Hisham Bustani and Linda Al Khoury, Waking up to My Distorted City (Bilingual Edition) (Arab Institute for Research & Publishing, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Hisham Bustani (HB): Amman has been a constant obsession in my writing. For a start, it is my hometown, where my memories of society and place were formed. The memories of my father Abdel Fattah (born in Amman in 1937) and my aunt Isaaf al-Diraniyyeh (born in Amman in 1919) were intertwined within mine, and constructed an intimate, familiar city. I often go back to these recollections in response to the transformations taking place in Amman today, which I find disastrous: the lack of planning; the ripping up of the urban fabric; the illusions of cosmopolitanism and neoliberalism; the closure of the city’s few public spaces; the rise of giant glass buildings on the ruins of stone houses; and the indifference of those who govern the city towards all of this, and their contribution to its demise.
The book is also bilingual (Arabic and English). I decided to cooperate with a group of distinguished literary translators (Nariman Youssef, Addie Leak, Alice Guthrie, Thoraya El-Rayyes, and maia tabet) to bring this book into English due to the near absence of literature dealing with contemporary Amman, and because Amman today has become the center of an ever-expanding community of ajaneb (foreigners or “expats”), and it could be useful for them to get to know the city where they live and with which they often have a superficial relationship.
Linda Al Khoury (LK): My spatial relationship with the city of Amman and my memories of it were formed visually through a mixture of events and places. As a photographer and visual documentarian, I started the process of documentation by preserving the scenes that had remained in my memory since I was young. Then I realized that the many transformations taking place in the city were directly affecting these scenes, erasing them stage by stage, with every change taking place in the spaces surrounding me.
This erasure, which started to affect my personal memory of places in Amman, gave rise to the idea of my photographic project which directly reflects the contrast between the city in my memory and in the present. The idea of a joint endeavor on the city with Hisham started in 2015, when we held a joint performance, an encounter between images of Amman and literary expressions of the city, each uniquely narrating this encounter from multiple viewpoints, references, and dimensions. The collaboration extended as we added new elements, culminating in the creation of this book eight years later.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
LK: My project in the book, entitled “My Distorted City,” presents the recent wave of urban transformation, which has begun to starkly change the city’s features, affecting its identity and my own spatial memory. This profound change is represented by many things. They include the changed architecture, which used to have a distinct style expressed in precise artistic and aesthetic details, like the stone frames around doors and windows. There has also been an encroachment on public spaces, the spread of brash buildings full of glass, the clear neglect of sidewalks, and many other issues related to the city’s transformation. Throughout this work, we pose many questions about this transformation.
HB: This book belongs to the field of literature and arts related to cities, urban societies, and their transformations. While many books have been produced on Arab cities such as Cairo, Alexandria, Marrakesh, Beirut, and Baghdad, by many of their locals and residents, writing about Amman is rare, and often focuses on its past and not its present.
The book is organized in two distinct parts: my three chapters of texts, and Linda’s photographic album. My first chapter, entitled “The Heaviness and Lightness of Place, the Changes and Echoes of Time,” takes the form of literary memoirs, and recalls my layered memory of the city, and through that memory, summoned for reasons in the present, reflects my understanding of memory as being the present summoning the past for purposes of the present. It includes photographs from my family’s private archive, as well as postcards. The chapter invites the reader to see and feel the city’s past as it is represented today, within a present in which that past no longer exists, a present that is not even an extension of that past. The city’s rulers are intentionally erasing Amman, both physically and nonmaterially, just as they are deliberately confiscating public spaces and preventing residents from owning their city, giving the people of Amman a feeling of constant alienation. The first chapter is, therefore, an attempt to form an emotional reference to the city’s “now” as a parting of ways with its “then.”
My second chapter, called “Impossible Restitutions,” is a collection of narrative, poetic, and hybrid texts that bring us into the crisis of the modern city: alienation; “development” projects for old neighborhoods that effectively destroy the spirit of Amman and its urban relations; traffic crises, randomness, and chaos; relationships and dialectics of superiority that are created with and within the city by some of its US-European residents and visitors; the crisis of identity that is afflicting Amman; and so on. The third chapter is a quasi-research essay, its title clearly explaining its subject matter: “An Improvised Attempt to Understand Social Transformations in Amman.”
