Syria: An Innocent Abroad (Part IV)

Tea and Narghile

The vast outward reach of Businessparkville, IN is growing increasingly dangerous to our sense of identity. This notion is not revolutionary--that Carmel, Plainfield, and Greenwood are exponentially becoming a landscape of Simon Malls and efficient retail space, as well as excessive contributors to Indy's vacant housing ratio. The expansion of miscellaneous retail chains and indistinguishable housing is murdering the notion of neighbors and basic human warmth. But six thousand miles away, despite political turmoil and sexual persecution, the Arab word for "neighbor" still preserves its weight.

A year ago I conducted an interview with David Gray for NUVO's Oranje Indy issue, and on a personal level the Ball State Professor of Architecture indulged my helpless search for a "sense of place," as he put it, relative to the architecture and landscape of Indiana and the world. In some places, you just have to try harder than others to love your home. His designs accent and intrigue certain dimensions of stereotypical trademarks of Indiana; like a run-down red barn, sitting atop a soft incline of green-space in rural Carmel. When you live in a place that could be any of a thousand other cities in the world, sometimes only an artist and a searching heart can foster pride in the landscape. But in Damascus, where the labyrinth of alleyways and supersaturated round-a-bouts are filled with independent vendors, and the "neighborhoods" are a complex system of back-alleys with front doors miscellaneously scattered about the maze, proximity inflicts togetherness.

There is no such thing as a grocery store in Damascus. The system of shopping for anything is like a flea-market-- you buy your pistachios inside one shop, then walk twenty feet through the crowded Souk (think of the market scene in Aladdin... "Dates! Sugar Dates! Sugar Dates and Pistacciooooooos!") to buy a bag of soft and delicious bread--which, while I was there, thanks to the Iraq War and the influx of refugees, had inflated to the cost of madness at the bakeries. Six thousand miles away from a U-Scan and Kroger plus card, I was forced to speak with each vendor (such as the language barrier would allow)--God forbid, engage a moment of my time with another human being. And many of them are genuinely interested in my life, if only for the 7 minutes I come and go from their world forever. Since I've been back home, I have been aching for the U-Scan to ask me in pitiful English where I'm from, and eagerly welcome me to its medina.

When the infrastructure of society forces you to actually talk to people in person-- even if it's an escalating argument over the price of a taxi fare (generally ending somewhere near the range of 80 cents) and you see them everyday, you have no choice but to learn their name and, at that point, invest in them neighborly courtesy. This past weekend, new neighbors moved in downstairs. I considered asking them to take a break and visit-- but the idea of knocking on a stranger's door-- even one who sleeps eight feet below me-- and inviting them in for tea and narghile (hookah) seems asinine and moderately suspect. But, in the Middle East, that is hospitable-- that is life-- the kind I wish we had in Indiana.

There were certain Arab lifestyles that I wanted to bring home with me. Chiefly, stopping to "have a tea." I drink it daily at work since my return, in my flowery tea-cup (a habbit that has often called my sexuality into question among certain ball-busters) each afternoon, and it is wholly refreshing among the madness of my day. But Damascene culture takes it a step further-- no visit, errand, or play-date is complete without a tea and/or narghile. I've taken up tea in lieu of coffee, often times, but the impersonal experience of a Starbucks or massive Borders Book Store, with a paper cup and indiscriminate scenery is far from intimate-- and defeats my desire to stop for tea with my buddy on our way to the ballpark.

Meanwhile, oceans away, American students at the University of Damascus are having a quiet tea on the balcony of their home, after a pleasant afternoon siesta, before heading out for the hustle of their evenings-- and knowing, I mean really knowing their confederates, filtering through teabags the hardships and impermeable differences among their contrasting life stories, to find genuine warmth in white clouds of narghile smoke.






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