 8 times and nobody has helped me. Please.” Jean jacket man takes his materials and makes no show of considering them before handing them back. The mocking grin turned malevolent, he orders the man to leave: "Imshi!" The defeated Somali trudges back to the tin-roofed waiting area, no doubt to enter a futile plea at window number 2. The dwarf is looking on from the shadows. He is grinning.
It is now my turn to pay. Never have I had to go through more for the honor of forking over $61. Of course, this process has been much easier than getting into the DRC, but at least that was free. The process is complete. The clock has expired. Payment filed, jean jacket man places my certified application and passport at his feet with the rest of them. I open my mouth to thank him, but have lost my voice and can manage little more than a croak.
A briefing from Addis
First some anecdotes, impressions. The funny signage in Addis: A hoarding trumpeting the Society for the Erection of Martyr Advancement Foundation; a hardware store marquee advertising Pumps, Hoses, Paint and Vibrators.
All around the streamers and flags and garlands from the millennium celebration at the beginning of the month. In Ethiopia, you see, it is the year 2000, just turned. Also—and this is something I failed to notice the last time I was here—their reckoning of the 24 hour period begins not at midnight but at daybreak, i.e. six in the morning is their hour zero.
An anecdote overheard, spoken by a road-tripping wzungu couple: “We travel with a little plastic snake that sits coiled up on the dashboard. It gives every African who peeps in through the window a fright. Once we flung it at some children who were giving us trouble. They ran away screaming.”
The cab drivers all want to know if I can give them an in to get to your country, get to your country, get to your country. Cabbie Markos has a friend who has been in a 'refugee camp' in Hamburg for five years. The government will not let him work.
The hills around Addis range to 3,000 meters, and on those high ridges is where the world's best marathoners get their practice. And yet down in Addis’s cauldron where the diesel-choked air shimmers dully with a color like slate, it is an effort just to keep putting one foot in front of the next. The aridity and elevation give the smoke a granular acridness that refuses to clear, unlike, say, the sootiest diesel in rain or humid air.
Addis is squalid, yes, but its people maintain a dignity whose betokening facial expression verges on haughtiness. On the subject of the people, it would be an unforgivable omission not to mention the women. They are of the rarest beauty, yet—uncannily—in this place such beauty is no rarity. A silly thing to subject to analysis or taxonomy, perhaps, but it’s something about the sharply contrasting tones of lips and face, the delicacy of their faces, the high foreheads, the curves teased out to fit elongate frames, no less the conscious flare used everywhere to accentuate the beauty: Scent of musk, nails painted black or purple, scarves that hide one curve and set off another. Several times a day I feel as if I must surely be witnessing the passage of one of the world’s most beautiful women in the flesh. And as in Zambia, it also seems that the women here, and I mean the poor ones, are better kept and less weatherbeaten and careworn than the men. Why is this?
All around the streamers and flags and garlands from the millennium celebration at the beginning of the month. In Ethiopia, you see, it is the year 2000, just turned. Also—and this is something I failed to notice the last time I was here—their reckoning of the 24 hour period begins not at midnight but at daybreak, i.e. six in the morning is their hour zero.
An anecdote overheard, spoken by a road-tripping wzungu couple: “We travel with a little plastic snake that sits coiled up on the dashboard. It gives every African who peeps in through the window a fright. Once we flung it at some children who were giving us trouble. They ran away screaming.”
The cab drivers all want to know if I can give them an in to get to your country, get to your country, get to your country. Cabbie Markos has a friend who has been in a 'refugee camp' in Hamburg for five years. The government will not let him work.
The hills around Addis range to 3,000 meters, and on those high ridges is where the world's best marathoners get their practice. And yet down in Addis’s cauldron where the diesel-choked air shimmers dully with a color like slate, it is an effort just to keep putting one foot in front of the next. The aridity and elevation give the smoke a granular acridness that refuses to clear, unlike, say, the sootiest diesel in rain or humid air.
