Ajnabieh - The Foreigner

(Home safe from Cairo, and then from my post-Cairo "hey! Let's drive around the upper midwest for a week!" jaunt through Michigan and Ontario. But this has been sitting on my phone since I got back, and I finally had a moment to put it up here. Hi!)

NOTE: this post contains reference to the getting travel-related food poisoning. Nothing squicky and no details (trust me, you don't want them), but if the mere idea is an issue, best scroll on by.



1.

It was my first night in Cairo. I was jetlagged, exhausted, dehydrated, lost, confused, and about to get really, really sick, though I didn't know it. I ended up deciding to have knafeh for dinner, because I just didn't know anymore, and stumbled into a patisserie. After trying to order, and then being told to go take a seat and that a waiter would come, and then waiting for a table to open up, and then waiting for the waiter (probably all of this would have been easier if I weren't a mess), I managed to order a plate of knafeh and a cup of tea. "Bidoun sukker," I said, and the waiter gave me a funny look. I'm an idiot, I realized--there's an idiomatic way to order your tea without sugar, which I had of course forgotten. And maybe bidoun wasn't even how you said 'without' in Egyptian dialect. God, why had I left my Arabic textbook in the US? It wasn't doing me any good there.

After a while, I got my knafeh and my tea. "Without sugar," the waiter said pleasantly, and I tried not to feel too stupid. The tea was too hot to drink for a long time, but, God, I needed it.

2.

Two days later, I woke up at 9:15 and groaned. Of course, I had to get sick first thing in the morning this time. But I couldn't go all day without eating, and breakfast ended in fifteen minutes. I needed to put something in my stomach. I struggled into clothes and stumbled into the hotel restaurant at 9:32, feeling like an asshole.

The guy in the chef's hat who made omelettes was nowhere to be seen, but the girl who waited tables was around, and said "good morning!" to me cheerfully. I tried to smile back. Normally, this would be the point where I'd pile on the fuul and the boiled eggs and everything, but I decided to play it safe: orange juice, plain pita bread, plain yogurt, some honey to add to it. The waitress came to take my cup. (She'd learned, over my three mornings so far, that I wanted coffee with milk.) "Excuse me," I said. "Can I have tea this morning, instead?"

"Of course," she said, still cheerful, and walked away.

I struggled through some bread, and then a cup of tea appeared next to me. I looked at it. It had milk in it, already mixed. I blinked. No one, I mean no one, drinks tea with milk in the Middle East. God, they must keep a separate pot ready of milky tea for the aganib, because they know we like milk in our coffee and milk in our tea, strange as it is. My heart sank a little, because milky tea was the last thing I wanted in that state. I wanted a nice, plain cup of black tea, boring and bitter and enough to settle my stomach.

But what could I say? I sipped at it, forced down my yogurt, and cursed cultural sensitivity.

3.

Costa Coffee was like a giant suburban Starbucks, sprawled out on the side of Shari3 Gama3t Duwal 3arabi. (By the end of my two weeks, I knew just to call it Gama3t Duwal. I didn't yet.) It struck me as odd that these western-style restaurants took up so much space; in cities back home, they get crammed into the same tight quarters as everyone else. I got a seat--I had finally figured out that, in Cairo, you don't just go to the counter and order and then find your seat--and ordered tea and a croissant. I was feeling better than earlier that morning, but I still wanted to be soothed.

The tea arrived: a pot that must have held about two cups of hot water, a single Twining's English Breakfast teabag, and a latte cup to drink it from. I dropped the teabag in the pot, feeling resentful. When I make tea in a pot this size at home, I use three teabags, not one. The water wasn't going to be hot enough, either, which meant the tea was going to be frightfully weak. I huffed to myself. This cup of tea was going to be wrong.

And then I thought about learning to make tea with the family who put me up in the West Bank when I was there. Boil a saucepan of water; add a fistful of fresh mint, and a fistful of white sugar. Take one tea bag, and dip it in, again, again, again, until the water looks like tea. Then it's done.

This tea, I realized, was an act of fusion. Take tea-making norms from one place, apply them to tea from another. If this had been a bag of Lipton Yellow Label, then it would have made sense. I'd been thrown by my own, anglophile notions of what a "proper" cup of tea was. (Warm the pot, four minutes, no more, one spoon for the pot, milk goes in the cup first.) No, this is perfect, really; this is tea that is both/neither, that follows no rules but its own.

