<$BlogRSDURL$>

Journal of An American Expatriate

Friday, April 9

A few days ago my aunt in Phoenix informed me by e-mail that her older brother had just died. He was 83-years-old. Requiescat in pace.

My uncle had been in noticeable decline the past year. Pneumonia finally claimed his life. Knowing he will experience no more suffering, no further indignity softens our loss. He was my favorite uncle, and I always enjoyed his companionship.

The American writer William Faulkner is most often quoted for saying “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The lines refer to how an individual's past continues to resonate and shape both the present and the future.

All people who have affected us in positive ways remain influential, as if they are still our constant companions. To this end, the company of my uncle will never be gone, just undetected to outsiders.

While my uncle died earlier this week, my son traveled to Ireland. He is currently in Dublin for the St Andrew’s International Model United Nations (SAIMUN) conference.

Perhaps the connection between the death of an older family member and a younger family member returning to the ancestral country is a broad church. It does, nonetheless, reinforce Faulkner’s view of how the past is always with us. For me, the connection of our family to Ireland is steady.

Life in Bahrain seems unaffected by the combined Shia and Sunni insurrections in Falluja and surrounding areas of Baghdad. This is becoming George Bush’s Vietnam.

Friday afternoon is always a telling time for political protests in Bahrain. The local imams - Muslim clergy - frequently exhort the faithful to anger over American foreign policy. When this occurs, the young and the disaffected march on the U.S. Embassy, less than a mile from our residence, pelt the Bahrain Defense Forces with rocks and set old tires on fire before dispersed by tear gas shot from helicopters.

Conditions are a little dicey in Bahrain because the monarchy and ruling class are Sunni, while the majority of the country is Shia. For analogy, the Shia are fundamentalists, like the Puritans of Oliver Cromwell’s day, and take their cue from the grandson of Mohammad.

For now, however, it’s safe in Bahrain. The ruling class enjoys all the American money pumped into the economy. Money can turn aside even the strongest ideals.



|

Tuesday, April 6

Though slightly past the mid-century mark, I am still an incorrigible enthusiast for the nomadic experience and so I retain a gee-whiz impressionability that I have always dignified under the pose of “creative temperament.” When I was 12-years-old, I loved to stand on the St. Louis levee and scrutinize the Mississippi River as it spread out milky-brown and gleaming between the mile-wide shores of Missouri and Illinois. I wanted to be Huck Finn, with a romantic readiness, and head out for the Territory. Later I wanted to be Gatsby’s chronicler, Nick Carraway, the man inclined to reserve all judgments, and head West toward the mesmerizing sunset of the ideal New World. Now I feel like Odysseus, traversing an Arab culture where the beauty of the surface is profoundly deceptive.

When I was a college student in the early 1970s, my education was neither meticulous nor intense, and therefore not particularly fruitful. My true objective was to prolong my adolescence. Early on I knew I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous. As William Burroughs sardonically noted, they lounged around Singapore and Bangkok smoking opium in yellow pongee silk suits. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful servant boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.

Like many aspiring writers I once turned to journalism. I still have a lively interest in the morbid and the abnormal. I also have an appetite for the extreme and the sensational, for the slimy and the unwholesome. I feel at ease among people who are liars, sluts, crooks, morons, cretins, perverts and obsessives. Perhaps it is better than being safe, obedient, sterile and submitting to the smugness and hypocrisy of middle class American life. It's always a little demoralizing to know the government tolerates a certain amount of rat shit in our wedding cakes.

In an ideal world, I earn money from moi lettres les jour: l’epoque de Michel. I write in my oak-paneled library, bookcases filled with the fine morocco bindings of des grands classiques du Balzac, Flaubert, Hugo, Maupassant. There are also editions by Oscar Wilde, Valdimir Nabokov, Henry Miller, and James Joyce - especially that linguistic extravaganza Ulysses. This collection takes up a good four feet of la librairie, a fiefdom exceeded only by the complete works of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Marcel Proust, notably À la recherche du temps perdu.

On the contrary, my present reality is sand. Outside there is an ocean of sand, without beginning or end, motionless, stretching across a harsh, limited horizon. It is stupefying. One can only be dazed by a vision of implacable splendor and horror, dazed by vision itself.

The Persian Gulf is just beyond the walls of our three-story villa on Tubli Bay, an upper-class Sunni neighborhood of mock Roman villas in eastern Manama, the capital of Bahrain. Here there is no escape from the unrelenting elements of sun and wind, which alternately assault and caress the skin. It’s rather easy to conjure up Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, the great Victorian explorer, Orientalist, anthropologist, linguist, translator, author, and scholar, who posed as an Afghani physician and entered Mecca disguised as a Muslim hajj. Or T.E Lawrence, who stormed the port of Aqaba by land and helped the Arab guerrilla tribes defeat the Turks in World War One. There is a tremendous allure to the Bedouin culture, scarcely concealed beneath the facade of insipid American fast-food franchises and garish Western pop culture in general.

Still admired from Sophia to Kabul, one legacy of Alexander the Great seems to linger in this region of the Middle East: women are for child-bearing, men are for pleasure. Affluent Arab men dressed in traditional white, floor-length thoubs, replete with gutrah head covers, gather socially in late evenings at posh Western-styled restaurants. Women are largely absent. However, if adult females are present, they are cloaked in black abayas, a symbol of invisibility; they do not really exist and have no social status. These all-male gatherings suggest a decorum found among inverts dating to the 4th century B.C., when Alexander and his Greek warriors swept through this part of the world, on their way to the Khyber Pass and the Indus River.


|

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?