Thursday, 14 October 2010
Boys' Ballet + Beirut = "This is Libanon!" = Liebe-no!
In every country there's always one item that serves as the perfect scapegoat to get out of unnecessary moodiness. In Russia you can always get away with "I was drunk", in Armenia "It's the oligarchs", in France "I'm depressed", in Belgium "It's the weather"... Thus far, Lebanon is the only country were every mischief is brushed aside by everyone simply by referring to their country - "This is Libanooon!!!"...
- "Why are there no recycling garbage cans?"
- "Why no one gets their driving license by actually passing a driving test?"
- "Why are the women wearing full make up even when swimming in the sea?"
- "Why is someone's mistress issued a license to block an entire highway and get a fashion shoot video-ed?"
- "Why do women remember to call someone only after they start the engine of their cars and get in line to drive onto the highway?"
- "Why is everyone hooked on cigarets or shisha or panadol or all of those items?"
All these are questions that can be answered with one short "This is Libanon!"...
So much that one has to perfect strategies of approach whereby getting things done will never be hampered with "This is Libanon" followed by "Inshallah one day..."... Even though, everyone you talk to absolutely dreams of "one day". In fact, so vivid are they dreams that they can give you a clear description of a clean, shiny Beirut with architectural building standards respected, green zones enhanced, sewage canals cleaned and tucked away from residential areas, factories moved away and immigrant workers enjoying a respectful position inside the files of Labour and Social Affairs Ministry.
So, every morning as I go through things planned and unplanned I prepare myself for a journey of "This is Libanon"-less conversations with starting from the concierge of the building and the plumber, ending with clients and, yes, sometimes even friends.
One day, just like any other Lebanese day, I decided it was time to have my youngest son's dream come true. He loves to dance. Everything he does involves dancing. The way he runs to turn off the light, or fetch the water, or chase the cat, or run down the street with multiple jumps and turns in the air. He doesn't like the sound of traditional music I usually play in the house - Greek, Armenian, Arabic, Irish, Russian. No, he only rushes in when Shostakovich or Chaykovsky are playing and he just starts dancing... Then I told him what he does is called ballet and showed him the photos by Stanislav Belyaevsky, who - himself a long time lead dancer at St. Petersburg's world famous Mariinsky Theatre - is now running from stage to stage photographing ballet scenes right during the performance. He also has a large collection of photos that are shot during practice hours. My son, terribly concerned with what he calls the "womanness" of ballet, suddenly saw the practice of male ballet dancers, how strongly built they were and high their jumps were and gave me his verdict "Ballet is like karate, except it's dancing".
Once I got his "ok", I started to enquire who was the best ballet teacher one could get for their son. Call after call, school after school, I started to realise that there were no ballet lessons available for boys. There were two reasons for this - a/ there were no boys in the ballet groups and there never have been, b/ the ballet teachers themselves having studied ballet but not the art of teaching ballet could only have their girl ballet dancers simply repeat what they knew and had zero knowledge on how to teach ballet to a boy.
This perk aside, I started to get lots of "This is Libanooon!"s over and over again when I'd ask why don't boys dance ballet in Beirut. And not just from schools and teachers. Even my friends explained that what I was looking for was an extraordinary thing because no one here would "voluntarily" send their boy to a ballet school. No, Beirut is not a place where boys dance ballet - the highest art form of dance, it IS a place when starting from the age of four boys are rushed to Asian martial arts classes that usually are overbooked. The same boys that are continuously reminded to swallow their tears throughout the kindergarden and school years because "this is Libanon" and here "boys don't cry" is still the rule. never mind that the drug use and many other deep societal breaks are due to "boys don't cry" form of bringing up. With all the Frenchness of their body language, with all their urges to get hooked on the hookah/nargile/shisha the day they stop drinking milk, with all the depending on mom and dad getting them everything they demand, there isn't much independence left to these boys except to go to the karate class and let the steam off by "ha-yah":"hi-yah" shouts. They've never been allowed to kind of naturally choose their path. The entire family system is based on creating hiearchies of mutual dependence from father to son, so they'll always stay together no matter what. there is no individual choice. And this problem at macro-level is mirrored right through the way the government operates in Lebanon and the way people are dependent on personal political connections to get ahead in their lives in order to claim they're someone... They're someone because they know someone and not because they know something...
