Friday, March 25, 2011
BREAKING NEWS
in other, perhaps more important, news, my watch tan is almost back to its summer 2010 status. ace ace ace!
everybody be calm
so, more protests have broken out around amman in an escallation of the usual friday downtown demonstrations. i drove past one yesterday on my way home from the university. it backed up traffic for a while, but that was the extent of the effect it had on me personally. apparently, a little while later, pro-gov. counterdemonstrators started throwing rocks at the protesters. in egyptian fashion, that particular group of demonstrators has started camping out at that circle.
i know my family is worried about me, but errybody should chill out. SIT is really on top of stuff, they always err (air? i don't know) on the side of caution. and so far, they haven't said anything to us. so chill!!!
here's an article if you want to know more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/world/middleeast/25jordan.html?ref=middleeast
i know my family is worried about me, but errybody should chill out. SIT is really on top of stuff, they always err (air? i don't know) on the side of caution. and so far, they haven't said anything to us. so chill!!!
here's an article if you want to know more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/world/middleeast/25jordan.html?ref=middleeast
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
yesterday was a great day for the following reasons:
1) i found out i’ll be going to a WEDDING on saturday!! that means i need to go shopping, as i brought nothing even remotely fancy to this country. though my friend megan, who just went to a wedding this weekend, said i should hardly bother; no matter what i do i’ll definitely be shown up by all the jordanian ladiez with all their color and bling.
2) it was mother’s day in jordan. i made my mom a card in arabic, which she loved. she was asleep when i went to school, but in the middle of the day i got a text message from her expressing her gratitude. winning points all over the place!! this also meant GIANT CHOCOLATE CAKE. mohammad went back for 4ths, then made khitam give him a belly rub after he got pains from eating too much. love them.
3) i had the best taxi ride ever on the way home: 2JD exactly, all the windows down, the magic hour splashing sunlight onto the faces of white stone buildings, yo la tengo blasting through my earbuds. #californiasummer (is that how it works, @youngpb??). serious flashback to the best coast, driving gladys around town. also i’m starting to read east of eden, and steinbeck’s descriptions of salinas make me long for golden hills, oak trees, and the smell of the pacific ocean. teensy bit homesick, moomkin?
on saturday i took a solo trip up to jerash (i’m patting myself on the back for using my arabic to navigate the public bus station all on my own). i ended up meeting a nice dutch girl who i spent the day with. she’s been working in bethlehem for the past few months, but has had such an impossible time getting an extended visa that she has to pop on over to jordan every 3 months, then lie her way back into palestine, pretending to be a tourist so she can get another tourist visa. what a process! we had a great time, and exchanged info so that we can meet up when i visit amsterdam this summer (shout out to juliet, can’t wait for eurotrip 2011!). here are some pictures of this ancient city:
1) i found out i’ll be going to a WEDDING on saturday!! that means i need to go shopping, as i brought nothing even remotely fancy to this country. though my friend megan, who just went to a wedding this weekend, said i should hardly bother; no matter what i do i’ll definitely be shown up by all the jordanian ladiez with all their color and bling.
2) it was mother’s day in jordan. i made my mom a card in arabic, which she loved. she was asleep when i went to school, but in the middle of the day i got a text message from her expressing her gratitude. winning points all over the place!! this also meant GIANT CHOCOLATE CAKE. mohammad went back for 4ths, then made khitam give him a belly rub after he got pains from eating too much. love them.
3) i had the best taxi ride ever on the way home: 2JD exactly, all the windows down, the magic hour splashing sunlight onto the faces of white stone buildings, yo la tengo blasting through my earbuds. #californiasummer (is that how it works, @youngpb??). serious flashback to the best coast, driving gladys around town. also i’m starting to read east of eden, and steinbeck’s descriptions of salinas make me long for golden hills, oak trees, and the smell of the pacific ocean. teensy bit homesick, moomkin?
