Smuggling

The first time I came to Jordan I was twelve and wearing my brother's old wide leg jeans and long sleeved Nirvana t-shirts- of my own volition.

We kept coming back through here by bus so as to get to the other surrounding countries one by one, and each time we passed back through we would stop at "Mat3am Alia" for dinner. I couldn't believe that there was a restaurant named after my sister, just like I couldn't believe they were charging us for water.

The waiter for our table had a crush on my sister and kept us entertained with his advances throughout dinner. I wondered why this random waiter was so obsessed with her and decided it must have been because he thought his workplace was named after her. He brought her extra helpings of colorful, glistening vegetables and eyed her from the corner where he was huddled with the other waiters.
As we were leaving to board the bus he casually whispered, "I love you."  My mother laughed but I was completely traumatized. 

After a couple of healthy years of living in the Middle East and being proposed to in-passing by a few cafe waiters myself, I think I get it now. It's all part of the social contract. Nothing comes without a price. Travel to a faraway land, eat the shiny food- get propositioned by the cafe waiters. It's the social order.

And always a potential last resort to keep in your back pocket in case it becomes increasingly clear that you will have to marry a man whose first language is not English so you don't have to feel bad when he doesn't laugh at your jokes.

Another reason to make sure your abaya has pockets- along with concealing masbahas, pretzels, and other general types of smuggling.

Snickerdoodle 

I'm back  to my baking self.

I'm going to try to bake myself into a cooking self. Or bake a new self and keep the old one just in case life, in a general way, doesn't work out for me.

But first, I'm tinkering with egg/dairy/nut free recipes for my nephew, who has been plagued with all the allergies in the family. We often put effort into making him think he is eating the same thing as his brother and sister, strategically giving them tall, opaque cups so he can't see what's inside, or preparing foods that are the same shade of orange. Today, while his siblings were dipping warm chocolate chip cookies in fresh milk, he sat with them, pretty sure he was eating the same thing but still somewhat suspicious, taking bites of barley bread dipped in water. 

I was searching for a vegan snickerdoodle recipe in the hopes of cutting down on some of my trickery, and found the recipe collection of a girl who named her website something like the verbal equivalent of her haircut. As her picture loads alongside the list of various forms of deliciousness that go into a snickerdoodle, we find her wearing an apron and with big black framed glasses.

Well, yeah, Su. Of course that's what you look like. 

Then my niece beside me asked, 

-Shifu Khala- is that your picture? Why is your picture on there?"

Get off my case, kid! Can't you see I'm a new woman?!

-That's not me. Why would there be a picture of me on the internet?

Note to baking self- for real this time, get all pictures of former self off the internet. 

Or at least run them through the photo editor "hardened woman" filter, then "soften edges," then "softer."

Shopping

In my fifth (and Ya Allah hopefully my final!) trip to the tile store where I get to be a little black cloud shooting videos of different shades of wood, an Arab woman approached me. She immediately spoke English because she probably heard me narrating the descriptions of textures and colors of the wood into the camera.

She got right to the point.

Excuse me, do you have a sister here in Jordan?

Since I do, in fact, have a sister in Jordan I assumed she must know her and started to describe her.

But then she kept going.

Is she married? 
Do you have any unmarried sisters? 

Since I do, in fact, have an unmarried sister, I started to describe her too.

Does she look like you?

A curious thing to say to a girl who is 96% shrouded in layers of black. 

But this woman was not interested in me, but a girl who resembled the 4% of me that was showing. As if to say- almost, but not quite. I don't wear a ring, but she assumed I was a claimed woman. Maybe my eyes "look married." Or maybe she wanted a girl whose hands looked only kind of like mine.

Although I recognized this as an opportunity for adventure and ridiculous conversation, I shut her down with a simple no because she spoke perfect English (YAWN). I know not every encounter has to be an Arabic lesson, but I need to focus on finding situations where I can practice saying the important things:

How much are the apples?

My ____ is broken and I don't know how to fix it.

Do you have this in black?

From the Backseat

Halfway to Marj al Hammam, the taxi driver with the cigarette dangling out of his mouth suddenly got friendly and was asking me all kinds of things that I didn't understand and so I did my usual thing and answered yes, laughed and said "inshallah" and "alhamdullilah" at random intervals. It took a few minutes before I figured out that he was actually on the phone, wearing a headset, probably talking to his wife or his kid, judging from the occasional "baba! what's wrong with you!"

I think this is a thing. The mother of the kids I tutor calls her husband every half hour so he can yell at the kids for refusing to do their reading. The older one has taken to saying he "just want to die" when I show up to teach them.

So this guy was probably also yelling at his kid. I think he assumed I was talking to myself. Safe assumption- how can I resist? After so many years of doing it on the nyc subway with my Arabic flashcards in my lap as if to say- don't worry- I'm just studying. Although, the occasional passenger would get even more concerned with my presence once they saw what I was studying. 

