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Yearly Archives: 2007

Who Goes to those Campus Lectures?

Published December 12, 2007

This was the laughing question of a friend to me over dinner, a few years ago, in a city I didn’t last more than one year in, partly because of emotional and professional isolation.

“Well, I do,” I answered.

Another friend was sitting with her, across from me; they shared both physical and mental opposition to me.

“Yeah, I always saw those fliers and wondered who does go to those?”

They had a good laugh and I shrugged.

He was an IT service guy at a vocational community college who had changed majors twice in college and taken six years to finish; she an unemployed daughter of a retired doctor, stopped a year during college to travel abroad and study dance before finishing. Upon graduating, he bounced around a few entry level jobs, landing one that set him up comfortably at the community college and commenced to late night bouts of X-Box against other males of his undergrad glory days.

She was living with me because her parents’ house was too big to stay in alone (they had since moved to be closer to grandchildren, leaving her alone in multi-bedroom childhood home). She stayed in the spare room in my apartment and we held mock interviews to prepare her for dream job in the media industry.

They were as different from me as could be, but I couldn’t see it at the time.

I thought they were my friends and support during a very difficult time of life.

I worked at a university, abundant in resources that I took advantage of: theater, lectures, even sports, while at the same time struggling to find a suitable career that would lend me blend concern for students with solid scholarship.

They had both gone to college to get a degree.

I was still working at a school in order to complete my education which would become – a fact I didn’t realize during this dinner – a life long pursuit for interesting facts, stories, and knowledge about the human experience. I was never going to stop learning and learning was entwined in my living.

Both at that moment (and now), I’ve been to lectures of every kind: by diplomats, scientists, doctors, academics. Anyone and anything I’ve been invited to or announced as open to the public.

Not because of the free food (although this is an admitted plus, particularly when it’s good) but also because of the free stimulation. The sharing of ideas sparks in me my own. The wheels start turning – as they always have – in the presence of creativity. The presenter doesn’t even have to be a stylistically perfect orator.

I’m not sure if it’s the sitting down in someone else’s mind, something I’m not disciplined enough to do with my own on my own (a nap of a few minutes always seems like a good proposition just before a planned work period) or the fact that I now “work fulltime” and the better part of my day is spent in a office, or actually sitting down period, and being still that triggers this phenomenon.

Every time I go to a lecture, I’m struggling to reclaim the right to think. I find moments on my own here and there, but I’m more likely to do it if I’ve been in the presence of someone else who has been working on something and is sharing it with others.

Perhaps this is my father’s gift – the great monologist in the family – wiling to gather information from any source: by listening to the news, to lectures, to presentations (to anyone but family.)

Perhaps echoes of his recurrent warning during my teenage years – “Words of wisdom are going down the drain, down the drain” – a leftover from his own childhood, draws me into various auditoriums all over the world, seeking others, finding myself.

Here in the desert, lectures are spots of light combating short days and an increasing sense of intellectual isolation which can be held at bay for another hour in the company of other thinkers.

Oh, and those friends, the non-lecture goers?

Let’s just say I’ve found truer companions.

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And they think America is safe?

Published December 1, 2007

“In America,” our Moroccan friend says, “people go straight to their guns. Their anger shoots up.”

The rest of us at the table blink – we can’t really deny what he says, since just before dinner the shootings at Virginia Tech were made known to the entire world – at his bald statement.

“What do you mean, Americans go to guns?” one of us manages to ask.

We dig into the food as a debate brews on the cause of the massacre. The setting is a Lebanese restaurant in Doha, Qatar, a tiny desert state in the Arabian Gulf, situated just above Saudi Arabia. At the table is an ethnic hodgepodge: a couple, Latino American Catholics, my husband and I, Asian American Protestants, our friend an Arab African Muslim, who has lived in the United States, so we can’t contradict his observation outright as total ignorance.

“When I was in the States, one night a man said to me, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ In Morocco this happens all the time. We say, okay, kill me, but tomorrow, okay? Not today, I’m busy,” he brushes one hand against the other, palm to palm, which is an Arab gesture to indicate a matter is finished and shrugs.

We all laugh.

“But this night, the guy says this and the police ask me, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure you don’t want to –’ ” our friend stops, at a loss for words, but the missing phrase is familiar to the rest of us – “Press charges?”

He nods.

“Press charges, that’s it. I said no. I didn’t take the guy seriously. He is just saying something, you know? But the policeman take me by the arm, around the corner, and he ask me again. ‘Are you sure?’”

He scoops up hummus with bread and chews thoughtfully.

“I used to think the police in America were too hasty, always going for their guns, but I know now they are not. They have to be that way because everyone else is that way.”

We Americans sit in silence as he elucidates the social etiquette of conflict in Morocco.

“At home, people argue for hours and you just let them. If two men are arguing you let it continue and know they are not that serious no matter what they say – if they start shoving – that’s a warning sign. People will go and break it up.”