on saturday i took a solo trip up to jerash (i’m patting myself on the back for using my arabic to navigate the public bus station all on my own). i ended up meeting a nice dutch girl who i spent the day with. she’s been working in bethlehem for the past few months, but has had such an impossible time getting an extended visa that she has to pop on over to jordan every 3 months, then lie her way back into palestine, pretending to be a tourist so she can get another tourist visa. what a process! we had a great time, and exchanged info so that we can meet up when i visit amsterdam this summer (shout out to juliet, can’t wait for eurotrip 2011!). here are some pictures of this ancient city:
Thursday, March 17, 2011
i hate oman
ok, that's not true. but after spending a week in oman on our "spring break" (and truly having a fantastic time, mind you), i was still too happy with my decision to study abroad in jordan. before i get into why, here are a few background facts of this country that may not even be on your radar:
oman is a small country (slightly smaller than kansas, as the CIA world factbook tells me) in the ARABIAN (not persian, as was emphasized to us several times throughout the trip) gulf. it has shared borders with yemen, saudi arabia, and the UAE. just a jump across the oman gulf is iran, and pakistan and india aren't too far away either. this geographical location makes tense power dynamics, but also a cuisine that is the bomb.com. it has about 3 million people, about 1 million of which are under the age of 14! it became independent after it kicked out the portugese in 1650, and has a history of imperialism, once controlling parts of present-day tanzania and zanzibar (as a result, there is a large african, swahili-speaking population in oman). it is a sultanate, and is under total rule (essentially) by sultan qaboos. sultan qaboos is an interesting fellow (not to mention he has the funniest name in the world) and there is a strange personality cult surrounding him in oman. he makes public appearances about once a year, if you're lucky, and he hardly ever makes public statements on anything. but over the span of about 40 years he single-handedly transformed oman from a country with no economy, virtually no education, and no political power to a modern nation (mcdonalds and everything!) built on a fuel economy whose reputation is that of a peace-keeper.
oman is a much more ethnically diverse country than jordan, largely because of the job opportunities provided by oil. interestingly, omanis have a sort of snobbery when it comes to the jobs they'll do. they look down on blue-collar work, and as such, these jobs are mostly filled by indians, pakistanis, and east africans. but in oman, as in many all the other gulf countries who are witnessing the same trends, there is an effort to "omanize" the workforce, wherein there are certain quotas that businesses have to fill of native omani workers. it's a strange idea: omani's don't want certain jobs, but then they complain that there are no job opportunities for them, so the government provides a certain percentage of jobs for them, which allows them to bargain for better salaries ("you don't want me for 50% above minimum wage? i know you need to hire another omani, and try to find another who will do the job for anything less.").
you can tell a native omani (non-"expat") apart from his dress usually. they are wear dish-dashas (which many people in jordan do too), but the omani dish-dasha has a tassle coming out from the collar. they wear scarves around their heads like a turban or they wear the kofia, a traditional east-african hat. if you aren't omani-omani, you would never wear this. it's considered disrespectful. and in oman, disrespect can get you thrown in jail. seriously!! even if someone, say, accidentally ran over your foot with his car, if you were to, in a fit of rage, spit on the ground in front of him and call him a bad name, you could be fined and spend about 3 months in jail.
talking to the kids at SIT oman, i think i would have had a really tough time. social roles are even more cemented in oman than in jordan. we always talk about jordan as being extremely influenced by tribalism; in oman, it's even more so, especially, it seems, for women. you are not even supposed to ask a man about how his wife is doing because it implies that you were thinking about her. however, women make up about 70-80% of this university we went to in nizwa. this is partly because nizwa is more rural, so families who are more nervous about sending their daughters to muscat (which used to be defined separately from the rest of oman, and still is by many citizens) where they might be corrupted can send them instead to nizwa. still, i found it interesting that so many women were in university when their job opportunities were essentially limited to teaching or nursing.
the SIT kids felt they were in a weird limbo because of these strictly defined social roles. while they weren't tourists, they weren't really a part of society either. they can't make friends with young omanis. they can't really go out. seriously. we asked them where there were fun places to go and they could offer no suggestions. "i haven't done anything in this country" one of them said. they just go to school and then go home. i'm sure they are learning a lot from class and from their families, and i'm sure all that free time makes them extremely well-read, but if i were in their place i would go majnoona (crazy).
but, oman is STUNNINGLY GORGEOUS. the slogan of their tourism website was "beauty has an address." nothing could be truer. crystal-blue waters push up against dramatic orange mountains that look like they are climbing higher before your very eyes. the buildings are fresh white in color with blue and purple and orange tiles outlining every window. paradise? i think so. the only downside was that it can reach up to 125 degrees F in the summer!!! as such, i overheated just about every day.
our first day we went to the ras al jinz turtle reserve, where many green turtles come to nest. we spent the night at a campsite in these tiny huts. so much fun, so little sleep. the next day we went to the town of sur where we saw a dhow (boat) factory. here is a picture of some dhows in front of an old outpost:
then that afternoon we hiked into wadi shab, a true oasis. after scrambling over rocks that seem to be almost alive (i immediately was reminded of zion national park in utah), we came upon bright blue freshwater pools that we spent the afternoon swimming around in. blissful relief from the oppressive heat.
the next day essentially consisted of me with my head in a toilet (thank you sketchy omani "fast food") and then a meeting with the SIT students.
monday we visited nizwa university, jabreen castle, and the old town of misfat 'abreen. my favorite part of the castle was the view it afforded. how some of these towns sprung up in the middle of the desert is beyond me.
