Journeys

The great outdoors – camping days

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wond’rous glory of the everlasting stars.
Clancy of the Overflow, AB (Banjo) Paterson

Sleeping under the stars, close to nature and exposed to the elements has a timeless allure, whether under canvas or on a bedroll or in a swag. It’s almost atavistic – a harking back to simpler and indeed, primeval days, a retreat albeit temporary from the workaday world and the ties that bind us to it, and a genuine pleasure of the open road.

For those with a drop of vagabond blood in their veins, and the echoes of a gypsy soul, it’s a sure cure for those “summertime blues”!

The Travelling People

Countries where the nomadic life has long been consigned to history and where the sedentary lifestyle is regarded as the civilised norm, individuals and authorities have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a rite of passage, a route to self-improvement. But whilst some camp for leisure and pleasure, for many, it is a economic and social necessity that has often been condemned as uncivilised, unsanitary, indigent, and even criminal – and it has also served as a proxy for disputes about race, class, discrimination and rootlessness.

For centuries, sleeping outside has been embraced or condemned, depending on who’s doing it. A recent book on the history of camping in the US explores what, exactly, camping is, and how the pursuit intersects with protest culture, homelessness, and identity. A excellent review in The New Yorker is republished below.

In some countries that are seeking to modernise rapidly, heavy-handed authorities have endeavoured to curtail the wandering life by regulation and resettlement, at times, by brute force. Recall the sad conclusion to James A Michener’s novel Caravans, set in Afghanistan, and the its movie adaptation, and also British historian Vincent Cronin’s The Last Migration (1957), a  account of the Pahlavi shah’s regime’s repression of the Falqani nomads in the name of “progress”. I can’t recommend it enough. It is tragic and beautiful, and authentic in every finely drawn detail, like a Persian miniature on ivory. Closer to our western consciousness and consciences, is the savage repression and dispossession of the Native American and Australian First Nations. It is historically and culturally ironic that a loop-hole in Australian law decreed that camping was permitted on the lawns of Old Parliament House in Canberra, the Australian capital provided no more than twenty tents were erected. So it was that on Australia Day, 26th January 1972, indigenous activists established an Aboriginal Tent Embassy to protest against the the Australian government’s refusal to recognize indigenous land rights. It is there to this day, drawing national attention to unresolved indigenous issues. Read about the Aboriginal Tent Embassy HERE 

The early light is breaking
The morning sun is waiting in the sky
And I think I’m gonna break away
And follow where the birds of freedom fly
Caravans, Mike Batt

Aboriginal Tent Embassy 26th January 1972

The big backyard

As a nipper in Birmingham back in the late fifties, we had a very large backyard, with a lawn, apple and pear trees and a huge veggie garden. And one of our pleasures during the few warm months of school summer holidays was to erect a tent on that lawn. My brothers and I would spend our days outdoors, with a picnic and an old wind-up phonogram record player, until ordered in at sundown. We’d always wanted to spend the night there but our folks wouldn’t let us. We never understand why – we were perfectly safe in our own garden, and in our suburban backyard, there were none of the wild things we encounter in the wild. Looking back, I surmised that it had a lot to do with social norms. The folks grew up in rural Ireland, and probably associated camping out with the peregrinating ‘travellers’ who were regarded very much as unsightly and shady – a prejudice that persevered into their new lives in Birmingham. Back then, we had other names for them, for which I’ve been called to order on many a Facebook post.

In those days, “the travellers” would camp with their caravans and lorries on the “waste land” (yes, that what we called it, for reasons that were never explained – there was a lot that was not explained back the but was just taken for granted) that used to be homes and factories before the Luftwaffe destroyed them over ten years before. They had Irish accents, and this created an affinity with these itinerant folk as our parents and relatives were Irish immigrants, and we lived in an Irish world of Irish history, politics and music – as a young teen, I loved Ewan MacColl’s beautiful song Freeborn Man of the Travelling People, and it was the very first folk song I ever sang in public – in a billet in Southall during an Easter CND march.

As teens, we joined the Boy Scouts – where camping was deemed not only acceptable when under the auspices of the institution, but also, character building, and a means to learning resilience, self-reliance, and of acquiring valuable Baden-Powell bushcraft skills. To my folks, this gave camping the tick of respectability. The annual summer camp became a permanent fixture of my early adolescence, with its cooking over fires, washing in cold country streams, and singing jolly scouting songs around a roaring fire of a summer evening (I still remember them, and snatches often pop into my memory unannounced). We’d see parts of our land that few of us had the means to travel to, and experience a rural England that city folk had long lost touch with. On overnight hikes we’d tote our backpacks along country lanes and byways, compass and ordinance survey map in hand, and set up a flimsy tent in an open field when the sun went down. The following hazy pictures were taken at a combined South Birmingham troop scout camp in Echternach, Luxembourg, on the German border. We were an eclectic crew – it even included a trio of Sea Scouts (incongruous as Birmingham was a long way from the sea). Of its time – nowadays, such a group shot would be so much more cosmopolitan. That’s me, arms folded.

Echternach Scout Camp, August 1963

Echternach Scout Camp, August 1963

As I grew to manhood – and outgrew scouting, I remained accustomed to sleeping out. At music festivals in rural England in the late sixties, it was a given that we would bed down on site come all weather – as the lovely pictures of the retro-medieval fayres provided by my good friend Charles Tyler show (Charles in the lad with the guitar in the featured photograph). I would often sleep on the side of the road when hitchhiking throughout the land. I’ve slept under the stars in England and Scotland, in Greece and Yugoslavia, Syria and Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.

I’ve awoken covered in snow near the Culloden battlefield outside Inverness; been moved on by Yugoslav police when I’d mistakenly turned in for the night next to a military base outside Niš; settled down in a shabby park by the Sea of Galilee, wary of scorpions; slept on a precarious ledge high above the rose city of Petra in Jordan; bedded down in the desert on the border between Iran and Afghanistan; and battled mosquitoes on the banks of the Hawkesbury River. In latter years, on safari in Tanzania, we awoke in the night in our tent by the Rufiji river to see a big eye staring at us through the flimsy window as an old tusker proceeded to do his business right beside our tent; and sat around a fire of acacia sticks in a makeshift bush camp on the Serengeti savanna.

Just the other day, I was browsing through my travel diary for 26th August 1971 and came upon the description of my nighttime arrival in the outskirts of Amman, Jordan, on my way to Petra and Aqaba – a night I had long forgotten: “In my lostness, I came upon a policeman. And soon, three traffic cops were crashing the ash and buying me tea and bread. At last, they took me to a park, where King Hussein had a palace,  and bade me sleep – under their protection. Come morning, I was gently awoken by the coppers who bought me breakfast and commandeered a taxi to take me into the town centre (where) again, police assisted me by asking a taxi driver to take me to the Aqaba road”. We took risks, we travellers of “the Overland” back in the day, and many times we were blessed with the charity and caring of our fellow humans.

My hitching days are now long gone, and so is the urge to set up camp in the great outdoors – apart from that African journey, when there was little alternative. And yet, I still love the great outdoors and being close to nature. Living off-grid on a rural property far from the madding crowd and surrounded by forest, with birdsong by day and frog song by night, I reckon I have have the best of both worlds.

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

Read also in In That Howling Infinite, Song of the Road (1) – my hitchhiking days, and Song of the Road (2) – The Accidental Traveller

Barsham Faire 1973

Meagan Fair, Pembrokeshire, 1975

The Confounding Politics of Camping in America

For centuries, sleeping outside has been embraced or condemned, depending on who’s doing it. A recent book by the historian Phoebe S. K. Young explores what, exactly, camping is, and how the pursuit intersects with protest culture, homelessness, and identity.

Dan Piepenbring,  The New Yorker April 27, 2022

An illustrated scene of many people camping

Illustration by Sally Deng 

Just a drop would do, though. Early campers didn’t wish to be mistaken for actual vagabonds, and the line between the two was easily smudged. In 1884, Samuel June Barrows, an outdoors enthusiast and, later, a one-term congressman, warned that a traveller carrying a “motley array of bedding, boxes, bags, and bundles” might arouse “suspicions of vagrancy”; to distinguish oneself from the riffraff, it was best to pack a “de luxe” tent and fashionable attire. Barrows’s anxiety underscored the contradictions of recreational camping, which he described as “a luxurious state of privation.” One of its luxuries was that it was temporary. In the name of leisure, well-heeled campers sought out the same conditions that, in other contexts, they condemned as uncivilized, unsanitary, or criminal.

In “Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement” (Oxford University Press), the historian Phoebe S. K. Young finds that Americans have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a means of survival, a rite of passage for the nuclear family, a route to self-improvement, and a form of First Amendment expression. In Young’s account, it becomes a proxy for disputes about race, class, and rootlessness—all the schisms in the American experiment.

As Barrows slept beneath the stars, countless workers were forced to do the same. In the eighteen-seventies, a boom-and-bust economy and a burgeoning network of railroads compelled laborers to crisscross the nation, following the cycles of the market. The “tramp problem” vexed those of means. Allan Pinkerton, the founder of the ruthless, union-busting Pinkerton National Detective Agency, blamed the Civil War for giving men a taste of “the lazy habits of camp-life.” In 1878’s “Strikers, Communists, Tramps and Detectives,” Pinkerton detailed the “grotesque company” tramps kept by moonlight, writing that debauchees would doze “in a stupid sodden way that told of brutish instincts and experiences.” Scarier than the encampments was the fear that some Americans might find them appealing, retreating from society to enjoy “the genuine pleasure of the road.”

The travel industry soon recognized those pleasures by making tramping an aesthetic, something that campers could slip into and shuck off as they pleased. A writer for Outing, a magazine aimed at moneyed outdoorsmen, preferred to “rough it in the most approved ‘tramp’ style—to abjure boiled shirts and feather beds and dainty food, and even good grammar.” As Young points out, the quotation marks around “tramp” raised a barricade between the imitation and the original. Real tramps led a precarious existence, subject to arrest, surveillance, poverty, and ostracism. When élite campers wore their costume, they shrugged at a world in which, as Pinkerton wrote, “a man may be eminent to-day and tomorrow a tramp.”

The double standard was especially glaring in Native communities. White Americans, including Barrows, saw tribal settlements as the epitome of savagery. The U.S. Office of Indian Affairs hoped that Native populations would disavow their “barbarous life” and take up “a distaste for the camp-fire.” Such goals were presented as matters of public health, but the message diverged sharply depending on the audience. Although Native groups “learned that the only way to prevent consumption was to give up camp life,” Young writes, “recreational campers read that exposure to fresh air and sunlight” could cure the illness. The government forced Native children to attend boarding school and subjected adults to dehumanizing reëducation projects. Meanwhile, Outing, as it had with tramps, presented Indianness as an identity to be adopted and discarded on a camper’s whim. One contributor confessed that summer gave him “an irresistible desire” to “live the life of a savage in all of its most primitive simplicity.”

In the early twentieth century, the automobile allowed legions of new drivers to flock to the countryside. Camping shed some of its élitist pretensions, but its popularity exposed new rifts. Eager for traffic, many towns constructed no-frills auto camps at their outskirts, where entry was often free, at least until the camps attracted hordes of families and their Model Ts. These “tin-can” tourists, as Sunset magazine called them, ate canned food heated on the engine—or, more boldly, by a camp stove connected to the exhaust pipe. Camps couldn’t keep such people away; now that the backcountry, or even the frontcountry, was within reach, Americans intended to pitch their tents wherever they could. From 1910 to 1920, national parks and monuments saw a fivefold increase in visitors, reaching a million a year; by 1930, that figure had jumped to more than three million. The deluge was unmanageable. In addition to arresting vistas and pristine forests, campers expected generous amenities—firewood, electric lights, running water, garbage collection—and they were not in the habit of leaving nature as they found it. California’s redwoods, in particular, were so frequently, heedlessly beheld that their roots began to choke underfoot.

To save the trees, Emilio Meinecke, a plant pathologist for the U.S. Forest Service, conceived a template still in use today: a one-way loop road with short “garage-spurs,” each of which functioned as parking for a designated campsite. By presenting campers with private, manicured spaces, Meinecke hoped to spare the surrounding plant life, reminding visitors that they were “guests of the nation.” Intentionally or not, his campsites had the flavor of the suburbs—the land, once for farming, was now to be savored as a consumer, and every family had its plot. The New Deal funded the “Meineckizing” of almost ninety thousand acres of federal campgrounds, about half of which were new, signalling the rise of what Young calls “the campers’ republic.” “Mixing leisure with nature,” she writes, “became a potent way for citizens to demonstrate national belonging.”

But all was not well in the republic. The Great Depression had pushed record numbers of Americans into homelessness: by one estimate, during one day in the spring of 1933, a million and a half people were sleeping outside or in public shelters, and the actual number was likely higher. Because camping was so popular, budget-minded vacationers were sometimes cheek by jowl with the down-and-out. Who could say which was which? Manufacturers of camping trailers went out of their way to disclaim the use of their products as “a permanent address.” Others argued that campgrounds were too affordable or unsupervised. In 1940, J. Edgar Hoover, never one for understatement, alleged that roadside tourist camps had become “dens of vice and corruption” for “gangs of desperados.” Even Meinecke, for all his talk of hospitality, did not look kindly on extended stays at national parks. In an internal report, he complained that some visitors, “evidently camped for a long time,” had given one of his campsites a “ ‘used,’ second-hand look,” spoiling it for “decent people who are not slum-minded.”

If the U.S. has dithered about the basics of camping—who can do it, where, and for how long—it’s been outright bewildered by camping as political speech. Could anyone have a message so urgent that it can be delivered only by sleeping outdoors? The answer is yes, as thousands of protesters have made clear, but the government has seldom taken them at their word, instead casting them as devious freeloaders or closet indigents. Occupy Wall Street, which famously enjoined its participants to bring tents, honed an approach popularized after the Civil War, when the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans’ group, camped near the Washington Monument to raise awareness of their sacrifices. In 1932, the Bonus Army—thousands of out-of-work veterans seeking their service bonuses—followed suit, encamping in plain view of the Capitol. For weeks, the public debated whether the soldiers were heroes or hobos. President Herbert Hoover, deciding on the latter, ordered the clearing of the camps, resulting in a fiery conflict that claimed at least one life.

But a tent makes a forceful statement: someone is here, and that someone intends to stay. When Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference wanted to show Washington the true toll of poverty, they decided that camping was the only suitable action. The Poor People’s Campaign brought more than two thousand people to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in May, 1968, a month after King’s assassination. Known as Resurrection City, the encampment lasted for six weeks, drawing support and ire. A concerned citizen wrote to President Lyndon B. Johnson that “a hoard [sic] of locusts” was abusing “hallowed ground.” Calvin Trillin, writing for this magazine, noted the irony: the poor had intended to show America that they were “sick, dirty, disorganized, and powerless—and they are criticized daily for being sick, dirty, disorganized, and powerless.” By June 24th, the camp had dwindled to five hundred, and police fired tear gas to expel those remaining. A demonstration about homelessness, it seemed, was no different than homelessness itself.

Just three years later, Vietnam Veterans Against the War began planning to camp near the Capitol, and the Nixon Administration, fearing a repeat of Resurrection City, refused to give them a permit. The V.V.A.W. requested a stay on the ban, and the case went to court. Determining the legality of protest encampments, Young writes, “required finding an elusive balance between Constitutional freedoms and public safety.” The N.P.S. would allow only a “simulated” camp on federal grounds: no fires, no tents. John Kerry, who argued for the V.V.A.W., maintained that a real campsite was the only way to “tell our story to the people of this country.” The judge hearing the case, meanwhile, felt that to camp was essentially to sleep and was an act that couldn’t “express a single idea”—and that couldn’t claim First Amendment protection. He upheld the camping ban; the Court of Appeals reversed it; the Supreme Court reinstated it. The V.V.A.W. decided to camp anyway, and, not wanting a public-relations disaster, Nixon let them be. The Washington Post quoted a Park Police officer who, looking over a National Mall clotted with sleeping bags, waxed philosophical: “What’s the definition of camping? You tell me. I don’t know.”

