Tag: Writing

Sports Fan

(in celebration of ‘my’ baseball team winning the World Series, this is an essay from about five years ago)

I grew up watching Washington football with my father and brother so I have a deep, fulfilling, unshakeable hatred for the Dallas Cowboys. Later, when I moved to Boston, I watched the Patriots pursue a perfect season and the Redsox chase the World Series, so I thought I knew all about being a sports fan and supporting the home team. Then I moved to a small city in the Middle East.

I teach at a university and one of the best ways to create links with my students is to connect what we are reading with their culture. And since ‘football’ (soccer) is a major part of their lives, I pull sports metaphors into my literature classes, explaining Queen Elizabeth and the Spanish Armada in terms of offense and defense, comparing the queen protecting her country to the famous Omani goal-keeper Ali al Habsi.

But I have gradually realized that soccer here is quite different than in the States. My sister’s children play soccer. They have uniforms, scheduled practices, a coach, fields with clipped grass and painted white lines, goals with a net to catch the ball. And that ball is white, fully-inflated and regulation-sized. There is organization. There is a season with a beginning, an end, and a referee with a whistle. The kids wear cleats and matching shirts. The parents car-pool, have phone-trees, stand on the side-lines and watch. Everyone knows who, what, when, where. The ‘why’ is for the kids to enjoy themselves, get some exercise, and learn to be part of a team.

In Salalah, football is for anyone who feels like playing. Girls play together or with male brothers and cousins in empty areas. Men gather in loose-knit teams every afternoon and whoever shows up plays, sometimes 20 players on one side. They play on the beach or gravel lots with rocks to mark the goal. The side lines are either lines drawn in the sand, quickly obliterated by scuffling for the ball, or a line of small rocks. The ball is whatever color, size and shape happens to be around. And when the kids play, there are no adults anywhere near. Everyone has a good time.

I got my second lesson in Omani-style sports when the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) met in the capital city of Muscat. The meeting of the government leaders was enlivened by the Gulf Cup, a football (i.e. soccer) tournament. I first realized something was odd when the DJs on the English-language radio station seemed weirdly humble. “Of course all the teams will play well,” they would declare. “We are rooting for all the teams!” “We wish everyone good luck!”

This is team-spirit? I asked myself. This is the battle cry? During a call-in show, one DJ asked the listener to predict the score of the first game (Oman vs. Kuwait). “Oman will win!” chirped the guest, “1-0.” 1-0? What kind of score is that? What happened to annihilating the enemy? Crushing them in devastating defeat? Humiliation! 24-0! I remembered the public buses in Boston during World Series frenzy displaying “Go Sox” instead of the route number. Everyone in the city had blood lust.

But, this is Oman. Public displays of bravado are not encouraged; the culture supports working together. I should have known better than to expect the whole ‘who’s your daddy’ insult-fest. When I watched the end of the Saudi-Kuwait game, as the camera panned the stadium full of fans from both sides calmly standing and applauding, it was hard to tell which side won. Sedate appreciation is the expectation. When a player falls on the field, it is normal to offer him a hand; but in the GCC Cup, a fallen player is grabbed from behind and scooped up onto his feet. Players arguing with the referee are quietly talked down by members of both teams.

Not that there isn’t deep emotion attached to the sports teams. A few members of the national team came to visit the University for a Pep Rally and the entire auditorium was packed. Students, male and female, wore their Omani football scarves to class during the tournament. Many young men decorated their cars with the Omani flag or striped in the Omani colors (red, green and white). After every Omani victory, guys would drive around the city honking and singing. There was even a spontaneous parade near the old souq.

But the celebrations were positive and family-friendly. There was also no vandalism, no  ‘hooligan’ behavior. And when Oman ended up winning the championship game, the leader, Sultan Qaboos, declared a public holiday – all schools, offices and government offices were closed for a day. Sportsman-like behavior!

 (photo by M. A. Al Awaid)

Why I Don’t Cook – Thinking about Food Exchanges

It was a sad and awful day the day I saw okra in the grocery store. Oh for Pete’s sake, okra! OKRA! the bane of my existence as a child: slimy and tasteless and, it turns out, quite the favorite here. Sigh. When I complained to my mom on the phone that I had to share this lovely country with that awful vegetable, she recommended that I could make a casserole with it and bring it to on a picnic.

I love going on picnics, but I have never brought a casserole or anything I have made, a fact I have been considering this week. One problem is that I don’t have cookbooks, another is that I am not a great cook. Also my oven has about a 20 degree temperature difference between the left and rights sides and I can’t always find things I want, especially herbs and spices.

