I Can't Believe I Forgot to Add that...

We went to this "Arab" neighborhood that was built on an old spillway where the city's filth flowed on blasting water into the sea. Just like any city, ethnic groups here (Arabs, Jews, Ethiopians, Christians and others) live in polarization. Those atop the Mount Carmel don't care to come to these neighborhoods hidden by the mountain's very shadow. This neighborhood was strictly Arab with tight roads and surplus of zooming cars and vespas. I saw children running around with footballs (the kind you play with your feet), looking at us like people look at strange exhibits in museums. We walked some and reached these two falafel places that stood right across from each other. I turned to the one on the right where there was no line. There, I ate the best falafel I ever had. I drank Hebrew Coca-Cola. I looked up and saw a picture in the corner between the wall and ceiling. It was a little league basketball team clad in Hebrew. This reminded me of all the pizza places in New Jersey and New York that had little league baseball or basketball team pictures overlooking the establishment. The "NO SMOKING" sign could be read by Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, or English speakers. I thought, " damn it's like an alternate Universe."But no. It is the world we live in. Vast and full of things very different but small and full of things metaphysically similar.

The Anniversary of my Escape from the Depths of Womb Matter.

Yesterday was the day of my birth. I am now twenty one. I spent it touring Haifa, Israel from the top of the extravagant, lush Bahai gardens that sit on the summit of Mount Carmel where on a clear day one can see the city of Acco where the best falafel in the world is created by experienced hands. The gardens decline smoothly until it reaches the Shrine of Bab. The history of all this was represented in this spectacle but is still hidden by hundreds, maybe thousands of years and of course my foreign status to Israel. Afterwards, we went to a Souq (pronounced Shook) an expansive outdoor marketplace where one could buy literally anything. From fruits and vegetables to licorice liquor to electronics. I surveyed each store eating a pomegranate, chewing the juices out of the bright crimson seeds that lived in sweet darkness until I came along. I stopped at this one shop and bought some Middle Eastern spices, spices to which I was ignorant. Right now they are sitting in my room filling the space with its alluring scent.

poltics

It's arduous to declare american citizenship to the common people of the Haifa streets who demand to know your nationality especially if you are the only black person (of west african descent among black people of ethiopian descent). Haifa consists of Jews and Arabs, mostly. Supposedly, there is equality here. But hey? : what if some guy hates americans? fuck.

On the Plane

The screen in front of me says that it is 10:43AM in America and 5:43PM in Israel. I am somewhere over the island of Cyprus - so foreign to me. When I look to my left, I see symmetrical stripes of colors falling from indigo to blue stalking the aircraft's windows. When I look to my right, I see earth, the horizon and then the fiery molten twilight that recedes in intensity and vibrance upwards reaching turquoise and then the same dull blue that I see to my left. The almost supernatural glaze of these high skies plants wonder in my thoughts. Such beauty is so mysterious, so elusive since these are new skies to me, virgin skies before my penetrating gaze.

January 22nd, 2011 4:14pm-New Jersey.

Tonight I fly out to Tel Aviv. Wheels leave the ground at 11PM, wheels touch the ground again at 4PM. I'll take some sort of transportation to Haifa. I'll open the door to my room. The suitcase hits the floor. I'll get settled until fatigue comes. Then my head will hit the pillow, the same pillow for the next five months. I'll be away for a while so I am ever so conscious of the time that's going by before departure. The ticks of the clock echoes around my brain


From this day, I will hold onto the time spent with my family and the distant glow of the sunset looming behind the naked creaking trees that live in my backyard.

i BLAME history.

Recently, there have been a stream of abductions in Niger. Very recently, two French nationals were kidnapped in Niamey, at a popular restaurant that, at the time, was probably alive with laughing, talking people and brought to the golden brown desert where they were killed by big machine guns. This specific place where their lives ended took place in a remoteness that may have brought the echo of their cries to the old library walls of Timbuktu.

Who killed these people? The media says that terrorists did it - Al-Qaeda. Every depiction brings to focus wild, reckless, crazy murderers wielding AK 47s in the cool, dusty Sahel night. Putting all our trust in the media, we see that these terrorists are fiends pitted against Good. They might as well be vampires as we know them.

But what do we know? The trusted journalists of CNN, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, all they did was put words together in a document. We weren't there that night on the Mali border where French blood was drawn. We weren't there before that night. We have never asked a "terrorist" why. Very rarely do we swim against stream. What if these "terrorists" are responding to some historical context established on more bloodshed?

Why are so many African countries bedlams rendering any combing through impossible? Why?! Why is it that such a rich, beautiful, mysterious continent, the one from which man arose - why is it so torn apart by war? Endless wars that build opaque viscous clouds of consternation that just sustain it all? I blame history. I blame the Europeans who cut their way through the vast land stripping all its treasures from African hands, exploiting the land and the people, subjecting them to the bowels, the depths of despair, the same hopelessness and helplessness that say a drug addicted sex slave would fall to after submission, submission, submission!

This historical phenomenon set up by the Berlin Conference doomed various countries of the Continent to poor development, to retardation, to the creation of hellish monotonous cycles of failure and self destruction.



The French nationals who were kidnapped in Niger had ties to the large nuclear energy company called Areva. So now things begin to make a little sense. Areva is probably a company like Walmart that exploits workers overseas, takes advantage of their cheap labor while depleting the valuable resources of this foreign country. It doesn't get any closer to slavery than that in these days of globalization, in these days of the World Wide Web spun by discrete, dexterous, poisonous predators, successful in holding humanity in these silky traps.

We will never know the entire story as to what exactly rendered countries like Niger into the poverty and AIDs stricken arena of violence it has become today. But I do know that people have been kidnapped and killed this past week. But why? Why is there a group of people that is today's "Commies", today's "Nazis", why are they in Niamey kidnapping laughing, talking people out of restaurants? Why are they the reason that I may not experience Niger after years of dreaming about Africa? History. An unfortunate succession of events brings us to 2011, a time where we cannot do what we want, a time where we are not free. I blame history as I anticipate the blurry future, as I hope, in spite of my cynicism, that the present can prove my wild conclusions wrong.

anticipation is blurry foresight

I sit here patiently, clueless as to what my long stay in Niger will bring to me or how it will shape me. Right now, to me, Niger is a concept, an idea, a shape on a map. Numerous people have described to me the country's beauty and the its people who, through custom and habit, maintain this image.

But these are just subjective experiences, based on individual interpretations. One person sees a baseball bat as a tool to send a baseball out of range of the opposing team players. Another person may see it as a weapon to blah blah blah. Another person may it as memorabilia. Recounting experiences requires the combination of the factual and transcendent aspects, a duality that involves that which really actually exists and that which we spawn in our minds (something that transcends reality). Everyone is different. Therefore we all distort these two aspects, we all emphasize one part of this duplicity differently. Relying on the perspective of another keeps me ignorant and eager to the thing that I've yet to experience for myself. Right now, Niger is just some bright place in my thoughts.

That'll change in sixteen days.