Although I could have entered Israel alone, I made the decision to return to Jordan and accompany Mary whilst we decided how to solve her passport problem. This decision resulted in my stay in the Middle East acquiring an entirely different aspect from what we had expected: we were faced not with tanks and machine guns, but with equally distressing facts of Middle Eastern life, such as the horrendous ‘honour killings’ of any woman even suspected of having physical contact with a man before her (arranged) marriage.
Through the necessity of waiting for papers to acquire a ‘clean’ passport for Mary, we spent a month in Jordan, and then a couple of weeks in Egypt (the nearest Irish Embassy is in Cairo). During this time, we never stopped talking to Arab women, in depth, Mary in particular having access to their normally hidden side through her massage work, whilst my own contact would come through political conversations and teaching English.
We lived in a permanent state of shock. We had landed on an unknown planet, a separate reality. Never having studied Arab culture – we were in the Middle East simply in response to a human tragedy unfolding in Palestine – we mostly felt like two-year-olds, wide-eyed and our mouths agape learning about the nightmare world we found ourselves in.
Our position was uncomfortable in the extreme. We were supposed to be ‘helping the Palestinians´, yet found ourselves in total disaccord with every aspect of the culture we went to protect and preserve. Daily we agonized about our seemingly absurd situation and daily we asked more questions …
The very first thing we had to cope with, apart from the unrelenting stifling heat, the dusty ugly traffic-ridden towns, the utter absence of a single blade of greenery, the unrelieved desolation of the desert landscapes (not ‘desert’ as in National Geographic photos, with smooth dunes and elegantly placed camels – but desert strewn for mile upon mile with the wrecks of cars and the black plastic bag detritus of uncaring capitalism) – was being woken up each morning at 4.0 a.m. by hideous amplified wailings from the Mosque next door (there is always a Mosque next door, no matter where you live).
Now I am a permanent early-riser, but I am used to waking to the sounds of birds and goats and cockerels. And as a militant atheist, not known for my tolerance of oppression in any form or colour, I lived in a permanent frenzy of outrage at this domination of our daily lives. Ten times a day – at the beginning and end of each ‘service’ – there would be a repeat of this painful earbashing, at full pitch, organized to criss-cross the whole town so that there was no escape anywhere.
On the few occasions I have ended up, through our theatre presentations, in small Colombian country towns at weekends, I have always been indignant to be assailed by the same aural bullying from competing Evangelical and Catholic churches. I am astonished that any population anywhere in the world puts up with having their lives ruled in this way.
But that was just the ‘decorations’. We had only been in Jordan a few days when we first heard the fatal words ‘honour killings’, an intrinsic part, evidently, of Arabic culture, whether Christian or Muslim. We made the acquaintance of what must be a unique species: a Welsh Muslim woman, who told us that one day on a beach, her 5 children playing in the sand had discovered .. a Foot. She and her Arab husband went to investigate and it was the shallowly buried body of a 16 year old girl. Every week in the excellent English-language newspaper ‘The Jordan Times’, there are reports of these killings. And this is ‘just’ Jordan, and ‘just’ the year 2002. We continued our investigations and discovered this phenomenon has been going on for thousands of years all over the Arab world, predating both Christianity and Islam, along with the unthinkable barbarity of female genital mutilation.
Mary worked for a while as assistant to a highly educated Jordanian Christian school nurse and they never stopped talking – and arguing – about women’s issues.
The nurse at first tried to deny that the ill-named ‘honour’ killings were a widespread problem. “For instance,” she said, “in my family, only two women have been killed …”
She later confessed, in tears, that she was once in danger of her only daughter being killed as the girl fell in love with a Muslim man, which would have brought – fatal – disgrace upon the family. “Luckily” she contrived to swerve the girl’s affections on to a ‘suitable’ Christian man. The nurse readily admitted she would have had to agree to her daughter being killed ‘if it was necessary’. Indeed, we heard that it was often the mother of a girl who instigated the process, and always her father or brothers who would carry out the murder ‘to cleanse the honour’ of the family of some imagined sullying.
Mary and I made a deliberate habit of bringing this subject up wherever we went, as we could hardly talk about the weather with our minds in such a state of shock. A young lawyer woman we met in a desert village at a women’s centre in North Jordan – one of the few openly sexual women we ever met, in closefitting tee-shirt and skirt, free in her movements and full of life – immediately agreed it was a horrible social problem. Her best friend, a girl of 19, was being forced to marry an old man she hated and she told her father she would kill herself if he persisted in his ruling. The father ignored her. The girl poisoned herself and dropped dead at her wedding feast.
