AIAW Featured Writer: ANGELLA NAZARIAN

Angella Nazarian - Writer

It must have been the highlight of their day, maybe even their entire month: Here was a gorgeous, blue-eyed American blonde stumbling into a Middle Eastern souvenir shop right by the border of Jordan and Israel, belly dancing in front of two middle-aged Arab shopkeepers.

My friend Cathi and I had first walked into the store out of sheer boredom. We’d been waiting by the border for close to an hour to get our visas stamped. The only thing to do was to look at the tiny trinkets on display at the souvenir shop right by the guard station. But Cathi was intent on spicing up that morning. She took one look at the shop’s video of a half-naked belly dancer doing her serpentine moves and decided to strike those dance moves herself. Yes, right there. She stood in front of that TV, wearing her bubble ski jacket and baseball cap, gyrating her hips, moving her arms about, shimmying her shoulders for me and the two very grateful Arab men. Believe me, it was a sight to see. The men dropped their newspapers, first looking our way in a paralysis of surprise. But it took no time for them to catch on.

“Yalla, yalla,” they said as they clapped in encouragement. I was hiding between the aisles, laughing hysterically at my friend’s uncoordinated attempts at 8:30 in the morning, with a belly-dancing scarf tied around her hips.

We were only a few minutes into Cathi’s impromptu act when her husband rushed into the store. He did a double take. I don’t blame him for being confused by this bizarre scenery—me squatting on the floor laughing and Cathi dancing—hopping, really—around the store with cymbals in her hands. But John, like my husband, takes these Felliniesque moments with good humor. Time spent with us is like an afternoon with Lucy and Ethel.

“Okay, okay. Playtime is over. We can finally go through the border,” John said. Cathi put the cymbals back on the shelf, laid the scarf on the counter, and bowed to the shopkeepers. She had obviously forgotten we were not in Japan. People in Jordan don’t do Geisha-like bows. They simply say thank you. Nonetheless, in keeping with true Middle Eastern hospitality, the shopkeepers offered her the scarf as a gift. Lovely.

A short drive through the desert took us to the outskirts of our destination—the famed city of Petra, now one of the Seven Wonders of the World. I had seen pictures in travel magazines but they did not prepare me for its grandeur.

It took us another forty-five minutes on foot, through long, twisting canyons called the Siq, to get to the interior of the historic city. The surrounding walls of the canyon, awash in waves of different shades of red, were so high that they shut out the morning light. Our guide, Salam, explained that during the centuries right before and after Christ, Petra was a thriving civilization and a trading empire. The very trail we were walking on once served as a major caravan route between Arabia and Syria. Roman soldiers on horseback and rich merchants with their camels trekked through these winding roads trading saffron, exotic oils, and incense. Today, this narrow passageway also serves as Petra’s main entry, like the eye of a needle, threading us through the dark cavern into the light. Without a doubt, it is simply the most spectacular and dramatic entrance to a city that I have ever seen. The treasury, an imposing neoclassical building carved into the soft stone of the mountain some two thousand years ago, marks the beginning of the city. This magnificent sight partially peered out from the last bend of the Siq—behind those jagged, rose-colored cliffs.

As we walked through Petra onto the more expansive spaces, Salam pointed to the visible black holes in the cliffs nearby. “These openings you see are entryways to the tombs that the Nabateans carved out for their ancestors. Eight hundred have been spotted so far. The ones you see farther away with the Romanesque architecture may have been used for escaping the summer’s heat.”

We could tell that the Nabateans drew from varied styles of architecture. An unusual mix of Greek columns, Roman-style amphitheaters, and Indian-inspired elephant-head carvings were all incorporated in tribal and Mesopotamian dwellings. This eclectic group of building styles reflects the influence of the different countries that once came through this part of the Great Rift Valley. And Petra, like the entire Middle East, has layers and layers of customs, traditions, and religious backgrounds that make for a rich but often disjointed cultural landscape.

