The Road from Damascus

by Robin Yassin-Kassab

  This morning he’d gone home. He knew Muntaha was at work, but he didn’t let himself in. He just looked at the front for a few minutes, and the neighbouring fronts, and the black street surface. Then he’d walked to the barber’s.

  Harry the Barber was reading the sports pages when Sami arrived. Too early in the day for rum or company. Some dub reggae playing on a cassette deck. Trumpets, drums, blues guitar.

  ‘Sami! What can I do you for?’ asked Harry, rising.

  ‘Haircut, please, Harry.’

  ‘Yes indeed.’ Harry ushered him into the blue chair and cracked a barber’s bib. ‘You looking like the seventies.’ Tying it motherly around Sami’s neck. ‘Like a disco king. You building up to an afro there.’

  Harry fitted a pair of scissors to his hand and limbered up, making ‘chop chop’ sounds to the rhythm of the dub.

  ‘Why don’t you just use the machine this time,’ said Sami.

  ‘You want it short?’

  ‘Short and simple.’

  ‘What about your bald bit?’ Harry pointed to his own shiny top and chuckled indulgently. He knew his customers’ issues.

  ‘I suppose it’s time to come to terms with that.’

  ‘You’re the boss.’

  Harry was a short man. He stood and worked, his head not far above Sami’s, wielding the relentless machine. Sami’s curls came sprinkling downwards. The twists and turns of his previous vanity.

  It was the dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson playing. An extended version of ‘Time Come’.

  read di vialence inna wi eye;

  we goin smash di sky wid wi bad bad blood

  ‘And a shave, I think,’ said Harry.

  Sami considered the hours and days he must have spent scraping at his face to make it smooth and secular. Sculpting concepts, carving modernity on to his cheeks and chin. As if facial hair signified evils beyond itself.

  Shaving had been one of his obsessions. He didn’t see the point of worrying any more.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Well then.’

  look out! look out! look out!

  but it too late now: I did warn yu

  ‘And you’ll be wanting some green?’ asked Harry.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘No thanks?’

  ‘Not this time.’

  ‘That’s a change.’

  Seeing his face in the mirror made him uncomfortable. He closed his eyes and willed himself towards a pampered slumber.

  now yu si fire burning in mi eye,

  feel vialence, vialence

  burstin outta mi

  ‘New leaf turning?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Barbers were one of the good things in Syria. Most men visited every week, for more than a mere haircut. The barber would do a lot. By tapping a flaming wax taper against your ears he’d burn the hair, more plant than human, that grew inside. He’d shape the left and the right of your beard, if you had a beard, in perfect parallel. (Sami, of course, hadn’t had a beard. He hadn’t been that sort of person. But he’d observed it done.) The barber would pull the skin taut to shave around your lips, he’d snip your wiry nostril hair, he’d clip your Arab eyebrows. He’d massage perfume into forehead and neck, and pause while you sipped the tea he provided. Throughout the process he’d complain about business and tell you coded political jokes. Your only job was to luxuriate in such excessive service, to trust the luxury. To stretch your throat towards his open razor. It was like giving yourself to the sea in the dark. Like putting yourself in God’s safekeeping.

  But not just yet. Sami wasn’t ready.

  Impatient to continue about its business, Sami’s head rejected the chair’s specialized support. Harry pushed it gently back, and worked the machine to the music. ‘Time Come’ was recorded on a loop. It came round again with steady inevitability, coming with its deep base shuffle.

  It soon come

  It soon come

  Look out! look out! look out!

  ‘More tribulation in the Middle East, I see,’ remarked Harry, still working.

  Tribulation indeed. Sami checked it each morning in the residence’s internet café. Yesterday morning: helicopters rocketing police stations in Gaza, six Fatah activists killed in the West Bank, fighting in the Aqsa mosque compound. Today: Jamal Mansour from Hamas killed, with seven others, in a helicopter raid in Nablus. Dead children stiff in the rubble. Pictures of living children bearing stones, fighting for Palestine with chunks of Palestine. Untrained and ragged gunmen. Pictures of the hi-tech enemy: their metal insects spitting fire. Their tanks tearing up the olive groves. And every day photos of funerals. Processions of flag-wrapped corpses, with their faces uncovered – the tradition for martyrs – tossed by waves of angry mourners.

