Elsewhere

Moving Day

2010-04-01T13:23:00.002-07:00

'Elsewhere' has moved, well, elsewhere.

I decided to move my blog to Wordpress. All my previous blogspot postings, comments and photos have already been packed up and moved over. I hope you come visit at my new digs.

The new site is here: http://marcellodicintio.wordpress.com/

See you there,
Marcello

The City and the Dogs

2010-02-18T10:43:00.011-07:00

I found a wonderful article on the Huffington Post today. The posting is from the blog of Ir Amim, an Israeli non-profit that works to examine issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within Jerusalem. When I was last in Jerusalem, I took a tour of East Jerusalem with Ir Amim.

The author of this story, Yizhar Be'er, writes about cheerful murals that decorate walls in East Jerusalem, what they say about the conflict and, especially, what they hide. It is a fascinating report with some compelling images. The link is here, but I've included the story it in its entirety below.

The City and the Dogs: A Psychedelic Tour through Jerusalem's More Peculiar Districts

A Special Report by Yizhar Be'er

You have to see it to believe it. The photographs that appear here document the murals that stretch dozens of meters down the length of the road that leads from the neighborhood of Silwan -- that is, the City of David -- along the Eastern Wall of the Old City on the way to Dung Gate. The murals decorate a wall that conceals one of the ugliest and conflicted corners of the world. Similar murals can be seen along the border between the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo and the Palestinian neighborhood of Beit Jalla during the days of firing between Jerusalem and Bethlehem during the second intifada. I saw murals like these in Belfast, when the Civil War of Northern Ireland was still playing out on the streets and in the pubs. But the skirmishes there are long over, so whoever is looking for such insanity now has to come here, for here you can find it in abundance; especially in the City of David -- that is, Silwan--the place where, as they say, it all began.

Whoever looks at these murals -- pop art-style oil paintings in a style that's gleaming, crisp, and crisp, like the industrial paintings of Andy Warhol -- sees an image that doesn't exist in reality, but may be led to believe depicts the city of Jerusalem. The greatest enemy of knowledge, the mathematician Stephen Hawking once said, is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge. These murals present a reality that is imaginary, illusory, and utterly alienated from the darkness and treachery that is being conducted beneath and atop the very grounds of the holy basin of the Old City.

Exhibit A:

The hills of this imaginary Jerusalem are grassy and green and carry the symbols of Jewish sovereignty: the Knesset, a menorah, Montefiore's windmill. Beyond the murals sprawls the true reality: the run-down Arab neighborhood of Silwan with a gaping wound in its middle, the pit of the "Givati Parking Lot," one of many megalomaniac projects of the Elad organization--a right-wing entity that aims to thwart any possibility of arriving at a compromise agreement in Jerusalem. The State of Israel, in a fit of insanity, handed the administration of one of the most sensitive and explosive sites in the world to Elad. But we'll get to that.

The next segment also paints an imagined reality. The Western Wall, cloaked in moss and sadness, with lovely and clean Jews standing around with polite self-discipline. The Western Wall plaza, empty and glittering against the unsightly foreground of the flooring of the actual city: dirty, poor, beleaguered.

In this third section we will examine how the narrative of Jerusalem has been radicalized to portray a city that is green, modern, secular, and open to the winds of the world--in other words, all that is foreign and opposed to the possessive and sealed off city in which I live. The Yad Avshalom monument, which according to Jewish tradition holds the remains of the rebellious son of King David, is shown planted in the center of a green hill, upon which glides a golf cart against the blue sea and sky. The sun is rising (or is it setting?) on the eternal capital, half submerged in the water. On the side, a Hebrew worker labors--an Elad man, most likely--with two buckets in his hands, hovering above a pile of cement. The man embodies what by now is the nostalgic fantasy of the good Hebrew laborer, a Zionist emblem that has long been replaced by the flood of Arab workers who uphold the construction industry. It is only the sidewalk stones, dislodged from their places in front of the mural and lying alongside the actual asphalt road, that remind us of the neglect and ugliness that no amount of oil paint can correct, and neither the cement that the diligent worker prepares in the image.

The concrete can't cover over a thing, owing that ancient Jerusalem, like the heart of a nuclear furnace, is boiling over from within. The Arabs (still) populate the majority of the land in the holy basin, including the lands of the Old City and Silwan/City of David, as well as the holy sites outside the city walls. The ground beneath their houses are the sites of secretive digs which rattle the ground, crack the walls and the roads, and pave the way for the big explosion, the inevitable eruption which is sure to come.

The radical right-wing organization Elad, in its activities with the approval and authority of the Israeli government, is embittering the lives of hundreds of Palestinian residents. Jewish settlers have control over properties in the heart of Arab neighborhoods and disseminate small islands of settlement which create impossible mosaics. They are aided by the Israel Antiquities Authority--which has acquiesced to the generous payment proffered by Elad--to dig on Elad's dime and with the support of the Jerusalem Municipality, government offices (every Jewish administrator in Arab areas is given a personal security attaché funded by the government), and even the police. Arab residents of Silwan who dared to appeal to file legal opposition against the digs that were cracking the walls of their houses were arrested by police in the dead of night and charged with ridiculous accusations that were never brought to court but were sufficient to plant fear.

It's hard to believe, but the surrealistic plan to dig a tunnel beneath the entire Old City from Damascus Gate to Dung Gate is already beginning to find its footing on the ground. In several places, digs are being run just dozens of meters from the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Handing over the administrative keys to one of the most sensitive and volatile sites in the entire country, and possibly the world, to a political, extremist organization is akin to deciding to hand over the keys of the nuclear base in Dimona to Ahmedinejad and friends.

In any event, the Arabs are convinced that the Jewish settlers living in their neighborhoods are trying to reach under the Temple Mount, and ultimately aspire for their very destruction. Just another conspiracy theory? Not necessarily. Thousands of Jews identify with the movement to rebuild the Temple. They gather around Succoth in the national convention center and swear to "remove the abomination" (i.e. the holiest Muslim site in Jerusalem and one of the holiest sites of all of Islam) from the premises.

In this reality, all the pieces are adding up to the colossal Armageddon that awaits.

Even in the idyllic mural of Jerusalem of high, signs and symbols are concealing themselves from evil messengers. One can find in the murals Israelis, tourists, the ultra-Orthodox, the nationalist-religious, the secular, a smattering women and children, but only two Arabs. Two images of Arabs were selected to represent the quarter-million Arab residents of the city. Below is Arab A, standing alongside an imaginary wall of Jerusalem. Passing behind him is a group of tourists who are indifferent to his existence. Arab A stands, leaning on his walking stick, and glances around (what is he plotting?). Beside him: a dog.

Arab B appears in the second picture. The background of this part of the mural is the alleyways of the new Hebrew Jerusalem. Two Yeshiva students stand around talking, a woman returns from shopping, a boy in a knitted yarmulke walks home with his bicycle. Arab B, a woman in a traditional embroidered dress, steps into an alleyway, with her back half-turned against the viewer. Next to her stands--you guessed it--a dog!

Did the anonymous artist deliberately plant two dogs--an animal known by Israelis to be considered impure by the Muslim tradition -- next to the only two Arab figures in the huge mural that extends along the entire holy basin? I don't know the answer, and the truth is that the answer is not all that important. It is enough that the Arabs are convinced that this was the intention. And here vandals managed to blot out the faces of both Arab A and the dog that stands beside him.

Dogs and pigs have long been hazardous material in the Muslim world. The oft-used taunt--a settler favorite--that couples "pig" "dog" and "Muhammad" are words that light fires. Dogs are an impure animal according to Islam. According to tradition, the prophet Muhammad claimed that angels do not enter houses with dogs or pictures (Orthodox Judaism, similarly, considers it forbidden -- even an image is considered an abomination). Another tradition says that a Muslim who runs into a dog on his way to pray must purify himself again, even if the dog did not touch him. In Muslim folk culture, in any case, a dog is a contemptible animal.

In this case, it's no surprise that on the day of Arafat's death, the newspaper Yedioth Ahronot proclaimed in an eye-catching (Hebrew) headline: "His Day Has Come," referring to the Arabic proverb known well to every Israeli, "Every dog's day will come." (Kul kalb bi'gi yomo in Arabic, and kol kelev ba yomo in Hebrew.) Unlike the phrase's English cousin, which rosily promises that even the lowest among us will have a day of good fortune, in its Semitic form it may as well be, as the Forward's "On Language" column aptly remarked: "Every scoundrel will receive his comeuppance."

In this reality, in which every drop of mutual trust has long since evaporated, intention doesn't matter. The question -- "Did settlers really intend for their archeological digs to run up against the foundations of mosques in reaching for the very roots of Jewish existence?" -- is not particularly relevant; much like the question of whether the Arabs really do want to throw us into the sea. It's enough that Muslims and Israelis, respectively, are convinced enough as to the (positive) answers to both of these questions as to have already amassed a stockpile of ammunition that could, with the slightest disturbance, engulf everything in sight. As we say in Hebrew, "The dog is buried here." In other words, X marks the spot.

Yizhar Be'er is the founder and executive director of Keshev - The Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel, an organization that researches the Israeli media, threats to democracy, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Translated from the Hebrew by Ilana Sichel

Life through a new lens

2010-01-30T14:57:00.004-07:00

A short piece a wrote for the University of Calgary's Alumni magazine has just been published. In it, I talk a little about my walls project and my own origins as a writer. You can find it here.

I just finished a first draft of half of my walls book - I will need to travel again to write the second half. I am looking forward to putting it aside for a month or so, working on magazine pieces, and planning for my next trip. I'm also doing some presentations for classes here at the University. I will be talking about the Iranian traditional wrestling for a Kinesiology class, and about the Iranian love of poetry for a English lit students. I already spoke to a class of Environmental Design students about the social impacts of walls. These are busy times.

A Nakba of Olives - an excerpt

2010-01-06T17:50:00.004-07:00

[What follows is an excerpt from my Walls book-in-progress. This is from my chapter about the West Bank Wall called 'A Nakba of Olives.' Most of the chapter is about my time in the Palestinian village of Jayyous, and this excerpt is part of a longer account of an anti-Wall demonstration I observed there last February.]

It is a bad day for a protest. I am standing in Mohammed’s kitchen and looking out of the window at the rain. Mohammed’s second-floor apartment is half-finished and rarely cleaned. A week-old tub of yogurt sits on the countertop among spent Yellow Label tea bags and cigarette butts. Plastic soda bottles and falafel wrappers spill onto the floor beneath the hole in the countertop where a sink should be. Yesterday’s pita hardens into leather. One of Mohammed’s brothers brews tea with water from the bathroom sink – the only running water in the place – for the small gathering of activists from overseas waiting in the salon. Julia, a German activist with the International Solidarity Movement, is among them. She boasts about being blacklisted and strip-searched by the IDF, and advises me to take out my contacts. “The tear gas gets behind your lenses,” she warns as she traces on her eyeliner.

There is supposed to be a demonstration against the Wall today, but earlier this week, the IDF raided Jayyous. Soldiers entered the village at night, seized about a hundred young men and penned them in the school gymnasium. The troops also occupied several village houses and spray-painted a Star of David over a pro-freedom mural on a school wall. The IDF took about a dozen men with them when they left, and the men are still in custody somewhere in Israel. I wonder if the night action by the IDF will intimidate the young men out of their weekly protest and I ask Mohammed if anything is going to happen today. He says he doesn’t know. He says that the “street will decide.” I don’t believe him. His cell-phone has been ringing all morning. If anyone knows, it is Mohammed.

From the window we watch the road that leads from the centre of the village to the Wall’s south gate. At around noon, just as the group in the kitchen decides there will be no demonstration, we see a half-dozen young men walking up the road. Another group follows. They don’t have banners or flags or any other accoutrements of protest, but clearly something is happening. “It is the shabaab,” Mohammed says. The word is Arabic for ‘youth,’ but in the context of occupied Palestine, ‘shabaab’ refers to the bands of rebellious young Palestinian men – the stone-throwers and trouble-makers – who wage their own miniature intifadas on the IDF. Mohammed pulls on a black coat with a fur-lined collar, pockets his cell-phone and hands his camera to Aidan, a Canadian volunteer with ‘Stop the Wall’. Mohammed goes down the stairs and out the door. The rest of us follow him up the road.

We stop at the edge of an olive orchard. The shabaab are there. They calmly lift stones from the road and hurl them over the trees. Aidan tells me there are IDF soldiers on the other side of the grove. I cannot see past the grey trunks and silver-green leaves and the shabaab cannot see where their stones land. Eventually a clank of rock against metal signals that someone hit something. Probably an IDF jeep. The hurlers turn to each other and grin.

The response comes quickly. A pop from behind the trees and a tear gas canister fizzes overhead like a dud firework wheezing yellowish smoke. I think of Julia and my contact lenses but the wind whips away the fumes. Then an explosion so loud everyone cowers. Sound grenades. I am terrified and look to Mohammed. His hands are over his ears and he is ducking from the noise. But he is smiling. So are the shabaab. They laugh and reach for more stones to continue their assault on soldiers they cannot see.

Someone yells something in Arabic and the mood changes. The boys run from the groves. They are still grinning but frantic now. Aidan looks calm. I ask him what is happening. “The Israelis are coming,” he says and I hear the army engines rumble. The protestors run down the road and join the boys who again collect stones to throw. I don’t want to run. I feel it will implicate me somehow, but there is a blast from another grenade so I flee with the others, up the road and around a corner where someone has written ‘Stop the Wall.’ I stop running because everyone else stops. And then there is a new sound, a crack I don’t recognize. “Those are rubber bullets,” Aidan tells me and we are running again. I don’t turn back because I’m afraid to see how close the soldiers are....

We turn a corner, step over a row of boulders the shabaab have lined across the road, and continue to a ledge overlooking the valley. There are Israeli soldiers on the other side. I can see them ducking under the clotheslines on the rooftops and taking cover behind black water tanks. Here on the ledge, a half-dozen shabaab hurl stones at the IDF with homemade slings.

Mohammed told me that Palestinians are born knowing how to sling a stone. He joked that West Bank boys emerge from their mothers’ womb swinging their umbilical cords over their heads. I stand behind the shabaab, afraid of being hit by an errant stone, and watch as they co-opt King David’s weapon against his own heirs. Some wrap keffiyehs around their heads to hide their faces, but most don’t bother. The rain slickens cheeks too young for beards, and soaks through their blue jeans. Slings dangle from pockets like something cool.

I watch one of the stone-throwers, a boy in his late teens. He carries a sling made of denim and nylon cords. The boy threads a finger through a loop on the end of one cord, then grips both ends with his right hand. He lifts a stone from the road, places it in the cradle of denim, then holds his arm straight out from the side of his slim body. The stone swings back and forth in its cradle as if being lulled to sleep. The boy bends his legs and turns his body to eye the soldiers from over his shoulder. He pauses for a moment in this taut, proud pose.

After eyeing his target, he sweeps the sling over his head and his hand spins on its wrist. The cords blur and whistle as the stone strains against its cradle. The boy cocks his body back, twists his face into a sneer, and snaps the stone into the air as his entire body lurches forward. The released sling makes a sound like a bird and, relieved of its turning force, falls slack at the boy’s waist. The stone flies but the boy does not watch to see it land. His eyes are down as he lifts another stone from the ground. Cradles it. The sling swings and whirls and whistles again. It is a furious beauty.

I don’t want to leave the sling boys. I find it hard to resist their swagger. They hurl insults between their stones, and shout “Jayyous!” each time a tear gas canister fired at them falls harmlessly into the valley. Their stones fall short, too. Mohammed told me about an older man in Jayyous – a veteran of the first Intifada – who is a sniper with a sling. He is not in action today. I never see these boys hit anything at all. But this is not the point. For the shabaab, it is enough just to resist. To not cower. To fill a hard grey sky with hard grey stones.

The IDF insists it is the stone-throwers that trigger the army’s action. The moment a rock is thrown, the marchers become rioters and the protest an insurrection. Activists can hardly cling to claims of nonviolence, the Israelis say, if the shabaab pelt soldiers with rocks. After all, a slung stone can shatter a skull. Still, the battle on the streets is hardly even. Far more Palestinians than Israelis have been injured in these clashes. As I watch Israeli forces, clad in bulletproof vests and helmets, emerge from armoured jeeps to wage war on rock-throwing teenagers, the IDF claims of self-defense seem absurd....

Audacity and the Wall

2009-12-23T16:15:00.009-07:00

I've finished a new draft of my West Bank Wall chapter and will post a short sample soon. It was a difficult chapter to write. There are so many facets to the Wall that I had trouble knowing when to stop.

What struck me most during the writing, and during my time in Palestine earlier this year, is the Wall's audacity. The Wall has a concrete conviction in its own bluntness. It makes no pretenses towards grace or sophistication. It is blue-collar and proud. It is boastful. The Wall is cold and rude and hard and stone. And it doesn't give a shit what you think.

But the Wall is not the whole story in Palestine. What I want to show in this chapter, among other things, is that while the Wall is a potent symbol of the Occupation - something to march against, spray with paint and pound with fists - it is only an example of Israel's audacity in regards to the Palestinians.

Here is another one: A Palestinian organizer of anti-Wall protests in the West Bank, Abdallah Abu Rahmah, has been arrested and charged with arms possession. What were the arms in his possession? Spent IDF tear gas grenades and canisters that were fired at demonstrators during the protests. He had the "arms" displayed in his home like this:

You can find the story about Abu Rahmah's arrest here. It makes me wonder if the Israelis who collect rockets shot at them from Gaza are also guilty of arms possession?

"Books Not Bombs" online

2009-12-14T15:32:00.003-07:00

A story I wrote about Tmol Shilshom, my favourite place in Jerusalem and a mecca for writers, is now online on the Maisonneuve magazine site.

You can find it here.

John Irving on Wrestling and Writing

2009-11-18T22:10:00.003-07:00

The author John Irving was interviewed by Michael Enright on CBC Radio a few weeks back. He spoke about how his own career as a wrestler influenced his writing. Irving started to wrestle when he was an ill-tempered fourteen year-old. He told Enright that “you can’t lose your temper on a wrestling mat”, and that wrestling was all about controlling one’s temper. Channeling it. “Wrestling was my first discipline,” he said.

Irving started to write about the same time as he started to wrestle, and eventually made the connection between the two pursuits. Passion, fear and anger are fuel for a writer as much as they are for a wrestler; and just like a wrestler a writer must be able to manage them. He learned how do do this on the mat first through repetition. Through the hours of practice on the mat. He goes on to say that as a wrestler, you...

accept the responsibility of learning a small detail until it becomes second nature. Until a move or a response to someone else’s body becomes instinctive. It isn’t instinctive. It’s a learned process. But it has to be as quick as something instinctive if you’re going to be any good. I was disciplined at that before I became disciplined as a writer. And it helped me.

Irving relates the necessity of a wrestler to constantly repeat his movements over and over to the necessity of the writer to constantly revise. Wrestling taught him the stamina for constant rewriting.

I am thinking of Irving these days as I lay down my rough first draft of the Walls book. Quite frankly, most of what I’ve written is horrible. My experiences overseas were rich, and my notebooks are full of delicious details, but my prose so far is weak and my narrative disjointed. I know that the beauty, if there is to be any, will come later through rewriting. I have a long way to go and I get exhausted thinking about it. I could use a little of the wrestler’s stamina right about now.

Article: "Berlin Wall is gone but Israel’s inhumane barrier still stands"

2009-11-13T11:00:00.004-07:00

I found an excellent essay about the West Bank Wall on the Herald Scotland website. The author - who, oddly, is not named - writes eloquently on many of the ideas I mentioned in my last post.

You can find it here.

[Correction: David Pratt wrote the aforementioned Herald Scotland piece.]

Walls in Berlin and Palestine

2009-11-12T16:53:00.005-07:00

Along with the Berlin Wall anniversary celebrations this week came the parallels between the Berlin Wall and the wall Israel has built around the West Bank. (The photo is of graffiti on the Wall in Ramallah.)

These comparisons were inevitable, of course, and so was the subsequent scoffing of the West Bank Wall's supporters. There is no comparison, they say. The Berlin Wall was built to imprison East Berliners. Israel's barrier was built to save innocent lives. They point to the fact that attacks within Israel were greatly reduced since the wall was erected in 2002. The Wall is good, they say.

They are wrong.

First of all, the building of the West Bank Wall did not result in the reduction of terrorist attacks in Israel. It coincided with a reduction of violence that was already underway. In the year before the Wall, the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority were already cooperating with intelligence sharing to prevent suicide attacks. Most importantly, key Palestinian groups had already abandoned such attacks as a tactic. The violence was ebbing before the Wall. This is a fact.

Secondly, it is naive to think that the primary purpose of the Wall is about security. If stopping attacks was the goal, then why wasn't the Wall built along the 1967 borders? Why does the Wall divide Palestinian farmers from their land? Why does the Wall appropriate so much Palestinian territory? Why are so many olive groves and fruit trees uprooted for the Wall? I've never heard an apologist for the Wall answer these questions.

