Pamela Olson’s first book Fast Times in Palestine chronicles her at-first innocent entrance into Palestine in 2003, one in which she was largely unaware of the environment and conflict there. It clips along at an inviting brisk pace and offers surprises and many turns because Olson is a chance-taker and jumps at opportunities.
Olson’s writing is refreshing partly because she perfectly captures the boisterousness of youth. She embodies a universal adventurous spirit. Her voice and initial innocence were sometimes amazingly naive and often made me smile. She’s smart, gutsy, grabs the tiger by the tail, and takes life as it unfolds willingly. Something she referenced as “cultural osmosis”, the perfect recipe for magnetically connecting with charismatic people, allows her to adapt and absorb experiences with ease and often humor as she occasionally stumbles and picks herself right back up at every turn.
Olson didn’t travel to the ME with any intention of entering Palestine. After graduating with a degree in physics from Stanford she embarked on a middle eastern journey by way of Cairo camping in the Sinai and then on to Jordan enjoying touristy type experiences and treating herself to a stay at Amman’s Al Sarayya Hotel which often functioned as a stopover for all the journalists traveling between Baghdad and Jerusalem at the beginning of our long war on Iraq.
This is quite early on in the book but gives you a sense of the charming openness of this young traveler that, coupled with her physicist’s inquisitive mind, carries her everywhere through the ensuing narrative:
The manager of the hotel was a droll and charming man named Fayez who’d been trained as an electrical engineer. He was an intelligent, clean-cut chain smoker, tall and thin and distinguished-looking, the kind of guy you’d expect to see patiently explaining something obscure but important on CNN. I sat in his office with a few other guests, and he offered everyone sweet Arabic coffees, on the house. Someone asked about the stuffed white wolf sitting on top of one of his filing cabinets, Fayez explained that a reporter had nicked it from one of Saddam’s palaces. He left it in Fayez’s office and made him promise not to sell it.
Olson’s “scalp began to prickle” over the war loot and her discomfort in America’s role in the invasion. After the recounting of a soldier emptying his ammunition into a bus she experiences somewhat of an awakening:
As their stories went on and on, my palms began sweating and my heart beat faster. I was almost shaking. Strangely, it wasn’t the horror of the stories themselves that upset me the most. It was the prickling realization of how thoroughly I had been misled by my own press and government. They’d made the war sound so clean and under control, abstract and far away. Here, it sounded like nothing short of a blood soaked catastrophe.
Then again maybe these ‘independent journalists’ were lying or exaggerating, trying to impress each other and tourists like me with big talk.
There was only one way to find out. My head began buzzing as I realized what was possible here. It was nice enough drinking tea with Bedouins and gazing at the stone monuments of ages long past. But here was a chance to witness history as it was being made.
I asked about expeditions to Baghdad the next day and was offered a ride shared taxi for $200. I wasn’t sure what I would do once I got there. I figured I could meet people like I had in Cairo, Dahad, and Amman, and things would work out somehow.
I was aghast! Olson didn’t make it to Baghdad, she took a very different turn. A turn that changed her life in ways one assumes she would have found unimaginable just days before.
Although I’ve been a participant in activism for Palestine for a few years there’s still an abundance of history and factoids I know nothing about. There are phases of recent history over the last ten years that tumble and spin around together, current events tend to weasel their way into our psyche in disjointed or turbulent ways, frequently not in a linear fashion. On reflection, more than anything Olson’s book provides a very decent backdrop of the history during the period leading up to Palestine’s entrance into the global consciousness of the conflict that’s emerging today. She accomplishes this in an extremely accessible way and I learned a lot. This is an excellent beginner’s guide to the conflict largely because it introduces the reader thru virgin eyes because Olson herself, for the most part, was a virgin to the conflict. Although prepared with a brave, open and curious mind she wasn’t looking or asking to have her mind blown. Stay tuned. This book is a breath of fresh air and we’ll be publishing a few more excerpts with commentary over the days and weeks to come.
Thanks for the wild ride, Pamela, and as always Stay Human.
