1.
Here
is a Syrian microbus, more commonly known as the servees
or micro.
As
you can see, it doesn't look anything special.
A white box on four
wheels, about ten seats, a sliding door on the side, a sign on the
roof with the route written
in large letters. But three years after leaving Damascus, the servees
is often on my mind.
I
went to Damascus at the start of 2007 with a plan to study Arabic for
a year, The city won me over, and I decided to stay on. I worked
there as an English teacher until the end of 2009.
Some
days, I still have pangs of nostalgia for the servees. When
I am waiting at the bus stop on a wet Southampton morning, for
instance, watching the back of the bus I've just missed as it
disappears around the corner. When I look at the timetable and see I
have thirty minutes till the next one. This is the kind of time when
I indulge myself: I imagine for a moment a battered white servees
sailing down the street towards me. I see myself flagging it down,
pulling open the clunking slide door with a mumbled
salaamu 'alaykum, and
riding the micro again.
Riding
the micro is one of the most efficient ways I have known of getting
around a city. It came regularly, responding to demand at busy times
but also running late into the night. You could flag one down
wherever you were, and you could get off wherever you wanted. They
drove fast, weaving through traffic at bum-clenching speed. They
were also absurdly cheap. When I first arrived, you could ride the
servees five times for the price of a falafel sandwich. Sometime in
2009, the fare doubled, but it remained so cheap that even regular
rides failed to make the slightest dent on my wallet. But it was not
just the practical advantages that made me love the servees. It had
less tangible charms.
2.
Riding
the servees was not easy for beginners. You first had to be initiated
into its mysterious ways. I met the first hurdle when I discovered,
to my surprise, that there were no maps of the different routes.
There were no timetables, no central ticket offices. There was
nothing but the minibuses themselves, snaking and swerving through
busy streets, each heading in a winding line towards the final
destination painted on the sign on its roof. The routes seemed to
have always been there, as if they had emerged organically, like
sheep-tracks or the paths of migratory birds. It seemed that every
Damascene carried a microbus map in their head, like the knowledge of
a London cabbie. But as a foreigner, I had to construct my own map,
one line at a time.
In
the beginning, my mental map of Damascus was a stubby little thing.
It was a Lonely Planet Damascus, a wandering line from the ancient
souqs of Old Damascus to the hotels and banks of the modern city
centre, punctuated by famous ice-cream parlours, cheap restaurants
and historic bathhouses. It was enchanting, but I wanted to see more.
When I figured out how to navigate the servees lines, the larger city
began to open out in front of me.
My
servees apprenticeship began outside Bab Sharqi, the eastern gate of
the old city. The first servees I took was the Jobar-Mezze
line,
which
took me through the heart of the modern city to my Arabic classes at
Damascus University.
I would stand at the edge of the pavement, beneath the ancient stone
tower. Nancy Ajram, the botox-enhanced Lebanese pop star, towered
over me on a giant billboard across the road, seductively enjoying an
ice cold Coca-Cola. The main road roared with several lanes of
traffic that skirted around the Old City walls. The bend in the road
gave me about 5 seconds to identify the right servees after it came
speeding around the corner.
This
was, I discovered, an excellent exercise in speed reading. As a
beginner, you don't read Arabic, you decipher it, picking apart each
word letter by letter, brain straining and lips moving. But when the
word is hurtling towards you on four wheels, you do not have that
luxury. You have to be primed, ready for its shape; the swooping arms
of the waw,
raa
and zaa,
the dotted cap of the
taa marbuta. With
time, the names of the various servees routes came to occupy a
special place in my brain, their shapes burned into my memory as some
of the first Arabic words that I read as a native speaker reads-
Ghouta, Qaboun,
Midan-Sheikh, Duma, Barzeh, Harasta, Yarmouk, Jobar-Mezze.
3.
For
its passengers, the servees was simply a convenient way of getting
from A to B. But it was also, inadvertently at least, a kind of
meeting place. A place where Syrians of all ages and backgrounds came
together for a moment, in an awkward shuffle of elbows and knees,
before heading off their separate ways.
For
this reason, riding the servees was an education for a foreigner like
me. It seemed like all Syria was there. There would be manual workers
in dusty work clothes alongside civil servants with shirts and
briefcases. Chattering college girls, some in grey overcoats and
tight white hijabs, others in jeans with their hair down. Old men in
thaubs counting on prayer chains, and large housewives in black
abayas with hijabs pinned above the chin; teardrop frames for pale
faces.