Those that have been following this blog know that I've seen these things first hand. I've come to realize that the Wall is not a 'security' barrier. The Wall appropriates Palestinian land for settlement expansion in the West Bank. The Wall disrupts the Palestinian economy by dividing farmers from their fields, or by destroying their orchards altogether. The Wall creates de facto and non-negotiated borders. Rather than create security, the Wall creates the anger and frustration that inspires violence.

This Wall, like the Berlin Wall before it, needs to fall.

Representing the Other

2009-11-05T10:15:00.004-07:00

Yesterday I was part of a panel discussion with writer Sid Marty, and moderated by Pamela Banting, about "Representing the Other" in Creative Nonfiction. We covered several interesting ideas during the 90 minute discussion, but a comment from a member of the audience questioned the responsibility of the author in portraying the Other, and I would like to muse on that a little here.

The gentleman suggested - and I am paraphrasing - that writers must work to reduce the 'otherness' of the Other. To show the reader what we share in common and the ways we are the same. This is a common trope found in travel writing: the idea that people in foreign cultures are "just like us." The claim is oft followed by the question, "So why can't we all just get along?"

This idea is politically correct. It may give us a warm feeling and a John-and-Yoko glow. But it is nonsense. No travel writer - and perhaps no creative nonfiction writer - is interested primarily in what we have in common with the Other, regardless of his or her claims. The writer goes off to seek the differences in the world, the exotic, the unfamiliar. That is the point of the whole exercise. I don't give a shit about commonalities.

Besides, it is impossible to un-other the Other. We can never hope to truly know another person, especially one coming from a background completely foreign to our own. How could I truly comprehend a man who has lived his life in a desert refugee camp? Or an Indian migrant camping out on the edge of Europe? Or a Palestinian farmer watching his olive trees bulldozed to build Israel's Wall? Or, for that matter, the young IDF soldier doing the bulldozing? To suggest that we can understand these people and show how they are, in some important way, "just like us" is hubris. It is also, I think, insulting.

Writing the Other is not about comprehension, but about responsibility. We are beholden to the Other to portray him with compassion. We strive to make our readers sympathetic to and respectful of the Other, not to understand him. Perhaps we work to bust myths and debunk stereotypes. In this way, we write to affect change in our reader. To teach the reader something new.

Much of my writing is about the cultures of Islam. There is no Other more maligned and feared these days than the Muslim Other. In my Iran book, Poets and Pahlevans, I show the reader that the Iranian Other is not a fundamentalist and flag-burning radical, but a sophisticated and reasoned caretaker of rich cultural traditions. The book does not claim that the Iranians are just like us, far from it, but it aims to show the reader that the Iranians are not how they perceive them to be. The book is, at its heart, a 300-page love letter to the Iranian people that celebrates the ways in which they are unique from Us. We can learn much from them.

The gentlemen in the audience stated we can prevent war by showing what we have in common with the Other. My initial response to his comment was that stopping wars is not my job. It isn't, but I wish I'd expanded on that a little more. His point is that we are less likely to drop bombs on people similar to ourselves. I think this is naive. As a culture, and as a species, we don't have much problem harming our own. I suggest instead that portraying the Other with compassion, revealing the beauty in their uniqueness, and inspiring sympathy for their culture is a more realistic path to peace. We are even less likely to drop bombs on those we've learned to love.

"Wall of Shame" goes digital

2009-10-29T11:54:00.003-07:00

The digital version of the current Geist magazine is now up and running. My story about the Saharawi refugee camps, titled "Wall of Shame," begins on page 53. The good people at Geist did a fantastic job with the layout. My work has never looked so pretty.

This story has turned out to be rather important one for me. It represents the first chapter of my 'Walls' project and it is the piece I worked on during my literary journalism residency at the Banff Centre in 2008. In addition, this 'Geist version' - edited for both brevity and clarity - won the 2009 Dave Greber Freelance Writer's Award.

Here is the link.

While you are electronically flipping through the magazine, look for Billeh Nickerson's McPoems. Fast food can be beautiful after all.

Hills, here and elsewhere

2009-10-26T08:08:00.006-07:00

My office window faces north and from here I can see the edge of Calgary's Nose Hill Park. The park is a vast stretch of grassland that has avoided the encroachment of subdivisions and suburbs. A miracle in Calgary. I used to run along the trails on Nose Hill Park when I was a teenager. It is the first place I ran out of my own volition. (Before that I'd only endured the forced marches of Phys-ed class). My hill run began on the pathway behind my house and stretched up through the brown and tan suburbs, underneath busy 14th Street, and up onto the Hill. The pathway ended at a picnic table made ragged by pocket-knife graffiti. Initials added to initials framed in lopsided valentines. The mathematics of teenage lust.

Sometimes, when I was lucky, I saw a young deer at the end of the pathway. I don't know how many times this happened - in retrospect, it couldn't have been often - but I remember it very well. The morning moments with a young deer was the reward for my panting and sweat.

Other things happened on Nose Hill, of course. A parking lot on one edge of the hill, just out of sight from my office window, was called, charmingly, 'Pecker Point'. An archaeology of beer cans and condoms lays beneath the gravel bearing witness to what happened here. There were fires, too, started by careless smoking or illegal fireworks, that often blackened the hill to its edges. Sometimes we could smell the ash in the air from the St. Helena Junior High down the road.

My times on Nose Hill were decidedly more chaste. Just the morning runs and the hope of spotting deer at the picnic table.

I am writing about other hills right now: the Khasi Hills in northeastern India along the border with Bangladesh. The Khasi Hills, of course, have little in common with the dry Calgary park I can see from my window. On the Khasi Hills, moisture from the Bay of Bengal collides into the cliffs and pours down in a rage. These hills endure the world's highest annual rainfall, and Indians come in the dry season to stare over the cliffs and imagine the storms. The rains turn the Khasi Hills into jungle, but Nose Hill is only green in the weeks after a grass fire - a brief transition between the black and brown.

Instead of the white flowers that hang along the Khasi roadside, Nose Hill enjoys a brief blessing of crocus. I remember my kindergarten teacher bringing us onto the hill to see the tiny purple flowers. Mrs. Bloy told us to find a blossom and lay on the grass beside it while she told us the myth behind the Chinook wind. I cannot remember the story, but I remember my puffy winter coat and the feel of the dry grass on my face and the velvet petals of my flower. That day on the Hill remains one of my fondest childhood memories.

I mention it here because I became a father three weeks ago and I'm feeling nostalgic.

Writer-and-Wrestler-in-Residence

2009-09-22T08:04:00.003-07:00

I've been the Markin-Flanagan Writer-in-Residence at the University of Calgary since mid-August and I've had a fabulous and productive month. From my 11th floor office I managed to complete a handful of freelance pieces for magazines and, more importantly, another chapter in my Walls project. A first draft of my Ceuta and Melilla chapter is now in the proverbial can.

I am both thrilled and startled at my productivity here. It makes me wonder why I couldn't get so much done at my office at home. (That office is now a nursery - my next 'project' is a collaboration with my wife and will be released in the next few weeks.) Perhaps I've gotten so much work done here at the University because the writing has never felt so much like a job. I get up in the morning, tuck a sandwich into a Ziplock, and head to the office. I have business cards and an office phone number. I have regular hours in which I do manuscript consultations, an online calender, and - miracles of miracles - a salary.

I already worry what will happen when this delicious gig ends in June. I hope I can keep up my momentum.

I am an alumnus of the University of Calgary and a former member with the varsity wrestling team. I stopped being a competitive wrestler when I graduated in 1996 - though some of my teammates, and certainly some opponents, might say I stopped being competitive long before that. I returned to the wrestling room for a few months in 2003 and 2004 as part of my the preparation for my book Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey Into the Heart of Iran. The book chronicled my travels through Iran in search of Persian poetry and traditional wrestlers. I planned on wrestling in Iran and wanted some mat-time back home to get my body fit enough that I wouldn't end up hospitalized.

Now I am back on the mat again. Since I spend most of my day on campus, and since I really miss the sport, I am taking advantage of my proximity to the old wrestling room. Last night was my first practice. It hurt.

There was something intensely satisfying about the rituals of a wrestling practice. The give of the mat beneath my boots. The warm-up stretches. Bending knees and bumping foreheads. Then, on the ground, pressing your body into to the mat to fight the strain that turns to pain before the turn. The familiar feel of ribs against wrist, of fingers on forearms. The slow soak of sweat and knee-pad stink. The brief camaraderie strangers share in combat. I was the oldest wrestler on the mat by at least 15 years, easily the slowest and most likely the weakest. Still, it felt good. Really good.

I am curious to see what effect these tri-weekly battles will have on my writing. In Poets and Pahlevans, I traveled through Iran looking for the connections between combat and creativity. Now I will do the same here on more familiar ground. I just hope I survive.

Great Home Chefs

2009-09-11T10:32:00.005-07:00

My freelance writing career has been typically feast or famine. This September I am feasting.

In addition to the Maisonneuve piece I mentioned in my last post, and a story about Tangier in this month's Westworld Magazine, I wrote the cover story in today's Swerve Magazine. In it, I profile five great amateur chefs of Calgary and attempt to understand what motivates them to make magic in their home kitchens. The photos, by Marc Rimmer, are marvelous.

Since any discussion of great home chefs has to include someone's grandmother, I thought I might as well include my own. That's her holding the giant meatball.

The story is titled "From their kitchens with love."

A Biography of a Café

2009-09-10T09:07:00.004-07:00

Earlier this year I had the great honour to read at a Jerusalem café-bookstore called Tmol Shilshom. (I mentioned this in a previous post.) I'd been wanting to read at the café for years, and it was a fabulous night.

Tmol Shilshom has a fascinating history. The café's opening night event in 1994 featured the beloved Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai and granted the café a literary cachet. Since then, the café has become a place for authors to both read and write. Some of the world's most celebrated writers have graced the lecturn at Tmol Shilshom: Amos Oz, Yann Martel, Frank McCourt, as well as lesser scribblers such as myself. The café is a centre for Jerusalem's contemporary culture, and one of my favourite places in the world.

I wrote a 'biography' of Tmol Shilshom two years ago, and the story has finally has seen the light of print. The piece is called "Book not Bombs" and it appears in a fine Montreal magazine called Maisonneuve. You can find it on better magazine racks in Canada.

Reading about the Saharawi

2009-08-09T11:48:00.010-07:00

Last week I 'headlined' the monthly Flywheel Reading series event at Pages Bookstore in Calgary. It was a chance for me to read from the book-in-progress and I am grateful to the Flywheel crew for inviting me to read. The reading was recorded by a local spoken-word blogger - thank you, Dale - and I've posted the audio below. My reading begins after a couple of minutes of preamble by the event host, Stephanie Davis.

The three excerpts are from my chapter about my visit to the Saharawi refugee camps in Algeria in February 2008. Those of you who have been following my blog for a while might remember my posts and photos from that trip. If not, you can find them here, here , and here .

By way of context, and to make a long and complicated history extremely short, the Saharawi are long-time inhabitants of the Western Sahara who fought a war of independence against the Moroccans for the territory in the 1970s and 1980s. During the course of the war, Morocco built a series of defensive walls, or berms, in the desert to repel the advance of the Saharawi forces. On the east side of these walls, on land granted by Algeria, are the Saharawi refugee camps where upwards of one hundred thousand Saharawi live. More than half of them were born in the camps and have never known the land their parent's generation continue to fight for.

I hope you enjoy the reading. Click the little green arrow below to play.

Mightily, the Overflood

2009-07-17T12:57:00.002-07:00

I was going through some of my old travel journals and came across this little gem. These are tasting notes for Vinium Karalahna, a wine my wife and I drank plenty of during our honeymoon on the Turkish Island of Bozcaada:

"Profound ruby red with violet tints allures to stare at it into depth and strong scents of cherry and plum flood out, mightily. At a first stir, it is a powerful overflood of mellow fruits like cherry, dewberry. wild strawberry. Thorough harmony of scents and savours. Highlight of pleasure which seduces to sip it over and over again."

Making Light of The Wall

2009-07-14T21:24:00.004-07:00

This Israeli commercial for a cell phone company is a shameful example of how some Israelis view the Occupation. I don't know what I find most offensive: the light-hearted portrayal of a symbol of apartheid, or the fact that the Palestinians in the commercial remain invisible.

Walls Book Update

2009-07-13T16:47:00.003-07:00

I am still working on my walls book. Those who have been following my blog already know I've spent much of the last two years abroad conducting research for the book. So far I've visited Algeria, Morocco, the Western Sahara, Ceuta and Melilla, northeast India, Kashmir, Israel, Palestine and Cyprus. Starting in mid-August I will begin a ten-month residency at the University of Calgary to try to turn my stacks of illegible travel journals into something resembling a first draft.

My original idea for this book had me covering walls and barriers in about a dozen different countries and territories around the world. Lately I've come to the realization that this was, perhaps, rather too ambitious. There is some concern about whether I can manage a narrative line that links all of these diverse places. I don't want to write a series of postcards. I want to write a story.

So, I am going to simplify my intentions. Aside from a return to Kashmir (my time there last November was too brief) and a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border, I will focus the 'walls' book on the places I've already been. I am excited, and honoured, to have the time and space offered by my residency to get this done.

After a long silence

2009-07-09T20:33:00.004-07:00

I arrived home from Cyprus in May and have spent so much time hustling for freelance writing jobs that I have neglected this blog. It has been a strange few months. By the time I returned home my grant funding had dried out, I didn't have a bartending job anymore, and my writer's residecy would not start until mid-August. So I've been working hard turning out stories for various magazines to keep the wolves at bay.

In two months I finished a long story about my time in the Saharawi refugee camps, a history of Tmol Shilshom cafe in Jerusalem, a 'reconsideration' of Tangier, an account of the archery stakes in Shillong, a feature about great home chefs in Calgary and two short profiles: one about an Olympic bobsledder and the other about a self-described 'philanthropy junkie.' I also have deadlines for a pair of stories about a retired zoo-keeper on Denman Island who raises rare Pekin Robins. (More on 'The Birdman of Denman Island' in a future post.)

I have writer friends who do far more than this, but personally I've never been this productive. There is nothing like potential starvation to spur one on.

(As you can see, I changed the look of the blog. The photo is from the fabulous medina in Tangier. I am not sure about the white text on black background, though. Any suggestions would be welcome.)

Tavern Joys

2009-04-07T03:43:00.003-07:00

Friday night was one of those epic nights that make me happy I do what I do.

I went in search of a Turkish Cypriot meyhane, a sort of tavern restaurant, that I’d read about. As always, I got lost, but this time I stumbled on the place accidentally as if on purpose. It was early for dinner and I was the only diner in the place. My waiter suggested a bottle of raki. I poured a healthy dram into the glass, added water, then ice – the proper raki preparation I learned in Istanbul on my honeymoon.

I don’t know if the place had a menu, but I was never offered one. The dishes just started appearing: Chunky hummus with smoked paprika. Almonds. Fava beans, both marinated and pureed. Thin slices of salty beef pasturma. Yogurt tzatziki. Pickled celery. Fatty dried lamb. Three kinds of cheese. They arrived rapidly, and as the raki began to dull my mathematics I started to lose count. I do remember that grilled quail was my main course and fresh watermelon was for dessert.

By the time my coffee arrived, a group of men had collected at a table with the owner. They brought over some strawberries for me to try. Then some fresh almonds in green fuzzy jackets. Then they refilled my raki. Then they just decided that I might as well join them.

The raki kept coming, and we all watched a Turkish Superleague soccer game on the television. Afterwards I excused myself to leave, but the men refused. They said I could not go until I’d tried the macaroni that the chef was preparing. This did not sound so exciting, especially for someone of Italian descent. One man must have read my unimpressed face because he said. “This place is famous for its macaroni. It is not cooked in water.”

This was intriguing. “What is it cooked in?”

“Grouse stock.”

I returned to my seat.

Someone filled my raki again. And again. Then a woman joined us. One of the men who was deaf – and perhaps mentally ‘slow’ – had a crush on her and gave her a pink scented candle with Valentine hearts glitter-glued all over it. She was gracious, but not seduced. (She was also, according to one man, a fascist.) Another two men arrived: one a Turkish Cypriot journalist, the other a young man from Abkhazia who played soccer for a local team and only spoke Russian. The grouse macaroni, when it arrived, was dressed with shredded cheese and dried mint, and was rich like no other pasta I’ve ever had.

It was two in the morning by the time I left the restaurant. Someone drove me back to my hotel, but I don’t remember who. Maybe it was the waiter. I do remember that the owner would not accept any money from me. He just kissed my cheeks and walked me to the door.

A real writer would have take the opportunity to get some ‘work’ done. He would have asked the men about the Turkish Cypriot problem, found out if they’d ever crossed to the other side, and scribbled down their comments in his notebook. I didn’t do any of this. My notebook never left my pocket. Someday I might regret this, but sometimes, I think, you just have to surrender.

Walking through the Dead Zone

2009-03-23T03:14:00.001-07:00

After spending five weeks amid Palestine’s daily despair, the divisions here in Nicosia seem almost quaint by comparison. The forty year-old conflict between the Turkish North and Greek South has lost all of its heat and momentum, but entrenched feelings of betrayal and distrust keep it going. There is some talk in the newspapers about 2009 being the year the island is finally reunited, but nobody I’ve talked to believes it. I will be here for about three weeks and in that time I want to get a sense of what the divided city means to people today, especially those young enough to have never known a united Nicosia.

The walled Old City is divided neatly in half by the Green Line and a narrow buffer zone that is off-limits to everyone but military personnel. In the south, the area near the buffer zone is a fascinating collection of abandoned homes and decades-old barricades. I am constantly drawn to this line. No matter where I am headed in the city, I make sure I take the route closest to the Dead Zone.

In the Dead Zone, second-floor windows are glassless and piled with sandbags to provide cover for riflemen who haven’t been there for decades. Paint flakes off the walls. I found an abandoned shop filled with trash – broken shelves, empty gas canisters, an old moped frame. The dust dyes it all the same grayish brown. Only an empty soda bottle, tossed in recently, adds any colour. Against the gray it shines like an emerald.

The barricades that block the street are crumbling. The sand bags leak. Old wooden bunkers sag. The rows of sand-filled metal barrels bleed rust. Some of these have become unwitting planters for weeds that grow into yellow flowers. Some barrels are painted in alternating blue and white, in honour of the Greek flag, and remind me of the cheery formica-and-vinyl of 50s diners. And everywhere, of course, is the barbed wire that snags the occasional plastic bag that blows past.

Young soldiers stand next to some of these barricades in a strange juxtaposition of youth and dereliction. How bored they must be, soldiers in a war that is over. All they have to do is wave away the tourists who come with their cameras. There is no photography allowed. Stern signs in three languages warn people like me to ‘Keep Away!’ as if there is real danger here. Meanwhile, the rain and wind and weeds continue their march. Trampling the barriers into the ground. Sucking history into archaeology.

A Settler Home for Purim

2009-03-23T02:57:00.004-07:00

(I waited until I left Israel to post this story, and I am not sure why. I guess I didn’t want to have to confront whatever anger it might inspire in those I write about. I tried to convince myself that I was being polite. Now I wonder if I am just cowardly.)

I met a young writer at my reading in Jerusalem. He invited me to join him for the Purim holiday in the settlement of Neve Daniel where he lives. I accepted the invitation right away even though I have strong feelings about the settlements themselves. These communities are built on stolen land in the West Bank and are deemed illegal by nearly every international body. I believe, and so do most Israelis, that the settlements represent one of the biggest obstacles to peace. If violent jihadists represent extremism on the Palestinian side of the equation, than the settlers represent extremism on the Israeli side. I have always believed this.

I took the bus from Jerusalem into Neve Daniel. The Wall followed the highway for part of this journey. For the benefit of the settlers, I suppose, the Israelis have made the Wall attractive here. Some of it is built of textured stone in various shades of pinkish tan and ivory. The implications of the barrier – its effects on Palestinian life, its silent rejection of peace – are whitewashed by a pleasant, garden-wall aesthetic.

Purim is a fascinating holiday. People dress in costume, sometimes as characters from the biblical figures the holiday is derived from. Others in disguises that would befit our North American Halloween. There is a lot of eating and a surprising amount of drinking. For many, drunkeness during Purim has a spiritual component. The bus was filled with young Israelis and American yeshiva-students in varying costumes. I listened to them talk about all events that were planned. Who was going to which party and with who. I know little about Judaism, but I always associated the faith with sombre devotion. It was heartening to see Judaism linked with such silliness and fun.