I don't mind this as long as this is the internal cuisine of other families. But the frowns and objections I get upon delivering the news my son wants to do ballet - I do mind. Immediately stereotypes are brought in - ballet is more a feminine thing they say, even though every Lebanese won't miss a chance to boast about the world famous Rahbani's musical theatre (where there are plenty of boys who dance great but had they done basic ballet their bellies wouldn't shake as much when jumping in the air and they wouldn't sweat as much to get the front row nauseous with scents transcending the stage limits) . I was even cautioned by one that my son "won't grow tall". I told her she's confusing ballet with gymnastics but not much success.
I finally found proper ballet lessons at the Russian Cultural Center where, again, my son will be the only boy but the teacher can teach a boy, too. He's super-excited and will start on Friday, every week twice, 1,5 hour each time without realising that what he's doing is what an ice breaker does in the Siberian rivers in winter - he's going against "This is Libanon" and proving that "Inshallah" is a concept that can also happen now, today and not sometime in indefinite future.
Friday, 13 August 2010
Have You Asked? vs. Have You Asked... Or the Cost of Keeping One's Laundry ALL Clean
To all those urging people to move to Armenia, have you ever talked to an immigrant "hayastantsi" in your community, have you asked why and how they left, have you asked how painful that decision of cutting the umbilical cord from a shameful statehood for the love of homeland was, have you asked how they live in an invisible in-between state between an unbearable state and an un-integrating local community? ASK!
***
There's a war of emotions going online and live wherever Armenians meet. The armies are divided between those who are for repatriation and those against. And of course there's a third group of the disengaged, who simply are indifferent to put it softly, and don't care to put it realistically. While emotionally, at this stage, I'm against these reignited campaigns for repatriation, I am in a way also FOR the repatriation, a view that comes with a list of items starting with but and/or if, channelled through a concept known us constructive process to be delivered by a conglomerate of interests provided for all the vested groups.
When the latest Gallup statistics came out rating the Armenians highest in percentage in their desire to leave the country, even outbeating Moldova, the usual "winner" in this bid, the pro-government newspapers qualified Gallup as yet another statistical giant randomly making up its numbers. The opposition newspapers called for immediate change of government, complaining of its continuous failures and themselves failing to bring any constructive suggestions on how their political favorites would conduct a change. And while our neighbors Georgia and Azerbaijan had comparably lesser numbers of those desiring to leave, Armenia's electorate rated highest in its understanding and expectations on what elements democracy is made of and what rule of law stands for. Equally, Armenia proved to have the highest rating for civic participation through NGOs and/or random, subject-specific civic campaigns. A conclusion thus should be drawn that being "cursed" with an educated exposé on democratic values and social standards of living within a rule of law state, Armenia's citizens are more expressive in their frustrations....
But why to leave? This is the question, the puzzle, keeping every Armenian awake for another ten minutes every night before falling asleep; every Armenian living anywhere, that is. Anywhere, be that first or second or fourth generation Armenian, 50% Armenian, 75% Armenian, 25% Armenian, living in any continent of world from North to South, from east to West. These nuances are too delicate even for someone as Gallup to ponder upon to such a scale that even if Cleopatra had the equal chance of an immediate guaranteed death by putting her hand into this Armenian Pandora's box, she'd still vie for the snakehouse. Why did we leave? Why are we leaving? Why do we dream to leave? The why has become the taboo, the unspoken question everyone busies themselves with, while calmly resolving any impediments of "where", "when", "how", "what"...
The "why" has become our dirty laundry, it's unwashable, in a way useless, underexposed, but you can't get rid of it, you can't throw it away, it's too dear. You can't stick to it, it's too worn out. And as in our communist childhoods, the laundry roll-lines were stretching from one building onto another, creating a tender laundry line of communication between neighbors who might as well be sworn enemies, we make sure that we hang our laundry in such a sequence that the neighbor is first exposed to the best of our items, our beautifully clean white sheets enriched with scents of spring, a multitude of shirts our husbands and brothers wear silent witnesses to their position at work, our blouses in tasteful colors accompanied with skirts... The aim of this laundry strategy is that by the time the neighbors' eyes reach the skirts, their mad jealous enough to turn away from the rest of laundry items... In the meantime, the "secret" laundry line in the bathrooms behind the shower curtain would have the discolored items, the items with stains that wouldn't quit, the shirt with stains of blood from a son who had been caught up in a street fight for no apparent reason, the ripped cheap khalat/wrap robes of the housewife.... No, we did not want the neighbor to see it... eventually, if faced with the enemy, you could throw in a couple of "why" laundry items for confronting your neighbor, but you'd both know it's your awareness of the "why" talking with no evidence to support.
