Moummad & Mohmed

This is an inaccurate drawing.

It is late afternoon in Amman. Men are walking up the sidewalk, uphill. Coming home, I guess, from work. Below me, the city, or what I can see of it, lays belly-up. Maybe it’s tanning, cinder-block skin baking in the sun.

Whatever it may be, gravity presses heavy against the tops of  Amman’s sun-slow body. I feel like it is waking, maybe because eyes, visible in the windows of some houses, occasionally glance around and close again; pretending in vain, to dose domestically a few minutes longer. 

Kids run through Amman’s alleys and it’s avenues. Home from school, maybe, playing.

It will get busy very, very soon. Not with the yelling of “buy!” “sell!” like it has been in the center of town, but more likely with the holler of, if it were in the American West, where I am from, “Dinner!” shouted up the stairs of every household.

I am only on my second drawing. I sketched a time-consuming landscape first. A sleepy mosque behind a sleepy olive-orchard, resulting in a sleepy picture with sleepy lines and sleepy realism..

…yawn. 

No one bothered me. The only thing that moved was a restless black plastic bag.

For this drawing, I am spying. I am drawing a porch. The women of the family who lives inside are visible. They have left their living rooms and kitchens and are catching the breeze on the porch for awhile, unaware, at least I think, that I am watching. Timidly, I am grabbing lines for my drawing. Straight ones for the porch, as parallel as my hand can make them. Straight lines for telephone poles. Struggling because there is nothing to hold my paper-back sized sketchbook flat except for four fingers and thumb. Straight angles of stairs, of cinder-block walls. 

Then once in a rare while, a round line of a face poking out from under a black head scarf, a round line of the crotch of a pair of trousers that drift on a clothesline in the breeze. A round line of a girl’s knee, bent as she leans against the wall in her younger-generation tight blue jeans. -All of these, but rarely two at once. The porch, the porch, the porch, blue jeans. The porch, the porch, the porch, eyes-

-a petunia.

porch porch porch.

Without looking like I’m looking at them I wonder if perhaps they are waiting for dinner to cook. There are three older women and a younger teen. I wonder why the younger teen doesn’t wear a full black robe. She is certainly aware of her curves. 

I could go on all day. Inside do they take off the robes and walk around in Dolce and Gabbana? Do they have shades of mascara in more colors than I can name? What’s on on the TV inside? Melodramatic Lebanese music videos or text and voice of the Koran?

Anyway, that brings you up to speed. 

In an artistic sense, basically, the line weights are all-off on a scene where the light is all right. I have a ballpoint pen where I need a paintbrush. I am a shy stranger when I need to be a family friend.

A man in khakis and a dust-white shirt breezes by. The door-welders down the next block must be closing the big clanging garage doors of their shops. Arabic-words lace the air. I still can’t distinguish words from sentences. Conversations are sometimes more like a smell than anything else. You taste their flavor, and come up with three different things they make you feel and no proper way to describe them to anyone else. 

Men are walking by on their way home from work, long sleeved shirts and slacks. I am in jeans and a t-shirt. Acceptable. American, at least on this road, for sure, but were it not for my blonde hair and my blue eyes, maybe maybe I could go without so many second glances in these clothes.

I re-situate myself. The teenage girl, the one in a mis-leading and restrained maroon headscarf and sequin studded pants-pockets is looking at me from the porch. She is talking excitedly. Look at the young American drawing us. 

She is leaning against the wall next to the open door to the living room and when she looks she doesn’t so much smile at me, but there is a smirk somewhere in her eyes that is armed and dangerous. She turns and talks about me with a childish laugh, the kind kids make when a gross bug has crawled on their sleeve at recess maybe, waiting to see what weird thing he will do next.

 I have become an object of conversation.

I keep drawing. I’m looking for the right metaphor. I don’t like to think of myself as a weird bug. It’s like, in a weird way, the arab girl is looking at me like a group of high school girls from across the cafeteria look at a new boy at lunch. That’s closer I think.

A boy emerges from the living room onto the porch. He holds onto the iron bars of the railing. Head peering out at me. He runs down the stairs of the porch and disappears for a quick moment. He appears across the street, he cranes his neck to look at me. He makes some sort of noise, I can’t remember what-a shout maybe, a whistle. When I look up, he waves me over. I stop, close my plain sketch-book, look both ways, and cross the empty street.  (over-long paragraph.)

He is dressed in a white karate outfit with a white karate belt. His head is at about that height where I could hold my hand out and grip it, and he’d never be able to make a move on me. 

He holds out his hand, wrist bent professionally, chin up. I shake his hand firmly. 

I show him what I am doing. I feel a little bit like I am showing him that in fact, I am not carrying any firearms. 

Since the drawing is so bad I explain to him “These are the stairs,” 

“-the telephone pole”

“-the porch”

He nods. “Yes.” He says.

“See…” I trace with my pen and point to the real-life facsimile.

“Yes.” He nods.

“Is it okay?” I ask. To draw, I mean. 

“It’s okay,” He says. He walks back to his house.

I draw. 

He returns. I haven’t done a lot more. I’m frustrated with my drawing and I’m distracted. I’m paying a great deal of attention to the teenage girl and the black robed women gossiping in a circle on the elevated porch. I have drawn a few quick sketches of them on the side. Three circle heads with dots for eyes. Studies for later. 

A new character is on the porch. A colorful spit-fire pig-tailed little girl is going between women and jeans-girl. It’s cute, sometimes she perches on the railings and looks out onto the wide street. Her face smashed just a tiny bit, eyes wide.

In front of me, Karate Boy is just watching again.  He looks at my face and then my pad. I’m not grabbing any of the right lines now but I decide to keep drawing. Illustrating the process for him. It’s working, he’s catching on to where I am looking, seeing me grab a line and try to lay it onto my page, another line, onto the page. His head now, runs a circle from pad to face to porch to pad. 

We are making progress, him and I. I think. There is potential here. 

Emmissary Two arrives. He stands behind Karate Boy as his head spins slow circles.

Two is just focused on the paper. He stands tip-toe. 

I stop to show them both. 

One chats with Two (in Arabic.)

“Where are you from?” One says, head no longer spinning.

“U.S.”

“Welcome.” 

“How long are you here?”

“Five weeks.” I hold up my hand. Five. 

This doesn’t compute as well. “Five, like a month plus…” 

I give up. 

We try this again.

“Your family?”

“Yes.” 

Yes is a response, I have noticed so far, that means just as often “Yes” as “I don’t understand.”

“Are you in school?”

“Yes.”

“And you?”

Nod.

Finally, I ask them if I can draw them. I tell them to look at me, and hold still. They smile and do, I look into their eyes as I draw, not at the page. They crack smiles, this is too weird, too weird. I finish. I show Karate Boy, I let him draw me. 

Afterwards I tell them, write your name in English and Arabic, and they do, and I write mine, maybe with better handwriting, but just in English.