  Look out! look out! look out!

  It made him think of the brother-in-law whose mosque he had to find this afternoon. The anger of the Intifada youths, and their frailty – it made him think of Ammar. In 1991, when Ammar was a proper youth.

  The second time Sami met Muntaha was the first time he saw her brother. She’d called him for long enough to suggest a meeting at a café in Queensway, and Sami got there early to prepare for her. He found a section of wall with his back. He pressed against the alternative culture advertising, and swivelled slowly on the balls of his feet, trying to scan the crowd. The busy and the exiled swaying past. He was above the level of bobbing heads, dreadlocks, hats, hijabs. He tried to remember the swing of her hair. He couldn’t make her out.

  Then she was beside him, smiling as if at a joke. Sami opened his mouth to say what he’d planned to say, but next to her was a scrawny teenager, thin to the point of emaciation inside his leather jacket. A Public Enemy target was printed on his T-shirt.

  ‘Hello, Sami,’ Muntaha said. ‘This is my brother, Ammar.’

  ‘All right,’ nodded Ammar.

  ‘Yeah, how you doing?’ Sami tuned his delivery to streetspeak, and extended a hand to be shaken. It was met by a clenched fist. Sami realized too late, and they ended up somewhere between a slap and a fumble, embarrassed.

  ‘Ea-sy,’ breathed Ammar, the first syllable like he’d been slapped on the back, the second radically unstressed. He rolled his thin head on the thinner pivot of his neck, making a great show of sizing Sami up, bunching his lips tight closed, narrowing his eyelids.

  Has she tasked him with taking my measure? Sami asked himself. A teenager whose head looks like it’s been squeezed in a vice, to take my measure? He looked straight at the boy and spoke in Arabic: ‘Is everything all right?’

  Ammar’s attitude broke. ‘Yeah, yeah, all right,’ he replied in English. ‘Do you want to go in?’ He smiled weakly at Muntaha and Sami. They smiled back, like a couple.

  Inside they huddled on stools, three points to a triangle, knees touching.

  ‘I see you like Public Enemy.’ Sami pointing at Ammar’s chest.

  ‘Yeah man,’ said Ammar through falafel. Oil crawling along his sharp chin. ‘I give them maximum respect.’

  ‘Public Enemy,’ began Sami. He was conscious of Muntaha’s lips. Red and full and turned up at the edges, as lips are drawn in comic books. He was conscious of her silence too, and couldn’t tell what it meant. As inscrutable as a Sumerian statue, he thought. Upright, wide-eyed, but for what? Intent on the conversation? Judging him? In awe?

  ‘Public Enemy,’ said Sami, ‘have taken music to a new level. It isn’t even music any more, which I mean as a compliment. It’s the news, it’s politics, it’s preaching. And also the roar of the crowd, and the noise of the metropolis.’

  Ammar was leaning so far forward their noses nearly touched. But the sister? Sami worked on not looking at her.

  ‘What they do is layer different sounds. TV adverts, traffic, the police. Allusions to Farrakhan and Malcolm X. Old soul music spliced up and given new meaning. It’s very postmodern.’

  ‘Wicked!’ ejaculated Ammar. Muntaha, meanwhile, had finished her shawarma sandwich. She folded the grease p
aper into a tight, neat square.

  ‘A PE track,’ Sami went on, ‘is not a song. Not only that. It’s a cacophony of voices in competition. It’s the media attacking the media. It’s a history lesson. It’s both tribute to and parody of the black music tradition.’

  ‘Yeah man,’ said Ammar. And after a pause, ‘Word!’ Sami wondered if he was reaching the sister through the brother. Did she see his future as he saw it, as lecturer, speechmaker, as a man who is listened to? He saw the blackness of her hair, and worked on avoiding her face. Just chatting casually, to the brother, that’s all he was doing.

  ‘What they do is take the language of the street and make it allegory, symbolism. It’s the most apt sound for the end of the millennium. It’s end of the world stuff, global revolution stuff. It’s nothing less than apocalyptic.’

  ‘Wicked, man, wicked!’ squeaked Ammar, jigging with great frequency on his stool like a praying Jew or a Third World child learning the Qur’an, like a convulsive from any culture.