This Green Letter will turn into a book if I cite the dozens of cultural horror stories we were told. In Jordan, we stayed nearly the whole time at the excellent Jordanian Women’s Union headquarters in Amman, where some very dedicated and brave women – the two leaders are atheists, a very rare breed in Arabia – are spending their lives trying to help women who are the victims of the incredibly suffocating social system, where a broken marriage automatically results in the woman losing all her children, and a divorced woman can never marry again and is forced to return to live with her parents whatever her age. Many of the women of the centre are lawyers, trying to turn the clock forward to wrench their society out of the dark ages, and meeting with regular Government shutdown of their organization, sometimes for years at a time.
About 70% of Jordanians are actually Palestinian – refugees and descendants of refugees from various Israeli military campaigns. Politically, we were always 100% on their side. Culturally …
We visited a Palestinian family whose relatives Mary had stayed with the other side of the Forbidden Frontier – forbidden that is, to Palestinians who cannot visit their relatives just a few miles away. I got talking to the eldest son who had some English, about how marriages were arranged. When he had finished telling me how a man would acquire a wife, I asked not-innocently “and how would a woman indicate that she liked a man?” This brought forth incredulous guffaws of laughter. “It can’t happen” he asserted confidently.
We were taken on an outing to one of the most horrible places on earth – the Dead Sea. There I watched, glazed by now with so much oddness, as whole groups of women clad from head to toe in thick black clothes (in the sizzling 40C temperature) waded into the heavy salt water and ‘bathed’ – and then came out and – I am not making this up – poured fresh water over themselves, still fully begarbed.
When I mentioned my bafflement at such uncomfortable dress fashions to a young Jordanian-Palestinian man, he got very annoyed and said why was it I didn’t complain about women in Africa going around naked. I failed to make the connection.
The weeks and our brain cells, and all our original passion and enthusiasm were draining away, but we trudged on, transferring to Egypt where we were lodged at a house belonging to the Mennonite community. Cairo is in a class apart in terms of city horror. Sinners needn’t wait to go to Hell – just go to Cairo. Here the petrol economy that rules the world and turns its leaders insane can be witnessed in its unmitigated form, with none of the tinkerings and prettifyings of England or Ireland like growing millions of poor little baby trees along motorways to pretend we aren’t committing suicide. In Egypt there is no pretence. It is an out and out military dictatorship, kept in place of course by American dollars and dedicated to breeding CARS. Cars rule. I realized how extremely Western I am when I couldn’t get over the fact there are no pedestrian crossings, no traffic lights, no traffic police and quite simply, no way of crossing the road. And no gaps in the unbelievable streams of cars, night and day. Mary and I would stand helplessly at the side of the road until we could join groups of berobed Muslim women who would wade without thinking out into the battlefield. The cars wouldn’t hesitate, slow down, and of course not stop. Pedestrians have to dodge in and out of them, schoolchildren, blind people, the old and young alike.
But Egypt is at least rebellious. Mary and I, two middle-aged ladies,
had the remarkable experience of being courted in the streets in a manner
familiar to us from our teenage. Not here the pious lowering of the eyes –
or deliberate turning of male backs as occurred to me once in Amman when I
had the audacity to approach some men to ask them the way … And I bring
home from Cairo the memory of the best chat-up line I ever heard, as we
sweated in the damaging heat at the side of a road, trying to pluck up
courage to cross … “How do you like Alaska?” We cracked up laughing and
began an interesting if brief friendship with two Egyptians who introduced
us to the male side of Arab oppression.
The first thing we discovered is that there is no such thing as an ‘ordinary Israeli’. Every single one is an absolute individual, matching each other only in the outrageousness of their opinions, the extremity of their views, the tremendous desire to talk, the fierceness of their attitudes – and an absolute belief in themselves as Eternal Victims, no matter that most of the rest of world can see clearly that the whole State of Israel was founded upon an untenable aggression.
I agreed with none of them, but found most of them fascinating to talk to. It was a tremendous relief to see women free in their movements and dress in charge of their own bodies and lives. But a shock to see young girls in alarmingly tight-fitting army dress, huge weapons slung carelessly over their shoulders, smoking, gum-chewing, loudly laughing, swaggering around with their young male counterparts, the young kings and queens of Israel ruling at gunpoint.
And after the first pleasant impression of wellorganized roads with Pedestrian Crossings and no hourly ear-assault from religious loudspeakers, one starts to feel uneasy, then queasy, then downright uncomfortable. Hey! There’s a war going on – and here is the country at war living in obscene modern luxury, unaware it seems of the Other Israel called Palestine, the land of roadblocks and homes reduced to rubble, daily and nightly assault, thousands of disappeared prisoners and weekly lists of men, women and children shot ‘by mistake’.