But there are larger issues at play that make the food exchanges between me and Omanis I know so uneven. One factor is I don’t know how to make what they like to eat. Rice is a staple of Dhofari cooking and most Omanis in Dhofar eat it every day; I have cooked it perhaps twice in my life. Local favorites like asseda (cooked wheat flour with samn, clarified butter) and harees (boiled wheat with meat cooked and blended into porridge-like consistency) have only a few ingredients but need a lot of time and effort to be made properly. I am not fluent in the spices used here. I use rosewater and orange water as perfumes, not to cook with; I prefer olive oil to samn.

And I am hesitant to bring foods which had different flavors and textures than food normally eaten here: dill, brie, hollandaise sauce, pumpkin spice, sharp cheddar cheese, bitter orange marmalade. When I offered a Dhofari friend nachos, I got the same look as when I am offered cow’s stomach or goat’s intestines: “I am so happy you like that, please don’t try to make me eat it.”

There is also a worry when I bring something home-made that it might have something haram (proscribed in Islam). Dhofari friends know that I understand and respect Islamic dietary rules but, well, anyone can make a mistake. There might be a sauce I brought from outside Oman and I didn’t KNOW that there was something haram in it and…  So it is better if I bring packaged food such as cookies or dates. When bringing presents back from trips, I make sure gifts such as chocolates have a clear list of ingredients and/ or are labeled halal (permissible to eat in Islam).

Foreign restaurants are opening in Dhofar – Mexican, Thai, Sushi – and there are expanding types of food in the grocery stores such as organic and gluten-free. But this food diversity is under the umbrella of government control which ensures that all food sold in grocery stores and restaurants halal.

I love eating Omani food – white rice with freshly grilled fish and dates is one of my favorite meals. Their macaroni dishes are wonderful. All the dishes with meat, rice and spices are delicious: mandi, kabsa, makbus. I could eat halwa (see below) and basbousa (cake made with semolina, usually flavored with coconut in Salalah) every day. It’s not fair that I get enjoyable meals while only contributing Pringles, cookies, juice, soda and water but then I remember the reaction when I handed over oatmeal cookies. From politeness a few people took a nibble. The pain in their eyes was the same as mine when confronted with okra, liver, cooked carrots or bread pudding. It’s good to try new things but it’s also good to stick with what you know.

 

Halwa – (the Arabic word for ‘sweet’) is the traditional dessert of Oman. It’s made with sugar, water, clarified butter, cornstarch and flavorings such as cardamom, saffron, sesame seeds, almonds and cashews. It is slow cooked in large batches and then poured into various-sized bowls. The color varies from a light blond to almost black to reddish depending on ingredients. The consistency is like a tough Jell-O. To eat, one scoops out a teaspoon- to tablespoon-sized piece with a spoon and eats it plain or plops the piece on of a small piece of a thin, plain cracker-like bread (khoubz raqaq/ raqeeq or kak) and eat both together. Halwa is in the center of the photo above in the clear, square container.

Literature and Ethnography

I love turning from ethnography to literature, then back to ethnography. Thinking about culture helps me understand fiction and reading poems helps me see differences between cultures more clearly. As I sit down each semester to find new poems and stories to teach, I always think of “Finding Poems for my Students” by Mohja Kahf (complete poem below):

O my students,

I scour the world of words

to bring you poems like the rocks

my girls dig up in riverbanks

and come running to show me

because the notches in them

say something true, something

that an ancient Wisdom

wanted us to see.

I run to you, pockets full of poems…

One day,…

may the poem be for you

the one phone number in the universe

you were looking for

There is a pure joy in opening a new book of poems to see what is inside, to read how someone found a new way to describe the sky, a bird, a feeling, a person or even poetry itself. And sometimes a poem opens a door for understanding and I want to use it in a culture, not literature, class. For example in excerpt from “Four in the Morning” by Wislawa Szymborska (complete poem below) :

The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.

The hour when earth betrays us.

The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.

The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.

The hollow hour.

Blank, empty.

The very pit of all other hours.

No one feels good at four in the morning.

If ants feel good at four in the morning

–three cheers for the ants. And let five o’clock come

if we’re to go on living.

The words “The hollow hour./ Blank, empty.” struck me as odd, so I had to reflect and unpack until I could express what surprised me. In Oman, “Four in the Morning” is a dark time, but not “hollow” or “blank” or “empty” – it is the time of anticipation, the time before the first call to prayer. The dangerous time on the Arabian Peninsula is midday, under the killing sun. The “empty” time is in early afternoon, when lunch is finished, stores are closed and everyone is relaxing.