My settler 'guide' met me at the bus stop and took me to the house where we would have the Purim meal. The place was packed. More than twenty people crowded around the table. The noise was amazing. At times it seemed that everyone was talking at once, with one or two people singing Purim songs at one end of the table or another. With all their guests and the happy noise, my hosts had little time to talk with me about my project. I was relieved at this. I was afraid such talk would lead to a talk of politics, and I knew that my views would be as repulsive to them as theirs are to me. I suspect my hosts knew this, too. I decided to be a quiet and grateful guest, even though this made me feel like a fraud.

Things got uncomfortable, though, midway through the meal. One of the children had dressed up as a cowboy, and the family sang ‘Home on the Range’ in honour of his costume. Afterwards his mother, my host, announced that she knew another version of the song that she helped write. Her husband asked her not to sing it.

“Okay. I won’t sing it, but I will say the lyrics.” She turned to me. “But you have to remember that I am from the inner city.” The woman proceeded to recite a racist version of the song written to insult Mexicans. I don’t remember the middle part, but the song began with:

Oh give me a home,
Where the cockroaches roam…

And ended with:

Where seldom is heard
An English word,
And the bodegas are open all day.

I didn’t know how to react. The woman was clearly proud of this song. And she was beaming at me. I wanted to tell her that the song fit exactly with my image of what settlers are like. I wanted to say that I was not surprised at the song because, after all, the settlements themselves are built out of racism. I wanted to thank her for showing her true colours to me and vindicating my discomfort at accepting her generosity, and for being here at all. But I didn’t say anything.

After the meal, one of the children, a four year-old girl dressed as an angel but with her wings tied on upside-down, decided she wanted to sit in my lap. While the rest of the family was distracted by the post-meal prayer, the little girl reached across the table, grabbed a handful of raw cucumber sticks, and started playing with them as if they were building blocks.

“What are you making?” I whispered in her ear.

“A choo-choo train,” she whispered back.

I like kids. The girl reminded me a little of my niece, who I miss terribly when I am away from home, and I was touched by her immediate trust of me even though I was a stranger. It was a sweet moment.

But as we were both playing with our food, something occurred to me. If you had asked me, in that moment, if I thought that this little girl’s home should be taken away from her, I would have said yes. I would support the bulldozing of her house, of her school, of the playground down the road where she climbs the monkey bars and swings on the swings.

I had a hard time with this. I had a hard time reconciling my opinion of the settlers as a group with the hospitality of this family and the tenderness of this one child. I haven’t changed my mind about the settlements. They are immoral. But things get complicated when we are confronted by individual souls. It was a difficult day.

In Nicosia

2009-03-21T03:13:00.003-07:00

I arrived here in Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus, a couple of days ago. I will soon write a post about my first impressions of the city, and have to catch up with another story from Israel. So stay tuned.

In the meantime, check out the work of Cypriot photographer Thodoris Tzalavras. I had the pleasure of meeting Tzalavras for coffee yesterday, and his photos of Nicosia's Green Line, "Nicosia in Dark and White," capture in image what I hope to describe in words. These are some beautiful and haunting photos. See them here.

Barbed Wire in Bethlehem

2009-03-14T15:22:00.004-07:00

I went to Bethlehem to photograph some of the graffiti on the Wall - which I did - but found myself more enamoured with the coils of concertina that is everywhere. Perhaps I have seen too much of it in the past year, but there is an aesthetic to barbed wire that I find beautiful in spite of its nature.

The Walls of East Jerusalem

2009-03-14T15:18:00.001-07:00

Today I took a tour with an Israeli-Palestinian NGO called Ir-Amim to visit Jerusalem’s backyards and unholy places. A bus carried a crowd of mostly foreigners around East Jerusalem to show the impacts of the Wall.

I had been looking forward to hearing about the Wall from an Israeli perspective and was surprised that our guide expressed the same objections to the Wall that my Palestinian contacts did. He, too, believes that the Wall is not built for security but is, at its heart, a political barrier. Certainly my Palestinian farmer friends in Jayyous who find their olive groves the wrong side of the Wall would agree.

He talked about how the Wall’s current route in East Jerusalem only serves to segment, weaken and anger the Palestinians in a failing attempt to ensure that the city maintains a Jewish majority. He told us that most Israelis support the Wall as a security barrier because, as he put it, “they don’t know or don’t care” about the Wall’s human price. I asked him how such a media- savvy and newspaper-addicted society like Israel could simply not know, he told me that “they don’t know because they don’t care. They think barrier does not affect their daily lives.”

But it does, at least in Jerusalem, and the tour showed some compelling ways how. First, he told us that as soon as the Wall was being constructed in East Jerusalem, Palestinians on the other side feared, rightly, that they might never again have access to the city. So Palestinians in the West Bank left their homes and flooded into Jerusalem in advance of the Wall. Their numbers increased real estate prices through simple supply-and-demand economics. Soon, few could afford homes. This fact, combined with the sudden inability for poor Arab Jerusalemites to shop in cheaper West Bank markets, poverty in Jerusalem increased. Then crime. And the homes these ‘migrants’ left became quickly occupied by other West Bank Palestinians. So a Wall meant to keep Jerusalem as Jewish as possible resulted in an increase in the Muslim population, an increasingly poor and angry one, both within the city and in its immediate environs.

In addition, the building of the Wall has resulted in the closure of many East Jerusalem hospitals and clinics. These facilities used to cater to Palestinians from both East Jerusalem and the West Bank. With the closure of the West Bank, the hospitals are lacking in patients ans are forced to closed. Now Arabs from East Jerusalem are forced to seek medical attention in Israeli hospitals that, as a result, are operating beyond their capacity.

It was a very interesting tour, but a gloomy one. The guide showed us the myriad of problems but offered no solutions. Even more depressing was that much of what the guide said revealed two basic assumptions. First, the Israeli settlements around Jerusalem are there to stay. Secondly, Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem truly hate each other and do not want to be neighbors. After the month I’ve spent here I am starting to agree with both statements.

Sending a Message

2009-03-14T14:43:00.006-07:00

The fingers on Yusuf’s right hand are sore and black. “Some spray cans are more finger-friendly,” he says, and he should know. He finds a broken bottle on the ground, with the bottle cap still on the neck, and discovers it fits perfectly on his spray-finger. The ad hoc prosthetic will make the painting easier. Yusuf also finds an unfired rifle bullet on the ground. He tosses it to me. “A souvenir of Palestine,” he says. I thank him and put it into my pocket, but drop it back onto the ground when Yusuf is not looking. After all my time in the West Bank on this trip I will have enough trouble with airport security without having them find live ammunition in my luggage.

Yusuf goes back to the Wall, peels away some old Palestinian campaign posters, rattles his can, and sprays the next message on his list onto to the grey concrete:

Zahour ma femme
cherie, je t'aime

He moves half a concrete slab to his right, checks the paper in his hand, and writes:

Hey Ruby, let's get married!!

Yusuf is a graffiti writer for Send A Message. The project allows ‘senders’ from anywhere in the world to send a message to a recipient by having Yusuf and his cohorts spray paint it on the Wall. The sender pays thirty Euros for the service, and the recipient receives emailed photographs of the sprayed message. The money raised goes towards a Palestinian youth centre in Ramallah. The project is just over a year old, and already over 1200 messages have been sprayed onto the Wall, most by Yusuf.

Many of the messages express a sort of long-distance solidarity with the Palestinian cause, but most of them don’t. According to Faris, a coordinator with the project, a full two-thirds of the messages they write are, what he calls, silly. There are birthday messages, wedding announcements, and everyday pronouncements of love. There are also simple ‘ads’ for personal websites, radio stations, or the websites of favorite rock bands. (Perhaps this blog could use some Wall exposure.) Someone had a falafel recipe sprayed on the Wall, and Faris told me that there have been at least a couple of marriage proposals in addition to Ruby.

The project workers will not spray messages that are racist, insulting, or obscene. They will also refuse messages that they disagree with. For example, messages referring to the Wall as the ‘Security Barrier’ will not be written because the Faris and Yusuf – and all Palestinians, and myself – don’t believe that the Wall has much to do with security. And no overtly pro-Israel messages will be written. I told Faris that I’d seen ‘This wall saves lives’ painted on the Wall in Bethlehem and asked if he would accept this message. “No, because it is not true,” he said. Such messages are against the aim and spirit of the project, he told me.

I was skeptical about the project when I first read about it. I’d spent three consecutive Fridays watching the stone-throwers and tear gas at the anti-Wall demonstrations in Jayyous where young men risked injury and arrest resisting the Wall. What was the point of writing something like ‘Happy Birthday Jane,’ on it?

Faris told me that he is asked the same question by many Palestinians who also wonder what good the project ultimately does. Faris said that ‘simple,’ Palestinians, those who the Wall affects the most, understand. The intelligentsia in Ramallah who have grown comfortable and have forgotten what it means to resist are the most cynical. Faris explains that in addition to raising money for the youth centre, the project serves as a unique form of dialogue. The sender and the receiver are linked by a concrete barrier built to separate. This irony, in itself, is compelling. The project also inspires more conversation about the Wall, and the system it represents, by exposing it to people who might not be politically motivated. In this way, the banal messages are most interesting. Those writing Mandela, Gandhi and Pink Floyd quotes are mostly preaching to the converted, or at least to the already interested. But someone who writes a message of love, or a falafel recipe, brings attention to the Wall through a sneaky sort of whimsy.

Another common criticism of the project is that it strives to make an ugly and hated structure into something beautiful. Faris counters this with “you do not notice the nail polish on the hand that is beating you”, but I liked Yusuf’s metaphor better: “If you take a piece of shit and make a beautiful sculpture out of it, you do not change its nature.”

I found the ‘silly’ messages on the Wall surprisingly compelling. I couldn’t help but think that they subverted the Wall’s martial nature. By using this military construction as a medium for decidedly lighthearted discourse, the ‘Security Wall’ becomes, in that moment, no more imposing than a bathroom wall. I didn’t see any “For a good time call…” messages, but I am sure they exist. These messages do not impact the Wall’s real effects – passing through the cattle-worthy gates to the Israeli side was an instant reminder of this – and the project will not serve to bring the Wall down. But it was never meant to. Instead, the messages mock the Wall and rob it of its emotional power.

(The Send a Message website is here.)

A Zoo in Palestine

2009-03-08T12:01:00.006-07:00

The rain and wind has stopped and it is spring again in Palestine, and I feel good. For me, it is not really traveling unless I can feel the sun warm my face. Perhaps this is a Canadian thing.

I traveled to Qalqilya the other day, a city in the northern West Bank. Qalqilya is known for two things: it is completely encircled by the Wall, and it is the home to Palestine’s only zoo.

Sometimes the metaphors are too easy that one feels lazy even making them.

I went to the zoo on a Thursday afternoon. It is a cheerful place. The benches and railings are painted in bright colours. A new ‘safe’ playground donated by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation stands in the middle of the grounds. There were only a few families at the zoo that afternoon. Women in hejab led packs of excited children past the cages and to and from the ice cream vendors. After spending the last few weeks witnessing the effects of the Wall on the Palestinian people, and hearing their despairing stories, it was refreshing to be somewhere a little more lighthearted.

The Qalqilya zoo has not embraced the idea of ‘habitat enclosures,’ though I doubt the place could secure the sort of funding necessary for this sort of thing. Considering the depressed Palestinian economy – hobbled by local corruption, Israeli occupation and global recession – it is a miracle that this place exists at all. One can easily forgive some of the cramped cages, and the fact that the exotic specimens share the space with some rather banal creatures. In addition to a pair of sleeping leopards, a pacing bear, red-assed baboons, and – the zoo’s star – a feces-flinging hippo, there was a cage with a guinea pig in it. And a hutch full of rabbits. My favourite, though, was the chicken cage. The same birds could be found in identical coops down the street at the market. Those hens, however, are for eating.

Lamenting a Lonely Planet

2009-03-03T05:04:00.003-07:00

I found an interesting article about travel and guidebooks by author Stephen Henighan in the very excellent Geist Magazine. You can find it here.

A Tree Falls

2009-03-02T14:08:00.005-07:00

Mohammad told me that he knows every centimetre of his family’s land south of the village of Jayyous. He remembers camping in the middle of the fields in the hot Palestinian summers, and he especially remembers planting olive trees with his father. “It is a special thing for a Palestinian boy, to plant an olive tree,” he told me. “You watch the tree grow with you. And if you grow faster than the tree, you know that something is wrong. Maybe you have to give it more water, or more food. You have to care for it more.”

Now there is something else wrong. Mohammad has not seen his tree, or any of his family’s land, since Israel built the Wall around the village in 2003. There was no warning to the Wall. No meetings or discussion. Instead, notices appeared pinned to trees proclaiming the land was to be confiscated for security purposes. Then the bulldozers came. The villagers resisted, fought hand-to-hand with soldiers, but eventually the Wall went up.

I’ve learned a lot about the Wall in my time here in Palestine, and the more I learn the more I realize that Israel’s claim that the Wall is for security reasons is mere fallacy. Supporters of the barrier point to the fact that since the Wall was erected hardly any suicide bombers have infiltrated Israel from the West Bank. The Wall saves lives, they say, and some refer to the barrier as the ‘Fence of Life.’

This may be true. The Wall may in fact deter the worst of Palestinian militants from carrying out their murders in Israel. But none of this explains why the Wall exiles farmers from their fields, and why this confiscated land is bequeathed to Israeli settlements so they have room to expand. The security argument does not explain why the Wall separates Palestinian communities from each other and turns the West Bank into a discontinuous collection of Bantustans. The security argument does not explain why the Wall penetrates deep beyond the Green Line and into the Palestinian heartland. The argument does not explain why Mohammad’s father must rent land from a neighbor while his own fields lay unused and the trees he planted with his sons wither with neglect.

Olive trees can live for thousands of years. Trees in the Garden of Gethsemane outside the Old City of Jerusalem are over two-thousand years old, and some believe they were witness to the arrest of Christ. Mohammad’s tree will probably outgrow him. And if the bulldozers spare it, the tree may well outlive him. What is uncertain is whether either will outlive the Wall.

Talking Walls in Ramallah

2009-03-01T09:09:00.002-07:00

The late winter has brought rain-slicked stones and cold to Palestine. Just like my time in Kashmir in November, I find myself unprepared for the cold. And also just like Kashmir, the unheated hotels bring no relief from the cold outside. My blue jeans which were soaked through during the protest in Jayyous three days ago have still not dried, and my feet have not been warm in a week.

I found some relief this afternoon in a Ramallah restaurant called Pronto’s where the sort of gas heat lamps common on Canadian bar patios are housed inside. (The fire hazard of this sort of thing is quickly forgotten when sitting beneath its delicious heat.) I met boikutt, a Palestinian hip hop artist of some renown who I met here in Ramallah in 2007. We talked about activism, art, music and the Wall.

Boikutt, whose real name is Basel Abbas, supports the idea of painting the Wall. Certainly, as a hip-hop artist, street art like grafitti suits his aesthetic. More than this, though, is the fact that writing on walls has always been part of the Palestinian experience. In the days of the first Intifada, when villages and refugee camps were under curfew, there was often no other way for Palestinians to communicate other than writing on their own walls. Spray-painted messages would announce births and funerals, and would express warnings to the occupying forces: “The PFLP will avenge the death of the following martyrs….”

But boikutt is afraid of ‘commodifying’ the Wall, of commercializing it, and having it become a symbol that, in the eyes of the international community, stands for everything. “The Wall is not the point,” he said. It is much bigger than that.” The Wall appears in boikutt’s lyrics, but only as part of the larger landscape of Palestinian life. Boikutt suggests that without the Wall – and the grand canvas it provides – foreign artists might not be interested in the conflict at all. It is good that the Wall has attracted the solidarity of the ‘Internationals,’ but the Wall is not the Occupation. If the Wall fell tomorrow, life in Palestine would not automatically improve.

Sam, a film-maker friend of boikutt’s had more to say. He explained how the biggest effect of the Wall in Qalqilya - a town in the northern West Bank that is completely enclosed by the Wall - is the increase in Islamic fundamentalism. The municipal government is now run by Hamas. Farmers who have lost their land to the other side of the Wall have no work, no money, and nothing else to do but go to the mosque and pray for God to intervene. He suggested, too, that the Wall has succeeded in eliminating face-to-face contact between Palestinians and Israelis. It is easier to hate someone you cannot see. And it is easier to kill them.

However, Sam believes that the best action against the Wall is to ignore it. Palestinians should not grant it importance, or legitimacy, by rallying against it. He said that the weekly demonstrations do little other than provide a release for anger, and that effort would be better spent improving education and health care in Palestine proper. “We have a bigger wall,”he said.

Painting the Wall

2009-02-24T07:22:00.004-07:00

I am back in Ramallah and just spoke to Mahmoud Abu Hashhash at the A. M. Qattan Foundation, a Palestinian arts organization. I wanted to pick up on a conversation Mahmoud and I started the last time I was in Palestine in 2007 about art and the Wall.

Mahmoud told me that many foreign artists come to Palestine and want to create art with the Wall. Many of them are politically motivated, and want to be in the sort of ‘heated place’ that inspires them artistically. He suggests, however, that only a few of the artists seem to be fully engaged in the conflict, and they forget that everything that the Wall represents – seperation, racism, oppression – all existed before the Wall was built. Mahmoud himself has never been allowed to travel to Jerusalem, for example, regardless if the Wall was there or not. What the wall has become, especially for foreign artists, is an encapsulation of the entire conflict. It is the conflict cast in concrete. A solid, tangible manifestation of an otherwise amorphous and multi-hued struggle.

Mahmoud compares the Wall to the weekly demonstrations that occur in villages like Jayyous. Like the Wall itself, these actions condense the entire conflict into a few hours of marching, slogans, tear gas and stones. For foreigners wanting to demonstrate solidarity with the Palestinian cause, the Wall and the protests against it provide a convenient outlet. Mahmoud does not mean to belittle the artists and other Internationals that come to express solidarity. Far from it. The Palestinians are grateful for the solidarity and welcome the Internationals into their midst. But the focus on the Wall or on weekly demonstrations can be a rather narrow one.

I asked Mahmoud why Palestinian artists do not seem interested in creating ‘Wall Art.’ The first answer was a simple one: painting the Wall is trendy, and artists do not like to follow trends. But he had another, more compelling answer. Contemporary Palestinian artists seek to free themselves from the patriotic symbols that have occupied Palestinian political art for decades. Artists are not portraying national ideas and collective pain anymore. Instead they are looking inward and describing the situation through their own inner space. Gone are the old symbols. Instead artists are ‘talking’ about disappointment and personal loss. Mahmoud told me that in the wake of the destruction in Gaza, artists there are not talking about grand ideas of loss. They are not waving flags, Instead they are writing about their own homes, their own studios, what has been damaged and what has been destroyed. It is through this intimacy that they express a more general pain.

Artists in Palestine have internalized the Occupation and are creating art from within themselves. For this new generation of Palestinian artists, the Wall is simply too broad a canvas. It is too public and too blunt.

Fighting the Wall in Jayyous

2009-02-22T10:15:00.003-07:00

The weather was windy and cold on Friday morning. It was a bad day for a protest, I was told. I was in Jayyous, where every Friday since November villagers gathered to demonstrate against the Wall. But no one was sure what would happen on this Friday. Two nights prior, Israeli soldiers entered Jayyous and imposed a curfew. They went house to house and rounded up over a hundred young men. After the soldiers left the next day, more than a dozen villagers remained in custody. Because of the incursion, and the weather, Mohammad was not sure if the weekly Friday protest against the wall would even happen. “The street will decide,” he said.

At first it didn’t seem like anything was going to happen. Then, from the roof of the house where I was staying, a small group of men started to walk up the road towards the gate in the wall. Then another small group. The street had decided, and I followed the protesters to the gate.

It was a strange experience to be there among the stone throwers. To hear the whistle and snap of the sling shots. Their cheers and smiles were surprising to me. No doubt anger and frustration inspired them, but the action was pure joy. They shouted insults. They cheered for Jayyous. They advanced against the soldiers, launched stones into the air, and fled the oncoming army jeeps. Tear gas canisters sailed overhead, trailing pale yellow smoke through the grey sky, but they had little effects in such a windy afternoon. A bad day for tear gas. There were rubber bullets, too, and the boom of sound grenades. Someone said that this battle was much smaller than in previous weeks, but as I stood within range of all of this I didn’t know whether or not to be afraid.

I stayed close to a man I knew, a Canadian who volunteers with the Stop the Wall organization. He didn’t hurl any stones, but I watched as he joined the protesters and heave boulders into a line across the road leading into the village. This was meant to slow the soldiers advance, and for a moment I felt an unexpected impulse to help these men. I didn’t, clinging instead to my safe and responsible – though perhaps cowardly – role as mere observer.

Around one corner, a man invited us into his house. Assuming we were suffering from tear gas, he gave us rags dribbled in cologne from a whiskey-flask and urged us to press the cloth against our faces. We went to his roof and took photos until the soldiers started to target us. A tear gas canister arced towards us, its red ember burning, and narrowly missed the rooftop. We retreated into the salon, where the man put out plastic chairs for us to sit on, prepared tea, and turned on the television to an English-language movie channel. Palestinians hurled rocks at soldiers outside while in the house, Napoleon Dynamite tasted milk for defects.

