I am not making this up …
The Arabic site for Aljazeera had this poll on its front page.
Which is better for you:
Dictatorships
Foreign meddling
That’s it! Their polls are usually poorly written … but this is a new low. Why are Arabs faced with only these two options … rot under oppressive dictatorships, or be enslaved by this corrupt world order? How about living in a free society away from foreign interference … Is that too much to ask for?
We are nothing but ideas … ideas that our parents came up with sometime ago. They shaped us to be as close to what they thought of originally as possible . We are ideas that can think on their own. We can evolve into new ideas (sometimes better, but most of the time worse).
However, We need a context/discourse to be understood, and (more importantly) to have a meaning. This context is our prison … it limits how we understand ourselves and how we define our insignificant existence.
There are few “ideas” out there that do not need a context to exist. Ideas that cannot be understood, and mean absolutely nothing. They are significant just because they exist. They are significant just because you cannot understand them. This might be what I am evolving into.
I started the day by listening to some Massive Attack … nothing like trip hop (aka acid rap) to set the mood of the day. The sound is unique … It is dark and sad … with a very subtle hint of anger. It is the creative and elegant manifestation of fears, doubts and insecurities.
About two weeks ago, I passed my PhD candidacy exam. My oral defense (according to the exam committee) was perfect. However, one comment was made that troubled me. I was told that I did not conceptualize the topic to the fullest. What troubled me about this … was the fact that I knew it … I knew that I was too focused on the details. Even when I tried to change this … I could not. I was just too tangled up with the trivial details of who did what … when and where … why and how.
I have been thinking a lot lately about the conceptualization of reality … Reducing everything to its fundamental truth. Life would be easier to understand … relationships would be easier to build … characters would be easier to maintain.
My inability to conceptualize important events in my life led me to where I am today- alone with half a million thoughts racing through my head. The details of everything that ever happened to me don’t want to go away … they are locked up in my mind … and decaying very slowly. If only I can see the truth behind everything that happened.
I kinda like this excerpt from the poetry of Ernesto Guevara de la Serna (aka Che Guevara)
” Die, yes, but riddled with
bullets, destroyed by the Bayonets, if not, no Drowned, no …
A memory more lasting than my name
Is to fight, to die fighting”
The last time I tried to pray was 8 months ago. I wanted to give my faith another chance. Maybe I will rediscover the bliss of religion I felt years ago.
I picked up my Quran, and started getting ready for the ritual of Salah (prayer). I usually recite out of memory. But that one time, I wanted to read something new … and long.
Seconds into the ritual, I realized that I am logically analyzing every single word. I was trying to understand how God thinks… How he argues… I wanted to find flaws in what he says. I was doing all of this unconsciously. Part of me felt guilty…. It is blasphemous to question God.
I could not go on with the prayer. But I could not just walk away. It is a sacred ritual anyhow … maybe not to me … but to many it is. It has to be ended properly. So I decided to go on with it … I went on reading verses mindlessly, absorbing the words without understanding them. I guess that’s the best way to worship God. I guess that’s the way God intended to be worshiped.
I had another episode of my (relapsing) Che Guevara syndrome.
I wonder why I care in the first place. I am not really religious, so I guess I am not faking it like all of those religious nuts. To them, caring about the unfortunate is nothing but an obligation, a means to an ends -just one of the many paths to eternal bliss. It is not really sincere if you come to think about it. Wanting to help people for the sole purpose of feeling better about your self is selfish. This satisfaction is the bastard child of the unholy union of religion and morality.
Anyhow … back to the original point. I really do not understand how I got to develop all of this compassion, if you wanna call it that. Like I said, it does not have anything to do with religion. It must to be something more innate… an instinct maybe. I guess this instinct is what inspired socialists before, and does to this day.
If this is an instinct, then it must have a biological depth. There must have been an environmental element that led to its emergence. But how does helping the poor/weak/misfits help survival. Nature would say fuck the weak … fuck the poor … fuck the misfits. It’s the survival of the fittest after all.
Maybe it’s not an instinct … I take it back …Maybe we just want a purpose … “Fighting for the POOR” sounds fulfilling. Maybe Che and Lenin were being sucked into the same vortex of moral obligation as the average god-lover. Maybe it was all in self-interest after all. Capitalism works in mysterious ways.
Che once wrote:
“There, in the final moments of people whose farthest horizon is always tomorrow, one sees the tragedy that enfolds the lives of the proletariat throughout the whole world; in those dying eyes there is a submissive apology and also, frequently, a desperate plea for consolation that is lost in the void, just as their body will soon be lost in the magnitude of misery surrounding us. How long this order of thing based on an absurd sense of caste will continue is not within my means to answer, but it is time that those who govern dedicate less time to propagandizing the compassion of their regimes and more money, much more money, sponsoring works of social utility”
I was watching one of the Iraqi dish channels earlier today (there are like a thousand of them!! each with a different political or social agenda … that says a lot about their unity). It was a game show. The bottom line was … the funniest team wins. In one of the challenges, they asked each team to nominate somebody to tell a funny poem. One of the poems left me rather perplexed.
