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Abu Ivanka al-Amreeki and the Bureau des Étrangers
If you have a few minutes, read this essay by Peter Harling, The Syrian Trauma. He wrote it in September 2016, but I only discovered it about two weeks ago. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, though.
“Every now and then,” he wrote,
the conflict in Syria produces an iconic image of horror and suffering, which many brandish as an undisputable truth that will finally shake the world into “doing something.” Others break down at the sight of such images, or instinctively avert their senses. Mass killings and disappearances, industrial-scale torture and sexual abuse, gruesome staged executions, starvation tactics, the continued use of chemical weapons, napalm, cluster and barrel bombs, not to forget the torments of desperate emigration – all have spawned morbid emblems of their own.
“Arguably, all conflicts are traumatic,” he continues,
… Syria seems nonetheless to bring in something different, hard to pin down — an elusive truth that is precisely what we should not fail to understand. Indeed there are many layers to the Syrian trauma. First, Syrian culture, in normal times, is remarkably civil. The Syrian dialect of Arabic is ravishingly polite. Education is a source of national pride. Unlike many other parts of the Arab world, urbane mores permeated the countryside more than a rural ethos reshaped the city. Communal coexistence, edgy on occasions, was nevertheless a profession of faith.”
It occurred to me, as I kept reading, that the Syrian civil war is an event, like the Holocaust, that showed us something new about our innate capacity for depravity. If the Holocaust made clear that humans had the ability to unite the task of murder with the age of industrial efficiency, Syria showed us that we could unite murder on a mass scale with instant, global communication — and remain indifferent, bored, even angry with the victims of what has surely been the most widely-viewed crime of its sort in human history.
Atrocity after atrocity has been documented, filmed, frantically uploaded, broadcast, in real time, to an indifferent world. It is hardly the world’s first terrible war, of course. But it’s the first conflict of this magnitude to take place in the age of the Internet and the cell phone. It’s the first time the whole world has been able to see, in so much detail, the faces of the grieving and the dead, to hear the voices of victims begging for help. Anyone with a phone can even call Syrians themselves to speak to them directly — on Skype, no less, for free. And the world, having seen this, replied, “So what.” The world listened as half a million Kitty Genoveses screamed for help. It shrugged.
Thus, wrote Harling,
… a fifth and related source of trauma for Syrians … the horrifying spectacle of an outside world watching on as their country is pointlessly and endlessly tortured. They have learned the hard way how shallow and callous our media and politics can be. People who remember every sorrow in every detail must contend at best with generalized amnesia, at worst with conventional wisdom dismissing their life experience. Their misery is met with fatigue; their flight to safety with hysteria.
On Tuesday, videos and photographs displaying the aftermath of a chemical weapons attack on Khan Sheikhoun, south of Idlib, emerged. Again, anyone with a cellphone could see what it’s like to experience this:
I expected the world to meet this with the same indifference as it had all the previous attacks. And for all the reasons that don’t bear repeating, I certainly didn’t expect President Trump to do anything about it. But yesterday the news broke in the middle of the night (in Paris, anyway) that the United States had launched 59 Tomahawk missiles at Shayrat Airfield, targeting “aircraft, hardened aircraft shelters, petroleum and logistical storage, ammunition supply bunkers, air defense systems, and radars.” That’s the airfield from which the planes that dropped chemical weapons on Syrian civilians — and then bombed the hospitals treating the victims — took off.
Usually, when news of this magnitude breaks I sit glued before my screen, trying to figure out what’s going on. But I couldn’t this time: I saw the headline, then had to rush out the door. I’d been awake for hours already, assembling my documents and preparing to spend a long and stressful day at 17-19 rue Truffaut.
17-19 rue Truffaut
Like all foreigners who live in France, I need permission to be here. My case falls under an unusual bureaucratic category called “exceptional family circumstances.” But as you can imagine, the Bureau des Étrangers at 17-19 rue Truffaut is overwhelmed by petitions from desperate people with good reasons to want to be in France, ranging from “exceptional family circumstances” to “I will be killed immediately if I go back” to “That’s not a good enough reason, you have 48 hours to leave the country.”
Given the number of applicants at the Bureau des Étrangers on any given day, and given the general principles under which the French bureaucracy labors, these visits are stressful.
I go with everything I can imagine a French bureaucrat wanting to see: my birth certificate, my grade school report cards, my college transcripts and diplomas, my medical records, my father’s medical records, my mother’s last will and testament, my certificate of health insurance, tax records, rental contract, phone bills, electricity bills, my grandfather’s service medals, every book and every article I’ve ever written, half a dozen passport-sized photographs, notarized translations, duplicate copies, triplicate copies — I go with so much bureaucracy-pleasing paperwork that I have to put it in a suitcase. I arrive at dawn, demurely dressed, and wait on line in the cold with all the other stressed, demurely-dressed people until they open (promptly at 9:00 a.m.) – and then we wait on line for hours more.
As we wait together, we naturally bond over our anxiety about what awaits us inside that forbidding building. We’re all desperately eager to appease and please the bureaucracy, but none of us really understand what it wants — no one actually knows, in fact, including the people who work there. We all fear angering it by accident. We’ve all heard stories about things that can happen — to a cousin, an uncle, to someone who worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant in the 9th — and none of us know what to make of these stories or whether it could happen to us.
The first time I went there, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder if this could be the very place my grandparents stood on line, in 1941. I had heard the story of “standing in line” from them, but I don’t think they ever said where, exactly. My grandfather had been promised French citizenship for his service in the Foreign Legion. He’d fought in the Battle of France, on the Belgian border. He was one of only 250 survivors of his 1,250-man regiment. But then France fell, and the only thing they could hope for was an exit visa. I wondered if they’d stood on that line, just like me. But with one very big difference, of course. If the bureaucrats looked at my papers and said, “No,” I’d be deported. Had the bureaucrats inside looked at my grandparents papers and said “No,” they would have been sent to the death camps.