Poor gun control is his analysis of the Virginia Tech massacre but not for us Americans. Mental health, we insist, the shooter was mentally ill and needed extensive care, and this is the real omission he fell into, not lenient gun laws.

“A person who wants to kill will kill. He will find a gun, no matter what laws there are,” someone retorts.

I wonder about each of our cultural models for conflict and resolution. For my husband and me, children of Asian immigrants, growing up we learned discretion in public and at home as a guiding principle. Each member of our respective families circulated on his/her own orbit, distributing the others as little as possible.

Is this why I feel uncomfortable when our close friends erupt into an argument in the midst of social gatherings, their heated tones and speedy back and forth exchange leaving me a little breathless and embarrassed? Is it stereotypical to attribute their expressiveness to Latino backgrounds – a culture opposite our own – which sanctions this type of open exchange as constructive, nothing unusual, and even healthy?

Similarly, our parents’ stoic exteriors are likely the reason why in public, my husband and I speak to each other through clenched teeth, until we get home and then the screeching begins. We generally have our more pensive discussions alone rather then in the midst of the continuous dialogue of our friends; tonight is no exception.

During his undergraduate days at Virginia Tech, my husband made himself at home in the Korean community. He feels a connection to the shooter and perhaps some of the blame. On the drive home, he is still thinking about the dinner conversation and the horrific incident at his alma mater.

“You know counseling is such a stigma for Asians. Maybe his parents just ignored him and thought would get better. Maybe white parents would have sent him to therapy,” he says.

We both stare ahead into the red light tail lights of vehicles stopped in front of us; traffic is not just a problem in Washington, D.C., the city we relocated from to Doha.

Yet even life in Qatar seems filled with audible expressiveness of everyone around us: is it the intonations of Arabic that makes people sound angry or is it the volume at which they speak? Do my eyes pick up on the moving arms and raised eyebrows and interpret these are warning signs of anger?

I wonder about the ways in which we understand ourselves and communicate these perceptions to others. These issues of cultural communication which the shooter revealed to us – his having been perceived as an EFL student despite the near perfect English he speaks in his NBC videos – the contradiction between who we know we are and the person others think we are? Perhaps this is another lesson made clear by this incident at an American university; is America still the land of complacent suburbia and rampant consumerism or is there now a menace which has nothing to do with terrorists?

I live in the Middle East, which, according to many, is an unstable region where my safety is constantly at risk – yet I find myself glued to the T.V. – not by images of Iraq, but by shaky camera phone shots of Blacksburg, VA. Seated in my living room in Doha, I see the U.S. as an outsider, listening to footage of the screaming.

In a twisted irony, a few days after the Virginia Tech rampage my book club was scheduled to discuss We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver, a book about a teenage boy who shows up at school one day and shoots classmates to death with a crossbow. The discussion turned to safety in America and American attitudes towards the rest of the world. The rest of women are ex-pats of the Caucasian Diaspora; they are from England, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Ireland, South Africa, everywhere but North America. As the only American in the group, I attempt to articulate the blessing-curse nature of the Second Amendment.

“This wasn’t the Muslim bogeyman,” one woman says of the grainy flat eyed image of the shooter, “This was one of their own.”

Who needs a War on Terror when there’s war waging right inside our own borders amongst our young people? No one that week – not pundits, or psychologists, or news anchors – could come up with a plausible theory to explain the violent expressiveness of individuals with grievances in the United States. Few of these disaffected youth experience the economic hardship of refugees in Gaza or other unstable places around the globe. None have the religious ideology which propels suicide bombers towards the unthinkable. Yet they still resort to carnage and violence as a revolutionary force of one.

“Do you feel safe?”

This is the one question I hear most often when people discover we live in the Middle East.

It’s an ironic refrain because most of my new friends, Arab, Asian, and European alike, see America as a hot bed of ethnic and religious discrimination marked by random violence, equally unpredictable as the rumored instability in the Middle East.

The Virginia Tech shooter reconfirms their suspicions and raises questions of our own.

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a new kind of ladies’ night

Published November 20, 2007

“What goes on at ladies night?” This seems like an ordinary question; men are often mystified about those nights the trustworthy and stable women in their lives run out with girlfriends, dressed to the nines, with a shouted “Don’t wait up,” over the shoulder as the door shuts in their face.

In certain states in the Middle East, it is perpetually ladies night due as non-related women and men are gender segregated. For Muslim women, ladies night means complete freedom, as they discard hijab, the veils that cover their hair in observance of Islamic dictates for female modesty.

The subject of this particular ladies night inquiry, however, was the ladies only, invite only, evening of a fashion show hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University’s branch campus in Doha. The male faculty and staff were barred from this occasion for the entirety of the show’s annual run. They are all required to leave the building mid-afternoon the day of the show. As of spring 2007 there are no male students at VCUQ, though the first male students are allowed to enroll in fall 2007. They will likely also be left out of the ladies only evening, made even more precious by their inclusion into the school. The questioner, a male faculty member who had taught at VCUQ for three years, looked up at me and I was mystified.