The ensuing decades did little to answer that question. By 2012, Congress was holding hearings on the subject, in which Trey Gowdy, a House member from South Carolina, grilled Jonathan Jarvis, the director of the N.P.S at the time. “What is the definition of camping?” Gowdy demanded. Occupy D.C. had been staying in McPherson Square, in downtown Washington, for months, and Jarvis had been reluctant to say that the protesters were camping—their actions were a means to an end, not the end itself, which was reason enough to avoid enforcing the N.P.S. ban. Gowdy seemed to understand the Occupiers as recreational campers in disguise; their politics were a cover story for a good time, and taxpayers were footing the bill. But the Occupiers emphasized that they weren’t camping at all. (“WE ARE NOT CAMPING,” signs on their tents read.) Campers slept outside for the joy of it; Occupiers wanted “a redress of grievances.” Gowdy couldn’t compute how people camping “for fun” were permitted only in certain areas, while those “pitching a camp in protest of fun” were welcomed by the National Park Service. Without a clear distinction between camping and not-camping—the distinction that generations of Americans had tried and failed to make—he felt that “the fabric of this republic” was “going to unravel.”

Song of the Road (2) – The Accidental Traveller

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

In a highway service station
Over the month of June
Was a photograph of the earth
Taken coming back from the moon
And you couldn’t see a city
On that marbled bowling ball
Or a forest or a highway
Or me here least of all
You couldn’t see these cold water restrooms
Or this baggage overload
Westbound and rolling taking refuge in the roads
From Joni Mitchell’s Hejira

When the Beatles and their partners, with Donovan and Mia Farrow in tow, travelled to India to sit at the well-kissed feet of the Maharishi, they would’ve travelled by BOAC jetliner. But hundreds if not thousands of young people from Europe and North America were already making their own own way, by boats, trains, trucks and automobiles, motorbikes and bicycles, and in extremis, shank’s pony, some ten thousand kilometres and more  to the end of the line, be this Kathmandu, Kolkata (where I ended up), South East Asia (Tim Page, a recently departed friend, ended up there as a war photographer in America’s “crazy Asian war) or Australia (that’s where my uni pals washed up – see below). Other adventurers set out in the opposite direction from conservative Australia and New Zealand-Aotearoa heading for Britain, the “old country” and a wider world. The numbers would swell during the seventies and the “overland” as it was then called became the well-travelled “Hippie Trail” – until the Iranian Revolution and the Afghan wars effectively blocked it to all but a resolute and crazy-brave few.

The Beatles in India

I’d never intended to hit the hippie trail back in the day. In the northern summer of 1971, I didn’t even know it existed.

I’d just finished my final exams, graduating with a good degree, but after three exciting and formative years, it was as if everything had suddenly ground to a halt. Uni was over; a romantic relationship was on the rocks; I was footloose and free, floating and feeling the urge to escape elsewhere, somewhere, anywhere. I’d no idea at all what I would do next, other than an inchoate plan to undertake post-graduate study – guided by my tutor and mentor exiled Hungarian academic Tibor Szamuely, my academic interest was Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but that was to be down the track.

When the finals results came out, I spent the evening at the student union with friends, unwinding and getting pissed; and the very next day, I walked into the Student Travel office and booked a one-way air ticket to Athens (only my second time on an aeroplane), passage by steamer from Piraeus, Athen’s port, to Alexandria, Egytpt, via Limassol, Cyprus, and back from Egypt to Piraeus and thence to Tel Aviv, Israel, with no bookings for onward travel.

Seized by the idea of visiting the two principal antagonists of the almost recent Six Day War, I’d a naive and uninformed notion to view both sides of the Arab-Israeli puzzle (and we’re no nearer a solution today, and I’ve spent half a century since watching and waiting – but that is another story). Within a few weeks, I’d bought a second-hand rucksack and sleeping bag, converted my savings to traveler’s cheques – there were still currency restrictions in the UK on how much cash you could take out of the country – packed a few things, and in the words of Cat Stevens, I was “on the road to find out”.

That road took me through the Middle East, and on and on, until I reached Kolkata in Bengal. What was planned as but a two month holiday to “clear my mind out”, to quote that Cat song again, extended to over six months as the appetite grew with the eating.

I traveled through lands of which I knew very little, picking up fragments of history and heritage, parables and politics as eastwards I roamed, through the lands of antiquity and of empire: Greece and Cyprus; Egypt and Israel; the Levant (old French for the lands of the rising sun – Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan); Iraq before Saddam, and Iran under the Shah; Pakistan and India, who went to war with each other as I crossed their frontiers (a story for another time); and then back to Britain by way of Turkey and the fabled Pudding Shop.

I stood beside the great rivers of ancient stories – the Nile and the Jordan, the Orontes and the Yarmouk, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and the Ganges. I traveled though deserts and mountains, the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. I climbed through the Kyber Pass, immortalised by imperial endeavour and hubris, and the valley of Kashmir, a betrayed and battered paradise. I crossed Lake Van, in the shadow of Mount Ararat, and the Bosphorus, from into Europe. I stood atop ancient stones in Memphis and Masada, Baalbek and Babylon, Jalalabad and Jerusalem.

On my return, my plan to specialize in Soviet Studies evaporated as I resolved to learn more about these lands, their peoples, and their histories, and this I did. The Middle East has long-since captivated and colonized much of my intellectual life, imbuing it with a passion that has found expression in my persona, my politics, my prose, my poetry, and my songs.

See: East – an anthology and Song of the Road (1)  – my hitchhiking days

Broken statues, empty tombs.
Ghosts of commoners and kings
Walk the walls and catacombs,
The castles and the shrines,
Marking lives and story lines,
Lie the ruins and the bones,
The ruins and the bones,
Ruins and bones.

Through the desert to the beyond … 

I was at the end of the beginning. Having travelled through Egypt and Israel, I’d decided, for many reasons, that I wasn’t ready to return to England as planned, and recalling the advice of a fellow traveler I’d met in Cairo, I resolved to head east …

In early 1972, I wrote in an empty1962 diary: “Friday 20th August 1971, a fateful day indeed, when manifold and manifest destinies unfolded, when plans were forgotten and begotten, when the past was shelved and the future postponed. To the desert. Through the desert. To the beyond. To see. To decide. To move forever onwards with no direction home. With no grip of time to defeat me or dictate to me …”

Less prosaically, my actual travel diary recorded on that day:

“Arriving in Nicosia from Tel Aviv at 15.15 after a neglectful and body-shaking El Al flight, I headed straight into town from.an almost deserted airport. How much Anglo, how much Greek, how empty. Hot and boring in my mobile mood. Bought a ticket to Beirut and headed straight out again on the six o’clock Air Liban Boeing 707. A highly hospitable fifty five minute flight and by seven o’clock I was passing through Lebanese customs … “

The following day, I wrote:

Saturday, 21st August 1971, Beirut
“Now for a calculation space … I have £55 in travelers’ cheques and £25 in cash. Eighty quid in all. How far will that go? Syria? Iraq? Jordan? Afghanistan, Iran? Then home? Visas, maybe five quid? Amman to Baghdad, four? Damascus Amman Two? Amman to Baghdad, Teheran, Kabul 10 quid? That’s £21 all up. Kabul to Istanbul, £13, so £34 in all. £3 max in each for contingencies? £15 or £49. Leaving about 30 quid by Istanbul. Cutting Jordan, could save four. India? There is time, but little money … Even if the three quid were cut and Jordan too, that would leave £19 from Kabul to Delhi – but I must eat, I must eat somewhere – hence, no India…this time … “

But the appetite grew with the eating and the road led on and on …

Life on the road …

Traveling was sooo different back then in the days before ubiquitous air travel, the Internet and mobile phones. On the road, our destinations were set, but these were fluid in their timeline and attainment. Much of our information came by word of mouth from other travellers on the road. You’d head to places other people had recommended, without having seen pictures and read descriptions on the internet. You couldn’t book a hotel room in advance so we often never knew where we’d sleep. You’d find a bed for the night once we’d arrived in a city, town or village or if you were in the information loop, you’d rock up at well-frequented hostelries like Amir Kabir in central Teheran, Mrs Dunkeley’s Guest House in the heart of New Delhi, and the famed houseboats on Dal Lake in Kashmir. Often, you slept on floors, in railway station waiting rooms, in constant fear of robbery, or beneath the stars. You’d spend long hours waiting in the post office to place a call home, and sometimes the operator didn’t know where that was. Letters would take an age to reach their destination. I wrote letters to England from Amir Kabir, and picked up the replies on my return journey months later. You’d work out how to deal with banks and money changers to convert travelers cheques to the local currency – and  keep a close count of every cent because these were limited, and you were constantly worried about being ripped off.

Hotel Amir Kabir, Teheran

Like many on the road, I travelled on the cheap, crowded onto local buses, struggling to grab a third class seat on packed trains, eating street food. watched every dinar and dollar, rial and rupee. To supplement my diminishing funds, I washed dishes – and sold blood twice, to the Red Crescent in Jerusalem’s Old City (risky) and In New Delhi (in hindsight, potentially suicidal).

I’d only intended to be out of the country for about a month, but had cleaned out my bank account. I’d worked on building sites in Birmingham during the summer breaks from University, and had earned enough to keep me in books and records and other “luxuries” and also for travel. And I got to India and back to Istanbul before I ran out of cash and had to get my folks to wire me enough for a ticket home. My university pals who took The Overland a year later washed up in Darwin stoney broke and had to work their way all the way south to Bondi Beach, where they’d resolved to rent a flat overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Of the five who roved out, three returned to England, but two remained, establishing careers, marrying “sheilas” and raising children and grandchildren – by happy circumstance, I too settled in Australia six years later, and John (RIP) and Christian became my oldest friends in Australia.

Most of us travelled without cameras and so relied on travel diaries and memories. I had a dinky old Kodak and couldn’t afford a lot of film – I sold some for extra cash somewhere along the way – so I had had just a few pictures on a couple of rolls. And I had to wait until my return to England to take them to Boots Chemist for processing. And looking back, perhaps it was easier and also most adventurous in those days to be present, to live in the moment, and to be surprised over things you hadn’t seen before, not even in books and photographs. So many everyday things are now very practical with ATMs and mobile phones and travel advisories to hand, whilst our mobile phones and tablets absorb so much of our attention. In some ways these take away much of the vicarious risks and also, magic. I’m sure glad to have experienced travelling in the old-fashioned way.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
Walking Song, JRR Tolkien

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

My road in pictures

The brown fedora, Giza 1971

By the rivers of Babylon, August 1971

Srinegar, October 1971

Luxor, Egypt 1971

Me and the gang, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 1971

Layers, Damascus 2009

Salah ad Din al Ayubi, Damascus 2009

Sun al Hamadiyya, Damascus 2006

Bakdash ice cream parlour, Damascus 2009

Cruising the Golden Horn, Istanbul 2014

The Sulaymaniya Mosque, Istanbul 2014

Jerusalem the Golden

Bondi or Bust

The morning after the night before …
In late summer 1972 we housemates threw an all-night farewell party before going our separate ways. Christian, Brendan, John, Mike and Eric embarked on the hippie trail across Asia and ended up in God’s Own Country. Having recently returned from that same odyssey, I remained in London, but destiny saw me washed up DownUnder five years later. The first picture portrays the laid-back lethargy of that morning in East Finchley. Chris is in the shot so Brendan must’ve taken the photograph. The second is taken when we got it all together for a more formal tableau with Chris behind the camera.


Shortly thereafter, the five pioneers set off for Dover and the East. Many years later, Christian revealed these pictures from their journey. The first is of John and Chris soon after landing in northern Australia. The others are pictures of Chris’ tote bag. He still has it.

When an old cricketer leaves the crease,

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

When the day is done and the ball has spun in the umpire’s pocket away, and all remains in the groundsman’s pains for the rest of the time and a day. There’ll be one mad dog and his master, pushing for four with the spin, on a dusty pitch with two pounds six of willow wood in the sun.

It was a magical Sunday afternoon during an English Indian Summer in September 2008, an afternoon that evokes memories of long gone childhood and adolescence. I was England on my tod to surprise my mother on her 80th Birthday, and passing through London, I was staying with one of my oldest friends and his family in Muswell Hill. He asked me if I’d like to pop down with him to the local cricket club to down a few ales and watch a game.

Now, in all of my adult life, I have never been into spectator sports, and I haven’t watched a cricket match for over half a century. But I was enjoying the company and the craic, and thought “well, why not?” So there we were, sitting in the little members stand, drinking beer and calling out “well bowled!” and “well played, sir!” like a pair of old die-hards. In addition to his many other talents, Peter was an avid and talented amateur cricketer, and the game was his passion – he once considered a professional career and in retirement and was part of a peregrinating team of amateur players who would criss-cross the world giving kit and coaching to young people who lacked the skill and wherewithal to play. The visited some thirty countries in their cricketing odyssey.

Peter Setterington passed away in his sleep on Wednesday 23rd March. He was almost seventy five. We’d been firm friends for five decades. It’s 4am the following Sunday and I’m sitting here writing this eulogy in a hotel room on the fifty fifth floor overlooking Sydney’s Darling Harbour and listening to Roy Harper’s tribute to the game that is played in heaven. It’s cold and rainy outside and this echoes the emptiness I am feeling inside.

‘Twas in another lifetime

When the moment comes and the gathering stands, and the clock turns back to reflect on the years of grace as those footsteps trace for the last time out of the act. Well this way of life’s recollection, the hallowed strip in the haze, the fabled men and the noonday sun are much more than just yarns of their days.

1972. I was house sharing with former uni pals in London’s East Finchley. One of my friends worked for a market research company located on the top floor of an ornate Georgian building in Trafalgar Square. It’s still there – it’s the one with the little cupola on top. He talked about this very friendly, garrulous, and ambitious bloke who’d just joined the team. Not long afterwards a girl who also worked there threw a party in Romford, Essex and invited Chris and us flat mates. And so one Saturday evening in spring, we all headed over there.

The party is now a blur. I was introduced to Peter for the first time, but then proceeded to get blind drunk. I passed out on the bathroom floor and woke up in a flat near Hampstead Heath with the sun streaming through the windows. A kindly lass had volunteered to put me up for the night and Peter, who lived in close by in Swiss Cottage at the time, had driven us there. I think I was fully clothed. He rang me up a few days later to ask how I was, and we became fast friends.

His helping me out at that party when we were total strangers was an early display of the decency and generosity of spirit that he showed to me and to others on many subsequent occasions. When a mutual friend got himself into dire straits and seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth, Peter made every effort to track him down until the trail went cold in Thailand. He was like that.

Later that year, my friends hit the Hippie Trail, ending up in Australia. I moved to a bedsit in Finsbury Park and commenced my Middle East studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies. A year later, I moved in with two gay friends who had a big house in Highgate. I cleaned the place and lived there for free in a top floor flat. They would introduce me to friends as “the only queer in the house”. Peter would often drop in of an evening in an old red Post Office van and we’d pop over to Jack Straw’s Castle by Hampstead Heath for a drink. He ran a mobile disco on the side at the time, and the van was the “band bus”.

During my London days, we’d visit each other and he’d have great parties. Peter really knew how to enjoy life and to help others to do so to. In March 1974, he threw one for me at his Swiss Cottage home to celebrate my 25th birthday, to which I invited all my London friends. I recall walking home to Highgate across the Heath in the early morning mist.

I’d stay weekends now and then with Peter’s folks in Oxford – Spring and summertime walks in bucolic gardens, punts on the River Cherwell and Pyms on the back porch. So quintessentially English. If I recall rightly, his father was a teacher at the university, well read and very erudite. His mother, whom Freddie has met whilst he was on military service, was a charming and beautiful Burmese lady who treated me like part of the the delightful and happy family.

