By HISHAM BUSTANI
Translated by NARIMAN YOUSSEF
Amman is not incidental. The sayl, the stream that patiently carved a path between seven hills for thousands of years, drew—as waterways often do—the din of life. It was somewhere close to here that the Ain Ghazal statues were found. Nine thousand years old, captivating in their simplicity, they seem to be about to speak as you contemplate their black-tar eyes, the details of their fine features, their square torsos and solid limbs.
By ALA JANBEK
Translated by ADDIE LEAK
Amman was culture, colorful walls, and distant souqs in the old city where Mama tried to buy everything we needed in one trip. Na’ur was where my grandfather built the mill near a spring, where our home by the hill watches the sun set behind Palestine, far from the chaos of the valley.
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.
Translated by MAYADA IBRAHIM
They say that Amman is merely a caravan crossing, and that the spiritual tie between it and its people has been severed. I do not mean the concept of “belonging”—that is a loaded word—but rather the spiritual connection between a person and the city they inhabit. This is the ability to grasp moments from the past to relive them anew, to reflect on memories shared with the city, to feel its streets coursing through them, and to imagine, in a whimsical moment, the city pulling a feather from its pocket to gently tickle them.
The man’s face is gone. Gone the others circled around him in the hut, gone the clang of cowry shells (were they cowry shells?) gathered around their ankles, gone the hut. Gone the ochre-red soil on which the hut was built. All that’s left is the fabric the man, who was a chief, was wearing. The blue of it—a blue so rich it throbbed.
Indigo doesn’t just dye a surface. It gives depth.
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.
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.
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