I’m trying to find a positive way to describe the dissonance I feel from today’s experiences as I transitioned from Fulbright participant in Tel Aviv to tourist in Amman, Jordan. I rode along the highway in Tel Aviv and looked for one last time at the garbage dump that has been rehabilitated to a land mass and remembered Al Azhar Park in Cairo as well as the goofy comments from one of the Fulbright seminar participants who claimed that she heard one too many times about the dump. This was on the heels of counseling a young Israeli hotel worker who helped me with my bags that he should do what he can to try and make the relationship with his girlfriend in Guatemala work (after also recommending my favorite town ever for vacationing to him—San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico).
At the airport I got to have the conversation I had practiced with a friend about the Lebanese stamp in my passport. “Why did you go to Lebanon?” “To go to a good friend’s wedding.” “And what was her name, and do you know anyone else there? And do you have any other activities there?” I tried to act natural while finding myself feeling like some sort of criminal who really had something to hide. I remembered my friend’s admonition that making jokes about military activity would land me in jail, so I practiced my poker face. Not surprisingly, I was selected out of the line for a second security screening.
I waited in line and watched individuals take from two to ten minutes in the special screening. I was escorted to a side screening table. Imagine Macy’s the day before Christmas, and you’ll get a sense of the level of activity in that place. We started with the first of four bags (two of them handbags). Inside a large plastic crate I looked at the contents of all my electronics equipment, a morbid, threatening spaghetti of cords, each piece touched once, twice, by a special wand which I gather was testing for radioactivity. I thought, well, this shouldn’t take too long—just a couple more minutes.
The minutes drug on as we started the second bag. “Don’t touch the bag I’ve just checked at all,” I was warned. Eventually three others took turns looking at the contents of my next bag. They were not happy that I hadn’t told them in advance about the books I had been given in Egypt as gifts. I was supposed to have declared them, apparently. So we searched through the first large piece of luggage. I took out every item of clothing and separated out my books. All those Arabic sounding authors and titles related to Egypt and Arabic. Pages were touched, flipped through. I couldn’t resist and asked if they’d like some of the recipes in the Egyptian cookbook I had bought. The one long-haired woman who seemed to be in charge of my investigation smiled back, so I hoped I might finish the check, which had drug on for over an hour, soon.
After the fourth painful bag (couldn’t I get a chair!?!), I was told I would get another check. I was escorted by my female investigator (mercifully, she was female), to a sort of changing room. Luckily I was wearing very thin clothes which provided easy access to all body parts. I was told to take off many components and then frisked in ways I didn’t imagine possible. I stood there wondering what the folks who have been profiled upon entrance to the US must feel like and reminded myself that it was good to go through this humiliation to be able to empathize with them. What else could I say to myself to offer any comfort? So, after this hour and a half of interrogation, looking, touching, I was freed.
I took my Royal Jordanian flight, the only female passenger of ten on the way to Amman. The male flight attendant sat next to me and described his four marriages all over the world. I hoped he wasn’t campaigning for the fifth. Maybe I shouldn’t flatter myself. Upon entering the Amman airport, I noticed the long gazes with which I was greeted. Like so many parts of the Middle East (excluding Israel), folks are constantly checking each other out. I reminded myself that it was time to get used to a new culture and that I needed to suck it up. My friend from Beirut (she flew in) hugged me at the customs boundary and whisked me off to her hotel. Somehow I didn’t have a hotel reservation (oh boy), and she luckily didn’t mind sharing her room with me. I also thought my husband was coming in tonight, but was wrong (it’s tomorrow).
So we went to a Western style bookstore where I looked at hundreds of political titles. Naturally, there were several titles related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. All of them sympathetic to the Palestinians. I picked them up, read their first few pages. One book was full of political cartoons—insulting, many of them—correct only insofar as the author’s narrative was concerned. All I could think was, “Whose narrative is it today?” We walked for miles through Amman, and my world spun around me as I realized these streets look so similar to Jerusalem and not Cairo (I had expected the reverse). I’m just managing expectations here. We’re listening to Arabic music videos, interrupted briefly by the Muslim call to prayer on the broadcast, about to have dinner at a Lebanese restaurant.
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