In 1978, my wife and I moved to Australia. But when I returned to the old country, I’d stay with Peter and Jenny, first in Finsbury Park, and later in Muswell Hill near the Alexandra Palace. His home was our home, and as the years rolled by, Adèle, my second wife, and I watched Peter and Jenny’s sons grow from childhood to youth to family men.

Over time, Peter rose higher and higher in the marketing world, eventually becoming a senior executive for Saatchi and Saatchi – until he rationalized himself out of a job sometime in the nineties. I recall once lending him book called Driving The Pigs To Market, a take-down of the marketing industry. It may still be somewhere on his crowded bookshelf , and though I’ve stayed at his place many many times over the years, and I’ve searched, but could never find it.

On the surface, we seemed an odd couple, Peter and I – him with him marketing shtick and business acumen, and me with my Middle East Studies and morning music and poetry, and later, as a visiting Aussie. But in reality, he was much, much more than his marketing persona. He was a Renaissance man whose interests extended far beyond his day job – he was well read and loved music and an avid fisherman, a hedonist and wine buff, and above all, a consummate family man.

We had clicked immediately, and whenever we reunited, he’d collect Adèle and I up from the tube station, and we’d just pickup from where we’d last left off, chatting away through the night about life, the universe and everything, and downing gallons of French wine.

A big man with an unquenchable zest for life, he was a force of nature. With his cheeky grin, loud laugh and pukka accent, Peter was and is so much a part of my London life – and London will never be the same without him.

Yours was a life well lived, old chum, and yes, “very well played, Sir!”

Fare thee well …

When an old cricketer leaves the crease, you never know whether he’s gone. If sometimes you’re catching a fleeting glimpse of a twelfth man at silly Mid-on. And it could be Geoff and it could be John with a new ball sting in his tail. And it could be me and it could be thee and it could be the sting in the ale, the sting in the ale.

For more about London in In That Howling Infinite, see: Back in the Day – my journey, in song and poetry; A Window on a Gone World – London days; Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days; Something about London; Ciao Pollo di Soho – memories a classic café 

Ciao Pollo di Soho – the café at the end of the M1

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

Soho (needless to say)
I’m alone on your streets on a Friday evening
I’ve been here all of the day
I’m going nowhere with nowhere to go
Al Stewart, 1972

… it felt like we had one toe in the Mediterranean, even though it was January and our fingers were numb under our gloves …
Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Too Much

Sometimes, out of the blue, a message from the old country triggers happy memories and sends us wandering through “the foggy ruins of time”. An old friend from my London days emailed me the other day, recalling how back in the day, I’d frequent a cheap and cheerful Italian café in Soho – what was then “swinging” London’s seedy, sexy and infinitely interesting red-light, hip-boutique and cool restaurant mecca. She’d laid down one wintry English afternoon to relax with a novel, and to her surprise, two pages were dedicated to that very same café.

So, as often happens these days, I was son flicking through my back pages and  disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind.

Cut to 1967 and pictures of a gone world …

The café at the end of the M1

As I wrote in a recent trawl through my back pages (OK! Enough with the Bob Dylan already!):

.“… that motorway from Brum to London was a road well-traveled. In my final year at Moseley Grammar, I’d often hitch down to London for a weekend with pals who’d gone there before. We’d hang out at cheap and cheerful Pollo’s Italian restaurant in Old Compton Street in Soho and the Coach and Horses across the road, and go to Cousins folk and blues joint in a cellar in nearby Greek Street, and the 101 Jazz Club off Oxford Street. Bunjies folk cafè and Ronnie Scott’s jazz club were just around the corner. After a meal or a pint, I’d often catch the last tube to the end of the line closest to the M1. I can’t recall how many times I headed off into the night; and there were always drivers on the road at the witching hour. I guess many folks “get the urge for going”, as Joni sang back then, “and they had to go …” And in those generous times, people were happy to offer a lift to a wayfaring stranger – gentle souls who would not leave strays stranded by the dark wayside; lonesome folks seeking company and conversation in the dark night of the soul; curious people wondering why a young man would hitch the highways in the middle of the English night”.

Yes, Café Pollo was indeed a significant landmark of my London days.

I discovered Café Pollo in the Spring of 1966 when I’d first hitched to London with school friends to take part in a Campaign for Nuclear Disbarment march. From ‘66 through ‘71, I’d go there whenever I was in town, and regularly when I ended up living there – right up to my departure for Australia in 1978. When I was studying at the School of Oriental and African Studies, I’d go there for lunch after Friday classes with my best mate and soul brother Mike (we were born on the same day in the same year in a British city beginning with B).

So, for years and years I’d hung out at Pollo’s. Dined there, boozed there, courted there – almost always on spaghetti bolognese and Chianti with a sticky rum baba to follow. It was crowdy, noisy and smokey, and in winter, steamy and clammy – and “cheap as… “

Though I’d left Old England’s shores, I’d visit Pollo’s whenever I returned and catch up with old pals. When I became vegetarian, the bolognese was replaced with pesto pasta liguria or arrabbiata. When The Evening Standard and Time Out recommended it as an excellent “cheap eats”. I thought its glory days of low-key popularity were over. But it was always there, the same as it always was. The feature picture of this post was taken, I think, when Adèle and I were in England in 1987 – I still have that old Chinese denim jacket and use it for sitting around our bonfires in wintertime.

We continued to go there until 2005, when we were denied service as we just wanted a cup of coffee. The next time I popped by, in September 2008, it was gone. Indeed, it had closed soon after our disappointing coffee quest. Having served the impecunious for generations, it was, in the words of a classic London cafés blog, dismantled and dumped, to be born again as a classier, impersonal, cut-out trattoria – La Porchetta Pollo Bar.

But at least, the name and the memory live on …

Cheap, cheerful and unchanging …

Classic Cafés published an excellent obituary to this Soho icon. Here are some extracts:

“The Pollo, at 20 Old Compton Street, with its ox-blood booths, lapidus beanpole railings, contemporary ceiling, murals, top notch signage, and perfectly preserved light fittings always had hungry queues waiting outside. It remained the proverbial Soho institution for as long as anyone could remember. A proper bargain Italian with perfect ‘60s decor, friendly banter and a worryingly high turnover of chefs (there always seemed to be a ‘chef wanted’ sign in the window). “Cheap and cheerful” remains the operative term at the long-standing Italian café Pollo …

… The almost endless hand-written choice of pastas has now been typed up for easier interpretation, but otherwise the menu remains much the same as I remember it being 20 years back. The food is still hearty, the prices are laughable for central London, the coffee is rocket fuel – and the waitresses still insist on doubling you up in the booths with complete strangers …

… Plenty has changed in London. Fortunately, Pollo hasn’t … The Pollo often finds its way onto the ‘top cheap London eats’ lists, and it was the Evening Standard listing under budget eating that first nudged me in its direction a few years ago… It isn’t fancy. It is an Italian restaurant. The inside looks something like a truckers’ caff, with formica tables and little booths, and there is more room downstairs if it looks full. There isn’t a lot of space and the tables are packed in, but the food is good. The main courses consist of a variety (unsurprisingly) of pasta and pizza dishes, again the price range for these tends to be between £3 – £5. There are some risottos as well, and some meat dishes, such as chicken with rice or veal which are a bit more expensive”.

One toe in the Mediterranean …

As for the book my London friend was reading, which inspired her email and my jaunt down the rabbit hole (a pleasant one), The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy, here’s what the protagonist had to sat about about our café de coeur:

“In late January 1989, Jennifer and I were sitting in a cheap Italian restaurant called Pollo in Old Compton Street, Soho. It was always full of students from Saint Martin’s our school around the corner because it offered its loyal impoverished customers three courses for a fiver. Jennifer had introduced me to Pollo when we first met. Once we discover spaghetti vongole and penne arrabbiata, it felt like we had one toe in the Mediterranean, even though it was January and our fingers were numb under our  gloves … She devoured a plate of spaghetti bolgnese even though she was supposed to be a vegetarian. While she drank water,  I knocked back carafe of red wine and ordered another one …. it was warm inside Pollo. Everyone was smoking and shouting us the waiters thumped plates steaming pasta on the formica table. A young man with a blue mohican was stubbing his cigarette in the avocado that had arrive on a plate. it was stuffed with something pink’.

Al Stewart’s Soho (needless to say …)

Apropos the song quoted at the beginning of this memories, whenever I recall Soho in the sixties, I always think about British singer-songwriter and musician Al Stewart’s over-orchestrated debut album of 1967, Bedsitter Images.

Maybe it’s about what here in Australia that, borrowing from our indigenous compatriots, we might call “spirit of place” – the association with the streets within a hop, skip and an amble from Old Compton Street out into Shaftsbury Avenue and that bookshop in Charing Cross Road, the opening verse of the second track Swiss Cottage Manoeuvres, and that flat in Swiss Cottage, a suburb I used to frequent in the seventies. Maybe it’s the seedy, needy, greedy vibe of the priapic songs on Al’s follow up albums. An old friend and Al Stewart fanboy called them aural masturbation. Me and my flat mates were all fans of Al back then, and went to most of his gigs.

In the early seventies, when a girlfriend started going out with him, I actually got to know him for a brief while. Indeed, one time, when he played in Birmingham Town Hall, me and a couple of pals drove up to my old hometown to see him, and after the show, invited him back to my folks’ place for a late night fry up. My mom reckoned he need fattening up. And afterwards, she and Al sat in the kitchen for a couple of hours talking about pop music. “I love Cat Stevens”, mom said. “Oh, I much prefer the Incredible String Band”, said Al. “Oh, they’re very weird, but Paul like them!” She said. Then they got talking about Mick Jagger. And my dad, in the sitting room, said to us others gathered there, and referring to Al’s stature, said “there’s not much to him is there!”. Strange but nice how you recall these little things. The folks have both passed on …

© Paul Hemphill 2022.  All rights reserved

For more about London in In That Howling Infinite, see: Back in the Day – my journey, in song and poetry; A Window on a Gone World – London days; Song of the Road – my hitchhiking days; Something about London

 

For Krishna Sundari -friends always and forever

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

In September 2021, our beautiful, talented, wise friend and soul sister Krishna Sundari departed our world.

I am remembering how we first met once upon a lifetime ago. She was Kathy Kellock in those days, and later reverted to her birth name, Kathy D’Amico – she was of American Italian heritage and the music was in her blood – her late father played a mean flugelhorn is a Sydney jazz band

It was in the fall of 1983 at Hornsby Folk Club in Sydney, Australia. This gorgeous, elfin flautist was doing a Jethro Tull riff to Red Gum’s Ned Kelly Song, Poor Ned you’re better off dead, with a couple of folkie lads in a band called Kurrajong. After their set, I went up to her and said “Hi, I’m Paul. Would you like to be in my band?” She said “I’ll give it a go”. And she did. The band was HuldreFolk.

Our group sundered, as is the way of most groups, but we never lost touch, and we’d rendezvous often down the years. There’d be many an impromptu recital along the way. All were special. One enchanted evening, I think it was 2013, we held a house concert in our home in Newtown, Sydney. The band was winding down. “Where’s Eric?”  asked Adèle, And away they go, Dimitri, Dominic and Krishna Sundari, into Layla. Llew ran off, quickly returned, and hey! it’s bizouki Layla – and magic happened. Magic happened often whenever Krishna Sundari picked up her flute.

We’ve all traveled different roads since and have ended up in places we’d never imagined we’d be.

She changed her life and her religion, joining the Krishna faith, letting go of the material world and giving away everything she owned except the clothes she wore – and her flute (after all, Krishna himself was a flautist). She rarely played, but she’d take it out and played like in days of old, enchanting all who heard her.

On enchanted evening, we held a house party at our Newtown  home back in about 2013. The band was winding down. “Where’s Eric?” asked Adèle. And in they go, Demitri, Dominic, and Krishna Sundari, into Layla. Llew ran off, returned  and hey, bizouki Layla. And magic happened. magic happened often when Krishna Sundari picked up her flute.

Kathy D’Amico, Billy Williams and Wayne Jury jam at our home, December 2016,

Visiting her guru in India, she was at a dham in Kolkata when COVID19 struck, and unable to score a flight back to Australia, remained there for sixteen months. She called us regularly on WhatsApp to tell us that she was safe and happy, and how wonderful it was when during the lockdowns, Kolkata’s pollution disappeared, the skies were blues, and birdsong filled the air. It was only after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer that she was evacuated back to Australia via the Howard Springs Quarantine Camp in Darwin and her family. It was her karma that she passed away in Mullumbimby.

She faced her death with courage and equanimity, confident in her belief that this world is just one station on the way to a better one.  Before she left India on a Qantas repatriation flight she joked that if she missed that plane and died, at least she would be cremated beside the Ganges.

At the end of our mutual journey, it’s like we’ve been close friends forever – and forever, we will always be.

At Sri Govinda Dham, Uki

Our deepest condolences to her daughters Sarah and Haley, her son Robert, and granddaughter Naomi, her former partner, Billy Williams and the devotees of the Sri Govinda Dham in Uki on the Tween River.

As my friend and Arabic teacher said when I told him of the loss of friends, Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’un –  إِنَّا لِلَّٰهِ وَإِنَّا إِلَيْهِ رَاجِعُونَ‎ – We belong to God and to Him do we return

Kath played on my two record albums.  Here she is in full flight.

Kathy jamming with the Hip Shooters in Mullumbimby

Exit West – a hejira of hope

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i don’t know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
Somali poet Warsan Shire, Home

Outside my regular, earthy existence here on our acreage in the midst an Australian forest, where our days are largely dictated by the weather and the changes of the seasons, I have two extracurricular preoccupations. These are a lifelong passion for the Middle East – its history, it’s politics, its many faiths and cultures, and its people, supplemented and complemented by travel to those lands that are still safe and accessible for travellers; and working as a volunteer helping people who have come to our country town as refugees from war – and, increasingly of late, the displaced and damaged Yazidi Kurds from benighted Syria and Iraq. I’ve previously been written about this work in In That Howling Infinite:  No Going Home – the refugee’s journey (1) and Hejira – the refugee’s journey (2).

And along comes a beautifully written story that speaks elegantly, poignantly, and yet, viscerally to the refugee experience. Mohsin Hamid writes: “… everyone migrates, even if we stay in the same houses our whole lives, because we can’t help it. We are all migrants through time”. Many of us are indeed temporal migrants, crossing the world to establish new lives far from home and “the fields that we know”, as Gandalf the Grey put it a long time ago in a land far, far away. And when we migrate, we leave former lives and loves behind. When Nadia promises her lover’s father that she will look after his only son, ”by making the promise he demanded she make, she was in a sense killing him, but that is the way of things, for when we migrate, we murder from our loves those we leave behind”.

Like Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel of 1953, Mohsin Hamid’s novella Exit West is a fable and also, a parable. A tale of alternative futures that says much about ourselves, and sounds a warning about where we are headed. But unlike Bradbury’s incendiary scenarios, it also signposts paths that may lead to what may in dire circumstances be interpreted as happy endings.

Hamid also echoes the fantastical fancy of a “Time And Relative Dimension In Space” (yes, The Tardis!) storyline that once propelled Alice through the looking glass glass and the Pevensie children through their wardrobe, and the magical realism of our own times. It is a portal fantasy, straight out of speculative fiction and children’s literature, but the world on the far side is darker and more dangerous than either Wonderland or Narnia.

Like Bradbury’s, this is a book for the times. Then, it was the blinkered and poisonous groupthink that ensnared American politics, society and culture during the years of the McCarthy witch hunts (and indeed, anywhere past and present where straighteners endeavour to chain their compatriots with their own world view). Now, it is the unravelling of societies riven by politics, religion and war, a world in which millions of souls are cast adrift on the highways and the high seas.

Exit West begins, ironically for myself as an Australian and until quite recently a longtime resident of inner-city Newtown, in a terrace house in the neighbouring suburb of Surry Hills. An unidentified women is sleeping. A dark, disheveled stranger struggles out of the darkness of her closet door, crosses the bedroom and slips out of the window into the warm Sydney night.