Addis is squalid, yes, but its people maintain a dignity whose betokening facial expression verges on haughtiness. On the subject of the people, it would be an unforgivable omission not to mention the women. They are of the rarest beauty, yet—uncannily—in this place such beauty is no rarity. A silly thing to subject to analysis or taxonomy, perhaps, but it’s something about the sharply contrasting tones of lips and face, the delicacy of their faces, the high foreheads, the curves teased out to fit elongate frames, no less the conscious flare used everywhere to accentuate the beauty: Scent of musk, nails painted black or purple, scarves that hide one curve and set off another. Several times a day I feel as if I must surely be witnessing the passage of one of the world’s most beautiful women in the flesh. And as in Zambia, it also seems that the women here, and I mean the poor ones, are better kept and less weatherbeaten and careworn than the men. Why is this?
Monday, October 22, 2007
Istanbul Cont'd
Mission accomplished on the first head. I had the bath. It was relaxing, no nonsense, and it made me see that the bathhouse in Sana'a had an Ottoman precursor. The same vaulted dome with small, tubular skylights bored out of the stone roof, allowing light to cut through the steam and play on the water and walls. There really isn't to’ much to report. Though (shucks) I suppose it does bear mentioning that there was a bit of pain involved. At one point my masseur Ahmed crossed my arms over my chest, bore down on the elbows, and managed to crack the cartilage between several vertebrae. There was also some painful, if not very thorough, leg massage.
I might add, with reference to an estate which I am fortunate enough to have seldom affected me to my detriment, that Turkey has just passed a parliamentary motion authorizing its troops to attack PKK rear bases in neighboring Iraq. The practical meaning may or may not be near nil. but the symbolic echo of our own unilateralism is unmistakable, and gives little comfort. It also makes it tempting to play on my Swedish identity as needed.
There is a phenomenon I often experience when walking around unfamiliar urban spaces. It goes a little something like this: I am walking along when it occurs to me that I wish to sit down for a coffee or a sandwich. There are many options available. But instead of inspecting them and settling on the first one that meets with my approval, I can't bring myself to stop and inspect a single one. Whenever I think about stopping to inspect a menu or poke my head through a door, I am gripped by a kind of horrible, self-loathing inertia. Why is this? One reason is the self-awareness that comes with being on display to the residents of an unfamiliar place. I don’t want to be seen hesitating. So why then do I not simply make for the first place that catches my eye? Well, because that would be impossible. It’s a matter of atmosphere, you see. When in unfamiliar places I am nearly always trying to think about them actively, or write about them. To make up for the soporific dazzle I feel New York sometimes imposes on mind and pen. So while I cannot risk ridicule by stopping at one bill of fare after another, nor can I hazard the frustration of wasting my time where, due to poor service or the presence of too many cretins, I cannot think. The alternative is to wander around for miles or hours with seeming purpose, while ready at any step to concede, to deflate in a heap of defeat. I start to feel I would have been better off staying at home. It started happening to me in Istanbul today, but I was fortunate enough to hit on a solution that I hope will not seem too creepy. This is what I did: As soon as I felt the onset of my purposeful indecisiveness, my eyes fixed on the form of a female pedestrian in front of me. I fell to following her, almost without thinking. After taking about 3 of the turns she had taken, I decided that if she entered a café or a restaurant within a few minutes, so would I. It seemed likely that an attractive young woman would lead me to an attractive place. And if she didn’t enter one within a few minutes, I would step into the first one she shot an appraising glance at. And that is exactly what I did. I am now sitting at the intersection of two narrow alleys under the high and watchful eye of a minaret. There is music, and a little bit of street life, but at the tables I am alone. It is perfect—even more so because I ended up here a function of someone else’s whim. Yes, I rode the waves of fate to get here. Not bad. I’d like to try this more often, to unburden myself of as much of the responsibility of choice as possible. Will that mean that I will end up behind a white picket fence, or behind bars? I just hope it doesn't get me into too much trouble!