Back on the street we followed the stone throwers. Some young boys. Others in their thirties. Some wrapped kefiyas around their faces while others shouted bald-faced at the olive uniforms taking positions in greenhouses and on the roofs of private homes. Their slingshots were hardly accurate. I never saw anyone even come close to hitting a soldier or a jeep. But accuracy was not the point. Resistance was. Standing up to the high-tech Israeli war machines with homemade weapons made with twine was the point. Each flung stone was a statement of defiance. ‘We are not going anywhere. And the Wall must come down.’

Hooked on a Feeling

2009-02-15T07:23:00.003-07:00

Yesterday, on my brief foray out of my hotel room and into the fresh air, I visited a bookstore in Arab East Jerusalem called Educational Bookshop. The place is little more than a stall, and its main function, as its name implies, is to sell textbooks and school supplies, but the store also stocks an excellent selection of books in English. They have translations of Arabic poetry, volumes about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and other titles about the culture and religion of the Middle East. It is one of those dangerous places where I always end up buying something, regardless of how many books I am currently hauling around.

As I was browsing, I listened in on a conversation with the shopkeeper and a white-haired British foreigner. I heard the Brit tell the Arab shopkeeper that he had recently visited Akko, a town on Israel’s Mediterranean Coast. I visited Akko, also called Acre, back in 2000. It is a very pretty walled medieval town that, due in part to its distance from both the West Bank and Gaza, has suffered relatively little from the decades long conflict, though I am sure there are Palestinians that would disagree. The more interesting Old City is populated mostly by Muslims – and my nose remembers the whole place smelling divinely of sheesha smoke – while the new town is mostly Jewish.

“Akko was very nice,” the Brit said to the shopkeeper. Then he added, in a sort of conspiratorial whisper, “but it felt occupied.”

No doubt this was just a cheap line meant to endear himself to the shopkeeper. Before 1948, Akko was a Palestinian town, but I don’t think there are many who would describe the present city as ‘occupied’, especially relative to towns in the West Bank. Simply put, I think the Brit was full of shit.

Still, his comment made me wonder if occupation does have a particular feeling that a visitor can sense. Certainly having soldiers on the streets and checkpoints imparts a specific brand of unease, but out of sight of barriers and military, what does occupation feel like? Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinsky wrote that a writer must must experience events on his “own skin,” and it is “this feeling along the surface of your skin, that gives your story its endurance.”

Can a writer feel occupation on his skin?

In Jerusalem, with cold

2009-02-14T04:48:00.003-07:00

I spent twenty-seven of my first forty-eight hours in Jerusalem in my hotel bed, and yesterday slept for seventeen hours. A cold and a cough that descended on me the day before I left Canada turned into a full-blown phenomenon on the plane ride into Israel. I became that coughing, sputtering, disgustingly snotty guy on the plane no one wants to sit beside. By the time we touched down in Tel Aviv my airways felt like they were on fire and every sneeze seemed likely to shatter my arms.

The last time I traveled alone to Israel I had a passport filled with stamps from Iran and Turkey. And so I spent six hours in security while the customs officials made sure, through some mysterious means, that I was not up to anything nefarious. This time my passport was lit up with stamps from Jordan, Algeria, Morocco and Pakistan, and because I spent two weeks last year passing in and out of the Spanish enclaves of Melilla and Ceuta from Morocco, I had twenty-eight Moroccan entry and exit stamps. I figured I would beat my six hour record by a couple of hours at least.
This time, however, the travel gods offered me some mercy. I was through security in less than an hour. Aside from asking me if my wife was Moroccan and how I could possibly be a writer if I didn’t own a cell-phone, the airport security officials had little interest in me. I am sure it helped that I am scheduled to do a reading at a Jerusalem bookstore-café on the 23rd, and that my name and face are currently on the café’s website. (www.tmol-shilshom.co.il) I will write more about the café, which is one of my favourite places in the world, in an upcoming post.

I am feeling better this morning – my lungs have stopped burning, anyway – and I am looking forward to getting started on the research into the West Bank wall. I am waiting for my contacts here to get back to me. They include an anthropologist, a human rights lawyer, a Palestinian hip hop artist, a cultural centre official, and people from organizations that campaign both for and against the security barrier. I am casting my net wide in the hope of finding some stories that have not yet been told. That, I think, will be my biggest challenge on this leg of the trip.

Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T19:21:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned below, I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to process what learned in India and Morocco into legible prose, and preparing for my next trip. Today, though, like much of the world, I am sure, I spent much of the day watching the inauguration.

It is hard, in a way, to react to the inauguration as a white Canadian. He doesn’t represent my country, and while I can imagine the intense joy African Americans must feel at Obama’s ascendance I cannot begin to relate to it. Still, I teared up twice during the telecast today. It wasn’t during Obama’s speech, inspiring though it was. And it wasn’t during the wonderful poem or the beautiful final blessing. I wept when they showed George Bush leaving the White house for the last time, and again when his helicopter lifted off from behind the capital building to take him back to Texas. I’ve been waiting a long time to see the back of that man. Good riddance, Mr. Bush.

Bush’s began his presidency at roughly the same time as I began my writing career. During the Bush years I traveled a lot through the Islamic world. As I slowly learned about the cultures of Islam, George Bush dropped bombs on them. I discussed Bush’s policies with Muslims in Iran, Turkey, Palestine, North Africa and Kashmir. In some of these places, I found a surprising respect for the man – nowhere more than Iran where many young Iranians told me they would like to see Bush rid their homeland of the mullahs the same way he removed Saddam Hussein and the Taliban. Mostly, though, I met Muslims who felt that George Bush’s America was in direct conflict with their values. And I watched as the politics of fear turned every Muslim into a potential terrorist; a rival in some great clash of civilizations.

Will the end of the Bush presidency mean that Islam and the West will suddenly get along? Not likely. It is promising that the US is now led by a man who was able to find Iraq on a map before his daddy bombed it. Obama is a thinker, not a cowboy. While he may never live up to the expectations that he’s been laden with – Canada’s Frank McKenna actually used the word ‘messiah’ this morning – there is no doubt in my mind that things will be better.

Next trip

2009-01-20T19:17:00.000-07:00

I haven’t done much writing in the few weeks I’ve been back from India, but I have been busy. Following the advice of my enthusiastic agent, I’ve reworked the proposal for the ‘walls’ book a few times. As I write this, the proposal sits on the desks of publishers in Canada and the US while I sit at my desk with my fingers crossed. I’ve also been trying to turn some of my notes from my travels in India into magazine pieces and am waiting to see if the editors I work with find any of my story ideas interesting.

Mostly, though, I’ve been spending my days planning my upcoming trip. In the second week of February I will travel to the West Bank and Israel to investigate the Israeli-built security barrier. From Israel, I will travel to the island of Cyprus and write about life along the Green Line that seperates the Turkish north from the Greek south, and where Canada employs a peacekeeping force of a single soldier. Afterwards, I will likely travel south to Johannesburg to visit the gated communities that define the urban landscape there in a new kind of apartheid. I might also make a trip to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, but I am waiting to see if the security fencing the Egyptian government promised in 2005 after a terrorist attack has ever been built. I should be gone for about two months.

I am especially excited about my return to Jerusalem. I will be doing a reading at a fabulous café-bookstore-restaurant called Tmol Shilshom. Each time I visit Jerusalem, Tmol Shilshom becomes a daily haunt. There is no better espresso in the New City and no better place to write. I am thrilled that this time I will be on the lectern reading from my work instead of just scribbling madly in my journal at a corner table. I am unsure what to read,however. I don’t know what will go over worse with an Israeli audience: reading from a book that declares my love for Iranians, or excerpts from a work in progress that says building walls is bad.

A couple years ago I wrote a sort of ‘biography’ of Tmol Shilshom. The story was never published anywhere. I was thinking of putting the story on this blog, but I found out a couple of weeks ago that a Montreal-based magazine, Maisonneuve, is interested in publishing it. I am happy it will see the ‘light of print’ after all.

In the off chance that any of you in my humble blogosphere might be in the Jerusalem area next month, you can see me read at Tmol Shilshom on Monday February 23rd at 7pm. Details can be found on the Tmol Shilshom website: www.tmol-shilshom.co.il/.

Home

2008-12-15T09:47:00.000-07:00

After a delayed flight out of India, then not finding a stand-by seat out of London, I finally made it back to Calgary on Saturday. I was welcomed by the warm arms of my wife and the icy embrace of a Calgary cold snap. It was nearly 30 degrees when I got on the plane in Kolkata. When I got off the plane in Calgary it was minus 40 degrees with the wind-chill. Who needs anything like as amorphous as 'culture shock' when the landscape offers you actual physical shock.

My time home, however, will be short. I will be abroad again by mid-February visiting the West Bank Security barrier, the fencing around the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, and the fallen wall on the divided island of Cyprus. I've been to Israel and Palestine several times and I am excited to return, but I am most looking forward to Cyprus. Aside from a little history, I don't know very much about the place, but I can't imagine a Greek and Turk-populated island in the Mediterranean can be anything less than beautiful. Certainly the weather will be better.

I will spend the next couple of months writing down the material I managed to glean from my time in India. As I mentioned before, I will have to return to Kashmir - and visit the Pakistan side - in the spring or summer of 2009 to do my research on the Line of Control, but I probably have enough material on the Indo-Bangladesh border fencing. I won't know for sure until I get writing.

Another task I have to accomplish before I leave is to prepare a lecture for a monthly gathering of the Canadian Author's Association in Edmonton. I was honoured when they invited me to address their membership in January and speak about travel writing. Still, I am nervous. I have no problem reading from my work in front of a crowd, in fact I really enjoy it, but I have never stood before an audience and talked about my own writing process and philosophy. I am sure it will be a useful exercise but I am feeling rather jittery.

Café moment

2008-12-09T23:39:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, as I was reading in a Starbucks-clone café, the man sitting at the next table removed one of his sandals and began caressing his bare foot while whistling ‘My Heart will Go On.’

Finishing in Kolkata

2008-12-09T23:31:00.001-07:00

I am back in Kolkata winding down the last few days of my trip. I will be home in Calgary on the weekend, and while returning to a Canadian winter and the Christmas nonsense holds little appeal I am glad, in a way, that this trip is over. It has been a frustrating couple of months. Early snowfalls, security bureaucracy, controversial elections, official-but-undeclared curfews, and the occasional terrorist attack scuttled much of what I wanted to do. At least I’ll be home for Christmas Eve dinner at my grandmother’s house.

(My wife has been printing off my blog entries and giving them to my grandmother to read. This is no small task. Nonna is in her eighties and English is her second language. She manages to read through the blogs alright, but apparently it takes the better part of a day. Each time I write a word she might find difficult I feel a brief snap of guilt. Wait until she sees all the Indian names in the next paragraph….)

I’ve been spending the last few days eating Bengali and Hakka Chinese food, and immersing myself in ‘Indian Lit.’ Having given up on ‘wall’ research for the time being means I can devote serious hours to other people’s books. The shops and streetstalls are filled with wonderful Indian authors that I never read before. This is a welcome change from North African travels earlier this year when I could not find English books anywhere. In India, I’ve ‘discovered’ Kirin Desai (I am the last to read Inheritance of Loss, no doubt), Amitav Ghosh, Siddharta Deb, Basharat Peer, Amit Choudury, Sanjoy Hazarika, and Calcutta literary saint Rabindranath Tagore.

What most of these writers have in common is a remarkable eye for detail and a poet’s gift for description. Even when the narrative fails to hold my attention, which happens once in a while, I am happy just to give in to the beauty of the language.

It is strange to me, then, that the same community that produces such rich and observant fiction can write such bland nonfiction. I read an anthology of Indian nonfiction early on in this trip and was alarmed at the clichés and flat prose. I found the same phenomenon in another anthology, called AIDS Sutra. Even gifted Indian novelists – with some exceptions, my friend Jaspreet Singh being one of them – tend to write stilted nonfiction.

I wonder why this is. In spite of India’s pantheon of great writers, nonfiction is a genre that does not seem to be fully embraced or explored. The abundance of Bollywood biographies in the ‘best of nonfiction’ anthology is, perhaps, a good indication of this.

Imposing identity

2008-12-04T02:12:00.001-07:00

I’ve spent the last week or so in Assam and Tripura. I intended to make another attempt at the fenced-in village of Bhogdanga in Assam. I had a contact at a television news channel that was willing to ‘lend’ me some credentials, but the attacks in Mumbai meant that all of India’s more sensitive border areas were made even tighter and I was not granted permission to visit. Instead I spent a few days in the company of anthropologists, photographers and general smart people. We had impassioned discussions about bombings and borders inspired by some fine Nepalese rum.

One observation, among many, that related to my walls project was this: The construction of physical barriers along borders inspires feelings of nationalism that were not already there. I find this very interesting. It is the opposite phenomenon I witnessed in Melilla, for example, where the fencing is built because of a sense of national and cultural pride, not the other way around.

On some parts of the Indo-Bangladesh frontier, the actual borderline separates people of different ethnic groups that have little in common culturally. This was often the case in Meghalaya, where ‘tribal’ groups such as the Khasis lived on the Indian side of the border, while Muslim Bengalis lived on the other side. However, in many other areas, people on both sides of the border share the same culture, language and religion. Before the fencing, people crossed over freely to visit with family, go to the market, or fetch water never considering, or at least not caring, that they were crossing an international border. The invisible boundary, drawn by some official in some office in some city far away, was meaningless. And so, too, was the idea of nationality. If I share my entire culture with the people in the next village, does it really matter that I am Indian and they are Bangladeshi?

But the fencing changes things. Yesterday I visited two villages along the border fencing on the outskirts of Agaratala, the capital city of the tiny Indian state of Tripura. With a Border Security Forces officer as my guide, was able to cross through the fence into the so-called ‘No Man’s Land’ that separates the two nations. Women led cows by tether ropes to nibble on dry rice stalks. Men tended to vines of bitter melon. Girls in bright saris poured water onto budding cauliflower from shiny bulbous pots they carried on their head. Clearly this was some man’s land.

A young man told me how, before the fencing, he used to cross the frontier to play cricket with his cousins. Or watch the Bangladeshi trains go by. Now he only sees them after he passes through the soldier-guarded gate and goes to work in the fields. He has to be back before six in the evening; that is when the gate is locked each night. And I met an old man with a fabulous white beard and striped-rotten teeth whose family house is on the Bangladeshi side of the fence. A worn footpath from his compound led straight past the border pillars into Bangladesh. His family has had that plot of land for 100 years, long before the ‘nation’ of Bangladesh even existed. In the past, the invisible line meant little to him, perhaps it still does, but the Indian government now insists his family move to the Indian side of the fence. “It seems it would be better to not have relations with Bangladeshi people anymore,” he said.

Since the fencing went up three years ago, people cannot freely visit family across the line. The impromptu cricket games between cousins no longer happen. Those who live in the shadow of fence posts and barbed wire are starting to develop a sense of national, political identity that never existed before. This is not necessarily a bad thing, I suppose, but it is not organic. It is imposed. The fence demands allegiance.

On Mumbai

2008-12-04T02:10:00.002-07:00

I’ve resisted commenting on the Mumbai attacks in this blog because I don’t think that my take on the disaster is at all relevant. I was, thankfully, not in Mumbai at the time, not even close, and I knew none of the victims. I cannot pretend to understand what Mumbaikers are feeling – though to assign a single emotion to a city of 18 million unique souls is insulting anyway – and I don’t want to give armchair commentary. There is enough nonsense in the Indian media. The newspapers and news channels clang with typically grotesque post-disaster rhetoric that creates heroes in one moment and assigns blame to villains in the next. Politicians read bland pre-typed statements while the pantheon of Bollywood icons step forward in their turn to give their own starlit take on the disaster. I find this repulsive, too, though I suppose these cinema icons represent the class of Mumbaikers who could actually afford a room, or even a meal, at the hotels targeted by the terrorists.

I will say, though, that the attack in Mumbai, as well as the bombings in Guwahati which happened a little over a month ago, reminded me of an essay I read two months ago by Amitav Ghosh. I don’t have the essay with me so I cannot quote directly from it, but in it Ghosh speaks about another spate of violence – I don’t remember which; perhaps the riots in 1993 – and the way it was written about. He said writers have an unfortunate tendency to approach violence aesthetically. They feel that violence must be described in its lurid, realistic detail, and ‘writing violence’ means painting a visceral scene of black smoke and blood. He doesn’t mean that the writing is necessarily gratuitous, or even poorly written, but that it focuses only on the mechanics of death.

Ghosh argues that this sort of writing pays humanity no service. Instead, writers should step back and observe the acts of kindness and self-sacrifice that always accompany such tragedies. And he is not talking about the rescue workers, SWAT team members and fire-fighters who are the official, media- and politician-christened heroes of these terrible days – though their efforts should, of course, be celebrated. He is speaking of those for whom heroism is not their job. He is talking about those who lead others through dark hallways to emergency doors. Those who drag the bleeding to shelter. Those who press fabric torn from their own clothing against the wounds of strangers.

This is not heroism. It is humanity. It is the light that exists on the other side of the darkest shadow. Sadly, it gets the last of the ink if it gets any at all.

Photos of Srinagar

2008-11-25T08:05:00.001-07:00

Since it has been a while since I've posted any photos - and since I seem to be scamming someone's wireless signal in my Delhi hotel room - I thought it a good time to add some visuals.

All these photos are from Srinagar, the largest city in the Kashmir Valley. (The man in the close-up is the guy who made my new hat.)

Kashmir postponed

2008-11-25T03:02:00.001-07:00

Sadly, I left Srinagar and the Kashmir Valley the other day without having visited the villages I wanted to see. My research plans were frustrated by the combination of snowfall-closed roads and the idiosyncrasies of elections in a disputed territory: general strikes, sudden blockades, and undeclared curfews. I will return to Kashmir in the spring or summer after temperatures warm and tempers cool.

The trip, though, was not a waste of time. Being in Srinagar for the elections was fascinating, if sometimes frustrating. There were three general strikes in the six days that I spent in the city. Each was a result of the Indian army shutting down the roads in fear of protests and marches against the election. With the streets closed, shopkeepers did not bother to open. There were soldiers everywhere, armed with rifles or batons, standing bored on street corners or building fires out of trash to keep warm.

Whatever tension the blockades may have caused was not apparent in the faces of the boys who, with a day off school, took their flat wooden bats into the empty the streets for impromptu games of cricket. Every block had its own game going, some overlapping with others, with cardboard boxes, traffic pylons and wooden planks standing in for wickets. It was a fabulous scene: the severity of men with guns juxtaposed with the happy clamor of boys with bats and plastic balls.

Bill Clinton once said that Kashmir was the “most dangerous place on earth.” This is a territory being fought over by two nuclear-armed enemies. The potential for an unfathomable disaster is as great here as anywhere. But it is important to say that while the political situation has, in the past, stumbled drunkenly towards crisis, and may do so again, the Kashmiris themselves are not brutes. Far from it. I was treated with generosity by everyone I met. One can be passionate about a cause, and one can live in a disputed place, but political frustration does not cancel out one’s impulsive tendency towards kindness.

There is a tendency of some travel writers to exaggerate the danger of the places they visit in order to come off as adventurous or romantically reckless. This sort of writing is lazy and offensive. Doing research for this trip I came across a two-part story by a Western journalist who travelled through Kashmir. He spent one night as the guest of a village family. They offered him tea and dinner and a place to sleep, but the writer kept repeating the danger he thought he was in. He mused over and over about his fear that the man who invited him into his home would eventually slit his throat, as if the offer of a meal and a bed was a ruse for murder.

First of all, if the writer was indeed afraid for his life, he would never have accepted the invitation. Of course not. Secondly, and most infuriatingly, the danger he manufactures does a disservice to the people he is writing about. Especially in Muslim Kashmir. In a world already sick with Islamophobia, it is irresponsible to tar all Muslims as potential murderers in a cheap attempt to paint yourself as brave.

But I digress.

My trip out of Srinagar had to start early. It was another strike day and I was afraid the highway would be closed once the sun came up, so I walked to the taxi park before sun loosened the thin crust of ice on the open sewers. I got on the last transport headed south. It was a rare road journey done in the daylight; I’ve suffered through far too many overnight bus trips in the last couple of months. The Sumo, an eight-passenger Land Cruiser-clone, climbed into and out of the Kashmir Valley, where soldiers walked through the morning mist with metal detectors and swept the roadside for bombs, and where men at the tea stalls sold saffron packets, wicker baskets and cricket bats.

