Notes From Syria I

Gretchen McCullough

Often when I was returning from Damascus on the bus, I stared out at the monolithic statue of Hafez il-Assad on a hill. With open arms, he beckoned to the people. Assad was not Lenin, and I was not in Russia, but near Tartus, Syria, not far from Lattakia, where I lived. The coastal road wound along the Jebel Ansariya mountains; the Mediterranean ocean, a royal teal. The natural beauty was an airy, hopeful contrast to the dark Eastern-European atmosphere of Syria. While I had come to Syria for a job and adventure, many Syrians I knew wanted to escape from the unassailable secrecy of the regime, talk of Secret Police and spies, snarled bureaucracy, and lack of opportunities and resources. Many Syrians were so frustrated by daily life they talked of nothing but getting out.
     Daily life involved so much waiting, that you couldn't help but think that you were on the stage of a Waiting for Godot play.
     Karim, my Syrian beau and I were always waiting for goods or permission or a new plan. For example, take the ink cartridges for my computer. We had made a four-hour pilgrimage to Damascus, only to be told at the Canon shop: "No ink cartridges. They might have them in Tripoli." Tripoli was an hour and a half from Lattakia, but we could not leave Syria without exit visas. Organizing visas took time, and required visits to many offices. I would have to get permission from the Dean and the President of Tishreen University. Many days they were not available. After Karim and I got the permissions, they would have to be recorded in a giant ledger in the Main Administration building. After that, we could then make the trek to the Immigration office to get the actual visas. These chores might take as long as ten days. Without the cartridges, we would have to use the computer lab at Tishreen University, which was rarely open.
     I had to learn not to plan. Plans curled in on themselves, like the edges of burned paper. Plans were soft apples that had been in my fridge for a month. Plans smelled rank, like the garbage I had forgotten to take out.
     Even the university schedule was fluid. Tishreen University was supposed to open September 15, but no one came. Various explanations were offered. The Faculty of Arts didn't have enough space. The timetable wasn't finished. The boys had military service. Unofficially, the university opened October 1. Karim and I moseyed down to Kesseb, the mountain resort on the Turkish border--a place of refuge for Armenians fleeing from the Turks. There, we ate delicious fateyre, a small pizza with sesame seeds and red chilis. Very tenderly, Karim wiped the red oil from my chin with a kleenex.
     When we returned to Lattakia, he helped me choose material for the curtains in my flat. Not the material I would have preferred, but better than the tattered blood red my landlord, Samuel had provided: a swirled ocean blue for the guest room, a rust and dabbed brown for the Arabic coffee room, and an orange and blue hen design for the bedroom. The man who sold us the material had a wandering eye.
     We visited the offices at the university and drank tea. And then Turkish coffee. After tea and coffee, we switched to zurat, herbal tea. Another day, we bought pillows for my flat--four squares of hard foam, tied together with a piece of pink string. I was pleased by small, concrete triumphs.
     Surprises and cancellations reigned. Unannounced holidays abounded: Ba'ath Party, Muslim, Christian. Visitors arrived: the other Fulbright professor from Aleppo, a poet from Britain, a delegation from the American Embassy, accompanied by a rock band. (Karim and I ran around Lattakia, putting up posters for the rock band.) I continued to pencil in appointments in my pocket calendar, but realized this was a ridiculous American habit in Syria--most events were spontaneous or came together at the absolute last minute.
     The other real difficulty was communication. While I lived in Syria (from 1997-99), there was no easy access to e-mail. Precious letters sometimes washed up at the Syrian post office. Phone calls were immediate, but so was the price: two dollars a minute. I spent a tidy sum on phone calls the first year. Samuel, my landlord, scolded me: "You are wasting your money."
     Samuel's remedy for my punishing phone bills: buy a phone card at Lattakia Centrale downtown, instead of calling direct from his house. Hungry-looking Arab men lined up behind three glassed-in phone booths. Once I got the bluish floppy phone card with the picture of space-age satellites on the front, I waited in line with all the men. Already claustrophobic, once I had finally gotten into the glassed-in booth, I wanted out. The phone call was a brief, shouted conversation in front of a curious audience.
     Instead, I could send a fax, although sending a fax took as long as writing a Ph.D. dissertation. Whole afternoons were chewed up at Lattakia Centrale. Sometimes, the only person at the post office who knew how to operate the fax was off running errands, or having tea. Or the fax lady was there, but the overseas line to the U.S. was busy.
     Even if I felt brave enough to charge off to Lattakia Centrale alone, I couldn't. I had to ask Karim to come with me to translate the fax since my Arabic wasn't up to it. (Records of all faxes are filed with the Secret Police.)
     Sometimes, I felt like Gilligan, a castaway on a desert isle. Mostly, I floated in eerie silence. Lattakia was the edge of Mars, far from the outside world.