I do a lot of talking with students about metaphors in literature classes, e.g. the moon is positive in Arabian culture, with no connotations of werewolves or danger. In culture studies classes, we talk about time relativity, e.g. if you say that you “ate dinner late,” what time does that mean? In some cultures, a “late” dinner means 8pm, in others it means 2am.

We look at examples such as:

  •   It took a long time to get to work.
  •   She left work early.
  •   She did her shopping quickly.
  •   She had a short visit with her sister.

to see the different ways to interpret the phrases. Is a “short visit” 30 minutes or 2 days? In both literature and culture classes my students and I talk about how everything changes when you change locations. In the States, on a rainy day, you stay inside or use an umbrella; on rainy days here, people sit outside and have a picnic, saving unbrellas for sunny days.

When Szymborska writes that 4am is “The very pit of all other hours” she’s opening a window into her culture that allows us to see what she sees, but also allows us to be able to articulate something we knew, but never expressed, about our own cultures.

“Finding Poems for my Students,” Mohja Kahf

O my students,

I scour the world of words

to bring you poems like the rocks

my girls dig up in riverbanks

and come running to show me

because the notches in them

say something true, something

that an ancient Wisdom

wanted us to see.

I run to you, pockets full of poems.

I select: This poem will help you pass a test.

Here is one that is no help at all,

but is beautiful; take it, take it.

O my scroungers after merely passing grades,

I bring you poems I have hiked high

and far to find, knowing

they will mostly end up like the rocks

my daughters find, tossed in drawers

with old batteries, mislaid keys,

scraps bearing the addresses

of people whose names

you no longer recognize or need.

Your current glazed-eye indifference

doesn’t bother me.  One day,

when you are either cleaning house

or moving (and sooner or later

everyone must do one or the other),

you will shake the drawer and the poem

will fall out.  And may the poem be for you

the one phone number in the universe

you were looking for, and may it be

for you the mislaid key

to your greatest need.

On that day,

you will read.

 “Four in the Morning” by Wislawa Szymborska:

The hour from night to day.

The hour from side to side.

The hour for those past thirty.

The hour swept clean to the crowing of cocks.

The hour when earth betrays us.

The hour when wind blows from extinguished stars.

The hour of and-what-if-nothing-remains-after-us.

The hollow hour.

Blank, empty.

The very pit of all other hours.

No one feels good at four in the morning.

If ants feel good at four in the morning

–three cheers for the ants. And let five o’clock come

if we’re to go on living.

May Bsisu’s The Arab Table – Reading Recipes for Cultural Understandings

Bsisu, May. (2005). The Arab Table: Recipes and Culinary Traditions. New York: William Morrow.

For years, I had only one cookbook, The Joy of Cooking, a present from my mother. But after I started to do research on foodways in Southern Arabia, I began to buy cookbooks to learn more about Arabic foodways in general and to compare and contrast with Dhofari foodways. My areas of interest are how “the Arab table” can have various meanings in various locations and what those meanings might be in Dhofar.

My favorite cookbook so far is May Bsisu’s The Arab Table (2005). She is so generous and comprehensive; she lived in several countries including Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, England and the United States so she knows several food traditions and the difficulties of cooking “home” food in a new land. She includes data about which plants grow where (e.g. 252) and recipes for non-Muslim celebrations (299, 303, 345). The photos are gorgeous, the recipes are clearly written and she always gives hints, substitutions and information about where to get ingredients. I wish I had someone who would cook the delicious dishes for me!

I am reading it for cultural data, trying to catch the moments of surprise then exploring and articulating the variances, such as the difference between Bsisu’s threed/ thareed recipe (188, a platter layered with bread covered with sauce, then rice, then chicken and finished with a garnish) and how it is made in Salalah (a soup to which pieces of dried bread is added). Her chicken schwarma recipe (190) calls for pieces, not slices, of chicken. She has Um Khalid (331); in Dhofar the bread-pudding dessert is called Um Ali.

She describes specific foods for New Year’s which indicate happiness (322), something I have not found here. In asking about ‘performative’ food, i.e. food that brings about a change such as good luck, my informants say that is not part of Dhofari cultures, although there are foods for physical changes such as to lose or gain weight. She also discusses foods, such as raw meat (225) and certain cheeses (16), which are not eaten here.

Other difference are that many recipes require a specific cooking environment such as accessories not easily found in Dhofar (especially in 2005 when the book was published, for example fleece blankets 220), the implication that meat is bought from butchers who will prepare meat as requested (207), and the implied need for a fully out-fitted kitchen with spice-grinder, food processor, sauce-boats, plates to invert dishes on, etc.