misfat 'abreen is an old town that reminded us all of something from the land before time. on the cliffs of mountains, people have built steppes of agrigulture that have propered largely thanks to an ingenious water system called the "telege." people still lived there and yet it was a tourist destination, and something felt slightly "off" as i walked on a tourist path right past people's homes. it was almost as if the feeling we were supposed to get was that we were looking through a window into the past. weird, and sort of unethical? to make me feel a little less guilty i made sure i greeted everyone i saw (in arabic) and definitely didn't take pictures of anyone.
the last day we went to the sultan qaboos grand mosque, a structure completed in 2001 that combined mosque design from all over the muslim world. seriously grand. it coveres 416,000 sq. m. a little too opulent for my taste, but i enjoyed the gardens (i forgot what a park looks like. there are none really in amman).
we were all SO HAPPY to be back in amman. after going around in a comically small bus in a country that was underworldly hot, being sort of treated like children and getting creepy stares, we were pretty glad to leave. don't get me wrong, oman was OMAzing. but when i got my passport stamped and heard my one thousandth "welcome to jordan," it felt as good as hearing it for the first time.
oman is a small country (slightly smaller than kansas, as the CIA world factbook tells me) in the ARABIAN (not persian, as was emphasized to us several times throughout the trip) gulf. it has shared borders with yemen, saudi arabia, and the UAE. just a jump across the oman gulf is iran, and pakistan and india aren't too far away either. this geographical location makes tense power dynamics, but also a cuisine that is the bomb.com. it has about 3 million people, about 1 million of which are under the age of 14! it became independent after it kicked out the portugese in 1650, and has a history of imperialism, once controlling parts of present-day tanzania and zanzibar (as a result, there is a large african, swahili-speaking population in oman). it is a sultanate, and is under total rule (essentially) by sultan qaboos. sultan qaboos is an interesting fellow (not to mention he has the funniest name in the world) and there is a strange personality cult surrounding him in oman. he makes public appearances about once a year, if you're lucky, and he hardly ever makes public statements on anything. but over the span of about 40 years he single-handedly transformed oman from a country with no economy, virtually no education, and no political power to a modern nation (mcdonalds and everything!) built on a fuel economy whose reputation is that of a peace-keeper.
oman is a much more ethnically diverse country than jordan, largely because of the job opportunities provided by oil. interestingly, omanis have a sort of snobbery when it comes to the jobs they'll do. they look down on blue-collar work, and as such, these jobs are mostly filled by indians, pakistanis, and east africans. but in oman, as in many all the other gulf countries who are witnessing the same trends, there is an effort to "omanize" the workforce, wherein there are certain quotas that businesses have to fill of native omani workers. it's a strange idea: omani's don't want certain jobs, but then they complain that there are no job opportunities for them, so the government provides a certain percentage of jobs for them, which allows them to bargain for better salaries ("you don't want me for 50% above minimum wage? i know you need to hire another omani, and try to find another who will do the job for anything less.").
you can tell a native omani (non-"expat") apart from his dress usually. they are wear dish-dashas (which many people in jordan do too), but the omani dish-dasha has a tassle coming out from the collar. they wear scarves around their heads like a turban or they wear the kofia, a traditional east-african hat. if you aren't omani-omani, you would never wear this. it's considered disrespectful. and in oman, disrespect can get you thrown in jail. seriously!! even if someone, say, accidentally ran over your foot with his car, if you were to, in a fit of rage, spit on the ground in front of him and call him a bad name, you could be fined and spend about 3 months in jail.
talking to the kids at SIT oman, i think i would have had a really tough time. social roles are even more cemented in oman than in jordan. we always talk about jordan as being extremely influenced by tribalism; in oman, it's even more so, especially, it seems, for women. you are not even supposed to ask a man about how his wife is doing because it implies that you were thinking about her. however, women make up about 70-80% of this university we went to in nizwa. this is partly because nizwa is more rural, so families who are more nervous about sending their daughters to muscat (which used to be defined separately from the rest of oman, and still is by many citizens) where they might be corrupted can send them instead to nizwa. still, i found it interesting that so many women were in university when their job opportunities were essentially limited to teaching or nursing.
the SIT kids felt they were in a weird limbo because of these strictly defined social roles. while they weren't tourists, they weren't really a part of society either. they can't make friends with young omanis. they can't really go out. seriously. we asked them where there were fun places to go and they could offer no suggestions. "i haven't done anything in this country" one of them said. they just go to school and then go home. i'm sure they are learning a lot from class and from their families, and i'm sure all that free time makes them extremely well-read, but if i were in their place i would go majnoona (crazy).
but, oman is STUNNINGLY GORGEOUS. the slogan of their tourism website was "beauty has an address." nothing could be truer. crystal-blue waters push up against dramatic orange mountains that look like they are climbing higher before your very eyes. the buildings are fresh white in color with blue and purple and orange tiles outlining every window. paradise? i think so. the only downside was that it can reach up to 125 degrees F in the summer!!! as such, i overheated just about every day.