~
In Darren’s harbor there are many boats seining for bluefish, mackerel, and I believe turbot. These vessels ply a fading, outmoded and unproductive trade, and form the foreground to the constant stream of container ships and tankers, the standard-bearers of globalization. Their boats are overstaffed, the waters overfished—although the currents flowing in from both the Black Sea and Marmara have kept them at this game of diminishing returns to date. The Black Sea offing has been cleared of smog by the bluster of this day, with ships at its very limit issuing a vague and blurry challenge to the uniformity of the horizon.
Just now there is a tanker passing called the Aegean Angel, its name writ small on the prow, its font size in sharp contrast to the huge emblazoning of the line’s name amidships, Arcadia Hellas, as if in challenge to the Turkishness of these waters, which of course have flowed and scintillated and been plied under the auspices of many different standards in many different times. And now to do a bit of fishing…
I might add, with reference to an estate which I am fortunate enough to have seldom affected me to my detriment, that Turkey has just passed a parliamentary motion authorizing its troops to attack PKK rear bases in neighboring Iraq. The practical meaning may or may not be near nil. but the symbolic echo of our own unilateralism is unmistakable, and gives little comfort. It also makes it tempting to play on my Swedish identity as needed.
There is a phenomenon I often experience when walking around unfamiliar urban spaces. It goes a little something like this: I am walking along when it occurs to me that I wish to sit down for a coffee or a sandwich. There are many options available. But instead of inspecting them and settling on the first one that meets with my approval, I can't bring myself to stop and inspect a single one. Whenever I think about stopping to inspect a menu or poke my head through a door, I am gripped by a kind of horrible, self-loathing inertia. Why is this? One reason is the self-awareness that comes with being on display to the residents of an unfamiliar place. I don’t want to be seen hesitating. So why then do I not simply make for the first place that catches my eye? Well, because that would be impossible. It’s a matter of atmosphere, you see. When in unfamiliar places I am nearly always trying to think about them actively, or write about them. To make up for the soporific dazzle I feel New York sometimes imposes on mind and pen. So while I cannot risk ridicule by stopping at one bill of fare after another, nor can I hazard the frustration of wasting my time where, due to poor service or the presence of too many cretins, I cannot think. The alternative is to wander around for miles or hours with seeming purpose, while ready at any step to concede, to deflate in a heap of defeat. I start to feel I would have been better off staying at home. It started happening to me in Istanbul today, but I was fortunate enough to hit on a solution that I hope will not seem too creepy. This is what I did: As soon as I felt the onset of my purposeful indecisiveness, my eyes fixed on the form of a female pedestrian in front of me. I fell to following her, almost without thinking. After taking about 3 of the turns she had taken, I decided that if she entered a café or a restaurant within a few minutes, so would I. It seemed likely that an attractive young woman would lead me to an attractive place. And if she didn’t enter one within a few minutes, I would step into the first one she shot an appraising glance at. And that is exactly what I did. I am now sitting at the intersection of two narrow alleys under the high and watchful eye of a minaret. There is music, and a little bit of street life, but at the tables I am alone. It is perfect—even more so because I ended up here a function of someone else’s whim. Yes, I rode the waves of fate to get here. Not bad. I’d like to try this more often, to unburden myself of as much of the responsibility of choice as possible. Will that mean that I will end up behind a white picket fence, or behind bars? I just hope it doesn't get me into too much trouble!
~
In Darren’s harbor there are many boats seining for bluefish, mackerel, and I believe turbot. These vessels ply a fading, outmoded and unproductive trade, and form the foreground to the constant stream of container ships and tankers, the standard-bearers of globalization. Their boats are overstaffed, the waters overfished—although the currents flowing in from both the Black Sea and Marmara have kept them at this game of diminishing returns to date. The Black Sea offing has been cleared of smog by the bluster of this day, with ships at its very limit issuing a vague and blurry challenge to the uniformity of the horizon.