  ‘Sami’s going to do a PhD,’ Muntaha explained.

  What had she meant by that? What had he looked like to her? He looked to himself, in retrospect, like a hollow character. If you rapped your knuckles on him he’d feel like tin, and make a hollow metal clang. What had he meant by speechmaking? He was a face painted on a balloon, his brain a bubble of roiling air. He was too lively, too self-staged, to be true. If that was how he’d really been. Was his picture of himself accurate at all? He wondered how the film played in Muntaha’s head.

  It was a month or two after that meeting that he took Ammar to the PE concert. They were firm friends. At home Ammar had to listen to his music on headphones, to avoid his father’s frown, so he used to come round to Sami’s flat to blast it. Flicking the Miles Davis or Mingus or Coltrane cassettes with disdainful thumb from the deck, or discs from the turntable (this is back in the day), using A Love Supreme as a frisbee: ‘Now get this bollocks away from me! Listen to this one mash yu head!’

  He also picked Sami up in a variety of cars, driving licenceless at first, to circle the city with windows unwound. Showcasing the vehicle’s booming system by playing PE’s sonic collage, and eery Schoolly D decadence, and NWA (’Fuck da Police’), and BDP’s more positive rhymes. There was also Naughty by Nature, Big Daddy Kane, Stetsasonic. As time went by (by which time driving had become his profession) Ammar expanded to Brand Nubian, Snoop, the Wu-Tang.

  It all felt like dangerous fun with your arm hanging loose against the car’s exterior, nodding your brow to the beat but keeping your expression disengaged. The thrill of being driven. In those days Sami still wore a kuffiyeh. Ammar wore wraparound shades, especially at night. You’d expect difficult moments, what with Ammar half standing at certain climaxes, one hand on the wheel and the other raised out the window in fist salute or flagging at spectators, mouthing lines like:

  if yo fucks wit us

  we gots to fuck yo up

  nigga…

  But there never was any difficulty, because they were moving, and because it was a private city, one of the most spread-out and low-rise in the world, with enough space for all manner of private madness.

  Ammar stabbed his speech with ‘jew na wat ameen’ and ‘jew na wat am sayin’. His accent slid from Jamaican (Shabba Ranks, Cutty Ranks, the general badboy dancehall phenomenon), through New York (PE, Schoolly D), to LA street drawl (Ice T, Snoop). He could reference them all in a sentence. His preferred exclamation was ‘cha!’ He expressed comprehension with a long deep ‘seen!’ He called his sister ‘man’ and sometimes ‘brother’. Sami, being male, he addressed as ‘bro’, as in, ‘Yo, bro! Whassup?’ His multicoloured associates were ‘G’ or ‘Negro’ to their faces, and in the third person, his ‘associates’, his ‘crew’, or his ‘brothers in arms’. For Panther-stylee speechmaking he got articulate, clipped and resonant in a contemporary Black London tone. When asked for commentary on a film or a piece of music he said things like, ‘I question its blackness.’ He quoted PE a lot in general conversation. If Sami laughed at his Farrakhan references, he rapped: ‘Don’t tell me that you understand / Until you hear the man.’ Or: ‘Sami treat me like Col-trane / In-sane!’

  A couple of years on, and Sami stopped paying so much attention. He was fruitlessly busy in academia, and then travelling. But bumping into Ammar after weeks or months of library-bound absence he noted the stages of his transformation. The adolescent became a sort of man, which was advertised through his clothing. He matched his sunglasses with unmixed plain colours (mostly black), and shiny shoes, and a straight-line mouth. He had his hair cut close and disciplined. He no longer gestured provocatively from car windows, emanating now a harsh sobriety which wouldn’t allow it. For those in the know, he was mimicking the Nation of Islam lifestyle, except when it came to spliffs. Then he was much more Five Percenter: ‘Given that the black man’s God, we all divine. We make our own commandments. So chill, bro. Skin up and pass the dutchie.’

  Only the tip of Ammar’s tongue was in his cheek. He was reading pamphlets about how the mad scientist Yaqoob invented the white devil race by genetic experiment. There were bits of Islam and bits of Christianity cut up and sampled and redefined in the mix – very hip hop.