The temperature began to rise as we descended the foothills of the Himalayas’ southern slopes to Jammu, Indian Kashmir’s ‘winter capital.’ The other passengers and I spent our time peeling away layers of clothing as the temperature rose, and complained as our driver stopped repeatedly for tea and cigarettes. Only I seemed amused by the hundreds of pink-faced monkeys sitting on the roadside like cranky old men waiting for an overdue bus.

In Kashmir

2008-11-21T05:55:00.001-07:00

Winter came early to Srinagar this year. It is rare to receive snow in the Kashmir Valley before December. It reminded me of my home in Calgary, where winter always catches autumn unawares and snow chases the still-yellowing leaves from the poplar trees. At least here in Kashmir, winter seems to have realized its rashness and pulled back a little. The sky has cleared, the air warmed, and the snow melted into mud.

Still, Kashmir does not fully reveal its beauty in November. It only suggests it. Birds step across the green lotus pads in Dal Lake, but the flowers are not in bloom. The houseboats are shuttered and empty. The vegetables have already been harvested from the floating gardens, and the saffron already plucked from the purple crocus fields. The famous Mughal gardens are gated and their fountains dry. The Himalaya Mountains are faint through the winter clouds, like Gandhi’s face in the watermark of a worn ten-rupee bill.

Since the bulk of my travels in the last decade have been in the Islamic world, my arrival in Kashmir felt like a homecoming of sorts, even though the security at the airport made it feel as if I was landing in an army base. I feel comfortable among Muslims. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Hinduism is a complete mystery to me. I can’t keep straight all those multi-hued and -headed gods, and I don’t understand the rituals or philosophy. But I understand Islam. It is refreshing to hear the familiar symphony of inshallah and salaam aleikum.

I’ve come to Kashmir to write about the Line of Control, the ceasefire line that separates the Indian-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir from the Pakistani-controlled Azad Kashmir. Since Partition in 1947, the battle for Kashmir has defined relations between the two neighbors. Not long ago, Pakistan and India nearly hurled nuclear missiles at each other over the territory. These days, though, Pakistan has other things to worry about: a resurgent Taliban, American air-strikes over its territory, and national bankruptcy. Here in Srinagar you rarely even hear the word Pakistan. The Kashmiris much rather talk about azadi: Freedom.

“Do not say that Kashmir is in India,” said the young man in the bookstore on Residency Road, even though I didn’t. For him, and for most of the people I’ve talked to, Kashmir is an undivided state that has been denied independence. “Kashmiris are living in a cage,” the man said. “We are tired of being slaves to India.” Elections are going on right now, and there are several independence parties, but none can claim wide-ranging support. There are no inspiring leaders, and Kashmiris, especially the young, are distrustful of the politics. Some parties have called for a boycott of the elections, and when polling happens here in Srinagar on Christmas Eve, few of the men I talked to will cast a ballot.

I visited with a retired history professor, Dr. Khan, in his home the other day. We drank tea and talked about the Line of the Control. He scoffed at it, and called it a “colonial conspiracy.” Dr. Khan said that the villages closest to the Line – the places I hope to visit – are where the people suffer the most. “They are constantly surrounded by military. They live in perpetual fear.” Then he added, “Whenever you draw a line, you commit an inhuman act.”

I will seek permission from the District Commissioner to visit border towns both here in the Valley and in Ladakh. In the meantime, I am happy to walk amid Srinagar’s red brick and timber neighborhoods, eat apricot kernels, and stare into Kashmiri faces. Winter may have dulled the landscape, but grey November does not detract from the beauty of the Kashmiris themselves. Great sloping noses. Eyes like dark honey. Women drape themselves in swoops of coloured scarves and walk through the streets like rolling gems. The chilly air reddens their cheeks while henna reddens men’s beards. The old men hide baskets of burning embers under their robes to stay warm. Deep wrinkles make every face a mountain range.

I am in Assam, I am.

2008-11-14T22:49:00.001-07:00

Assam must be beautiful. Tea plantations spread over the slopes, rice patties flank the river valley, and rhinocerous lumber in the national parks. But I haven’t seen any of this. Trying to get my research done means I am spending my time in bland cities and travelling by night. The Assam I imagine is out there, but I can’t see it in the dark or in the streets of the capital. The closest I get are the rhino posters in the hotel and the beautiful Assamese tea I drink all day long from the road-side stalls.

The reason I am in Assam is to visit Bhogdanga, a village on the Bangladeshi frontier that is completely surrounded by the border fence. But I haven’t seen Bhoghdanga either. The border area is sensitive, I am told. A hotbed for militant elements. “Heaven for terrorists.” Certainly, too dangerous for a foreigner. I was forbidden to go anywhere near Bhogdanga, so instead I spent the other day in Dhubri, the closest city of any size. All day I was tailed by security forces, intelligence officials, and cloned policemen in identical tan uniforms, identical red berets and identical moustaches. They were there for my security, or so they said.

It became clear right away, though, that these men were not only interested in my protection. They were suspicious of me and my intentions here. When I telephoned a contact in the capital, one officer listened to the conversation over my shoulder. When I used an Internet café, two policemen went in after I left to question the proprietor. Four officers stood outside the shop where I got a shave and a haircut, and six men, one aromatically drunk, were at the bus station in the evening to make sure I really left town. It was a frustrating day.

It was hard to appreciate Dhubri while under surveillance and hearing the constant putt-putt-putting of police motorcycles following me all day. But now, two days later and in the capital, I see what a beautiful place Dhubri was. The town sits on the edge of the Brahmaputra River. Having nothing else to do, I watched the morning labourers arrive in Dhubri from villages across the river in great wooden boats. Hindu women in bright salwars and bracelets clinking on their wrists. Long-bearded Muslim men and their black-clad wives coming to barter for lambs. Sikhs here to pray at the gurudwara.

Muscular, barefoot men heaved sacks of onions and neatly bundled bamboo from overloaded carts onto boats for the return trip across the river. Bicycle rickshaw-wallahs argued for custom on the streets. Goats nibbled on whatever trash they could find, and cows – safe from the butcher’s block here amid the Hindus – lazed in the sunshine and dust.

At night, once the days commerce was over and the riverfront quiet, birds and bats rioted in the treetops. And a full moon followed the purple-smear of dusk to scatter shards of light over the Brahmaputra.

After Meghalaya

2008-11-13T02:12:00.001-07:00

I’ve just finished my tour of the villages along the Bangladesh border in the Indian province of Meghalaya. This is some stunning landscape: overwhelmingly green with slender betel nut trees, paan vines, rice patties and fruit orchards. Many of the people who live in these areas are known as ‘scheduled tribes,’ India’s official indigenous peoples. Most of the tribes in the area have adopted Christianity with vigour. There are churches everywhere, Bible verses painted on trucks, and statues of Christ along the roadside. Still, some of the old beliefs still persist. Yesterday at the main market in Shillong, a goat was slaughtered and his entrails ‘read’ as an oracle of the year ahead

Traditionally, the official border has meant little to the people who live on the frontier. The villagers here are used to passing freely across the line to sell fruit and betel nut to the Bangladeshis, and the Bangladeshis come north to sell meat, fish and imported kitchenware. Security has tightened in recent years, but India’s Border Security Force soldiers assigned to protect India from ‘infiltration’ are happy enough to let visitors pass through for a small bribe.

But times are changing. India’s entire border with Bangladesh is due to be fenced, and in light of the recent bombings in Gauhati which were blamed on cross-border militants, the government has made fencing a national security priority. Those who live on the borderlands understand this, and are resigned to the coming of the fence, but they disagree with its route.

According to an agreement between India and Bangladesh, no defensive structures can be built within 150 yards of the actual border, or ‘zero line.’ This means that for many villagers, their land will lie on the other side of the fence. For some of them, their homes will be lost. The government promises to build gates to allow access to the fields, and there are rumours of compensation, but no one knows any details. Where will the gates be located? How long will they be opened for and who mans them? Who decides the value of the land that is lost and when is the money paid out?

Also, the villagers worry about the security of their crops. Even now without a fence, villagers assign armed guards to watch over the fields during harvest season to protect against thieves from Bangladesh. Who will protect their crops when the fence is built?

The issue here is the collision of big, national interests with the ‘small’ interests of those who work the land. Big issues like terrorism and infiltration have louder voices than the small landowner who needs to sell his oranges or tend to his rice. I had tea with a village headman whose family home is close to the zero line. He will lose the house if the fence follows the planned route. Even if he is compensated for the house, there is nowhere else to build. He doesn’t know where he will go. “We are not rich people,” he said, “or big landowners. We are labourers. If the fence comes and we lose our land, what are we supposed to do?”

It may be small consolation, but they have plenty of time to consider their options. The newspapers are full of politician bluster about sealing the border quickly, but very little of the fence has been completed. I rode along one border road near Baghmara to see the progress on the fence. In some areas, the posts were up. In other areas the strip of land for the fence was still being flattened. Mostly, though, there was no evidence of fencing at all, and Bangladeshi traders were passing over the line without any problems.

Small black stones on the edges of the rice patties claimed ‘India ends here,’ but only in the quietest of whispers.

The Archers of Shillong

2008-11-02T01:38:00.001-07:00

Here are some photos of the daily archery stakes in Shillong. Archers fire arrows across a pitch at a tiny bamboo cylinder while on-lookers lay their bets with bookies around town.

Tomorrow I am on my way to the villages along Meghalaya's border with Bangladesh. It will be a fascinating trip. The fence that India has built along the border is formidable and, according to the Governor of Meghalaya, is important to counter the smuggling of cattle and, especially, the movements of militants across the border.

However, the fence is a hardship for some poor villagers who have always traded with villagers across the line. The fence makes this impossible. I hope to meet with these farmers and write their stories.

A First Look at Meghalaya

2008-10-31T06:13:00.002-07:00

In spite of the day’s tragedy, the drive from Guwahati, in the state of Assam, to Shillong, in Meghalaya, was a wonderful one. This is hill country where smart slant-roofed houses line the highway and where the landscape is clean and green. I love the aroma of the forest. It reminded me of the days I spent in a forest monastery in Togo a decade ago. There was that same freshness. The same vegetative sweetness. (Scent memory amazes me). We passed hilltops shrouded by rain-clouds and palm trees reflected in placid lakes. This was my first experience with ‘natural’ beauty on this trip, and after Mumbai and Calcutta, I didn’t realize how much I missed it.

Meghalaya is predominantly Christian, and as we drove into the region the statues of blue Krishna are replaced with white Christ’s, and the tiny roadside stalls selling rice with pig’s blood, a local specialty, outnumber the vegetarian eateries. The people, too, are different. They look more East Asian than Indian. Once we reached Shillong I was impressed with how clean the city was – again, especially coming from Calcutta. And although this is one of the most economically depressed regions of India, there are no beggars on the streets. I wonder why that is.

The nights are cool. Another relief after Calcutta’s and Mumbai’s swelter.

Of Fireworks and Other Explosions

2008-10-31T06:11:00.001-07:00

Just like the last Hindu celebration I witnessed in Mumbai, I don’t understand Diwali, the “Festival of Lights.” It has something to do with the blue-skinned Krishna’s victory over something or other. Every street in Calcutta had a temporary shrine to Krishna built. Some were tiny modest structures. Others were grand tents several metres high. Inside was a statue of Krishna, trampling his defeated foe with a garland of severed heads around his neck.

Most exciting, though, especially for the young, were the fireworks. People set off fireworks all night long all around the city. These were not professional fireworks displays, but the festivities of individual families who bought their 'crackers' from the markets. I watched from the roof of my hotel as the city lit up all around me. There were so many crackers going off it sounded like a war zone. Once and a while, a burst of coloured flares would rise up in a bouquet from one street or another. Sometimes the fireworks did not have the altitude to reach over the rooftops, and one had to watch for the occasional flash of light from between buildings, or the wall of some tower suddenly light up with colour from the explosions I could not see.

The boy at the hotel said that the fireworks would end at midnight, but they went on all night long. The next morning, scraps of coloured foil and piles of ash and soot littered the street, and there was so much particulate matter still suspended in the air that flights from Calcutta’s airport had to be delayed. They call it the Diwali Effect. It happens every year.

Yesterday I left Calcutta and flew to Guwahati. I arrived just in time for the explosions. I don’t know how much play the attack got in the Western media, but northeastern India is in a crisis right now. Five bombs exploded in Guwahati. Four others blew up in smaller towns in the province of Assam. The bodies are still being counted, but up to 72 people have been killed and hundreds injured. I'll spare you the gruesome details that the papers did not.

I did not hear the bombs go off – I must have been in my taxi from the airport at the time – and I didn’t visit the scenes of the carnage. Instead, I opted to leave Guwahati and head to Shillong, a city about a hundred kilometres south where I am scheduled to meet the governor tomorrow. Our driver had to take an alternate route to Shillong since the bombing shut down the main highway. We were lucky to get out when we did, because a curfew was imposed and the roads going in and out of Guwahati were closed.

The mood is somewhat tense here in Shillong as well, even though we are in a different province. There are police on the roundabouts, and last night, at ten o’clock, a half-dozen police knocked on my hotel room door. They were going from room to room making sure that all the guests had good reasons to be in Shillong.

Considering that most commentators blame jihadists from Bangladesh for the bombings, my research into the border fence has suddenly taken on a whole new urgency.

So Happy This Didn't Happen to Me

2008-10-26T06:30:00.000-07:00

(I don't know if I am allowed to just cut and paste stories from The Globe and Mail onto this blog, but I can't resist posting this one.)

TRIPPING: RIDING THE RAILS IN INDIA
Flush from embarrassment

RITA PARIKH

Special to The Globe and Mail

October 18, 2008

It didn't come crashing to a shrieking halt. Bags didn't fly missile-like from overhead racks. And people didn't tumble into the aisles.

Instead, all was calm as the train rolled gently to a standstill: This is what happens when you pull the emergency stop?

We were two weeks into our journey across Western India, heading north from Udaipur through the colourful state of Rajasthan. And we were relaxed for a change.

After our white-knuckle drives on India's treacherously narrow highways (where the still-smoking wreckage of transport trucks seemed part of the natural landscape) and agonizingly long journeys on buses vibrating with Bollywood music, spending a night on a train felt like a walk in the park.
Print Edition - Section Front

Indeed, rail travel in India is a fantastic way to see the place. More than 63,000 kilometres of track criss-cross the country's 29 states, and more than 13 million passengers ride the rails each day, staggering numbers by any measure.

You can travel first, second or third class. You can standing room only, or opt for an air-conditioned sleeper, complete with freshly-laundered sheets. You can also travel in the privacy of your own spacious cabin. Or, if you're a woman travelling solo, hop on a female-only car.

Best of all, you can open your windows to the scents of sea and spice (and diesel), and to the calls of touts and hawkers peddling chai and spicy samosas.

Much as I was enjoying this heady awakening of my senses, though, I was distracted by the rumblings of my stomach. So with some trepidation - what would a toilet used by hundreds of millions of people look like? - I headed off to the washroom.

Thankfully, Indian Railways is the world's largest state employer and I had little to fear. Somebody, clearly, must be assigned to clean the toilets. And now it was up to me. I glanced at the sign posted on the wall behind the toilet: Flush before and after use, its bold, black letters advised; in front of the sign dangled a bright, red, chain.

I shrugged and pulled hard, staring down at the toilet. But there was only silence. It was then that I noticed the foot pedal on the floor. And in a flash, the adrenalin began to course through me.

With a gentle sigh, the train started to slow and I made my way quickly back to my seat.

"It's stopping," I whispered anxiously to my unconcerned partner.

"Uh huh," he said, not looking up from his book.

"You don't understand. I did it. I pulled the emergency stop!" I could hear the panic in my voice as he stared at me in amazement.

We glanced at the sign posted across from our seat: "To stop train, pull chain," it read. "Penalty for use without reasonable and sufficient cause, fine up to Rs. 1,000 and/or imprisonment up to one year."

I imagined police, angry passengers, a year behind bars. I could pay the 1,000-rupee fine (about $20). But would I get to choose?

And then, in a small voice, the child within me spoke. "Do you think they'll know it was me?"

Within a minute I heard shouts and saw men gathering around our rail car. We poked our heads out the window and followed the fingers pointing upward.

Busted. A small red flag flew accusingly from an opening in our roof.

"It was me," I yelled, anguished. "It was an accident!"

And then I watched in horror as word of an "accident" spread like wildfire through the car.

"No, no. It was me." I said, struggling to get the story back on track. "I thought I was flushing the toilet."

More shouts, more head-shaking, more quizzical expressions. Finally, a passenger beside me leaned out the window, translating.

Silence. Disbelief. Then, miraculously, laughter. Giggles and chortles and outright guffaws. Rail travel in India is nothing if not entertaining.

I can't remember if I ever made it back to the washroom on that trip. But with no fine, no jail term, no major public humiliation, that train journey remained a relief.

Comedians and Street Sleepers

2008-10-25T06:03:00.001-07:00

It is amazing to me the two societies that exist here. There are the middle and upper classes who go to work in their business suits and dress up for weekends at the nightclubs. And there is the population that lives just beneath their knees on the ground and in the dirt, the people that seem miniaturized by poverty. The two groups occupy the same space at the same time, but might as well be on different planets. And neither group seems relevant to the other aside from the occasional coins that drop into someone’s tin cup.

The other night I saw both sides. I watched the Canadian comedian Russell Peters perform at the Science City auditorium in eastern Calcutta. With ticket prices starting at $25, this was an event for the upper classes only. It was a great show. Peters’ parents are originally from Calcutta and this was the first time he performed a show here. The crowd – dressed in shiny saris, high heels and sports jackets – welcomed him like a favourite son. They even laughed when he ridiculed Indian film stars and mused about what Bollywood-inspired porn films might be like.

After the show, I decided to walk back to the centre of town rather than try for a taxi. It was around ten o’clock and the shops in this part of Calcutta had been closed for some time. Along the sidewalks were the street people. (One Indian journalist I read calls them ‘starvelings.’). There was one about every hundred metres, sleeping on the pavement. Some dozed beneath trucks or rickshaws. Some had a scrap of cardboard to sleep on. Others a sheet of cloth or plastic. One man on the Circus Street flyover even had a small pillow. But the most ragged slept directly on the ground.

I wonder if these people choose where they sleep. Why this stretch of pavement or this traffic median and not the next? Are they in the same place every night? Or do they wander until they are tired, then simply lay down?

I passed a one couple that was still awake. A man and a woman, camped out on a flattened carton and leaning against the side of a building. They had their arms around each other and sat there smiling and laughing as if at a picnic in a park.

At the Bangladesh Border

2008-10-25T06:00:00.002-07:00

The official at the Border Security Forces office with the small cheery moustache laughed when I told him I wanted to see the border fence at Jayantipur. “That is impossible,” he said. “It is a restricted area.” Otherwise, he and the other soldiers in the office were friendly and happy to answer all my questions. They told me that in some places, the fence separates Indian farmers from their own fields, and that the fence itself was likely inspired by the “Palestinian Wall,” but I couldn’t get anywhere near it.

I had come by train that morning from Calcutta, and even though my intention of seeing the border fence was bust, it was worth coming to the area just to get out of the big city. This was my first foray out of the teeming Indian megopoli since I arrived in the country. It was a relief to be able to breathe the air.

I hired a bicycle rickshaw man with red, paan-stained teeth to bring me from the train station to the border post. At first we were stuck in a jam of similar rickshaws, carts, and bicycles. Most were armed with an old-style squeeze-bulb horn that the drivers honked continually. It sounded like a riot of angry rubber ducks. Eventually the traffic thinned out and I was on a wide road lined with trees and barbers’ stalls. In this part of rural India, the villagers use cow dung for fuel, and nearly all the trees along the road were spotted with the drying brown patties. Each had a hand-print in the middle left by whoever did the splatting. We passed over small rivers and beside clean ponds where women bathed and boys swam. After Calcutta, I was struck by how green everything was. In the cities, even the trees seem grey.

After being denied access to the fence, I walked into Jayantipur anyway, curious as to how far I could go. A teenage boy on a bicycle stopped me. He spoke a little English and when I told him I was just going for a walk he shook his head. “That way is Bangladesh,” he warned. “No-man’s land. Soldiers.” He mimed a soldier firing a rifle. “AK-47!” He beckoned me to follow him back to the main road and offered to double me on his bicycle back to the train station. We rattled back along the main road. My driver – whose Bengali-Muslim name escapes me – was thrilled to have me as a charge. Each time we came upon a friend of his he jerked his thumb back at me, smiled and shouted “Foreigner!”

I returned to Calcutta just in time for the evening rush hour. At the station near the border, the Indians waited in tidy queues to buy tickets, but once the train arrived, it was bedlam. I was swept up in the current of pushing bodies and launched into the train purely under the power of the mob. But this was nothing compared to the scene waiting at the station in Calcutta. There must have been a thousand people fighting to get on the train as the rest of us tried to get off. Again, I had no power over any of my movements. I was ejected from the train by the surge behind me, then forced across the platform to the exit in tiny steps, trying to keep from falling. Or weeping. I’ve never seen anything like this.

