Journey to Jordan

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to go to a Muslim Arab wedding for my friend Lafi’s cousin.  Lafi is a really good friend of mine, without a doubt my closest native Arab friend here in Jordan, and I’m surprised that I haven’t written more about him on this blog.  I met him in the first few weeks up at Food City, and we’ve been talking and hanging out ever since.  Gini and I have been to his house a couple of times and by now we’re practically members of the family.

Lafi lives with his wife, two children, mother, father, brother, and sisters up in Tarbarbour, a new neighborhood up in North Amman.  Tarbarbour is right on the edge of the city, on land that is still relatively empty, and they have a beautiful view of Amman from their porch and a very pleasant breeze.  They bought the land and built the house themselves, so they own it, which is no small thing.

Before moving to Tarbarbour, however, they lived in Jabel Nasr, a neighborhood in East Amman.  That’s where all their family is–cousins, grandparents, second cousins, etc etc–so that’s where we went for the wedding.  It’s a nice neighborhood, as far as East Amman goes, but compared to Tarbarbour and West Amman it’s crowded and somewhat poor.  Still, there are a lot of good people there, and I felt comfortable among all the wedding guests.

Lafi picked us up in front of Muxtar mall at Duwar al-Medina.  Me, Gini, and Nikki (Gini’s roommate) all went together.  I wasn’t sure what to wear and was going to go in a dark collarless shirt, but my host aunt told me it would be better to wear my white collared shirt, like I was going to church.  The tie was optional, though–a lot of Arabs don’t wear ties with their dress clothes (though at the same time, a lot of them do).  I was glad that I wore a collared shirt, because Gini and Niki were both dressed up pretty nice, and most of the guests were wearing suits.

The first part of the wedding was a big party for the women.  I’ve heard from my sister Kate what this is like.  Of course, that part of the wedding is JUST for women, so while Nikki and Gini stepped off into the room where all the festivities were going on, I followed Lafi on up to the roof of the apartment.  All of the men were up there, sitting around drinking coffee, eating Kunafeh, and talking about banking and finances.

I met a few new people and chatted with some of the guests in Arabic, but mostly just sat around enjoying the breeze.  A few people took interest in talking with me, but most of them were either just chilling or talking about various other things.  I didn’t really mind, though.  It gave me a chance to walk around and look at the neighborhood from the rooftop.

Lafi pointed out the apartment where he used to live with his family.  I could definitely see that moving to Tarbarbour was a major step up for them.  The apartments were all rough, dirty concrete, with barred windows, rebar sticking out of the unfinished roofs, and telephone/power lines draped low across the street and over the roofs of the smaller buildings.  The streets were narrow, with garbage and litter against the corners, and the porches and sidewalks were unfinished.  Still, in typical Arab fashion, all the apartments had gardens that looked like they were meticulously kept.

Even in big cities like Amman, I feel that Arabs still have a small town mentality that colors the urban experience in everything.  Every neighborhood is like a village unto itself, where everybody knows everybody and everybody is related in some way.  Even in the middle of the city, people stay close to the land by growing beautiful gardens.  These gardens are not for show–they are mainly for growing food, and people still measure the year by which fruit or vegetable is in season.  A few months ago, it was plums; now, it’s grapes and figs.  Olive trees are as common as maple trees in Massachusetts.

After the sun set, the women finished up with their party, and we all came downstairs to follow the groom over to the bride’s house, driving a shining limousine all decked out with flowers.  Before we left, however, Lafi’s brother showed me a handgun that one of the brothers of the groom was loading.  I was really surprised to see this and wondered if he was some sort of family guard or something.  We got into our cars and, driving with our hazards and honking our horns for good measure, we formed up a merry procession with the groom’s limousine at the front.

We stopped for a while at the bride’s house and waited in our cars for the couple to come out.  Some people went inside, but a lot of people also waited outside like us.  Then, amid shouts and clapping, the bride and groom stepped outside!  Everyone was really excited, and as their limousine started to pull away with them inside of it, some men from the family pulled out their handguns and shot of a few rounds in the air.  In Arab culture, guns are not only used as weapons, they’re also used to celebrate and mark special occasions, even though technically this is illegal in Jordan.