“Well, not that much, really,” I said. This was true; as in any religiously conservative environment, Hindu, Christian, or Muslim, ladies night takes on a much more sedated atmosphere.

“We just watch the show… It’s the same show the next night too, right?”

My friend nods. He seems as frustrated by my inability to supply information, as though I’m holding out some secret, refusing to share it with him because of his maleness.

“Well, no one has their hair covered.”

He looks up again.

“Actually, no one wears abayas.”

He is suddenly really interested.

This is probably because every mall, restaurant, and classroom in Qatar is filled with abaya clad females and this all you see of Qatari women unless you are related to them. (The designer abaya industry boasts top names including even Christian Dior.) Or unless you are invited to a ladies only gathering.

In Islam, a woman only has to cover her hair when around non-male relatives. For the student or working Muslim woman who chooses to, this can mean every moment that she is outside her house; or even inside her house if someone other than her father or brother is in the room. Women who “cover” (which usually means covering their hair, but can also extend to their whole face) adopt a variety of styles in how they carry out this practice. The Qatari approach to female “covering” is an abaya a black robe with long sleeves long enough to cover feet also and a shayla, scarf, about two to three yards in length, that warps around hair, ears, and neck, hiding any space down to the collar of the abaya. This is how ninety-eight percent of Qatari women dress.

I drove home that night and shook my head at my friend’s slightly dilated pupils. There are no cameras, not even cell phones with cameras, allowed at this or any other gathering where women will be “uncovered.” This ensures everyone can have a good time without worrying photos of her hair, body, or face, will show up on the internet, or even worse, be blue toothed around the country. After all, there are only about 150,000 Qatari nationals. It is a really small country and we all know how we feel about photos of ourselves… so a prohibition on photography might be always be a bad idea.

I thought back to my first Ladies Night fashion show, the previous year, when I had only been in Qatar for about six months. I was shocked at what was underneath those abayas and shaylas. Behind the black of the robes and headscarves were designer labels I’d seen only in magazines or on the red carpet. This was the first night I saw my female students and almost didn’t recognize them because suddenly, instead of looking at a face, I was looking at an entire head, with hair, ears, neck, in short, everything “uncovered.” That night I was electrified and a little embarrassed at my own shock, given all my feminist sensibilities.

The women were… stunning. And I was staring at everyone and everything like a blind mouse given a promised few hours to see.

“Mohana, hi.”

I turned and smiled politely at a beautiful young woman. I had no idea who she was.

“It’s me. Hala.”

“Hala! Oh, wow. Look at you. Your hair is beautiful!”

Was there a more idiotic thing I could have said? Other than blurting, so that’s what you really look like, probably not. Clearly she wasn’t hiding her hair because she needed daily Rogain treatments. She was observant of Islamic tradition; she was “covered” in public like a respectful Qatari female. And she was drop dead gorgeous.

It went on over the course of the night as student after student approached me to say hello and I was bedazzled by the mascara, bold shades of blue eyeliner, perfectly blow-dried manes, curled, straightened, artfully arranged and satin evening wear. The actual models on the runway were only mildly interesting in comparison to the menagerie of women I knew, students, faculty, staff, who I literally saw in a different light that evening. They were chatty and friendly, eager to know what I was up to with summer only a few weeks away, boisterous. After the show, the murmur of voices rose to a dull roar as everyone piled into the reception area to eat, gossip, and compare jewelry.

The next day, back at work and in the daily grind, the previous evening seemed like a secret we shared; like I was having a dalliance with many women, all once, because I had seen beauty behind closed doors.

This was all before I learned about the other variations of ladies nights; weddings, as most wedding receptions in Gulf countries are single sex, henna parties, where artists apply the dye in all designs and styles in a festive gathering, and of course, dancing lessons.

Of course, my friend can’t get into any of these.

And I like a good friend, rub it in.

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In search of a word…

Published November 13, 2007

For the past week or so, I’ve been looking for a word. Yes, it sounds crazy, not a pair of glasses, or car keys, or even a misplaced phone number. But a word. The word I was looking for was – I thought – “asture.”

But it came up with the red squiggly line underneath it which means spell check thinks it’s misspelled.
So I clicked on the red squiggly and this is what spellcheck offered me:

Assure

Astute

Pasture

Satire

Azure

None of these were the one that I wanted. I was typing away, happily meeting my NaNoWriMo goals, when I wanted this word “asture” to describe the boss in the novel I’m writing. I meant, purposefully sparse, a no nonsense man. I Googled it, figuring the internet dictionary would know exactly what I meant.

Turns out the Internet (and Google) have their limits too. This is what I got with a search for “asture”: lots of links explaining the word pasture.

I was getting desparate: had I made up a word? I am moderately dyslexic when it comes to spelling and numbers – things reverse themselves – so I turned to my tried and true source for all things literary: my undergraduate English professor.

Here is the email I wrote her, subject line, “What is the word I mean?”:

Asture? The word that means sparse, plain, reserved.

Would have been in Jane Eyre to describe that orphanage where her friend died from TB.

