I was recently on a short business trip, and I was sort of dreading the whole trip, including the country of destination. I was aware of this, of course, but was still ashamed of myself when – upon hearing any piece of news related to either the project or the country – I would jump to the irrational conclusion that that might be enough to cancel the trip. Like I said, I was ashamed, but there it was. In the end, there weren’t sufficient reasons to derail the trip and I found myself, plainly and simply, traveling.
Among the coping skills I’ve learned as an adult, I put on a brave face and tried to seem un-phased by this non-turn of events. I believe I was doing this so well that I almost seemed callously indifferent. That is until we were in the car, driving on a sleek highway next to a sweet hillside that was spotted with airbrushes of orange and yellow. Oh my goodness – autumn!! One of my favorite seasons that is beyond brief in my beloved Lebanon, where the leaves don’t linger and fade, they opt instead to just drop at the first sign of wintery weather. I looked again to make sure it wasn’t just a type of boring tree, perhaps a breed that was too lazy to carry full-colour leaves to begin with (you may be puzzled by this notion since, as far as I know, no such tree exists, but that might just describe to you how un-excited I was about visiting this country). By that second look, my cynical callous indifference had all but withered and I found myself goofily smiling at this beautiful hillside holding autumn for me, for me to enjoy.
How ironic, I thought, that it would be this beautiful nature that would make me like this country again. This is when I realized that it wasn’t the first time. I could remember being on a bus from London to Oxford, upset and depressed by the usual gloomy, wet weather, when I looked out at a field with edges that disappeared over the horizon, and seemed to reflect a tinge of lush, rich, deep green onto the otherwise non-descript sky. All I could think of was ‘emerald’, and how, for the length of that field, I felt as if I was inside one.
I thought back to one of my many walks in Sri Lanka, when I would reach the point of saturation with all the dust, sun, heat and shriveled, dried up bark (which would give you the feeling that the sun practically peeled it off the trees and sucked the moist life out of it). Just around then, I would feel a slight, delicate cool, and would look up to find I was walking next to a majestically upright coconut tree, bending just so at the top out of its easy-going and kind shade-y character.
I would think of a perfectly smooth, wavy sand dune in Sharjah’s otherwise lifeless desert where I grew up, of a lake appearing like an oasis beneath the narrow, winding roads somewhere between Sanaa and Taez in Yemen, and so on and so on.
So there it was, a self-realization revealing itself to me for the first time, that it isn’t always my lofty notions of anthropological curiosity, courteous interaction with people, or self-disciplined motivation that keep me connected to places, and thus people. It was something much simpler all along and for which I can claim no credit whatsoever – but I'm happy to take a back seat to nature any day!
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Write, dammit!!
The home page for one of my browsers, the one I use most often, is this blog. I did not do this out of egoism, but rather as a reminder for me to write, write, write. Whereas this reminder was pleasant in the past, it has now become a plainly annoying nag. Why do I do this to myself?
But the truth is that I do miss writing, so I came here today equipped only with my virtual pen and this blank page, with no particular idea, inclination or direction… let’s see where we end up.
I’m in a coffee shop with free wifi, decent music, and a strict non-smoking policy, there are a handful of these around town that have become my makeshift workspaces when I get too restless (and undisciplined) to work from home. I actually do have a cool set-up at home – I custom-designed my desk, have a couple of my favourite Klimts hanging right above to keep me calm and inspired, have broken in my office chair just so, and am at the perfect angle and distance from the air conditioner to remain perfectly cool/warm, depending on the weather. My coffee-shop workspaces have none of these traits, but they all share one feature that is sometimes central to getting any work done: they force me to stay seated. At these coffee shops, there are no TVs and shows that come up and “who knows when they’ll be screened again” (who am I kidding, I know they’ll be back on in 4 hours). There also aren’t any dishes in the sink, or laundry in the hamper that I can suddenly decide to feign a heightened hygiene conscience and feel propelled to clean right this instant. There aren’t any rooms to tidy up, even though they have been comfortably neglected for weeks, or any phone calls to make, or plants to water, and so on, and so on.
No, these coffee shops are the closest type of workspace to my offices. And the procrastination they offer is also quite similar – websurfing, emails, and – wait for it – blogging!
