I woke up with this poem in my head:
Far From Home
As the old Muslim woman scooters down the bike path
I glide by glancing at the proud face shrouded by her hijab
My breath catches.
I've been writing poems for about a year and a half, based on something I see or a memory I have. I wrote this one in the style of Haiku, but I have no training and probably am violating rules about meter, and I probably am cheating by adding a title. (Which, by the way, is a reference to both of us.) All I know about Haiku is that it is three lines. I am attracted by the discipline of using as few words as possible to put a frame around a moment.
Beside seeing this regal woman driving an Amigo with her head held high the other day, I have had a few other Muslim encounters of late. Outside of 9/11, my reality in the US was that I rarely was aware of Muslims. There was one Muslim family in my kids' school. But here I see Muslim women every day - I'm sure I see Muslim men, also, but they don't self identify with head coverings like the women.
The other day when we were in Stuttgart, as we visited our friend Ele's church, there was a summer fair for children going on, and there were a lot of kids there. Some of them ran up to greet Ele when they saw her. They were all Turkish kids and they knew Ele as the "God Lady." An interesting thing about the German church is that it is organized in a parish system, so anyone living in a certain geography is in the parish. Ele has a lot of "immigrant" families, almost all Turkish, in her parish. When we drove through Helmut wanted to make me aware of the traffic situation and said, "This is Little Istanbul. German driving rules don't apply anymore, just imagine you are in Turkey." Ele considers everyone in the parish part of her congregation, and loving all the families is part of her job. I've been thinking about that. Maybe Catholic churches in the US have boundaries, but Protestants don't, and one result is we don't have much to do with anyone who doesn't come to our church. You really need to show up for us to love you.
Later that day we went on the Neckar with the Palestinian and Israeli group. Dieter, a German youth pastor, had organized this. How one even starts to gather groups of young people from Palestine and Israel and get them to come to Germany is beyond me. Amanda is helping with this conference, and both Amanda and Dieter mentioned that the day had been very intense before the relaxing trip on the river. What I observed in our gondola was that there was a marked difference between the Israelis and Palestinians. The Israelis were a bit older and more mature, and they exuded a sort of relaxed confidence. The Palestinians were all raw energy. We had one guy who seemed like a perpetual motion machine, constantly moving from one end of the boat to the other. I wanted to sing, "Sit down you're rocking the boat!" from Guys and Dolls to him. I thought about what Dieter had told me: that the Palestinians had never been out of the West Bank before, and that to come to Germany they had to travel several hours to an aiport in Jordan, because they aren't allowed to fly from Tel Aviv. You could feel the anger below the surface with these kids, and it wasn't hard to imagine any of them picking up a rock or a grenade and throwing it. The question that ran through my head - which must not be original to me - was "are terrorists born or made?"
I don't have any answers today, just experiences of contact with people from very different places with different lives from mine. Dieter is convicted enough to try something - and a boat full of Jews, Christians and Muslims is a little microcosm of our world. I imagine we all need to sit down and stop rocking the boat.
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It's very good to hear your honest observances about life in this new place, and about the new corners of the world you're more often in contact with. The geographical difference between living in a country that spans a continent and a country that shares it its continent with lots of others again makes itself clear.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to make an observation about the "throwing the grenade" point you made. When I first met the Palestinian group, I felt the same way. Actually, I'd flesh that out by saying I felt in a odd place, because I was there to welcome them, but they didn't speak English, the Arabic sounded loud and sometimes angry to me, and their cultural patterns (how they dealt with time, new people, etc.) was also unknown to me. Plus, I came to the realization that I had very little context to place them in outside of the terrorist reports I hear in the news. So I felt like it wasn't hard to connect this VERY foreign sounding language and the "raw energy" kids, as you put it, with throwing a grenade.
The more time I spent with them though, the better I got to know them. And I learned a little Arabic, too. And as I started to learn words in Arabic -- tomato, beauty, moon, for instance, and learn individual personalities, instead of seeing them as a homogenous group, the more that their language sounded joyful and welcoming to me, and their gestures open and familial, less hostile and foreign. And now, I couldn't see any of them throwing grenades, any more than I could see Bobby Eggleston doing so. Or any of the Israelis, for that matter.
Why did it seem possible that one of the Palestinian kids would be a rock or grenade thrower? Why didn't the Israelis appear to us like people that would bulldoze houses, or use Palestinians as body guards? My guess is two-fold. One, because the Israelis were older, more educated, and were communicating in English. This is huge. Removing the uncertainty that comes from not understanding a language completely changes the way we interact with each other. Two, because the lack of other information about Palestinians makes it easier to slip them into a stereotype -- because there's no other 'box' so to speak, to place them in in our brains. We have more information about the Israelis, thanks to a shared history, a shared God, and more media exposure. Plus, they spoke in English.
Living this experience gave me a new way to understand Palestinians, outside of what I hear and see reported. This is why intercultural exchanges are so important - they give personalities to numbers, and moves people to change. Just a thought.
Time for a little father-daughter dialogue. I appreciate and agree with the points you are making about the Palestinians - we simply don't have much contact with many Arabic speaking / Muslim people in the US and are ill prepared to understand them. It is easy to make generalizations. And speaking of generalizations, the generalization I was trying to make about the Israelis was that the confidence they exuded came from having the "upper hand" in their relationship with the Palestinians. Anyway, we only had a little contact, and Amanda spent a lot more time with them - so pay attention to what she says. Finally, why are you dragging poor little Bobby Eggleston into this. He could pick up a rock and throw it as easy as anyone else.
ReplyDelete"Little" Bobby Eggleston is not so little anymore, but I cannot imagine him throwing a rock or grenade for that matter. He's as sweet as he was when he was "Little Bobby."
ReplyDeleteThe only rocks Bobby is throwing these days are skippers along Lake Michigan.... Although Ellie on the other hand nailed her brother big time!
ReplyDeleteMore to the point, I totally agree with communicating and walking in one another's shoes before we form our opinions. Unfortunately when are we given the chance?
Hey - I just learned about Haiku from Don Hux - the secret is
ReplyDeleteFive Syllables
Seven Syllables
Five Syllable
The most famous Haiku:
"An old silent pond
Into the pond a frog jumps
Splash! Silence again"
follows that rule - all the more amazing since it was written in Japanese and this is only a translation. I am going to try to rework the poem on top of this post to fit the rules.
And I am happy now that Bobby's mother has joined our conversation about rocks and grenades.
okay - five / seven / five is hard work. After a day of trying on and off and at least ten separate attempts, here is the best I can come up with that fits the Haiku rules:
ReplyDeleteThe old woman's shroud
does not hide her dignity
I ride by breathless.