Gone to look for America

I'm back in America, in the U.S.A.

I left on September 9, 2010 and came back to JFK airport on June 22nd, 2011, with eleven new countries and infinite new thoughts and life under the soles of my feet.

Everything I've done and seen and learned and everywhere I've been - unforgettable.  

But it's time for me to get back to knowing my own country.  If I'm not a patriot, and not a nationalist, I am still and forever an American, and I want to know what that means.  I want to see this country mile by mile from the ground, not 30,000 feet up in the air.  

I just got back from an amazing and probably life-changing weekend at the Socialism Conference in Chicago, and after a 20 hours bus trip with some badass socialists, reading Kerouac and feminist socialist theory, I'm in Texas.  I'll be here for a week, then back to Philadelphia/DC, and as many more adventures as I can fit in to the slipping summer months.

Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together

I've got some real estate here in my bag

So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies

And walked off to look for America

"Kathy," I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh

"Michigan seems like a dream to me now"

It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw

I've gone to look for America

Laughing on the bus

Playing games with the faces

She said, "The man in the gabardine suit is a spy"

I said,"Be careful, his bowtie is really a camera"

Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat

We smoked the last one an hour ago

So I looked at the scenery, she read her magazine

And the moon rose over an open field

"Kathy, I'm lost" I said, though I knew she was sleeping

I'm empty and aching and I don't know why

Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike

They've all gone to look for America

All gone to look for America

All gone to look for America

I spun around till I was dizzy; I thought I'd fall down as in a dream, clear off the precipice.  Oh where is the girl I love? I thought and looked everywhere, as I had looked everywhere in the little world below. And before was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhere far across gloomy, crazy New york was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam.  There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded - at least that's what I thought then.

- Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk.  Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.

- Kerouac, On the Road

Alexi Murdoch - Song for You

So today I wrote this song for you
'Cause a day can get so long
And I know its hard to make it through
When you say there's something wrong

So I'm trying to put it right
'Cause I want to love you with my heart
All this trying has made me tight
And I don't know even where to start

Maybe that's a start

'Cause you know its a simple game
That you play filling up your head with rain
And you know you've been hiding from your pain
In the way, in the way you say your name

And I see you
Hiding your face in your hands
Flying so you won't land
You think no one understands
No one understands

So you hunch your shoulders and you shake your head
And your throat is aching but you swear
No one hurts you, nothing could be sad
Anyway you're not here enough to care

And you're so tired you dont sleep at night
As your heart is trying to mend
You keep it quiet but you think you might
Disappear before the end

And it's strange that you cannot find
Any strength to even try
To find a voice to speak your mind
When you do, all you wanna do is cry

Well maybe you should cry

And I see you hiding your face in your hands
Talking 'bout far-away lands
You think no one understands
Listen to my hands

And all of this life
Moves around you
For all that you claim
You're standing still
You are moving too
You are moving too
You are moving too
I will move you

---

"The Industrial Workers of the World union has been accused of putting women in the front lines of protests.  The truth is, the IWW simply does not keep them in the back, and they go to the front!"

- Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

"Israel is not a nationalist dream; it is an imperialist nightmare."

-Sherry Wolf

"America and Western Europe are feeling rightly penitent for the Holocaust - but it is the Palestinians who are paying this penance."

- Archbishop Desmond Tutu

---

I think my favorite thing about being home is the hour between 5 and 6, when the late afternoon turns into early evening and the sun is hot and slanting and slipping and seeping.  I only feel that warm, baking easy summer in America.

Coffee is cheaper here too, or at least my kind of coffee.

The driveway to my mother's house is flanked by bamboo and mimosa.

Wake up, stumble off the bus, dazed, needing and knowing no sensation but bloodflow in my legs, stare around, lean on a stucco wall, half listening to people talk, back to the bus.  The gas station sign says just in big white capitals on a red field, GAS.  

Where are we? Drive for a moment, peer at roadsigns.  In a barren shrub grass park, a sign wickedly proclaims, "Welcome to Miami."  More helpfully, the turnpike toll says Oklahoma and I know I'm in a part of the country I've never been before. What do the stars look like here? Lean back, look up and through the bus window's glare.  

I can see them all, hear them all singing in their spheres.  I'm going to visit them all, I think.  I'm going to get up there and see every star. And just for a moment, a long moment, I think that if I could rid myself of every human bond, every attachment, dependency, love, desire, fear, and be free from everything, I could get to every star.  And then I begin writing in the dark.

---

Bob Dylan, A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’
Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?
Who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a young child beside a dead pony
I met a white man who walked a black dog
I met a young woman whose body was burning
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow
I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded with hatred
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall


P.S.  60th post!