The poet started it off by talking about the lack of security in Iraq these days … that there were bombing everywhere … he sets up the scene … he is in a bus in Baghdad … an old woman with a big bag sits next to him … he notices that she is rather huge and old … he does not feel good about her … she keeps checking that big bag of hers, and adjusting things in it. He starts thinking that she is a suicide bomber… He goes on and on talking about death and how certain it is. Everybody around him looked as somber as they can get. It was dead serious.
He went on …
So there he was facing certain death … he decides to do something …he grabs the bag and runs out of the bus! She chases him down the road … He finds out later that she was only rolling cigarettes.
Now the end might not be that funny (or funny at all). But the fact that Iraqis are able to see humor in their extremely grim situation is astonishing. I guess the same kind of resilience exists here…but never to this level!
Friday sermons are something that I don’t want to experience again.
The art of orating in Arabic involves a lot of ‘junk’ sentences that serve no purpose at all, other than giving the orator time to come up with something else to say. Preachers that give the Friday sermons talk very slowly, and raise their voices unexpectedly for dramatic effect. The content itself is boring. After 1400 years of Friday sermons, preachers are running out of things to say. As a result, preachers start repeating things that have already been said by others. The result is a very artificial and awkward speech about God and faith.
And when a preacher decides to make his sermon interesting, he adds some politics to it. This abomination goes so far as racism and anti-Semitism. People sit down and absorb all of this bullshit thinking they are undisputed facts. What they refuse to realize is that the preacher’s knowledge of politics is not any better than theirs. But he is standing on a podium while they are sitting on the floor. He is closer to God … He must know what he is talking about.
Taboon is a main type of bread in the Palestinian countryside.It is prepared by placing the doe on a round, slightly-pointy, hot plate for prolonged period of times. The final product would be a very large flat loaf of soft bread.
Kofir Thilith is the town where both of my parents grew up. It is a very small and rural village outside of the city of Qalqilia in the West Bank . My parental grandparents moved out of the village years ago to reunite with their relatives after being separated in the 1948 war. Most of my mother’s family stayed there. Back in the early 1990s, my parents used to take us there every summer for a week or so. The place was a living hell! There was no electricity, no paved roads, no water, no modern toilets, no TV. My parents used to drag us there. If that was not enough, the nights were unbearable. Heat and mosquitoes used to make surviving the night a very harsh challenge.
There was one thing that made these trips worth it. The mornings at Kofir Thilith were amazing. The morning breeze was free of pollution, and filled with the sounds of domestic animals. I used to try to wake up as early as possible to capture that amazing phenomenon. On top of all of this, the smell of Taboon bread added a very unique flavor to the scene. I used to run to the Taboon (which is the device used to make the bread, usually located in a shack outside of the house) and tell my grandmother to make me a special loaf. My grandmother usually made us these without our request. Our ‘special’ loafs were small, round and had our names on them. After acquiring my valuable loaf I used to feed some of it to the chickens, rabbits, pigeons and sheep that lived in the shack on the side of the house.
Since the beginning of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000, I was able to my grandmother only once. When we arrived there, I was surprised to find that the town had paved roads, electricity, running water, and toilets! The nights were a breeze because of the fans and the AC. However, there was a very sad trade-off. The mornings of Kofir Thilith lost their innocent glamour. The morning breeze was polluted. The quite serenity was replaced with noisy traffic. And the smell of Taboon bread did not stand out anymore. It transformed from being a morning sensation, to merely a breakfast ingredient.
It seems that the advances of modern life have sucked the innocence out of my most cherished childhood memories. When I told this story to a close friend of mine, she said that this was a normal stage in growing up. I guess there will always be a stage when magic is replaced with facts; romance with reality. Maybe the smell of Taboon was there all along. I just did not notice it.
I knew I was back in Palestine when I saw two guys smoking under a large glowing “No Smoking” sign. I was back in the land of contradictions; the land of the illogical. The taxi driver that took me from the border to Hebron put on his seat belt only when he was on Israeli controlled roads in fear of a ticket. When he was back in Palestinian territory, he removed it. So in the hour and a half trip from Jericho to Hebron , he put on and removed his seat belt five or six times. What I could not understand was the reason why he kept removing it. It would be more convenient to just keep it on. It did not make sense to me.
A guy on the taxi was talking about the dangers of smoking while he was sucking on a cigarette. When I told him that he was smoking, he said he tried to quit, but could not. Well, I guess his attempt to quit gives him the right to contradict himself so openly.
My brother-in-law, who is fairly educated, believes that god gave us the right to kill non-Muslims; that the purpose of Islam is to conquer the world. Yet he believes that Islam is peaceful; that the daily bombings in Iraq are carried out by the CIA. I have heard this ideological nonsense from almost everyone here. Ideology seems to define this region. Logic and objectivity have been forsaken.
I do not know if Palestine ’s problems can be fixed at all. There are too many variables. Every visit convinces me more and more that we have made the decision to collapse as a society. I try to think of solutions, but my decisions are clouded with anger and confusion. I am angry at everyone here for letting the situation deteriorate like this. I believe that any third world country can develop. However, such development cannot occur with a self-destructive ideology.
