Five days following that Fuheis-mania incident, I was spotted and subsequently accosted by two of my friends in Rabieh. At first, I expended no effort to hide my irritation by that, which I could tell made them feel kind of awkward, but I noticed soon that this was not so courteous of me, especially given the fact that I haven't seen one of them in ages, during which, sometimes deliberately, sometimes inadvertently, I ignored many of her school-days-nostalgic and reunion-suggestive hints implied in brief sporadic periods of communication.
Trying to compensate for my early rude behavior I decided to drive each of them home after an indirect introduction to my newly found urban sanctuary, somewhere onlooking a beautiful part of Wadi Saqra street, where we chitchatted about our pasts and presents until the time for a drive to Al-Ashrafieh, where the girl lives, was due. I dusted off the mental map I have of east Amman's streets, a fairly functional one, but now that I haven't been there for many years, since the last of my relatives had "evacuated" that side of the city, it was segmented and less efficient, so I ended up taking a really long route through Jabal Al-Jofeh toward Abu Darwish mosque, or the checkerboard mosque as I call it.
That proved unpleasant at first, especially the narrow steep mountainous terrain I am not used to maneuvering on, but it was not until I came by a stunning nightly extensive panoramic view of Amman that I forgot all about that and caught myself in the process of envying the whole of Al-Ashrafieh dwellers for being able to behold such beauty every night. But what made it of extra charm to my eyes was that it shattered and supplanted another view which I had two years earlier on top of an elevated platform in Amman, which lurked in my mind undefined until it took the expressive form of "a sprawling graveyard" months later when I came across a description of Amman as a beautiful graveyard by Mahmoud Darwish.
Trying to compensate for my early rude behavior I decided to drive each of them home after an indirect introduction to my newly found urban sanctuary, somewhere onlooking a beautiful part of Wadi Saqra street, where we chitchatted about our pasts and presents until the time for a drive to Al-Ashrafieh, where the girl lives, was due. I dusted off the mental map I have of east Amman's streets, a fairly functional one, but now that I haven't been there for many years, since the last of my relatives had "evacuated" that side of the city, it was segmented and less efficient, so I ended up taking a really long route through Jabal Al-Jofeh toward Abu Darwish mosque, or the checkerboard mosque as I call it.
That proved unpleasant at first, especially the narrow steep mountainous terrain I am not used to maneuvering on, but it was not until I came by a stunning nightly extensive panoramic view of Amman that I forgot all about that and caught myself in the process of envying the whole of Al-Ashrafieh dwellers for being able to behold such beauty every night. But what made it of extra charm to my eyes was that it shattered and supplanted another view which I had two years earlier on top of an elevated platform in Amman, which lurked in my mind undefined until it took the expressive form of "a sprawling graveyard" months later when I came across a description of Amman as a beautiful graveyard by Mahmoud Darwish.
Soon, my knowledge of the social subtleties of the area was reawakened from its dormant state, but added to it was the first time musing over the origins of the Armenian neighborhood, which as its name suggests, is the place where the majority of the Armenians in Amman came to settle in the past. But besides being fond of sewing, a thing you can easily infer from the numerous tailor shops paving the neighborhood's main street as you stroll it down, I never came to know a single thing about them. The mental stagnation induced by this humbling "confrontation" with one of the oldest neighborhoods in Amman and the fact that I knew very little about its origins was not comfortable, if not unsettling, but my namesake friend had already unwittingly paved a way out early on when he picked up and started going through an issue of Review:Amman I had.
The magazine is a nascent self proclaimed one stop point for all your needs to know about the past, present and future of Amman and its identity, a thing it has proved to be successful to some degree at thus far with its sundry articles, despite some jarring historical errors, but the catch is the narrow definition of a city identity that it embraces. Had it been a single mind effort, the narrowness would have been condonable, but, and if I am to relent from my position in this regard, in which I maintain the Sisyphean nature of such a task, for the sake of reaching some middle grounds here, then that there are eight contributors makes it culpable. It is indicative of either an editor in chief's micromanaging attitude, or the common grounds based on which the team was assembled, consciously or not.