Just now there is a tanker passing called the Aegean Angel, its name writ small on the prow, its font size in sharp contrast to the huge emblazoning of the line’s name amidships, Arcadia Hellas, as if in challenge to the Turkishness of these waters, which of course have flowed and scintillated and been plied under the auspices of many different standards in many different times. And now to do a bit of fishing…
Thursday, October 18, 2007
A list
As salat al-fajr (the dawn prayer) is called this morning--rustily, I think--I indulge in the workaday pleasure of composing a to-do list, albeit slightly turned away from the usual chaff to do with management of money and my own labor. This time I’m indulging in a list of sights to see, "experiences" to have, and perhaps, at the outside, people to correspond with. Notwithstanding which, or even as a function of which, depending, I should like to note that purchasing some original Izmir tile, or any Ottoman craft if at all within my means, seems as sound an investment as any. And, by the (noting) way, that this morning my mind seems ever to have skipped to something else by the time my pen moves to mop up whatever progression of morsels were previously in its eye, or teeth, or hand or mouth. That has a ring to it: In my all-devouring (pantophagor) mind's mouth, I digested a morsel. Or: Living from mind's hand to mind's mouth.
Enough, enough! Now for a plunge into sights future and potential, before backpedaling into a treatment of sights seen.
1. I want to bathe in a hammam. One of those stone-built Turkish baths deep in the bowels of some building where foreign voices are muted by hissing jets of steam. Which brings me to a half-waking question I asked myself earlier. Why, if gay men can visit a gay bathhouse and have casual, even anonymous sex, and this arrangement is accepted as a by and large legitimate manifestation of their sexuality; why then are no similar bathhouse arrangements possible for straight pleasure-seekers who wish to take the waters, and something else besides? Has anyone ever heard of a co-ed heterosexual bathhouse that acts as a sexual crucible? Sex among men and women that is truly casual is hard to come by. And perhaps that is as it should be. After all, no matter how effective the contraception, heterosexual coitus cannot be separated in form from the serious business of reproduction.
Only in a culture (or world) without a trace of hope* for future generations—or where sex had been irrevocably divorced from the business of reproduction, with the pair's latter half invested in the holy offices (labs) of gene science (obviously an arrangement that applies only to the rich, or to those who submit to the reproductive imperatives of Power), could we conceive of a bathhouse where men and women met for sex that, divested of the merest vanishing trace of sacred generative power, was truly casual. This thought spawns another: If reproduction (and its specter) were somehow totally cut out of the arrangement, would then a different logic apply to the selection of partners? I'll admit it's ridiculous right here, since so much of this business is impulsive and instinctual anyway. Men would still be attracted to the curves that denote the ability to bear and rear children, women still so to the hard lines and size that bespeak the ability to protect.
One thing that might disappear in the bathhouse of a culture’s twilight, though, is what might be termed speculative prostitution—when the body is offered in response to perceived wealth, on speculation of reward. Or at least the genetically (i.e. the promise of a safe childrearing environment) motivated branch of that behavior might disappear.
But no—I am getting ensnared in these speculations. I despair of their foolishness. On the one hand, if the production of new people were entrusted to magician-scientists, there is no guarantee that heterosexual sex would survive. All the mysteries—that vestige of sacredness (that "utopian trace" enshrined to this day in the institution of marriage, and negatively apparent in the opprobrium piled on the harlot) that attends heterosexual sex even today—would be lost. And lacking that sacredness, and even especially the cynical mock sacredness flogged by Hollywood and Madison Avenue and all the rest, what would drive the sexes to seek each other’s company? What, indeed, would keep alive any distinction between the sexes? If it is all taken care of in the lab, what need to attract the other by honing and displaying one's physical attributes, or through various social and intellectual flourishes to "demonstrate value?"
We have already begun to witness a tendency toward androgyny in the west. Witness metrosexuality. Witness the worship en masse of ephebic males and of waiflike boy-women who, in their quest of a supposed bodily perfection, deny that body its fertility. Witness the ever-increasing swapping and reversal of gender roles, and witness especially the tendency, among intellectual and technical elites, to define the self beyond the pale of sex. A bad thing? It is a thing like any other. Though it is something Islam has a problem with, in case you weren’t paying attention.