We drove down to West Amman, to a special reception hall near Mecca mall where the wedding dinner took place.  It took a while to get there because of the traffic, and Lafi had to stop midway to get gas (there was a line at the gas station which reminded me a bit of pictures of the 70s–gasoline currently costs about 70 qirsh per liter, which translates to four dollars per gallon, and everyone is suffering because of it).  That was ok, though, because the father of the groom also got caught up in traffic, so we all waited on the street for a little while before going in together as a big group.

The reception hall was cordoned off into two sections–one for the men, another for the women.  This is the way things are done traditionally, but it’s also considered acceptable to have mixed parties, at least in the city.  Later on, the men migrated over to the women’s section and things became more mixed.  We started out by gathering around tables, sitting around, and talking some more.  As the evening progressed, cake and drinks were served, but mostly we spent the time talking while the women were singing, dancing, and partying.

A lot of the guys started taking an interest in me, and asked all about my home, what I was studying, what America is like, etc etc.  One of the relatives kept pressing me to get him a visa when I become an ambassador–he was half joking around, but only by a half.  Others joked around about various things, and tried to put on a macho show by talking casually in front of me about sex.  Arabs get most of their impressions of the West from movies and TV, which means that they have a very skewed view of us Americans and our sexual attitudes and/or experiences.  Besides that, Arab culture is saturated with sexual tension and hidden sexual references (though sometimes those references are not quite so hidden–read the first hundred pages of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights and you’ll see what I mean!).

A little while later I switched tables and got into a conversation with Kareem, Lafi’s Ukranian brother-in-law, and I spent the rest of the evening in an engaging conversation with him.  Kareem is from the Ukraine, but he moved to Jordan when he married Lafi’s sister, who is currently studying law and just recently defended her thesis.  He’s a fun man to talk with, has a jovial attitude, and despite the fact that he’s a chain smoker (he lit up about five or six times while we were talking) he’s a good man and we had a really enjoyable time talking with each other.

I asked when the actual moment of the wedding was–after all, I was a little bit surprised that so far, all we’d really seen was one party after another.  In Christian cultures, the moment of the actual marriage can be traced to the altar, where the priest asks “do you take so and so to be your lawfully wedded husband/wife?” In Muslim cultures, however, there is no priest who performs this role.  Instead, the families of the bride and groom negotiate with each other until they reach an agreement, mostly a monetary one (like a prenup–who gets what and how much in the case of a divorce, how much to pay for a dowry, etc).  When the bride and groom both sign the paper that the families draw up for the contract, that is considered the actual moment of marriage.  However, because there are so many parties that go on in the days and weeks after the signing of the marriage contract, the couple generally waits a few days to consummate their marriage.  I don’t blame them–these Arab parties can be exhausting!

Kareem and I talked about all sorts of things.  Despite the fact that we’re from radically different cultures, cultures that twenty years ago were on the brink of war, we understood each other really well and had an engaging conversation.  We talked about Arab wedding customs, the situation in the caucasus with Georgia, Russia, Ossetsia and Abkhazia, and the new oil pipeline that Azerbaijan just built in that area.  We spoke a lot about Democracy and Democratization, what the real motives are behind the foreign policy of Russia and the United States, and neo-liberal ideas of free trade and opening closed societies to the positive forces of globalization.  Sometimes, I really don’t like talking politics with people, but even though Kareem and I had some different ideas, I really enjoyed talking with him.

By the time we’d finished, I realized that everyone else had moved into the other room and the party was wrapping up.  It was about eleven thirty by this point, so we made our way outside with most of the other remaining guests.  A short while later, Lafi, his wife, and Gini and Nikki came out, and we drove home.  By this time, I felt totally at home, and had a wonderful time talking with Lafi and the others and listening to Arab music on the radio as we made our way back to Ad-Dustour and Press street, where I live.

A fun and enjoyable evening, full of all kinds of cultural experiences!  I’m very glad I was able to see a Muslim wedding before going to the states, and if you get invited to one while staying in the Middle East, I definitely recommend going to it!