I could see hollowed-out caves and elaborately sculpted porticoes in every direction. I turned to Salam and said in jest, “This place is so surreal that it feels like it is straight out of an Indiana Jones movie set.”

“As a matter of fact, they did use this place in one of the sequels,” she said with a chuckle. “But of course you can see why. This is a pretty remarkable place.”

After our two-hour walk and a full Middle Eastern meal, we were eager to hitch a ride on the most popular means of transportation in Petra—a donkey. Salam flagged down a Bedouin named Mustafa, who had skin like aged leather, warm hazel eyes, and eyelashes that could sweep the floor. Each of his donkeys had a more bizarre name than the last. My son Eli’s donkey was named James Dean, while mine, strangely enough, was called Michael Jackson. It was my first time on a donkey, and I never realized that they could canter as fast as a horse. My kids squealed with delight at the sight of me screaming to Mustafa, “Make Michael Jackson stop!” As scared as I was, I was also laughing out loud at the sheer absurdity of my statement.

When we reached a steeper incline, all seven donkeys slowed down, and we got a chance to take in the surroundings. I wanted to pay attention to things as they reached me at that moment—the shifting shadows cast by the setting sun, the pulsating haze, the deepening of the colors of the rocks, the full moon that showed like a cold, white sun over the mountains ahead to the south. A swelling presence arose in me. I looked at Mustafa, who was walking beside me, showing off his crooked smile and his tea-stained teeth. I was struck by how much affection I felt for this man, who was almost a stranger. Somehow, I felt that he, like all of us, was just trying to fill his life with love.

I marveled at the tapestry of colors and smiled at Phillip and Eli’s rollicking laughter that echoed and filled the canyon with the sound of pure joy. At that moment I had a deep love for life itself and all that it has offered me. It is precisely this expansive feeling that lifts me, that weaves its experience into the texture of my life. And it’s places like this, these moments of connection—my proximity to infinite things—that I love above all else in life.

There are enduring motifs, feelings, and landscapes that appear in my personal journey, that give shape to my experience of life. In Petra, I found the vast, hypnotic calm, the crisp dryness of the winter air, the color of the sky that was suffused with the familiar lilac-gray similar to what I used to see back home in Iran. It was the sound of my sons’ rollicking laughter, taking me back to when my I used to hear my brothers’ playful banter and play in the alley outside our house. It was the color of the sunlight, the same hues I often marveled over at dusk from my balcony in Tehran. My visceral response to this landscape in Petra had tunneled a path to the trove of childhood memories and was casting its light on the faces and places that have been long out of reach. We were miles away, yet this was as close as I could get to the country that sheltered me as a child.

As a little girl, I often felt that a sense of belonging was a feeling that should naturally reside within me, whether it was in relation to a country, a specific group, or even a personal identity. But riding on that donkey in that blazing desert sun of Petra, it hit me: belonging is more an act than a feeling. It is actively engaging in a deep level of connection and reciprocity with my feelings, with each individual I meet, each event taking place, or whatever environment that I find myself in. The foundations of belonging seem to start on a personal plane rather than on a collective level. And with each successive encounter and moment of connection, my identity expands to encompass seemingly divergent philosophies, whether eastern or western; people who I never grew up with, whether it is Mustafa the Bedouin or Joseph, my safari guide; or landscapes, whether they are the wondrous ruins in Cambodia or the offbeat neighborhoods in Venice, California.

In the end, what is revealed in my travels to other cultures belongs to me forever. What I see and learn becomes a part of me. In Petra, I felt it within me: the truth of my experience lies in the fact that everything is separate unless you see it with an open heart. In my most inspired and unguarded moments, I feel the walls me and others, me and nature, me and a beautiful melody—crack and disappear. Much like what I encountered in Petra, there is also a narrow passageway that leads you to the interior of something more vast, wondrous, and transcendent. It is when I am in this kind of state that I find myself not in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar faces, but rather, ever so blessed to feel intimate with so many things. It is in these same moments that I feel at home wherever I go—and most importantly, at home in my own skin.

Angella Nazarian - See more info about Life as a Visitor

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