All posts tagged: Essays

Confrontations with Amman: A Love-Hate Relationship

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.

Confrontations with Amman: A Love-Hate Relationship
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Amman Compendium

By MARIAM ITANI
Translated by WIAM EL-TAMAMI

On Greetings

Hello, Amman. Greetings to you, your people, your streets, to all the surprises and endless stories you have hidden up your sleeves. I landed here ten years after marrying one of your sons, fulfilling the prophecy of my grandmother, who always said, “Wherever you go, life will take you to Amman.” Yet coming to Amman was actually the last thing my husband and I expected to do. 

We arrived at the wrong time, in the blazing heat of August. My oldest son, Izzeddin, was very happy, because he’d had two birthdays: one in Beirut, another in Amman. As for my daughter, I’d left her behind in Beirut with my grandmother, buried in the same earth, keeping each other company. I visit her more there than I would if she were buried in the cemetery here, far away from the city, covered in layers of dust and mirage. Coming onto the airplane, I was told by the flight attendant that this would be the last time I would be allowed to board a plane, because it looked as though I was about to give birth. I told her that I had decided to give birth in Amman, and showed her the doctor’s reports that allowed me to travel. I took hold of Izzeddin’s hand, and we sat in the very first seats on the plane. It was my first time booking business class from Beirut to Amman, because that gave us extra baggage allowance—something we desperately needed.

Amman Compendium
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Hotel Philadelphia

By KHALED SAMEH
Translated by WIAM EL-TAMAMI

1.

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.

Hotel Philadelphia
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Gently

By DAN HECK

 

It’s sometime in 2007. I’m almost 21. At night I stock bulk items in the backroom of a Target. Dante helped me get the job. My best friend since eighth grade: the human bully-repellent with rockstar swagger and long, luscious hair. Target’s pay sucks, and I hate work, but it’s something I can do with Dante. 

Most nights, we unload the truck’s thousand or more items together. The two of us in a tight, hot, truck container, tearing down walls of packaged toys, clothes, food, and cleaning supplies. One time, the wall of goods is packed extra tight. It’s probably 120 degrees in the container and managers demand we keep the unload moving. I’m too precious with the cargo, so nothing moves and heat exhaustion creeps in. Eyesight blurs. Standing dizzies. I’m a couple sweats away from passing out. I get a cold Gatorade and a five-minute break, but only if I finish the unload. A manager threatens to steal both away.

Gently
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Grey Dumplings

By GRZEGORZ KASDEPKE
Translated from Polish by JONATHAN BAINES

Piece appears below in English and the original Polish.

 

Translator’s Note

The memoir-plus-bonus-recipe ‘Grey Dumplings’ by Grzegorz Kasdepke is taken from the volume Królik po islandzku (2022). When it appears in English, I hope it’ll have the title Icelandic Rabbit. It’s a collaboration with the novelist Hubert Klimko-Dobrzaniecki. The two authors take it in turns to share a snapshot from their lives, each with a relevant recipe tacked on the end. The stories are accompanied by Aleksandra Cieślak’s striking illustrations. (Ask your search engine to show you the cover!) The short prose pieces are unfailingly comic, but there’s always something more serious going on as well. There are thirty vignettes – and thirty recipes – in total and an atmosphere of friendly competition as they stack up. Cumulatively, they paint a vivid picture of Polish life over the last several decades. ‘Grey Dumplings’ is the first of Kasdepke’s contributions. I was drawn to it by the same qualities that illuminate his writing for children: a lightly-worn irony and an exhilarating curiosity about the world.

Jonathan Baines

 

Grey Dumplings

The smaller the flat, the more friction – literally and figuratively – between family members.

My parents lived in a small room in my grandparents’ flat. They were very young (as a child, of course, I didn’t appreciate that, but it’s clear to me now – and perhaps my father’s mustache did seem a little thin). It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, just until they were assigned their own three-bedroom flat on the Dziesięciny estate in Białystok. It went on for ten years. Goethe would have seen the beauty in this, at least from my childish point-of-view. One two-roomed flat and three generations: that’s the real magic of numbers, don’t you think?

Grey Dumplings
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More to the Story

By MICHAEL DAVID LUKAS

My Grandma Betty’s garage, like the rest of her house, was always neat and well-labeled. The tools hung in their places. The floor was swept clean. Along the walls, DIY wood shelving was stacked high with boxes labeled according to their contents. Herb Toys. Xmas Decorations.

Somewhere amidst all the old slot cars and yearbooks, up by the rafters in a far corner, were three produce boxes filled with ephemera from her childhood in Toledo: a trophy from the Maumee River Yacht Club, a 1911 desk calendar printed by her adoptive father’s plumbing and heating company—“We’d like to be your plumbers just the same as Dr. Jones or Dr. Brown is your doctor”—get-well cards, bank books, newspaper clippings.

More to the Story
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Shadow Count

By LAURA MARRIS

Book cover for Laura Marris's The Age of Loneliness
Somewhere in those years of 6 a.m. flights, I developed a recurring dream of a place I knew in the northwesternmost corner of Connecticut, where stone walls snaked among the trees of a forest that had once been farmland. The kind of town where the post office is also home to two chipmunks, one messy and one clean. A place full of wild birds, the flocks of my earliest childhood, vortexes of robins where rural woods broke open into fields. Where I had dug in the streambed and drunk the shimmer of mica with the silt. Where old traces of human mining and clear-cutting had been softened by an enveloping abundance. I felt myself wanting to check on it, wondering how it was doing.

Shadow Count
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