The inscription on the saucer said "Italian about coffee." And English about tea, I expect, in exactly the same way.

I hate, hate, hate cutting things. Hate it. I'm assuming those of you who write recognize the feeling at least a little. I especially hate cutting bits I like, when they no longer fit the tone or structure of the piece they're in. Sometimes they're beautiful, or funny, or meaningful, but they just have to go.

Hey, I guess that's what having a blog is for.

This used to be in the fourth chapter of my dissertation, as the introduction to a subsection on my fieldwork teaching ESL in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

I got the question every time I started working with a new group of students, and this day was no exception. "Where you from?" Wilad asked, as I put the children's book I'd been using to teach colors and clothing back in my purse.

I used to answer that question with "Kensington," my Brooklyn neighborhood, or "Philadelphia," my hometown. But that's never the question they're asking. "I'm American," I say.

"You husband 'arabi?"

I thought of my wife, with her Jewish last name, who was at home with our six-month-old son. "No," I say. "My husband's not Arab."

(Linguistic note: Arabic lacks a copulative verb [i.e., to be] in the present tense. Native speakers of Arabic learning English often drop them as well. In my fieldnotes and writing, I try to preserve syntax where I can, because I think how we talk matters.)

OK, now back to the exciting task of finishing my damn dissertation this weekend. *makes more tea*

I continually find new reasons my dissertation research is odd. The most recent is the frequency with which I move between fieldsites. Now, obviously, my "fieldsite" broadly considered is "the Arab communities and institutions of New York City," and I haven't left it. But, more practically, I've moved in and out of different areas of community activism and organizing, following some issues more than others at different times, digging in deeply to a particular niche area and then pulling back out and moving on to another.

I'm lucky: the digging in I'm doing now is into a space where I have a ton of connections, both purely professional and more personal. I keep using Facebook to set up interviews, for instance, because it's where I see people the most. Both of the days I did interviews this week, I was met with hugs and cheerful greetings when I arrived. I'm also getting very little resistance to meeting with me--I was able to schedule a time to talk to everyone I tried to schedule with within a week.

It's good, as I'm coming to the end of the most active phase of my fieldwork, to realize that I am in a different position than I was a year and a half ago, when I was scrambling to do interviews. It's also good to read through what I wrote a year and a half ago; while my depth of knowledge has changed, and I think my framing has shifted, the data I collected then is still relevant and interesting. So, phew: it's not a lost cause, this "finishing the damn dissertation" project.

Among the returns that this week held for me was my first trip to Bay Ridge in months. Is it wrong that my initial thought upon stepping off of the train and walking up Bay Ridge Avenue to 5th Avenue was ZOMG FOOD!!!!1!!!? In any case, the sudden immediate availability of Arab junk food was (pleasantly) overwhelming. Being overwhelmed, I, in the end, resorted to just getting a donut at Mike's Donuts, but I have begun planning what purchases I'll be making at Belady next week when I go back.

The streets look much as I remember them from last summer, when I was down there two or sometimes three days a week. A few businesses appear to have gone under; one restaurant I've never gotten to go to had its windows papered over, though there was a sign indicating this was vacation, not permanent. Perhaps there were fewer people on the streets; it was in the nineties and threatening rain, though, so I don't think that was particularly indicative.

One of the things that struck me was just how much cultural fusion happens in Bay Ridge. It's a neighborhood where immigrant and ethnic groups collide in rapid succession. The stretch of Fifth Avenue that is unquestionably Arab is only five blocks long; halal groceries and sweet shops cluster together, but sit in comfortable relation to old-school Brooklyn coffee shops, Chinese restaurants, a very cool comic store, an Irish pub.



This is the door of a 99¢ store on Fifth Avenue. 99¢ stores are common in all low-income/working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn; they carry a variety of merchandise, including food, stationary, housewares, and toys, most for 99¢ an item. For folks who live in these neighborhoods, they're the general stores. I go to my local one for mailing envelopes regularly (and then a screaming fight with my toddler about how he really doesn't need another plastic dinosaur, or that awesome Dora ball). Although this isn't universally true, many are run by Chinese immigrants, particularly in neighborhoods with a Chinese presence (like Bay Ridge).