The
seats of the servees would soon fill up, but it seemed that a sacred
rule of servees drivers was that there was always room for one more.
As passengers, it was up to us to find imaginative ways of
tessellating. It was times like this that reminded me that the
Turkish name for the servees was 'dolmuş',
meaning 'stuffed'. Squatting awkwardly on the slippery hump above the
back wheel, tightly pressed between one man's legs and another man's
bottom, it was hard to dispel the feeling that we were the meaty
stuffing in a tightly-packed aubergine.
But
on other days, I would be lucky enough to find my favourite spot- the
window seat directly behind the driver. Here, I could lean my head
sleepily against the window and stretch my legs (or at least, not
have them jammed up against my chin). If I was lucky, I would get to
listen to the driver telling some anecdote to the passenger in the
front seat. I rarely understood much, but I enjoyed the familiar
phrases that would pepper the stories: I swear to God. By the
prophet. You've gotta be joking. I'm serious, man.
4.
On
an English bus, the passenger is a passive creature. The rules are
simple: you pay your fare, you sit and you mind your own business.
But riding the servees felt like joining a fleeting community.
Despite
the chaos and the bustle, the servees was often a place of small
kindnesses and civility. Men would give up their seats for women and
the elderly. People would help the frailer passengers on and off.
And there were rules pertaining to specific places in the servees.
The person sitting nearest the door, for instance, would make sure
that it was properly shut after every stop. And the one place I
learned to avoid was the aisle seat behind the driver.
The
first time I sat there, I was shocked to find myself bombarded with
coins and notes from other passengers. I felt a rising panic as a
woman pressed a 25 lira piece into my hand, saying 'two fives'. A man
then handed me a 50 lira note and a 5 lira piece, muttering 'three
fives and a five'. I realised that the passenger sitting there had
the job of receiving fares from passengers, handing them over to the
driver and making sure everyone got the right change passed back. I
was up for language challenges, but a maths problem and a language
problem wrapped up in one was more than my poor brain could take. A
kind woman next to me noticed my bewilderment and sorted out the
mess, and I made a mental note to never sit in that seat again.
Drivers
were remarkably relaxed about when you paid the fare, as long as it
reached them before you arrived at your destination. However, when I
rode the service with Syrian friends, I soon learned that they would
go to great lengths to stop me from paying my own fare. This appeared
to be a common Syrian trait; I once saw two elderly ladies on a
servees getting into a physical altercation over who paid. I let my
friends win this battle a few times, but soon I learned to be as
ruthless as them. I would prepare the change for both of us in the
palm of my hand before the servees arrived, ready to make a lunge for
the driver on the way to our seat.
Learning
the language of the servees was also essential. As there were no
fixed stops, you had to shout to the driver when you wanted to get
off, something that initially made me very anxious. The first time I
tried, I half-shouted to the driver from the back seat in a formal
phrase straight from my Modern Standard Arabic textbook: 'uriidu
an anzil hunaa!' When
he didn't respond, I repeated myself, shouting louder each time until
he eventually pulled over. For some reason, this display prompted
many stifled giggles in my fellow passengers. I only realised the
reason for this when a Syrian friend told me that it was roughly
comparable to yelling 'VERILY, I WISH TO ALIGHT!' on an English bus.
After this, I quickly learned how to do it like a Damascene, with the
standard phrase: 'al yamiin!' meaning 'on the right!'.
But
one day as I was riding the servees, I heard a man say something
slightly different to the normal phrase. He was a big man, thick-set
and stubbled, and he crouched in the aisle. When we approached his
stop, he shouted 'nezzilni,
bullah!'. It meant,
literally, 'let me off, by God'. There was nothing particularly
unusual about the words in themselves, but there was something about
the phrase that pleased me in some indefinable way. It might have
been his accent, the gruff bark and falling intonation of a Damascene
working man. It might have been the assertiveness of it, or its
casual grandeur, invoking the name of God in order to get off a
minibus. But to me, it said: here's a man who knows exactly where
he's going, and exactly where he's getting off.
And
so I adopted this phrase. The first few times, it came out in a timid
adolescent croak, and attracted some odd looks. But with time and
practice, I liked to think,
it developed into something approximating that man's gravel tones.
5.
Once
I had overcome these minor obstacles, I couldn't help feeling a small
buzz of mastery from riding the micro. I flagged them down with
confidence and climbed on with a spring in my step. I
would pity my ex-pat friends who relied on taxis. After a while, I
even dared to take
the accountant's seat behind the driver.