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
HB: This is my eighth book, after five literary books, a comic book, and two volumes of postcolonial/decolonial studies. It brings together something from these diverse routes, and it holds a special place because of its discussion of my city and my attempt, through it, to discover my ambiguous relationship with Amman. In a way, this book is my most personal work, and a continuation of my attempts to present the personal through its entanglement with the public/general: the personal interrogating of the public/general, inasmuch as the public/general is influential and present in the personal. That is why I have included three qualitatively distinct chapters within the same cover: they all fall into this inseparable private-public existence.
LK: “My Distorted City” is a long-term, ongoing project, as the transformation is also ongoing: I see it, examine it, and am exposed to it every day. Therefore, this project is open and has not yet been finished. This is perhaps a characteristic of documentary photography and photographic storytelling, as the movement of reality and its constant change prevent the topic from ending. The changes in Amman are a case in point. I see this book as a major achievement in my career, as it is my first.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
LK: The audience for documentary and artistic-literary books on cities is diverse, so this book could be of interest to a varied and wide audience, especially since it is in both Arabic and English. The audience closest to this book is the people of the city of Amman, who are directly affected by the city’s transformations. What we hope is that the questions arising from the book will reach them, and that a door for dialogue will open with the residents of Amman, become an entry point for a wide public discussion on the city.
HB: I hope that this book will connect Amman’s locals and residents to the(ir) city, and some sort of questioning will arise from this connection. There is no public discussion on Amman; there is a shyness about it. How can people who do not consider themselves to be from Amman discuss Amman? The book, in this sense, is an invitation to reconsider and redefine, to find the collective courage to break into the city and own it through discussing it.
What we are trying to do here is to tackle the people, society, identity, and the factors that are physically changing the city, such as authority, power, and control, in addition to the commodification and reproduction of the city within the criteria of the standardized “cosmopolitan” image of the “contemporary” or “modern;” an image stained with glass towers, mass consumption, superficial entertainment, and shopping malls, forcibly dragging the city (and by means of consumerist fetishist seduction) into a neoliberal “fate,” becoming huge consumer-goods outlets. In this sense, Amman’s transformations should be understood within the context of the authority that rules it and the economic-political power relations governing the world today.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
HB: I am working on a project which has been ongoing for some time and has been postponed—once again—into 2025. The project is to assemble my published and unpublished poetic texts in a book that I hope will present a new perspective on what a poetic text is, using what I call “flow,” and addressing poetry as a tool of redefinition, contemplation, and non-linear generation of multiple meanings.
LK: I am working on an open-ended, long-term documentary photographic project that tells the stories of the people of the city, entitled “Stories from the Hills of Amman.” It is an ongoing project and will produce exhibitions and other media in due time, whenever part of it is completed.
Excerpt from the book (pp. 83-85)
Amman as ‘quasi-city’: who owns public space?
Hisham Bustani
Translated by Addie Leak
The city is meant to provide its residents with breathing room and public spaces, and the residents are meant to own these spaces, from both moral and material standpoints: moral by way of being present in them, making use of them, giving their existence its principal purpose; material because the establishment, maintenance, and sustainability of these spaces rely on funds that come from the residents’ pockets in the form of various taxes and fares.
Many big cities are known for their large expanses of public space that are necessary to absorb the hustle and bustle of urban life. Interspersed among the buildings of those cities are forests, large gardens, parks, and other areas designated for public use, such as sports grounds, walking paths on river banks, and playgrounds. The Tiergarten forest, for example, takes up over five square kilometres in central Berlin. It was completely destroyed during World War II but has since been fully replanted and is now perhaps even more beautiful. London has its famous Hyde Park in the city centre, with a total area of 2.5 square kilometres. It also has hundreds of garden squares, small gardens open for public use within residential neighbourhoods. And then there’s Paris, famous for its sweeping boulevards and expansive squares designed to break the visual and psychological sharpness of dense urban architecture. And there are many other examples.
These grand public spaces exist in the heart of capitals and major cities, occupying land that holds immeasurable real-estate value. Yet they’re protected in their status as untouchable public property, there solely for the benefit of city residents. But when it comes to Amman, what has happened—and what is still happening?