***
It's 5pm and already the dark has settled outside along with a thick cover of ice begging for snow for just as I'm cold inside our 42sqm apartment and longing for at least proper heating, the ice is longing for a coat of snow. I'm preparing for my end of semester exams at candlelight, in a living room that hasn't been used since the first snow arrived in mid-November. Our family's tradition in midnineties demanded that all move into one room of the house, nail a layer of transparent plastic sheet over the windows, keep the door closed at all costs and not let a hint of heat out. And by "heat" we meant what was left after heating up the room with an electric cooking stove during the two-hours of electricity the war-time Armenian government had assigned us with.
The usual silence outside of no cars driving because of lack of petroleum deliveries, no people walking unless it was an absolute necessity to step outside, not even the stray animals. Everyone was thin, every day there were news of sudden heart stroke victims independent of age, coffins returning from Karabakh sometimes filled with a dear friend's dead body. We'd take a break from our routines of getting cuponed bread, butter, coffee and other humanitarian aid "luxuries" and prepare for the funeral, which included getting kilometers of black ribbons to be tied from tree trunk to tree trunk on pavements leading to the cemetery. We'd also get cornations for we'd hang one cornation per cord of black ribbon stretched between two trees. Hearing crying relatives during this marches to the cemetery was usual. It was spread throughout the country. Wherever you were, you'd witness or take part in such a march. We'd then stand near buckets of water and offer those returning from the cemetery to wash their hands prior to entering the post-funeral traditional dinner of boiled lamb and potatoes, accompanied with an unaccounted for amount of 50gr shots of vodka, each shot a tribute to a quality the dead soldier had.
Through all these gloomy surroundings, one thing was clear, we had a strength to survive anything. We had collectively decided so when going to mass demonstrations with our parents and demanding the communist government to leave... us alone. Well between 1992 and 1996, every single previously proud USSR citizen of Armenian descent had become used to this suffering. While other ex-Soviet state were going through similar miseries, we'd still manage a smile with a hint of secret power, some kind of magic every Armenian feels attached to from the date of learning about the Genocide. THEY marched to their deaths and survived. We're marching through death to our freedom. we can't complain because we had a hope with clear definition of independence, free Armenian Republic at last to look up to. They didn't.
***
Part time, I'm working at a newspaper, covering various political news. I'm a law student and that's enough for an editor to hire me because I don't cost too much compared to an experienced journalist. the editor teaches me the art of journalistic writing and releases me onto press conferences of opposition parties, parliamentary debates, various ministries. It is then that a not-so-well-meaning opposition leader, an ex-KGB operative offers me data on who steals what in which manner and how the whole independence hope is gonna blow up once the cease-fire is reached. I don't believe him. I don't believe anyone can kill such a hope from within. Story after story, a clear picture is drawn on how to trade in various commodities even if those are humanitarian aid. Flour mixed with too much yeast to produce bread that'll weigh and look like a full 1kg bread but in reality less flour is used. Whatever remains from it, is sold in black market. Kerosene to be provided to households to fill in kerosene lamps and Fujika Korean heaters, mixed with water, whatever remains - sold in the black market, parafin for candles, mixed with water, sold... anything and everything goes. It becomes clear how and why certain politicians exposed to the same amounts of food quotas are continuously getting fatter, while the country is having wholes added to their belts.
Everyone knows who's doing what, but no one complains. We're at war, we have our independence to take care of. We still are in a sort of a Soviet limbo unable to realise that we don't have to put up with this new brand of apparatchiks. Even at law school, or rather, especially at law school it becomes clear how things are done in this place. Bribe, bribe, bribe, all the way bribe. If you're from a village, you can bribe with 60kg of potatoes - a true winter time commodity, you can equally accessorize the potato package with packages of dried fruits, or walnuts and raisins, whatever goes. Once, someone from Gegharquniq had even provided a professor with a month-ful deliveries of fresh ishkhan fish from Sevan. Dollar bills getting into exam rooms enveloped in student grades booklet. Every other institution, anything that could be described as an institution had its own internal cuisine of corruption from guard to cleaning lady to director. It was everywhere and undealt with because "we're at war, we have independence to take care of"...
The corruption had become the "why" no one would address and deal with. It was the dirty laundry and no one's business except of people involved in it. It was THEIR dirty laundry because they did play a huge part in their play of hanging fancy laundry outside - the white fancy sheets of independence smelling of a promising spring, the shirts of colors and collars of a democratic apparatus, the skirts of a smily willful public servants once you had made clear that closing an eye on their dirty laundry was no problem at all. Oh, aren't our neighbors jealous? Have they not seen how rich and tasteful we are...