our first day we went to the ras al jinz turtle reserve, where many green turtles come to nest. we spent the night at a campsite in these tiny huts. so much fun, so little sleep. the next day we went to the town of sur where we saw a dhow (boat) factory. here is a picture of some dhows in front of an old outpost:
then that afternoon we hiked into wadi shab, a true oasis. after scrambling over rocks that seem to be almost alive (i immediately was reminded of zion national park in utah), we came upon bright blue freshwater pools that we spent the afternoon swimming around in. blissful relief from the oppressive heat.
the next day essentially consisted of me with my head in a toilet (thank you sketchy omani "fast food") and then a meeting with the SIT students.
monday we visited nizwa university, jabreen castle, and the old town of misfat 'abreen. my favorite part of the castle was the view it afforded. how some of these towns sprung up in the middle of the desert is beyond me.
misfat 'abreen is an old town that reminded us all of something from the land before time. on the cliffs of mountains, people have built steppes of agrigulture that have propered largely thanks to an ingenious water system called the "telege." people still lived there and yet it was a tourist destination, and something felt slightly "off" as i walked on a tourist path right past people's homes. it was almost as if the feeling we were supposed to get was that we were looking through a window into the past. weird, and sort of unethical? to make me feel a little less guilty i made sure i greeted everyone i saw (in arabic) and definitely didn't take pictures of anyone.
the last day we went to the sultan qaboos grand mosque, a structure completed in 2001 that combined mosque design from all over the muslim world. seriously grand. it coveres 416,000 sq. m. a little too opulent for my taste, but i enjoyed the gardens (i forgot what a park looks like. there are none really in amman).
we were all SO HAPPY to be back in amman. after going around in a comically small bus in a country that was underworldly hot, being sort of treated like children and getting creepy stares, we were pretty glad to leave. don't get me wrong, oman was OMAzing. but when i got my passport stamped and heard my one thousandth "welcome to jordan," it felt as good as hearing it for the first time.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
salt pictures
finally, some pictures from a pre-badia day trip to the city of salt:
our friend abdullah serenading us
jordan flag. nationalism!
the oldest school in jordan
salt!
from a very old church
our friend abdullah serenading us
jordan flag. nationalism!
the oldest school in jordan
salt!
from a very old church
conundrumumumumumum
today we had yet another interesting lecture about the feminist movement in jordan (or lack thereof) from a jordanian scholar working at the university of jordan. she teaches american lit, which i think is an important point to remember, and started the women’s center at uj. she was an excellent public speaker, almost dangerously so, and i found myself completely enraptured in what she had to say. it wasn’t until after i had thought for a few minutes, checked back over the notes i had taken, and processed her rhetoric that i started to feel a wrench in my stomach.
mostly, i felt her lecture to be extremely disorganized and she jumped from place to place. she went off on completely unrelated tangents, then at the end of the lecture started wrapping up with the history of the women’s movement (which she really spent no time talking about), and then read a letter written by an egyptian woman in 1909 that i think she expected us to cry over.
i guess i’ll start with what i liked/thought interesting about her lecture and then move into what i found problematic.
she raised some points about cultural views of women and the impact on their health that i had never realized before. for instance, here it’s crucial that a woman be a virgin when she marries, and the way to prove her chastity is the blood from her broken hymen. this is so important, in fact, that some parents don’t even let their girls ride bicycles or participate in sports because they are afraid that their hymens might break prematurely. this compounds a lot of what i’ve noticed regarding health in this country. there doesn’t seem to be a lot of knowledge about healthy eating or proper exercise. for example, my host sister in the badia asked me why she was so fat when she walks a full two km per day. well, that’s only about one mile and she doesn’t walk it very quickly. also she eats sweets galore (jordanians love their sugar). similarly, a girl on the program here stayed with a very traditional family in the badia whose women essentially never left the house. they were all pretty overweight. it worries me that these cultural views are keeping people from healthy and active lives.
the lecturer also said that it sometimes takes her hours to convince a woman to get a mammogram, especially in rural areas. she couldn’t figure out why this was until she realized that the only physician in town was a man, and the women of the village felt that it was improper for him to touch them in such a way. highly educated female physicians didn’t want to live in those villages where they felt their lifestyles were restrictive. she also said that religion can influence women to make unhealthy choices. here there is a sort of fatalism: whatever happens, god has willed it. the lecturer spoke of a woman she met who knew she had a lump on her breast but wouldn’t go get it checked out because she had faith that whatever happened was the will of god and she didn’t want to betray his will.