I can’t find it and the dictionary thinks I mean ‘astute’ which I do not.

Did I make this word up?

Help!
m

Everyday she is now living her dream of being in the Big Apple, teaching and walking around everywhere, or taking the subway, right in the middle of the city that pulses with life. After decades in North Carolina, raising three children, and teaching at a small liberal arts college, she threw off the shackles of domesticity and made me dream come true. Needless to say, with her in NYC and me in Doha, our correspondence is more precious than ever.

As I waited for her response, I posted to a NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/234858) forum, WORD OF THE DAY, which offers everyday a word to work into your section for that day. There were funny ones such as flies, or cut, or purple, and there were interesting ones such as abandon, or precise, or betrayal. Having stumbled onto the forum, I was ten or twelve words behind. I busily started writing in the past suggestions but I was still stumped by the specter of “asture.” So I wrote the forum moderator, a similar, but increasingly desperate plea to figure out what word I meant. (For more on my NaNoWriMo: http://mohanalakshmi.livejournal.com/2813.html)

She (I’m assuming, not entirely sure that is a woman) wrote me back a polite message with various permutations of words that were close to the spelling of the word I wanted, and some that were not:

perhaps you mean:
astute: shrewly discerning, acute, wiley – someone who quickly picks up what is going on from minimal information

aesthete: one who makes overmuch of the ‘sense of the beautiful’ generally someone who is not a part of the real world of emotions and dirt

apathy: indifferenct to what appeals to feelings – dont care about anything

aloof: removed in distance or feeling from, reserved stand offish, not involved

Was her tone slightly…. Impatient?
I waited, knowing I would be vindicated by my now urbanite mentor.

Her opening line:

“I’ve never heard of it in my life.”

What? I thought. Eeek! I

’ve invented a word, and not only that, a word so obscure that even my most favorite literature teacher in the world hasn’t heard of it. I despaired and felt foolish. Perhaps the forum leader on NaNoWriMo was right to edit me. Perhaps I was a dolt, searching for a word that didn’t exist, stubbornly bothering people who had better things to do – like write with words that everyone knows, for example.

Then, in the typical intellectually curious fashion that she used on me all four years of undergraduate to bolster a burgeoning interest in graduate school, she recounted an episode of something similar happening to her:

But then I was teaching a poem by Francis Ellen Watkins Harper called “Bury Me in a Free Land.” It’s in one of those used-to-be-$1, now $2 Dover editions. One stanza starts, “I could not rest if I heard the tread / Of a coffle gang to the shambles led.” I’d never heard to coffle and didn’t get around to looking it up. Then the day I was teaching it, I went and left my book at home, so found it on the internet and printed it out. There, the line read “Of a coffee gang to the shambles led.” That sort of made sense – maybe a coffee plantation on a Caribbean island. I made a point about how Dover can’t afford to do careful editing and still keep the price down. Then in the middle of that night I suddenly remembered coffle, went to dictionary.com, and learned it’s a line of prisoners chained together. So the next class, I had to make the point that the internet is even less trustworthy!

Love,

I put this all behind me and kept going on NaNoWriMo, kept going with daily tasks like work, laundry, having a dinner party, cleaning up.

My husband has recently started going back to school to complete a bachelor’s degree that fell by the wayside when he was offered full time employment as an undergrad.

“How do you know so many words?” he asked me one night while I was typing busily on the laptop on NaNoWriMo.

He was at the dinning table, typing on his latest assignment on his laptop.

“Reading,” I mumbled, “I read a lot and you always learn words that way.”

“Do you stop and look up every word you don’t know?’

I looked up.

“I don’t really have to anymore. But I used to. Sometimes I’d circle them and then come back.”

The rest of the evening went in companionable silence and we both reached our requisite word counts.

A few more nights go by and I’ve forgotten all about my quest for this word that no one else seems to know but me.

And last night, tucked in bed, feeling a little achy from a cold he had likely passed on to me, I read. I read because I always have read, ever since I can remember, from eight or nine, my mother taking us to the bookmobile to get our weekly allotment. I’ve read things she didn’t want me to read, romance novels before she thought I was ready for them, and this is how I found about many things about life as an adult she would rather have kept secret (but that’s another story).

So I read last night, like nearly every night for a ten thousand nights.

And that’s when it happened:

In the middle of SUITE FRANCAISE by Irene Nemirovsky there it was:

“Mentally Charlie reproached her for this – he liked his maids to be thin and a bit austere - but she looked about thirty-five or forty, the perfect age for a servant, when they’ve stopped working too quickly but are still fit and strong enough to provide good service” (223).

THE WORD! Used EXACTLY as I meant it to describe the boss in my novel!

I circled it, dog-eared the page, and went to bed with a smile on my face.

Now even Google knows what it means:

“Austere, bleak, spartan, stark all suggest lack of ornament or adornment and of a feeling of comfort or warmth.”

dictionary.reference.com/browse/austere

Thank you, Mom, for sharing with me the love of reading.

Thank you, mentor, for giving me the courage to ask questions.

