//far flung//
Fall 2012
Raw and Unedited
Andrea García-Vargas
The protestors started at Al-Husseini mosque, after the Friday noon prayer. They waited for dozens of praying men to finish their salah and stand up from their ragged mats. Then, they set out.
They came in keffiyehs, hijabs, jeans. They stood on the roof of vans wearing Che Guevara shirts, chanting through megaphones. They were men, they were women. They were children carrying slogans.
I was not a protestor. I carried no slogans on a banner or A4 sheet of paper. I wore a lurid pink scarf around my head and my frizz poked out from the edges as I zipped in and out of the crowds with a Canon in video mode in my hand. I was playing the role of the intrepid video-journalist from the West, and this was my documentary—to be posted later on Facebook.
My outsider’s gaze went only so far. The people standing in front of markets and stores were not protestors. They were not embraced by the spirit—they were watchers, and they were mostly men in plainclothes, standing among the melons and the apples watching the gleaming banners in Arabic script. And they watched me in my attempt to blend in. To them I wasn’t a video-journalist. I was a woman. I was also ambiguously Arab, though my bright pink headscarf didn’t fit in with the drab grays. If I revealed myself, would I be as much a part of the problem in their eyes as King Abdullah II and his government?
I had reached the end of the street, where the procession had stopped and began to gather around the truck with the Che Guevara shirts. I stood and I filmed, slowly gliding over the policemen to my left-held hands and created a blockade. I stood apart from the chatty passersby so I could capture the chanting, the guttural Arabic emerging from hundreds of protestors into a single voice.
I was right behind a policeman who kept moving from foot to foot like a pendulum. The van roof with the Che Guevaras was intermittently blocked from my view. And then he moved his head.
And then, fire.
The van was dangling a flag. A burning flag. I didn’t know what flag it was, but it was a burning flag and that was enough: I had to get close. I don’t remember much, but I remember running to the van. I don’t remember carrying my camera in my hand, which made for some shaky footage. I remember trying to find the end to the line of police officers but the van was blocked off. I couldn’t get to it. To the flag. The Jordanian flag? Wasn’t that illegal?
I turned off my Canon. Two American boys—actual boys, barely hitting 18—stood with their cameras similarly poised to take in the scene. “I was all for it until the end. My whole opinion just flipped,” one of them said.
The other one laughed in ridicule and shrugged. “Whatever.”
I didn’t know what the first boy meant, and I didn’t stop to overthink it. My mind was in shreds over seeing a burning flag—the most forefront symbol of hatred I could think of. Hatred towards Abdullah, towards the government, towards Jordan. Hatred that would be followed by imprisonment. Just criticizing King Abdullah got you a couple nights in prison, or a visit from the police at the very least. Burning the nation’s flag—I couldn’t fathom what the punishment would be. I had a feeling that my vague, Orientalizing notion equating the Middle East with human rights abuses was prejudiced, but I knew so little at the moment about what would happen next that I didn’t know what else to think. I stood to the side, frightened, waiting to see what the policemen would do next.
Then the police line broke. The van drove away through the gap. Nobody followed it. Nobody surrounded it to pummel it or holler angry nationalist cries. The people, glistening in the sweat of Jordan’s summer, began to break, too. It was as if nothing had happened.
For a few moments, I was stunned. In my confusion, I took out my Canon and turned it on to capture a panoramic video of the dispersing crowd. Through the viewer, I saw one spot in the crowd where no one was standing. That must be where the remains of the flag were. But no one was gathered around it. People were barely looking down on it. I walked to the spot, the camera’s viewer still on my right eye. I turned my camera down to see the familiar red, white, and blue.
It’s a strange thing to see your country’s flag contorted from its normal colors into a blackened mess. It is nothing like seeing it on TV, like on CNN or Fox News. Televised flag-burning is a plane of hyper-reality, so much so that it’s almost too horrible to believe, usually accompanied by angry men in dishdashas wailing in delight as the flag shrivels. But this—this wasn’t hyper-reality. It wasn’t wailing, delighted American-haters. It was a crowd of Jordanians that had briefly shouted on the burning flag and now was leaving as though it had never happened. Nobody stomped on the flag. Several people carefully stepped over it. And I picked it up.