Or take the obverse of the coin: Cultural twilight, nihilism. Imagine you are on a doomed flight. Now consider the act of (heterosexual) sex as your final. Even assuming there is enough time, and that the mechanics are workable, is there not something obscene to the thought of having sex during your last minutes over the earth? (Note that this is not to be confused, either with becoming a member of the mile high club, or with dying of a heart attack during orgasm, both of which I hold to be desirable, the latter ideal) Never mind the old notion of death being something to face down stoically, alone. It’s the wisdom of repugnance, I say! Seriously now (calm down!), I can’t vouch for others' way of thinking, but when I think of being in a situation preliminary to a known catastrophic death, I think I would want to hold a woman, kiss her—I just can't see wanting sex. Isn't this because, whether we like it or not, the heterosexual act still has this aura of hallowedness about it, stemming from its (still) central role in the powerfully mysterious business of creating new humans? When in speaking of "casual sex" we say that it has become an empty ritual, I suspect that we do not quite believe it. Rituals involve us in processes that are greater than ourselves, and that is why we participate in them. Now imagine a somewhat more prolonged twilight, i.e. a nuclear winter. Obviously not the time to bring a child into the world, but beyond that even—let's say contraceptives are used—isn't it a sacrilege of sorts to commit the joyful act as the world is dying? Witness the scarcity of August babies.
That said, I think that a truly active heterosexual bathhouse will remain the stuff of fantasy. It may be a thrilling fantasy—who doesn't enjoy an occasional peep into the abyss of dissipation and irreverence? By way of closing I would like to mention that I can sense another can of worms ready to burst. Its label reads that there are those among us in the West who, despairing of all things, are of the opinion that it is wrong to bring children into the world as it is, despite the lack of any certain ending to our breakneck age—and who, acting with a truly moral consistency, eschew sex. These are the harbingers of the forlorn sight of the empty twilight bathhouse. Just a morsel for thought.
So that is one thing I need to do, is visit a Turkish bathhouse. The plan is to do so today.
2. Next up is the Hippodrome, that much celebrated center of Byzantine and then Ottoman political life. Forgive the flourish: It's almost verbatim from the Lonely Planet, that non plus ultra of forgettable bombast. I dare them to say "undiscovered gem" one more time. I fucking dare them. Regardless, the Hippodrome is where chariot races and wrestling bouts determined the faction that had political favor with emperors and sultans. I don’t aim to get into a lengthy treatment of this—I know very little of Roman, Byzantine or Ottoman history—but it brings me back to something I wrote in my first post on this trip. About how it is exciting to be able to read past chapters of history in the monuments that have survived its spasms and cataclysms into the present. That Istanbul gives an exciting feeling because it reads like a palimpsest. All very true. And which may lead visitor and denizen alike to make claims about the antiquity of a place. As opposed to, say, the New World. Or to Australia. Or to Scandinavia, which to my eyes has always seemed so newly civilized. What I’m getting at is this: Almost every land is antique in terms of human habitation. Our perceptions of antiqueness are conditioned by the survival of written documents and by the practice of having built in stone. These are the hallmarks of antiquity after all. I have been reading a book called The Conquest of America by Francis Jennings. It deals with the dispossession of the Indians of New England, and with the myths of civilization, and chosenness, and manifest destiny, as well as the legal fictions used first to justify and then to forget that dispossession. The point is that our land is also very much an antique one. In Boston, the book mentions, researchers carbon-dated an unearthed fish weir, and found its wood to have been felled some 4,000 years ago. Which in its own understated way provoked in me the same sense of sublimity and wonder that filled me yesterday in the Church of the Divine Wisdom, when I considered that that magnificent cathedral had been built a millennium and a half ago. The signs of what and who came before are everywhere. In North America, they are insubstantial, spectral, buried beneath centuries of mutually reinforcing violence and amnesia. It should come as no wonder that so very much of our landscape seems haunted, upon closer inspection, by reminders of the dead that are just faint enough to be disturbing.There are some other things I want to do before I leave on Saturday, like go out on the town one night, but if I begin to write about that I may lose myself in a mire of verbiage. Until next time then, I remain your faithful correspondent.
