By Sarah StutevilleNovember 15, 2010
I first visited the Middle East in 2003. My husband and I were living in New York, frustrated by our low-paying service jobs, our dirty overpopulated apartment and the politics of fear and violence that defined that city in the first years after 9/11.
My career as a freelance international journalist was a twinkle in my eyes as I set out for Egypt, Israel and Palestine four months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
My husband had similar sentiments. Alex and I wanted to go on a “fact-finding” mission; to see if they really hated us as much as the rising cable news channels would have us believe.Young and indignant, we went to prove what we were sure we already knew: that the war was wrong, that the Bush Administration was a disaster and that WE could transcend those politics and make a human connection that somehow told the real story.
The middle aged Cairene cab driver was thrilled to meet Americans and practice his English. We were thrilled to meet an Egyptian and practice our political theories. We exchanged typical pleasantries:
“How do you like Egypt?”
“It’s wonderful!”
“Did you see the pyramids?”
“Yes!”
“Where from in America?”
“New York!”
Then the inevitable:
“September 11th…”
“Yeah”
“This is very bad.”
“Yeah”
I can’t remember his name now, but I vividly recall the chemical cinnamon smell of the air freshener stuck to his dashboard and the clicking prayer beads swaying from the rearview mirror.
I think we were trying to find a movie theater but we ended up back at the cab driver’s concrete high-rise. One in a forest of drab apartment buildings on the outskirts of the city—each room fitted with little cubby hole balconies decorated with flapping laundry.
The September 11th opener had turned into a political conversation and we were enthusiastically agreeing with each other over scalding tea in tiny clear glasses:
Bush?
Bad!
Terrorism?
Bad!
Muslims?
Good!
Iraq War?
Bad!
Americans?
Good!
It was going well. Clearly we were fulfilling similar missions, confirming that the political rhetoric of our tribes was empty and self-serving. Global politics were spinning off into an era of violence and turmoil we were all just beginning to comprehend and I was still clinging to the idea that the world was populated by like-minded tolerant people (like-minded and tolerant in exactly the same way as me!) momentarily caught off guard by a few rough bands of assholes.
The conversation ebbed, the taxi driver’s wife bustled and clanged in their tiny kitchen, her house robe and loose headscarf bundled around her. The evening was coming to a close when, in what felt like a closing expression of candor and friendship, the taxi driver leaned forward:
“I will show you something?”
“Of course. Please.”
“You see this cat?”
There was a large poster behind the overstuffed love seat we were perched on. It’s the one where a tabby clings determinedly to a free floating branch with the words “Hang in There” stamped across the top.
He reached between us, pulled the photo off the wall and stepped back to face us. There, glued to the back, was a blown up video still of Saddam Hussein, the one of Saddam in a black suit and fedora standing on a balcony shooting off a shotgun. Tucked into the corner was a gently smiling Osama bin Laden, his head cocked to the side in a white turban, his little salt and pepper beard at a flirty angle.
“Yes?” Asked the taxi cab driver.
“Right?” He asked again, “Saddam and Osama right? You like?”
“Ummmmm…” we said in unison.
His wife was already hollering at him from the doorway of the kitchen, hands flying in a fury as, I assume, she berated him for shattering the easy hospitality she had woven around us.
Alex and I, confused, examined the photos politely as though we were checking them for composition and lighting. In the taxi back to our hostel we grasped after the easy camaraderie of the earlier evening but ultimately resigned ourselves to listening to the tedious clicking of his glass prayer beads.
Somehow in my mind that interaction marks the beginning of my career as a journalist. Not because I handled it well (why didn’t I ask him why he had those photos clandestinely displayed?) or because it was all that shocking (charismatic and violent leaders capture the male imagination—so what?) but because it was the beginning of my understanding of the world as a place poorly described by the black and white, for and against, red and blue political culture of my generation. It was the beginning of understanding all that I didn’t understand.
2010
In the past seven years the War on Terror has gone from bad idea to way of the world. The Iraq War has gone from controversial invasion to hopeless quagmire to an “end of combat operations.” And I have gone from a stridently political waitress to a befuddled journalist looking for the complicated stories rather than the people that agree with me.
I’m back in the Middle East, this time on a big sprawling reporting project that somehow includes Alex (of course) a former marine (and childhood friend) that served in the Iraq war and a comic book artist (and former roommate) that specializes in non-fiction and political comics.
It’s another “fact-finding mission” (or maybe the start of a bad joke: Two American journalists, one former marine and a cartoonist walk into a tea shop in Damascus…)
We’re trundling through the rocky wheat colored landscape of Turkey on a two day train that represents the first leg of a six week journey that will take us to northern Iraq, Syria and Jordan.
The wintery sun has slipped sideways in the sky and long shadows move across the white linen of the dining car, tablecloths embroidered with the crescent moon and star insignia of the Turkish railway. Two slinky Iranian women with floppy bangs and broken English make flirty conversation with the American men in our weird diplomatic convoy and a couple of Turkish drummers with hippy haircuts and sarcastic t-shirts have shown up for dinner.
I am here to tell stories of a generation—mine in the U.S. and my counterparts in this region—now defined by the violence and conflict I was just beginning to grasp eight years ago. This time I have no political conclusions to confirm, no smug beliefs to proselytize, but I guess I’m looking for the same thing—human connections that transcend politics and somehow tell the real story.
Time to go buy my fellow train travelers a few scalding cups of tea and talk some politics.
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