Berkley Center

It has now been two months since arriving in Amman for my language and culture program at the University of Jordan. Until now it has been an incredible experience. Everyday your mind is bombarded with images, sounds, and situations to which you are not accustomed. Being forced to use your little knowledge of the local language becomes tiring, uncomfortable, however comfortable you may be submerging yourself into a different lifestyle. It is a long series of ups and downs. One day you get the feeling you have mastered the situation you live in, understanding everything that goes on around you, only to find yourself struggling the following day in a simple conversation with a taxi driver or with your host family. However, through the weeks, you adapt to the environment and you begin to identify the different cultural norms that move the people around you.

Arab hospitality is a given. Everyone likes to talk to you about it, especially before you arrive. "It’s part of the culture," they reassure you, "they cannot avoid being welcoming and warm." "He who believeth in one God, and a future life, let him honor his guest," says a common Islamic proverb. While I was slightly skeptical about this at first, it is mostly true: there is a general sense of obligation towards the guest, the visitor, and the foreigner. As you enter a shop, a taxi, or a restaurant, the local is eager to find out more about you and have a conversation, which in my case tends to be about either Italian football teams or Silvio Berlusconi, a man whose depressing legacy seems to continue to cross borders. The same happens in families whose primary concern is to make sure you have everything needed, often stuffing you with more food than you could ever eat.

Yet, it is not that simple. Hospitality seems to be often exclusive to a very narrow range of moral acceptability. This is coupled with the common hypocrisy of a young population that judges what is sinful, haram, while harassing others in the street. While being a tall, white male in the street is definitely an easy status almost immune to annoyance (as it seems to be in most places, after all), it is often hard to digest the light but constant molestation directed at girls as they walk down the street, local and foreign alike. While just saying "haram ‘alai" tends to work most times, after just six weeks into the program most girls in the group have collected an arrangement of anecdotes in which they were harassed, shouted at, stalked, or even followed by a car for a prolonged amount of time.

Something more subtle, yet similar happens, in the family environment as well. While without any aggression or disrespect, passive aggression and quiet judgment seems to be a national sport. If you do something that might not fit the local norms, often unintentionally or by the smallest extent, it is unlikely that you will be called out by those closer to you. However, you will most likely be judged heavily behind your back. In the long run, this creates a very tense, uncomfortable environment in which you are constantly uncertain of the response to your actions or words.

Life in Amman becomes a mixture of two extremes, a dichotomy between full, warm, sincere hospitality and profound, subtle, burdening judgment. The tensions that can be felt on a normal day, walking down the street, seems to define the social fibers of society, influenced by a mixture of historically flexible religious norms and group mentality. While still elaborating the chaotic influx of images around me, I am sure that my feelings are palpable and that they correspond to reality. As I continue my experience in this city, I will keep pushing for a better interpretation of what surrounds us, trying to make sense of something drastically removed from my comfort zone.