My makeshift hijab stopped being a disguise: Having a burnt American flag in my hand was evidence enough of my citizenship. It was in my hands, and I was suddenly a participant in this historical narrative I had been videotaping as an outsider all along. I had a slice of history in my hands, and I would never let it go. As I examined the colors bleeding into each other and traced my fingers where the staff should have been, I went from being a woman in a hijab to an American, and people began to stand and stare. But I didn’t think of it. My head felt fuzzy along the temples, and all I could do was look at my flag, my burnt flag.
And then someone shot a photo of me. The moment became eternalized. I blinked, and turned. It was a woman in a hijab, and she had captured me, the American, in a hijab. That picture would later make me the poster child for American apologia on a Jordanian “news” website (more like yellow journalism) and quote me as having “cried over her flag, but understood what her country had done wrong.” But though that picture would be misused to promote an anti-American government agenda, I would just laugh. Because what I would remember from her wouldn’t be that article. It would be when she put her camera down and said, “We disagree with America as a political idea. Not with the citizens,” and when she smiled.
I would remember smiling back at her broken English and saying, “I understand.” I would remember standing in the hot Jordanian sun as it baked the drying tar on the flag in my hands.
The crowd had now completely left. A few men stood in front of the stores, going back to tending their melons and their apples. I took my scarf off and wrapped it around the flag. I would later fold it carefully in my luggage and at customs in Washington D.C., feel my heart palpitate when I thought the customs officials might search my bags and find what could be an incriminating piece of evidence. I would hang it in my room and look on it, an artifact of the history I had been part of.
Self-consciousness came crashing down on me when I saw the lone street in front of me, with Jordanian men on the side and my bare head, but I kept my flag covered. I didn’t want people down the street, the people who may have cheered to see the flag burn, to see me with it. I wanted to keep it safe.
I tucked it under my arm and walked back up the street.
They came in keffiyehs, hijabs, jeans. They stood on the roof of vans wearing Che Guevara shirts, chanting through megaphones. They were men, they were women. They were children carrying slogans.
I was not a protestor. I carried no slogans on a banner or A4 sheet of paper. I wore a lurid pink scarf around my head and my frizz poked out from the edges as I zipped in and out of the crowds with a Canon in video mode in my hand. I was playing the role of the intrepid video-journalist from the West, and this was my documentary—to be posted later on Facebook.
My outsider’s gaze went only so far. The people standing in front of markets and stores were not protestors. They were not embraced by the spirit—they were watchers, and they were mostly men in plainclothes, standing among the melons and the apples watching the gleaming banners in Arabic script. And they watched me in my attempt to blend in. To them I wasn’t a video-journalist. I was a woman. I was also ambiguously Arab, though my bright pink headscarf didn’t fit in with the drab grays. If I revealed myself, would I be as much a part of the problem in their eyes as King Abdullah II and his government?
I had reached the end of the street, where the procession had stopped and began to gather around the truck with the Che Guevara shirts. I stood and I filmed, slowly gliding over the policemen to my left-held hands and created a blockade. I stood apart from the chatty passersby so I could capture the chanting, the guttural Arabic emerging from hundreds of protestors into a single voice.
I was right behind a policeman who kept moving from foot to foot like a pendulum. The van roof with the Che Guevaras was intermittently blocked from my view. And then he moved his head.
And then, fire.
The van was dangling a flag. A burning flag. I didn’t know what flag it was, but it was a burning flag and that was enough: I had to get close. I don’t remember much, but I remember running to the van. I don’t remember carrying my camera in my hand, which made for some shaky footage. I remember trying to find the end to the line of police officers but the van was blocked off. I couldn’t get to it. To the flag. The Jordanian flag? Wasn’t that illegal?