also, she and our last lecturer brought up a point of “distribution of resources” point. they said that jordan, as a developing country, and its government have a hard time focusing on feminist demands when they are so strained and stressed in other areas (a consequence of this is that the feminist movement is necessarily limited to upper-class participants, making it, like second-wave feminism in the US, a bourgeois/intellectual movement). going hand-in-hand with this point is that jordan, the middle east in general, and palestine in particular face huge political obstacles, particularly in relation to israel but also to the global political stage in general, in making their voices heard, understood, and respected. our lecturer said, and i’ve noticed this as well, that men here definitely have a macho attitude going on, which i see as being a product of feeling emasculation in other parts of their lives (note to self: look up statistics of domestic violence in the US before and after the recession).
now to the stuff i didn’t like:
while i appreciated the information the professor gave us, and i found much of it enlightening, she was definitely coming from a western perspective on feminism which makes me question the potential success of her point of view becoming the mainstream in jordan. she noted, but then seemed to dismiss, the impact of colonialism on reactions to feminist movements. she said that here feminism still has a huge stigma attached to it because it is seen as a betrayal of islamic values, that it is part of the “westoxification” of the arab world. then, she went on to say that feminism is a secular movement. this raised a big old red flag in my head. we have been talking this whole semester about how the religion of islam cannot be separated from other realms of society. it is not just a system of thought and beliefs but a way of life; islam is orthopraxic not orthodox. how then, can feminism (or at least the secular feminism that our lecturer prescribed) succeed in jordan? when she was talking to us, it was almost as if she was commenting on a people and culture other than her own. probably had something to do with her western education and the fact that she in an english lit professor.
she did say though that these “westoxification” accusations come readily partly because there is just a lack of middle east-produced feminist discourse (egypt is the exception). to a certain extent, there is nothing to do but borrow from the west.
herein lies the conundrum that i’ve been struggling with for so long re: feminism in the islamic world. i really don’t think that western feminism can survive/thrive in the middle east. firstly, there is too much outright rejection of anything western-produced in all realms of life, something that i don’t think will change until the US stops supporting israel (it’s amazing how i can trace almost every problem in jordan back to israeli-palestinian conflict; but this isn’t me extrapolating. it legitimately permeates every facet of life here). secondly, it doesn’t account for how deeply islam is incorporated into people’s life. thirdly, there is such a huge divide between intellectualism in amman and tribal traditionalism in the rural parts of jordan. i don’t think that the strength and influence of tribes in jordan can be underestimated, especially when the king right now relies heavily on these tribes’ support. i don’t know how connected these feminist intellectuals are with the needs/desires/challenges of women in rural jordan. the feminist movement here is definitely very bourgeois.
we were talking about top-down vs. bottom-up social reform. is change only going to come if the king/government (likely the king because parliament is very patriarchal and there are only female ministers because of a quota system) declares it, or is there a way for more grassroots change to occur? and even if it could, would it really be bottom-up reform? the point that i brought up is that because feminism here is so bourgeois still the bottom doesn’t really seem like the bottom. the analogy i brought up is freedom summer, in which white college students from the north went down to mississippi to help the black community exercise their voting rights and participate in the civil rights movement. it seems like this is almost what would happen be happening between women in the city and in rural areas. i can’t figure out how i feel about this. obviously i’m glad that mississppians voted, but freedom summer had some lasting negative effects. as david on my program brought up, sometimes the perfect gets in the way of the good. but i don’t know if i agree with this either!! i’ve never been a fan of band-aids. i think there needs to be patience, for people to realize that women have only been able to vote here since 1974 (which, humorously, i think is the same year women gained the right to vote in switzerland) and that there have been huge changes in that short period of time. there’s no easy answer other than it definitely isn’t the west’s responsibility to “save” islamic women. and if people in the west had any real interaction with women over here they would realize that they are much more capable than most give them credit for.
buzzword in my life for the past few weeks: CONUNDRUM. aaaaaaaah.
mostly, i felt her lecture to be extremely disorganized and she jumped from place to place. she went off on completely unrelated tangents, then at the end of the lecture started wrapping up with the history of the women’s movement (which she really spent no time talking about), and then read a letter written by an egyptian woman in 1909 that i think she expected us to cry over.
i guess i’ll start with what i liked/thought interesting about her lecture and then move into what i found problematic.
she raised some points about cultural views of women and the impact on their health that i had never realized before. for instance, here it’s crucial that a woman be a virgin when she marries, and the way to prove her chastity is the blood from her broken hymen. this is so important, in fact, that some parents don’t even let their girls ride bicycles or participate in sports because they are afraid that their hymens might break prematurely. this compounds a lot of what i’ve noticed regarding health in this country. there doesn’t seem to be a lot of knowledge about healthy eating or proper exercise. for example, my host sister in the badia asked me why she was so fat when she walks a full two km per day. well, that’s only about one mile and she doesn’t walk it very quickly. also she eats sweets galore (jordanians love their sugar). similarly, a girl on the program here stayed with a very traditional family in the badia whose women essentially never left the house. they were all pretty overweight. it worries me that these cultural views are keeping people from healthy and active lives.