***
Nearly two decades have passed. 1.3 million immigrants later, we still are proud of our laundry. It has grown more diverse, the rope-roll for it has gotten longer, the sheets a,d shirts and skirts now have labels of globalization, they shine in the sun and release a scent too irresistible for a tourist from another global village. BUT, so has the dirty laundry grown, its old items have gotten just as many more items, there are more antibacterial means available for fighting its rottenness but somehow the values of their initial state cannot be established any longer. With the new Gallup having spread the scents of this dirty pack has once again alarmed that we've GOT to get rid of it the way residents of certain Italian regions throw away old things from their windows every New Year. We haven't had a proper New Year since our independence. We haven't had a catharsis. We've gotten to enjoy this hide and seek with our neighbors. "We have no dirty laundry", we proclaim and our neighbors echo our words, or perhaps we're echoing theirs?
The 1.3 million are to be capitalized upon. They've got a truly all clean laundry, it's worth to be brought back and join the public viewing in laundries' game, but only if the dirty laundry's gone, ALL gone. It's like a bone marrow transplant that can't attach successfully unless all the bacteria are cleansed of the locus. In this cancerous situation, the clean cells are packing and leaving, the remaining ones are fighting to stay clean and are keeping a contact with those who've left. For when the bacteria have no clean cells to attack, they attack to each other for at this point their unable to mingle with each other and even if they reproduce, the produce is more lethal than the protogenes and thus they refrain from reproduction.
SomeWHY, somewhere, somehow, sometime, somewhat, through all our journeys we've finally found our very own Gandhi-gene of peaceful resistance... LEAVE and LET LEAVE... There's a threat of war, there's independence of MOTHERLAND to take care of and so we keep our laundry clean with no dirty background and it doesn't matter where we are, all that matters is that it ALL remains clean. Leaving, thus, is a way of catharsis. One thing is clear, we leave to return. Cell by cell, the clean attaches to the clean, the mean attaches to the mean and the latter kill each other off, while the former live each other on. It's the price of keeping our baggage clean our Diasporan brethren should enquire us about when faced with our high rates of immigration from the motherland for we're doing so FOR the motherland.
Wednesday, 11 August 2010
Nargile+Lebanon=Che Guevara
Prelude...
The radio was playing an Arabic song, or rather a song in Arabic that i knew so very well - the tunes of "Comandante Che Guevara". I thought he's so loved in the Middle East, they translated the whole song. half a second later I felt how I detested it, how no other version but the Spanish could relate the story any better, even to those who speak no Spanish. I expressed this though outloud and the driver laughed his victorious laugh, the one that means "Lady, your perception of the Arabic is very embryonic". he explained it was a commercial for a nargile. Nargile is most fashionable. Well, it's always been. But add nargile to the booming semi-pubbing everything and anything industry and you've got yourself a profitable business in the ancient land of phoenicians.
It's not the pub, it's what the pub...
One can't ask for a full scale pub as we know it in Europe, well, Northern EU Member States, to be precise. I, too, being a proud outcast from the land of Eurasia, a fancy word the ex-USSR citizens like to associate with, never particularly liked being in the pub, but as an Irish friend explained to me - "you shouldn't focus on the pub, you should focus on what the pub represents", e.g.
-close to the office,
-accessible for anger management and burger+cigarettes+beer combination at lunchtime,
-a place to write one of those lousy office reports required either by your underlings or upperlings,
-emergency relationship discussion spot at a random 3pm meeting with a friend,
-Happy Hours,
-Friday evening after-work gathering of all colleagues to get relatively drunk in order to better strategize how to construct the bridge, under which to release the murky waters of damaged relationships caused by office politics,
-Saturday night live bands, hopeful meetings with a one-night-stand-turned-into-regular-date-turned-into-girl/boy/friend-with-a-potential-of-a-life-partner, and
-Sunday hangover cures at 4pm....
-Something interesting to talk about on Monday morning at the office...
Yes, the Eurasian me found this long list too demanding, too much waste of time, money, energy. I'd prefer a place that for European standards would be considered too fancy. What if I wanted to wear something really really nice, put a nice make-up, go out with friends to a fancy place where I could have something I can't cook in my kitchen (which I think is the standard for anyone going to restaurants, hence, the simplicity of menus anywhere North of Vienna for a what Americans call "an average citizen" in terms of economic and social standing), not discuss office politics, not be obliged to be too close to various perspirations of people around me, not fight for a chair, not sit at a table from mahogany that's been absorbing too much pub humidity and scents witness to remnants of someone else's physical and spiritual pub antiques and/or antics, not really try and convince someone that I'm REALLY married and only at the pub because it's a TEAM-BUILDING trip, not try and explain why even though I'm from Armenia, I'm not from Russia and no, it wasn't them who attacked Georgia first... What if I wanted to return home looking exactly as sober and fresh as when I left home... usually, I'd end up making a long list of compromises-vs-requirements every single time I had to face the pub, even if it was a friend's birthday party.
