Jordan Is Back Door Exit for Thousands of Iraqis

An Iraqi Artist depicts the nature of diaspora on this "door painting"


Jordan has long been a haven for the dispossessed as more than half of its current population fled from Palestine after Israeli occupation in 1948. (causing a demographic dynamic that is worth several blogs of its own). Now in 2005 after the American toppling of Saddam and the continued violence in its wake, Jordan is home to thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

While official statistics, as reported by the UN Commission for Refugees, keep numbers below 20,000, unofficial numbers from the street balloon up to half a million. The construction boom in Amman to house the influx is audible, every morning I awoke to the RAT-AT-TAT-TAT-TAT of jack hammers or the VROOOM of bulldozers tearing up another lot. Every evening I'd see and smell fires burning inside ramshackle one-room huts built with construction refuse, where some of the migrant Egyptian workers imported to work for dirt-cheap have taken up residence. The enclosed picture is of the buildings in my neighborhood, populated nearly entirely by Iraqis and the rare blonde American :-), that were piecemealed together as quicky as Lego Land. Jordanians have also whispered to me that the elite from Syria have, to preempt a preemptive strike by the American military, begun building and investing in real estate in Amman.

One afternoon, a taxi driver who had lived in Iraq previous to the invasion gave me an earful on the subject in English perfected in New Jersey (GO NETS! he exclaimed at one point to prove his past residency in the armpit of America). He told me angrily that his Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering degree that had served him handsomely in Iraq now earned him a seat behind the wheel of a grimy service taxi vehicle. Stories of such poverty of diaspora are discussed in this zmag article. Yet, driver went on to say in a Joisey accent, scores of other Iraqis who could afford the transition to Jordan were not the chaff of society by any means. These wealthy Iraqis (many of whom I assume were former beneficiaries of the Baathist regime?) could expedite their status as citizens in Jordan by forking over 70,000 JDs, a price many were more than willing to pay. Unlike the fleeing Saddam who was found in a hole, Iraqi "refugees" here can be found driving sports cars, lounging in cafes exhaling puffs of shisha, and moving into freshly furnished apartments.

Another woman told me of the Hobbesian chaos on the Jordanian-Iraqi border where emigrants, their pockets literally bulging with the wealth of Iraq (as wiring the money out of Iraq is forbidden), are frequently robbed and accosted by opportunistic thieves (and one rumor was that American soldiers were even part of the marauding, ugh, I hope that's just a hollow accusation).

Regardless of the means that Iraqis take to make it to the Kingdom of Jordan, it seems as if many look to make Jordan their permanent residence. The impact of their presence in Jordan, as well as the impact of their absence in the struggling Iraq, will effect both countries in ways that will continue to unfold.

Soap Operas are America's Soapboxes??

"Monday, August 22 #4618As Dante watches Nick and Bridget, Taylor calls him regarding Bridget’s pregnancy. Dante reveals that Bridget already terminated the pregnancy, to Taylor’s shock. Although Bridget states that she didn’t mean to hurt Nick, he is extremely upset and refuses to believe that Bridget has terminated the pregnancy. Brooke is shocked to find Stephanie pointing a gun at her. Brooke picks up the gun as if she’s going to shoot herself, but she turns the gun on Stephanie instead. Stephanie taunts Brooke to shoot her and when Brooke fires the gun at Stephanie, she misses." [Recent plot summary from The Bold and the Beautiful]

Last evening as I relaxed in my new all-girls dormitory near the University of Jordan in Amman, my neighbor Maram and I turned on the local music video station and to my chagrin 50 Cent's "Candy Shop," the sugar-coated song filled with sexually explicit innuendo, was playing. Although the rhythm of the song has a certain like bees to honey je-ne-sais-quoi, when I remembered the lyrics and watched the gyrating women taking chocolate-bathes in the video, especially in front of my new Jordanian friend, I became ashamed of the American import. More than ashamed, I was anxious that Arab audiences here would assume that the attitudes reflected in music videos would be assumed to be ubiquitous among Americans.

I asked my friend Maram if she thought everyone in America went to the "Candy Shop," so to speak. "No no!" she laughed as if to show the utter ridiculousness of my assumption. I breathed an inward sigh of relief. "Of course we know that these music videos are not real," she continued, "and that American life is really just like "The Bold and the Beautiful" and "Days of Our Lives. I am a huge fan! Who is your favorite character?"

Maram's limited English and my non-existent Arabic thwarted my efforts to explain the narrow, largely feminine, audience that the melodramatic series appeal to in the US. I laughed to myself for awhile then became troubled by the association of soap operas with the American lifestyle. When I think of soap operas the plot lines that spring to mind are usually twins separated at birth, forbidden love affairs, amnesia in a foreign country and subsequent identity crises, money laundering by men with dark mustaches, adulteries and secret children recorded in inordinately detailed diaries; basically all the trappings of a dysfunctional arabesque, a drawn out Jerry Springer where the actors are attractive and glib.

I don't advocate nixing soap operas from the air waves here in the Middle East, though I think we should consider their, and all other American media exports for that matter, unwitting impact. Americans think of soap operas as cotton candy, gossamers, never equating or relating them back to their lives except to exclaim, usually in the pejorative, "Wow, that's like a soap opera!" Yet Maram, along with other Jordanians I've chatted with, don't understand the distinction between American entertainment and American life. This is understandable, they are 6000 miles away from the evidence that would disabuse soap operas from their soap boxes. If America wants to convince the Middle East that democracy is worth embracing, we need to formulate a better way to showcase what life is like in our own democracy.