the lecturer also said that it sometimes takes her hours to convince a woman to get a mammogram, especially in rural areas. she couldn’t figure out why this was until she realized that the only physician in town was a man, and the women of the village felt that it was improper for him to touch them in such a way. highly educated female physicians didn’t want to live in those villages where they felt their lifestyles were restrictive. she also said that religion can influence women to make unhealthy choices. here there is a sort of fatalism: whatever happens, god has willed it. the lecturer spoke of a woman she met who knew she had a lump on her breast but wouldn’t go get it checked out because she had faith that whatever happened was the will of god and she didn’t want to betray his will.
also, she and our last lecturer brought up a point of “distribution of resources” point. they said that jordan, as a developing country, and its government have a hard time focusing on feminist demands when they are so strained and stressed in other areas (a consequence of this is that the feminist movement is necessarily limited to upper-class participants, making it, like second-wave feminism in the US, a bourgeois/intellectual movement). going hand-in-hand with this point is that jordan, the middle east in general, and palestine in particular face huge political obstacles, particularly in relation to israel but also to the global political stage in general, in making their voices heard, understood, and respected. our lecturer said, and i’ve noticed this as well, that men here definitely have a macho attitude going on, which i see as being a product of feeling emasculation in other parts of their lives (note to self: look up statistics of domestic violence in the US before and after the recession).
now to the stuff i didn’t like:
while i appreciated the information the professor gave us, and i found much of it enlightening, she was definitely coming from a western perspective on feminism which makes me question the potential success of her point of view becoming the mainstream in jordan. she noted, but then seemed to dismiss, the impact of colonialism on reactions to feminist movements. she said that here feminism still has a huge stigma attached to it because it is seen as a betrayal of islamic values, that it is part of the “westoxification” of the arab world. then, she went on to say that feminism is a secular movement. this raised a big old red flag in my head. we have been talking this whole semester about how the religion of islam cannot be separated from other realms of society. it is not just a system of thought and beliefs but a way of life; islam is orthopraxic not orthodox. how then, can feminism (or at least the secular feminism that our lecturer prescribed) succeed in jordan? when she was talking to us, it was almost as if she was commenting on a people and culture other than her own. probably had something to do with her western education and the fact that she in an english lit professor.
she did say though that these “westoxification” accusations come readily partly because there is just a lack of middle east-produced feminist discourse (egypt is the exception). to a certain extent, there is nothing to do but borrow from the west.
herein lies the conundrum that i’ve been struggling with for so long re: feminism in the islamic world. i really don’t think that western feminism can survive/thrive in the middle east. firstly, there is too much outright rejection of anything western-produced in all realms of life, something that i don’t think will change until the US stops supporting israel (it’s amazing how i can trace almost every problem in jordan back to israeli-palestinian conflict; but this isn’t me extrapolating. it legitimately permeates every facet of life here). secondly, it doesn’t account for how deeply islam is incorporated into people’s life. thirdly, there is such a huge divide between intellectualism in amman and tribal traditionalism in the rural parts of jordan. i don’t think that the strength and influence of tribes in jordan can be underestimated, especially when the king right now relies heavily on these tribes’ support. i don’t know how connected these feminist intellectuals are with the needs/desires/challenges of women in rural jordan. the feminist movement here is definitely very bourgeois.
we were talking about top-down vs. bottom-up social reform. is change only going to come if the king/government (likely the king because parliament is very patriarchal and there are only female ministers because of a quota system) declares it, or is there a way for more grassroots change to occur? and even if it could, would it really be bottom-up reform? the point that i brought up is that because feminism here is so bourgeois still the bottom doesn’t really seem like the bottom. the analogy i brought up is freedom summer, in which white college students from the north went down to mississippi to help the black community exercise their voting rights and participate in the civil rights movement. it seems like this is almost what would happen be happening between women in the city and in rural areas. i can’t figure out how i feel about this. obviously i’m glad that mississppians voted, but freedom summer had some lasting negative effects. as david on my program brought up, sometimes the perfect gets in the way of the good. but i don’t know if i agree with this either!! i’ve never been a fan of band-aids. i think there needs to be patience, for people to realize that women have only been able to vote here since 1974 (which, humorously, i think is the same year women gained the right to vote in switzerland) and that there have been huge changes in that short period of time. there’s no easy answer other than it definitely isn’t the west’s responsibility to “save” islamic women. and if people in the west had any real interaction with women over here they would realize that they are much more capable than most give them credit for.
buzzword in my life for the past few weeks: CONUNDRUM. aaaaaaaah.
Friday, March 4, 2011
addendum
1. today i ate brains. i don't know from what animal (story of my life because i still can't speak this goshdarn language), but i'm assuming cow?
2. i also ate goat stomach in the badia.
