two journeys

It's been a while, and I had writer's constipation, so sorry for the bloat. I'll be more concise in the future. Anyhow, I'm back.


part 1: JFK to DAR

It's about 17 hours from JFK to DAR, plus a two-hour layover in Dubai, but it's an effortless, timeless journey, thanks to my Emirates Airline amusement pod, which has, by my estimate, close to 22,000 hours of digital media literally at my fingertips. There's a touchscreen on the seat in front of me, tilted upwards, and when the passenger ahead kicks back into relaxation mode the screen is shoved right under my nose. Forget the reading material I brought; I basically have no physical option but to watch the damn thing. Why fight it? There's comedy, sport, drama and news. There's Hollywood, Bollywood, Kollywood and Nollywood. On one audio channel an imam sings the Holy Qur'an in its entirety. Thirty channels up there's a Genesis box set, and thirty channels from that a Jeff Foxworthy routine on endless loop. The paradox of choice is baffling, crippling even, and, lost in this digital labyrinth, I simply end up watching The Hurt Locker three times in a row.

In all honesty, was I ever going to do any reading? The only book in my laptop bag is my sister’s battered copy of The Ambassadors, by Henry James, difficult under any circumstances and impossible in this micro-ecology of leisurely distractions. Who can parse the impenetrable sentences of a late Victorian novelist, widely praised but largely unread, when the brightly photographed duty-free catalog offers such delights as the $931 Etoile de Montblanc Ball Point pen ("A unique diamond floating in the transparent dome is cut in the shape of the renowned Montblanc emblem,”) and a $40 men's fragrance with the unfortunate label of Cockpit ("An unexpected name that sounds like an invitation to travel and adventure.")

I try to read during the layover, too, but I'm overstimulated now, thanks to a half-day of backlit magic and a $6 shot of espresso at the airport cafe. I overpaid for this beverage, of course, but in my defense I was still suffering from sticker shock, thinking originally that it cost $18, a forgivable mistake, since the word "dirham" (the UAE's currency) sounds an awful lot like "dollar", especially as mumbled by an indentured Filipino airport serf. Six dollars is too much for an espresso, but what do you expect? This is Dubai.


The Arab gentleman at the table next to me is reading The Lexus and the Olive Tree, which seems appropriate. Here we are, Mr. Thomas Friedman, in the Dubai airport, your corporate utopia, where everyone has elite status, everyone gets a business-class upgrade, everyone's a VIP. This is globalization through a lens of cosmopolitan cupidity, our cultural prejudices erased through our shared lust for gaudy objects and real estate, and you are its foremost proponent. You are the chronicler for this world, Mr. Friedman, with your specious reasoning and your turgid diction and your quadruply mixed metaphors. Never mind that this whole edifice is borrowed against time, collateralized against petrodollars, and erected against the back of underpaid labor. There is not room for that kind of subtlety in your analysis, not here in this cavernous hall of glass and steel.

Or is there? Henry James tells us of the "vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard, in which parts were not to be discriminated nor differences comfortably marked. It twinkled and trembled and melted together, and what seemed all surface one moment seemed all depth the next." And make no mistake, Emirates is Babylon, a fact attested to by your polyglot service crew, who speak English, Arabic, Spanish, Tagalog, Urdu, Hindu, Swahili, French, German, Afrikaans, Vietnamese and Twi. Emirates is Babylon, never more clear than on your approach to Dubai, where sits the world's tallest structure, the Burj Dubai, half a mile high and climbing, a brilliant, spiral tower that makes Biblical ambitions look modest. Emirates is Babylon, for before it sits the world, or more accurately The World, an insane, man-made archipelago of backfilled desert, impossibly large, now unfinished, flooded and bankrupt.


This is the surface, all surface one moment, but then all surface the next, and again the next. There is only surface in this world, and to look for depth is a fool's errand. Decadent, yes, like the Paris of The Ambassadors, but untempered by the delicate aesthetic sensibilities of that earlier century. Here the value of art is measured in dollars, and the dissection of commerce, too vulgar for mention in a previous age, is the only feasible topic of conversation. Here, melded as one, are the unappeasable appetites of Paris and the crass commercial instincts of Woollett, Massachusetts. The surfaces of our digital flatscreens grow as thin as tracing paper, and the depth behind them is only the foam of a seat cushion.

Because something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mister James?


2. airport to office

Leaving the plane in Dar Es Salaam I get my first taste of unconditioned air in over 20 hours. It's muggy and polluted but not unpleasant. We're directed into passport control, simultaneously with another arriving flight from Kenya, all of us pushed into an overcrowded crush of undeodorized humanity. I complete my swine flu questionnaire ("Have you recently come into contact with pigs or livestock?") and submit my application for a multiple-entry visa, which takes nearly an hour to get and costs one hundred US dollars, no small bills, no alternative currencies, and nothing minted before 2001.

