Issue 29 | Page 5 | The Common

City / Non-City

May 5, 2025 Amman Portfolio, Issue 29, Translation

By YARA GHUNAIM
Translated by WIAM EL-TAMAMI

Eight Ways of Looking at a City

Every day, on my way to work, I make a bet with myself: Will I find the tree—the one next to the Own the Apartment of a Lifetime! sign—still standing in the same place? When we’re together in the car, my mother wonders aloud: “My God, when did that building come up?” I imagine the buildings sprouting up from the earth, like plants.

I spend more than half my day in an office, behind a closed door, inside a gigantic glass building. I sit in front of the computer screen. I contemplate how empty space becomes apartments to be bought and sold. Now that homes have become investments, there is no sky left; all the air is now conditioned. They’ve blocked out the sun, buried the sea in another city. And yet, when I go out, I see flowers growing, forcing their way through the concrete of the sidewalk. I marvel at their intuition—their knowledge that concrete is bound to break.^[1]

The System

May 5, 2025 Issue 29, Issue 29 Poetry, Poetry

By ELISA GABBERT

Chrysippus laughed so hard
at a donkey who ate all his figs
that he died. Melville said Death
winked at him with the left eye.

Hotel Philadelphia

May 5, 2025 Amman Portfolio, Essays, Issue 29, Issue 29 Essays, Translation

By KHALED SAMEH
Translated by WIAM EL-TAMAMI

As I sit here in the Hashemite Plaza, I am surrounded by noise—visual, auditory—coming at me from all directions. This grand forum attached to the Roman Theatre has now become a breathing space for hundreds of thousands of residents of East Amman and the surrounding governorates. Some come here for recreational reasons, to get together, or to make a living. There are many other reasons why people come to this square, reasons that are not unique to Amman and that are found in most cities around the world. There are pimps and sex workers (heterosexual and homosexual); children being exploited in different ways; dealers of hashish and other drugs—along with various other things that Ammanis would include in their long list of taboo topics.