Crazier still, was that the street people who sleep on the train platforms did not move. They risked being flattened by a thousand footfalls. I almost stepped on one woman. She lay on the ground, impossibly asleep in her white rags, as the wave of commuters seethed above her and did their best not to trample her to death.

In Calcutta

2008-10-22T07:36:00.001-07:00

In revenge for the burning of his wife, Sati, the God Shiva decided to destroy the universe. The God Vishnu, thankfully, stopped Shiva by flinging a discus at him. The weapon also severed Sati’s charred corpse into 51 pieces which were flung across the landscape. Her little toe landed on the banks of the Hughli River, and became a pilgrimage site that eventually grew into Calcutta: an overwhelming city of some 18 million people.

I arrived in Calcutta by train on Monday, and in describing my first impressions it is hard not to succumb to clichés of poverty. Some of the scenes on the street are punishing. Trios of naked children. Cripples wave their stumps at passersby for donations. Entire families live on a patch of sidewalk. I saw a woman lying on the pavement with two infant children. One was suckling on her breast but the woman herself was unconscious. Beggars plead in my ear and tug on my sleeves. Homes built of scraps of cardboard form against the sides of buildings. Thin men pull rickshaws or push heavy carts. The street vendors sleep on top of their stalls at night. Others sleep on the highway overpasses, inches from traffic.

But alongside of all this is a contemporary thriving city. There are smart Starbucks-clone cafés, juice bars and bookstores patronized by young couples and businessmen. Bollywood stars hawk everything from jewelry to steel rods from enormous billboards. This is not a city of homogeneous squalor, but a place where the desperately poor somehow live alongside the comfortable middle class. Sometimes directly under their feet.

Speaking of feet, I‘ve spent most of my time in India looking down. The uneven sidewalks and pavement sleepers are one reason for this, but everything, it seems is happening at ground level. The sellers, the beggars, the taxi derby are all terrestrial phenomenon. There could be angels soaring above all of this and I would have no idea.

I had an interesting conversation with some new Indian friends on my last night in Mumbai. My hotel was in Colaba, the tourist centre on Mumbai, and I had noticed that I received far less aggressive attention from the touts and souvenir sellers than some of the other foreigners did. The drum sellers and pashima scarf vendors never pestered me after I refused, but I saw the same men tail other tourists for blocks hoping to plead a sale out of them.

I was trying to figure out why this was. I thought that maybe my relatively small stature and conservative dress made me less noticeable to these guys. Compared to some of the enormous dreadlocked Aussies I might as well be invisible. Then I thought maybe I am just dark enough to pass as a local. No one would confuse me for a dark-skinned Bengali, but I could be a Parsi. And on a couple of occasions, men asked me for directions in Hindi assuming I was a local.

But my friends Angad and Tara had a different explanation. They said that these touts and sellers can spot an easy mark a mile away. That is their job, after all, and they have perfected the ability to instantly size up a potential customer. It is not that they don’t notice me, it is that they can immediately tell that I am not interested in buying and nor am I likely to be talked into it. I hadn’t given these guys enough credit. They were reading me right all along.

Thinking about Travel Writing

2008-10-16T22:22:00.002-07:00

Last night I attended a reading and discussion put on by the American Club in Mumbai. An American nature writer and poet named Bruce Berger was in town. After reading some wonderful poetry, Mr. Berger spoke with a moderator, poet Ranjit Hoskote, and the small audience about the writing life.

The discussion turned to travel writing, a genre that Berger also writes in. He talked about how great travel writing used to be, especially in the post-war years when magazines like Holiday published long-form stories by such writers as Paul Bowles. Back then, there were places in the world still to discover and explore. Now, with the global media ad cheap airfare bringing the most far-flung locales within reach – virtually if not actually – there is little left to write about.

Berger’s complaint is a common one, but I feel he is missing something. In a world where there may be no new places to discover or explore, travel writing has changed. It is no longer enough to describe an African marketplace or the beaches on Morocco’s Atlantic Coast. This has already been done. Now travel writers – the good ones, at least – are seeking out narratives in these places, not just scenes. They are looking for people’s stories. They are writing about relevant things, not just postcards.

And perhaps they are doing it in disguise. No one would immediately call the ‘Letters From …’ articles in Harper’s travel writing, but the stories are long dispatches from abroad, usually with some cultural or political focus. I just finished reading a book called AIDS Sutra in which a number of authors of Indian descent, my friend Jaspreet Singh among them, told the stories of the communities in India most impacted by HIV-AIDS. The authors wrote about sex-workers in Kolkata and Andra Pradesh, AIDS orphans and the transgendered in Mumbai, and drug-addicts in Manipur. This is not a travel book by anyone’s definition, yet each story brings to life both people and their place in the world.

Perhaps we have reached the end of our explorations on this earth, but all that means is that those who write about far-away places will have to find more interesting stories. We cannot write about rivers we’ve discovered or mountains we were the first to climb. We can no longer write about ‘first contact’ with ‘the natives.’ Now we have to sit down and listen to them.

What a fantastic opportunity this is. In a time of falling towers, when people are increasingly afraid of the other, we writers are invited to tell the other’s stories. The end of discovery might turn into a golden age of travel writing. Or whatever you want to call it.

Painting the Walls in Mumbai

2008-10-14T22:33:00.001-07:00

“My friends drool over guys. They drool over cars,” said Dhanya Pilo as we walked along Chapel Road in her neighborhood. “I drool over walls.”

Meeting Dhanya and writing about her Walls Project are the primary reasons I am in Mumbai. It is an interesting story. Last year, Dhanya had just finished an internship working with a well-known fashion photographer. The work was exhausting and Dhanya was looking for “something physical” to do. Something that might, as she says "relieve her mind and eyes" and recharge her creativity. She asked her landlord if she could paint one of the walls in the compound. He agreed and Dhanya, along with some of her friends spent the day turning the bland concrete slab into a colorful mural.

This inspired an idea. Dhanya knew that there were no shortage of walls in her neighborhood that could benefit by a few licks of colour. She scouted out potential locations, sought permission from property owners, and engaged the help of the neighborhood’s artistic young people. The streetscape in Dhanya’s small corner of Bandra was was brightened by sudden splashes of colour and design, and Dhanya had found a project that had a long term vision.

Dhanya told me about the moment she knew that her idea became a Project. She had found an abandoned house in a field near where some young boys practiced volleyball. The house used to belong to a famous Indian film star, but was now crumbling. Dhanya asked the neighbors if they thought it would be okay if her friends painted the old walls. The moment they consented Dhanya summoned her friends with her mobile phone. ‘Bring paints,’ she texted them, ‘and bring your cars.’ It was night, and the artists needed to shine the headlights on the walls in order to paint.

Once the cars started arriving and the painting began, residents from all the nearby buildings came out to see what was going on. Someone called the police, but when the officers saw Dhanya and her friends weren’t vandals , they let the artists be. Now Dhanya is a neighborhood celebrity. Residents in the neighborhood call out to her to compliment her on the work, and offer up their own walls to be painted. A group of graffiti artists from France showed up in Bandra and helped paint a couple of murals. Now Dhanya cannot look at a building without thinking of it as a potential canvas.

After receiving some press for the Walls Project, Dhanya got a message from an NGO working in Kamathipura, Mumbai’s largest red-light district. The organization wanted to Dhanya to ‘import’ her project into their neighborhood and involve the sex-workers in bringing some sense of whimsy to the brothel walls.
This is what I am most interested in: the painting of Kamathipura’s walls. I want to write about what the murals might mean in such a neighborhood. And what the walls themselves represent to the people who live there. For those women working in the brothels, does it matter that the walls around them are painted with flowers? If so, why? What can art accomplish there?

Unfortunately, I may not get a chance to find out. I had hoped that the Kamathipura project would have begun around the same time I arrived in Mumbai. (It was a bit of a gamble, I know). But project has still not started and will not begin for at least another week. I’m afraid I will be gone before then. My time in India and Pakistan is short, and the Indo-Bangladeshi Barrier beckons. I also need to get into Pakistan before December or my visa will expire. Writing about the walls in Kamathipura might have to wait for another time.

Mumbai moments

2008-10-12T20:11:00.002-07:00

I don’t understand Hinduism. The philosophy is simple enough, but the rituals and the pantheon of multi-headed and multi-armed gods are beyond my understanding.

I witnessed a ritual on Chowpatty Beach the other night. Devout Hindus prayed and sang in front of the statues of goddesses, then they immersed the goddesses in the sea. I watched as a 50-metre effigee of Ravan, the ten-headed demon, was burned to the ground on the beach. The annual triumph of good over evil to the tune of fireworks and flame. That same day, Hindus decorated their vehicles with garlands of marigolds. Cyclists hung flowers from their bicycles. Taxi drivers broke melons in front of their cars and crushed limes beneath their tires in a ceremony of blessing.

The rains have just ended and the air is still thick with the moisture of monsoons. There was a whiff of a breeze on the beach that night, but the wind blew from the city out to the sea instead of the other way around. It was as if the water itself coaxed the dirty city air towards it, following the path of the believers who sunk their idols. The next day was the hottest yet, and the marigolds that still hung from car hoods and handlebars had grown as soft as egg yolks.

There are no neutral moments in Mumbai. Everywhere you look there is something that moves you. A man with a henna-reddened beard passes a street stall selling alarm clocks and vibrators. Another stall crushes sugar cane into juice while the bin of discarded splinters attracts flies. Burning incense sticks are rammed into the roots of trees. Bookstalls sell poorly-bound versions of famous novels, and the magazine stands offer the new Indian version of GQ. There are men who sleep on the streets every night. Women shine and sweat in their saris. At the Royal Bombay Yacht Club, wealthy members jive to a live band playing swing tunes and Elvis, while just outside, in front of the Gateway to India, beggar girls offer strings of orange blossoms to strangers in exchange for rupees. Each trip in a taxi is like an amusement park ride.

There is nothing banal in Mumbai.

In the Maximum City

2008-10-08T21:47:00.000-07:00

I am finding it hard to know what to write about Mumbai. This is a city, after all, that has been so well-served by writers far better than I am. And one of them, Suketu Mehta, encapsulated Mumbai in two words: ‘maximum city.’

I didn't know what to expect here. Everyone I know who has travelled to India has spoken about the place in superlatives. It is like 'another planet.' It 'blows the mind.' Still, I've never been attracted to the place. The Islamic world and Africa are more my beat, and if it weren't for this walls project, I might not have visited India at all.

But my first few days here in the maximum city have been exhilarating. The streets here are like nothing I've ever seen before. They are so filled with colour and industry. Men and women sit on the pavement and thread marigolds into garlands. Streetside shops crush sugar cane into juice or press paan into betel leaves. Black and yellow taxis avoid accident by inches as they serve around pedestrians and cyclists whose bravery borders on madness. Everywhere is the smell of incense, fenugreek and car exhaust. At noon the smog filters the sun and turns the streets to sepia.

I’ve heard about the infinite hassles of India, but in the last two days in south Mumbai I’ve experienced little of it. A young man offered me hashish. Another a pretty girl for a massage. And the taxi drivers in front of my hotel plead for custom. But these offers are without aggression. I am permitted to walk amid the noise unfettered.

I don't know if my mind has been blown, but there is certainly something about this place. (I do know, however, that these are banal and obvious observations. I blame the jet lag.)

Last night I had dinner with Dhanya Pilo, an artist responsible for the Walls Project I am writing about. She and a group of young artists painted the compound walls in Bandra, a Mumbai suburb, with murals and graffitti. It was a way to bring life and beauty to some drab city streets. Since then, a representative from Mumbai's largest red-light district has been in touch with Dhanya asking her to bring her Walls Project to their neighborhood. Sometime in the next few days, Dhanya will join with some of the sex-workers in the district to bring some whimsy to one of the city's most despairing areas. I am looking forward to hearing the women's stories and learning about the walls that surround them.

Literary Gluttony

2008-08-28T12:36:00.000-07:00

Anyone else getting tired of food writing?

I started my freelance career writing about food. A fabulous little bi-monthly food magazine in Calgary called City Palate published my first paid article, an account of my time in Mali's Dogon country drinking millet beer with locals. I went on to write about a dozen or so pieces for the kindly editors at Palate. Nearly all the stories were about eating abroad. Those stories led to a monthly gig at another Calgary magazine writing profiles of local chefs. I hated that column - chefs are rarely as interesting as they think they are - but I managed to churn out ten profiles before abandoning it.

Suddenly, somehow, I was a food writer. My stories about cuisine and restaurants gained far more attention than any of my other work. One year I had written a story about two people I met while traveling in the Middle East: a twenty year-old female army officer and a former Palestinian terrorist-turned-tour guide. (This was pre-September 11th). The story meant a lot to me both personally and professionally, but was completely overshadowed by a puff-piece I wrote about the secret life of waiters. People still mention that waiter story.

The fact was, and still is, that food-writing sells magazines. I have far more success pitching food-related stories than I do any other kind. My first long-ish story for The Walrus was about two famous chefs from Konya, Turkey. EnRoute published a piece about a tavern meal my wife and I enjoyed in Istanbul, and will print a story about a cafe owner and a Chinese restauranteur in Jordan. City Palate still calls me once and a while to ask for material - usually my long-promised diatribe about breakfast diners and eggs - or to contribute to their annual 'Cheap Eats' column. This is surprising considering a number of the places I've recommended in the past have been shut down by the health board.

I've no problem eating food. I still obsess over cuisine when I travel. Just ask my poor wife who I dragged, starving, through Istanbul one summer in search of authentic anchovy pilaf. Just last week we were in Portland where we I visited cinemas that serve pizza and microbrews, and swooned at menus that included such delightful weirdness such as braised lamb BLT's, quail with marrow sauce, and foie gras profiteroles. And I can't wait to fill my stomach in India and Pakistan this fall.

I love the eating. I'm just weary of the writing.

Perhaps it has something to do with what has happened to food. Groceries have become status symbols. You don't believe me, check out the crowds at the Calgary Farmer's Market in their lululemon pants and zillion dollar baby-carriages. Ingredients are fads. Last year you couldn't find a menu without smoked paprika and pork belly. The year before it was pea shoots. Now we are pickling everything. Television chefs are adored for their sociopathology - only in pro-wrestling are villians so popular. Bartenders are mixologists now. Today people refer to themselves as 'foodies' in the same way they used to describe themselves as 'wine connoisseurs.' (Both terms are never used by real experts in food or wine. Mention to your waiter that you are a foodie or a connoisseur and watch his or her eyes roll). Tap water is 'in.' Writing about this stuff feels like prostitution.

Granted, there is some fine food writing out there. I just finished reading John McPhee's essay "Giving Good Weight" about the farmers' markets in New York City during the 1970s. It was fabulous. Saveur Magazine and gastronomica is full of good writing. And, quite frankly, my Konya piece, "Sufi Gourmet," is the best thing I've written in a while. I guess the key for me is that food-writing has to be about culture. Not pop-culture. If I write about food again, it will have to be a story with some meat on it. Something with relevance and real characters. No more empty calories.

Cheap Books

2008-08-08T12:35:00.001-07:00

Hello all.

It was one of those moments that eventually humbles all writers. I recently discovered that the hardcover edition of my last book, Poets and Pahlevans: A Journey Into the Heart of Iran, has been remaindered. This means that it will soon appear on those bargain tables in front of bookstores alongside back-issues of The Believer and books about gardening.

I managed to rescue a couple of boxes of P&P from such a fate and I am selling them cheap to anyone out there in Bloggerstan who might be interested. I will unload them for $12 bucks each; that's less than half of the cover price and cheaper, even, than the paperback edition. If you live in North America, I will pay for the postage. Hell, I'll even sign them.

I am under no illusions that the book will suddenly be a hot commodity among the readers of this blog - I am no doubt related to most of you - so I am not going to set up a PayPal account or anything like that. If you want a copy just email me at harmattan(at)telus(dot)net and we can work something out.

The Forgotten Wall

2008-08-02T15:50:00.000-07:00

Here is a very brief excerpt from the piece I wrote in Banff.

It is a time of no war and no peace. The ceasefire holds but cracks are starting to show. The refugees wait, and though one man says it is courageous to be patient, it has already been more than thirty years. There are more than a hundred thousand refugees and they’ve built a nation out of nothing on wretched hard-packed sand. They are ready to cross over the wall that separates them from home.

The wall is built of sand and stone, but also of rumors, half-truths and bluster. I hear the wall is an Israeli design, and that Americans provided the radar installations. I hear the entire Moroccan army stands along its length. I hear that the minefields that line the wall are veritable catalogues of ordnance: three million mines of every brand and design. Someone tells me the wall is the only thing keeping the Saharawi people from reclaiming their territory. I hear it stretches for 2700 kilometres, and I hear it is much less than that. I hear it is the longest wall in the world.

The Saharawi refugee camps lie on the eastern side of the wall, near the city of Tindouf in the Algerian Sahara. The land is a gift of the Algerian government, but it is not much of an offering. It is called the Hamada du Draâ, a rocky limestone plateau covered with sand and devoid of beauty. The few plants that survive here grow armed with thorns. This land is far from imagined desert scenes. Like most of the Sahara, there are no sudden green oases here, and no slow shift of curving dunes. Instead, there is only pallor and the whip of winter gales.

Only the Saharawi themselves interrupt the paleness. The men walk through the camps in blue or white robes that crinkle like tissue, embroidered with gold thread, and fragrant with tea steam and tobacco. The women swaddle their bodies in colors that don’t exist in the natural desert. Bold reds. Tie-dyed blues and greens and purples. The colorful fabrics keep the skin beneath cool and colourless. Pale skin, pale as the desert itself, is prized among the women here. I find this vanity strange. But then again, here on the barren plain, it is perplexing that there is any life at all.

Leaving Banff

2008-08-02T15:35:00.000-07:00

Today is the last day of the Literary Journalism Program and my last afternoon in 'The Hemingway'. It has been a wonderfully fruitful month. With the help of a careful editor and the the suggestions of my writing mates, I have managed to put together a polished first chapter of my 'walls' project. I also made a pile of contacts in Canada's writing community, shared ideas for new stories, and drank enough wine and bourbon to float a king's ship. The post-Banff detox starts Monday.

The environment here at the centre is like no other. Besides the other writers, the place is crawling with creative types. The writers hosted a party on Thursday night that was attended by opera singers, dancers, lighting designers, actors, visual artists, costume designers, and classical musicians. I will likely never attend an event with that sort of crowd again, and so I am feeling rather melancholy about leaving this place.

When I return to Calgary I will begin planning the next research trip for this book. I will fly to India in October and look at the walls along the Pakistan, Bangladesh and, possibly, the Burma border. Then I will travel to Pakistan, Iran and the Gulf States. I am also interested in visiting Kandahar in Afghanistan. The Canadian military is building a wall of stone and brick around the university so Afghan students, especially women, can feel secure attending classes. I am unsure, however, of the logistics about traveling in a war zone.

In the Hemingway

2008-07-15T10:33:00.001-07:00

Greetings all.

I am currently, and blissfully, ensconced in my forest studio at the Banff Centre. I am one of eight writers enjoying a residency as part of the Literary Journalism Program. We will be here for a month working on new projects with the aim of having a long magazine piece ready at the end. I am working on turning my experiences in the Saharawi refugee camps into a viable chapter for my book. So far, it has been going well.

Today the group of writers, and our three editors, will gather to discuss my first draft. I am excited to hear what they have to say. These folks are not only excellent writers but close readers as well.

The Banff Centre is a paradise for artists. I am surrounded by ballet dancers and opera singers. The path to my cabin passes a collection of music huts, so the sound of classical cello, violin, and flute welcome me to work each morning. Each of the writers in the program are given a studio to work in while they are here. Mine is called the Hemingway. And although the studio is named after the architect Peter rather than the writer Ernest, seeing the name above the door gives me something to shoot for.

If any of you are within striking distance of Banff this month, the writers in the program will be reading from their work on Monday the 21st at 8pm. In addition to hearing me go on about walls and deserts you will hear from writers working on a number of interesting topics including Palestinian hip-hop, traffic as a metaphor for chaos in Italy, a GoogleEarth-obsessed 80 year-old who grew up in Nazi Germany, and the psychology of whales.

There will be free wine.

Writer-in-Residence

2008-06-04T12:15:00.000-07:00

I have some happy news to report.

I've been chosen as the University of Calgary's 2009-2010 Writer-in-Residence. My residency begins in August 2009 - which is perfect, as I should be done the bulk of my traveling for this 'walls' project by then - and will last for ten months. I will be responsible for helping new writers with their own work, but the bulk of my time will be spent writing. Writing, writing, writing. The university generously provides me with an office and a salary for this purpose.

It is a wonderful gift, and I am humbled by it.

Home

2008-06-02T16:22:00.000-07:00

Hello all.