And when we approached my destination, I would bellow “let
me off, by God!” and the driver would pull to the edge of the road
without so much as a backwards glance.
I
came to enjoy the variety between the micros. Some micros were tatty,
all rusted metal and threadbare upholstery. A few were fitted out
with plush interiors, multicoloured lights and thumping sound
systems. Some had names written on the back window: princess,
beautiful, light of my life. On some, we listened to the recitation
of the Quran, the sonorous voice drenched in holy reverb. On others,
it was rural debke
music, with its abrasive pounding beats and the manic electric organ
that sounded like an overdriven Casiotone with extra black keys.
With
time, my microbus map grew to become a tangle of intersecting lines
that joined up different parts of the city that I knew. The
Mezze Autostrad line
took me to my friend Jawad's place, where we would sit on the balcony
of his high rise flat, drinking tea and eating lentil
and
rice mujaddara
discussing the
confounding mysteries of Arabic grammar and the opposite sex. The
Yarmouk line
took me to the home of my Arabic teacher, Mazin, whose legendary
parties would go on into the early hours. The Jeramana
line took me to the hole-in-the-wall Iraqi bakery where I got my
supplies of the pitta-like samoon
and the crispy tanoori
flat-bread, and I would ride the Midan
line to some of the oldest and best restaurants in Damascus, famous
for their grilled meats and fuul
beans.
The
Rukneddine line took
me to one of my favourite places, where the houses climbed steeply up
the rocky slopes of Mount Qassioun. I would ascend the steps past
teetering buildings to the path that led to an ancient shrine that
looked out over Damascus. Heading up in the early evening, I would
watch the sun set as the call to prayer from a hundred mosques hung
over the city like a fog.
The
micro lines showed me a city of contrast; from wide tree-lined
streets to densely built-up working class neighbourhoods. They showed
me a city of diversity; from conservative Muslim areas to places rich
in minorities; Druze, Ismaelis, Christians and Mandeans from Iraq.
I
noticed that you could not get everywhere on the micro; there were
blackspots. No servees went to the complex of expensive restaurants
off the airport road or the swimming pools and leisure centres on the
road to Beirut. They were places for people with cars. And it was
unusual to see a servees in the high-class neighbourhoods of Maliki
and Abu Roumaneh, with their jewellers, designer shops and luxury
apartments with armed guards. Micros skirted around the edges and
along the main thoroughfares, but rarely ventured inside.
When
friends came to visit, I would insist on getting the servees rather
than the taxi. 'I'll show them the real Damascus', I would think to
myself, and proudly take them to places outside of the usual tourist
trail. It took me almost three years to feel like I really knew
Damascus. But in the three years since I left, I have begun to
realise how much was missing from my map.
6.
The
last servees that I saw was on the news. It was torn open like a
tin can. There was a bomb near the President Bridge, one of the
main microbus hubs in the centre of town. The servees had been gutted
by flames and its seats were wrenched apart by the blast. There were
shoes scattered on the concrete outside.
Early
on in the uprising, news of every bombing, massacre and military
assault left me with a lingering knot of dread and sadness. But there
came a point where the images of destruction began to lose their
power. They hit my visual cortex with a numb familiarity, just one
more item on the news parade: here is shiny-faced Cameron and his
hand gestures. Here is George Clooney on a red carpet. And from
Syria: shrouded bodies, weeping mothers, and the ragged skylines of
ruined streets. The images were horrific in a distant way, but
somehow, the scale of destruction had become too great for me to
process. It was as if a parallel Syria had emerged: Syria the news
story, the conflict, the humanitarian crisis. Meanwhile, the
uneventful, everyday Damascus that I had loved remained intact in my
memory, as if I could return to it at any moment.
The
image of the servees cut through this. It captured the moment when a
familiar and mundane world turned hellish. A normal day: a school
run, a commute, an errand. Mumbled greetings. Three warm bodies
squeezed into each row of seats. The faint smells of aftershave and
sweat, washing powder and cigarette smoke. Coins passed from palm to
palm across the rows to the driver. In Syria this normality had
seemed as solid as the concrete beneath our feet. The photo showed
how fragile it had become.
7.
When
the uprising first reached the capital in 2011, I noticed something
odd as I followed the news. The first areas in Damascus that rose up
against the regime sounded strangely familiar, although I had never
visited them: Jobar,
Douma, Barzeh, Ghouta, Qaboun, Harasta.