  ‘See, it’s written in the Qur’an, yeah? When Yaqoob creates the whites, yeah, the other divine black elders, they saying, wat yu doin man? That one gonna spread corruption and shed blood. And he say, “I know what you know not.” That’s Qur’an, second sura.’

  ‘That’s the angels asking God what He’s doing creating man. It’s got nothing to do with whites and blacks.’

  ‘Yeah, in your forged version.’

  Sami chuckled at him. If Ammar wanted to mangle Islamic text into chunks of absurdist rap, he could be Sami’s guest.

  Ammar took to breaking down everyday language into esoteric particles to reveal hidden political significance. This was a technique learnt from the Five Percenters, so prominent in the rap milieu. Otherwise known as the Nation of Gods and Earths, they’d split with the Nation of Islam on the logical grounds that the returned God of the blacks, Master Fard Muhammad, who taught that the time had come for the black man to regain his divine place in this world, time come therefore for the final race war and defeat of the devil – this Master Fard could not be God because he was in fact white. Most probably a Syrian Druze.

  ‘They call it library,’ Ammar would say when Sami told him where he’d been hiding. ‘But lies buried is what it is for the open-eyed.’ Or, ‘Television? That’s tell a lie vision. Don’t believe a word of it!’

  Sami laughed. ‘Shit, a dictionary of etymology would sort that out for you.’

  ‘Don’t complicate things, bro. Keep it simple. Ya cyaan run no revolution if yu na keep it simple.’

  Ammar seemed to Sami very much like the immigrant that he was. If he understood the social codes of the place better he wouldn’t make himself so ridiculous. And that was also why Sami went easy on Ammar’s accent issues. He’d seen other cases of the same syndrome. A Pakistani friend at the university, for instance, who’d arrived with an Oxbridge accent, and then met a girl with a Mancunian twang and switched overnight, apparently without being aware of it, to her flat vowels and clogged-up consonants. That’s the adaptive strength of the stranger. A strength in most of its manifestations. If you’re not stuck hard in your habits you easily pick up new ones.

  But the lunacy went a little too far. Sami feared that Ammar would be hurt. He tried to explain.

  ‘We can call ourselves black politically speaking, in that we’re not white, and for solidarity, yeah, agreed. But ethnically, racially, I don’t think so. I mean look at my skin. It’s a lot more white than black. The Five Percenters is an ethnic movement. They’re blacks, meaning of African origin. They don’t much like whites. Believe me, you wouldn’t fit.’

  ‘It’s a movement for the original black Asiatic man.’ Ammar waved the argument off. ‘I’m an Arab, guy. You don’t get no more Afro-Asiatic than me.’ />
  There was truth in this, but useless truth, because the black nationalist definition of Asiatic was a religious mythical definition. It was like the Rastafarians talking about Zion and the tribe of Judah. It didn’t mean they had common cause with the denizens of Golders Green.

  ‘Keep it simple,’ Ammar said, in speechmaking mode. ‘We’re black. We need to know who we are, and then we need to stand tall.’

  Simplicity. A dangerous refuge.

  ‘It’s about power, bro. It’s about making knowledge the servant of power.’ He illustrated this with a rare reference to Marwan: ‘I mean, look at my father. Why he so hunched up, man? Why he so, like, fuckin’ defeated and shit? Reads his books and goes to the mosque, but how’s that ever going to give him any more power? He needs to know who the devil is, and who his allies are.’

  To Sami, black nationalism smelled too much of blood and semen. And not his. It felt too much like rigid Black manhood. In its American context it was attached to claiming some land on which to establish a black state. Like Zionism, it was a perverse response to oppression. But he wasn’t going to get angry about it. The Five Percenters had no power to realize their ideas, which decontextualized in England meant very little anyway. In practice, it was no more than sexy identity-assertion, and Sami of the kuffiyeh and Intifada T-shirt could understand that well enough. Strange that Ammar wanted to be a black rather than Arab nationalist, but not that strange. Ammar’s Arab nationalist option had been shut down in his distant boyhood when people calling themselves Arabists shattered the al-Haj family. History had squashed the possibility of Arabism. Moreover, there was no hardcore Arabist rap.

  So Sami, usually so intolerant of any shabby mysticism but his own, allowed Ammar’s rants. They didn’t trigger any of his taboos. They weren’t religion, at least not the religion he’d been trained to despise.