Assault
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I had forgotten how the frogs must sound
After a year of silence, else I think
I should not so have ventured forth alone
At dusk upon this unfrequented road.

I am waylaid by beauty.  Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass
that am a timid woman, on her way
from one house to another!

Last Day

I'm leaving the Middle East tomorrow.

I can barely even begin to describe how I feel about that.  I'm so looking forward to the rest of my travels - Riga, Berlin, Reykjavik - and I'm so looking forward to seeing my family all over the US again and to seeing my friends and my old cat. It'll be nice to be back home, enjoying my house, wearing little summer dresses, going out for drinks with my sister, eating good Thai food and Mexican food, checking what's changed in my favorite museums, and what's changed in me.
But there is so much that I will miss.  If I start thinking about it now, I'll never leave.  And like it or not, my plane sails out of Amman in 36 hours, and I'd better be on it.
My year abroad lasts for one more week.
I'm going to eat as much hommos, mtabbal, mashawi, kouse, wara einab, fresh juice and arabic ice cream as I can possibly hold.
I'm listening to nothing but Arab music, speaking as much Arabic as I can, and just trying to get the most out of my last hours in this fantastic, addictive part of the world.

And I'm already working on ways to come back next summer.

Petra, Jordan

Western Desert, Egypt

Athens, Greece

Rome, Italy - St. Peter's Basilica

Rome, Italy

Venice, Italy

Giza, Egypt

Chouf Mountains, Lebanon

Beirut, Lebanon

Byblos, Lebanon

Istanbul, Turkey - Hagia Sophia

Abu Simbel, Egypt - the whole IFSA group

Beirut, Lebanon

Byblos,

Lebanon

Link-a-palooza

Check out these links from some badass feminists in Lebanon who just happen to be my friends -

The Daily Star - Website crusades against harassment in Lebanon

Qaweme (Resist) Harassment Blog

Adventures of Salwa anti-harassment video:

The Adventures of Salwa - Resisting Sexual Harassment

And now go join the Nasawiya (feminist) facebook page and get more updates from them!

Words and Stone

Orignnally written for publication in the Kenyon College Middle East Students Association Journal, May 2011.  

This is the night, what it does to you.

I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.

-       Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”

Wadi Qadisha, North Lebanon

Lately, I haven’t been thinking my own thoughts.  The words of other people, known and unknown, living and dead, have been leaping into my mind and out of my mouth.

Yesterday, on a bus on a long drive from Beirut into the mountains of North Lebanon, I realized I was running away – running from deadlines, from readings, from sidewalks, from sidelong looks, from Beirut, from Palestine and from Israel, and from names altogether.  I had to get to the mountains.  It was just where I went – north, north, north, following that eternal flawless arrow up and up to where I could see the snow and the yellow hamaida flowers bursting out of it.

Give me a moment before summer begins, just one breath before the heat of the year.

It was there in the mountains that I could think, could breathe.  A year of living by the sea has robbed me of all bounds, made me limitless, swept my certainties over the edge of the horizon, again and again.  I needed the dirt, the sky, and two walls of holy mountains around me so that I could think, away from the clutter of empires, from the debris of the age – the humans and cities that are the debris of the world. 

Up here, you could know things.

 

Every year, the world finds its way to spring.  The snow melts.  Green things grow. The cedars are as ageless and evergreen as always, enduring and renewing.  Surely my winter – your winter – will not last forever. 

‡

“In Egypt, one hour isn't like any other…

each moment is a memory renewed by a bird 
of the Nile.”

-       Mahmoud Darwish, “In Egypt”

Kom Ombo Temple, Southern Egypt

 I was in Egypt for three and half months, countless hours, and so many moments both forgotten and unforgettable.  The Egypt I lived in is gone now anyway, so what I could tell you that you could use?  I could tell you about smoking lemon-mint sheesha outside on the shores of the Mediterranean in December, or about how the Egyptian government banned sheesha in Alexandria during election week in November to keep Muslim Brotherhood members from congregating and debating in public.  Or about camping in the White Desert outside Cairo, watching the moonrise and staring at the Milky Way, listening to Bedouin music.  Or about my Arabic teacher, a beautiful, 40 year old Ph.D., director of a research institute, who still lived at home and had a curfew because it’s so hard for women to support themselves and because its culturally stigmatized for a woman to live alone.  All of these things were part of my Egypt, but after February 11 when Hosni Mubarak stepped down – or really after January 25, when the Egyptian people stood up – that Egypt is gone, changed forever, and the future is completely in flux.