3. here are my host nephews. they were adorable, except when the littlest one tried to eat my arabic textbook, which i borrowed from SIT, not bought. don't be fooled by his old man appearance. he still cannot talk. maybe that's why we bonded. because i cannot talk either, except "shookrun" (thank you), "qoyes" (nice!), "majnoon" (crazy, as in "qaddafi majnoon" which is my go-to political conversation starter nowadays), and "moomkin" (my favorite word because of its versatility. it can mean may i or maybe or so-so, and i use it in all situations).
2. i also ate goat stomach in the badia.
3. here are my host nephews. they were adorable, except when the littlest one tried to eat my arabic textbook, which i borrowed from SIT, not bought. don't be fooled by his old man appearance. he still cannot talk. maybe that's why we bonded. because i cannot talk either, except "shookrun" (thank you), "qoyes" (nice!), "majnoon" (crazy, as in "qaddafi majnoon" which is my go-to political conversation starter nowadays), and "moomkin" (my favorite word because of its versatility. it can mean may i or maybe or so-so, and i use it in all situations).
the badia, the bomb.com
this past thursday-monday i was doing a rural homestay in the southern badia, in the town of al-rajiff, some 30 minutes from petra. it. was. amazing.
i stayed in this house with "oomy" ("my mother," as i was told to call her), who was quite old, with bad teeth and rough-skinned hands. unfortunately i have no pictures of her because she is shy. she has 7 daughters and 1 son. all of them, except the youngest daughters, are married with kids of their own, but they all live in al-rajiff too. they are always at the house, especially on the weekends, cooking and cleaning and tending to the animals. oh yeah, my family had like 13 goats and 8 chickens, approximately. but we ate 4 of the goats (i'll get to that story in a second).
the first night i was there, my youngest host sister (23-year old maliha) got engaged to my friend natatlie (who was also staying in al-rajiff)'s host brother!! that meant one thing: mansaf. mansaf is the national dish of jordan, and it consists of either goat or lamb meat, rice with leben (tart, milky yogurt), parsley and almonds. it's delicious. it's cooked over a fire in huge cauldrons basically. so that afternoon we (by we i mean definitely not me, but the men in the family and all the male neighbors) slaughtered 4 of our goats. i thought it would phase me more because i was a vegetarian for 3 years. but it really didn't. they slit the throats and out poured a waterfall of blood, which the young children had fun running around dodging. my host sister burned something called baqhour to mask the smell of the blood. unfortunately (or fortunately, depending), i don't have any digital photos of the slaughter to show you, dear readers. i took them on my film camera. some cvs photo guy is in for a fun surprise!
so the next night we had a "small party" (oh, just about 100 people) at our crib. all the women were inside in the sitting room, and the men were outside under a makeshift tent. natalie and my other SIT friend staying in al-rajiff, anna, were able to come. the three of us were required to wear hijabs and dish-dashes (a long, shapeless dress covering your entire body), which was pretty fun, except my host sister sprayed my hijab with like 800 spritzes of perfume. we sat and chatted as my host sister came around with a bucket of water so we could wash our right hands, and then with a pot of turkish coffee and two cups, which 50 women shared (which is, undoubtedly, why i'm now ill). then the mansaf came in several GIGANTIC plates, and we ate on the floor with our right hands, occasionally using bread to pick up the goat and rice. yum yum yum. here are some pictures. natalie and anna are the ones who are obviously not arab. natalie looks like a badia bride.
it was a great evening, except there was no dancing, because it was still the mourning period for my host dad who recently passed away.
in case i didn't mention, al-rajiff is located at the top of a huge valley that looks like it was carved out by giant eagle talons (lord of the rings?). the mountains also sort of looked like the bumps on dave lanegran's booze nose. my host brother-in-law, abu adl (which means father of adl; people here often take the names of their firs-born sons) led me around the valley, which he grew up in. he said he used to walk all the way up the mountain from the bottom of the valley to go to school... barefoot. he would leave at 4 in the morning, with only a breakfast of a palm-ful of sugar to sustain him. oh, also, abu adl used to live in bahrain and work as a bodyguard for the al-khalifa royal family. no biggie.
he showed me old bedouin winter homes, which you'd barely be able to find if it weren't for the tiny chimney poking out the top. inside was just a bed and a few necessities, and the resident had scratched a greeting and his name on the wall with a soft rock.
he also showed me traditional water collection methods of the bedouins, which i of course flipped for. here is abu adl and his daughter miriam, walking up the steps to a catchment pool for rain runoff:
then we gathered some brush and made shay marameeya (tea with sage) on a cliff overlooking the valley and lay out in the sun. i died a little bit of happiness, especially when abu adl said that i was a bedouin because of how much i love tea. but apparently i am not a bedouin because i pick up after myself. bedouins here just litter. everywhere!! when i picked up the cans of juice that abu adl and his daughters left behind, he said: "BADIA. NOT CALIFORNIA." but i took them back home anyway.