Sometimes the pressure-cooker the Palestinians are being forced into boils over and some of the blood and rubble hits posh middle-class Israel. Mary met a man who was driving in his car one day when the bus in front of him blew up and he found himself dragging dead bodies out of the wreckage and handling parts of people… We stayed with the brave parents of a young girl killed by a suicide bomber as she walked along a street to school. Instead of joining the chorus of warcries, they joined the peace movement saying “The Occupation killed our daughter.” On their very tasty Jerusalem front door they have a notice saying “Free Palestine”. They have done talks all over the world calling for justice for the Palestinians, and the man appears in John Pilger’s maligned documentary “Palestine is still the issue.”
We went to accompany Palestinian peasants in their olive-picking harvest, watched over, but not protected by, the Israeli Army, and regularly attacked by the Israeli settlers – the most violent and marginal elements of Israeli society, lured by financial reward to live as weapons of war on the tops of hills overlooking Palestinian villages. The man organizing the trip and the person who drove us to the olive groves was, astonishingly, a tall young Rabbi from an unlikely group called “Rabbis for Human Rights”. In such people lies a glimmer of hope.
Sitting at the side of the dusty road after the day’s work, Mary was
informed by a handsome young Israeli driver passing by that she was an
‘Arab-lover’ and that he was going to ‘kill us all.’ Another, with
amazingly good aim, covered my shoes in spit. I was so surprised, all I
could do was burst out laughing and commend his precision, not that he
stayed to hear me. I don’t expect it is very funny for the Palestinian
peasants who have to watch their crops wasting, or risk their lives picking
them.
It took me a week to land. I was in a glazed nightmare state from all I had seen and felt in so many alien lands. Bogota the Awful looked beautiful to me. Aeroplanes, previously viewed as unlikely monstrosities, seemed friendly. I’m not sure which felt more unreal: looking down on clouds, looking up at mindbendingly violent films on the myriad TV screens, - or suddenly finding an unknown Colombian girl kneeling down in the aisle next to me saying “Excuse me, but aren’t you Jenny from Atlantis?” It was several moments before I could speak, my brain reeling. We were 35,000 feet in the air – how could anyone up here know me? “I have seen you in a documentary film in Paris where I study”, she “explained”. I still stared, quite braindead with the weirdness of it all. The documentary was made by a film student in Bogota, who had met our kids, including Tristan, when we were refugees and they were juggling and singing in the parks to pay for their next meal …. She was in the middle of making the film about us when Tris and Javier were murdered. The theme of the film then swerved radically and evidently it is now being shown in film competitions.
I arrived in a psychic space-helmet in the Southern town of Popayan, which suddenly looked picturesque to me, with horses and carts and variegated buildings, instead of the unrelenting modernness of the Middle East with its uniformly hideous square concrete block buildings. Normally I regard Popayan as a place to run from as fast as possible back to the mountains.
No-one at home. Ah well, I’d learnt to be stoical in the last 6 months. An insane hot bus-ride for hours and hours over the mountains to the South of the Department of Cauca, hanging precariously out of the door as inside was a suicidal sardine-can of crushed peasants … to a mountain village called Balboa where the whole family were about to put on a theatre show. Even as they all hugged me, a mound of loving female daughters and stepdaughters, I still hadn’t landed. I said to Anne “I just need to walk and walk to wake up from the mental nightmare I am stuck in.”
Be careful what you wish for. The day I left Popayan to travel the normally 7-hour journey home to the farm, there had been a national strike against the new US-backed paramilitary-fomenting rightwing Colombian regime – but the bus company, when telephoned, declared that buses would now be running.
Not wanting to wait two hot hours in the bus-station, I started walking out of Popayan in the direction of Purace National Park – our farm is on its borderlands, but on the far side, in the Department of Huila. First, I walked along the sad island of blackened trees in the centre of the two traffic lanes, commiserating with each tree as I passed, then at last, a turning out of the town and suddenly – it all stopped. The nightmare ended. No noise. Hardly any traffic. Fields. A road going up and up. And up. Hours slipping smoothly by. Grateful legs walking. Grateful lungs breathing. A head full of desert sands and cultural nightmares clearing, cleansing, becoming thought-free. Greener and greener and higher and higher. Then I noticed the time. Uh-uh. No bus.
I didn’t care. I kept walking. Eventually I thought perhaps the sensible thing to do might be to hitch a lift. A lumbering old lorry stopped immediately and I was taken 30 kilometres to the village of Purace where the only street was thick with the gaily coloured tribal clothes of the mountain Indians who are my neighbours. A cup of milk for dinner, then on again for another 15 kilometres with the same driver till he turned off the road to a sulphur mine. We were on the outskirts of the deserted – and feared – Purace park and it was late afternoon. “You must stand here and wait for the bus”, he said, “there are no settlements further on.”