I turned off my Canon. Two American boys—actual boys, barely hitting 18—stood with their cameras similarly poised to take in the scene. “I was all for it until the end. My whole opinion just flipped,” one of them said.
The other one laughed in ridicule and shrugged. “Whatever.”
I didn’t know what the first boy meant, and I didn’t stop to overthink it. My mind was in shreds over seeing a burning flag—the most forefront symbol of hatred I could think of. Hatred towards Abdullah, towards the government, towards Jordan. Hatred that would be followed by imprisonment. Just criticizing King Abdullah got you a couple nights in prison, or a visit from the police at the very least. Burning the nation’s flag—I couldn’t fathom what the punishment would be. I had a feeling that my vague, Orientalizing notion equating the Middle East with human rights abuses was prejudiced, but I knew so little at the moment about what would happen next that I didn’t know what else to think. I stood to the side, frightened, waiting to see what the policemen would do next.
Then the police line broke. The van drove away through the gap. Nobody followed it. Nobody surrounded it to pummel it or holler angry nationalist cries. The people, glistening in the sweat of Jordan’s summer, began to break, too. It was as if nothing had happened.
For a few moments, I was stunned. In my confusion, I took out my Canon and turned it on to capture a panoramic video of the dispersing crowd. Through the viewer, I saw one spot in the crowd where no one was standing. That must be where the remains of the flag were. But no one was gathered around it. People were barely looking down on it. I walked to the spot, the camera’s viewer still on my right eye. I turned my camera down to see the familiar red, white, and blue.
It’s a strange thing to see your country’s flag contorted from its normal colors into a blackened mess. It is nothing like seeing it on TV, like on CNN or Fox News. Televised flag-burning is a plane of hyper-reality, so much so that it’s almost too horrible to believe, usually accompanied by angry men in dishdashas wailing in delight as the flag shrivels. But this—this wasn’t hyper-reality. It wasn’t wailing, delighted American-haters. It was a crowd of Jordanians that had briefly shouted on the burning flag and now was leaving as though it had never happened. Nobody stomped on the flag. Several people carefully stepped over it. And I picked it up.
My makeshift hijab stopped being a disguise: Having a burnt American flag in my hand was evidence enough of my citizenship. It was in my hands, and I was suddenly a participant in this historical narrative I had been videotaping as an outsider all along. I had a slice of history in my hands, and I would never let it go. As I examined the colors bleeding into each other and traced my fingers where the staff should have been, I went from being a woman in a hijab to an American, and people began to stand and stare. But I didn’t think of it. My head felt fuzzy along the temples, and all I could do was look at my flag, my burnt flag.
And then someone shot a photo of me. The moment became eternalized. I blinked, and turned. It was a woman in a hijab, and she had captured me, the American, in a hijab. That picture would later make me the poster child for American apologia on a Jordanian “news” website (more like yellow journalism) and quote me as having “cried over her flag, but understood what her country had done wrong.” But though that picture would be misused to promote an anti-American government agenda, I would just laugh. Because what I would remember from her wouldn’t be that article. It would be when she put her camera down and said, “We disagree with America as a political idea. Not with the citizens,” and when she smiled.
I would remember smiling back at her broken English and saying, “I understand.” I would remember standing in the hot Jordanian sun as it baked the drying tar on the flag in my hands.
The crowd had now completely left. A few men stood in front of the stores, going back to tending their melons and their apples. I took my scarf off and wrapped it around the flag. I would later fold it carefully in my luggage and at customs in Washington D.C., feel my heart palpitate when I thought the customs officials might search my bags and find what could be an incriminating piece of evidence. I would hang it in my room and look on it, an artifact of the history I had been part of.
Self-consciousness came crashing down on me when I saw the lone street in front of me, with Jordanian men on the side and my bare head, but I kept my flag covered. I didn’t want people down the street, the people who may have cheered to see the flag burn, to see me with it. I wanted to keep it safe.
I tucked it under my arm and walked back up the street.