First encounters with the Middle East (March 2009)
Beit Al Serkal, Sharjah--By two o'clock, it was ninety-something degrees. This was the cooler time of year in the desert.
More than sixty artists from the region and beyond were descending upon Sharjah, a tiny private country on the tip of Arabia. Artists from Iraq, Iran, America, Brazil, Italy, Germany and elsewhere were touching down.
We were in a dream-like state of scorching jet-lag checking into hotels, negotiating taxis, searching for the museum, inspecting crates, and grabing a bite of lamb or hummus in between.
The A/C wasn't working in the gallery. The only good thing about this situation was that people could speak English and that my art was here. The staff ignored, cajoled, and soothed us from the control tower of the Sharjah Art Museum, the ruler's private art collection.
Many hands at the direction of the curator Isabel Carlos placed my mother's poetry and my paintings onto the walls. We called it "Inheritance: Reclaiming Land and Spirit."
Dubai
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Everyone back home in Hawaii knew about Dubai, a half-hour drive from Sharjah. It seemed all of America knew about Dubai except for me. The city with the world's tallest building-to-be, the indoor ski slope of the desert, the man-made islands, the gold markets. "I'm going to Dubai," I said to a conservationist friend in Hawaii, wincing. "For shopping?" he asked, smiling. I had dedicated my career to environmental conservation and now I was going to set aside the very principles I cherished most. Forty years ago this city--this country--did not exist as it does today. It was a fishing port, an ancient trade stop held among ruling sheikhs. Now from the desert arises glass, gold, steel and a carbon footprint like no other. Drinking water, the desalinized Arabian sea, costs more to produce than oil. And people whisper that the oil is almost gone. Thinking ahead, she has remade herself as a world class tourist destination, the financial capital of the Middle East. |
We are at the famed Mall of the Emirates, a Vatican City with domed glass and vaulted ceilings. Beautiful Emirati click and flow in Gucci heels and robes across granite mosaic tiles. Jeweled black silk folds over hands and cell phones. This chilled glass city is multi-level and multi-directional. It's a maze you can't get out of. I need a map that gives me scale in miles and elevation. 'Ski Dubai' is here.
At the entrance, the call to prayer pipes through the sound system. People are praying somewhere in this beautiful maze. They are shopping and praying. I feel I've been outdone.
Outside, the world's highest concentration of construction cranes stand still, motionless. Architects and engineers must love the freedom and gymnastics Dubai demands even as their instruments lie dormant. Artists like me from around the world flock here to exhibit.
Do her neighbors secretly smile at the thought of her ruin? Do they think it a vanity, this intersection of east and west, of capitalism, art and Islam--the decadence we've heaped upon her?
We head to a bonafide cultural site, the Jumeirah Mosque among a sea of condos and high-end boutiques. We were crossing paths with my friend from Spain whom I'd met a dozen years before in California. I brought two changes of clothes--one for the mosque and the other for the night club. Here, unlike in Sharjah, I could order a cocktail and reveal my arms without stinging embarassment. We drove to the Atlantis hotel, a vacant palace rising from the man-made Palm Islands. We took in the final extravagance.
Provisions
Flanked by the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Desert, Sharjah calls itself the cultural capital of the United Arab Emirates. There are more than forty-five heritage centers, museums, galleries, parks and theaters in this tiny state. The ruling sheikh, a playwrite reigns over a province a little bit bigger than the size of Maui, my home.
I imagine Sharjah patiently strives to be an antidote to Dubai's skyward fantasy in whose shadow it forever lies. Today is Sharjah's moment. Every two years, members of the art world watch the Sharjah Biennial which selects, commissions, and presents artwork for two months in the spring. They are here to observe and most of all, judge. Is it marketable? Is it a coherent artistic conversation between the region and the rest of the world? How does it compare to Art Dubai next door?
Today is the press conference. Jack Persekian, artistic director and Isabel Carlos, curator from Portugal describe the open call for projects, five hundred proposals received.
In the end they selected sixty or so visual art projects, books, plays and performances. Unlike other Biennials, there wasn't a prescribed theme from the outset. The team wanted artists and non-artists alike to create new work from their own well-springs.
They called our collective work "Provisions for the Future." Carlos observed that we were concerned with concepts like immigration, travel, narrative, fiction, memory and history, escape and exile. All of the artists, she explained, wanted to hand the world a gift, a testament, something tactile, a provision for the next generation.
Beirut lost and found
My mother and I were here to re-connect with the country of her grandparents, who had died in Lebanon or left for America about a century ago. Disease, war, and starvation had scattered our family. The Diaspora is the national narrative for a majority of Lebanese who live outside their own country while a minority remain. Like so many U.S. immigrants, my mother's grandparents had children who met and married American Lebanese. In all likelihood we were the first of our family to visit in more than three decades. Did we have any relatives remaining?
I fell in love with Beirut at the international airport, in the baggage claim. It was a hard fall, immediate and absolute. The welcome party was unexpected and frenzied. "The energy of this place is addictive," I was wisely warned by a savy, chic Beiruti.
Lebanese are a people to whom blood is sacrosanct no matter how distant. The son of his uncle, the daughter of her auntie. That is how strangers are introduced, always according to mother and father. We are embraced, deep smiles are exchanged, tears are shed and food is shared.
"You welcome a stranger into your home, care for him, and after three days you ask his name," my grandmother often told my mother of the legendary hospitality.
This country has survived millenia of trouble. Its beautiful and productive coastline crowned with high mountains is a prized possession of kings. Flanked by the eastern Mediteranean and snow-capped mountains, it has been invaded from every direction and by every empire.