Now, back to that novel, and that austere boss character….

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Some Random Thoughts on Class and Gender in Doha

Published November 7, 2007

I’m working in my office and a student, wearing nikab, a face veil that drapes in front of the face and covers everything except a woman’s eyes, which a friend who lives here affectionately calls a ‘ninja mask.’ (in case you need a photograph: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/niqab/).
A side note: many nikab clad women drive wearing these veils, despite the fact that the limit peripheral vision enormously. This is not just my un-hijabed opinion. When I was talking about this with another student, one who wears a shyla, a headscarf that covers hair, neck, and ears, she agreed and said this is an opinion that her father shares: women driving wearing nikab are not necessarily the safest (a whole new angle to women driving stereotypes).

But back to this particular day, she is wearing nikab and comes in to ask me to use my cell phone. She has to use my phone, she tells me, because her parents won’t let her have a phone. They think it’s “bad.” Yet, they think it’s okay for their daughter to walk into a stranger’s office (I have never seen this student before, expect on the first occasion that she came to use my phone) to ask to use the phone. This seems a discrepancy to the issue of modesty, which is what they seem concerned with, if her dress and lack of phone are any indication.

“You remember me?” She asked, as though surprised.

“No one else has asked to use my phone,” I respond. And it’s true. An area of the world where workers can SMS in to bosses that they aren’t coming to work, and people break up via mobile phones, not to mention use Bluetooth technology to make assignations with strangers in public, her not having a phone stand out.

Other issues?

At a mini-conference this week, I asked a few co-workers to help assist in taking microphones to audience members who had questions for panelists, I was confronted with the divide between acceptable forms of work and unacceptable forms of work. This is determined by status and image of course.

“Aren’t there any servants to do it?” One asked me.

Servants? Was work an extension of her home?

Let’s flash to the sight that greeted me as I got out of my car earlier this week: two women who work in the kitchen of our building, bringing tea and making copies, scurrying into the parking lot to get two grocery bags from staff in my building. The bas had the contents of the other women’s breakfast. They were items that could have been stuffed into my tote bag that was slung over my arm. I watched as the procession, the staff in front, and the tea ladies in back, proceeded into the building.

Back to the microphone handler search: Of course I had to start with the women because the men were too dignified to do this task.

Of the few I asked, most pointed to their long abayas, the hems of which were dragging on the floor, and said they couldn’t run because they would fall. This is how dress marks us in our everyday lives here; the thobes and abayas don’t allow for running, pushing, lifting, or any other semi-manual labor. They make for great gliding however, as women’s feet are hidden, and girls from a young age learn to walk in small, mincing steps, designer handbags dangling from the crook of their arms. There isn’t any sense of the egalitarian idea of shifting identities – I may be a plumber during the day but at night I can be whatever I want, all I have to do is change my clothes – you are what you wear, essentially.

There were two volunteers, eventually however, and this was even more interesting. One was sharp: the microphone was right there when someone needed it. She moved swiftly (even in her abaya) and stood to the side as the speaker said whatever was on his/her mind. The other was much more timid. And although she stood against the wall and made to approach several speakers near her, she never did actually hand the microphone to anyone. She was shy and the distances too far for her to travel.

“I might meet my husband,” one person said, as I asked her why she didn’t want to help us out (it was a long day and these handlers were on their feet for an hour at a time).

In the end she turned me down; I guess he’ll just have to wait until another day.

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NaNoWriMo

Published October 31, 2007

Heard of it? It’s the National Novel Writers Month. Yes, where people all over the world (even me in Qatar) commit to writing a novel (50,000 words) in one month, starting November 1 and finish November 31st. Why do people do it? Some for the sheer community building of it; there are forums and blogs and veterans of this crazy month. Some for the challenge (new year’s resolution like it looms over us) and then there are likely others like me, who love writing, but in the quest to get better at it, have let some of the fun drain out of it.

Why is writing not as fun as it used to be?

Because I’m trying to break into the magazine market?
Because i’m trying to finish a dissertation?
Because I’m mid-stream one novel project after having written sixteen chapters of another?

For all these reasons, and perhaps the most important one to me, the loss of spontaneity, I’m taking on NaNoWriMo.

I’m going to sit down everyday and come out with 1,500 words.

And I’m going to let it be about whatever it wants to me.

The title?
“What Surprises Me Most”

Stay tuned to see what that will be.

And it’s not too late to sign up (November 1st isn’t until tomorrow!): www.nanowrimo.org

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A word about goals, age, and lists

Published October 27, 2007

Sometime when I was sixteen, or twenty, or somewhere in there – those years are all so hazy – I made a “Do Before Turning Thirty” list for myself. It included things such as: finish Ph.D., get an agent, travel to Israel. My rationale for this? I’ve no idea. I think it was the result of my mental musings; no order of importance, no particular reason, just a summation of the things I wanted to do, sort of like what you want to get the next time you are at the grocery store. Different from shopping for a particular meal or event, but similar to being on the lookout for a spectacular dress, because, well, you just can’t have too many of those, can you?