It took a moment before it hit me. They were the names that I had
seen every day on the roofs of passing microbuses. They were the
destinations of the routes; places on the outer limits of the city's
sprawling suburbs. Some of them were lines that I had ridden
regularly within the city. But I didn't have any friends or students
in these places. There were no famous restaurants or beauty spots
there. I'd never had a reason to ride the servees to the end of the
line.
When
I had taken the coach to other cities in Syria, I had occasionally
glimpsed some of these areas out of the window. It had surprised me
how far the urban sprawl stretched, a sea of grey in all directions.
Some areas, like Douma, were cities in themselves, with their own
souqs and parks and upmarket neighbourhoods. But as a general rule,
the further we got from the centre of Damascus, the more the
buildings became shabby and densely built up; naked concrete and
breezeblock, unfinished roofs bristling with metal rods. The
municipal services didn't appear to reach this far; some streets were
unpaved and rubbish piled up on corners. Why did the uprising reach
the city through these outer suburbs? It might be suggested that the
Sunni Muslim areas were the ones that rose up first. There is no
denying the ugly sectarianism that has risen to the surface in this
conflict. But most neighbourhoods in Damascus are dominated by Sunni
Muslims. There must have been more to it than that.
When
I mentioned this to Rami, a Syrian-Palestinian friend who now lives
in the UK, he said that this was no coincidence. 'This is not a war
of politics, or religion, or sectarianism,' he said. 'It's a war of
poverty.'
8.
In
the years I lived in Damascus, nothing much seemed to change. I had
noticed the doubling of the servees fare along with an increase in
the price of mazout
heating oil. The price of bread also went up, and I was vaguely aware
of a drought in the countryside from occasional news headlines. But
none of this had impacted my Damascus. Looking back, the 5 lira
increase in
fare had reached me like a small tremor from a distant earthquake.
It
wasn't until I left Damascus that I realised the scale of the
drought. Between 2007 and 2009, it had displaced 1.5 million people.
Countless internal migrants had come to Damascus, and most lived in
the outer suburbs of the city, where the housing was cheapest, and
where they remained invisible to most people in the centre. These
neighbourhoods were home to those who felt most keenly the grotesque
imbalance of power and wealth in the country. They were the people
who protested first, and who first faced the brutal reaction of the
regime.
I
was not blind to the poverty in Syria. I saw the contrast between
rich and poor, but it was on the periphery of my vision. I didn't see
how far it stretched beyond the horizon. My Damascus felt normal but
it was an anomaly. It was an island of relative plenty in a ocean of
poverty.
The
poor neighbourhoods were not the only places missing from my Damascus
map. There were dark places in the city. Since speaking to Syrian
friends now living in the safety of the UK, I have realised how their
cities were haunted by places whose very names were a gut-punch of
dread. Certain neighbourhoods such as Kafer Souseh, Adawi, Mezze and
Barzeh were infamous for the security centres they housed; the prisons
and interrogation rooms of the labyrinthine branches of the
mukhabarat.
These places meant torture, indefinite detention without trial,
humiliation and helplessness. When I lived in Damascus, I passed
heavily guarded military buildings most days. I may have looked at
their armed guards and wondered vaguely for a moment about what was
inside, but the wondering didn't last long. These places didn't
occupy my city the way they did for Syrians.
9.
The
conflict in Syria cannot be oversimplified; it has become a sectarian
civil war and an international proxy war as well as a local struggle
against tyranny. But at its heart, it seems that the Syrian regime
was a dictatorship that relied on old methods to deal with a new
reality. Dictatorship depends on a precarious balancing act; finding
the right combination of bread and terror to keep a people pacified.
If the population are scared enough, a certain amount of hunger and
hardship can be tolerated. But if the hunger becomes unbearable, then
an escalation in terror is not enough to keep people silent. The
balance is lost, and there is no turning back.
I
never foresaw the intensity of the popular uprising in Syria, or the
brutality of the government response. But the conflict could only be
understood in light of those places that were absent from my map;
those dark spots of brutality and the invisible band of poverty that
encircled the city. With these blindspots, the unrest and violence
seemed alien and surreal. Perhaps it is not surprising how many
Damascenes swallow the regime propaganda that blames all unrest on
foreign mercenaries and terrorists.
10.
I
went for a drink with Saeed, a musician friend from Damascus who now
lives in the UK. I told him that I had been writing about the
Damascus map I had drawn from my rides on the servees. We reminisced
about the points where our maps converged. His fifth floor flat in
Rukneddine where I had lived with him for a month. The bar in the
Jewish quarter of the Old City where he played jazz piano every
Tuesday, while I drank Lebanese beer and made a meal of the
complimentary peanuts and carrot sticks.