Time and space shift – as they do over the next two hundred or so pages – and unexpected, strange, wonderful, frightening, dangerous things happen.

Arabian nights

Imagine a modern, cosmopolitan city in the Middle East, multi-ethnic, multi-faith, heterogenous, and relatively tolerant. People and their various communities get along with each other despite, in spite of, even, their differences. Secular and religious, rich and poor coexist in relative harmony. Alongside mosques and madrassas, there are cafes and coffee shops, colleges and campuses, banks and ATMs. There is the glitzy uptown with wide streets, hotels and department stores, and a picturesque and historic old town, the timeless jungle of suqs and alleyways, ancient mosques and churches, Ottoman and colonial-era mansions with their hidden courtyards now converted into boutique hotels, and the all-hours hustle and bustle, street sounds and smells. And beyond, the boulevards with their post-colonial apartment blocks, and outlying, sprawling slums and shanty towns that attract the dispossessed and destitute from the countryside, and the refugee camps that over time have become suburbs housing refugees from drought and financial misfortune and from wars past and present. It could be Damascus or Aleppo before the war, Baghdad or Mosul, Beirut or Istanbul.

There are the rich folks and there the poor folks, and in between, the relatively comfortable middle classes cleaving to their religious and political affiliations, and yet, getting along with each other, and striving to be part of the globalized world. Many are educated, some are affluent, multitudes struggle. But there is power and water, and in our wired age, good mobile and internet service and social media. People are able to communicate and connect with each other and with the wider world.

It is a time of turmoil and social and political unrest and the city is swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war. A young man meets a young woman in a classroom, but doesn’t speak to her.

“It might seem odd” writes Hadid, “that in cities teetering at the edge of the abyss young people still go to class … but that is the way of things, with cities as with life, for one moment we are pottering about on errands and the next we are dying, and our eternally impending ending dies not put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it dies”.

Nadia and Saeed have met in an evening class “on corporate identity and product branding”. She wears a long black robe, he, a fashionable stubble rather than the required beard. When he follows he downstairs to ask her out, he is surprised to see her pick up a black motorcycle helmet. She rides around their city on a scruffy trail bike. Saeed is the only and late-life child of two educated parents whom he loves and respects. He lives with them in their flat in a once elegant part of the city. Nadia has broken with her religious, well-meaning family and lives alone in a rickety flat at the top of a house. Her dress, Saeed learns, is to protect her from men. They meet in coffee shops and a Chinese restaurant, and eventually, in Nadia’s tiny apartment. They play music on an old record player, smoke dope, eat magic mushrooms which Nadia has bought online, and fall in love.

In this urban landscape set in what could be the very recent past, the still unfolding present, or an impeding and dystopian future, things are falling apart and the centre is not holding. The distant drumbeats of civil strife get louder and closer. For all their weaponry and electronic sophistication, under the drone-crossed sky and in the invisible  network of surveillance that radiated out from their phones, recording and capturing and logging everything…18, the forces of law and order are struggling to hold back the falling dark.

First there are “just some shootings and the occasional car bombing”. Then there are checkpoints, and soon the sky is full of helicopters as the army strikes at militants infiltrating the suburbs and attacking strategic locations. Law and order crumbles; there are power and internet outages; and a rush on food stores and banks. Battles rage. Buildings are bombed and shelled, and innocents are killed in the crossfire. The militants advance and inevitably, conquer, targeting those of other faiths and affiliations, and imposing their coded of conduct and costume.

In the pages that follow, ordinary chores and ordinary preoccupations of thoughts, feelings, emotions, fears and fantasies play out in uncertain, extraordinary and often magical circumstances.

As people adjust to the new reality of homelessness and danger, a new normalcy is created: “Refugees had occupied many of the open places in the city … some seemed to be trying to recreate the rhythms of a normal life, as though it was completely natural to be residing, a family of four under a sheet of plastic propped up by branches and a few chipped blocks. Others stared out at the city with what looked like anger, or surprise, or supplication, or envy”.

As the violence worsens, and lives are shattered, escape feels ever more urgent. War erodes the façade of Saeed’s  building “as though it had accelerated time itself, a day’s toll outpacing that of a decade”. Nadia tapes up her windows against shattering glass. They hear of mysterious black doors appearing all over the city, all over the world. To walk through these doors is to escape into another part of the world and into a new life.

Led by a shadowy agent to a shattered dentist’s office and shown a door that once led to a supply cupboard, Saeed and Nadia go through the door, experience a passage of extreme stress and darkness “both like dying and like being born”, and miraculously arrive, exhausted, in a toilet block next to a beach club on Mykonos, Greece.

And thus, the narrative transforms into an antique story of lovers fleeing their homeland. From Mykonos the couple travel on several times, including through a startling vision of London in the near future …”The following evening helicopters filled the sky like birds startled by gunshot, or the blow of an axe at the base of their tree.”

                                                    Illustration, Jun Cen, The New Yorker

Slipping Away

But it is not just the abandoned and forsaked of Nadia and Saeed’s once cosmopolitan city that are falling apart.

“Rumours had begun to circulate of doors that could take you elsewhere, often to places far away, well removed from this death trap of a country … Most people thought these rumours to be nonsense, the superstitions of the feeble-minded. But most people began to gaze at their own doors a little differently nonetheless”.

 “The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders, nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play. Many were arguing that smaller units made sense but others argued that smaller units could not defend themselves”.

Imagine then a world where the affluent, peaceful, economically and technologically advanced countries of Europe and North America, the so-called “north”, become a magnet to people who yearn to escape the poverty and violence, drought and famine,  oppression and dispossession of the overpopulated “South”. Millions are on the move by land and by sea, and from the Rio Grand and the Sonora Desert to the Sahel and the Sinai, to the Aegean and Mediterranean seas, they are spilling over the borders, staggering across deserts, and washing up on the shores of the lands of milk and honey.

As Nadia and Saeed stagger into the Mykonos sunlight, elsewhere people are emerging in the same dazed way from garden sheds and bedroom closets all over the world.  And the couple’s journey is punctuated with disconnected moments happening elsewhere on earth. “All over the world people were slipping away from where they had been, from once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous battlefields,

But those who are slipping away are not trekking across deserts or taking perilous journeys on a lethally overcrowded dinghies across the Mediterranean or Walking the dusty, thirsty highways of the Balkans. They just step through a door. For those who are slipping away, there are no life-or-death journeys in the backs of lorries, trecks across rivers and desert, or perilous crossings on flimsy, overcrowded dinghies; No harrowing middle passages – just a swift, jarring stepping through a dark doorway, and the cognitive shock of having been freshly transplanted to tough new terrains.

Whilst the story highlights the triggers that impel or more often compel people to flee their homelands, it focuses more on the psychological consequences of dislocation – and then in a superficial romantic fashion – boy meets girl, boys runs away with girl, boy loses girl. It neglects the  reality of the trials and vicissitudes of dislocation.  As described in No Going Home:

What if you had to leave behind everything that you hold dear. Your identity, culture, language, faith. You job, your school. Your loved ones, your friends, and your play-mates.
What if you have to sleep with your shoes on so you are ready to run if your enemies are approaching your village? And then you have to flee your home and climb the mountain to escape, helping your youngsters and old folk up the rocky slopes in the summer heat, and there is nothing to eat or drink, and nothing you can do except wait for capture or rescue.
What would YOU do if you had but a short while to gather a few things together and run, leaving your whole life behind? What would you try and take with you?
Then you wash up, literally and figuratively, on foreign shores – in border refugee camps, dusty border towns or urban slums. And there you stay, with other tens, hundreds, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands in like dire straits.

Hejiras of Hope

For all the confusion, dislocation, disappointment, there is hopefulness. In one of the parallel but alternative universes a suicidal man chooses life. In another, two old men – one Dutch, one Brazilian – exchange a kiss. Most of all there is prayer – prayer for the loss that “unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry”. Being human is the solitary commonality.

But as with most things in life, there is a reckoning. If you escape from your homeland with your romantic partner, through a door or otherwise, things get pretty intense pretty fast, and amidst countervailing currents and crosswinds, relationships slowly, sadly, and realistically unravel. Not only do emigres and refugees slip away form their former lives, they slip away from other people, people they had in some cases loved – “as Nadia was slipping away from Saeed, and Saeed from Nadia”.

For in this life and in the next, there are promise made and promises broken. Bonds forged and then loosened and broken – “eventually a month went by without any contact, and then a year, and then a lifetime”.

“She wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not. But then around he she saw all these  people of all these different colours in all their different attires and she was relieved, better here than there she thought, and it occurred to her that she had been stifled in the place of her birth for virtually her entire life, that its time for her had passed, and a new time was here …”

And in a world that is constantly changing, revolving evolving, sometimes it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

 © Paul Hemphill, 2021.  All rights reserved

The following is a survey of the statistics of the world refugee crisis, published in In That Howling  Infinite in June 2019 as an epilogue to No Going Home, and after that are tow reviews of Exit West

The Melancholy Mathematics of the World Refugee Crisis

Like death and taxes, the poor and racism, refugees have always been with us.  But never in modern times – since the Second World War – have they been so many!

There are over sixty nine million people around the world on the move today – that have been forcibly displaced from their homes – fleeing from persecution or conflict.

This doesn’t count economic migrants who have hit the roads of sub Saharan Africa and Central America fleeing drought and crop failure, economic recession and unemployment, poverty, gangs and cartels, seeking a better life for themselves and the families in Europe or the USA.

Three quarters of a million ‘economic migrants’ are on the move in Central America, whilst the UN estimates that at least four million people have left Venezuela because of its political and economic crisis in what has been described as the biggest refuge crisis ever seen in the Americas. There are refugee camps on the Colombian border. Most are in Columbia but others have entered Brazil and Peru.  But these are not by legal definition refugees – see below, The Refugees’ Journey .

Of those sixty nine million people over 11 million or 16% are Syrians. The numbers keep growing Thirty one people at being displaced every minute of the day. In 2018 alone, 16.2 million people were newly displaced.

Forty million people have been internally displaced within their own countries – this includes six million Syrians and off our radars, some two million souls who once lived in the contested regions of eastern Ukraine.

Over 25 million are refugees in neighbouring countries and further afield. 25% of them are in Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, and Uganda. Some 57% of them come from three countries: Syria, 6.3 million, Afghanistan 2.6 million and South Sudan 2.4 million. The top hosting counties are Turkey 3.5 million, Lebanon, 1 million, Pakistan 1.4 million, Uganda 1.4 million and Iran 1 million.

Jordan shelters over three quarters of a million Syrians; during the Iraq wars, this relatively poor country sheltered a similar number of Iraqis, and still hosts tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians who’ve fled persecution at home.

These figures are of those registered by the UNHCR. The real numbers are much higher. The Lebanese government estimates that there are more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees in the country.

Much of the focus these days is on the Middle East – Syria and its neighbours, on Libya and the frail boats crossing the Mediterranean, on the war in Yemen which has killed over thirteen thousand and displaced over two million.

But situation in Africa is as dire.

More than 2 million Somalis are currently displaced by a conflict that has lasted over two decades. An estimated 1.5 million people are internally displaced in Somalia and nearly 900,000 are refugees in the near region, including some 308,700 in Kenya, 255,600 in Yemen and 246,700 in Ethiopia.

By August 2018, the Democratic Republic of the Congo hosted more than 536,000 refugees from Burundi, the Central African Republic and South Sudan. And yet, there are over 4.5 million Congolese people displaced inside their own country and over 826,000 in neighbouring countries, including Namibia, Angola and Kenya.

Should the present situation in Sudan deteriorate into civil war, another tide of humanity will hit the road.

And closer to home, there are millions of refugees in Asia.

As of March 2019, there are over 100, 000 refugees in 9 refugee camps in Thailand (as of March 2019), mainly ethnic Karen and Shan. Refugees in Thailand have been fleeing ethnic conflict and crossing Myanmar’s eastern border jungles for the safety of Thailand for nearly 30 years.

There were an estimated 1 million Rohingya living in Myanmar before the 2016–17 crisis, and since August 2017, an estimated 625,000 refugees from Rakhine, had crossed the border into Bangladesh.

The top-level numbers are stupendous. The detail is scary.

Some 52% of the world’s refugees and displaced are children. And many are unaccompanied. Every hour, around 20 children run for their lives without their parents to protect them.

Children are the most vulnerable to disease and malnutrition and also to exploitation and lose years of schooling. Millions are elderly and are also face health problems.

And the problems facing young people and adults are all enormous. International aid is limited and host countries often unsympathetic. Work opportunities are few, some countries even forbidding refugees to take work, whilst unscrupulous employers exploit the desperate. Migrants are often encouraged, sometimes forcibly, to return to their countries of origin regardless of whether or not it is safe for them to return. There are reports that many have returned to Syria into the unwelcoming hands of the security services.

Refugees have lived in camps and towns in Pakistan and Thailand, Namibia and Kenyan for decades. Most refugee children were not born in their parents’ homelands.

And the camps are by no means safe havens. There may be no shelter or only basic shelter in tents; no privacy; a lack of clean water; meagre food; limited medical care; and the threat of injury, disease and epidemics. They may be poor physical security and armed attacks, and abuse by the authorities and officials. There may be organized crime, shakedowns and extortion, corruption and bribery.

Families may have become separated, exposing women and children without the protection of male family members to more fear and violence. Women are subsequently vulnerable to harsh conditions, including potential sexual and physical and abuse, poor healthcare, and unequal access to food and water. They may be coping with the loss of the head of the family and with the changing roles and responsibilities that come from being the sole parent. They may not know if their male family members will return to them safely and they must deal with the stress and anxiety, the grief and loss arising from their recent experiences. They might be fearful of the future, which in a camp is unknown and unpredictable.

This Syrian mother and her child were rescued by the Greek Coast Guard.

Magical Vision of the refugee crisis

Sukhdev Sandhu, The Observer , 12 March 2017

Exit West, a novel about migration and mutation, full of wormholes and rips in reality, begins as it mostly doesn’t go on. A man and a woman meet at an evening class on corporate identity and product branding. Saeed is down-to-earth, the son of a university professor, and works at an ad agency. Nadia, who wears a full black robe and is employed by an insurance company, lives alone, rides a motorbike, enjoys vinyl and psychedelic mushrooms. She doesn’t pray. We think we know what will happen next: a boy-girl love story, opposites attracting, secular individuals struggling with the shackles of a theological state.

Now, though, this unnamed city is filling with refugees. Militants are creating unrest. The old world was neither paradise nor hell – one of its parks tolerates “early morning junkies and gay lovers who had departed their houses with more time than they needed for the errands they had said they were heading out to accomplish” – but its terrors are driving out those with ambition and connections. Saeed and Nadia embark on a journey that, like the dream logic of a medieval odyssey, takes them to Mykonos, London, San Francisco.

Hamid, intentionally for the most part, doesn’t exert as tight a narrative grip as he did in previous novels such as The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Exit West shifts between forms, wriggles free of the straitjackets of social realism and eyewitness reportage, and evokes contemporary refugeedom as a narrative hybrid: at once a fable about deterritorialisation, a newsreel about civil society that echoes two films – Kevin Brownlow’s It Happened Here and Peter Watkins’s The War Game – and a speculative fiction that fashions new maps of hell.

All the same, the novel is often strongest in its documentation of life during wartime, as Hamid catalogues the casual devastation of a truck bomb, the sexual molestation that takes place as hundreds of city dwellers throng to take their life savings from a bank, and the supernatural elation of taking a warm shower after weeks on the road. This is annexed to elements of magical realism and even The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe-style children’s storytelling. A normal door, Saeed and Nadia’s colleagues start to discuss, “could become a special door, and it could happen without warning, to any door at all”.