This September I came a year closer to my deadline and I was nervous. I was close to crossing off a few of the must do; I’ve been a doctoral candidate for a few years now and keep sending revision to my dissertation committee. Also, written in invisible ink, I’ve found the person who will support me throughout my life, whether they are goals for thirty, forty, or one hundred. Why was I secretive about putting “get married” on the list? A combination of despair (no one is out there), defiance (if no one is out there, I’d rather be dead than disappointed looking for him), and disapproval (there is no one because I’m a special case). Lucky for me: none of these were true. And even luckier, he did want to help me get to my “Thirty” list. Which is why when we went on safari earlier this month, check. Another one down.

There are still three to go (again no particular order):

1. Visit Israel and the Palestinian Territories

2. Finish my Ph.D.

3. Publish a novel

Yes, it’s going to be a busy year!

Do you have goals, reader?
If not, I encourage you start dreaming and set some. To employ a cheesy (but nonetheless truthful true cliché) – if you aim for nothing, that’s what you’ll get.

If you have some (either age related or otherwise): share?

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Ramadan, Alcohol, and Life in a Muslim Country

Published October 25, 2007

It’s Saturday night in Nova (Northern Virginia) and I’m with my husband’s college buddies, although he has stayed behind in Doha to work while I travel to the US for work. I walk into the sports bar, my second in two nights, to say hello. This is my obligatory visit as much as my stay with his parents and my two nights in his childhood bed. His father and stepmother take me out for gossipy meals where we combine the known facts of the remaining son’s dating life. Tonight in the bar everyone is friendly and warm – especially those that came to our wedding in Florida. They are what I have affectionately named the Korean Mafia, the safe haven my husband had as a child of Lao-Thai immigrants found for his Asian identity. They are a close group and I’ve never felt as loved as I have by their embraces.

“Can I get you a drink?” one friend asks.

“I’m okay,” I say and return the hug.

“You don’t drink— that’s right,” he responds, suddenly remembering.

This is the litany that I’ve repeated since I turned 21. But this group, hard drinkers every one, gets right to the point: “Why?” It isn’t belligerent like in high school or awkward like in college, bemused in graduate school. It is curious, like most of their other questions about me – non-Korean, South Asian.

“I never started,” I explain, “So I got old enough that I would only be doing it became I care what other people think.”

This really is the reason – also religious conviction that life is already mesmerizing enough I don’t need enhancers. Its also one of the reasons I love living in the Middle East. I know it sounds silly but its true – the Muslim alcohol prohibition has freed me in the 18 months I’ve lived there. I no longer have drinks with coworkers where someone might embarrass himself and roam the office with woebegone eyes for the next few days. I don’t have to endure the raised eyebrows and quick stammers of “do you want seltzer? Or soda?” as hosts retreat into their kitchens trying to please me. Instead, I’m respected. It’s an odd thing, respect for something I’m marked as an oddity for in the US. And then by people depicted as war mongering and hate filled.

Muslims do drink, of course, the world over and Doha is no exception. But even those who imbibe admire me ruefully with their raised glasses. Respect aside, there is a safety in socializing with me which increases my value as a friend in the expat community. I am the permanent DD. With a zero tolerance policy, expats of all stripes shudder at being deported for quenching their thirst. There is a requisite four days you must spend in jail if you are pulled over intoxicated and then, urban legend says, extraction, shame, termination. As a law with religious roots, there is little even the most powerful companies can do on this one. So I cart people around from homes to the theater or from parties to homes. Liquor isn’t sold in all the Gulf countries, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are two notable exceptions. Tales drift across of home made wine, fermented in bathrooms, and sales of rubbing alcohol. Not all Arab countries have the same stance on this issue – Lebanon, Egypt, and even tiny Bahrain are more open to drink as a form of modern socialization.

But we are in Doha and I’m snapping at my husband: he doesn’t get to tell me how to drive if he’s been drinking. His recommendations for lane changes and please for me to brake earlier are more worrying than usual at 2am. I, no night owl, get us safely home, my poor night vision and fatigued reflexes are my own altered state.

Alcoholism is a known factor for those in the expat community as they struggle with long work hours and distance from things familiar. Many are here to stockpile for their future and then return home debt free, worry free, financially stable, maybe for the first time in familial history. The days, months, years, are a stopping point on the way to somewhere else and alcohol the best filler point they have.