Thus reading The Arab Table is fun on several levels. First there are great recipes and also I can see how not just the food choices, but the expectations of serving food, vary greatly between cultures.  For example, Bsisu discusses putting things of “each guest’s plate” (188) and setting up various “table” or “stations” for dinners (264-6) whereas in Dhofar, almost every main dish is eaten communally and guests sit in one location unless it is a large wedding party with a buffet.

At a party in a private home, there might be a table with desserts, but guests do not choose for themselves. A plate is made up and brought to them. At an Omani wedding party once, the hostess told me that she would bring a plate for me. I told her not to bother and got up and took sweets for myself. Later I realized how rude I had been, to deny her the chance to take care of a guest and to possibly allow others to judge her as not being an attentive hostess, to let a clearly foreign woman fend for herself.

The Arab Table is an excellent, thorough, big-hearted overview of Arab cooking.

https://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/00000144-0a39-d3cb-a96c-7b3d746a0000

(photo above is from social media, I didn’t want to take images from her book without permission)

 

Food Here and There/ Missing Food

While traveling recently I was thinking about how people miss foods when they are not in their home culture, but it’s more complicated than that. Sometimes you miss a certain taste (Diet Coke served with a lime slice and a lot of ice) and sometimes it’s a food experience (food + activity, walking around a mall with a Diet Coke in hand).

When I am not in Oman, I don’t miss food – I miss food experiences. I don’t like rice, but I miss white rice with grilled fresh fish served with dates, eaten on a beach with friends next to a campfire. I miss the way of eating: eating with my hands and the knowledge that all food is communal, that I can take something from another person’s plate without worrying that they will be upset and all my food is up for grabs from someone else. I don’t miss hummus, but I miss how hummus (and all appetizers) are shared. There’s no ‘I ordered this, it’s mine, if you want to try you have to ask my permisson’ but you ask for hummus and fatoush, the person you are with gets vine leaves and baba ganoush and you each take as much as you want from any dish.

When I am in Oman, I really miss coffee, the joy of a waiter or waitress walking towards me with a large carafe of coffee that will be put on my table. I have had more than my fill of “espresso-coffee” (espresso with hot water is not really coffee!). And I miss food. I miss pie. I miss raspberries, big salads with 25 ingredients, cheese plates and Mexican food. I miss a real breakfast: eggs, toast, hash browns and all the trimmings. I miss the taste of cranberries: cranberry juice and cranberry/ orange muffins.

Thinking about ‘missing’ reminds me of a great quote from Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon (2001)

The things an American who is abroad for a very long time misses—or at least the things I missed—I was discovering, weren’t the things you were supposed to miss. We are supposed to come to Europe for leisure, sunshine, a more civilized pace, for slowness of various kinds. America we are supposed to miss for its speed, its friendliness, for the independence of its people and the individualism of their lives. Yet these were not the things I missed, and when I speak to Americans who have lived abroad for a long time, those are not the things they seem to miss either. I didn’t miss crosstown traffic, New York taxicabs, talk radio or talk television, or the constant, appalling flow of opinion that spills out like dirty floodwater…

I found, to my surprise, that what I missed and longed for was the comforting loneliness of life in New York, a certain kind of scuffed-up soulfulness. In Paris no relationship, even one with a postman or a dry cleaner, is abstract or anonymous; human relations are carved out in a perpetual present tense. There’s an intricacy of debits and credits. Things have histories…The things Americans miss tend to involve that kind of formlessness, small, casual, and solitary pleasures. A psychoanalyst misses walking up Lafayette Street in her tracksuit, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup with the little plastic piece that pops up. My wife, having been sent the carrot cake that she missed from New York, discovered that what she really missed was standing up at the counter and eating carrot cake in the company of strangers at the Bon Vivant coffee shop.

 

 

 

 

“Arabic Coffee,” a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye

A lovely poem by a wonderful poet.   (complete image is below)

It was never too strong for us:

make it blacker, Papa,

thick in the bottom,

tell again how the years will gather

in small white cups,

how luck lives in a spot of grounds.

Leaning over the stove, he let it

boil to the top, and down again.

Two times. No sugar in his pot.

And the place where men and women

break off from one another

was not present in that room.

The hundred disappointments,

fire swallowing olive-wood beads

at the warehouse, and the dreams

tucked like pocket handkerchiefs

into each day, took their places

on the table, near the half-empty

dish of corn. And none was

more important than the others,

and all were guests. When

he carried the tray into the room,

high and balanced in his hands,

it was an offering to all of them,

stay, be seated, follow the talk

wherever it goes. The coffee was

the center of the flower.