The scarves draped in the window share space with decorative plastic flowers, umbrellas, and inexpensive children's backpacks. Next to the two pink scarves hangs a kuffiyeh; not the traditional triangular one worn in the Middle East, or even its politically-relevant neckscarf variant, but the type sold by street vendors in Manhattan in dozens of colors. The symbol of Arab struggle, as recoded by the hipster masses, and resold on the streets of Bay Ridge: there's a poetry in that. And that's the reason I love my fieldwork: because there's poetry in it, right alongside the politics, and it's my job to make it come to vibrant life.


(For those who don't recognize it [and who would, given the crappiness of the photo?], the icon above is of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which connects Brooklyn to Staten Island, and stands perched at the edge of Bay Ridge, visible from most points within it.)

Last Monday, I attended a rally calling for the New York City schools to close on the two Muslim holidays of Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. The rally was organized by the Coalition for Muslim School Holidays; catchy, no? Unfortunately, my photos turned out pretty poorly; I'll see if I can find some better ones and post them. However, I want to make a few observations about the event, the cause, and the politics around it.

1) Like any ethnographer working in a fieldsite that is reasonably keyed into information technology networks, I googled the coalition and event before I went. Most of what I found was news articles on previous steps taken by the group, including the 15-0 vote in favor of the holiday by the city council (see this NY Times article). Nearly all these articles included Mayor Bloomberg's quote, "If you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school." And every article, without fail, followed this immediately with the information that the NYC schools already take off for Christmas, Good Friday, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Passover. Clearly, Bloomberg's attempted framing isn't getting any traction in the media.

2) The Coalition's framing of the issue, on the other hand, was clear and consistent. This issue is about equal treatment and respect for the major communities of the city; about 12% of the students in the school system are Muslim. However, a subargument was made that I found very interesting: that the effects on the school system would be minimal. Over the next 12 years, one speaker said at the rally, only 10 instructional days would be lost, due to holidays falling either on weekends or during summer vacations. What's interesting about this is that it's a classic claim that the desired action is a minimal one. This is an easy claim to accommodate, in addition to being one justified on grounds of mutually agreed upon values (multiculturalism). Social movement theory: always relevant.

3) There was clearly an effort made to emphasize the diversity both of the Muslim community in the city, and the members of the coalition. The rally was co-emceed by a gentleman who appeared Arab to me (though he might have been South Asian, and I didn't get his name, and a woman who was East Asian. At least half the speakers were non-Muslim allies, self-identified. There were both Muslim and non-Muslim teachers, both Muslim and non-Muslim parents, and two non-Muslim representatives of unions (the teachers' union and the public employees' union). There were two other Muslim speakers, a coalition member giving the calendar data, and an imam talking about how many elected officials supported the measure. Of the Muslims who spoke, one was Latino by last name, one was South Asian, two were black, and one was Arab; of the non-Muslims, two were black, one Latina, one East Asian. The crowd was as ethnically mixed as this implies, and was prone to break out in spontaneous chants of si se puede.

3a) Yet the largest gap I saw was in getting Muslims there, particularly young Muslims. I attended with staff from the Arab-American Association, where I've done a great deal of my fieldwork, but unfortunately they weren't able to get their substantial youth base to show up. Among the reasons? An Eid trip to Six Flags. Frankly, there weren't a lot of young people there at all; elementary school students with parents, but not a lot of teenagers. Some of this might be reluctance to go into the city, which many outerborough teens have; some of it might have been the fact that it was the second (or for some, the first) day of Eid, and they were busy with holiday activities; some of it, I'm sure, was Six Flags. Teens can be a hard crowd to mobilize, as I remember from my own high school organizing days. But it was too bad more of them couldn't get out there.

4) Another interesting language/identity issue is what, precisely, to call the holidays that are being asked for. You'll note above I say "Eid al-Fitr" and "Eid al-Adha." I spell them this way because I'm a speaker (so to speak) of Arabic, and that's how one transliterates the names into English from Arabic in most general usage. But the Coalition's website says "Eid Ul- Adha and Eid Ul-Fitr," which strike me as South Asian transliterations. The NY Times as "Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha," which strike me as stupid transliterations; I think you need a character there to represent the ع in عيد , and skipping it looks just...wrong. (Perhaps this is a common transliteration in some context?) The Examiner link has both the second and the third. I don't have any conclusions yet on what these differences mean, but I want to flag them. Perhaps you, my almost non-existent readers, have thoughts on this question.

5) And a final note to self: maybe the next time you bring the baby to a fieldwork-protest, bring a tape recorder. It's hard to take notes and give a bottle simultaneously.