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We are sitting in
a coffee house one evening, every evening, in the dry, dusty well of
central
Amman surrounded by
mountains and thinking. Thinking about the Israelis. What will they
do next? Thinking about
the Americans. Waiting for the calm face of their President to
invade the television
screen, waiting for his cautiously worded speeches. Waiting for help
from our wealthier
brethren, the other Arab nations.
Trying to figure out a
way of putting two pennies over two pennies. Trying to discover a
way
of holding onto the two
pennies, until we earn the next two pennies. The weight of four
pennies in the pocket!
Ya Allah!
I am a musician, so I
need money to buy instruments. Without money, no instruments.
Without instruments, no
money. Similarities and contradictions interest me, because I am
an Arab, a philosopher.
I am an Arab because I am a philosopher. The daily parades of
ruminating mouths on the
television screen demonstrate that not all philosophers are Arabs.
What is the world coming
to?
To other night our
group, PALS FROM PALESTINE, had a piece of luck. A boy I knew from
the Jabal Hussein
refugee camp came up to our smoky table and said, “Look here, Yousef,
I am going to get
married tonight. How about some noise?”
He put it so aptly, that
refugee boy who is all grown up now. What else do we do besides
noise? Noise, noise,
dusty noise all around!
What else can we do?
See, I study accounting at a community college; I have no free time
to practice during the
day. Salah, the handsome keyboard man with the large head of curly
hair, is a tile-fitter’s
helper. He mixes cement in the yards and carries it indoors. Each
metal container he
carries on his shoulder weighs ten kilos or more. Our drummer is an
electrician. His big
feet at the end of his skinny legs shuffle up and down his ladder
all day
long. He bores holes in
walls and stretches wires through narrow tunnels inside them.
So, I tally and add
other people’s money on the strings of my guitar, at nights.
Ali hits his sticks
steadily on the same spots on his drums. The thin sticks are heavy
hammers and the
drumskins are newly painted walls behind the closing eyelids of his
sleepy eyes. Salah’s
hands drop like blocks on the keyboard. The gray cement he carries
stiffens his fingers and
accumulates under his fingernails.
We go and set up our
equipment on the flat roof of the two room house. The roof is a drop
of water in a sea of
refugee roofs. The refugee roofs of 1948 and the refugee roofs of
1967
extend to the edge of
the hill rippling with their slightly alternating heights.
Our transistor size
singer, Sameer, comes half an hour before the party starts, wearing
his
hundred percent
polyester silk scarf. He lowers the stand of the microphone to his
height
and bends the goose neck
down. He caps the microphone with an orange colored sponge,
a wind-screen, to tone
down the hoarse sound which comes out of his throat when he sings.
I line up my pedals side
by side, starting from left to right: noise gate, screamer,
distortion,
phaser.
The Arab-disco music we
play involves no risks. Our equipment protects us from listeners
of yesterday and of
today. The listeners fail to estimate our true musical competence.
“How well he distorts
the sound of his guitar,” a young listener says about my playing.
You
see, my music is
naturally distorted. But it is my prominently displayed
distortion-effect
pedal which makes the
listener say that. My worn out guitar, covered by stickers of
various
musical companies, is a
Fender. A Fender by Fender, Made in Taiwan. It is a genuine
imitation of the Fender
of the U.S.A.
Continuation...
Janset Berkok Shami
She is Turkish. After
studying English at Ankara University and at Queen Mary College of
London, she married and moved to Jordan. She had traveled widely and
lived in, the U.S., the Middle East and Western Europe. She writes
in English and had been published as a novelist and a short story
writer in several American, British, Turkish, Swedish and Arabic
publications. She had participated in three writing conferences: in
1994, at Emerson College workshop at Well in Holland; in 1995 at the
International Writers Program at the University of Iowa, and
recently at the Writers Conference at Spoleto, Italy.
Several of her stories
have been translated to other languages. “Waiting” has been
translated into Turkish (published in Argos of Istanbul), into
Arabic (published in El Edeb of Lebanon and in Aglam of Iraq) and
into Swedish ( published in Alhambras Litterar Magasin.) It also
appeared in Jordan: the Rough Guide.
Publications
Novels
* Cages on
Opposite Shore (Interlink, New York, 1995).
Short Stories
“The Diaries” (1990)
, “Blind Journeys” (1991), “A Written Contract of Marriage”
(1991), “Waiting”
(1991),“A Bucket Without A Rope” (1993), “The World Between
My Fingers”(1995) …
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