Here in Lebanon, things seemed completely different.  Clean streets, beautiful people, ethnic restaurants – all the comforts of home, plus the Mediterranean sea and the chance to speak Arabic and French and English, sometimes all in the same sentence!  How delightful, I thought!  But I’ve been here for a few months now, and I’ve learned some things about the reality of modern Lebanon.  Religious sectarianism runs through this country like a plague, killing any chance of establishing a real, just government.  The country is split by religion and region – the first question any Lebanese asks another is, “Where are you from?” because it will tell them what religion you are – Baalbek?  You must be a Shia, and you’re probably with Hezbollah.   Saida?  Or Saida suburbs – it makes all the difference. East Beirut?  Definitely Orthodox Christian.  Class is not important; French or English educated doesn’t matter; even political party takes second place to religion.  As a religious studies major, this is all fascinating to me.    But as a human being, one with Lebanese friends who worry about their state without a government, the sectarian prejudices of Lebanon are a serious problem, an impediment to real government, and no one I’ve talked to has any solution in sight.

‡

"Doing nothing in a period of repressive violence is itself a form of violence...If you sit in your house, live your life and go to your job, and allow the country that you live in to murder people and to commit genocide, and you sit there and you don't do anything about it, that's violence."

-       Naomi Jaffe, activist, Weather Underground co-founder

Children in the Saida (Sidon) Palestinian refugee compound, Lebanon

“Can I take your picture?” I ask in Arabic of the four young girls sitting on the shabby blanket on the floor.  They’ve all been watching me since I walked into their mother’s house – their house – in the Palestinian refugee compound in Sidon, with my big camera, my short hair and otherness.  I’m here with a student group from the American University of Beirut, with other international students but mostly with other Lebanese students.  I speak the weakest Arabic of anyone in my group, but I don’t really need much to communicate with these four shy, smiling sisters.  There should be five of them, I think to myself, remembering the story their mother told us when we came in, about her middle child who was bitten by a mouse last year and got sick and died because she couldn’t afford the medicine her daughter needed.  The UNRWA wouldn’t pay for it because this woman and her family – including her now deceased husband – fled from Palestine in 1967, and UNRWA doesn’t give legal refugee status or any aid to 1967 refugees.  I met another woman, another mother of four, old before her time and sick with epilepsy, unable to afford her own medication, and unable to walk up or down the stairs to her own house more than once every few days because of her illness.  Her name was Amal, and last year, the roof of her house had caved in right above where her four daughters slept.  The youngest one had had her arm broken by a piece of debris.  Because Amal and her children live in the part of the compound that’s built right into the historic old city of Saida, the Lebanese government didn’t allow them to rebuild their own roof, and didn’t send approve construction teams until 4 months later.  The government cared more about the architectural integrity of any given building in the old city than about the lives of the women who lived in it.  Amal herself had been born in the Saida compound after her father left Palestine in 1948 and all of her daughters were born there as well.  Whether or not they want to claim any Lebanese identity is not even up to them – because Amal’s father was a refugee, all his descendants in Lebanon will be classified as Palestinian refugees and subject to all the discrimination, racism, and legal limitation of the generations before them.    

            After talking to Palestinian refugees, even the impenetrable sectarian problems of the Lebanese seem unimportant, and worse, compared to the situation of the Palestinians in Lebanon and all over the Middle East, they seem solvable. 

‡

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of

great moral crisis maintain their neutrality.

-       John F. Kennedy

                      

Photo: E. Tess Wolterstorff, April 2011, View of Palestine from south Lebanon

At Kenyon, I was co-founder of our chapter of the student organization J Street U, an organization that promotes a “pro-Palestine, pro-Israel, pro-peace” stance on the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict, and I definitely tried to a take a moderate, fair-minded point of view on the whole issue, keen to see both sides and remain informed and impartial.  But I am a different person now than I was when I left Kenyon, and it would be foolish for me to think that my opinions and feelings on this issue could remain still amid the storm.  What I saw in the compound was three generations of refugees all living in one dark room – a humanitarian crisis that has lasted for 63 years.  In the face of my real experience, I am struggling with my neutrality.  I am struggling with whether neutrality is really the best position here, or if moral conviction must lead me to choose a side. I felt sick inside as I wandered around the compound, thinking about all the different nations and leaders and citizens responsible for this suffering.  The Palestinians in Lebanon have been dehumanized, forced to go through exhaustive military checkpoints every day to get from their homes to school.  Israel and Lebanon are certainly the most culpable parties in the situation, but there is a heavy mantle that gets put on your shoulders as an American citizen, and it would be naïve to say that America plays no role in the position of Palestinians in Lebanon and worldwide.  Our support, both tacit and explicit, for this treatment of Palestinians, going all the way back to 1948 when we imagined that Palestine was a land without a people which we could give to a people without a land, has led to a racist vendetta that is turning into a genocide in which we, as well as Israel and most Arab governments are culpable.  I struggled against paralyzing rage and despair just to write this article, trying to find a way to say what I believe without seeming to point fingers, but that is in fact exactly what I want to do.  Little girls should not die of mouse bites in 2011, and it makes me sick at heart and sick to my stomach that I pay taxes to the government that helped put her and her mother in the untenable, inhumane and unjust position they live in now.

