My wife knows I’m using her on this trip and she resents it. I wanted her to see the Middle East because she’s much more intuitive than I am. I wanted her eyes and ears because I’m clueless about people. I should never have admitted this to her.
She’s already held it over me several times, saying that she wanted a vacation and she’s being taken to an unhappy place for my selfish purposes. For twenty minutes in the cab ride she didn’t talk to me, angry about what she was getting in for. Then on the plane, going over our too big Mastercard bill for last month, she said, Well 2,000 of that was for your trip. Half of that’s yours, I said. No, this is your trip.
It’s been better in the day we’ve been in Jordan. She likes heat and Arab culture and hummus, and she enjoys the rites around Ramadan and seeing all the the different ways women wear hijab. In the hotel restaurant some guys were getting drunk (yes) and singing and she said, Do you think they’re going to dance? I shrugged but a minute later sure enough two of them were dancing, delicately holding one anothers’ hands in the air. They soon called over the waiter. My wife wanted me to dance too but I was too tired.
It’s kind of a boys’ club here, she said. And is that a bad thing? I ventured. She said, It’s just the way it is, in Syria and Morocco too. I don’t mind it. It’s never impacted me negatively. But that’s the culture. The women are all somewhere else. I pushed her and I could see her backing away at having her brain picked. I used to know a lot and now I know a lot less, she said elliptically, referring to when she studied anthropology and thought she understood a culture.
I woke up a couple hours ago and found these helpful statements on a political level, where I operate more than she does. This place is other, as Edward Said pointed out to us so long ago, and it sure is different. My culture’s not a boys’ club. Women have a different role, and I like that role. Big deal. All cultures are different. Then you think of what has been done to us in the west by ideologues: The idea that you could demonize one whole culture and one entire religion– to what end? To justify killing them? It’s crazy.
And of course so much of it is about a real estate venture, all to justify an ongoing landgrab, by a superior culture.
At the hotel bar, before the dancing, we watched a report on the TV about American Islamophobia. There was a long piece on the church that plans to burn the Koran. And because my ears are sensitive I picked up the constant references on the TV, and in conversation, to Israel and Palestine. So many of the people we’ve met in just half a day are surely the children of refugees.
At the bar, my wife said she was disappointed in me for not speaking more Arabic. You really ought to be learning Arabic. I thought about all the mulitilingual people you meet here, I thought about my college professor Michael Walzer learning Hebrew in his 50s, burrowing down into his Jewishness, and developing political theories that justified his ethnocentrism. I realized my wife was right. It’s a daunting challenge, but I’m already glad I brought her on my trip.