     I consoled myself that so much solitude would make me more productive. Not so. Even my plans for hiding were disrupted. Writing routines snagged on precious electricity. The insistent ringing of my phone made my nerves raw. The customers from the shoe shop next door rang my doorbell. If the phone didn't ring, or the doorbell didn't ring, the painter was moving furniture in Samuel's flat upstairs.
     In between cancellations at Tishreen University, there was time for conversation.
     What were my Syrian colleagues waiting for? For Assad's death. Better salaries. A flat. A job outside Syria. A Fulbright to the United States.
     The office that I shared with four or five colleagues looked like the stage set of a Sartre play, with the four desks, three chairs, and forest green strips for curtains. A portable blackboard on wheels faced me. The phone worked if you jiggled the cord. The office was redeemed by the three chairs with brown cushions and a small coffee table, a place where we gathered for jokes and gossip over Turkish coffee. The next office was separated by a flimsy sheet rock partition that didn't even reach the ceiling.
     One morning, one of Karim's friends, Mustafa, paced the office, like a hunted man. He could not support his family on the ten thousand lira a month he earned as a professor. His tomato farm was not making any money. He hated his job. He needed to buy anti-depressants for his sister who suffered from depression. His wife wanted a washing machine.
     "What should I do?" he asked me, lighting up another cigarette.
     Above Mustafa's head on the portable blackboard were diagrams of Chomsky's theory of grammar. A tree-diagram sprouted from his head. I suppressed a smile.
     I did not want him to think I was laughing at him so I moved one of the forest green strips which were supposed to be curtains, and looked out the window.
     "I don't know," I said. My hands were now covered with dust.
     He fished in his coat pocket for a kleenex, and handed me one.
     "Thanks."
     "Maybe I should emigrate to Australia."
     Emigration would not help him solve his immediate financial problems, but it seemed unkind to point out this obvious fact.
     The other Syrian professors who had emigrated to Australia had returned. One had worked as a barber. Many of them didn't like working other jobs outside the university. Even though they complained bitterly about Tishreen University once in Australia, they missed the status they had in Syria . University jobs in Australia, like most places, were hard to get.
     My dialogues with Karim about emigration were circular:
     "Why do they get their citizenship if they don't intend to stay?"
     "Protection from the Syrian government. To have another passport. They can leave whenever they like," he said.
     "How is it protection? They don't leave."
     "Magda has an Australian passport. She can leave whenever she likes. Of course, if you don't have the money for the ticket, you have to stay."
     "You can't leave without the money for the ticket. But if you are not committed to emigrating, I don't see the point," I said.
     "It's a matter of feeling free psychologically. She can leave if she likes," he said.
     "But she hasn't. How will she get the money for the ticket? Why would she try again? The last time she refused a good job because it wasn't at the university. So she ended up with nothing and had to come back."
     "Without the money, there is no way out," he said.
     Even if professors published many books (an impossibility since they were weighed down by heavy teaching duties and thousands of exam papers), their government salaries would never exceed ten thousand lira, or two hundred American dollars a month. Getting a Fulbright was one way they could gain access to hard currency. They often lived very cheaply in the United States so they could remit the dollars and buy daily necessities in Syria. For example, one professor used a good chunk of her Fulbright money to buy the furniture for her flat. Who could blame her, if that's what she needed?
     Competition was vicious for Fulbrights and fellowships.
     Leesa, the Cultural Attache had asked me to nominate one of the Syrian professors from the English Department for a two-week seminar, sponsored by the United States Information Service.
     When the Vice Dean, Mahfouz, learned that I had recommended Magda for the seminar, he harassed her. There was a steady stream of meetings and phone calls.
     "I should go. It is my right. I need it more than you do. I have a family," he said, cornering her after one of her lectures.
     He was mainly thinking of the financial benefits of the grant.
     Mahfouz had recently returned from a year-long Fulbright in Vermont. Still, he couldn't stand for anyone else to have the opportunity to go to the United States, even for two weeks.
     He complained that I had not recommended him.
     "You just returned from the U.S. Leesa asked me to recommend someone who hasn't been. Magda is teaching American Literature this semester, " I said.
     "My field is American Literature. Her field is the 19th century British novel. Why should she go?"
     For weeks, he treated me to tedious monologues about why he was more qualified and deserving for the grant. When I explained the situation to Ingy, Leesa's Syrian assistant, she said, "Maybe we can find something else for him. There is some Fulbright money left over this year."
     In the meantime, Magda succumbed to Mahfouz's pressure. Her mother had also been saying that I was a CIA agent. Magda wrote a bizarre letter to Leesa, withdrawing her application.
     "Who is going to go on the two-week grant?" Karim asked.