A third and a more interesting scenario, in which R:A's conception of Amman's identity is but a byproduct, can be constructed around Municipality of Amman's attitude in the past few years. The squabble with Amman Facebook page owners about a year ago, taken at face value, might sound like a one over the proprietary rights to Amman's new logo. But below the surface lie the real intentions of the municipality to establish itself as the sole legitimate representative of the city, and the only authority to pass judgments on what constitute its identity and what not. Instead of identities rooted in the natural historic, political, cultural and economic environment of Amman, the municipality is actively promoting and supporting any identity viewed within a synthetic context framed by lifeless architectural and urban studies terminologies, which, needless to say, are wholly inadequate and will eventually yield a gamut of inchoate identities.
I perceive this to be a late phase of the grander scheme that the state has been carrying out to cull intellect from the fabric of the Jordanian society since little after the time I was born, the very same scheme that among the most notable of its causalities lies ruined the edifice of intellect that the University of Jordan once was. The municipality, it is evident, has enabling resources, the equivalents of which are untapped by any other potential rivals, save for one which I will get to in a bit, and has succeeded thus far in providing the impetus and the catalyst to the crystallization and prevalence of an identity that satisfies the state's predefined terms.
However, there is a potentially strong and competing alternative identity looming amorphous and unnoticed in the subconsciousness of the erudite and well versed in modern Arabic literature, the Levantine branch in specific, which is full of fragments of all sorts that can be gleaned and assembled into a solid base for an identity that captures a more vivid and truer reality of Amman, a one which already promises us a chance to get over the inferiority complex we felt for so long as Ammanies toward Beirut, for it might be shown at the end that most of the great manuscripts published there during the past five or six decades had at some point during their production passed through Amman, at least once, before being published in Beirut.
The fact that the memoir of the most profound literary Arab figure during the past century, Abdulrahman Munif, is titled Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman (سيرة مدينة - عمّان في الأربعينات) stands as an initial revelation of an identity, the identifying of which might be the starting point for a new batch of great Jordanian literary authors.
The magazine is a nascent self proclaimed one stop point for all your needs to know about the past, present and future of Amman and its identity, a thing it has proved to be successful to some degree at thus far with its sundry articles, despite some jarring historical errors, but the catch is the narrow definition of a city identity that it embraces. Had it been a single mind effort, the narrowness would have been condonable, but, and if I am to relent from my position in this regard, in which I maintain the Sisyphean nature of such a task, for the sake of reaching some middle grounds here, then that there are eight contributors makes it culpable. It is indicative of either an editor in chief's micromanaging attitude, or the common grounds based on which the team was assembled, consciously or not.
A third and a more interesting scenario, in which R:A's conception of Amman's identity is but a byproduct, can be constructed around Municipality of Amman's attitude in the past few years. The squabble with Amman Facebook page owners about a year ago, taken at face value, might sound like a one over the proprietary rights to Amman's new logo. But below the surface lie the real intentions of the municipality to establish itself as the sole legitimate representative of the city, and the only authority to pass judgments on what constitute its identity and what not. Instead of identities rooted in the natural historic, political, cultural and economic environment of Amman, the municipality is actively promoting and supporting any identity viewed within a synthetic context framed by lifeless architectural and urban studies terminologies, which, needless to say, are wholly inadequate and will eventually yield a gamut of inchoate identities.
I perceive this to be a late phase of the grander scheme that the state has been carrying out to cull intellect from the fabric of the Jordanian society since little after the time I was born, the very same scheme that among the most notable of its causalities lies ruined the edifice of intellect that the University of Jordan once was. The municipality, it is evident, has enabling resources, the equivalents of which are untapped by any other potential rivals, save for one which I will get to in a bit, and has succeeded thus far in providing the impetus and the catalyst to the crystallization and prevalence of an identity that satisfies the state's predefined terms.
However, there is a potentially strong and competing alternative identity looming amorphous and unnoticed in the subconsciousness of the erudite and well versed in modern Arabic literature, the Levantine branch in specific, which is full of fragments of all sorts that can be gleaned and assembled into a solid base for an identity that captures a more vivid and truer reality of Amman, a one which already promises us a chance to get over the inferiority complex we felt for so long as Ammanies toward Beirut, for it might be shown at the end that most of the great manuscripts published there during the past five or six decades had at some point during their production passed through Amman, at least once, before being published in Beirut.
The fact that the memoir of the most profound literary Arab figure during the past century, Abdulrahman Munif, is titled Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman (سيرة مدينة - عمّان في الأربعينات) stands as an initial revelation of an identity, the identifying of which might be the starting point for a new batch of great Jordanian literary authors.