The taxi drivers are my only communication with ordinary people in Amman, and they get really happy when I answer the usual question "are you a new Muslim or were you Muslim 'from the start.'" The driver on the way home from Marj al Hamman nodded his head in approval and said "Subhanallah." And then I said "Subhanallah." And then he asked if I was married and I ignored him and continued trying to casually eat a banana under my niqab. In Morocco I would have said "shame on you!" but I'm not sure if that's a thing here.

The route across the city is so beautiful and I have plans to ask the next driver to drop me off near that spot where there are randomly a bunch of camels, plus some nearby sheep. It would be too expensive to have the driver wait around, but I have faith that some woman will feel bad for me and pick me up like they do when it's raining, and like the drivers in Morocco do for the elderly. I can't resist the camels. I can hear them calling to me.

"C'mon! Take our picture! You know you want to. Look how random we are!"

Or maybe it's an echo from some other corner of the city. But I'll probably give in anyway.
I know me. Even if the city hasn't met me yet.

The Voiced and the Voiceless

I saw a little girl and an older girl throwing pebbles at each other from adjacent balconies. It didn't look like it was happening in jest or merriment- they really wanted to hit each other. The little girl was winning and the older one was getting frustrated. She couldn't have been more than twenty, but was definitely old enough to know not to throw stones at helpless children.But I didn't judge her for it because that little girl looked like a real terror, and on her side it appeared to be a hate crime against the foreigner. Plus, that other girl was wearing the best boots.

Okay, it was me. That little monster needed to learn that just because the other person is bigger doesn't mean they will be the bigger person.

After she threw her final fistful I yelled "I'm going to tell your mother!" but later I saw her mother, and she was terrifying.

I've been saving up my Arabic for the elderly couples at Cafe Paris that like to talk politics because I tell them I'm Jordanian. But I know better than to talk to strangers and so more often, I keep my thoughts to myself and see if I can translate it into Arabic in my head. Knowing that I can do it is enough of a comfort for me, like a warm blanket of guttural and emphatic cross-woven threads. Mint green ones. The voiced and the voiceless, holding hands.

If I can't come up with the whole translation I take the advice of my Arabic teachers for "whenever you are not sure about (obscure grammatical rule or vocabulary word) - ask someone who speaks Arabic." So every couple of minutes I ask whoever is sitting next to me, how would I say (monster, tornado, etc.) in derija? and reserve all cases of casual conversation for when I get to use the fun words that deserve practicing out loud, namely "I'm confused / I was confused," where the K, guttural Kh and hard Q all combine side by side into one magical mess of sounds. And if I put it in the future tense I get to add a "gh." It's a party in my mouth, like bastilla and plum tagine- my celebratory dinner for my second last night in Tangier.

You had me at Smehli Ukhtee

I met an enchantress today. A real siren. She gave me directions when I lost my way home from the tailor after I promised him I knew how to get back home. The neighborhood boys tried to help me and I tried to shoo them away, and then the seas parted and there she was. She looked like Tinkerbell. Her hijab was up in a bun and tied in the back the way the local girls do but something about it made her look dangerous. The crowd of boys clearly had respect for her. When she smiled she had four silver fillings on the right side. Or maybe they were teeth. Both possibilities seem unlikely for a Moroccan girl from the medina, so it could have been something else. Maybe she ate glitter.

Whatever it was, it was magical. 

I can't stop thinking about her and wishing I had asked if I could take her picture. I think about going back to find her tomorrow but I know I won't, and that's how I know I am not a photographer at heart. Not really. I saw her, you didn't - finders keepers.

I haven't used any of the instant film I went to great lengths (and several fake-crying incidents at customs) to bring without passing through a security scanner.

It's not that I'm no longer enchanted by Tangier, it's just that I've already taken all the pictures, and now it's just the same pictures with a different camera.

It's a blessing. The Islamic ruling on whether or not photographing people is permissible is a disputed one, and I'm better off safe than sorry.

Miskeena

I keep mistaking strangers for my few remaining friends in Tangier and it keeps me feeling safe on the street. I realized that the reason I can never get a realistic perspective on modern-day Tangier is because I have only only befriended crazy people. People off their meds or damaged by years of drug use, or jut senile. 

I complained to my favorite pizza man about still being single. He just got married five months ago and told me I "missed my chance." He reminded me that he asked me years ago and I denied remembering.

In my broken derija/fus'ha: "It must have been a long time ago, when I still had my beauty. Now, there is no man in the world that wants to marry me. Poor girl."

Another boy chimed in: "Any man would want to marry you. Anyone. Ask anyone."

It was inappropriate and heartwarming. I took my pizza and fled to the sanctuary that is Cafe Paris. Where no one bothers me and the waiters seem genuinely relieved that I am still alive. I successfully got all of them to call me Hajja Shifa. I announce it to anyone who remembers me because it's the best thing I've ever done, and like to follow it up with "I have a new heart!" in desperation.

I suspect this may have been the driving force behind "Tangier: Case Closed." To claim that I have a new heart and I don't need the old one, wherever she is, lying in a gutter somewhere. Probably in Beni Mekada.


Incidentally, I also learned a new way to spell my name.