Passed customs stands a crowd of embassy drivers and cabbies, and even though over 400 people have just disembarked there's more than enough cars to go around. It's a tough life for these drivers, with an ample oversupply of cars and only five flights a day at most. They never have any cell phone minutes and between fares their gas tanks sit close to empty. I suspect some of them will go days without a customer. I pick one at random and direct him to the peninsula, Dar's richest neighborhood, an enclave of overpaid World Bankers, NGO goldbrickers, and puffed-up ambassadorships.

Immediately, though, we hit the jam. It's about 20 kilometers from the airport to my office but I'll be spending the next two-and-half hours in the car. At my fingertips are exactly 0 hours of digital media. Nor even analog media, as the radio's busted, and touching its monochrome LCD flat screen produces only a fleeting black discoloration and a greasy fingerprint stain.

A hundred years ago Dar Es Salaam, was, like Tokyo, a sleepy fishing village, and, is now, like Tokyo, a sprawling metropolis. But, unlike Tokyo, Dar does not have a G20 tax base from which to draw, and the city’s infrastructure is hopelessly overworked. The traffic situation in particular is beyond bad, and the roads are clogged with left-driving used Japanese rental cars, shipped in by the boatload, from Tokyo, natch. Industrialization in the country has brought about a middle class, of sorts, and their first purchase is always a car.

"2003, 2004, not so bad," says Ali, my driver, an African Muslim who speaks only Swahili and broken English. "Now, look at this." And he's right. The roads were built in 1961, complete with roundabouts and boulevards, intended for colonial administrators to zip around unimpeded in their ragtop Aston Martins. Since then the city's population has doubled and decupled, and the highway has become a parking lot. It's difficult to foresee a solution. The country's economy has developed, a little, but the government has not. Arguably, it's regressed, with the consequence that any public infrastructure spending is a pipe dream, unfunded by a nation of tax cheats and black market activity. And any funds that are collected are easy pickings for the grabby hands of the country's corrupted political elite. It’s not so much that this place is a victim of globalization; it’s simply not a participant.


Still, there are worse places in the world to wait in traffic; the highway itself is a splendid display of confused, almost Boschian imagery, drawn from around the world, stripped of all context, and presented with a sort of ludic incoherence. To the left, a pickup truck covered in Mandarin glyphs. To the right a daladala full of Tanzanian schoolgirls, clad in hijabs and miniskirts. One giggles and points to a phone number on her upper thigh, scrawled in pen. Or is it hennaed? On the bus ahead, a crowded courtroom of black swastikas and flaming Real Madrid sigils, with a silkscreened portrait of the Rt. Hon. Christiano Ronaldo presiding. And there's Obama. And there's a weeping Christ. And there's the Sacred Mosque of Mecca, covered in black cloth with gold trim, and framed by two skyward-gazing tweenaged Muslimettes.

Between these static vehicles thread columns of street merchants, arms draped with fourth-rate crap. You want groundnuts? You want sugar cane? You want DVD? You want three-week-old issue of The Economist? You want knockoff watch? You want counterfeit Montblanc pen? (Not the Etoile, sadly.) I try to buy some scratch-off cell phone minutes, but Ali stays my hand and shoos the vendor away. “No. Probably fake.”

And with the merchants come the beggars. A mother with infant. A blind crone. A man with no hands, who forlornly gestures at my window with his stumps. A child, dressed in rags, missing a leg, on makeshift crutches.

Here is a world beyond the imaginings of Henry James, a world ignored by Thomas Friedman, but suitable for other writers, perhaps. I give the crippled kid a thousand-shilling note, and say, or at least think, "Hello, my Tiny Tanzanian Tim." And where is the Dickens to chronicle your story, as your father labors as a clerk for some South Asian Scrooge? Somewhere in Africa this writer must exist, and someday he will display to the rest of us to this forgotten and unconnected world from the bottom up. He must be a native, of course, an urban, educated elite, erudite and cosmopolitan but possessed of a great sensitivity. His work is unpublished as yet, or perhaps unread, or simply untranslated. Or maybe not a Dickens, but an Engels, an African Engels, the step-uncle to a century of revolutions, who will roam the streets of this modern Manchester, and record without ornamentation the horrors to be observed therein.

Until then you've got me, and, should you make it through the fustian prose and the pretentious references to 19th-century literary greats, I can promise, if not to report, nor to stir, nor to educate, at least to entertain. Welcome back.