By MARYAM DAJANI
Translated by ADDIE LEAK
I’m leaving Abdoun after having sushi at Noodasia, heading toward Airport Road. The traffic light in front of me turns red, and all I have to do is step on the brakes… but where are the brakes? Are they on the right, or is that the gas? I’m getting closer to the light, cars are stacking up in front of me, what do I do? Is the pedal on the right or left?!
I wake up.
My car: a room of my own with glass walls open to the world. One that makes me feel free and independent, when, in truth, I’m public property.
Driving isn’t my time for reflection anymore. Ever since I started using GPS for everything—even finding the shortest route to places I know well—I’ve gotten too busy trying to shave a minute or two off the drive to think. Too busy following the blue line.
I try listening to my favorite song…
Hope when you take that jump
You don’t fear the fall[1]
… until I reach my destination: the Amman Chamber of Commerce in Shmeisani. There’s nowhere to park, as usual. I rank places in Amman based on my car’s ability to find a parking spot. My map expands every time a new spot gets casually added, even if we’re talking valet parking: strangers I give my room keys to.
In the afternoon, I head to Sports City to take my daughter to a taekwondo class. It’s the most popular sport in Jordan. She’s restless, fidgety: “I don’t wanna go! I have a black belt already; how many dans are you gonna make me get? Huh? Just look at Abughaush!”[2]
I tell her, “It doesn’t matter how well you do; the important thing is just to pick a sport and stick to it.” I don’t know how those words came out of my mouth; I used to fully believe Frederick Dodson when he asked, “If you’re not going to be the best in your field, what’s the point of doing it?”
My mom always tells me to let the driver take them. “You’ll wear yourself out going back and forth like that!”
“But I like talking to them on the way,” I tell her. “They actually listen to me.”
Or at least they did until the damn cell phone came along and took that away, too. I go around al-Waha Circle once, twice, three times. Why al-Waha? Because it’s not so small that I can simply speed around it, and because it’s crowded enough that everyone’s too busy exiting to notice me going in circles. It’s also not so big that I forget where I’m going. I circle through it until I decide where to go: Khalda, so I can go to Astrolabe, which is usually full of young people. Though I no longer feel like one of them…
Old, but I’m not that old
Young, but I’m not that bold[3]
… so maybe Gardens Street, toward al-Lweibdeh, where I’ve been going for three years now, or to Umm Uthaina so I can settle in at Segafredo, which is full of snobs and the nouveau riche. In Italy, Segafredo is just a little café chain that sells coffee and sandwiches at train stations, like Paul in Paris, or Abu Saleh for us. How is it that we look at anything from outside through a convex lens, making it bigger and more important, and then switch to a concave lens when we look at ourselves in Amman?
Or maybe I’ll go back home via al-Madina al-Munawarah Street (the Street of the Hungry, a.k.a. Gluttons’ Street) and flop onto the sofa, staring off at the plant-filled balcony and giving in to my writer’s block—again.
My sister, my daughter, and I go restaurant-hopping on moonlit nights in Amman. We stop in everywhere, then head home after we lose our cravings but before we lose our minds.
Where’s the line between hunger and gluttony?
I loop around Amman’s eight traffic circles, but the looping has gotten more difficult lately with all the bridges and tunnels and the multiplicity of lanes you can take, foregone conclusions suddenly turned into decisions. Everything has been chopped up; even the Sports City and Dakhliya roundabouts are no longer connected, closed circles but rather distorted, rectangular, and overlapping. Trying to navigate them makes you feel like a nearsighted person who’s forgotten their glasses, only realizing the mistake once they hit the long, straight line of Airport Road.
One day, I’m revolving around Dakhliya Circle, drawing closer and closer to the center through some law of physics, when a car with an official red license plate slams into my passenger side. The traffic cop comes over to murmur to the “respectable” parliamentarian, “Don’t push it; she’s not at fault. I wouldn’t file a police report….” But the man screeches and shouts. I lean against the barriers surrounding the roundabout next to the armored police vehicle; maybe, after all my turning around in circles, I can sink into them and enter into the heart of the city. But they push back against me. I had forgotten that in Amman, your share of the street is based on the type of car you drive and the color and type of your plates. So… pedestrians? What’s left for them?
I leave my car parked nearby and walk toward 4th Circle to catch the teachers’ strike. The white ball caps bobbing along the edges of the street as I make my way over, the human heartbeat I can feel pulsing through the streets, from Sports City Circle to Dakhliya Circle, Abdali Circle with its gendarmes, 3rd Circle, then a detour around the cordoned-off 4th Circle to finish out with 5th Circle, 6th, and 7th. Along the way, police cars, gendarmerie buses, and public security forces. 4th Circle and the neighboring Prime Ministry tower over it all as much as ever—how could we not appreciate the circle before? From now on, take a deep breath every time you pass through; you never know when you may be prohibited from entering.