Well I knew there weren’t. I had travelled that road a dozen times by night with our milk lorrydriver friend on journeys between the urban and rural branches of our commune. The road was feared as it was guerrilla territory and it was along there in the loneliest spot that the FARC guerrilla army had massacred 9 innocent people, 7 of them hillwalking ecologists whose families we later got to know in Bogota. This had happened not so many months after the loss of Tris and Javier and unconsolable grief had united us all.
Several people I had approached had said, “Yes, yes, a bus will come.” It never did. I had walked all day, on legs practically unused for 6 months. I ached, but I was happy. Travelling the cold heights of Purace park by milk van, one gets the impression of quite a short journey .. I guessed about 2 hours’ walk.
I guessed wrong. I had to reach the other side where there would be peasant shacks where they would take me in for the night. Fooled by the thought of a bus, I had on only a short-sleeved blouse and a light poncho. If it rained, I was in serious trouble. If I stopped, I would quickly freeze. If I carried on, my legs might give out. I searched the paramo for any landmark on that long road that I might recognize from previous journeys. I was too happy ever to seriously worry, though it did occur to me I might be calmly walking myself to my death before ever seeing my farm again – not death from the guerrilla, whom I felt confident of talking to, but from climate shock and exposure: when the lorry dropped me, my lungs caved in, unaccustomed to the altitude. I remembered the sick headache I had felt at several hundred feet below sealevel at the Black Sea not so long ago … I breathed very carefully, shallowly, realizing the road was still climbing …
Signs appeared, of a different nature: a rainbow flashed brilliantly on the screen of the sky telling me all would be well. Night fell and a shooting star repeated the message. A satellite flashed brilliantly catching the light of …what? Sun on the other side of the world? I couldn’t work it out.
My hands started to freeze. Without stopping – too dangerous to stop – I got my thin little socks out of my bag and used them as gloves. I moved my hands constantly, put them against my hot stomach to keep them alive. I marched on and on. No moon. But the sky with its trillions of bright stars reflects the water in the potholes in the road so you can avoid them … earlier I had noted with some alarm man-sized bottomless potholes where a stream passing under the road had forced itself through, creating death traps for silly people with failing legs and their head in the stars walking the forbidden road of Purace.
“FARC order: anyone travelling between 6.0 p.m. and 6.0 a.m. will be fined a million pesos,” announced a huge banner slung high across the road that I could just read as the light failed. “Or worse”, I thought – but I knew they would be more scared of me, not knowing who on earth I was, than I would be of them.
Eventually it was pitch black and I could only navigate by the sound of water rushing either side of the road in that high damp paramo that keeps half of Colombia green. I passed the point where the 9 people had been shot, one after the other, and thrown down a steep ravine. I agonized yet again with each of them as they faced their death. I passed the deserted cabin of the peasant man who had been kept in jail for months falsely accused of responsibility for the murders and whom we eventually, through dogged persistence, got released. And the road blessedly started to go downhill.
Five hours quick trot – I could not believe how long that road was. I worried that even if I did come to huts on the other side, I would be too embarrassed to scare the people by calling out so late at night. I risked a quick sitdown, very brief in case my legs seized up. Sat on my hat in the middle of the dark road. And I heard fairy music. OK, so my mind has given out. Nice sound though. I dismissed the hope, thinking it might be a trick of the night air bringing the sound from miles away across the mountains.
Suddenly there they were: two lighted peasant huts, with loud music playing. Oh dear. How do I explain my existence? The door of one hut was open. I pushed away my impulse to keep walking insanely on for fear of frightening them and shouted boldly: “excuse me, I have walked across the Park (no-one ever does that) and the night fell and I need shelter.”
I was immediately surrounded by armed guerrilla soldiers. I kept
talking. I was never worried. I knew all the names of my neighbours, of
the milkman, I could chat happily about where I lived. “Are you North
American?” one asked, unsubtley. No, I am European, would you like to see
my passport? He received it as a precious gift and they all went off into
a huddle to study it. I was by now sitting – oh blessed word – by the
dying embers of the blackened stove chatting happily to the peasant owner
of the house who knew the area I lived in, still so many miles away. A
guerrilla soldier came back smiling and said, “Are you the mother of
Alicia?” Indeed I am. “I like her,” he said (she is wellknown as she has a
little motorbike and is forever doing people favours by giving lifts in a
transportless area). “Of course you do,” I laughed, “she is very
beautiful.”
On a losing platform, Anne spoke at the meeting, pointing out that blood always follows oil. The paramilitaries will come in. There will be local warfare in the scramble for protection money from the multinationals that will arrive. As one lone wise peasant put it “They will take the riches, and we will be left with the rubble.”
The local families of course think only of money for next week’s food bill … The tree cutting has been stopped. Now this. Our environmental battle continues.
Until next Green Letter, goodbye and love, Jenny