Although re-built, Beirut still bears scars from the fifteen year civil war ending in 1991 and the recent bombing by Israel in 2006. A Palestinian leader is assasinated in Sidon a day before we visit. The Lebanese Army keeps the peace. Twenty-eight religions, side by side. But we never, as a rule, speak of the political trouble to one another. We read it in the newspapers.
Byblos, Jbeil and paper to pottery
Eight thousand year old Byblos, or Jbeil as the Lebanese call it is the oldest continually inhabited city in the world. The remnants of civilizations are stacked upon one another. Canaan, Phoenecian, Roman, Christian, Persian, French. . .it is hard for me the casual tourist to separate them.
The Egyptians are the ones who gave the name Byblos for the sums of papyrus that were exported from here. The Greeks called it Jbeil meaning 'pottery.' I walk the ancient ground imagining vessels of wine and smelling the cedars loaded onto ships. I imagine the burying of the dead among the ruins.
Dying and living in Maasser El Chouf
My mother's father, Najeeb Noujaim--Nash Ne Jame as those of his new country spelled it--left the cedar mountains and his family in his mid-teens to return to America. He and his family lived in America at the turn of the century. My grandfather's family returned to a Lebanon strangled by the Ottoman Turks, their grip upon a vanishing empire ever more desperate. Disease, famine and war engulfed the mountains.
From America my grandfather searched for his family across the Middle East. His entire family save for a sister and brother perished along a road to Damascus as they searched for food and sanctuary. His sister Melvina escaped enslavement by kidnappers by dressing as a boy. With the help of the Red Cross his siblings landed in New York, each tattered with a suitcase.
Later in life he grew distant never speaking of the tragedy that befell his family. Although he lived an adventurous life as an aerial photographer eventually settling down with my grandmother and raising two children, he died a highly accomplished yet quiet man when my mother was fifteen years old. I never knew him.
We have been almost a century removed from Maasser. Today, we walk the same streets as my ancestors. I imagine my grandfather's family planting cherries, herding goats, while children play and women roll grapeleaves for a feast in the days ahead.
My mother presents a family tree that dates back to the mid 1500s. Everyone we meet in the village points to their place on the tree. We discover another cousin we never knew existed.
I imagine the bloodletting of the mid civil war years. Seventy years before that, the starving masses of a failing empire. Were my great-grandparents among the many who walked from their village for days collecting rotting lemons to eat?
We know they left Beirut and Maasser for a better life and died on the road to Damascus. I feel the burden of those remaining today, Druze and Christians alike, those who are left behind. The loneliness of the village. The collective desire to reclaim the years before the civil war.
The Diaspora, the scattering, is hard on them. Hard on us. On everyone. My mother and I walk beneath the cedars, thousands of years old, longing in equal measure to return. This is the grove that was rumored to have built King Soloman's temple, known in Arabic as "the cedars of God." We promised to return again--and again--and again.
The highway of martyrs from Bekaa to Baalbek
Baalbek, the city of the sun, is the most famous Roman ruin in the Middle East. We drive an hour and a half from Beirut through the Bekaa wine valley to find this unlikely place rising from crowded tourist shops. On our last stretch we pass migrant camps, day laborers, and dormant grape vines.
Every fifty meters there are billboards of martyrs along a new highway. This is Hezbollah country. As an American, I am nervous. "Our country is friendly with Israel," my mother explains to our driver. "Is this a problem?" she asks. "There is nothing between America and them. Nothing," he says of his home, dusting both hands as if to say, it's finished.
We arrive at Baalbek and it is raining. We wait it out, stopping to eat in a smoke filled shop with thyme pie and Turkish coffee thickly brimming. An old man with tourist books complains in Arabic that it might freeze overnight and kill his future harvest. Laughing, a young man sits in a corner, his water pipe curling smoke. We nod sympathetically to the old man and buy his books. Standing up, our driver pays the bill, whispering to us in English that this is the proper way in the countryside.
Hawkers flock in the rain but I am steadfast in finding silence among the ruins. Confused, the gate keepers can't decide whether to charge me the foreigner rate or the Lebanese entry fee.
"I'm Lebanese but I live in America," I explain, as if that clears up anything. They settle on my status as a brunette and I pay the resident fee of 7,000 Lebanese lira or four dollars US.
Alone finally, I hear the call to prayer echo off stone, the mist lifting. Snow-capped mountains crown the Temple of Jupiter, the world's largest Roman columns. I linger in Bacchus' temple, the god of wine. What were the parties like? The orgies and human sacrifices?
I backtrack towards the exit/entrance, sitting down next to a soldier standing with a machine gun. I wait to re-join my mother there. The soldier's friends are josteling between laughter and silence. I can only imagine what they are saying. One of them is the same man who insisted he show me around. "Do you like art?" I smile, handing him my business card, making conversation. He explains in Arabic to the soldiers and they nod, revealing finally that my mother is back inside the ruins. I thank them--Merci iktir--and walk away.
Coming home
Maybe talking tragedy or tension overcomes the life of the moment. Does it compromise fragile friendships among recent foes? "It's boring, habipti--sweetheart," a Beiruti friend says, deflecting, as she rushes us down busy Hamra to her apartment, a bottle in hand from our cousin's winery.
Maybe one is the wiser in remaining stallwart to it all--in defending your every day happiness, the small pleasures in life. The Lebanese have a great sense of humor. They love their food and arak, the anise-flavored alcohol. They welcome those who have never laid eyes on their country. It is a lesson I will take to heart.