As a matter of fact, there are so many similarities to my previous routine of working in an office that I have begun to doubt my level of productivity during all those years of employment. I mean, was it truly an achievement to respond to around 50 emails a day, playing a virtual ping-pong game of ideas, that take much longer to see tangible fruition sans ping-pong? Did I really need to spend late afternoons writing comprehensive reports that would later be butchered into one-page briefs general enough to be relevant to just about any other project? I’m not sure… I often feel that, at the end of the day, I get things done within roughly the same period of time, but there is much more ‘camouflaged wasted time’ in an office than there is when I call it a day and decide to, say, cook or go for a walk.
What I don’t often get to do, sadly, is just write… The biggest downside of not being in an office and full-time employment is that you never have those lulls where your mind just gets to wander aimlessly and not immediately get roped back in by to-do lists and deadlines. When in an office, there are always some episodes that are just so mind-numbingly infuriating or boring (think back to just about any meeting that has gone too long) that they set my mind free to daydream, and that’s usually when the first lines of a blog entry come to mind. I’ll have to work on creating some daydream episodes, preferably without the infuriation!
But the truth is that I do miss writing, so I came here today equipped only with my virtual pen and this blank page, with no particular idea, inclination or direction… let’s see where we end up.
I’m in a coffee shop with free wifi, decent music, and a strict non-smoking policy, there are a handful of these around town that have become my makeshift workspaces when I get too restless (and undisciplined) to work from home. I actually do have a cool set-up at home – I custom-designed my desk, have a couple of my favourite Klimts hanging right above to keep me calm and inspired, have broken in my office chair just so, and am at the perfect angle and distance from the air conditioner to remain perfectly cool/warm, depending on the weather. My coffee-shop workspaces have none of these traits, but they all share one feature that is sometimes central to getting any work done: they force me to stay seated. At these coffee shops, there are no TVs and shows that come up and “who knows when they’ll be screened again” (who am I kidding, I know they’ll be back on in 4 hours). There also aren’t any dishes in the sink, or laundry in the hamper that I can suddenly decide to feign a heightened hygiene conscience and feel propelled to clean right this instant. There aren’t any rooms to tidy up, even though they have been comfortably neglected for weeks, or any phone calls to make, or plants to water, and so on, and so on.
No, these coffee shops are the closest type of workspace to my offices. And the procrastination they offer is also quite similar – websurfing, emails, and – wait for it – blogging!
As a matter of fact, there are so many similarities to my previous routine of working in an office that I have begun to doubt my level of productivity during all those years of employment. I mean, was it truly an achievement to respond to around 50 emails a day, playing a virtual ping-pong game of ideas, that take much longer to see tangible fruition sans ping-pong? Did I really need to spend late afternoons writing comprehensive reports that would later be butchered into one-page briefs general enough to be relevant to just about any other project? I’m not sure… I often feel that, at the end of the day, I get things done within roughly the same period of time, but there is much more ‘camouflaged wasted time’ in an office than there is when I call it a day and decide to, say, cook or go for a walk.
What I don’t often get to do, sadly, is just write… The biggest downside of not being in an office and full-time employment is that you never have those lulls where your mind just gets to wander aimlessly and not immediately get roped back in by to-do lists and deadlines. When in an office, there are always some episodes that are just so mind-numbingly infuriating or boring (think back to just about any meeting that has gone too long) that they set my mind free to daydream, and that’s usually when the first lines of a blog entry come to mind. I’ll have to work on creating some daydream episodes, preferably without the infuriation!
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
You Never Forget the War…
For cultures like ours that are prone to drama, we hold onto and mark all sorts of dates that – mostly – refer to a dramatic event. When speaking of national memory, this is at a whole different level to the “Where were you when Kennedy was shot?” question for a few simple reasons. Firstly, we don’t linger too long at the ‘it was just a regular day’ part of the story and choose to go into much more depth at how the world changed as a consequence. Second, although the Americans probably posed the question as an opener for a shared experience and shared grief, we tend to slip into a somewhat competitive discussion of which of us was affected more, closer to the event, or understood it at a whole other level and was thus more intimately touched by it.
All sarcasm aside, the main difference in our region is that we have far too many days to mark and remember, far too many events that provoke the question “where were you when…?” For stretches at a time, our lives were (are) defined by these rather than by our own regular life events. We don’t remember the year a cousin underwent surgery to remove his appendix because it was the same year that our 6-year-old lost her first teeth, but rather that that was the year of a particular conflict or bombing and the roads were closed, or the electricity was out. I suppose this is why you can never quite forget the war: it’s part of our calendar.