     "I'm sick of the whole thing. I didn' t feel like nominating anyone else. Leesa said we would forget it."
     Magda had not gone on the seminar. No one had gone. Instead, Mahfouz had gotten a month-long Fulbright to the States. Perversely, he had been rewarded.
     When I had first come to Lattakia, Mahfouz had provided me with more practical assistance and support than the Dean. He had taken me around to look at flats and he and his wife had invited me over many times for dinner. However, the incident with the grant had spoiled my good will.
     Later, Karim told me that Mahfouz had stolen books from the university in Minnesota, instead of making photocopies. (Because of the scarcity and expense of books in Syria, many people photocopy books when they are outside of Syria.) Karim was upset by the theft. He was a honest person and he was careful with books.
     A similar take-what-you-can-get attitude among professors emerged when the U.S. ambassador's house was trashed for retaliation against the U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1999. Karim had told me that many of the Syrian professors had said they were glad that the ambassador's house had been destroyed. I had offered advice to many of the same professors on their grant proposals.
     "You are upset."
     "This is not the kind of thing I want to hear on Christmas Eve," I said.
     "It's politics. Not personal. Not against you."
     "I don't want to know what people are saying. Really."
     Even though I was no fan of U.S. foreign policy, I was still upset by the professors' glee about the destruction of the American ambassador's house. I had spent a great deal of time, offering them advice on their Fulbright proposals so that they could get a paid year in the United States.
     "We don't care about your political system. We want the opportunities," Karim had told me once in a bitter, candid moment.
     Hard-hitting al-Ba'ath socialism had done nothing to foster economic opportunity in Syria. At the same time, Syrians wanted the opportunities that the United States had to offer, they resented the political power of the United States.
     The Fulbright Program had been started by Senator Fulbright to promote "exchange and understanding" between people of different countries. Unfortunately, such a noble idea was undermined by American foreign policy, which was driven by a desire for power and resources in other parts of the world. Syrians lived in a country with limited resources and opportunities. If they wanted to survive, they had to be quick.
     Leesa had asked me both years to sit on the Fulbright Committee to select Syrian professors for Fulbrights to the United States. She had also asked Henry, who was fifty-ish and balding, retired from the State Department, and now the spouse of a younger woman who worked at the Embassy. His wife had recently had a baby, his first child. Even though he still wore the uniform with his Oxford white shirt, blue trousers, and penny loafers, he had a dry sense of humor, and peppered his conversations with anecdotes from his years as a consul in Saudi Arabia. He hated Saudi Arabia without apology: "Women are like veal there. Tied up and left in dark rooms. Happiest day of my life when I left the place."
     In the first interview, a Soviet-educated Syrian professor sailed into the room, another man in tow. "This is Bob, " he told Leesa. "He comes with me."
     Bob was a Syrian, who spoke a slangy American English. Had he sold himself as a go-between to this insecure professor?
     With her petite figure and pixie cut, Leesa looked like an elf, but she was not intimidated easily.
     "I'm afraid not. No translators," Leesa said, shaking her head.
     Without Bob, the professor's confidence sagged, and he faltered in the interview. He shook his head many times, and reverted to Arabic. I had been in similar situations at Tishreen University, where I had been unable to communicate in Arabic.
     There were other nutty moments. Another Syrian professor, French-educated, could not speak English, either. Both Henry and Leesa broke into smooth, Parisian French; I felt excluded with my sketchy Spanish and hard-won Arabic. Leesa insisted that the professor must know English; the professor insisted that he would learn English once he got to America. The entire interview was conducted in French. I imagined the professor struggling to buy groceries at the local Winn-Dixie. "Parlez-vous francais?"
     "I am sorry, but the purpose of the Fulbright is research. If you improve your English, we will consider your application for next year," Leesa said in English.
     But he did not understand so Leesa repeated in French.
     "Please," the man said in English.
     State Department guidelines for Fulbrights were as bewildering as the interviews: 1. Soviet-educated professors. Idea: they experience American principles of democracy and the American way. (Their functional English was poor.) 2. Clearly-written proposals. (Many of the clear proposals did not match the speaking ability of the candidates. Someone else had obviously written them.) 3. Usefulness to Syria. How will they use their research when they return? (The candidates who spoke the best English were the ones with the most "useless" proposals for a developing country.)
     Many of the scientific proposals were out-of-date, archaic, and a tad wacky.
     "In your proposal, you say you are going to research formula milk? Hasn't that been done with Similac?" Henry asked one candidate.
     "How in the world would that be useful for Syria? Don't most women breast-feed their babies?" Leesa interjected.
     The professor and Leesa argued about how many women in Syria breast fed their babies.
     Leesa pressed the issue, "Do you have any statistics on how many women in Syria breast feed their babies? It seems to me that Syria doesn't need formula milk. And as Henry suggested, formula milk already exists, so what would you be researching?"