Enter Lebanon...
Knowing how much insufferable my Saturday night fever was, some nearly felt sorry for my departure to Lebanon, as if I'd be stuck somewhere in public-transportation-less Beirut just as murky waters under a bridge in a subconsciousness of a pub of Western denomination. But just as I expected Lebanon's nightlife has the same power of welcoming with an open embrace as the old aunties, uncles, relatives, friends living in Beirut. Especially when it comes to Gemmayzeh, a little street in the historical center of Beirut with at least two-centuries-old buildings astonishingly preserved (some well, some not well),. Gemmayzeh is Beirut's answer to bar hopping. It's taken to a VIP level if compared to an "average pub". They're clean, expensive, have valet parking services, waiters snatch the unnecessary items from the tables faster than one can utter shukran (which is why i guess no one says shukran as much as one had to say "thank you" or "merci" to comparably very lazy waiters in the "other" pubs), the interiors are outstandingly decorated, everyone is beautiful, everything is beautiful, even the music is beautiful, well the acoustics are beautiful because it's absolutely possible to both enjoy the music AND conversations with friends without the loss of voice cords or hearing... And, there is the nargile... It's funny how a cigarette smoke hater can absolutely not mind the nargile smoke your friend just covered you with... It's as dangerous as second hand smoking but there's something delicious about this death-by-a-friend-ly-nargile... And at this point I can proudly say that I overcame my fear of smoke by
"It's not about the nargile, it's what nargile...."
Little by little I discovered that when you place a nargile anywhere, that place ultimately becomes a pub... Here, you can pose and have about 10 minutes to daydream about this concept... Start from a fancy restaurant, go through a techno dance club, neighborhood cafe, pizza place, garden, home... Nargile is the ultimate shrink of Eastern denomination. It makes people talk, even when they don't... It make s a woman truly look mysterious and victorious, everlastingly beautiful, even if she's smoking her long list of problems away -
- lack of electricity, water and other essncials,
- kids problems,
- friends problems,
- relationship problems,
- war and peace,
-future and past...
Nargile is the one utility that can have one think locally and act globally. It's a silent secret weapon of mass instruction, it's the rosary beads that can bring together people of various social/religious/gender/political groups together at one table and make them calm at each other's presence...
Last month i read that Hamas was about to ban women from smoking nargile in public spaces because it was un-feminine... Such a big misconception. Unhealthy - yes, unfeminine - no. It is an escape, an exit strategy for a woman who's been running like a hamster in a wheel for the whole day... Wherever you go in the evening Beirut, women beautiful, women well dressed, women speaking softly, women with smiles and/or sadness, women young and old, women dressed in burqa or not, women with kids or not, with families or friends, but women always with nargile, the sounds of it filling up the air adding to the symphony of a Middle Eastern evening. It's the most important tool of cross-cultural or inter-cultural or intra-cultural communication or whatever else "experts of Western denomination" would have the nargile pheomenon classified...
A classification of an Eastern denomination would sound something like this: when banning smoking, one should separate the concepts of smoking and smoke... banning smoking as in smoking cigarettes dumped onto the developing and/or underdeveloped world is a very good, very necessary idea and campaign... Banning smoke not so easy... there's a lot of emotions invested into a nargile, every time someone blows a smoke away from nargile in the Middle East, a prayer for peace in direct or indirect manner is released onto the universe. the smoke for such a prayer is a necessary commodity to living and not merely surviving. Thus, in this case of cigarettes vs. nargile, nargile serves a purpose of a global necessity. To further support this point, one can find both cigarettes and nargile in Middle East's pubs, but one can never find nargile in Europe's pub who're suffering losses because of the ban on smoking. There ARE such things as Nargile Bars in Europe, though. The disciplinary aim of such a place is to go, sit on red cushions stuffed with sponges of suspicious quality, enter a realm of smoke acoustically irrelevant to the state of mind one has at the moment of entry, there are no cooked, uncooked, undercooked delights offered as garnishes... In short, the nargile is decreased from its notrious standard onto a lowly cigarette level... a better solution would be offering nargiles at Cuban cigar lounges, the sole places where one can smoke in Europe these days... And THAT's when it hit me that Che Guevara had somehow become the symbol of unity of cigar (without "ette"s) of Western denomination and nargile of Eastern denomination... they're both about peace that come at high cost.
