By YARA GHUNAIM
Translated by WIAM EL-TAMAMI
Eight Ways of Looking at a City
1.
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.
2.
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]
3.
When I think about how Amman became Amman, I think of its small houses as a cover of moss, creeping up haphazardly over the mountains. The houses had imprinted their image in my child’s mind when we visited the city every summer: a smattering of cubes, rising and falling on a distant mountain. Now, as I look out over the city through the large window on my left, I doubt that anything here has sprung up in an organic way. I realize, too, that Amman has expanded in the wrong direction. And, through some strange twist of fate, it so happens that I have spent all my time here in the very place that could have been a forest, or vast plains of wheat.
4.
In a city rife with forgetting, I live on the ruins of a possible forest, and the only access I have to the sky is the small balcony of our apartment.
5.
I don’t know where to go.
6.
I look through the car window, my gaze at an upward slant. The city that is losing its memory unspools itself before me like an empty tape, asking me to fill it with my memories. But I am disconnected from the city and don’t have many memories. At the same time, I feel that I have to lose my own memory to know how, and from which point, I can begin to write about Amman.
7.
A heavyset man sits on a wooden board balanced on four rocks in front of a church at the end of Rainbow Street. When I walk by him, he starts to call out: “He has risen, he has risen, he has really risen!” Then he screams in my face: “Answer me! Why aren’t you answering me!” I decide that he’s crazy. What a city this is: even the sane people expect you to resemble them. The man raises his voice, and keeps raising it even after I cross the narrow road to the other side. On my left is a set of stairs that leads me down to another street; in front of me a sign that says The Old City. Its arrow points toward all of Amman, which sprawls out, it seems, without end. I head back home.
8.
The last time I tried looking up, instead of down between my feet as I usually do, my grandfather was busy listening to the singing of a small bird. It was perched on a wall that separated his yard from his neighbor’s. I leaned back a little on my chair and turned my gaze up toward the sky. My mother’s voice echoed in my head: “My God, when did that building come up?”
When the City Disappears
It’s almost three in the afternoon. I’m in a taxi, traveling from Lweibdeh towards the 8th Circle, via Prince Talal Street and downtown Amman. On the radio: Oh, your eyes. They hold me in their gaze, command me to love you.
Yesterday, when I walked through a small passageway created by three interlocking trees on the sidewalk, it was spring, with a slight chill in the air—for a moment at least, until I was lashed once again by the heat of the sun.
You? You, stranger who feels at home, were lying in the grass in a forest of eucalyptus and willow trees. Then you got up to chase the current of the river that runs from Ras al-Ain, springs flowing into it, all the way to Souq al-Sukkar. You walked along the bank, across from the vegetable market, taking pleasure in listening to all the sounds of people and vendors.
The river is now behind me.
I don’t realize that Umm Kulthum has stopped singing until the taxi drives by a small house slated for demolition. We’re nearing the 3rd Circle, and in the background I now hear the voice of a musician I don’t know, singing a song I barely know.
The driver’s phone rings. The shape of the city changes: the buildings are now bigger, taller.
We drive through a tunnel, then over a bridge. The streets narrow, widen, narrow again. Shopping malls and offices. Glass rises on either side of al-Sayl, the stream that runs to the other end of the city—the city that could be any other city in the world.
The distorted song ends.
Walter Benjamin is in the driver’s seat. He glances back to tell me that walking in the streets of the city is not the same as flying over it. The passengers of a plane can only see how the streets flow with the terrain, shaped by the laws of nature all around. But, for those on foot, the city unfolds before them in a different way.
The car is stuck in traffic. I get out and start running in the opposite direction. There’s no sidewalk, so I run on the asphalt, between the cars. The tape of the city loops over and over again: bridge, tunnel, tall buildings, short ones, offices, malls, glass, glass.
Al-Sayl, the stream, has not disappeared.
A sayl of people and cars. Which direction should I head in? Should I use Google Maps? I catch a glimpse of you from afar, weaving through the masses of people, and I decide to follow you. The merchandise of shops and stalls is spread out on either side of me and sometimes even above my head. People move through them, on whatever is left of the sidewalk. No one is walking alone here except for me. I hug my shoulders in, so that the space around me becomes as large as possible.
As we draw closer to al-Husseini Mosque, the Sayl becomes denser. The boundaries between street and sidewalk begin to dissolve; everything runs into everything else. People, cars, stalls, a recorded voice intoning: “Three pairs of socks for one JD!” You run to the right of the mosque, in the direction of the market. A fruit stall; vegetables lined up neatly in front of a shop door; another recorded voice singsongs: “Clothes! Accessories! Any piece for half a dinar!” A hawker calls out in a strange, lilting melody: “Oh, tomatoes!” Someone grabs a handful of nuts from a heap piled high like a mountain, and keeps on going.
Just as your city disappears, you too disappear. My stream of thought is broken by the sound of a car driving past the apartment, calling out: “Anyone have any scraps, scraps, scraps for sale?”
A Geo-Romantic Study
“According to spatial theories, my love, public transport is considered a non-space. So there are no windows here that love can fly out of.”
They had agreed to meet on a bus whose journey begins and ends in the city’s second-to-last circle. Each of them waited on a different bus, because they had not agreed on the meaning of “last” and what might come before it. The two bus drivers got off their respective buses to speak on their phones while the passengers got on. They stood beneath two blue signs with the names and numbers of the bus lines. Behind them were construction barriers, the words For Investment inscribed on them in red. Social geography came in through the door of the first bus; love flew out of the window of the second bus. Like a black plastic bag, it hovered in the air over the heads of the passersby, then disappeared. She leapt out of the other door and ran down a narrow road, behind a taxi that was blocking the exit of the roundabout. She vanished suddenly from view. He, too, had jumped out of the window when he realized that the bus he was sitting on was heading toward the other half of the city.
Old City Anxiety
I’m trying to figure out how to leave the Roman Theatre before people start streaming in through the narrow gate, and I forget to pay attention to the lyrics of the song. At the plaza, I can’t find a taxi. I close my eyes and follow the masses of people crossing to the other side. I can’t find a taxi there either. All the anxiety that has been building up inside my head starts to trickle down into my stomach, hands, and feet. I put my phone in my bag, take it out, put it back in again. I try to distract myself by counting my steps and avoiding the people on the sidewalk: middle, left, right, middle, left, left, around the base of a tree. Has a cab arrived yet?
It’s late, and home is far away. My curiosity about the shape of the city at night has abandoned me. I close my eyes and run over to the other side of the road.
[1] This passage was written in response to the “Amman Skyline” section in Hisham Bustani and Linda Al Khoury, Waking Up to My Distorted City (Beirut: Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 2023), pages 55–65.
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Yara Ghunaim is an architect and writer. She documents the ever-changing urban landscape of Amman and questions her position within it. She holds an MRes in art and design from Cardiff Metropolitan University. Her research concerns questions of time and space in the city, with a special interest in finding intersections between architecture and the humanities. Her work has appeared in BAHR, Sukoon, and Ghost City Review.
Wiam El-Tamami is an Egyptian writer and translator. Her work has appeared in publications such as Granta, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Freeman’s, and AGNI. She won the 2011 Harvill Secker Young Translators’ Prize, was a finalist for the 2023 DISQUIET International Prize, and was nominated for a 2024 Pushcart Prize.