So how do you buy alcohol in a country where you are not allowed to bring it in with you? In Qatar there is one major distribution center and only those licensed can purchase. The rule is 10% of one’s salary is the maximum anyone can buy at one time. High ranking employees usually make fast friends. It’s overpriced and the days before Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, long lines portend the closing of all bars in the country until the fasting season is over. This causes an imposed fast of sorts whereby whole communities turn inward to party. The restaurants are closed during the day and most places of business finish at one pm so that exhausted and hungry employees can go home to wait for sundown when they will break their fast with community prayer and feasting. The Muslim fast diverges from Protestant notions of suffering in secret and stoic daily routines. Ramadan is observed by the whole community. Everyone shares their fatigue, heads own at desks, productivity slowing while expats exchange knowing glances that nothing will get done until the Eid, the festival season of reward when families take long holidays and all businesses close for three days. The open acknowledgement of fasting and the enforcement even on non-Muslims is an adjustment. I watch as a car of expat teens are pulled over by law enforcement for eating in daylight – they stammer apologies for causing others to stumble – they drive off quickly. This is different from the secular tolerance of the day touted in most other nations. Yet community enforcement is comforting in an odd way that the lonely martyrdom of Protestantism is not. Shouldering your cross seems easier when others are regulating the weight of it; when others share concern for your burden and lessen it, you feel supported.

You can eat during Ramadan if you are not Muslim, of course, behind closed doors, same as drinking alcohol. There are a few bold restaurants, long established and frequented by nationals and expats alike, which remain discreetly open only to those with discerning knocks like the speakeasies of the Prohibition. I eat my breakfast bar at my desk quietly, with the door closed, no one sees me. I sip water, also forbidden during Muslim fasting, furtively in my car, knowing I’m courting disaster. My husband and I meet at home in the middle of the day for lunch – a luxury we never make time for outside of Ramadan. We eat profusely, standing up in the kitchen, sharing our battle stories and voluptuously stuffing bread, rice, water into our starved palates. We gorge and then each head back to work, fortified for the next few hours until sundown.

Iftar, or footor in the Gulf, is the mini meal that breaks the fast at sundown, the time determined by the religious council in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. The sun goes down, prayers said, and in traditional families, the fast is broken with dates and laban, drinkable yogurt. People don’t lose weight in this season, though, because the feast added after the small provision of dates and laban rivals many wedding receptions. This is the time families gather among their extended communities and eat until the dawn prayer. The night passes for those less festive and day starts with a meal before the sun rises – the children left sleeping while adults rise to get sustenance for the day ahead. Female Muslim employees look peaked for this month because of the long hours of fasting are accompanied by long hours in the kitchen preparing delicacies that are popular this season.

“I was up until 5 a.m.,” my co worker tells me. I know she gets in at 7 a.m. so she can leave by 1pm. This means no sleep for her for three weeks, except in snatches. There is an official decree from the Emir – in observance of Ramadan the workday is reduced to six hours for everyone, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Many ex-pat companies look away, the idea of losing two-three hours of productivity an anathema to the Protestant work ethic. Others resist this saying “Because I’m not fasting, I have to work?” My husband, the admitted workhorse, leaves at 4pm instead of 7pm or 8pm during Ramadan because no one else is around and he can’t accomplish many of his team driven tasks. What about those lost hours, the lost money, the infernal equation drilled into every American? When gas is above $70 a barrel, it’s easy to make choices based on other priorities like religion, family, culture, tradition. I welcome Ramadan because I may not lose any weight, visiting the tents at all the hotels, constructed once in a year, filled with simulated feasts in Qatari homes. Live entertainment and late night shisha make this one of the best seasons to live in the Middle East. It’s a time of year when I don’t have to worry about explaining my non-drinking philosophy and when I know I’ll spend time with my overworked friends and husband.

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Ever been called out in print?

Published October 21, 2007

What’s it like to be talked about publicly? Not sure how any of Hollywood feels about being on the cover of US Weekly, but I got a small taste of public circulation this week, when I found out that I was named as one of the ‘foreigners’ working at a national Arab university in a letter to the editor written by an irate former employee to an Arabic daily.

The sum of her grievances?

Why are non-Qataris allowed to work at Qatar University?

This question brings the issue of “qatarization” – the process of turning over jobs currently occupied by foreigners to qualified Qataris – straight to my doorstep. Qatarization is the new buzz word for the country, another facet of a community outnumbered by the people living within its borders. Why are there so many non-citizens doing the cooking, driving, selling, cleaning, teaching? Rampant wealth is one reason; the medium income in Qatar is $60,000 according to one report. Take a reasonably wealthy population, mix in a region of workers desperate for income (South Asians) and you have a state where labor is racially defined to extreme class and socio-economic definitions. If you are Indian, Pakistan, Sri Lankan, or Bangladeshi, you are likely a construction worker, maid, driver, cook, or errand person. If you are American, British, Australian, or Canadian, you are likely an engineer, teacher, or involved in the oil industry.

Here I am, a Western educated South Asian, in the middle of this vortex; I am at the same time both Western (accent, dress, degrees) and Asian (skin color, place of birth, family). I violate two registers – I’m a South Asian woman performing outside the roles assigned to me – and I’m a Western working outside the American universities in Education City. I am a category unto myself. How did I get here?

Because of a third segment of society, the segment which ignores the obvious limits of the question posed in the Al Ray letter, the segment which recognizes merit will be essential to the process of readying this society for a time when the oil funds will dry up and people will have to roll up their sleeves.

If you are an educated Qatari, someone with a Ph.D. from abroad, you are likely a president or vice-president of a major national organization, someone who has seen the benefit of experience and expertise, regardless of nationality, and cultivates relationships regardless of class or ethnic issues.