And, of course, the list goes on: I remember when one conflict broke out because it was exactly a week before the date of my PhD defense and almost threatened my chances for traveling. Similarly, I remember the years of a particular reunion, and a friend’s wedding, because I managed to slip out of the country and back right before the airport closed in both those years. This naturally brings back memories of the first time the airport closed because we were not so lucky that time around and fled the country by land. Yes, I remember that year as well for the same reason.
You never forget the war because fireworks continue to make your hair stand on end, and you recognize the sound of tanks rumbling through the streets at night. Because every summer reminds you of one you spent under siege, where you couldn’t go near the beach and, even though you’re not a regular beachgoer, you can’t forget how much your body missed the sun that year. You never forget the war because, every time you travel out of the country, you still can’t chase away that fleeting thought that something might happen while you’re away, and are you prepared in case it does.
I think, however, that what most compels us to remember the war is that we lived to reflect on it, we survived. After the war in 2006, one of my expatriate colleagues was part of the first convoy to go down to the ravaged South after the war had ended. For a week, most of what they saw in the villages was funeral processions for those who had been found amidst the destruction and rubble and this naturally overwhelmed him. During one phone call, he kept repeating that we (the national staff) really had to go down there, searching for the words he tried to explain “you have to come down and stand witness to this part of your compatriots’ history”.
So, yes, you never forget the war for all your personal reasons, but it is not (just) that we are unable to forget - we are actually duty-bound to remember.
All sarcasm aside, the main difference in our region is that we have far too many days to mark and remember, far too many events that provoke the question “where were you when…?” For stretches at a time, our lives were (are) defined by these rather than by our own regular life events. We don’t remember the year a cousin underwent surgery to remove his appendix because it was the same year that our 6-year-old lost her first teeth, but rather that that was the year of a particular conflict or bombing and the roads were closed, or the electricity was out. I suppose this is why you can never quite forget the war: it’s part of our calendar.
And, of course, the list goes on: I remember when one conflict broke out because it was exactly a week before the date of my PhD defense and almost threatened my chances for traveling. Similarly, I remember the years of a particular reunion, and a friend’s wedding, because I managed to slip out of the country and back right before the airport closed in both those years. This naturally brings back memories of the first time the airport closed because we were not so lucky that time around and fled the country by land. Yes, I remember that year as well for the same reason.
You never forget the war because fireworks continue to make your hair stand on end, and you recognize the sound of tanks rumbling through the streets at night. Because every summer reminds you of one you spent under siege, where you couldn’t go near the beach and, even though you’re not a regular beachgoer, you can’t forget how much your body missed the sun that year. You never forget the war because, every time you travel out of the country, you still can’t chase away that fleeting thought that something might happen while you’re away, and are you prepared in case it does.
I think, however, that what most compels us to remember the war is that we lived to reflect on it, we survived. After the war in 2006, one of my expatriate colleagues was part of the first convoy to go down to the ravaged South after the war had ended. For a week, most of what they saw in the villages was funeral processions for those who had been found amidst the destruction and rubble and this naturally overwhelmed him. During one phone call, he kept repeating that we (the national staff) really had to go down there, searching for the words he tried to explain “you have to come down and stand witness to this part of your compatriots’ history”.
So, yes, you never forget the war for all your personal reasons, but it is not (just) that we are unable to forget - we are actually duty-bound to remember.
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Dunya's Bahrain
Since the unrest in Bahrain started, I could only think of my Bahraini friends and what they were going through; I would recall their thoughtful quiet concern for me and my family when we were facing our own forms of conflict in Lebanon, and I shuddered at the analogy. That sweet island nation that I had always held as the pride of the gulf (from the opinion of an expat who grew up in one of the gulf states), that country and those people were too sweet and, well, innocent to become jaded like us.
The twist that drove me completely mad was when the ripple effect of a Lebanese leader’s speech led to the discontinuation of all flights between our two countries, also cutting off phone connections. We were left to the one last channel of communication – the gracious internet.
I was ecstatic to see Dunya appear online and could not find larger letters in which to greet her. Her sweet subdued greetings were immediately followed with a sardonic “See, we can’t come to Lebanon these days”. I could imagine her mirroring my disappointed restrained smile at her end of the connection, and a simultaneous unspoken thought “thank goodness they managed to come for a visit to Beirut late last year”.
