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The Only Arab City Without A European Quarter

by SUMEJA TULIC

I am no stranger to the prefix pan: pan-Slavism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, and if all things go well, by the year 2050 pan-Europeanism. These concepts and the presupposed membership of my family in it were the Santa Claus and the New Year that were celebrated in my parents' house; the fine illusion of a cause and excuse for all sorts of lacks and sacrifices.

At odds with most of the pan-isms, their symbolic meaning was closes to the one of the candles in Judaism. We lit them on happy days that were hard to distinguish from the sad and hungry days when we ought to light them again. Small people do that: imagine people like them and believe that one day they would all be together crossing the Red Sea under competent leadership.

Later an older version of you notices that people are already crossing not just the Red Sea but pretty much all seas and oceans, alone. Once they have crossed to a place far from where home used to be, they are tuning to a broadcast of a prayer during Ramadan from Mecca, and they are thinking of their simple uneventful afternoon in late autumn when the sun was gentle — as if drawn with watercolors — and how it moved slowly over the mountain, the almond trees, the lemon trees, the orange sand, the stray dogs nobody loved, and a freckled noise eager to inhale all that.

When I came to Naples I was set on meeting a girl who would understand what I have just wrote, who could tell me if it ever snows in Naples and does she then draw almond trees in the snow and sign her name next to the drawing in Arabic?

The bottom line of Naples is not a camorra ditch or graveyard, it is that Naples belongs to nobody. In very narrow streets those dark black eyes own you, everything on you and in your bag, but only for seconds. Seconds it took for you to smell the detergent evaporating from shirts and undershirts and socks assembled in a cloth line above your head. Some 25 white, blue, pink, yellow and dotted flags of hello and welcome.

If that is not enough, touch the graceful angels imprinted on the crusty walls of the passage and continue on. Keep walking, nobody cares, and even if it seems they do, it is your skirt, waist and breast they would love to meet and greet.

On an unrelated note, a man’s ideal woman is the one the conquistadors met on the shore of an uncharted island — chestnut eyes, bare-chested, afraid, unable to utter a word of English, Spanish or Portuguese and thus mysterious. The sailor (better call him a sailor than the conquistador as the latter can butcher, burn and enslave her village) loves her instantly. She is perfect. She will be so easy to leave. From the same place he found her with tears in her chestnut eyes she will wave at his sailing ship.

An often-neglected streak of Islamic and Arabic tradition is traveling. The traveling is almost always a kind of ransom. Hardly ever do the roads lead to exceptional raptures or gifts. Almost always it is a surviving strategy, a refuge-seeking mission to extend life in the outskirts of Mecca, in Taif, in Medina, Ontario, New York, Paris, Palermo.

Centuries ago came Arabs to Naples with turbans smelling of sweat and flower water, carrying lemons and oranges, coveting numbers, concealing intentions. I don’t think any curious chestnut eyes met them on the shore. The wind must have blown very hard as it does on eventful days. Prayers were said and hopes set high. Centuries will pass and new young Arabs will come. Young students from Nablus, Haifa, Gaza with slick hair and tight shirts and pockets full of words like wattan (homeland), hurreya (freedom), adouw (enemy).

As the beautiful Napolitan girlfriend runs her hands over her Palestinian man’s hairy chest, she feels the spikey wire that trapped the white dove. His swaying affection would evaporate in the shabby dark room. Two things would dominate the silence – the strong perfume he wears and the skillful way he manages to look through her without it being so obvious.

At first she didn’t get it. Nights and months into their love she knew the streetlight or the pathetic moonlight creeping through the window takes him places. As she wished for solid thick clouds and electricity failure, he chanted something. Much like his protests in front of the university, or his shouting at his Arabs sitting around a table covered with newspapers where Yasser Arafat’s face is glued to Nasser’s hand by the sweet tea the Moroccans made, and the Syrians spilled over the paper. It sounds something like a lullaby that culminates in a wedding where, at some dull moment, guns will be fired.