Characters move through time and space like abrupt jump-cuts or skipping compact discs. There are no descriptions of life-or-death journeys in the backs of lorries or on flimsy dinghies. No middle passages. Just the cognitive shock of having been freshly transplanted to tough new terrains. Hamid is deft at evoking the almost contradictory nature of Nadia and Saeed’s digital life (their phones are “antennas that sniffed out an invisible world” and transported them “to places distant and near”), whose broadband freedoms contrast with the roadblocks, barbed wire and camps they face in what passes for reality.

Exit West is animated – confused, some may think – by this constant motion between genre, between psychological and political space, and between a recent past, an intensified present and a near future. It’s a motion that mirrors that of a planet where millions are trying to slip away “from once fertile plains cracking with dryness, from seaside villages gasping beneath tidal surges, from overcrowded cities and murderous battlefields”.

The skies in Hamid’s novel are as likely to be populated by helicopters, drones and bombs as they are by dreams and twinkling stars. Yet his vision is ultimately more hopeful than not. In one of the book’s parallel but alternative universes a suicidal man chooses life. In another, two old men – one Dutch, one Brazilian – exchange a kiss. Most of all there is prayer – prayer for the loss that “unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry”.

  • Exit West by Mohsin Hamid is published by Hamish Hamilton (£12.99). To order a copy for £9.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

Exit West  – necessary, timely, wise, and beautiful

American writer Richard Hoffman, judging the web ‘zine The Morning News’ Tournament of Books 2018, declared: “… Exit West is a full-fledged masterpiece; it’s necessary, timely, wise, and beautiful”.

Saeed and Nadia meet in a business class and begin dating just as war starts encroaching on their city:

“The following evening helicopters filled the sky like birds startled by a gunshot, or by the blow of an axe at the base of their tree. They rose, singly and in pairs, and fanned out above the city in the reddening dusk, as the sun slipped below the horizon, and the whir of their rotors echoed through windows and down alleys, seemingly compressing the air beneath them, as though each were mounted atop an invisible column, an invisible breathable cylinder, these odd, hawkish, mobile sculptures, some thin, with tandem canopies, pilot and gunner at different heights, and some fat, full of personnel, chopping, chopping through the heavens’.

The story is told in a lofty, mythical, religious tone. Sentences spool out like scripture. For the most part, I found this style beautiful. Occasionally, it would become too much, and I wished the story was more simply told. But that would only happen rarely, and the beautiful far outweighed the florid.

As things worsen in their city, the couple starts hearing rumors about the existence of doors that will magically lead them to a different place. I’d heard about this element of Exit West, and as that part of the story drew closer I found myself resisting the idea. I don’t know why that was. (Magical realism prudishness?) Whatever the case, I was dragging my feet. When it did finally occur, when they found a door, my stomach knotted up the way it does when your therapist or partner points out a flaw in your character. That knotted-up feeling was short-lived. The doors are a beautiful device. They make the reader feel—more clearly than straight realism ever could—precisely what refugees want. They want a door to take them from whatever frightening place they’re in, to a place that is safe. By skipping the realism we see it for what it is. The trick is high art.

There is a blurb on the back of the book that calls it “extraordinarily clever.” That is a gross understatement. Better than clever, the book is wise. Not only does it track Nadia and Saeed as they move through these doors, traveling first to a small island in Greece, then to London, then to Marin County, but it also tracks their relationship as it slowly, sadly, and realistically begins to unravel. There is no melodrama in this part of the story. When the two lovers lie in bed without touching, it feels as if they are true flesh-and-blood characters.

In the end, Exit West did that thing that only great literature can do: It made me feel more fully for humans writ large.

 

Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

Photographs of guns and flame
Scarlet skull and distant game
Bayonet and jungle grin
Nightmares dreamed by bleeding men
Lookouts tremble on the shore
But no man can find the war
Tim Buckley 1976 

Marines, Operation Starlite

Tim Page had already been two years “in country” when as an undergraduate I’d participated in the violent melees in front of the US embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square protesting what Kenny Rodgers would call “that crazy Asian war”. Our undergraduate passions were inflamed by the fear that our government would answer US President Lyndon B Johnson’s call to join him and his forces in Vietnam – our Antipodean kin in Australia and New Zealand has already committed troops, and Johnson was applying the economic screws. But Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson held firm and Britain avoided the débacle that has haunted the US for half a century.

This is the story of a war, and a young man who wandered into that war.

Chaos without a compass

A ship is waiting for us at the dock
America has trouble to be stopped
We must stop Communism in that land
Or freedom will start slipping through our hands.
I hope and pray someday the world will learn
That fires we don’t put out, will bigger burn
We must save freedom now, at any cost
Or someday, our own freedom will be lost.
Johnny Wright, Hello Vietnam

The Twentieth Century’s “Thirty Years War” was waged in South East Asia initially by the colonialist France, and then by neo-imperialist America. France’s war ended in defeat and ignominy for French arms and prestige, and a partition that was but a prelude to America’s Vietnam quagmire.

America’s War has since been defined as chaos without compass. It was inevitable that acclaimed historian Barbara Tuchman would chose it as one of her vignettes in The March of Folly, her celebrated study of débacles through the ages characterised by what would appear to be a single-minded determination amounting to tunnel vision that is akin to stupidity.

As Tuchman saw it, exceptionalism and manifest destiny are historically proven folly. Self-belief in American power and righteousness has historically created delusions of grandeur, obstinate attachment to unserviceable goals, stubbornness, and an inability to learn from past mistakes or even admitting error – a wooden-headedness that often sees the US persisting on erroneous paths that lead to loss of blood, treasure, reputation and moral standing.

Why did the US’ experience of backing the wrong horse in China in the forties not provide an analogy and warning in Vietnam in the fifties? Why did the experience in Vietnam not inform the it with respect to Iran right up to the fall,of the Shah in1978? And why hadn’t it learned anything when it stumbled into Salvador in the eighties? And then, of course, we arrive in the 21st century with no-exit, never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Middle East that end in retreat and betrayal with the ‘freedom-loving’ USA still backing the wrong horses by supporting autocrats and tyrants against their own people.

But, back to Vietnam …

As historian Per Yule noted in The Long Shadow: Australia’s Vietnam Veterans Since The War, the Vietnam War was based on an assortment of unproven assumptions and half truths. It wrongly identified a dictatorship as a democracy a civil war as an international conflict. Our armed forces were sent to fight in support of a corrupt military regime which received solid support only from the catholic minority and the small landowning class. Few willingly fought for the regime.

Many in the US military reckoned that if given a free hand by the administration of President Johnson, they could have prevailed against North Vietnam – by destroying it utterly with overwhelming firepower. But the US had backed the wrong side and no amount of support could make the South Vietnamese fight and die hard enough for their corrupt, incompetent, puppet government. We hear a similar rationale with regard to the the Afghan army’s rapid collapse and the US’ shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan

The US wanted to convince the North Vietnamese that they couldn’t win on the battlefield. The North Vietnamese wanted to convince the American people that the cost in blood and treasure was too high. Both sides continued to believe that they could improve their positions through escalation and both continued to focus on military rather than political means to end the conflict. And so we were left with an almost certainly unwinnable strategy of bombing the enemy to the negotiating table when that enemy shows no willingness to negotiate under duress. The bombing campaign, code name Rolling Thunder, was described by a commentator in Ken Burns’ documentary The Vietnam War as “the dumbest campaign ever designed by a human being”.

The many names for a war lost before it began

All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I’ll lead on.
We’re waist deep in the big muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Pete Seeger, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

Vietnam has been called the pointless war and the needless war. It was certainly a costly war. The butchers bill was horrendous. No one really knows how many people perished. Civilian deaths range from 1.3 to 4.5 million.of which over 80% were Vietnamese and 7% Cambodian. American soldiers dead numbered 58,220 and wounded,153,303. The number of Vietnamese and Cambodian wounded is inestimable.

As for the American forces, it most certainly “the poor man’s war” – most who were perished or were maimed were not rich folks, and a disproportionate number were black. Amd the more who died, the more were sent to replace them. And like here in Australia, thecdraft caught mainly the poor and unconnected. Even as soldiers started going home, actual or attempted murder by enlisted men of their superiors increased alarmingly.

As to the monetary cost: an estimated $1 trillion in today’s dollars. But that is doubtlessly an understatement – what about the rebuilding, the rehabilitation, the recompense? Vietnam was the most heavily bombed country in history. More than 6.1 million tons of bombs were dropped, compared to 2.1 million tons in WW2. U.S. planes dumped 20 million gallons of herbicides to defoliate VietCong hiding places. It decimated 5 million acres of frostbite and 500,000 acres of farmland.

It has been called “the helicopter war” because choppers were the primary mode of ground combat and transport, and also “the television war – it’s triumphs (few) and tragedies (many) were beamed Into American homes nightly, fuelling the public’s confusion and unease about this Asian war, and eventually, the anger that forced the US government to eventually withdraw over half a million soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors and abandoning South Vietnam’s puppet government, its demoralised and abandoned army, and its unfortunate, battered and bloodied people to the tender mercies of the hardline and heartless ideologues in Hanoi.

Vietnam was also, notoriously, a pharmaceutical war. In its final year’s, as raw and reluctant draftees made up an increasing proportion of the US forces, indiscipline and substance abuse transformed, in the words of one professional soldier, an officer, a fine army into a rotten one. Alcohol, marijuana, acid, coke, heroin, and a cornucopia of pills were freely available on base, on leave in Saigon, and often, in the field, and many soldiers actually made it a business. The press too were sucked into the machinery.

And, it was a promiscuous war. So far away from home and loved ones, like warriors in all wars since time immoral, US solders took comfort and solace where they could find it. Historians, memoirists, veterans of both the French and American wars in Indochina write and talk of the beauty of the Vietnamese women. Economic deprivation and social dislocation create a flesh market supplying lonely, frightened strangers in a strange land.

It was chemical warfare – not the mustard gas of older wars, and the Zyklon B of the Nazi death camps, nor the recent wars in the Middle East, in the first Gulf War, between Iraq and Iran, and in Syria – but the broad-acre use of chemical defoliants designed to deny the enemy of jungle and forest concealment that left behind a bitter harvest, a legacy of disease, deformity and death that ricochets to this day.

And, in the United States, it was a war that divided a nation. The protest movement emerged during 1965. It grew and grew, and by the Moratorium of October 1969, it became the largest outpouring of public dissent in American history. The moratorium movement was massive and unprecedented – and peaceful. Nationwide, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people across the US were marching. The children of politicians and officials and soldiers were also marching. They were marching not about winning or losing the war but demanding an end to the war.

It was a journalists war too, and the photographers’ War. The military had a relaxed and tolerant attitude towards the press that would seem profligate and foolhardy in today’s tightly managed and manipulated combat media. Journalists and photographers would be permitted and indeed invited along on patrols and sweeps, carrier landings, on helicopter “dust offs” (a euphemism for evacuating the wounded and the dead), and the controversial “search and destroy” operations that destroyed so many fields, villages and lives. Needless to say, the coopted fourth estate were often in harm’s way. They were taught how to use weapons and often actually did use them in self defence and, sometimes in anger. And like the officers and men with whom they worked, many were wounded and slain. More than two hundred would die covering the fighting in South East Asia.

And English photojournalist Tim Page, who ran away from boring ‘sixties Britain to the exotic East at the age of seventeen, taking the ‘overland’ route that decades later would be called ‘the Hippie Trail’, washed up in the war of our generation, and left it critically injured and indeed clinically dead in a medivac chopper.

Tim in a tight spot

Cameras and Comrades

There is no decent place to stand in a massacre
But if some women takes you’re hand
You go and stand with her.
I left a wife in Tennessee and a baby in Saigon
I risked my life but not to hear
A country-western song
Leonard Cohen, The Captain

Tim Page literally and figuratively ambled into the last of the “great” wars of the Twentieth Century; and reading Tim’s autobiography, you wonder whether this peregrinating, ever-restless bloke had more lives than a cat!

Page ran off to join the circus. Leaving England in 1962, it was to be twenty years until he saw his folks again. A restless soul, he split for Europe with his girl friend, and when she baled, headed ever-eastwards, an early pioneer of that famed trail in a succession of secondhand vehicles and a caravan of colourful comrades. The further east he wandered, the more drugs he savoured, sampling the local toke through Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal and Burma. Many a time, he was flat broke and broken down, and laid low with a variety of exotic, intimate and excruciating ailments. But we needn’t go there.

Though photography was a teenage hobby, he drifted into the profession almost by accident, and virtually ambled into the Vietnam War, the Great War of our generation – a road -trip to Vientiane, the sleepy capital of the Kingdom of Laos to renew his expired Thai visa saw him hanging out there just as the the US’ fateful foray into Indochina was escalating into the quagmire that it was to become.

For Tim, it was the worst of times, it was the best of times. “Hot and cold running …” he says, using the vernacular of those days … booze, drugs, girls, he meant – battle injuries and diseases – and action, lots of it, in the air in helicopters and on occasion, fighter bombers, on the land in jeeps, armoured vehicles, and motor bikes, on the rivers in patrol boats, and on foot.

The lure of sex, drugs, and excitement – and paid work for a major news agency saw him wash up in Saigon and the celebrated, inebriated Frankie’s House, a kind of home-away-from home and party house for transiting bao chi – ‘round-eye’ newsmen – a decadent, dissolute, de facto foreign correspondents club. From here, they would fan out though war-wracked South Vietnam under the often dodgy and dangerous protection of Uncle Sam.  In the 1992 series of Frankie’s House, based on Tim’s Vietnam days, he was portrayed by the Scottish actor Iain Glen, famous nowadays for his role as Ser Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones.

Iain Glen on the left as Tim Page in Frankie’s House

Like the soldiers they accompanied, many came back in body bags or on stretchers. Many just disappeared @and it has been Tim’s mission in life to trace these lost souls. They include his best buddy Sean Flynn, the son of famous actor and pants man Errol Flynn.

Tim’s number almost came up in a blood-soaked friendly fire debacle on a navy river boat. Patched up and R&R in the US, he photographed the burgeoning antiwar demonstrations wracking the nation and ‘fesses up in his chronicle that he didn’t quite get the rage of the protesters – to Tim and his Saigon peers, the war might’ve been hell, but it was also a helluva buzz, and he was itching to return to the maelstrom.  

But his intoxicating and intoxicated Nam days came to an explosive end in a dry paddy field when he and his helicopter crew landed to help an injured GI and walked into a minefield. Dead on arrival and resuscitated three times, he was medivacced stateside minus part of his skull and with injuries that hamper him still half a century later. Photographs of that almost fatal encounter turned up out of the blue just a few years ago.

Post-op and recuperating in the US, Tim took himself off to Woodstock, New York State. where it was being said that there was going be a cool scene – which indeed there was, as we all remember:  the famous music festival held over three days in August 1969 on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York (65 km) southwest of the town of Woodstock. But Tim never got to hear any of the great music – complications from his injuries meant that he had to be medivacced out of Woodstock, probably on the same chopper that had just brought in the legendary Crosby, Stills and Nash.  

And today he is still alive and kicking, despite multiple surgeries, PTSD, and suicidal impulses, and is still shooting pictures, revisiting Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, and also Afghanistan (he was appointed the UN Peace Ambassador that unfortunate country) where his photos have recorded for posterity, real-time real-time stories of reconstruction, recovery and resilience in these battlefields of old. One of his last “hot war” missions was to report in pictures on the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession. In Bosnia, he “souvenired” a Toyota utility truck with big UN letters on its flanks that eventually ended up on a property in Bellingen.

He is in demand at photographic exhibitions and symposiums news world wide, and continues to hang with those of his bao chi who have also survived the journey. Tim is now a neighbour of ours, over the hill, across the forest, four thousand miles and a lifetime away from his Asian war

Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
Jim Morrison 1967

© Paul Hemphill 2021.  All rights reserved

A Vietnamese woman grieves for her dead husband

Author’s note

Internationally acclaimed photographer Tim Page has been the subject of many documentaries, two films and the author of ten books, including his latest opus Nam Contact. He has been recognized as one of the ‘100 Most Influential Photographers of All Time’ and is the recipient of many awards. After a career spanning sixty years, world renowned photographer Tim Page has settled quietly into the Bellingen Shire, where he and his wife Marianne live what Tim describes as “a peaceful life. The choice of the word Peaceful’ is pertinent considering that his photographic assignments during the of the Laos Civil War, the Vietnam War and the Six Day War in the Middle East in 1967 brought him directly into the firing line. He still carries the injuries to prove it.