I wanted to know how she and her family were, if the images we were seeing on the news were accurate or exaggerated, and I wanted her to write about it. I so desperately wanted to hear the inside voice of someone as secular and balanced as her infusing the overriding discourse with simple humane insight. She had already started it with a short poignant email that she sent to her friends, simply saying “My name is Dunya, I’m not Sunni and I’m not Shiite: I’m Bahraini; I want to live in peace and justice”. This would be the sentiment she would repeat when I asked how she was, “we are all a mix in Bahrain, you see it in my family and others (families of mixed religions) and we are all okay… (how can) we have a clash between Sunni and Shiite? We never thought of it that way, we were always only Bahraini.” She was upset at this instigation of sectarian confrontations, insisting that they represented a smaller portion of Bahrainis trying to change the system, which was not accepted by all of them. “Even here”, she continues, “we say that not all who acted were Shiite”. And right then came the exclamation that news reporters and politicians often overlook, “I just hope everything will finish soon”, she sighed, “so we can get back to normal life.”
These are the voices that people needed to hear, I insisted, and went on trying to persuade, push and goad her into writing something, at how important it was for the outside world to access what was actually happening on the ground. “We are trying”, she would say, “but we need them to be stopped first…” I would insist, then she would demure “I am not a good writer”, I would continue with offers to assist, trying hard not to push her too far. I paused, waited for a response, a little silent lapse was followed with “will try, but writing is very emotional these days”.
I stopped. I just continued with our chat instead, and found myself asking her when we were wrapping up if I could share what she had told me with others.
“I know you know more thank you think, you met my family which gives you a sample of what it is in Bahrain. I am Bahraini, the thought of being Sunni or Shiite was irrelevant, we live in one house and you can see that I am Sunni, my sister is Shiite, but quite simply we are all Bahrainis.” She continued, “We all need more rights in Bahrain, as everywhere, but we want the royal family because we don’t want the country to be ruled by religious men, like in Iran or Saudi Arabia. When I was in the UK, I hated it when people looked at me suspiciously because I am Muslim (because of my veil), as if I was the one who had a hand in what happened in the US or the undergrounds, so I will never do that to a Shiite. I believe that in this world we have two types of people: good people and bad people, regardless of religion and ethnicity.” Dunya was raised in a Sunni-Shiite home and I asked whether that balance from inside the family and home might have had the larger influence on her. “I’m sure it has”, she said, “but this is how we all lived in Bahrain. I might have been more affected, but you will see that even Bahrainies today, when this is passed and forgotten, they will get back to how we were. As we always say ‘al deen lillah wal watan lil jamee’ (religion is for God and the country is for all)”.
But if that was the overriding Bahraini sentiment, then why were some people resorting to protests and clashes and touting them as rights along sectarian lines? “Politics is a dirty game”, she said simply, “people play it for their own agendas.” As much of the protest was against the royal family, I wondered for a moment what would happen to Bahrain without them, “We would be like Lebanon”, she stated plainly, the analogy that I had chased away at the beginning of our chat re-emerging on its own. “We would end up in civil war, because the Shiites and the Sunnis will fight for everything, and religious leaders will rule. So, yes, we do need change, we all say we deserve a better life, more freedoms, more rights, but removing the royal family is not the way to get those things. Besides, those factors are not all controlled by the royal family, and if you compare us to other gulf states, it’s clear that Bahrain is better off than the others.”
With that insight, I was suddenly a little more confused and had to ask what other factors were there, then, that stood in the way of reforms? My wise diplomatic friend lobbed it back at me saying “people like you will know the truth without me saying it; some will only believe what they want.”
The subject somehow changed, could have been by either one of us, as we both needed a breather to take in all that was said. I was still bewitched by her response when I asked her what it meant for her to be a Bahraini. She was quiet for what seemed like a very strained minute and replied “Bahrain nour el ‘ein (Bahrain is the light of my eye)”. That statement took my breath away.
We got a little distracted with news of impending storms when she said, “You know, when the tsunami happened in Japan, I told all my friends (Sunni and Shiite) that it would be very bad if we died hating each other, so let’s work for improvement instead.”
Well said.
The twist that drove me completely mad was when the ripple effect of a Lebanese leader’s speech led to the discontinuation of all flights between our two countries, also cutting off phone connections. We were left to the one last channel of communication – the gracious internet.