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Repacking in Istanbul
I write this to you not from the accidental
My first impression of
As a traveler with a Swedish passport, my visa was free and immediate, and although the airport's atmosphere had the oppressive still dampness of a basement in a hot summer rainstorm. It was especially bad in the bathroom before I removed from my face that layer of oil that always attends a long flight.
The decision to stay on was not immediate. Darren, who is taking some engineering courses at
Before mentioning my impressions of
So what have I been doing for the past few days? I will assume that this is a question you need answered. Flouting the conventions of this electronic medium (best suited to brief chatterings and unfounded oracular statements) with a view to enduringness, I will be at pains not to be pithy in a strict sense, but to provide as much pith as possible. I believe more and more that as with the brief, desperate pageant of life itself, each instance of expression or meditation occurs but once, so I feel compelled to fill it to the utmost, to be expansive, to occur in expression as much as in sentiment. When I returned to
And here I am. I am in the northern reaches of
On the first day Darren and I sat down to eat a kebab dish in the old city center, close to the Blue Mosque and the Aya Sofia, those incomparable monuments set off against and eyeing each other like two lovely women jealous of one another's charms. On the way to the restaurant, we were greeted by a rug merchant who stepped up to the curb where the cab happened to drop us off. "You are my destiny," he said, smiling. "My rugs are your destiny." Dazed by the combination of air travel and the restraint I always exercise on my English while abroad, I said nothing. But the absurd and strangely poetic hard sell stuck with me. Perhaps destiny will pair me with one of his rugs yet.
After we had eaten, we went back to the airport to change my ticket. The running around I had to do, first to change the ticket, and then to claim my bags before they were loaded into a plane bound for
The rain continued the following day. Rivulets flowed down the neighborhood’s steep streets and broken steps. A smell of sewage came up through all the drains in the apartment and I did not shower. Darren's grand view of the
That evening I had a revelation. I had brought too many things. Several hours were spent paring, culling, reorganizing. When all was done, I had managed to shed ten pounds or more. Falling by the wayside were toiletries, a few tattered garments, a stainless steel hipflask, a bottle of gin, a book or two, some superfluous gadgets, and the dirty socks and underwear that just make me more depressed the longer I cart them along. All this fit quite handily inside a leather briefcase that I had no business bringing to
The next day was another in the same mold: Rain, reading, relaxation. In the morning I took a long sunlit walk along the
In the days that remain to me here, I will continue napping, reading and writing. I may also go tour the Aya Sofia and an Ottoman palace or two. Perhaps, if I stay through the weekend, I will even meet some Turks. I will leave as soon as I get through or get an e-mail from Ian and Patra. How long will their Abyssinian vanishing act continue, I wonder?
There. This being the season of naps, I feel one coming on.
Friday, October 5, 2007
Sudan or bust!
Hello,
This is to let you know that I will be departing for the Sudan (by way of Ethiopia, initially) in one week on the nose. There I am meeting up with Ian and Patra, who have driven a Land Rover from Durban, South Africa to Addis Ababa (so far). The plan is for me to meet up with them in northern Ethiopia, and from there see if we can get across the border and make for Khartoum. The ultimate destination is Cairo. It will be the most exciting journey I have ever undertaken. With the exception, perhaps, of soaking in Yellowstone and Niagara during a road trip at the tender age of four.
So here again, I will find myself in the position of wanting only one thing: To cross the border.
I do not know how problematic it will be for Ian (as a Briton) and Patra (as an American) to get their Sudanese visas, but you can bet dollars to donuts that this Swedish passport holder will go with or without the entourage. One does not fail to gain entry to the Sudan twice in one lifetime. Does one?
As the next week passes, I will be making a post or two about my preparations and any other salient aspects.
And warn me not off the high seas of adventure--the pitiful land is scorching to my feet.