But these broad minded leaders are the exception while a pervasive polarized view of labor is why the letter writer feels justified in questioning the number of non-Qataris working at a Qatar institution. She has no frame of reference for an open industry, where people are hired based on their merit, instead of their nationality or ethnicity. The letter details complaints against specific employees by name, who besides me include Syrians and Egyptians who dare fulfill job functions which include representing the university abroad even though they are not natives of Qatar.

How can a non-Qatari represent Qatar or an institution named Qatar University?

The writer asks, unaware that her hostile attitude puts unnecessary barriers between those who choose to live in Qatar and those who identify with the reform project begun in 2000 at the university.

Her questions echo the impasse between Qataris and ‘guest workers’: most ex-pats will tell you Qataris don’t enjoy working and haven’t earned the titles many of them hold. Qataris will tell you foreigners get the best salaries and live in accommodations much nicer than what they ever had at home.

There is distrust, befuddlement, and anger, on both sides; compounded by the fact most ex-pats don’t know any Qataris, much less work with any, and vice versa. The polarization of this society mimics the segregated society of the United States – except this is socially and economically reinforced – in addition to racially defined.

Most people in my office find the newspaper letter amusing. They say not to pay it any mind and that most people know that I am here to help, to work in cooperation towards a better university.

The letter deflates some of my elation at having finally crossed the imaginary line at work into friendliness and cordiality with everyone on my floor. The first year I spent largely in silence; like the monkey at the computer trying to come up with Shakespeare as women in abayas titter past my doorway. Now people come to my office to greet me, linger in the doorway, look at photos of my recent vacation, and ask me questions about my husband, my wedding, my family. They share secrets with me about breaking fast while on their periods (anyone menstruating is exempt from religious observances) and where to get the best deals on fabric. I’m glad for their friendship and for the projects underway, which I oversee, which will, ultimately make this a better place to be a student.

However, the Al Sharq letter reminds me that there are mixed opinions about my presence here; and a clear example that there is still a lot of work to do on reducing the gap between the various populations living in this very small country.

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Surprised by “The Kingdom”

Published October 19, 2007

After seeing the trailer, complete with machine guns and exploding Suburbans, I wasn’t expecting to like the Jamie Foxx/Jennifer Garner action movie, “The Kingdom”. In fact, as the trailer finished, I turned to my husband and said: “More of the same. Now everyone will be calling us and saying, Is it really safe there?

The fact is the movie confirms many of the stereotypes Americans already have about the Middle East: oil barons, nervous around women, America haters, and unafraid of violence towards the innocent, even civilians, the trailer showed all that in about three minutes.

Then the reviews of the movie came trickling in – confirming the shallow plotting – and my assumptions about the limited artistic potential of this project. Given the characteristic Doha delay (waiting to see which movies are picked up by the arbitrary local distributor, whose selection criteria for bringing films remains a mystery) we waited and then forgot about this film.

This past weekend, however, it popped up on two screens at the City Center theater, the biggest one in two.

Given that it was one of two English options (the other being “Nancy Drew” we did the usual and went to see it. Heard the saying “beggars can’t be choosers”? It’s true.

To my surprise I found the film much more thoughtful than I had anticipated or hoped for. Granted, there was the requisite grenade throwing and machine gun totting, even a moment where Jennifer Garner gets wrapped in an abaya before being greeted by a Saudi Prince (the U.S. Embassy offical says, “we got to tone down the boobies” before putting it on her shoulders). And the scenes which depict the attack on an American civilian compound, mid-company barbeque and softball game, are harrowing and unrecognizable from our carefree lives in Qatar.

What was gripping were the stories of the Saudi police officers, men just as concerned that the bombers are caught as the Americans. Not because they fear political action, but because, as Al Ghazi, the colonel in charge of the unwanted American visitors says, “I have two daughters and a precious son. Those people got up not knowing it was their last day.” Al Ghazi and a minor character, Hayatham, are standouts while the rest of the Saudis in the film are essenitally protrayed as militant jihadis.

The violence of this movie distrubed me; it’s so counter to the past three years of livingin Qatar. And this heightened by the fact that on my left was a young Qatari male, shoes off, feet in the chair, chewing his popcorn and burping throughout the movie.

What did he make of all this?
What was he thinking when the bomb maker says “Allah Akubar” after seeing the deaths of hundreds of innocents, including children?
Was he upset?

Or when the jihadists kidnap one of the F.B.I. agents, wrap him up, film a threat, and then take out a sword to cut his throat?

My peaceful return from safari in Kenya was disturbed by this movie (see Kenya photo gallery).
It was a rip into the idyll of life in Qatar.

The end of the movie sums up our impasse: “We’re going to kill them all” both Jamie Foxx’s and the Abu Hamsa character say to various teary people in their lives.

Regardless of the rest of the movie – this sentiment gets to the core of entrenched nature of this conflict – and should make us all sit up and pay attention.

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