Like clothes on a line saying

You will live long enough to wear me,

a motion of faith. There is this,

and there is more.

Nye, Naomi Shihab. (2002). Arabic Coffee. Poems by Naomi Shihab Nye. Now Classroom. http://www.pbs.org/now/arts/nyepoems2.html

Essays about Teaching Poems

John Clare Looks Good in a Dishdash: Linking John Clare to Middle Eastern Poetry

Marlowe in Salalah: Making English Poetry Relevant – 2008

Teaching Literature and Staying au courant – The Man from Nowhere and the Ancient Greeks

Foodways and Literature – Food Stories and Poems

Foodways and Literature – Animal Poems

Teaching Paired Literary Texts

Translating Western Conceptions of “Nature” to the Middle East – 2009

gm - coffee 2

I am happy to announce that my article “مناقشة إثنوغرافية للحكايات الشعبية من جنوب عمان” [An Ethnographic Discussion of Folk Tales from Southern Oman] has been published in the journal Al Sha’ar (Alaan Publishers, Amman).

(photo by M. A. Al Awaid)

This paper examines the cultural markers within a set of folk tales recorded in southern Oman. In the 1970s Dr. Tom Johnstone documented the un-written, Modern South Arabian languages of Gibali (also known as Jibbali and Shehri) and Mehri in the Dhofar region of Oman. In 2014, Dr. Aaron Rubin’s published a book on Gibali grammar based on his own research, Johnstone’s notes and data from Gibali speakers living in America; the book includes 70 texts of taped speech transliterated into Gibali with an accompanying English translation which cover a variety of genres including folk tales, autobiography, grammar exercises, and fairy tales.

The paper explains how the folk tales texts are representative of southern Omani culture by analyzing the various textual elements such as characters, setting, plot events and theme, as well as physical markers such as landscape and animals. These texts are among the very few documents written in Gibali and help illustrate ways in which the Dhofari culture has, and has not changed, since the rapid modernization after the 1970s. I will also compare the elements from the Johnston/ Ali Al Mahri/ Rubin texts with folk tales from other texts Khadija bint Alawi al-Thahab’s Stories of My Grandmother: Folk Tales from Dhofar, Hatim Al Taie and Joan Pickersgill’s Omani Folk Tales, and Grace Todino-Gonguet’s Halimah and the Snake, and other Omani Folk Tales.

 

 

Food Tastes Better in the Rain – Khareef in Salalah

I had been in Salalah about ten months and it was the first day of my first khareef (the word means ‘autumn’ in Arabic, it’s used in Salalah to mean the monsoon season from the end of June until the end of August). I walked outside my house, felt the drizzle on my face and walked back in. With a washcloth I dried my face and thought about how could I possibly keep my hair de-frizzed in such humidity.

A few hours later, some of the Omani men in my research group stopped by. I made tea and set the carafe on a tray with cups and cookies and brought it into the majlis. One of the men picked up the tray and brought it out to the garden.

“We are NOT eating out there, it’s wet!” I yelled.

Oh, we were most certainly eating out there; it’s khareef. Time to eat outside.

For me then (and to a certain extent, even now) I don’t get it. Omanis are always so clean, so well-turned out: impeccable clothes, gorgeous perfumes and everything spotless. Why would you want to go sit in muddy fields and get rained on? And the mosquitos! Let’s not forget the mosquitos and some other smaller insect that leaves a welt that lasts for three days. And what happens to the food? Rained on. Damp cookies, soggy bread, a film of water on everything and you have to constantly drink tea to stay warm in your damp clothes.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” Omanis say to me.

I try to smile, using a mushy Kleenex to dry off my face, “Oh lovely!” And it is, the grass turning green, the fog rolling in, that wonderful damp earth smell – but could we not enjoy this through a plate glass window? No, we could not.

I have bowed to the inevitable and bought a water-proof purse; I wear washable Crocs. I have learned to always keep a stick or two of wood in my car so that it stays dry enough to get a fire started. I used to try to keep all the food covered but have given on that. Rain on the kabsa, rain on the briyani, rain on the mandi, rain on the mishgak (meat kebabs).

I have been on magical picnics. If you are sitting near the edge of a cliff, the clouds move in and out, opening and closing the vista down to the sea or over the plains. In the mountains, the ground is a carpet of green, with beautiful white flowers and purple flowers later in the season.

The culture you are born into is hard to shake; there are times I long for an umbrella, a rain jacket and a crisp cookie. But, food tastes better in the rain, or so I am told.

IMG_3202

(photo from social media)