This piece was originally conceived as a forward for an autobiography of Tim, now a friend and near neighbour on the edge of Bellingen’s Tarkeeth Forest. It was but a fallback option – I’d suggested to Tim and his Marianne that the book would be better served with a forward by either Paul Ham or Peter Fitzsimmons, Australian historians who have written about the Vietnam War.  It eventuated that the book was not published – but the story grew with the telling, informed by a re-watching of Ken Burns’ excellent documentary The Vietnam War and historian Max Hasting’s masterful tombstone of a book Vietnam., an epic tragedy 1945-1975  

The photographs featured in the post are but a few from Tim’s large archive. They are used with his kind permission ©Tim Page. These and many more can be viewed on his website timpage.com.au and in Nam Contact .

In Country

Postscript: Journey’s end – Tim Page’s wild ride

At 4.15pm on Wednesday 24th August 2022, after a relatively short illness, our friend and neighbour Tim Page, photographer, writer and humanist, passed away peacefully at his bush home in Fernmount, Bellingen Shire, on the mid north coast of NSW. e: Journey’s end – photographer Tim Page’s wild ride

Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore
You may not see me tomorrow
Bob Dylan

Friends of acclaimed Anglo-Australian photographer, writer and humanist Tim Page, gathered from all across the shire, from the mountains to the sea, and from around Australia on Saturday 10th September to bid him farewell at his bush home in Fernmount next to Tarkeeth Forest to bid him farewell. Bellingen’s resident square-tailed kite did a fly past as if to salute him, and as we sat around the campfire under a full moon, a bevy of fireflies emerged from the forest like faeries coming for to carry him home.

Tim had departed this mortal realm at 4.15pm on Wednesday 24th August 2022, after a relatively short illness. He been sleeping most of the time during those last few days when we dropped by on our way over the hill. We knew it was very close as we’d visited several times, and almost at the exact time of his passing, we’re were actually driving by but decided not to disturb him.

The international and social media response to Tim’s death was astounding and almost instantaneous. Within hours, tributes had been published and posted all over the world. The New York Times published an excellent eulogy, as did the Sydney Morning Herald. The Guardian presented an excellent gallery of his work. An interview by the ABC with Ben Bohane, photojournalist and author and longtime friend and mentee, is both poignant and precise. We had the pleasure of meeting Ben when he visited Bellingen and spent several days with Tim immediately before his death.

He was given a fine send-off. As one mourner noted in a Facebook tribute, “It was a long, melancholic, yet kind of wonderful weekend … the kind of gathering he’d have loved, crammed with people he cared about, the Stones and Dylan rolling out over the Birds of Paradise grove in the gully, a grassy aroma in the air, and tales of his misdemeanors, wisdom and humanity prompting chuckles and affirmations as a light breeze loosened leaves and sent them down in lazy spirals onto his wicker casket …”

Fine eulogies were delivered by Tim’s “brothers” in photo-journalism who’d worked with him over all over the world and down the years. There were tales of battlefields and bar-rooms, of recovery and resilience, of road trips and revelries, of incidents and accidents.

Tim Page 1944-2022

Tim Page 1944-2022

I spoke too, as a friend and a forest neighbour, and also, as a resident of Bellingen Shire. We’d had the privilege and pleasure of sitting with Tim for many an hour during the three months of his decline. We talked of was and when, of our childhoods in Nineteen Fifties England, of life in our valley, of history and politics and of his long and colourful career – and we were able to say goodbye to him in person four days before the end.

This is what I said …

Journey’s End

Living just over the hill, and forever dropping in here at paradise park, Adèle and I spent many an hours sharing stories and gossip with Tim and his partner Marianne and her sister Annette, who we farewelled right here just over a year ago. We all shared a common English heritage, having all grown up in postwar Britain with its rationing, blandness and monochrome conformity – in the midst of the Cold War and under the shadow of the mushroom cloud.

During the three months of his decline, Tim and I would reminisce about our common boyhoods in nineteen fifties England before we both split for foreign parts. 

We were into bicycles with drop handlebars and comics like The Beano and illustrated stories about “the war” – which was still a lived experience for the adults around us whilst the sons and brothers of our friends and acquaintances were called up for national service. We’d built the same Airfix aeroplane kits and hung our trophies from our bedroom ceilings – Tim’s are now hanging in his archive bunker over yonder. I believe he still has his Hornby train set and, no doubt, his Meccano – folks here of a certain vintage will know what I mean. He was and remained a great collector of stuff. He even picked up a UN Toyota “technical” utility truck in Bosnia and brought it back here. [Author’s note: he eventually gave the truck to a friend up the valley and it saw service as a water carrier during the devastating wildfires of our 2019-20 Black Summer]

In the sixties, we’d listened to the same music, and used some of the same drugs – me, much less than he. We both took to the Hippie Trail from Europe to Asia taking the ‘overland’ road that decades later would be called ‘the Hippie Trail’.

But Tim had already been two years “in country” when I was demonstrating in front of the US embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square against what Kenny Rodgers would call “that crazy Asian war”. 

Tim virtually ambled into the Vietnam War, the last of the “great” wars of the Twentieth Century, and though photography was a teenage hobby, in Vietnam, he drifted into the profession almost by accident. The war was a conflict with many names, but the best is probably one from Ken Burns great documentary: “chaos without a compass”. Tim navigated it cannily if carelessly for several but left ‘Nam a few years later critically injured in a minefield and indeed clinically dead in a medivac chopper. Post-op and recuperating in the US, Tim took himself off to Woodstock, New York State. where it was being said that there was going be a cool scene – which indeed there was, as we all remember:  the famous music festival held over three days in August 1969 on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York (65 km) southwest of the town of Woodstock. But Tim never got to hear any of the great music – complications from his injuries meant that he had to be medivacced out of Woodstock, probably on the same chopper that had just brought in the legendary Crosby, Stills and Nash.

Tim told us the clear-felled Tarkeeth Forest to our immediate south, just beyond those trees, reminded him of those Vietnam battlegrounds – indeed, the use of fires and herbicides in Forestry Corporation’s “forest re-establishment” reminded him of the devastation wrought by the defoliant Agent Orange in that unfortunate country. Ironically, Agent Orange may have contributed to his illness. He was unable to have MRI scans because of the shrapnel fragments in his liver from one of his many close encounters with the Grim Reaper. 

Listening to Tim’s stories, you wonder whether this peregrinating, ever-restless bloke had more lives than a cat! When he was first diagnosed in early May, as Adèle and sat on his hospital bed, I remarked that he’d already used up his nine lives. He replied: “No matter how many times you’ve faced the prospect of death, you’re never prepared for it”.

But, when the end came, he faced it with stoicism and courage. I hope that when we get there, we’ll all be as brave. 

Farewell wild rover.

Your’s was a life well lived, and to borrow from Rudyard Kipling, filling the unforgiving minute of the unrelenting day with sixty seconds worth of distance run.

As Bob Dylan sang, “Time is an ocean but it ends at the shore – you may not see me tomorrow”.

Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
Jim Morrison 1967

This painting by his friend Joanne Brooker portrays his long and eventful journey.

Tim Page by Joanne Brooker

Also in In That Howling Infinite: The Ballad of Denton Crocker – a Vietnam elegy ; and Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold – 1968 revisited

Nam Contact: Symphonic coda to Tim Page’s Vietnam

 

Children of Abraham

Paul Hemphill 5 Comments

The ancient and holy city of Hebron – al Khalil to Muslims, and named, like Hebron for the Jewish and Islamic patriarch Abraham/Ibrahim – is rarely out of the news; and the news is never good. “There’s this thing that happens here, over the Hell Mouth”, says Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “where the way a thing feels – it kind of starts being that way for real. I’ve seen all these things before – just not all at once”.

In May 2016, we visited Hebron, a fault line of faiths and a front line of an old war still being waged for possession of the Holy Land. It is a hot spot, a flash-point, where tensions between Israelis and Palestinians are usually followed by calamity, and bad things happen. It is the seemingly intractable conflict in the raw, a microcosm of the Occupation, and there is no denying the brutality of the place. Most western journalists and commentators give their readers an impression that Israel absolutely dominates this Palestinian city of some 200,000 souls. In reality, the area under military control, immediately surrounding the ancient Ibrahimi mosque, holy to two faiths, is very small. But in this pressure cooker of a ghetto reside some 700 settlers and thirty thousand Palestinians, segregated from each other by walls and wire, fear and loathing – and by two soldiers to every settler.

On our return, the e-magazine Muftah published the following article.

Children of Abraham and the Battle for Hebron

You who build these altars now to sacrifice these children, you must not do it anymore.
A scheme is not a vision and you never have been tempted by a demon or a god.
You who stand above them now, your hatchets blunt and bloody – you were not there before,
When I lay upon a mountain and my father’s hand was trembling with the beauty of the word.
Leonard Cohen, The Story of Isaac

I recently returned from Hebron in the occupied West Bank. The city is a fault line of faiths and a front line in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. It is a “hot spot,” a flash-point, a place where tensions between Israelis and Palestinians are usually followed by calamity. Hebron has been a key focus of the tension and violence that has characterized the troubled relationship between Palestinians and Israelis. Since October 2015, over 200 Palestinians and thirty Israelis have been killed across the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Israel, in the latest flare-up in the decades-long conflict.

In March this year, an Israeli soldier was filmed shooting and killing a wounded twenty-one-year-old Palestinian, following a stabbing attack on Israeli soldiers. The soldier, just nineteen years of age, is now facing trial, amidst massive outcry on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.. In June, not long after we left Israel, a young Palestinian murdered a thirteen-year-old Israeli girl as she slept in nearby Kiryat Arba. Hours later, a Palestinian woman was shot dead by Israeli soldiers outside of the Ibrahimi Mosque. Later that afternoon, Palestinian gunmen ambushed an Israeli car on a road just south of Hebron, killing a father and wounding his family. Local Palestinians gave emergency first aid to the victims and shielded the children from any further attack.

A Holy Land

Hebron has long been sacred to Muslims and Jews as the last resting place of the prophets Abraham and Isaac – the founding father of Judaism, and the son he had resolved to sacrifice until God ordered him to stay his hand. In the first century BC, Herod the Great, famed builder and bad boy, raised a mighty mausoleum above the cave where Abraham was laid to rest. Abraham’s wife Rachel, and his son, Isaac, Isaac’s wife Rebecca, and Isaac’s sons Joseph and Jacob – whose wrestled with an Angel to represent man’s struggle with God –  and Jacob’s wife Leah are also buried there.

As time went by, Christians and then Muslims revered Hebron as a holy place. Abraham was the founding father of both religions and his sons and grandsons, buried in the cave, are considered prophets of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In time, a mosque was established on Herod’s edifice, and for a short while, during the hundred years of the Crusader kingdom, a basilica too.

In the thirteenth century, the Mamluk Sultan Baybars expelled the Christians from Hebron. A small community of Jews continued to reside in the town of Hebron, however. In 1929, amidst rising religious and nationalist tension in the British Mandate of Palestine, some seventy Jewish men, women, and children were killed by Palestinians who had been incited to violence by rumours that Jews planned to overrun the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam. Many local Palestinians also helped save Jewish neighbors from the bloodshed. Following the riots, Hebron’s Jewish community largely ceased to exist, until the an-Naksa, or ‘setback’, of 1967, when Israeli military forces occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan Heights.

In the early days of the occupation, Israeli authorities did not encourage Jews to return to Hebron. One of the first illegal Israeli settlements was established outside Hebron in what is now Kiryat Arba, and thereafter, a small settlement was built around the Mosque of Ibrahim. Beginning in 1979, some Jewish settlers moved from Kiryat Arba to the former Jewish neighborhood near the Abraham Avinu Synagogue which had been destroyed in 1929. Other Jewish enclaves were established with the Israeli army’s support and more homes were subsequently purchased or forcibly taken over from their Palestinian owners.

With the establishment of a Jewish presence in and around Hebron, the religious right-wing demanded that Jews be permitted to pray at the tombs of the patriarchs, and the 700 years old restriction on Jews praying here was lifted. Muslims and Jews were now obliged to share the holy place, although it was formally administered by the Muslim Waqf. Thus, even prayer became a focus of conflict and tension, and sometimes, violence, particularly during each faith’s holy days.

Tensions and Divisions

Since 1979, tensions have continued to increase between the small community of Israeli settlers living in Hebron (several hundred) and the tens of thousands of Palestinians whose lives have been turned upside down by their presence. These tensions reach boiling point in February 1994, when US-born Israeli doctor Baruch Goldstein opened fire on Muslims worshippers during the dawn prayer at the Ibrahimi Mosque. He killed twenty-nine people and wounded another 125 before he was overcome and killed by survivors. Hundreds more Palestinians were killed or injured in the Israeli military’s response to the ensuing violence.

Goldstein had been inspired by a boyhood mentor, the ultranationalist New York Rabbi Meir Kahane, and had belonged Kahane’s militant Jewish Defence League, founded ostensibly to protect Jews from antisemitism, but implicated in numerous acts of violence in the USA  and elsewhere. On emigrating to Israel, he joined Kahane’s right-wing Kach Party.

The Israeli government condemned the massacre and responded by arresting Kahane’s followers, and criminalizing Kach and affiliated organizations as terrorists, forbidding certain settlers from entering Palestinian towns, and demanding that those settlers turn in their army-issued weapons. It rejected a demand by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation that all settlers in the occupied territories be disarmed and that an international force be created to protect Palestinians.

UN observers came to keep the peace, but, after Israeli and Palestinian authorities could not reach agreement on resolving the situation, they departed. The Hebron Protocol was signed in January 1997 by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat under the supervision of US Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Under its terms, Hebron was divided into in two. H1, 80% of the city, and home to over 120,000 Palestinians, was placed under the Palestinian Authority’s control. H2, which was home to nearly 40,000, was placed under the exclusive control of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in order to protect some 600 Israeli Jewish settlers who lived in the area. 

Jewish Israelis were barred from entering HI, whilst Palestinians found it nearly impossible to Access H2 unless they lived there. Palestinian residents of H2 experienced forcible displacement, restrictions on their movement, the closure of their businesses, IDF checkpoints and searches, and verbal and physical harassment by settlers protected by the IDF. 

In a surreal, sad parody, the mosque too was divided, with a separate mosque and synagogue. The IDF controls access, closing it to Muslims on Jewish holy days and to Jews on Muslim holy days. There are frequent bans on the call to prayer on the grounds that it disturbs the settlers, and likewise on exuberant 

Dual Narrative

We travelled to Hebron on a “dual narrative tour”. It was run by Abraham Tours, which operates out of the Abraham Hostel at Davidka Square in Jerusalem, and caters for independent and mainly young travelers on limited budgets. One half of the tour was conducted by a Palestinian guide and the other by a Jewish guide. They walked us though the streets surrounding the Mosque of Ibrahim, and gave us the opportunity to meet and talk with several members of each of the communities.

We visited the Muslim side of the mosque, which retained the wide prayer hall, the empty catafalques of Isaac and Rebecca, the qibla and minbar, and the beautiful dome; and the larger Jewish side, which was, once upon a time, the open courtyard leading to the mosque. Abraham and Sarah occupy the neutral ground between the two halves.

The area around the divided holy place is a ghost town. On one flank, a deserted street is patrolled by young Israeli soldiers in full battle gear, leading to the settler neighborhood. On the other side, past checkpoints and security screening, is Shuhada  (martyrs) Street, an impoverished souq with more shops locked up than open, a small number of Palestinian storeowners, and a bevy of children endeavoring to sell us souvenirs. Above the few shops that are still open, there is a wire mesh to catch rocks, garbage, and various unmentionables thrown at Palestinians from Israeli settler families who have literally occupied the higher ground, abutting and overlooking the souq.