I am home now where I will stay until the beginning of July when I begin a month-long residency at the Banff Centre of the Arts. I will use my time in the 'Literary Journalism' program to turn my scrawled notes from the Western Sahara into a legible first chapter of the Walls book.

My next research trip for this project will begin in October. I will head to the Indian sub-continent to investigate the walls that seperate India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma and Iran. I hope to also visit the Farghana Valley in Central Asia and see the wall along the Uzbekistan-Kyrgystan border. It will be an exciting trip, and I am most anxious to return to Iran, a country I got to know and love while writing my last book.

So, until the fall, I will be updating my blog only once in a while, and from environs decidedly less exotic than northern Africa. In the meantime, a recently published story about my honeymoon in Georgia can be found here:
http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/swerve/story.html?id=024f8ac8-99f5-436d-8255-188a35a827ba

More Melilla

2008-05-25T07:44:00.001-07:00

I am back in Tangier now and rounding out my last few days on this trip. I will back in Canada on Wednesday, if all goes well. I am looking forward to getting home, moreso than on any of my other travels. I miss my wife, my friends, my family and the easy conversations. I've also never returned from a trip with so much to do.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I spent the last several days in and around Melilla. I slept most nights in the village of Beni Ensar on the Moroccan side of the frontier. This border area is the ugliest place I've seen in Morocco. The streets are torn up for roadworks and there are heaps of rubble and wire everywhere. The winds from the Atlantic cast about the trash bags and dust. Puddles of grease stain the ground along with the slugs of mucus left by spitting men. Stray dogs limp around the streets afraid of everyone except for the teenage boys who huff slovents from dirty rags. At night, the streetlights flicker and men fight.

It is a shock crossing the border into Spain. There are smugglers everywhere. They are mostly old women who carrying huge bundles on their backs, or tie items beneath their clothes with twine. The word 'smugglers,' is not quite right. It suggests something furtive and secret. There is no doubt what these women are doing, but as long as they drop a few coins into the palms of the Moroccan border police everyone is happy.

I went to investigate the 'wall' and I found it means different things to everyone in the city. It was built to keep out illegal migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, but the migrants find other ways in. And once they are inside, the wall takes on a different meaning. As I wrote earlier, it becomes a symbol of imprisonment. It was built to keep them out, but now it reminds them are trapped within.

For the Spanish 'Christian' population in Meilla, the wall represents a barrier between their life in Europe - with tapas bars, bull fights and art modernista - with the wilds of Morocco. For centuries, Spain's primary adversary has been the Moors, and this wall represents another facet of ancient animosities. This is our side. That is yours.

But for the 'Muslim' population in Melilla, the wall means little. The border is fluid. They can come and go, legally and illegally, without much problem. The Muslim's are more concerned about what, if anything, their European citizenship means to them. Melilla's largest slum, dubbed the 'Canyon of Death,' lies just inside the border fence. Residents here are Melilla's poorest and are treated with disdain from the 'Spanish' elite. Steel wires and barbed wire are more forgiving that poverty and bigotry.

Thinking about walls

2008-05-16T07:56:00.000-07:00

My walls project is in its early stages, to be sure, but I´ve been musing a little lately about what all of it means. What do these various walls have in common? What do they tell us?

At first I was thinking that these walls are simply expressions of fear, but I think that might be too simplistic a take. I wonder, instead, if the walls are monuments to failure. They represent a lack of ideas and of imagination. The walls are not solutions, but are a manifestation of the failure to find a solution.

Any thoughts?

Border stories: Melilla

2008-05-16T07:08:00.001-07:00

I wandered around Melilla during siesta the other day. I drank espresso and brandy in a cafe near the art deco synagogue, then found a tapas bar behind the old bull-ring. The bartender poured me a short draft beer and cut me a few slices of salty serrano ham. In the old city, at the Church of Our Lady of Victory, a priest said a quiet Mass for five Catholics among the statues of weeping virgins and bleeding Christs. And in the Plaza de Espagña, just in front of the city hall and the modernista casino, two dozen illegal migrants lay on the sidewalk weary from their third day of a hunger strike.

Melilla is Spain´s other autonomous enclave on Africa´s Mediterranean coast. It is a fascinating place that takes great pride in its mix of cultures. Christians, Jews, Muslims and a scattering of Hindus all live in relative harmony in the city. Each group sticks to their own, but everyone seemed to get along, and the local tourist board portrays the city as a rare beacon of tolerance.

But everything is not well. Just like Ceuta, Melilla is a popular destination for African and south Asian migrants trying to live the European dream. Once here, however, most find that they are stuck. They languish in the immigrant detention centre, some for years, waiting for passage to mainland Spain. Many end up deported to where they came from. The strikers on the square - Algerians and Indian Kashmiris - are tired of waiting and hope their action speeds things along. Sadly, though, no one is paying much attention.

Melilla´s ´wall´is a high-tech fence that runs for 11 kilometres along the Moroccan border. The green-posted structure leans into Morocco and has a distinct reptilian look. Three high fences are equipped with motion-detectors and barbed wire. A ´moat´seperates the first and second fences is filled with a tangle of steel cables meant to trap jumpers. It is impressive. At one point, a vine of pink flowers breached the barbed wire and were growing across the cables, but since the Spanish erected the fence two years ago, no human has made it through.

The fence is clearly visible from the immigrant detention centre. It is just outside the front gate and across the road. The irony is that the residents of the centre made it into Melilla by circumventing the fence. They paddled in on overfilled boats, strapped themselves under trucks, and stuffed their bodies into the trunks of cars. In a way, they defeated the wall. But now the wall has become a symbol. It is a visible reminder that they are trapped here, not by the fence itself, but by bureaucracy, politics, and poverty. I asked a man at the centre what he thought when he looked across the road at the wall. He was from India and said in imperfect English ¨I feel terrible. I feel like we are bounded here.¨

While I stood outside the centre, an African woman came out of the front gate on a bicycle she borrowed. Her braided hair bounced in a pony tail as she pedalled up the hill in front of the fence. Two of her friends came out to watch. When she reached the top she turned around and coasted back down. She lifted her hands from the handlebars, and her friends cheered her bravery. Once she reached the bottom, she pedaled back up the hill, getting breathless, and sailed down again past the wire, barbs and steel.

Border Stories: Ceuta

2008-05-11T12:58:00.001-07:00

I've spent the last week or so in and around Ceuta, one of Spain's two autonomous enclaves in North Africa. Ceuta's border is also Europe's most southern frontier. As such, it is a major destination for migrants from Africa and Asia. If they can get into Ceuta, they are in Europe without risking a deadly sea crossing.

The border fence around Ceuta is remarkable: two tall fences seperated by a road for border patrol vehicles. Huge coils of barbed wire and electronic sensors. From a distance, and I was only permitted to see it from a distance, the fence has an unexpected beauty. It emerges from a thick forest and juts out into the sea in an elegant curve. It reminds me of the silver filigree in Morocco's jewellery souqs. Like a fine bracelet for some fantastic bride.

This beauty is lost, I am sure, on the men who try to scale the fence. I met one of them in Plaza los Reyes, a polished square in Ceuta's shopping district. His name is Jeffery James and he is from the Sudan, and when I met him he was begging for coins. I sat with him for a while and he told me about trying over twenty times to climb the fence. He had been beaten by soldiers, had his flesh torn by barbed wire, and deported to the no man's land between Algeria and Morocco many times, but always made his way back to the fence.

He was lucky the last time. He wore thick jeans and tied cloth around his hands. And he put on three jackets; each time he was snagged by the wire he shed a layer and carried on. Five men attempted the climb that night, but only three made it over before the Moroccan guards caught them. When Jeffrey reached the other side he was taken in to custody by the Spanish soldiers. They didn't believe he made it over the wire, but Jeffrey showed them his jackets still hooked in the barbs.

Jeffrey was brought to an immigrant holding centre called CETI where he will be housed and fed while his immigration application is being considered. There are over 400 migrants in CETI. They come from all over Asia and Africa, and each waits for the opportunity to reach mainland Spain: 'The Peninsula,' they call it. CETI is a safe place, but not a happy one. Nobody wants to be here, jobless, living among strangers, and fed food that they hate. The centre might be a thousand miles closer to Europe than where they began, but it is only a tiny step forward and by no means a certain one. Every month hopeful migrants are deported, usually in the middle of the night.

Five weeks ago, the 72 Indians in the centre got word that they were marked for deportation. Some had been at CETI for almost two years and had absolutely nothing to return to in India. So they decided to flee. Now the young men live in makeshift camps in the hills around CETI, and just behind the local SPCA. They have built tents out of plastic tarps and scrap wood, and fashioned stoves out of broken bricks they've found. They prepare curries from donated food, and grill fresh chapatis on a griddle made from the hood of an abandoned car. Some of the men 'work' outside the big duty-free supermarkets near the port, directing shoppers to parking spots and helping them with their groceries for whatever coins they might spare. And in the afternoons, they play cricket with a tennis ball and a bat they carved from a plank. The penned dogs howl from their kennels, as if they can sense a ball is being thrown nearby.

Mostly, though, the men wait for someone, somewhere, to care enough about their plight to help them. They harbour no illusions. They have come so far. Some crossed the Sahara to get here. Some were stuffed into the trunks of cars. One man spent three months blindfolded on a ship. Now mainland Europe is mockingly close; you can see Spain from the hills. But without papers, without officials working for them, they are as far away from that shore as they have ever been. They all know this.

I spent a few days with the Indians, listening to their stories and trying to play cricket. The men treated me as if I was a guest in their home back in India. They made me beautiful chai with shards of real ginger and spices they pounded fresh. I ate warm chapatis and hot curries. They asked me if I've ever been to Surrey, British Columbia, and whether it was true that there were so many Indians in Canada the street signs are in both English and Punjabi. They laugh often and joke constantly. Their bright spirits made my heart hurt.

At the end of my first visit, one man, Rocky, walked me to the edge of the camp. I asked him if there was anything I could bring them the next time I came. 'We don't need anything,' he said. 'Just pray for us.'

Reconsidering Tangier

2008-05-05T06:29:00.001-07:00

Tangier's reputation intimidated me. The seedy and licentious city the Beats tumbled through in the '50s had long since become a place travelers were urged to avoid. I read about the muggers and the pickpockets and the dangers of the medina. I was ready to find the worst of Morocco. I came to write a story about the old Anglican church, and would stay only as long as I needed to.

Now I have fallen for the place.

The old medina may be the most interesting in Morocco. It is filled with surprises and sudden revelations. The walls change colour as you walk, turning from white and turquoise, to yellow and rose, to red and yellow. Streets end suddenly in blind corners, or onto four-step stairwells leading to locked wooden doors. I got twisted and lost. I followed pencil-thin corridors and passed beneath balconies that brushed against the houses across the lane. At points, the canopy of walls open up to tiny squares with, say, a perfume shop and a teleboutique. The road is paved here, tiled there, and rises and falls without logic.

There are closet-sized shops filled with used televisions and even smaller stores loaded with old shoes. A woman irons trousers under a single light bulb. Boys play video soccer in a room with three computer terminals. There is the sudden damp scent of shampoo from the public showers, and the noise of a television from a huge cafe with high ceilings that seems impossible here where everything else is so small. There are street signs everywhere, but the shops have no names. Nothing here makes sense. It is exhilarating.

In Tangier, mens' beards are longer and whiter. The lunatics are louder, clumsier. The woman are more beautiful here, dressed in bright clinging fabrics. And there are people from everywhere. European travelers get their first or last looks of Morocco in Tangier, and they are either wary or weary. Desperate African men pass through on their way to board night-hidden rafts to Spain. They leave their wives here to tend to the children. Often they simply die in the sea. Women from the Rif mountains come with their woven lampshade hats to sell zucchini and tomatoes. There are aging homosexuals hoping for Naked Lunches, while local men kneel with hash pipes in the backs of the cafes. I walk and write. I swim in it all, just on thrill's edge of drowning.

There is so much to this place, and none of it feels like fear.

The South, under Surveillance

2008-05-01T05:58:00.001-07:00

I am being followed.

At least I was. I found out when I was sitting in a small cafe in Tarfaya eating grilled sardines. Sadat, the man who I came to Tarfaya to meet, came up to my table. "I got three phone calls today about you," he said. "You are the centre of attention. Let's go somewhere else and talk." He brought me to a little cafe run by an old man with hair like white lamb's wool and a cement mixer voice. The authorities had told Sadat that I had met with a known activist when I was in Laayoune and that they wanted to know who I was and what I was up to. Sadat told them that I was a student and was his guest. He also advised me to leave the hotel and move in to his place where I would be left alone.

I had not met with anyone in Laayoune, but I did meet with an activist in Smara, the town where I started my visit to the 'occupied zone.' I wanted to go to Smara because I had heard so much about the place when I was in the camps. In fact, one of the camps is named for Smara. Smara is also the closest city the 'the Wall.' I figured a visit here, to the other side, would be a poetic echo to the place I'd seen in the Algerian desert.

Smara is a beautiful city, with a surprising vibrancy to it considering its location far from anything but an oppressive heat. The nights are especially active with the streets filled with shoppers and walkers, and the cafes jammed with men watching European soccer on satellite television. After being a tourist in the 'north', it was refreshing to be among regular people whose welcomes were not edged with commerce.

I had one o my best meals in a while in Smara. On a street filled with meat shops, a butchers hacked off a few bits of lamb for me, slapped them into a plastic bag, and pointed to the grill next door. I handed my meat to the man standing over the coals. He grilled my meat alongside some tomatoes and onions, sprinkled the lot with salt and cumin, and dropped it in front of me with a round of fresh bread. Some days I pity the poor vegetarian.

The activist in Smara didn't tell me much that I didn't already know about the Saharawi situation. He, like the rest, still hope for Saharawi independance in the face of increasing odds against it. It is likely that my meeting with him in Smara was the reason for my being followed by the authorities.

They must have followed me to Laayoune, the 'capital' city of the south. Laayoune is a strange place. The only neighborhood that is more than 30 years old is in ruins. The central square is called Canary Plaza but has none of the lightness and whimsy that the name implies. Instead it is filled with rubble and trash and a few trees that scarcely have the motivation to grow leaves. The surrounding homes are falling apart, and marked with cracks and lesions. This is the old Saharawi neighborhood.

The rest of the city, though, is new and prosperous. A beautiful new mosque boasts carved plaster and stained glass. It sits on a city square made of spotless tile. The new soccer stadium grows real grass - a near miracle in the desert. The wealth here is inorganic, built of subsidies and tax exemptions, but manufatured prosperity is still prosperity, and the citizens are enjoying a sort of boom that doesn't exist elsewhere in the country.

For all of this, it is an ugly city. I remember speaking to some young women in the camps. They had been born in the camps and had never seen Laayoune, but they were sure the place was beautiful. In the imagination of a refugee, home, wherever it is, must be a beautiul place. Why else fight to return there?

From Laayoune I went to the fishing town of Tarfaya. The place is just north of the disputed territory, but is was here that the Green March of 1975 set off to claim the Western Sahara for Morocco. It is also the place where tea was first introduced to the people of the desert by a British trader passing through on his way home from India. The fortress he built still stands in the surf a few metres from the dune-curved beach. I came to meet Sadat, a kind man who is the only Saharawi I met who doesn't believe that independance is a realistic goal for the Saharawis. He is a community development worker who focuses on keeping Saharawi culture alive, but he is not convinced that a sovereign Saharawi state is an attainable goal. It was valuable for me, and for the book, to gain this differing view.

I stayed in Tarfaya for a few days, a guest of Sadat and under the eyes of what ever authorities followed me this far. I was rattled by the news that I was being monitored. Everybody warned me that this would happen, but just the thought of men in uniform in different cities calling each other and talking about 'that Canadian' burns a hollow in my chest. I wasn't afraid. I'd broken no laws and gave them no reason to arrest me. Still, the whole episode made me feel uneasy.

I am in Rabat now, en route to the far north where I will begin the second part of the research for the Walls book. I am far from disputed lands and I doubt the officials still care about me. Still, I can't help but look behind me every so often just to see if I've seen any of those faces before.

Solitary and Southbound

2008-04-22T10:02:00.001-07:00

Today I slipped south out of Tiznit and into ochre hills covered in bent trees spaced so far apart you'd think they don't get along. It was my third long roadtrip in as many days. I've traveled south from Casablanca to Essaouria, Essaouria to Tiznit, and Tiznit to Tan Tan where I now sit. Each journey has been about five hours long, and I've got another haul to Smara tomorrow. Yesterday, at least, the day ended with my greatest shave yet. My barber literally kissed my freshly-smoothed cheeks when he was finished.

And today, at least, I was not on a bus. I managed to hitch a ride on a truck loaded with bottles of mineral water. It was not a cheap ride, but I figured if we got lost in the desert at least we wouldn't dehydrate.

It feels good to be back south. Once again, I am surrounded by women wrapped in great swaddles of coloured cloth, and every man my age or older has a tremendous beard and missing teeth. I am in the Western Sahara, but I am not sure if I am in 'disputed territory' yet. There were a few checkstops en route, but my driver breezed through them pretty quickly by dropping a ten dirham coin into each officer's hand. He turned to complain to me after each time, shaking his head and saying 'Morocco is zero!'

Since Moonira returned to Canada a few days ago I've been thinking a little about traveling with someone else and trying to write. I realized that in order for me to engage with another place enough to be able to write about it I have to travel alone.

Please understand. I love traveling with my wife. We had glorious fun on our honeymoon and in Morocco this month. It was two weeks of real hotels, Moroccan wine, ocean sunsets, sandstorms, leather slippers and walks along the beach. More than all this, though, I adore Moonira's openness to the world and her kindness to the strangers we meet. Each time we travel I discover new reasons to love her.

From a writer's perspective, however, when I travel with someone else I learn more about them than I do about the place we are in or the people that surround us. This is fine for a vacation, but I find that when I sit down to write about 'our' travels instead of 'my' travels that I've missed the details that good travel writing requires.

It is true that I wrote three magazine pieces based on experiences Moonira and I had on our honeymoon, but these were happy exceptions. In each case the story presented itself as a complete narrative. I wrote about a dinner we had in Istanbul, a night among drunk Georgian men in a Tblisi tavern, and a weird festival in the hills of Adjara. These stories came complete with characters, plot and drama. As a writer, I had to do little else other than remember. Other than these sorts of rare, 'ready-to-write' experiences, I find that I only catch all the nuancess I need as a writer when I travel alone.

I used to think, somewhat romantically, that the world only reveals itself to the solitary traveler. Now I believe that only the solitary traveler has the space to see what the world is willing to reveal.

Best Menu Mistranslation Ever?

2008-04-20T14:10:00.001-07:00

Hello all.

The vacation is over and I am back on writer duty. I am in Essaouria now and will head south tomorrow. I will write a proper post soon, but in the meantime I want to pass along a little item from a restaurant menu here in Essaouria.

Apparently, at Restaurant des Arches you can order Filet of soil on the Mexican.

Sounds delicious.

In Morocco with Wife

2008-04-13T05:31:00.001-07:00

Most of those reading this blog will know that the reason why the updates suddenly stopped about a week ago was because this was when my wife, Moonira, joined me here in Morocco. We have been on vacation, both from our respective jobs - the research for the walls book being my 'work' - and, it seems, from this blog. Moonira is still traveling with me now, but I thought I should take a few minutes to let everyone know that I am still alive.

The vacation has been wonderful, though hardly relaxing. For all their wonders, Marrakesh and Fes are hardly the sorts of places where one unwinds. We spent our first few days in these cities and found ourselves in constant battle with taxi drivers, hotel touts, phony guides and vendors selling everything from carpets to hashish to the opportunity to pose with a Barbary ape on our shoulders. (We turned down all these offers). Aside from a kindly barber - Reda, who gave me the two best shaves of my life - all the Moroccans we met seemed interested only in separating us from our money.

I didn't feel at ease among the locals until Moonira and I got on the road, in the buses and grand taxis with everyday people who had better things to do than sell us junk. We traveled overnight to M'hamid, only a few kilometres from the Algerian border, where we undertook the requisite camel trek. Our voyage into the 'Dunes of the Jews' took place during a sandstorm but as my eyes filled with sand and my ass slowly turned to pulp I felt, for some reason, that this was a very Canadian thing to do.

There are many images from the last week I could write about: Drinking tea brewed from local saffron in Talouine and spiced coffee in the Marrakesh medina. Hitching a ride in Mercedes driven by a young man with stomach troubles. Drinking champagne on a Marakechi rooftop terrace. Walking through the palm groves of the Draa River valley. Sharing our taxis and buses with fabric-wrapped Saharawi ladies and Berber women clad in black shawls edged with dingle balls. Shopping for turbans and gilabas. And did I mention those wonderful shaves?

Algiers to Marrakesh

2008-04-01T08:13:00.000-07:00

Five weeks ago, when I first arrived there, I didn't like Algiers very much. The city disappointed me because it was a place I expected to love right away and I didn't. In my journal I wrote mainly that the coffee was good and that the men constantly spit on the sidewalk.