i did more stuff, but i'm too tired to write about it now, sorry. maybe later. except it is worth telling that it took a really long time to get back from the badia because the bus driver had us over to his house for tea. this is typical. i love this country.
i have two arabic midterms sunday so i have to study up. thursday i will be leaving for oman, where i'll be for a week. again, no biggie. tomorrow i'm going to ajloun to visit some castles. jordan is the best. sorry minnesota, but i'm going to try to get an internship here for the summer, or maybe in israel (codename "disneyland" so we can talk about it in public places without drawing death stares).
i stayed in this house with "oomy" ("my mother," as i was told to call her), who was quite old, with bad teeth and rough-skinned hands. unfortunately i have no pictures of her because she is shy. she has 7 daughters and 1 son. all of them, except the youngest daughters, are married with kids of their own, but they all live in al-rajiff too. they are always at the house, especially on the weekends, cooking and cleaning and tending to the animals. oh yeah, my family had like 13 goats and 8 chickens, approximately. but we ate 4 of the goats (i'll get to that story in a second).
the first night i was there, my youngest host sister (23-year old maliha) got engaged to my friend natatlie (who was also staying in al-rajiff)'s host brother!! that meant one thing: mansaf. mansaf is the national dish of jordan, and it consists of either goat or lamb meat, rice with leben (tart, milky yogurt), parsley and almonds. it's delicious. it's cooked over a fire in huge cauldrons basically. so that afternoon we (by we i mean definitely not me, but the men in the family and all the male neighbors) slaughtered 4 of our goats. i thought it would phase me more because i was a vegetarian for 3 years. but it really didn't. they slit the throats and out poured a waterfall of blood, which the young children had fun running around dodging. my host sister burned something called baqhour to mask the smell of the blood. unfortunately (or fortunately, depending), i don't have any digital photos of the slaughter to show you, dear readers. i took them on my film camera. some cvs photo guy is in for a fun surprise!
so the next night we had a "small party" (oh, just about 100 people) at our crib. all the women were inside in the sitting room, and the men were outside under a makeshift tent. natalie and my other SIT friend staying in al-rajiff, anna, were able to come. the three of us were required to wear hijabs and dish-dashes (a long, shapeless dress covering your entire body), which was pretty fun, except my host sister sprayed my hijab with like 800 spritzes of perfume. we sat and chatted as my host sister came around with a bucket of water so we could wash our right hands, and then with a pot of turkish coffee and two cups, which 50 women shared (which is, undoubtedly, why i'm now ill). then the mansaf came in several GIGANTIC plates, and we ate on the floor with our right hands, occasionally using bread to pick up the goat and rice. yum yum yum. here are some pictures. natalie and anna are the ones who are obviously not arab. natalie looks like a badia bride.
it was a great evening, except there was no dancing, because it was still the mourning period for my host dad who recently passed away.
in case i didn't mention, al-rajiff is located at the top of a huge valley that looks like it was carved out by giant eagle talons (lord of the rings?). the mountains also sort of looked like the bumps on dave lanegran's booze nose. my host brother-in-law, abu adl (which means father of adl; people here often take the names of their firs-born sons) led me around the valley, which he grew up in. he said he used to walk all the way up the mountain from the bottom of the valley to go to school... barefoot. he would leave at 4 in the morning, with only a breakfast of a palm-ful of sugar to sustain him. oh, also, abu adl used to live in bahrain and work as a bodyguard for the al-khalifa royal family. no biggie.
he showed me old bedouin winter homes, which you'd barely be able to find if it weren't for the tiny chimney poking out the top. inside was just a bed and a few necessities, and the resident had scratched a greeting and his name on the wall with a soft rock.
he also showed me traditional water collection methods of the bedouins, which i of course flipped for. here is abu adl and his daughter miriam, walking up the steps to a catchment pool for rain runoff:
then we gathered some brush and made shay marameeya (tea with sage) on a cliff overlooking the valley and lay out in the sun. i died a little bit of happiness, especially when abu adl said that i was a bedouin because of how much i love tea. but apparently i am not a bedouin because i pick up after myself. bedouins here just litter. everywhere!! when i picked up the cans of juice that abu adl and his daughters left behind, he said: "BADIA. NOT CALIFORNIA." but i took them back home anyway.
i did more stuff, but i'm too tired to write about it now, sorry. maybe later. except it is worth telling that it took a really long time to get back from the badia because the bus driver had us over to his house for tea. this is typical. i love this country.
i have two arabic midterms sunday so i have to study up. thursday i will be leaving for oman, where i'll be for a week. again, no biggie. tomorrow i'm going to ajloun to visit some castles. jordan is the best. sorry minnesota, but i'm going to try to get an internship here for the summer, or maybe in israel (codename "disneyland" so we can talk about it in public places without drawing death stares).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)