By RANEEM ABO RMAILA
Translated By MAYADA IBRAHIM
A Confrontation with Place: The City Changes, and We Change with It
I walk amid the traffic and the rush of people downtown. Here is where I first came to know the city, or so my memory claims, and I fall for it. Downtown has a “soul” that other parts of the city lack. It reminds me that I, in defiance of the hostile noise, am here, and that Amman the city is also here, attempting, however feebly, to find answers to questions that have long exhausted us. The soul of the place tempers the weight of those questions.
We return, regardless of how much we try to run or hide, to our questions about place and identity. Does the city grow weary of its people? Do we become, in our attempt to understand it and to keep up with it, the victims of place? The city changes rapidly; it loses its characteristics and becomes a stranger to us. Those of us who fear suffocating in our city try again to find familiar things in it. Downtown, whose landmarks begin with the Roman Theatre and end at Al Shamasi1 and Al Kalha Stairs, once formed the identity of the city; today there is only dissonance. Shops, cafés, and the ambition of investors extend across it from every side. It no longer resembles its past; it no longer resembles us.
As for me, weary of walking in the center of town, I try to lean on the first stairs I see. Others around me, fellow tired wanderers, take refuge in the stairs as well. There is no room to rest in this city. It’s as if Amman entangles us in an imminent and predictable trap. It commands us to keep moving while concealing our destination.
Sitting on the stairs, my bag on my lap, I lean on my hand, contemplating the movement of passersby. I look resentfully at what the city has become. A short-statured man’s voice creeps into my ears as he begins to play near the stairs. He has a guitar, white hair, and something that compels him to sing.
The movement of people becomes slower in my mind; the din of the city is slightly quieter. I wonder: What does it mean to be estranged from my city? As a person born here, how do I avoid being suffocated by it? How do I learn to accept it as it is: anxious and fretful? In the middle of the crowds, my tears fall, reluctant and slow. I yearn for a time when life felt less crowded and hurried, when people moved at a gentler pace, gave beauty its due, contemplated the sky, weren’t too embarrassed to dance when life sang to them. The man’s singing brings me back to the center of town. Where the city roars.
A Confrontation with Time: The City Doesn’t Change, So We Do
We would meet in front of the stairs, in the quiet before the performances began and the crowd arrived. Slowly we would ascend the stairs together, singing as we went. When we reached the top, where Amman lay before us, both distant and near, she would sit beside me. Together, we would set off on a wild journey to celebrate many Eids atop Pharaoh’s Stairs.2 But my hair has turned white, my hands have changed so much that I no longer recognize them, and Eid has yet to come. In its absence, I find myself fearing the stairs.
As they await my departure, the stairs confess their fatigue to me. They long to release the burden of steadfastness, but I plead with them to stay for the sake of all promises lovers make to each other. The stairs ask me to leave, saying my promises are too heavy a burden to bear. To remain standing, they must transform into a Roman Theatre and forsake lovers’ dreams of meeting atop them.
I cannot understand what the stairs mean. What would they be without vows of love? I ask them to explain. The stairs fall silent, turning away from me. But I press on, and they grow angry. They tell me: “That is the problem. You do not understand me, and neither do your friends. Your presence fills me with shame and makes endurance harder, and that is precisely why you must all leave. Your departure must be quiet, fleeting, unnoticed by the birds’ morning prayers.”
A Confrontation with the Neighborhood: East of the City
On the day of Eid, the young man in charge of the swing in my neighborhood asked for my family name. First names didn’t matter much. I didn’t know his; I only remembered the nickname the other young men had given him. Everyone called him “Gadis.” Young men acquire nicknames for various reasons, and as the years pass, people like me forget the reasons and the first names, and only remember the nicknames. Had Gadis learned my family name, he would have let me skip the line of children waiting their turn to ride the swing. Later, I realized that it wouldn’t be only during Eid games that I’d need my family name.
To maintain my sense of security in a place where young men know each other only by their nicknames, I would need my last name often. If the young men knew my family name—and, by extension, my brothers and father—it would protect me from the neighborhood troublemakers. They don’t mess with a girl if they know even one male member of her family.
I understood this early on, as did the other girls in the neighborhood. We knew that the young men who averted their eyes from us out of respect were the same ones who went to Wakalat Street in West Amman to disrespect girls whose last names they didn’t know.