The large green space in Ras al-Ain was destroyed, as was the spring itself, and turned into stone buildings and concrete spaces on the grounds of the Greater Amman Municipality, the same authority whose responsibility it was to protect them. The centre of the Fourth Circle roundabout in Jabal Amman, next to the Prime Minister’s headquarters, was enclosed by an iron fence to keep protestors out. The new Hashemite Plaza downtown is fenced in like a prison to monitor those entering or leaving it, bringing to mind Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which Egyptian authorities transformed into a maze of fenced passages with sturdy iron bars to control the movement of pedestrians and prevent assemblies. One of the first things Egyptian protesters did during the January 2011 uprising was remove these fences and bars, a clear tangible act that restored the public space, albeit temporarily.
This last example invites the question and the intimations of an answer: Is the commandeering and fencing in of public space in the city ‘urbane’ behaviour on the part of the authorities? And is the citizens’ attacking and uprooting of the tools of this commandeering, thereby restoring public space, really an act of vandalism and ‘uncivilised’ behaviour?
In quasi-cities, public space is scarce or non-existent to begin with. Where it does exist, the organisation and efforts to sustain it are, at best, lacking. In many cases, those efforts are employed in the service of influential investors or for the use of the affluent minority (e.g., the Dead Sea and Aqaba beaches and the Jabal al-Lweibdeh park, part of which was cleared for a ‘luxury’ restaurant, while what remains is closed to the public from 8 p.m.).
Quasi-cities are hostile to public spaces; public gatherings are regarded as a direct threat to the authorities, who are terrified by how these gatherings disturb the notion of ‘groups gathered in separate domains’, edging in the direction of ‘society owning the domain’. Society is dangerous and creative. It must avoid being caught in ‘incriminating circumstances’, and its spaces must be regulated with fences and police checkpoints. And at the end of all this, its members are condemned as ‘uncivilised’ and used as pawns to extract money from foreign NGOs and governments, under the guise of simply not being ‘mature enough’ for democracy!
Given the absence of sexual education, the scarcity of mixed-gender spaces, the view of personal sexual relations as falling under the guardianship of the entire society, with the governing authority at the very top, and when the first criterion for citizenship, namely equality (here, between men and women) is lacking, where do we assign blame when men behave badly? When the male citizens of a country become lechers, harassers, and murderers in the name of honour, and when some women justify and support that behaviour, placing the blame on their own gender, with even the ‘progressives’ among them questioning the virginity of murdered women before affirming their social and sexual freedom, can all this really be a matter of individual behaviour?
In the absence of public spaces, playgrounds, and parks, is it then a matter of individual behaviour when people let their children roam the streets of their neighbourhoods yelling late into the night? In the absence of public transportation and car parks, and given the selective application of the law and lack of regulation of city sectors and their uses (e.g., Al-Medina al-Munawara Street—a major road leading out of Amman—transforms into a busy street at night, clogged by street vendors and fast-food joints), can we blame it on individual behaviour when people double-park and leave their cars in no-parking zones? In the absence of early education about the importance of the environment, can we blame it on individual behaviour when people throw rubbish in the streets? When a law as important as banning smoking in public spaces is not enforced, can we blame it solely on individual behaviour when people comfortably break this and other laws, over and over again? And when the laws are broken by their supposed legislators and enforcers. When selective, intra-regional customs replace the laws that are meant to apply to everyone. When the Public Security Directorate and Ministry of the Interior, via the governorates, help form jahas to resolve tribal disputes outside the law. When elections are held on a tribal/regional/familial basis, within the one-vote law and the laws that replaced it. In these cases, can we really still blame it on individual behaviour when people act as tribes or family groups competing for material and moral spheres of influence, shooting their guns at weddings and at anyone blocking their cars in the streets, all the while commandeering the same streets for their wedding tents? When the leaders of the city treat it as plunder, or private property for themselves and their children, can we really blame individual behaviour when the rest of the population follows suit? And when citizens reclaim public spaces, albeit temporarily, and impose on them their arbitrary sovereignty, liberating them from the authorities for the purpose of social use, can we condemn their actions so unequivocally?
These questions answer themselves, confirming that ‘urbane’ behaviour is an issue of structural social production that concerns the very foundations of society. When the authorities monopolise the scope and space of societal organisation—interfering with its mechanisms in ways that separate the citizen from the practice of their citizenship, and thusremaining unchallenged as primary actors—then the responsibility runs much deeper than the small part borne by the individual.
©Hisham Bustani. Excerpted from Waking Up to My Distorted City (pp. 83 – 85) by permission from the rights holder.