But the last two days I spent in Algiers were altogether different, and I am not sure why. Maybe it was because I was leaving Algeria the next day and needed the pleasant farewell, or maybe it was because the skies were so clear and blue, but my last days in Algiers completely sold me on the city. I didn't notice the young men and women holding hands on my first visit. Or the good restaurants with cheap beer on tap. Or how the Casbah seems formed by some sort of civil tectonics, as if the houses were squeezed together along some fault line, buckled and rose, and now hover over the city in a tangle.

The last man to speak to me in Algiers was a taxi driver in front of my hotel. He offered to take me to the airport but I declined telling him I was going to take the public airport bus. Reflexively, he told me that the bus wasn't running that day. This was, of course, a lie, but it is the perogative of taxi drivers in this part of the world to weasel a fare by any means. It didn't matter that I knew he was lying, and that the bus comes every half an hour all day, every day. If he hadn't told me otherwise than he wouldn't have been doing his job.

I thought of him when I arrived in Marrakesh. The first Morrocan to speak to me was a taxi driver. He, too, told me the bus wasn't running and he, too, was lying. I told him his brother in Algiers would be proud.

I first visited Marakkesh with my sister in 1998 and, like Algiers, I remember not liking it much. But after last night I realized that Sonia and I had made a mistake a decade ago. We arrived at the central square, the famous Djemaa el Fna, in the daylight and watched as it slowly developed into its nightly madness.

This was wrong. Last night, the bus dropped me on the square after dark as the action was at its peak. I was thrown into the midst of it, and had to navigate the clouds of grill smoke, the acrobats, the musicians, the young men on mopeds, and stalls selling sheep's heads and snails and mint tea and lentil soup and fried fish just to find the right narrow street to follow to my hotel.

This is the way to experience Marrakesh. To be thrown in like a virgin into a volcano.

Graham Greene, again

2008-03-28T07:36:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about Graham Greene lately, and not just because of my afternoon drinking with priests. I read Monsignor Quixote on this trip, and am currently re-reading The Lawless Roads.

In Roads, Greene describes the Mexican desert and says that he cannot see beauty in landscapes that are "unemployed or unemployable." For Greene, only land that can be used - fertile, verdant land - is truly beautiful. Only "Romantics" see God in deserts and on barren mountain tops.

I know that Greene traveled in Africa, but I don't know if he ever saw the Sahara. I wonder how Greene would describe Algeria's dunes and palmeries - surely better than I do - but most of all I wonder if he would see beauty there.

In Constantine

2008-03-28T07:15:00.000-07:00

I decided to travel north instead of back south for S'bou. I have only a few days left in Algeria so I wanted to travel to places I haven't yet been rather than return to Timimoun.

So I am in the north where the orange trees are not yet in bloom but the hills are green and the air cold.

Constantine is another one of Algeria's 'dramatic' places. Just as Taghit and Beni Abbes startle the visitor with dunes, Constantine does it with cliffs and bridges. The city is built on a massive rock cliff surrounded by a river valley. It seems an unlikely place for a city. Too high. Too unreachable. A place for gods rather than men. Fantastic bridges link the city to the 'mainland' and these bridges are what Constantine is most famous for. I waited out a morning rainstorm then made my way across and back the great spans of iron and stone, realizing that I am developing vertigo as I age.

Easter with the White Fathers

2008-03-26T04:54:00.001-07:00

It was a scene out of a Graham Greene novel: Africans, Catholics, priests and whisky.

I'd been looking forward to meeting the White Fathers in Ghardaia for some time. The Peres Blancs have been ministering to African communities for a long time now, and maintain a library of books about the cultural, religious and natural history of the Sahara. In Algeria, the Fathers serve a very small community of Christians but focus most of their efforts on establishing dialogue between Christians and Muslims. It seems like a very contemporary goal, one that became suddenly important in the last decade, but the White Fathers have been commited to this work for over a hundred years.

I arrived in time for Easter mass and was greeted at the gate by an English priest, Father John. The opportunity to speak easy English was delicious; I've been struggling with French and have not had a real conversation with anyone for weeks. The church service, though, was mainly in French. It was ministered by a priest from Tanzania and there were prayers sung in Swahili, the readings were translated into Polish, and the Lord's Prayer was sung in Arabic.

It was a beautiful service, even for this retired Catholic. For all my abandonment of my religious belief, religious ritual still inspires me. To quote Tom Robbins, "To practise a religion can be very beautiful. But to actually believe in one can be deadly."

(My mother won't like that last quote, but she was happy to hear I made it to church on Easter.)

The Fathers invited me to join them for lunch, and almost immediately bottles of gin and scotch appeared. I drank a dram with the priests, then some watery wine from northern Algeria. We talked about my writing and their work among the Algerians, and enjoyed a wonderful meal. One priest spent a few years in Montreal and the White Sisters that were present came from places like Burkina Faso, the Congo and Rwanda. When I left hermitage Father John shook my hand and said he was happy to make me feel a little at home.

I returned to the next day to use their library and to meet the Bishop of the Sahara who was passing though Ghardaia on his way to Algiers. The Bishop represents the second largest diocese in the world (Siberia is the largest) but ministers to the smallest congregation. Unfortunately, the Bishop had very little time to spare with me, but I hope to return to Ghardaia and write a story about the Bishop and the White Fathers.

Wedding Night Jitters

2008-03-22T07:48:00.000-07:00

Just when I thought my French was getting better...

Last night I was listening to a shopkeeper across from my hotel tell me about the traditions of the Muslims in the area. He was talking in French and I was pretty proud of myself that I was understanding most of what he was saying.

Then he told me that he was circumcised on his wedding night.

At least that's what I thought he said. Either my French is failing me again or there are some rituals around here that seem both counter-intuitive and counter-productive.

The Mozabites

2008-03-22T07:25:00.001-07:00

There are only a few communities ofIbadi Muslims in the world. There are Ibadis in Oman, a few in Libya and Tunisia, and a large community here in the M'zab Valley around the town of Ghardaia where I have been staying for the past few days.

Ibadis are very conservative and do their best to isolate themselves from people with other beliefs. Here in the M'zab that means that the old Ibadi towns are walled and most insist that foreigners come inside only if accompanied by an Ibadi guide. This sounds rather unfriendly and xenophobic, but as long as foreigners do not smoke cigarettes in the presence or take photos of women and children, everything is fine. I wandered through one of the towns that does not require a guide the other day, and was treated with sincere welcome.

The old towns and the Ibadis traditional dress are all designed with the desert climate in mind; temperatures in the valley can reach 48 degrees in the summer. Homes are painted in light pastels to reflect much of the sun, and village streets are kept narrow and shaded. Men wear trousers with fabulous pleated crotches that hang don to their ankles - any waiter who has ever worked a patio shift in the summer can understand the logic here in this. Their white caps also work to reflect back the sunlight.

But, as is so often the case in this part of the world, the women are the most interesting. They wrap themselves in a sort of chador made of thick white cotton. Unmarried women keep their faces uncovered, but once a woman is married she pulls the cloth over her face so there is only a small hole for one eye to look out of. I still haven't gotten usd to seeing these ghostly, peeking, women. I am resisting the temptation to wink at them. I am sure that would be frowned upon.

I will stay for a few more days and attend Easter mass at the church of the White Fathers, an old Christian mission that has been around since the 19th century. They maintain a library of books about the Sahara that I would like to see before I go.

The orange trees are blossoming now, and the streets are thick with the perfume. With this fragrance, and the soft colours of the streets, this is a very beautiful place to be.

The Occidental Tourist

2008-03-19T01:41:00.001-07:00

Since my last post I finished a circuit of the Grand Erg Occidental which took me from Taghit to the oasis towns of Beni Abbés, Timimoun and, now, Ghardaia. It occured to me I've written mostly about the landscape here and not about the people. That has been an omission.

My favourite moment with the Algerians of the Erg came on the journey from Beni Abbés to Timimoun. Our bus stopped to pick up a large family who were waiting on the side of the highway. There were not enough seats for all of them, but as soon as they boarded the bus the other passengers reached out to hoist the small children onto their laps. The children didn't cry. They didn't fuss. They simply endured a few kisses and pinches then fell asleep in the arms of strangers. When the bus began to move, the father - with white robes, a loose white turban, and great yellow teeth - looked around to ensure all his children had a friendly lap to sit in. Then he settled into his own seat. It was a tender moment that speaks to the kindness of the people here.

There are other images from the past few days that will stay with me. The young men in Taghit who spontaneously began to sing and dance and drum in honour of the Propet's birthday, still days away. The women who wear cloth over their noses and mouth that look like surgical masks fringed with lace. The crumbling state-run hotels with great wooden bars, broken tiles and empty swimming pools that must have seemed grand 40 years ago. The butchers in Beni Abbés who lay freshly-severed camel heads on the sidewalks in front of their shops by way of advertisement, the blood trickling across the pavement. The way even strangers say hello to each other.

The Prophet Mohammed's birthday is tomorrow but the biggest celebration happens in Timimoun on the 27th. I will return there for the fesitval. In the meantime, I will spend the next few days, including my own birthday, here in the M'zab Valley among the Ibadi Muslims, the White Fathers and the palm groves.

Taghit Oasis and the Search for New Superlatives

2008-03-15T03:36:00.002-07:00

There are places in the world that can defy a travel writer's art. There are scenes that are so breathtaking that they completely defeat him. I feel that dunes of Taghit have defeated me.

Taghit is an oasis village on the edge of the Grand Erg Occidental, Algeria's western sea of sand. It is a small place with one main road, a big empty hotel, a post office, a Martyr's Square (does every city in the Islamic world have a Martyr's Square?) and a few cafés that are masculine temples to idleness. That is all.

But the dunes that hover over the village make Taghit smaller still. As my bus crested the hill that overlooks Taghit to the north, the scene was remarkable. I grew up near the Rocky Mountains so I am familiar with massive landscapes, but this is different. Even when they are beautiful, mountains are hard and forbidding. They are rocky and, therefore, harsh. The dunes that tower over the Taghit oasis are the opposite of this. It seems impossible that things so huge, so overwhelming, can also seem so soft.

The dunes change colour as the daylight changes. In the early morning they are a pale yellow and remind me of enormous lions laying on the landscape. They are most beautiful, though, at dusk when they turn deep orange, like the crema on the espressos I drink in those idle cafés.

Dusk is also the time of day when the frogs sing in the palmerie. On the other side of the village is the valley where the palm trees grow. They form a strip of unlikely green where farmers grow dates and figs and fava beans. A fresh water spring feeds the gardens through channels dug in the dirt. Unfortunately, nothing is being harvested at this time of year. There are no dates in the palms, and the figs are still as small as grapes.

At the beginning and the end of things

2008-03-10T08:02:00.001-07:00

I am in Ain Sefra now. Here is where the Atlas Mountains end and the Grand Erg Occidental, the Sahara's great western sea of sand, begins. Or it is where the mountains begin and the sand sea ends. A traveler decides his parameters based on the place he most wants to be. That is his perogative. So, for me, this is the beginning of the desert I've been waiting to see.

Algeria does not ease into desert; the desert happens all at once. As my bus curved into Ain Sefra on its way south from Tlemcen, there it was. A stretch of pinkish dunes rising over the town. The dunes lay upon the landscape with such lightness you could imagine them floating away in an instant. I wouldn't be surprised if I woke up in the morning and they were gone.

I walked through town and found it was market day. The weekly souk has a delicious African chaos about it with piles of fresh peas, baby turnips, and blue-black eggplants. Young men with mirrored sunglasses try to sell cassette tapes of American hip-hop by playing them so loud the music warbles and squeaks. As I travel south, tea will replace coffee as the drink of choice in the cafes, so I will have to drink my fill before I go too far.

On the edge of the dunes, there are pine trees among the palms. The smell reminds me of home.

In Tlemcen

2008-03-08T05:25:00.001-07:00

I am still in Tlemcen, in northwestern Algeria, paying for my laziness. I didn't feel like doing my desert-dirty laundry so I brought it to a cleaners. It will take two days to wash, which is actually three because I straddled the Friday holiday. And they won't be done until tomorrow in the late morning which means I won't be able to catch the early bus south. So that is another day I have to stay here. Next time I am washing my own damn clothes.

There are worse places to be stuck, though. This is a very pretty town with pastel coloured houses, Moorish architecture, and buildings decorated with plaster cherubs and flowers and other confections left over from the French. Men wear djlebas and woollen caps against the cold and crowd the cafes smoking cigarettes and drinking some of the best espresso I have ever had. Another French legacy. The countryside is verdant and green, almost otherwordly so, but this could be due to the fact that I spent so much time amid the desert's beiges and greys. I am not used to such flora.

I lost a bunch of weight in the desert. Living off of camel meat and endless cups of tea will do that to someone. Now, in the north, it seems impossible to have a meal without fries. My loose jeans will soon be snug again.

Once I get my clothes back I hope to head south to Ain Sefra, then further south. I am going to challenge the popular notion that travelers can't travel south on public transportation without a guide. I am just going to keep going until someone turns me back. There is a big religious festival in Timimoun on the birthday of the Prophet, March 20, so I will make that my aim.

I will be traveling to Morocco at the end of this month and I am nervous about it. The Algerians have been extremely kind and accomodating. Never once have I been hassled or even felt that I've been overcharged for anything. People are genuinely welcoming. They even seem to forgive my horrible French. (I actually think my French is getting worse instead of better).

Morocco is going to be the opposite. Full of hustle and hassle. I just hope that Algeria hasn't made me soft.

Last Days Among the Saharawi

2008-03-06T05:08:00.001-07:00

On my last day in the camps I had lunch on the edge of a minefield. I was only about 300 metres from the wall that separates the Saharawi from their homeland. As we sat there eating tuna sandwiches and barbecuing strips of camel meat on the tiny fire our driver prepared, Moroccan soldiers watched us from the top of the wall. I am sure they were happy to see us. Watching us eat lunch and drink tea was probably the most interesting thing the sentinels had seen in weeks.

For me, I was happy to finally see the structure that is the source of so many of the stories I heard in the preceding days. I recorded enough of them, I hope, and enough details about life in the camps to fill a chapter of my new book. I am looking forward to writing about the elaborate tea preperations and how many Saharawi women cover themselves completely when they are out of doors. This is not an act of religious faith, but of vanity. Pale skin is considered beautiful, and these women are fighting against the sun darkening their skin. My largest focus, though, will be to tell the stories about crossing over the wall and abandoning homes, friends, family and even ones own children for the relative security of the refugee camps.

In spite of their remarkable tales of escape, seperation, and exile I was most impressed with the spirit of the Saharawis. They all have heartbreaking stories to tell. They live in terrible conditions and have been waiting for over thirty years to return to lands stolen from them. Yet they are not a miserable people. They remain confident and welcoming. I was treated with such generosity from these people, and they have such little to give.

Photos from the Camps

2008-03-01T14:38:00.001-07:00

Here are a few of my favourite photos from my days in the Saharawi refugee camps.

This girl was part of the parade marking the Saharawi 'National Day', February 27th. They celebrated the day before, however, because all the foreigners who were in the camps for the race were leaving on the 27th.

A Saharawi woman waits for a ride in the blowing sand. The weather was like this on the day before and the day after the marathon. Fortunately, race day was clear.

These men, in traditional robes and turbans, are huddled against the wind and watching the parade.

Saharawi women in all their wonderful colour. The women cover their faces and hands to protect against the darkening of the sun. Pale skin is prized as beautiful for many women here.

A typical tea service. Tea, and the intricate preparation of tea, is a cornerstone of Saharawi culture. They drink tea all day long from those tiny glasses.

Among the Saharawi

2008-02-26T08:19:00.001-07:00

I feel like I am a long way from anywhere right now.

I am in Smara, the largest of the Saharawi refugee camps in southwestern Algeria. These camps have housed Saharawi people since the mid-1970s when thousands were expelled from their land in the Western Sahara by the Moroccan army. In 1981, the Moroccans built a wall seperating the refugees from their homeland. The wall is built of sand and rocks, monitored by Moroccan patrols and lined with landmines. But it is not enough to keep Saharawi from escaping what they call the occupied zone into the camps where I now sit.

The wall is what first attracted me to this place. In my few days here I´ve heard some chilling stories about men crossing the wall, and about the dangers the trip entails. These are a brave and proud people, and I have been embraced by their hospitality.

And I am not alone, not this week. Yesterday was the eighth running of the Sahara Marathon, an annual event meant to bring awareness to the Saharawi cause. There were 380 runners registered for the marathon, plus many more for the half marathon, 10km and 5 km runs. I am proud to say that I was the top Canadian in the 10 km race. That is to say I was the only Canadian. It was a remarkable experience running in the desert with Saharawis driving up and down the route ululating and shouting encouragement. When I reached the finish I was welcomed by hundreds of Sharawi women, each draped in vividly coloured fabric that covers everything but their eyes. As I crossed the line, the applause made me feel I´d actually won the race instead of being a mere ¨also ran¨.

More on the Saharawis, the camps, and the wall in upcoming posts.

From Dead to Red to Med

2008-02-21T02:26:00.000-07:00

Greetings all.

I am in Algiers now after nearly two weeks of luxury. I attended my first travel media tour in Jordan and while bus tours and big groups are not the way I prefer to travel, I could get used to five star hotels and free meals in posh restaurants. The tour brought us all over Jordan, from resorts on the Dead Sea, to camping in the desert, to an afternoon cruise on the Red Sea. The trip will yield a couple of new stories and gave me the opportunity to meet some interesting travel writers and photographers.

Algiers is a bit of a shock after all that pampering. It is a beautiful city, sloping towards the Mediterranean with its blocks of white apartments. The place has a marvelous cafe culture, and I have spent much of the last two days drinking two inch shots of espresso among men who smoke and wear suit jackets. Outside Cafe el Istiklal - Independance Cafe - illegal moneychangers wave wads of dinars and spit on the pavement. They seem to be the only ones who recognize me for a foreigner. The Arabic haircut I got in Amman seems to have everyone else fooled. My lousy French, however, fools no one.

Tomorrow night I will fly south to the refugee camps near Tindouf. My flight arrives there at one in the morning. Hopefully there will be someone waiting for me.

(Right now I can hear the music coming from the headphones of the man next to me in the Internet cafe. It is Lady in Red by Chris DeBurgh. I am having flashbacks of Iran.)

Welcome to Elsewhere

2008-02-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

Greetings, and welcome to the first posting of Elsewhere.

I've been thinking about starting a blog about my travels and writing - and the writing and travels of others - for quite some time now. Today, just hours before I head to Algeria and Morocco to begin research for a new book, seems as good a time as any.

I am very excited about my new project. I want to write about ‘walls.’

I traveled to Jerusalem last September and had the opportunity pass through the ‘security barrier’ that surrounds the West Bank. The building of ‘The Wall’ has conjured international debate, but it is not unique. There have been similar barriers constructed around the world for centuries. The Chinese built the Great Wall. The Romans divided Britannia with the Hadrian and Antonine Walls. The Berlin Wall split Germany in two. Human civilization has always been preoccupied with keeping people out and holding others in.

I am most interested in contemporary walls. These days, ‘fortress’ India is building security barriers along its borders with Burma and Bangladesh to ward against smugglers and illegal migrants, and another wall along the Pakistani border to protect against militants. There is now a wall along the Pakistan-Iran frontier built to foil cross-border drug traffic. Minutemen in the southern U.S. are not waiting for the government to build a security fence along the Mexican border. There are barriers going up along the borders of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen, and a security fence now protects Sharm el-Sheikh tourists from terrorists. The world is seeing a genuine building boom of walls.

All of these barriers are controversial. Some, such as the Indo-Bangladeshi barrier and the proposed U.S.-Mexico barrier, divide members of minority ethnic groups. Others are seen as racist barriers, and their stated aims are often suspect. Is the barrier going up between Brazil and Paraguay really meant to stop smuggling, for example, or are Brazilians afraid of the radical leanings of the Arab communities that reside in the border areas?

My plan is to travel to walls around the world and write about the people who live in their shadows. I will visit with the Bengali Indians who find themselves cut off from mainland India by the Indo-Bangladeshi barrier. I will speak to Baluchi desert traders along the Iran-Pakistan border and find out how the new wall affects their business. I will visit the Sahrawi refugees who wait for statehood on the wrong side of the Moroccan ‘Wall of Shame.’ I will seek out Glenn Weynant, an Arizona ‘sound artist’, who is using the U.S.-Mexico border fence as a musical instrument. I will relate the history and politics of each of these walls, but it is people and their stories that excite me.

This project is terribly ambitious. The research will bring me to the borderlands of at least thirteen countries on five continents and will require much time and expense. If you are interested in following along with this project - and others, and random musings about travel writing - you are welcome to tune in to Elsewhere.