I was on my way home from school when, for the first time in my life in the neighborhood, my first name gave me a sense of security. I was walking with my neighbor toward the narrow stairway near Abu Khamees’s shop, where my house was. The stairway was narrow and inhabited by cats and other bothersome creatures. As we approached the top of the stairs, five young men we knew well stood there, holding small plastic bags filled with powder. They noticed us, and we understood what they were about to do. There was no way to hide or turn back; we had to brush past them to get to the bottom of the stairs, where our homes were. Did they feel threatened? Did they fear we would tell on them? Without even exchanging looks, my neighbor and I began running down.
The narrow stairs seemed longer than they were before, much farther than I could bear. I heard someone running behind us. We were running fast; I didn’t think we could stop even if we wanted to. I could hear my heart pounding louder than all the sounds around me. The person behind us was getting closer, calling: “Raneem!” My first name stopped me in my tracks. I turned around at last and saw our other neighbor, six years younger than me, barely catching her breath behind us. She said, “Why are you running? I’ve been chasing you for a while!” I caught my breath, looked up, and saw the young men still standing. I counted them: “One, two, three… okay, they’re still five.”
I took my young neighbor’s hand, trying not to make her panic, and asked, “Did any of the young men at the top of the stairs speak to you?” She shook her head. My first neighbor smiled at me. Her eyes said: We made it! We continued, doing our best to keep our distance from the young men and the powder, while staying as close to home as possible.
A Confrontation with Memory: Fear
On a distant summer day in the city, the sun passed over lightly—not stifling me, nor making me afraid.
I was heading to the shop near my house when the suspicious man crossed my path. He had hands like mine, feet like mine, and a head that resembled every other head, but his eyes—his eyes were unlike any I had ever seen. I looked at the man’s eyes cautiously and continued walking toward the shop, my steps careful. As he came closer, fear crept into my feet, robbing them of their strength to carry me.
Later, I told my mother about the man, and she told Baba. He said to me, “Sometimes, when I see sweet children like you playing, I join in. But not everyone wants to play with children; some people might come close because they’re trying to violate your body.”
Though my house was close, at the time it felt impossibly far away, as if the whole neighborhood had remained in place but the doorstep to my house had been moved. The man hadn’t yet closed the distance when I turned my back to the wall. I felt him wrap himself around me, blocking out the sky and the sun. He drew closer—until the space between us was nothing—and robbed me of air.
Then I heard screaming. It sounded as though it came from someone else’s throat. The realization didn’t come right away—that the voice, the constriction in my throat, and the fear were all mine alone.
Startled, my mother came rushing out of the house. But she found me alone on the stairs. Where was he? Had he fled? My mother carried me back inside. Between my tears and trembling, I described to her how the suspicious man had tried to lift me to take me away from them. When he tried to place his hands behind my back, my voice drowned out my hearing—I could no longer hear or see anything until my mother carried me, and I collapsed in her arms.
I was eight when my father—hardened by life and deeply attuned to its ways—explained to me that some eyes we ought to be afraid of, which is why he said, “Sometimes, when I see sweet children like you playing, I join in. But not everyone wants to play with children; some people might come close because they’re trying to violate your body.”
I understood then that I would encounter other fleeing men in my life. They would have heads, hands, and feet like mine, but their eyes would never resemble the ones I knew.
I sat in silence with my father. The little girl, now overwhelmed by fear and no longer believing in play, said, “I beg you, Baba, and all the other adults: Don’t play with children. They are like me—afraid. But they can’t scream.”
My neighborhood changed. For years the little girl believed that all eyes were like those of the man who fled; then she finally saw people with hands, feet, and heads like yours and mine—eyes that spoke only of a desire to play. But the neighborhood had changed, and no one had taught me how to endure the sun’s harshness in the new city summers. Facing this new sun, I think of the possible sins of the man who fled and wonder if he, too, suffocates under the city’s sun. To avoid suffocation, I allow the eight-year-old child to teach me to scream.
- An informal name for the stairs connecting the downtown area to the former Jordan Cinema building.This nickname has cometo replace the original name for the cinema. The new name derives from the umbrellas used to decorate the stairs.
- This is the old name used for the Roman Theatre, which looks like a giant curved staircase worthy of a pharaoh.
Raneem Abo Rmaila is a storyteller from Jordan who brings narratives to life through film and literature. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English language and literature. In 2024, she co-authored her second book, which explores the city of Amman, her home. In this work, Raneem came face to face with often neglected aspects of the city and asked questions about its past and future while immersing herself in its present.
Mayada Ibrahim is a literary translator and editor based in Queens, New York, with roots in Khartoum and London. She works between Arabic and English.