     I did not comment since I had no academic or practical knowledge of formula milk or breast-feeding. (Nor did Leesa.) I glanced down at the professor's application again. He was Dean at the University of Aleppo.
     Finally, the flustered Dean backpedaled, "How can we do research without the Internet? How can we check anything?"
     "I agree. Syria's has got to get the Internet," Leesa said, sympathetic.
     "When will I know the results?" the Dean asked, humbled.
     "In a few weeks I'll send everyone a letter of their status," Leesa said.
     "Our main problem here is that we have no Internet. Our country is getting farther and farther behind in the world," he said.
     "I understand," Leesa said, shaking his hand. "Thank you for coming in."
     The Dean shook hands with Henry, and me.
     After the door shut, Leesa sighed. "I'd like to send him because he's a Dean. Soviet-educated. But what a bogus proposal!"
     "With my modest knowledge of science and recent experience with formula milk, I can see the proposal is weak," Henry said.
     "There are other people who have better-written and researched proposals," I said.
     The Dean was not on our list of top candidates. I filled out the form, and put him on our rejected pile on the floor.
     The rest of the day we tackled "usefulness." Was research on the quasi-autobiographical novel more useful than research on improving the nutritive quality of straw? (No.) Was research on Noam Chomsky's syntactical theory of grammar more useful than the effect of pigments on cottonseed oil? (No.) Was research on H.D. and the subversive role of women in literature more useful than research on urban wastewater for irrigation? (No.)
     If you defined usefulness only in scientific and business terms.
     My sympathies were with the "useless" more articulate proposals. The Fulbright to Syria had been my way out. I supported my writing with low-paid part-time teaching at the University of Alabama, credit card overdrafts, and loony odd jobs. To finish my novel, I had just scratched by. Once I had tutored a Japanese manager in pronunciation, mainly the difference between l and r. There I am, sitting at a conference table at the JVC plant, with a grim-looking Mr. Nakamura in a white jumpsuit. Over and over, "Lice. Lice. Lice." The lice job had paid well for a little while. In addition, to sleepy Alabama students and a dull Japanese manager, I had taught Koreans, Thais, and Japanese reading, writing, speaking--anything, everything--I could do it, except deliver pizzas.
     The most miserable part-time job had been delivering greasy pepperoni Dominoes' pizzas to hillbillies with ferocious dogs or on the West side of town. One night I had delivered a pizza to the Motel 6, commonly known as Crack Hotel in Tuscaloosa. As I went up the stairs, a black man jolted towards me and said, "Yo, that's for me." Surprised at myself, I retorted, "No, it's not" and kept going. I had thought to myself, "My life might be worth a nine ninety-nine pizza." Once back at the store, the manager said, "You have to go back. You forgot to take their coke." I begged and pleaded with some of the male drivers to go instead, but they refused.
     I sympathized with the Syrian professors, who were interested in the cash. Even the most idealistic academic, could not eat his research!
     The most deserving candidates should go to the United States. I didn't really care about the scientific or Soviet affirmative-action agenda of the State Department. In the end, though, it was Leesa, who ranked the candidates, and sent in the recommendations to the Fulbright Commission in the United States.
     The first year, I had done many programs for the Cultural Center so I could get my own Fulbright renewed: a reading from my unpublished Egyptian novel, a Donahue-style workshop on the "The Five Paragraph Essay," for a crowd of one hundred, a presentation on "How to Write Using Music" at a conference in Aleppo. I had even dressed up as Santa's elf for another colleague's presentation on "How to Teach Holiday Language in the Classroom."
     I remembered the long wait, before I had learned about the Fulbright to Syria the first time.
     My brother had said, "Why don't you leave Tuscaloosa? Get a job somewhere else? Houston?"
I could not even afford a U-Haul. Where would I go? How could I even move, without cash?
     The Fulbright committee in Washington had gambled on me. My Fulbright proposals were detailed syllabi: Travel Writing on the Middle East and Technical Writing for Doctors. I had taught neither.
     Like my Syrian colleague who had spent her Fulbright money on furniture, I used the money for what I needed. I set about paying off my monstrous credit card debt. And more importantly, the grant financed my writing and traveling for three years.
     I will never forget Sarah. She was not even one of my students, but had turned up at my office hours. Her devotion to English was almost religious. Would I correct her compositions?
     One day she followed me home from Tishreen University. After I made her a cup of tea, she sat in my living room and read me her essay, which compared Assad's regime to Nero's rule. "Nero belived that starving the dog would make him more obedient," she read.
     After she finished reading, she begged me not to tell a soul about her essay.
     I was flabbergasted by her political sophistication and knowledge of history. She was only nineteen, but she understood that a person could starve from humiliation and cultural isolation.

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