She's at it again

Back to the land of wakha, shkoon, khssni, and bzzef! Those words that lie in concrete in my brain, sharing bunks with all of my fossilized errors. Maybe I can bring them back to life so I can kill them. And then fossilize them dead.

In Amman there are no old guys sitting on haystacks looking out into the distance. On the train through Morocco heading north, there are tons of them. It’s useless to keep score. Morocco will always win. For “Tangier Take 5: Case Closed” I’m throwing projects out the window, and all I intend to do is sit and stare at the sea and try to understand the conversations happening around me.

O, how the tables have turned!

I once yearned for a space where no one knew me or knew my last name and where I could sit and write about the funny things around me like chickens wandering around cemeteries and cats climbing ladders.

But it’s a new era and I should just be thankful that I’m not “lost in a gutter somewhere” as my mother so lovingly puts it. But Mom, I find some of my best things in gutters!
Scribbled notes.
Little baggies.
Doll heads...

I didn’t expect the hijab to make such a marked difference in my public presence but it’s like a whole new world out there. I haven’t been harassed at all with one exception, and even his delivery was so sincere it was more like he felt bad for me. In fact, most strangers have been overly nice to me and I suspect it is because they think I’m a Syrian refugee. They ask me if I am and I don’t deny it.

And Tangier is taking good care of me.

Swaddled in 30 Dirham sweater pants, I wake up to pancakes every morning that I buy before the sunset prayer each night and put them in my purse for safe keeping.

Stories

I'm mostly by-the-book, except for those in between times when I forget to bring my book, or the book ends. Then it's my job as a teacher to figure out a way to make the complexities of the world a little easier to understand, all on my own and often using the gift of mime. Because honestly, sometimes I have no idea if the kids actually understand English or are just pretending and following along with the lesson by looking at the pictures.

Reminiscent of that time I tried to teach my third grade African-American students the meaning of "prejudice" (did not go well), today I got to teach about slavery. The reading lesson in Ahmed's book was about Harriet Tubman. It took a while for him to understand what I meant by "people who worked all day but got no money and just a tiny bit of food and if they didn't listen- bam!" (It's really easy to mime "beating," which was one of his vocabulary words.) 

He asked the usual questions- 

1."How come they didn't escape?" Then he reenacted three scenes from Home Alone to show what the slaves should have done to trick their masters.

2. "How come people thought black people were different from white people? Allah just made them that way!" A few minutes later he looked at me in horror and asked "Am I black?"

3. "Why do we pay our servant? She has black skin. I'm going to tell my mom to stop paying her..."

That last one was his idea of a joke to lighten the mood. I think he could tell that I was trying to teach him something "important" because I looked so uncomfortable. It is just so strange to teach kids about the very concepts of racism and prejudice through a historically rooted context as "truth", y3anni, "this happened" - even while these ideas would never occur to them on their own.

Ahmed got really sad that Harriet's husband John didn't want to go North with her and cheered himself up by making up his own tune and dance to "Go Down, Moses." I am worried he might try to teach it to the housemaid.

When I asked him to retell the story, he looked at the pictures and as kids will, tried to conjure something up that could resemble a narrative. In the last illustration, Harriet was basking in the sunlight with her arms up in triumph. 

"So, at the end, she lived in the North, alone, without John, and no kids. But she was making money, so it was okay..."

I asked if she was happy. "Yes, of course, look at her." He then began to more closely inspect the spots on her face where her skin was glistening from the sunlight, tracing them with his finger. His eyes grew wide and he looked as if he had cracked an impossible code. 

"Oh my God! At the end then she became white!"

It's times like this that I wonder how much it affects my students to be getting my version of things, filled with hope that somewhere in the pile of my American English, facial expressions, miming, illustrations and stifled laughter, they are gleaning some gems of truth and isn't-that-amazing's and that's-just-the-way-it-is's. Because sometimes the pictures work against me.

For today, I successfully stopped a kid from thinking that the slaves of the American South went North so they could become white. I've done my job.

Neighborhood

It's hard to fall off the map.

Especially for a girl who loves maps.

Traces them, embroiders them, doesn't scoff at others who claim to love maps. Saves them, mounts them, frames them. But then, everyone frames maps. 

I can't help but want to be part of things.

And I can't get over this obsession with wanting to befriend bedouins. They are my neighbors and I think we could be friends. At night I hear their footsteps as they rummage through the trash bins for thrown-away things of value. There are so many broken tiles in the trash and on the side of the road. We could make mosaics together and mount them on the walls of their little huts.

Today I found a toilet on the side of the road. It led to an opening in the tiny hill so you can peek through at the rolling hills and houses across the valley. A fertile place to make fertile friendships. But I fear my bedouin befriending days are over. We don't speak the same language and I'm not as approachable as usual when I am veiled. But I like to think I have a warm glow that says "I'm smiling at you from under here."

Global warming feels like a big hug from the universe and the infamous Jordan winter has yet to set in. The lines on the map are begging to be embroidered into the patterned cloth that I bought from the flea market but instead I spend my time drawing number bond worksheets and baking pumpkin cakes. A fertile place for a simple plan.