Scapegoating the Other

The Palestinians we met told us that Jewish settlers have been trying to drive them out of H2, to claim it for themselves, and that they will resort to all manner of harassment to do so, including throwing stones, and assaulting Palestinian children on their way home from school. Indeed, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recently confirmed that movement restrictions, along with on-gong settler violence, reduced income, and restricted access to services and resources, has led to a reduction in the area’s Palestinian population. 

It is a desperate, hard life for all the Palestinians who live there. They cling on, refusing to leave or sell their ancestral homes. Offers, some very large, have been made in the past, but people will not trade their birthright, even when they are faced with physical threats to their lives. One Palestinian whose home we visited told me that his late wife was shot by Israeli soldiers, while his children were attacked by settlers. Nowadays, he and his few neighbors have no choice but to remain or flee without compensation as the Palestinian Authority has forbidden selling property to the settlers. And so they remain, in poverty and punishment.

The rebuilt and refurbished settler zone is a mix of run-down apartments. waste grounds, new community buildings and playgrounds, and a street of shops that once served the settlers’ needs but are now locked and neglected in a dusty, empty street. Here, the settlers too play the victim card, claiming that they area harassed, insulted, and killed. We met the administrator of the small Jewish museum and library who told us of how her grandfather was killed in 1929, and how her father was killed by an assailant in his own home. 

Today there are two Israeli soldiers for every Jewish settler. They are youngsters, barely out of high school. Heavily armed and nervous. With the power to end or destroy the lives of the Palestinians they occupy, many of them youths just like themselves. 

“You who build these altars then to sacrifice these children, you must not do it any more”.

If only it was that simple on the fault line of faith and nation.

Below is a selection of photographs taken during our visit.

Read more in In That Howling Infinite on the Middle East : A Middle East Miscellany

You can read more about the pain and passion of Hebron here:
http://www.sacred-destinations.com/israel/hebron-tombs-of-the-patriarchs
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_conflict_in_Hebron

Author’s Note: 
Whenever I pen commentaries such as this, people ask why I rarely forward my own opinion on the issues I am presenting or discussing. On the contrary, I would argue that my views are fairly transparent in the subjects I chose to engage with, the words I use, and the vein in which I use them.

With respect to my numerous posts about Israel and Palestine, and the Middle East in general, I  come to my conclusions from a political science and sociology perspective – that’s where my academic experience came from – and a background in conflict resolution, supported by study and travel. If I do on occasions display any particular bias, it. originates in my longtime interest, understanding and affection for the history, politics and culture of the region, of its geography and archaeology, and  of its people of all faiths and nationalities that I make my observations.

I am presently working on a piece that encapsulates my thoughts on this complex and controversial subject. But meanwhile, here is a brief exposition.

I do believe that the systematic dispossession of almost a million Palestinians and the destruction of half of their towns and villages in 1948 is Israel’s original sin. It is the primal stain that colours and corrupts all that followed. And yet, if not for the actions, often daring, often brave, often questionable, and often deplorable, of the politicians and soldiers of 1948 – and of the generations that folllowed –  Israel would not exist today. This paradox is addressed sympathetically by Avi Shalit in My Promised Land, referred to above, and scathingly by ‘new history’ scholar Ilan Pappe in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.   

The Occupation, fifty years old this year, which grew out of the unexpectedly total victory of June 1967, has taken on strategic, ideological and indeed messianic dimensions by many in the  Israeli government and political elite. It compounded the original sin, deepened the primal stain, released the demons of messianic fervour, and wounded Israel’s soul. The settlements locked the nation into the the colonialist project. With the close-call of the Yom Kippur War, the violence and murder of the first and second Intifadat, and present Palestinian jaquerie, Israel’s heart has not just hardened, it has become sclerotic.

I admit that I have always been sympathetic towards Israel – from my first visit in 1972. But it is not a blinkered viewpoint. I am deeply critical of Israeli politics and policies, and have no respect for many of its leaders.

Ayelet Shaked, the nationalist’s La Passionaria, and her boss Naftali Bennett do not not represent ALL Israelis! They hold extremist views just like we in UK, US, and Australia have parties and individuals with extremist views. But there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis who oppose the present government and long for justice and peace. And if – a very big “if” – Arab Israelis and the Israeli left could work together, they could obtain a majority in the Knesset and change Israel’s politics.

Yet meanwhile, Binyamin Netanyahu and his nationalist allies call all the shots, the Israelis continue to control and exploit the land, its people, and its resources, whilst varying degrees of annexation are on the cards. The settlements are an abomination, as are the policies and practices of the state and its occupying army, as described by Lyons and others. There’s no escaping these facts.

But I am likewise critical of Palestinian governance, politics and politicians. Hamas and the PA are on the nose in their respective fiefdoms, and if a moderate “third force” were to arise – and survive, because sure as hell, they would risk being murdered – Palestinians who just want a quiet, normal life, adequate services, and opportunities for their children, and Israelis who want likewise, might – just might – reject their extremist, dogmatic, entrenched leaders and reach some form of modus vivendi.

Palestinians themselves have to take control of their own lives, kick out their corrupt leaders, cease inculcating their children with hatred and jihadism, and use all that international good will and dollars to build a viable economy that can provide jobs, opportunities, and security, economic and physical to the people. Only this way will they be inoculated against cronyism, corruption and extremism. And yet, the dead hand of a moribund, patriarchal, conservative and ethnocentric culture holds them back –  but that is the subject of another, future discussion for In That Howling Infinite.

Today, the ‘powers that be’, defenders and beneficiaries of a status quo that looks more like a cul de sac, predominate over a dispiriting array of competing, clamouring factions, left, right, nationalist, secular, tribal, Haredi, and Islamist alike. New, young, brace, local voices in both Israel and Palestine, are not heard.

So what happens next?

I get that question too. And I am perennially reluctant to venture an answer beyond one that runs like “on the one hand…but then on the other”.  I inevitably fall back on Robert Fisk’s response to the same question with regard to the calamitous freezing over of the Arab Spring and the fall and rise again of the same old autocrats and tyrants: “my crystal ball is broken”. It’s a cop out, really, but just as cogent as that famous line in that UK spy drama Spooks: “What’s gong to happen to me?” “Bad things!”

One thing is for sure: as songwriter Warren Zevon sang, “the hurt gets worse, and the heart get harder”.

October 8th 2017

For more posts on Jerusalem, Israel and the Middle East, visit:
https://m.facebook.com/HowlingInfinite/
https://m.facebook.com/hf1983/

See also, my collection of posts about Jerusalem, and A 

Hebron May 2016

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Hebron May 2016

Hebron 2016

Hebron 2016

Hebron 2016

Hebron 2016

 

The Boys of Wexford – memory and memoir

Paul Hemphill 7 Comments

We are the boys of Wexford, who fought with heart and hand
To burst in twain the Saxon chain, and free our native land!
The Boys of Wexford, RD Royce 1898

Glory-o, Glory-o to her brave men who died
For the cause of long down-trodden man.
Glory-o to Mount-Leinster’s own darling and pride
Dauntless Kelly, the boy from Killane.
Patrick Joseph McCall, 1898

It was on this day in 1798, during the first great Irish rebellion against British dominion, that the Battle of Vinegar Hill took place at Inis Córthaid, now the second-largest town in County Wexford.

The Rebellion of 1798 (Éirí Amach) also known as the United Irishmen Rebellion, was an uprising against British rule in Ireland during the summer of ‘98. The United Irishmen, a republican revolutionary group influenced by the ideas of the American and French revolutions, were the drivers of the rebellion. It was led by Presbyterians irate at being shut out of power by the Anglican establishment whilst Catholics became increasingly involved. Plans called for significant French support, which never eventuated. The uprising was poorly organized, uncoordinated, and quickly suppressed by much more powerful British forces. Both sides indulged in bloody reprisals. Between 10,000 to 30,000 souls perished, most of them Irishmen and women of all denominations.

The rebellion raged Ireland-wide, but County Wexford was its heart. Overlooking the town, Vinegar Hill was the site of the largest camp and the headquarters of the Irish rebels who held County Wexford for thirty days against vastly superior English forces; and it was there, after inflicting several defeats upon the insurgents that the English sought to finally destroy the rebel army. Battle raged on Vinegar Hill itself and in the streets of Enniscorthy with considerable loss of life among both rebels and civilians. It marked a turning point in the rising, being the last attempt by the rebels to hold and defend ground against the British military.

The famous statue in the market square of Enniscorthy shows the doomed Father Murphy, a leader of the ’98, pointing the way to Vinegar Hill for a young volunteer, ‘The Croppy Boy’.

Father Murphy and The Croppy Boy

The Battle of Vinegar Hill, Enniscorthy

History – and indeed, our lives – have a way of echoing across the world and down the years. In 1804, Irish convicts in the far-away penal colony of New South Wales, raised the flag of rebellion against the British soldiery and the colonial masters they served. It was the only convict rising in Australia. Many of those convicts would have been involved in the ‘98, and transported to Botany Bay for their part in it. Their quixotic Intifada was crushed at a place they called Vinegar Hill after the Wexford battle. In 1979, having migrated to Australia, I visited what is believed to be the site of the convicts’ revolt, the Castlebrook lawn cemetery on Windsor Road, Rouse Hill, where a monument commemorating the revolt was dedicated in 1988, Australia’s bicentennial year. Once open farmland, a place of market gardens and horse riding (back in the day, Adèle and I would canter across its  gently rolling paddocks), it is now a suburban sprawl of McMansions.

The Battle of Vinegar Hill, New South Wales

Myth and memory often embellish the stories and the glories of oppressed people rising up against the power, but when we recall these oftimes forlorn hopes, from Spartacus to the Arab Spring, it is difficult to imagine ourselves, in our relatively comfortable, free and democratic countries, in the position of people desperate and passionate enough to risk life and limb and to face the terrible consquences of heroic failure.  We can but sense, vicariously, the ache and the urge behind Lord Byron’s passionate couplet:

Yet, Freedom! thy banner, torn, but flying,
Streams like the thunder-storm against the wind.

And ponder Seamus Heaney’s poignant Requiem for the Croppies:

The pockets of our greatcoats, full of barley
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people, hardly marching on the hike
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.

Father Murphy and me

I’ve always felt a connection with Vinegar Hill and “the boys of Wexford” who fought there.

In Birmingham, back in the early fifties, we lived with our aunt in a cold-water, back-alley walk-up on the border of Balsall Heath (just inside Moseley, a ‘better’ suburb). Aunty Mary was my mother’s mother’s sister. Her family had lived through Ireland’s war of independence and the civil war that followed, and she carried with her the memory of those times when she migrated to Birmingham before the Second World War – after her husband had run off “with another woman” (these things happened in Catholic Ireland). She lived in that same old house right through the Blitz when German bombers regularly targeted The Second City’s engineering, motor and arms factories, and not a few public buildings including the Piccadilly and Waldorf cinemas on nearby Stratford Road which were destroyed with considerable loss of life. Mary would serve tea to the bomb-disposal lads as they carried out their dangerous work. When her sister died and daddy Paddy (Patrick Joseph, my middle names) had decamped – he’d found a new Love – Mary brought their six children over to Birmingham from Enniscorthy one by one.

I never met nor learned what became of my grandfather. My aunt and mother would say that if Paddy Whelan died, the devil himself would come and tell us. Old Nick never did, but my brother Robert recently chased down the records. Paddy also crossed the water, passing on in Leicester – not that far from Brum – in 1985 at the age of eighty.

My father arrived in Brum by another road. He was born in Castlederg in County Tyrone. An Ulster man, indeed, and Protestant too, He and several of his brothers has likewise crossed the water in search of a new life. Most Ulster ‘Proddies’ migrated to Glasgow in those days – the original homeland of the the Protestant settlement of Ulster initiated by King James I of England and consolidated with Orange King Billy’s victory over the forces of catholic ex-king James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. you can read more about all that here, and its legacy in Northern Ireland here. How he and my mom got together is another story and quite unrelated to this one. But it had a lot to do with the times. geography, coincidence, miscommunication, innocence – and romance.

I was born in Mary’s house. She had a friend who had once given birth so that friend was the midwife. My brothers followed over the next two years. By then, the National Health Service had kicked in, and they were born in hospital. Childbirth, forever dangerous, was now rendered less life-threatening. There we all lived, three kids, our folks, Aunty Mary, three uncles, two aunts, a pekingese called Monty, named for the famous field Marshall, and an ancient white cat called Gorgee. Monty was flattened by a bus on Moseley Road, right outside our home.

Three bedrooms, girls in one, boys in another, and our family in the third. Outside loo and coal shed, no bathroom or hot water (we kids bathed in the kitchen sink and grown-ups went down to The Baths). Cold and damp, and close to the shops. And there we lived until 1956 when a council house in Yardley Wood became our first family home. Cold and colder running water that froze in winter, but it was at least inside the house; a bathroom with hot water heated in a big gas boiler; and an outside flush lavatory that was nevertheless immediately adjacent to the backdoor and not down in the garden. A big garden it was too, for winter and spring vegetables, snowmen and summer camp-outs.

There we grew, with free medical treatment for all our ailments, and free optical and dental care. I still have crooked teeth – no fancy orthodontics on the NHS – but I have all my teeth still. And my eyesight. We were educated for free. This came in during the war with the Butler Act. So, thanks to the Welfare State, we were housed and healthy enough to get to primary school and beyond. Once there, we had free books, free pens and paper and compulsory sport, and doctors and nurses would turn up on a regular basis to check our vitals. And thus, we were able to reach the glorious ‘sixties ready to rock ‘n roll.

In 1956, my uncle took me “across the sea to Ireland” to meet our family – my mother’s, that is. Dad was a proddie from County Tyrone, and we didn’t talk about them. We stayed in the tiny terrace house in Patrick Street where my mother was born in 1928, a crowded place with an outside toilet and a whitewashed back wall that looked out onto windswept fields beyond.

Uncle Sonny (Philip, really, but knicknamed for Al Jolson’s famous song), took me to the top of Vinegar Hill, and it’s lonely ruined round tower, used then as a shelter for cattle. We visited the statue of Father John Murphy and the young volunteer, and I learned the story of The Croppy Boy. Today, the term “croppy” is used derogatively to refer to a country bumpkin. Back then, it also referred to the young patriots who answered to the call “at the rising of the moon”. Their name came from their cropped hair – interpreted by some at the time as symbolic of the rejection of the powdered wigs of the gentry and also of the style popularised by French revolutionaries. Sonny took me to The Bloody Bridge on the outskirts of town where Father Murphy was tortured and executed by the English soldiers, the ‘yeos’ (or yeomen). I put my fingers in the groove in the  bridge’s stone parapet, said to have been made by the dying priest himself. We walked across the bridge in Wexford Town where so many martyrs perished at the hands of the foe – and, alas, so many innocents were murdered by the rebels. Little matter that the bridge we now trode was the third built there since those fateful days.

History was alive, and it was black and white. People remembered, as if it was yesterday, how Oliver Cromwell cut a bloody swathe through Catholic Ireland and massacred the innocents of Wexford town. It was said that people hung Cromwell’s picture upside down in their living rooms, and turned his face to the wall for good measure. Relatives would recount how the Black and Tans, the English paramilitaries raised to terrorise the populace, held their bayonets to women’s throats demanding “where’s your husband?”…or father…or son…Even the English teachers at my English grammar school would remark that the ‘Tans were war veterans who’d survived carnage of the Western Front and wanted more.