This is to let you know that I will be departing for the Sudan (by way of Ethiopia, initially) in one week on the nose. There I am meeting up with Ian and Patra, who have driven a Land Rover from Durban, South Africa to Addis Ababa (so far). The plan is for me to meet up with them in northern Ethiopia, and from there see if we can get across the border and make for Khartoum. The ultimate destination is Cairo. It will be the most exciting journey I have ever undertaken. With the exception, perhaps, of soaking in Yellowstone and Niagara during a road trip at the tender age of four.
So here again, I will find myself in the position of wanting only one thing: To cross the border.
I do not know how problematic it will be for Ian (as a Briton) and Patra (as an American) to get their Sudanese visas, but you can bet dollars to donuts that this Swedish passport holder will go with or without the entourage. One does not fail to gain entry to the Sudan twice in one lifetime. Does one?
As the next week passes, I will be making a post or two about my preparations and any other salient aspects.
And warn me not off the high seas of adventure--the pitiful land is scorching to my feet.
A curse
I just spoke to my friend Carey, whom I got to know in Ndola by virtue of the two of us both crashing at Frank & Katie's Chateau Mzungu. And yes, she's very well, thanks for wondering.
As we were speaking, she related an anecdote about what happened when I left Ndola.
It seems that I had thrown away a shirt and a sweater when leaving my beloved Copperbelt town for Dar-Es-Salaam. I must have put them in with the paper rubbish in my bedroom. Which in retrospect was a silly thing to do.
When Carey came home later that afternoon, she walked Frank & Katie's maid Mrs. Zulu rushed up to greet her. "Hello Madam! How are you?" Mrs. Zulu was wearing my shirt and sweater, and owing to her very portly carriage, she cut a ridiculous figure. "Ah! I see Markus left you some clothes, isn't it?'
"No Madam! Eh! That Mr. Markus, he is a problem. Mr. Markus threw these clothes away. I found them in the trash. In Zambia we do not waste clothes Madam. Mr. Markus has cursed this house."
Carey was later able to reverse the curse by straightforwardly giving Mrs. Zulu a number of items she had no use for when it was her turn to leave. Along with the tent episode--when Mrs. Zulu found out I was sleeping in a tent in the backyard she was dismayed, because in Zambia this is something you do only to mourn the dead, which made my contrivance a trespass and an evil portent--it goes to show that I have a lot to learn.
As we were speaking, she related an anecdote about what happened when I left Ndola.
It seems that I had thrown away a shirt and a sweater when leaving my beloved Copperbelt town for Dar-Es-Salaam. I must have put them in with the paper rubbish in my bedroom. Which in retrospect was a silly thing to do.
When Carey came home later that afternoon, she walked Frank & Katie's maid Mrs. Zulu rushed up to greet her. "Hello Madam! How are you?" Mrs. Zulu was wearing my shirt and sweater, and owing to her very portly carriage, she cut a ridiculous figure. "Ah! I see Markus left you some clothes, isn't it?'
"No Madam! Eh! That Mr. Markus, he is a problem. Mr. Markus threw these clothes away. I found them in the trash. In Zambia we do not waste clothes Madam. Mr. Markus has cursed this house."
Carey was later able to reverse the curse by straightforwardly giving Mrs. Zulu a number of items she had no use for when it was her turn to leave. Along with the tent episode--when Mrs. Zulu found out I was sleeping in a tent in the backyard she was dismayed, because in Zambia this is something you do only to mourn the dead, which made my contrivance a trespass and an evil portent--it goes to show that I have a lot to learn.
These guys don't exactly have small dicks, you know
There are some miscellanies from my last trip that I need to get down before I depart on my next itinerary in a scarcely a week's time. On which more soon, so worry not your pretty little heads my dearies!
Arthur was frowning and clucking when I returned. He managed to look somehow paternal behind his big mirrored shades. "Where have you been, mate? I was scared to death for you!" When I told him I had just been getting some exercise, here's what he had to say: "These Congolese, they will give you exercise if they find you. You will run away, but they will catch you. And then they will rape you. If you are lucky, that is all they will do. And these guys don't exactly have small dicks, you know mate?"
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