Saeed told me that I was not the only one with a limited map. He
had lived in Damascus his whole life, he said, but had grown up
ignorant of much of the country outside his neighbourhood. It was
only when the uprising started that he gave much thought to the
people of Idlib, Der'aa or Deir Azzour. For all the destruction and
death of the last few years, he said, peoples' eyes have at least
been opened to a wider reality, a Syria beyond their own.
It
is not much of a silver lining. A move from the learned helplessness
of a life under dictatorship to the anarchy and terror of civil war,
with a brighter future still a long way off. Our conversation tapered
off with a familiar refrain: Allah kareem, God is generous. It is an
endlessly useful phrase in Syria, employed to resolve conversations
about sad and terrible things on a note of hopefulness. But over the
second pint of bitter in a sports bar in Reading, it rang somewhat
hollow.
On
the train home, I mulled over what Saeed had said. In a
dictatorship, I thought, it takes a certain amount of guts, even
recklessness, to be curious about the city beyond your own map.
Selective vision can be a survival strategy. But I realized that,
living in the UK, it takes a lot less than a police state to instill the same kind of incuriosity.
11.
These
days I watch Damascus through the news and the scrolling updates of
Facebook friends. I watch as the BBC and CNN teach us its geography
one massacre at a time; scattered flashpoints of destruction on an
otherwise empty map. The slaughter in the suburbs has escalated from
bullets to mortars to Mig strikes. Meanwhile, we learn the names of
new neighbourhoods as the violence moves towards the centre:
Kafer Souseh, Mazraa, Bab Touma, Saba'a Bahraat.
Residents
of Damascus are learning to live with a map that is constantly
shifting. My friend from Yarmouk tells me how, in the southern
suburbs, the battle-lines creep backwards and forwards from day to
day, from Tadamon to Hajr al Aswad to Yarmouk. A mental map is no longer enough; on Facebook, maps are circulated that help people navigate an increasingly dangerous city. In late 2012, a friend shared a map that showed sniper locations in Yarmouk; red spots with an arc
indicating the sniper's field of vision. There are maps that show the
location of the hundreds of checkpoints in Damascus. Some maps mark
areas controlled by the Free Army and the regime, while on other maps, it is the Syrian army and the terrorists. As the sectarian divide
deepens, the safe places on people's maps are increasingly determined
by the name and birthplace on their ID cards. Whatever the future
holds for Damascus, the city is dramatically and irreversibly
changing.
Saeed's family live
in a middle-class neighbourhood close to the centre. For now, it is a
relatively safe neighbourhood. He told me how children were being
taken out of private schools on the outskirts of the city and put in
the local government schools, to avoid travelling in areas vulnerable
to kidnapping. Some of the same servees routes are running, but lines
are interrupted by checkpoints, and are stopped for days at a time
when military operations are launched against restive suburbs. Those
who oppose the regime but happen to live in these regime-controlled
areas live in a state of painful ambivalence. True, it is not as
painful as being crushed by mortars and SCUD missiles, but it is
painful enough. When you live in an embattled enclave of a power that
you oppose, surrounded by destruction and anarchy, what is it that
you hope and pray for?
12.
I
liked to ride the servees because it felt like a microcosm of life in
Syria. It was a glimpse of a social fabric, held together with
courtesies and customs and unspoken agreements. But seeing Syria
unravel, I realize how much a calm surface can obscure.
Back in the UK, the stability we enjoy here feels more fragile. The UK is not Syria, but history gives us too many cautionary tales. Where there is growing inequality, where there is a rising tide of hunger and poverty, there is eventually a tipping point. Meanwhile, holes are cut in the social safety net with every new budget announcement. Waves of austerity measures concentrate power in fewer hands.
These
days, I take the bus every morning. I hang on to the handrail with
the other commuters and try to avoid eye contact. At some point in
the journey, my gaze wanders over to the route map above the window.
It occurs to me, at times, how small my city is. My Southampton map
delineates my own little kingdom: where I shop, where I work, where I
drink coffee, the houses of friends. If anything, here I am even more
blind to the city beyond my own. I lack the foreigner's curiosity
that drove me to discover Damascus. Some mornings, for a moment, this
bothers me. I have lived here for years, but I have never taken the
bus to the end of the line.
END