At times when I am heartbroken and away from home, I would literally pay to hear azan or see a mosque. At best, in the frightening moments of insecurity, when I’m failing at everything, I would press against his shoulder and then say Hey! Look there. My people!  My people is a covered women with her brood and her man and his mustache and his sister that, even from the tram I was in I could tell, was loudly chewing pink gum. My people are my mosque, my cross of protection and preclusion.

I point rudely with my index finger at them, but what I actually do is frame them with my palms that are summoned by the word Amen! Following this very self-centered reasoning, I am not surprised to meet an Algerian Facebook poet at the exit of a masjid in Naples. I could see him dancing in a drunken sea resort on the Mediterranean or in a trashy Parisian bar among pale and eager patrons. I could see him ride a motorcycle up the Atlas just so he can lie near the cliff and gaze at the sun from behind his retro chic Police sunglasses. He must be chronically heartbroken here in Naples.

He said that he could show me things and make me nice food. I said thanks, but I have a meeting with the Imam. Beside, if you cook for me and show me places, eventually I’ll fail at reciprocity. And then what? You are My people. I cannot scare you by pointing at you. Also, in Naples it is all masjids without minarets. How would I distinguish God’s house from any other house?! Go away! I must talk to the Imam.

Up narrow stairs tailored after those in Amsterdam I am sure, I found the Imam. He was younger than me, and regardless of his authority, he was modest and very comfortable with not speaking too much, or at all. His working desk was a mess and he looked at me like I am a human, not a temptation. I knew straight away that he reads poems during some afternoons and maybe named his goats after the Seven Hanged Poets.

That is something I would have done, but as he tells me in classical Arabic that he studied literature in Libya and became an ”oversea imam” after the revolution, I knew he had really done it. Goat after goat — elegantly stupid and reckless, jumping and bleating — he named them after poets once showered by masters of Mecca with golden coins.

Typical of students of literature, and of shepherds as well, the imam delegated the speaking of the practicalities of the Muslim Arab life in Naples to his aide. His aide is a middle-aged man who looked like my father, and spoke like my mother — first the most dire and stressful issues, and then, if we have time, we will be thankful for the little joys that miraculously appear against all odds.

Muslim Arabs like all other immigrant communities, and pretty much every other southern Italian, are heavily struck by the economic crisis. There is a growing dependency on aid from charity organizations, a rising number of people that are becoming homeless. Most of the men roam the streets hungry during the day or sit in Piazza Garibaldi and other squares. At night they sleep at entrances of churches, somewhat wet and cold but protected. Decades after they have been in Italy, they are either buried in a mass grave or shipped back to the country of their origin. Having in mind that the transport is costly, most end up in a mass grave mourned by few, forgotten very soon. Italy has one or two Muslims cemeteries with ridiculously small capacities. I try to constrain myself from pointing how all that can be seen as a spin of Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone.

Straight down from Piazza Bellini is a place described as “a square for relaxing and socializing," a mosaic of youth, leafs, pedals, pizza, marijuana and music. Down a steep street still wet with unexpected rain I met girl’s father — the girl that must have dreamt of the almond, olive and orange trees of her father’s country. She is a dancer or an actress, I cannot tell now, but she sure exists. Her father loves her very much and she is free to do whatever she wants but go to Bellini and inhale pedals.

The English ambassador in the mid-1800s called Naples “the only Arab city without a European quarter.” This malicious allegory of the place's somewhat dysfunctional social and architectural mixture is true today, but doesn’t do justice to all other cities within Naples. For one, let's wait for the metro stations to be completed. Until then, inhale paddles and leafs and dance in Bellini even when it rains. When you get tired, and your pan-isms kick in, open the windows of your apartment and play loudly Fairuz or Marcel Khalifa. Play loud enough so your nagging neighbor shouts her complaints. And when she does, in her yelling you will hear Umm Omar from next door in Homs. I swear.    

Sumeja Tulic is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and photographer living in Sarajevo. You can find her website here and her flickr here.

Photographs by the author. 

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