Dusty Alleys, Cheap Speech, and Musings of an American Overseas

By Nick Shafer

My heart skipped a beat as the tumbling cart clattered over cobblestone, knocking the satchel of fresh produce for the Mimouna feast cascading over the uneven stones. As I leaped back in surprise, my back thudded against the dusty red wall of the Lazama, a Sephardic synagogue built-in 1492 by refugees from the Reconquista that was— for months —my home. That was years ago now, when my Spanish class and I had learned about the Muslims in Andalusia, situated across the glittering shore of the Mediterranean. I'd dreamt for years of standing before the resplendent spires of the Alhambra, which towered over the twisting spice markets of the Albaicín. At the same time, the bells of the cathedral flowed over the cracks of forgotten history, occasionally snagging on a hushed Shacharit or a converted mihrab. Then, I told myself to go south. First by taking the ferry from the coastal cliffs of Gibraltar to the much-more-famous port of Tangier. I wanted to bask at the grand library of Fez, read the frantic pensive writings of the Beat Generation, touch on the heroic the legends of Kahina and Abdelkader and, perhaps more than anything else, follow the path of memories that for most of the rest of the world had— either by the passage of time or through forced forgetting— slipped away.

     2015 was just the appetizer of the multi-course meal on the way. There, in the streets of Marrakesh, I had my first taste of what an experiential education seeped in the world could look like. The next five years were a blur of movement and transitions, hellos and goodbyes. I never quite fit in, but I always remember those Moroccan nights and the twisting letters I couldn’t understand. I had moved to Minnesota before deciding that I preferred the California sunshine. I fell in love once or twice and even spent six months living in a California commune while preparing to transfer to Berkeley. I returned to the Kingdom to study Arabic and I learned Hebrew while running around darting shadows in Tel Aviv, all the while I was leading undergraduates through the complexities of the modern Middle East. I fell in love with Anthropology which shed light of what it means to be “human” across other societies and cultures. 

Chaotic moments— blissful, painful, and saturated with dopamine and adrenaline—are part of the fundamental reality within our globalized and intertwined world. Having spent most of the last five to six years living in and around the region, I witnessed firsthand how the power and privilege of citizenship plays out. Look no further than Ben Gurion airport, King Hussein Bridge, the Sinai, Dubai, or any other port of entry with "visa on arrival".  As citizens of a country with an outsized role— and fraught legacy  —in the Middle East, it is our moral obligation that every one of us understand where our tax dollars go. What exactly does it mean when we give so much money to Israel, Egypt, and Jordan? What does the War on Terror look like in the Sahel? Do we even realize how we hold the ignition key to light a regional war, seemingly as easily as typing 140 characters? 

     Most of us live in blissful ignorance of what our government does in our name overseas. Iran 1953. Cambodia 1969. 1968 Thailand. Iraq 2003. Yemen 2019. The list goes on and on. But even amid the smoke and mirrors, the tears and hyperbole there has historically been order in the madness. There have been corridors of power that provided some semblance of order and expectation. Now, with tweets zip-zagging across submerged cables as thick as a soda can and a foreign policy looking more like a foreign language, the corridors are looking more like mirror houses. But, in all honestly, this certainly was not on my mind when the sands licked my feet outside the small and run-down airport of Tindouf, Algeria, where I was on my way to the sunbaked refugee camps that hardly ever saw visitors. Nor were they on my mind when I sat on the King David hotel, just a stone-throw away from the sparkling new piece of sovereign American land in downtown Jerusalem. They also didn’t enter my mind when I broke bread after Friday prayers with my Jordanian friend who grieved the loss of his mother, who couldn't get a visa for treatment of her Parkinson's in Europe or the US. Or when I relaxed at Cloyne Court in the golden waning hours of an April sunset, falling in and out of consciousness listening to the constant chatter of a hundred souls and sipping cool lemonade, as if in some montage of the ideal college afternoon.

     The lightning bolt tweets always felt distant, and yet they have, in many ways, created the world that we live. Chaos has become controlled and perfected as if into a high-art form, an ID-dominated and emotion-fueled take on modernism. As an anthropologist, a student, a lover, and an aspiring diplomat, the concept of witnessing— seeing what the rest of the world has forgotten, elevating voices that we never hear, and approaching this world with complexity —is fundamentally transformative within the “simpler” world where morality is black and white, or “strategic vision” is determined to be a misspelled-warning and a one-off bomb. These desperate times— when we put our hopes in false Gods and call them saviors — call us to a higher level of conduct with our neighbors and our brothers. Whether in the Middle East, at home, or elsewhere, we need to reinvigorate our sense of wonder at complexity, as well as our notion that we can move beyond the simple childish lexicon of “bad” and "good”. 

     Simplistic narratives and stories hold no weight underneath the democratized knowledge brought on by the internet age, and we will need a new definition of bravery and vision if we are going to fight for peace in our times. Storm clouds are thundering, and all it takes is one erratic 140-character lightning bolt, a single B-52, and an accommodating group of applauding sycophants to see this beautiful region— so dear to my heart, and home to more than 400 million people —consumed in flames. As the unconscious and lumbering giant of the world, our role in this for us— as Americans and citizens —begins at home, in our post-offices and community centers, and in our schools and our sacred places. Otherwise, the dancing mirrors will dumbfound us with its absurdity as the writers for The Daily Show sit back and watch as the vibrant scripts for late-night TV writes itself. As we grow to be desensitized to chaos and even relish fitful moments of cheap jokes or Ideological Integrity, we must remember something first and foremost:

This begins, together.