Berkley Center

From my seat in a breezy cafe in Amman’s hipster Weibdeh district, I would never guess that one of the most brutal and deadly conflicts in the world is just a three-hour drive away. The brutality of the Syrian Civil War seems far removed from the security and optimism of life in Jordan. The people in Amman do not feel any more threatened by ongoing conflict in the Middle East than people in the United States do; when Hezbollah and Israel began exchanging fire a few weeks ago the explosions received only a passing mention in my Modern Standard Arabic class as an example sentence to use the word “ceasefire.” Local life and local concerns take precedence here, as they do anywhere else in the world. Jordan prides itself on being the safest and most stable country in the most turbulent region in the world, and thus far my own experience has affirmed that claim.

Yet just below the surface, the reverberations of regional conflict are everywhere. Ask any Jordanian about their background and you are bound to hear a hyphenated identity. Jordanian-Palestinian is the most common, but there are thousands of people who are Jordanian by way of Iraq, Syria, Kuwait, among others. If America is a country of immigrants, then Jordan is a country of refugees; more than 60% of the population arrived in the past few decades due to regional conflict.

On Thursday evening, I met up with a Jordanian girl who attends the University of Jordan. A thoroughly normal college student, she studies graphic design and intends to start her own business as a wedding planner. She is obsessed with Korean culture, and speaks Spanish and Korean in addition to Arabic and English. She loves her mother, fights with her siblings, and drinks way too much coffee. She is also an Iraqi refugee—her family fled from their home province of Diyala when she was seven. When I ask about her transition from the wartime instability of Iraq to the relaxed cosmopolitanism of Amman, she laughs a bit and looks down at her hands. “It was hard in the beginning,” she tells me in Arabic, “but now I am used to it. I used to think about Iraq all the time, but what can you do? Maybe there will be more war, maybe there will not. We cannot know and so we cannot do anything about it. At a certain point, we have to move on.” 

Jordan is surrounded by some of the most volatile regimes in the world, and yet the people here have, incredibly, moved on. I cannot help but contrast this to America’s sense of ever-present threat. Refugees in particular are demonized for taking away job opportunities from “real Americans,” at best. At worst, they are accused of being sleeper agents for the very terrorist groups they are fleeing. Certainly, there is some of this tension in Jordan as well, particularly regarding job opportunities on account of Jordan’s tight job market. Yet at the end of the day, Jordan has managed to create a multicultural community—the kind America still struggles to achieve. The patchwork of identities comes out clearly in the colloquial language, which has shifted over the decades as new nationalities added their local languages’ characteristics. For example, the Arabic letter “ ق” (transliterated into English as “q”) is not pronounced in Jordanian colloquial. Instead, there are two common pronunciations. Jordanians from more rural areas and Bedouin communities—typically the “original” Jordanians—pronounce the “q” like a “g.” The word qahwa (coffee) is said gahwa. Meanwhile, people in urban centers pronounce the same word with an “ah” sound—ahwa. The “ah” is actually an element of the Palestinian dialect that migrated into the Jordanian accent. Iraqi and Gulf colloquial Arabic both have a “ch” sound, whereas other dialects have a “k.” This has led to a common Jordanian slang term: ochay—a play on the Iraqi accent and the American “okay.”

Jordan’s treatment of refugees is far from perfect, and there are very real criticisms of the conditions of refugee camps here and the restrictions placed on foreign-born individuals. Yet although ancestral Jordanians are now a minority in their own country, overall, they have managed to integrate different cultures without sacrificing their own. It is a testament to the integrity and hospitality of Jordanians, a hospitality I have gotten to experience myself.