            It is unacceptable that in 2011 – an age of the United Nations, of the Millennium Goals, of unprecedented wealth in the United States and Western Europe, of real information easily accessible through the internet – that we should have such a political and human crisis, and that it should be taken with such an air of resigned disappointment, of disinterested benevolence, by most Americans.  No one is an island, especially the educated and economically advantaged citizens of a free and democratic country – we are part of this situation and culpable in it, and I know now that I can no longer live with that as long as things stay the way they are in Palestine and Israel.  There must be change, and soon.

‡

 “For,” the outsider will say, “in fact, as a woman, I have no country.

As a woman I want no country.

As a woman my country is the whole world.”

-       Virginia Woolf, “Three Guineas”

The author at Petra, Jordan

I began this year thinking that my American passport was like a golden ticket to the world – lines were fast, visas were cheap, customs was always easy.  I know now that I am lucky just to have a country.  Knowing that I have a home to return to makes any alienation or hardship abroad temporary.  But I don’t see my passport as a free pass anymore; quite the opposite, it feels like it has become something of a weight around my neck.  In my archaeology class, we talk about the destruction of sites like ancient temple site of Eridu in modern Iraq and after learning of its great significance in human history, we see pictures of its occupation and devastation by US military forces.  The magnificent city of Babylon was turned into “Camp Alpha” by the Marines who carelessly caused substantial and irreparable damage to the site, which is one of the most important ancient sites anywhere in the world.  If I fall into the trap of caring more about the spaces than the people, as the Lebanese government has, there is always someone there to remind me.  One night, walking with a friend along the seaside corniche in Beirut, a man stopped and started to chat with us.  When he asked where we were from, and we answered, America, he said, “America?  I am Iraqi!  You kill us.”  Horrified, my friend and I desperately wanted to say no, not us personally, no.  But what did that mean, what could we really say?  Yes.  We do. 

I feel guilt, but I choose instead to accept the feeling of responsibility, to accept that I got lucky in my birthplace, and that I have to use the advantages I did nothing to earn in the service of people who weren’t so randomly lucky.  Guilt is a paralyzing emotion, but responsibility is galvanizing, and so I try to make the conscious choice towards action and passion and outrage, rejecting fear and stasis and despair.

I didn’t write this article to preach to you, to tell you ultimate truth or make you angry – I wrote it to make you passionate, to make you curious and brave enough to take your skills and your compassion beyond the sphere of your comfort zone.  Platitudes, I know.  But you’d be amazed at how many things blaze into clarity when you step into the home of the other, of a refugee, and you’d be amazed at how complicated everything becomes when you stand with one foot on both sides of a divide, an alien to both, and yet culpable in at all.  Uncertainty and flux can be powerful creative energy as the Egyptian people – and the Libyans, the Syrians, the Bahrainis, and so many more – are finding out even now.  If you want to find out what your passport means to you, try and get into the West Bank.  If you want to find out what your home means to you, imagine it falling down around you as you sleep.  If you want to know what your health means to you, imagine being so sick that you can’t walk down stairs.  When you’re done imagining, go and find out and read and take pictures and think.  Maybe you’ll discover, as I have, that certainty is not the greatest thing of which your mind is capable, and that the sea and the wind and lives of others have swept you clean and left you to rebuild something stronger from the ruins of yourself.

Last plane tickets

Just finished buying the last plane tickets of my year abroad - 

My schedule for the next month:

June 7 - Leave Beirut (sadly, and soon to return inshallah)

Arrive Amman, bus/etc. to Ramallah

June 14 - Leave Ramallah, return to Amman

June 15 - Amman to Riga, Latvia for an 8 hour layover!

Riga to Berlin, arriving mid-afternoon!

June 21 - Leave Berlin

12:00 AM, June 22 - Arrive Reyjavik, Iceland!

1:00 PM, June 22 - Leave Reykjavik

7:00 PM, June 22 - Arrive New York City, United States of America.

ASAP - back to Philly!!!

May 27, 2011!!!

Happy Birthday to my beautiful beautiful wonderful NEPHEW!!!
BEST DAY EVER.  I've been listening to every single song on my itunes with the word "baby" in it.
I can't wait to get home and actually see him and schoogle him and celebrate the newest tiniest member of my amazing family!!!

Billie Holiday, "Summertime"

Cat Stevens, "Morning Has Broken"