The army of teachers, several thousand of Jordan’s two hundred thousand, are demanding their rights—money they were promised years ago, that will pull them above the poverty line. I thought of the seventh-century renegade Abu Dharr al-Ghifari,[4] who said, “How can he without a crust to eat not rise up, brandishing his sword?” A mouthful of bread is more honest than any speech given by politicians or reformers: it’s the dividing line between the luxury of ideological debate and true commitment to revolution.
“If you see the same tree twice in the forest, you know you’re lost.” The streets in Amman look alike, all narrowly spaced buildings, the same type of tree. I often feel that this street in Dahiat al-Rashid is the same as that one in Rabieh, or that a certain street in Jabal al-Hussein is the same as another one in Jabal Amman. Am I lost, or is it just déjà vu?
Déjà vu happens less as we get older and our wonder at magic tricks runs out. No new, confusing situations stimulate the brain to ruminate on our memories. Scientists have discovered a shared brain network that underlies both memory and imagination, and there are striking similarities, too, between remembering the past and imagining or simulating the future.
I whirl around with Amman, weary, in a Sufi trance that has never given me the grace to achieve oneness. Like the reaction when I correct government officials on my name—Maryam Dajani, not Majali like all those ministers—and see the respect in their eyes dim.
Spin, sugar bowl, spin
It broke I don’t know when
Who peeped it, didn’t sweep it?
Who peeped it—you!
Little girls hold hands and dance in a circle, chanting this rhyme; they decide who has seen the sugar and left it strewn across the floor, then let go of the culprit’s hand and push her into the center of the circle. Personally, I saw the sugar, smelled and tasted it, but I never made it to the center of the circle.
After I grew up, at university, I learned what the word “da’ira” really meant—not simply a circle, but da’irat al-mukhabarat, too, the General Intelligence Department, and how it related to student activists. A closed, complete circle.
Now that we’re adults, we have to be pushed to spin, pouring out gallons of olive oil to slide on and make our engines turn, but as children, we twirled ourselves around for fun. We went to the Jubeiha Amusement Park for the ballerina ride and the Ferris wheel, spinning and screaming in fear and exhilaration before ending with the pirate ship and then vomiting on the sidewalk. At the park gates, when vulgar songs would play, my sister would tell me, “I feel like my ears are caked in dirt.” The one time we rode the bus to Sweileh, she told the driver, “Please turn off the radio.” He asked her why, and she lifted her head high and answered, “Because I don’t listen to music.” I remember the man’s quizzical, patronizing look before he continued on his way as though we were invisible. How does the forbidden become permissible over time?
I drive the car to the National Conservatory of Music. My son Omar sits at the piano, waiting for his teacher, an Armenian, to give him the signal. Then he says “Bismillah,” in God’s name, and starts playing.
I exist along the edges.
My car is parked on the edge overlooking a valley behind the Islamic Educational College in Jubeiha, a vast expanse of dirt, the dream of Jordan Street coming into view on a desolate horizon. In my hands, I have a coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts and a donut with chocolate sprinkles. After a long day at the university, I ask myself for the millionth time what I should do. Automatic cars are voiceless; you don’t feel the engine. Moving a car should be a more complex process, moving forward or reversing more than a single gear shift you either ace or fail.
I imagine putting the car in drive, not reverse
and free-falling into the valley.
[1] “I Lived,” by American rock band One Republic.
[2] Ahmad Abughaush is a Jordanian taekwondo athlete who won Jordan’s first (and, to date, only) Olympic gold medal in Brazil in 2016. On November 6, 2020, the Jordanian Public Security Court sentenced him to six months in prison on charges of falsifying official documents and illegally possessing a passport. Abughaush announced his retirement from international sports on October 30, 2020, and nothing has been heard from him since.
[3] “Counting Stars,” by One Republic.
[4] Companion of the Prophet Mohammad, among the first to convert to Islam; many Islamic hadith (oral traditions) trace back to him. He has been described as Islam’s first socialist.
Maryam Dajani is a writer, pharmacist, businesswoman, and scholar in medical anthropology. She holds an MBA in marketing and is a business and public health consultant. She publishes articles regarding the three taboos: sex, religion, and politics. In 2021, she published Totemic: The Light and Darkness of Self-Discovery Through Writing, as well as a chapter in the collection To Write a City: Amman at Point-Blank Range.
Addie Leak is a co-translator of Mostafa Nissabouri’s For an Ineffable Metrics of the Desert and Hisham Bustani’s Waking Up to My Distorted City, as well as the curator of a Words Without Borders feature on Jordanian literature. She is based in Amman, Jordan.