I was ecstatic to see Dunya appear online and could not find larger letters in which to greet her. Her sweet subdued greetings were immediately followed with a sardonic “See, we can’t come to Lebanon these days”. I could imagine her mirroring my disappointed restrained smile at her end of the connection, and a simultaneous unspoken thought “thank goodness they managed to come for a visit to Beirut late last year”.
I wanted to know how she and her family were, if the images we were seeing on the news were accurate or exaggerated, and I wanted her to write about it. I so desperately wanted to hear the inside voice of someone as secular and balanced as her infusing the overriding discourse with simple humane insight. She had already started it with a short poignant email that she sent to her friends, simply saying “My name is Dunya, I’m not Sunni and I’m not Shiite: I’m Bahraini; I want to live in peace and justice”. This would be the sentiment she would repeat when I asked how she was, “we are all a mix in Bahrain, you see it in my family and others (families of mixed religions) and we are all okay… (how can) we have a clash between Sunni and Shiite? We never thought of it that way, we were always only Bahraini.” She was upset at this instigation of sectarian confrontations, insisting that they represented a smaller portion of Bahrainis trying to change the system, which was not accepted by all of them. “Even here”, she continues, “we say that not all who acted were Shiite”. And right then came the exclamation that news reporters and politicians often overlook, “I just hope everything will finish soon”, she sighed, “so we can get back to normal life.”
These are the voices that people needed to hear, I insisted, and went on trying to persuade, push and goad her into writing something, at how important it was for the outside world to access what was actually happening on the ground. “We are trying”, she would say, “but we need them to be stopped first…” I would insist, then she would demure “I am not a good writer”, I would continue with offers to assist, trying hard not to push her too far. I paused, waited for a response, a little silent lapse was followed with “will try, but writing is very emotional these days”.
I stopped. I just continued with our chat instead, and found myself asking her when we were wrapping up if I could share what she had told me with others.
“I know you know more thank you think, you met my family which gives you a sample of what it is in Bahrain. I am Bahraini, the thought of being Sunni or Shiite was irrelevant, we live in one house and you can see that I am Sunni, my sister is Shiite, but quite simply we are all Bahrainis.” She continued, “We all need more rights in Bahrain, as everywhere, but we want the royal family because we don’t want the country to be ruled by religious men, like in Iran or Saudi Arabia. When I was in the UK, I hated it when people looked at me suspiciously because I am Muslim (because of my veil), as if I was the one who had a hand in what happened in the US or the undergrounds, so I will never do that to a Shiite. I believe that in this world we have two types of people: good people and bad people, regardless of religion and ethnicity.” Dunya was raised in a Sunni-Shiite home and I asked whether that balance from inside the family and home might have had the larger influence on her. “I’m sure it has”, she said, “but this is how we all lived in Bahrain. I might have been more affected, but you will see that even Bahrainies today, when this is passed and forgotten, they will get back to how we were. As we always say ‘al deen lillah wal watan lil jamee’ (religion is for God and the country is for all)”.
But if that was the overriding Bahraini sentiment, then why were some people resorting to protests and clashes and touting them as rights along sectarian lines? “Politics is a dirty game”, she said simply, “people play it for their own agendas.” As much of the protest was against the royal family, I wondered for a moment what would happen to Bahrain without them, “We would be like Lebanon”, she stated plainly, the analogy that I had chased away at the beginning of our chat re-emerging on its own. “We would end up in civil war, because the Shiites and the Sunnis will fight for everything, and religious leaders will rule. So, yes, we do need change, we all say we deserve a better life, more freedoms, more rights, but removing the royal family is not the way to get those things. Besides, those factors are not all controlled by the royal family, and if you compare us to other gulf states, it’s clear that Bahrain is better off than the others.”
With that insight, I was suddenly a little more confused and had to ask what other factors were there, then, that stood in the way of reforms? My wise diplomatic friend lobbed it back at me saying “people like you will know the truth without me saying it; some will only believe what they want.”
The subject somehow changed, could have been by either one of us, as we both needed a breather to take in all that was said. I was still bewitched by her response when I asked her what it meant for her to be a Bahraini. She was quiet for what seemed like a very strained minute and replied “Bahrain nour el ‘ein (Bahrain is the light of my eye)”. That statement took my breath away.
We got a little distracted with news of impending storms when she said, “You know, when the tsunami happened in Japan, I told all my friends (Sunni and Shiite) that it would be very bad if we died hating each other, so let’s work for improvement instead.”
Well said.
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