In the summer of 1969 my brother and I and an old chum spent several weeks in an Enniscorthy that looked and felt felt like it had not changed since Aunty Mary’s day – so well portrayed in the academy award nominated film Brooklyn. Dressed as we were in hippie garb and sporting long locks, we cut incongruous figures in the pubs and at the local hop, and were so unsuccessful hitchhiking around the county that we walked many a long Irish mile. We hiked to Killane, Sean Kelly’s country, and inspired by the song, climbed upwards though heath and hedge to the top of Mount Leinster. We stayed at 13 Patrick Street, and spent a lot of time sitting up on Vinegar Hill, beneath its round tower, looking down on the River Slaney and the town beyond. My brother was a keen photographer, and he took the following pictures:

The Croppy Boy 1969

Enniscorthy from atop Vinegar Hill August 1969

Enniscorthy Sunset August 1969

Fast forward into another century, and I was “on the Holy Ground once more”. Adèle and I attended the wedding of an old pal and cosmic twin (born on the same day as me at about the same time, in English town beginning with B) we were the only Brits in a seminar at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Back then, SOAS was known to many Arabs as the school of spies, a status I was reminded of by the owner of our hotel when we all visited Damascus in 2006. But I digress.

The wedding was held at an old pub in right in the heart of Ireland, and in getting there, we did a whistle-stop tour of the south, including Enniscorthy, Wexford and Ross, the heartland of the ‘98 rebellion. When I first visited Enniscorthy, you could lie down in the middle of the Main Street and not be disturbed by traffic. This time, you could still lie down in th middle of Main Street – we were stuck in a traffic jam as we wound up the hill past Saint Aiden’s Cathedral to Patrick Street, which was no longer on the edge of town. The old house was still standing, as the song goes. Clean and crisp and pebble-dashed. As we stood outside number thirteen, a young goth girl in a multicoloured hoodie with tattoos and piercings opened the door. I told her how my mother and her brothers and sisters were born in this very house a long, long time ago, and that we’d come all the way from Australia to see it. “You don’t say!” she said.

13 Patrick Street, August 2004

Vinegar Hill August 2004

I was best man at that wedding, and in a speech largely devoted to the groom and our mutual, lifelong appreciation of Bob Dylan, I was able to relate to guests young and old tales of my Irish childhood, taking us all “down the foggy ruins of time”, and sang extracts from songs I actually did learn at my mothers knee. When I was little, mother Mary would march us up and down the parlour as she sang Enniscorthy’s songs of rebellion: Kelly the Boy From Killane, Boulavogue, and the eponymous Boys of Wexford.  “In comes the captain’s daughter, the captain of the Yeos …” – I’ve always wondered what became of that young rebel lass. Transported to Australia with hundreds of others, maybe? The songlines of my Celtic twilight.

We were told that such songs were banned in Britain, and that we must never sing them in public. There’s nothing so tempting as forbidden fruit. A relative brought us over Irish Songs of Freedom, sung in a sweet tenor by Willie Brady – a daring deed indeed, listening to it was,   and perhaps my first act of rebellion. We know now that this was all a cod. The Clancy Brothers were singing those rebel songs to packed houses the length and breadth of the British Isles and North America. And today, of course, you lose count of the collections and anthologies of Irish songs of freedom, rebellion or resistance, sung with vim, vigour, and nostalgic gusto from the Clancy Brothers and Dubliners back in the day to Sinead O’Connor and Celtic Woman.

In true men, like you men – songs of ‘98

So, on this, the two hundredth and twentieth anniversary of Vinegar Hill, let us remember the patriot men with a few of those old songs.

At Vinegar Hill o’er the pleasant Slaney
Our heroes vainly stood back to back
And the yeos at Tullow took Father Murphy
And burnt his body upon the rack
God grant you glory, brave Father Murphy
And open heaven to all your men
The cause that called you may call tomorrow
In another fight for the green again
Boulavogue Patrick Joseph McCall 1898

The song commemorates local parish priest Father John Murphy, he of the statue in he market place, who led his parishioners into battle in Wexford. Father Murphy and the other rebel leaders were captured and executed. He was hanged, decapitated, his corpse burnt in a barrel of tar, and his head placed on a spike as a warning to other rebels.

Enniscorthy is in flames and old Wexford is won
And tomorrow the barrow will cross
On the hill o’er the town we have planted a gun
That will batter the gateway to Ross
All the Forth men and Bargy men will march o’er the heath
With brave Harvey to lead in the van
But the foremost of all in the grim gap of death
Will be Kelly, the boy from Killane
Patrick Joseph McCall 1898

Sean Kelly was one of the leaders of the ‘98, celebrated for his role in then Battle of Ross, where he was wounded. After the fall of Wexford on 21 June, he was dragged from his sick bed, tried and sentenced to death and hanged on Wexford Bridge along with seven other rebel leaders. His body was then decapitated, the trunk thrown into the River Slaney and the head kicked through the streets before being set on display on a spike as a warning to others…Bad times for brave men.

Some on the shores of distant lands
Their weary hearts have laid,
And by the stranger’s heedless hands
Their lonely graves were made;
But though their clay be far away,
Beyond the Atlantic foam,
In true men, like you, men,
Their spirit’s still at home.
Who Fears to Speak of ‘98, John Kells Ingram 1843

See also, Irish Rebel Music, and A Selection of songs of ’98.

And in In That Howling Infinite, see Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody

Rocky Road to Heaven’s Gate

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

And it’s oh, what a beautiful,        
Oh, Oh Lord, what a beautiful city
Twelve gates to the city, hallelujah!
Reverend Gary Davis

We all have a city or, if we are fortunate, cities of our heart. A place you see for the first time and say “I am home”.  It is intangible – a feeling, a sense of you belonging to it, and it belonging to you. You might call it a “spirit of place”. And whenever you return to your city of the heart, you feel that you’ve never been gone, that the years that have passed since your last visit, and the changes time has wrought on it and on yourself mean nought.

I felt this spirit the first time entered London with a bunch of Birmingham school mates on a spree. When I first saw Paris. And when I first crossed the Jebal ash-Sharqi from Lebanon and descended to the oasis that was Damascus.

And so too when first I set eyes on the Old City of Jerusalem, and walked through the Damascus Gate. This ancient gate was the portal to a city that has forever danced on the edge of my consciousness (for that it what these cities do).

I fear that I will not see Damascus again. Back in the day, I was drawn to it again and again. When i spent months in Jordan, I would travel by “service” taxi once a week to Damascus just to BE there. To eat bouza ice cream at Bakdash in the Souk al Hamidiyye. To sit quietly in al Takiyya al-Sulaymaniyya, the most beautiful little mosque I have ever visited. To walk into history along The Street Called Straight. The guards on both sides of the border knew me by name.

Damascus is beyond my reach today. but there is still Jerusalem, Yrushahlahyim, al Quds. the Holy, the Golden, the magical…

Back in the day, I would roll down from Ramallah or Mount Scopus to Jerusalem and stand before it’s faux mediaeval walls. I would walk through the Damascus Gate into the Old City, grab a felafel sandwich, some figs, or a plate of kanafah, depending on the time of day, and amble contentedly through the alleyways and souks down to the Via Dolarosa, and then up Daoud Street to Omar Ibn al Khatab Square and the Jaffa Gate beyond. Traveling back from West Jerusalem, I would retrace my steps, and always with the same sense of wonder and delight.

It was a journey of the senses – the call of the muezzin and the peal of church bells, the cacophony of the hustle and bustle of the marketplace, the colours of the markets and shops, the aromas of spices, sweets, and cooking meats, the infinite variety of dress and custom of the many faiths, tribes and communities that dwelt therein or, like me, were passing through. If I had time on my hands, I would sit for a while in the gardens atop the Haram ash-Sharif, or wander into the Dome of the Rock or al Aqsa to sit and ponder awhile, or else progress through ecstatic clamour of the Escher edifice that is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

The Occupation was relatively new then. I was not oblivious to it, but rather, very aware of its manifestations. I had crossed from Jordan, via the famous Allenby Bridge, and had watched my fellow bus passengers, Palestinians, endure the humiliating searches and questions  of the border police, whilst armed military patrols were commonplace. None expected it to endure, ossify, and drag on for fifty years. There was bitterness, shame, and anger, for the memory of an-Naksa of 1967 was fresh, and the wounds livid, but not the frustration and  hopelessness and the latent and actual violence that prevails today.

But, let’s return to the Damascus Gate.

Damascus Gate Thursday

Damascus Gate Thursday

It has been in the news a a lot of late. The recent and still ongoing Intifada Saki-niyeh – the Knife Intifada – has brought this venerable and famous gate into the world’s focus. It has been the site of many violent confrontations of between Palestinian protesters and Israeli security since  October 2015. Many Palestinians have been killed and wounded in the act of attempting to stab Israelis, and several  Israeli police men and women and civilians have been killed or injured.

In recent years, whenever the Israeli authorities, fearing unrest, prohibit access to the Haram ash Sharif for men under fifty years of age, the Gate has become a de facto place of worship as scores of Muslims pray in the open spaces in front of a gate that has now acquired nationalist and religious significance – most recently, the stand-off in July 2017.

Nazmi Jubeh, a professor at Birzeit University notes that the gate “has become a symbol for the Palestinian national struggle because of its accessibility to Palestinians and the main connecting point for both worshippers and for markets.” See Daoud Khuttab’s article in the Middle East newsletter al Monitor – the piece which inspired me to write this post.

Kuttab quotes Azzam Soud, a well-known Palestinian writer whose stories are often set in Jerusalem. The Damascus Gate, he says, is a recurring feature of Palestinian novels and short stories.

It is the Old City’s biggest, oldest, and most important gate, and the beginning of all roads to the north. Today, it stands beside the bus station that services East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and is the most direct access to the al Aqsa Mosque and the Khan Ezzat souk. Before 1948 and the division of Jerusalem, the gate competed with the Jaffa Gate which was the primary entry point for pilgrims. With the partition line running in front of it, the Jaffa Gate was unusable, but since 1967, has been the portal for tourists, pilgrims, and Jewish worshippers visiting the Kotel. The Damascus Gate remains the main entry for Palestinians.

And it will remain, at least for the foreseeable future, a focus and a locus for Palestinian expressions of faith, identity and resistance.

But as with most things in the Holy City, the Gate has a long historical pedigree that is worth recalling.

Damascus Gate in 1856

Damascus Gate in 1856

In antiquity, there were twelve gates to the city. These were destroyed when the Bablylonians razed the walls and the Temple of Solomon.in 587 BCE. Named for the twelve tribes of Israel, these are now best remembered in Revelations and in the Reverend Gary Davis’ song.

The gate we see today was built in 1537 during the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. But its existence is very much older than that, as reflected in its Arabic name, Bab al ‘a-mu-d, the Gate of the Column. That refers to a victory column erected by the Romans in honour of the Emperor Hadrian in the second century. It was Hadrian who ordered the rebuilding of Jerusalem as a Roman city in the wake of the city’s destruction by Titus’ legions in 70CE, during the Great Revolt that saw the razing of the temple and the expulsion of most of the Jewish population. The remains of the Roman gates have now been excavated, and we pass under the lintel of that gate, this being inscribed with the name the Romans gave to Jerusalem, Aelia Capitolina.

The gate is situated in the northwest wall where the road leads to Nablus, and thence, in days long past, all the way to Damascus in Syria. Hence its name in Hebrew, Sha’ar Shkhem  or Nablus Gate, and in English, Damascus Gate. Imagine, travelers of old on foot or horseback and caravans of traders passing under that Roman lintel. And even before Hadrian, pilgrims like the biblical Jesus and his comrades would have entered Jerusalem the Golden through this gate to sacrifice at Herod’s massive and magnificent new temple, having journeyed from Galilee and places north. Saul of Tarsus would have set out from this portal on the fateful journey to Damascus that was to transform him into Paul of Tarsus, Christianity’s first and most celebrated missionary, and the catalyst who transmuted a breakaway Jewish sect into a world- wide religion.

The Roman gate was preserved and built upon during the Byzantine, Muslim, and Crusader occupations of Jerusalem, and was given its present form when under Suleiman’s orders, the walls of Jerusalem were rebuilt and seven of the eight gates used today were constructed. The eighth, the New Gate, was constructed in the mid nineteenth century to give Christian pilgrims swifter access to their Holy Places.

Imagine also then, Guy de Lausignan and Reynald de Chatilon at the head of twenty thousand crusaders setting out for their doomed rendezvous with Salah ad Din on the parched Horns of Hattin. Or Christian pilgrims and holy men walking the long miles through Anatolia and Syria to the Holy Places. Or Kaiser Wilhelm on his grand tour through the Sultan’s domain from Istanbul to Damascus and Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, the authorities opened the wall next to the Jaffa Gate so that he could ride through in state. In Damascus, he visited the tomb of Salah ad Din and considering it a little shabby, donated a new improved model. It is still there, in all its gaudy emptiness , alongside the real deal.

In an earlier post, I recounted the history of the Jaffa Gate, the westernmost of the Holy City’s eight gates. Over millennia, this was the pilgrims’ gate, the entry point for the faithful – for Jews come to worship and make sacrifice at the Temple of Solomon and later of that of Herod; and for Christians to walk in the footsteps of the Christ, and to worship at the oft-rebuilt Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the many other Holy Places that have drawn pilgrims to Jerusalem over the centuries. It is named for the port at which so many of these pilgrims disembarked. See my posts Amazing Grace: There’s Magic in the Air, The Grand Old New Imperial Hotel,  and Messianic Carpet Rides.

Read Israeli Sarah Tuttle Singer’s wonderful  tribute to al Wad Street: My Street Has Two Names. It’s a gem.

© Paul Hemphill  March 2016

Postscript

Here is a brief description of each of the eight gates of Jerusalem, counter-clockwise from south to west:

The Zion Gate: Bearing Jerusalem’s earliest biblical name in Hebrew and English, this gate’s  Arabic name is the Gate of the Prophet David, as the Tomb of King David on nearby Mount Zion, is but a short distance away. This gate leads directly to the Armenian and Jewish Quarters. It is also known as “the Hurt Gate”, a reference to the damage it sustained during a vicious firefight in 1948 when Hagannah soldiers fought and failed to lift the Arab Legion’s siege of the Jewish Quarter. The Quarter was razed to the ground and its inhabitants expelled, and was rebuilt when the Old City was taken by Israel in 1967.

 

The Zion or “Hurt” Gate

The Dung Gate: Its name derives from the refuse dumped here in olden days where the prevailing winds would carry odors away. Nehemiah 2:13 mentions a Dung Gate that was probably near this one. The gate leads directly to the Kotel, the famous Western Wall, and the Southern Wall Archaeological Park.

The Gate of Mercy: This gate, in the eastern wall of the Haram ash Sharif or Temple Mount is also called the Golden Gate or the Eastern Gate, and has been blocked for centuries.  It is said that when Christ returns in glory, and the dead are resurrected, this gate will be miraculously opened.

The Golden Gate, viewed from Gethsemene

The Lion’s Gate: This is named for the pair of ferocious looking carvings that flank it. They are tigers, the heraldic sigil of the blonde, blue-eyed, Albanian 13th Century Sultan Beybars. It is also called St. Stephen’s Gate, after the first Christian martyr, who tradition says was stoned nearby. Lion’s Gate, which leads to the Pools of Bethesda and the Via Dolorosa became famous during the Six Day War when the IDF stormed through en route to the Haram.

Herod’s Gate: Notwithstanding the name, the infamous Judean King, builder and all-round bad boy had nothing to do with this gate. In Arabic and Hebrew this north-facing gate, which leads to the Old City markets, is called the Gate of Flowers. It is said that the name derives from a rosette carved over it. The north facing gate leads to the Old City markets, and is at the southern end of Salah ad Din Street, the main shopping strip of Arab east Jerusalem.

And finally, The Damascus, New Gate, and Jaffa Gates all which are described in this post.

Faces in the Street – images of the Damascus Gate and the ancient Muslim Quarter

Sultan Suleiman Street

Damascus Gate

Damascus Gate

Al Wad Street

 

Al Wad Street

Khan al Zait

 

Al Zait Street

Al Wad Street

Via Dolorosa

Via Dolorosa

Al Daud Street

Allah ud Din Street

Allah ud Din Street

Khan al Zait

Khan al Zait