An official certificate of “Non-belonging to the Jewish race.”
I don’t know whether my grandparents fully understood, at that time, what would happen to them if they were sent to the camps. I asked my father whether they knew, but he doesn’t know, either. There were certainly many rumors about by 1941. But people refused to believe what they were hearing. Perhaps my grandparents didn’t allow themselves to think of that while they were waiting. You can’t think like that if you’re trying to persuade an overworked bureaucrat that all of your paperwork is in the right order and makes perfect sense.
Yesterday morning, everyone’s eyes, like mine, were glued to their cellphones. We were all trying to figure out what had just happened in Syria and what it meant. We were all a bit scared to talk about it with each other. None of us knew for sure where the other people around us came from, after all. Obviously, I didn’t want to end up in a shoving match with a Russian — in front of the cops and multiple surveillance cameras — right before trying to make my case to the officials that I’m a harmless, law-abiding, middle-aged woman who wouldn’t even inconvenience the French state, no less get in a public brawl right in front of the Préfecture de Police. It was strange: everyone was reading the news on their screens, furtively glancing at each other, and then tentatively, whispering, “Qu’en pensez-vous?”
What do you think?
It was definitely not the right time or place for me to say — as I usually would — “Hi! I’m an American journalist, and I’d like to know where you’re from and your reaction to President Trump’s decision to launch cruise missiles at a Syrian air base.” It wasn’t even the right time for me to guess where people were from. Wherever you’re from, when you’re on that line, you speak French and you act as assimilated as you know how to act. So I can only say what I saw and heard; I have to guess what it meant.
There was a Frenchman near the line, or at least his accent was Parisian. I think he worked inside and had come out to smoke. He was about forty. He glanced at the screen of my phone, which — like his, like everyone’s — showed the words, “Frappes en Syrie : la Russie dénonce « une agression », les alliés de Washington applaudissent.” We made a bit of small talk. “Vous êtes américaine?” he said. (My accent gave it away.) I said yes. He’d been to New York once, he’d heard California was beautiful. Did I like France? We both looked at my phone. I said, “Qu’en pensez-vous?”
He looked as if he wasn’t sure. Then he said, Avez-vous déjà été en Normandie?”
I said that I had.
“C’est impressionnant, Je pense à ces gosses américains. Ils ont traversé un océan, sont venus dans un pays dont ils n’ont jamais entendu parler, pour faire cela pour nous … “
Believe me, this is not usually the first thing people here say when I say that I’m American. I can’t say for sure why he said it or what he was thinking.
There were a handful of men next to us from Mali, I’d guess, or from somewhere in Francophone Africa. They were perhaps in their thirties. Qu’en pensez-vous? I said to them
One said, tentatively, “Je pense que … j’espère que cela peut être bon, si ça fait bouger des choses … Si cela peux changer quelque chose … “
Another interrupted, “Non! Je ne suis pas d’accord! Ils ne sont même pas allés à l’ONU. Chaque fois que l’Amérique s’implique, elle empire!” He realized he’d raised his voice more than he intended, and returned to a hushed tone. “Mais c’est trop tard, ils auraient dû le faire depuis longtemps, les Américains. Les Syriens, ils ont trop souffert.”
“Assad, il est un fils meurtrier [redacted],” said the first. A statement, not an argument. Everyone near us nodded quietly. No exceptions on that.
A woman from, I’d guess, somewhere in north Africa, there with her two kids, both runny-nosed, asked me, “Pourquoi Donald Trump a-t-il changé son avis? Il n’y a que 48 heures, il était quelqu’un totalement différent.”
Usually, I can handle any and all questions about American politics and how America works. But I was as stumped as my interlocutor. I told her I honestly hadn’t the first clue. That I was completely surprised. That it was the last thing I thought he’d do. “Mais je suis très heureuse que nous l’avons fait. Enfin.“
Everyone fell quiet.
We were all still waiting on line when the jokes about Abu Ivanka al-Amreeki hit the Internet. They made the Malians laugh, although no one — literally no one but me — got the joke about Kushner of Arabia.
I hope everything went okay for everyone else on that line. I hope none of them were deported.
Published in General
This is so manifestly childish. There is no “world” waiting to do something this is no different than placing one’s hope on a unicorn showing up and saving you from peril.
When most say “the world” what they generally mean is the United States and we will intervene or refrain from doing so based on our interests. If other nations are willing to get up off their pathetic flabby asses and do some work they are more than welcome to the party. But do not be surprised when some of us here in the US balk at cleaning up messes that have nothing to do with us.
I’m glad you survived the gauntlet. As for Syria, I’m working my way through my own gauntlet. On the one hand, only a barbarian would hold that what Trump ordered was immoral. On the other hand, the US was not attacked by Syria, so I’m wrestling with the question of whether we have fired an unprovoked first shot. If this goes further, Trump must obtain Congressional approval so that we can have an actual debate on whether and how to further prosecute a war. And we must treat any further action as a war so that Russia and Iran know that the consequences of their intervention could be very, very unhappy for them. We must know what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and what we intend to do when the battle has been won. If this does portend war, are we prepared to invade? If so, we need an overwhelming force to end things quickly. Do we have the personnel, equipment, and weapons to engage in such a war while still maintaining our strategic standing in the rest of the world?
As an aside, it might well orient the mind to reality if we went back to calling DoD the War Department.
Invade the world, invite the world. No thanks.
America owes the world nothing.
If we are to invade the world, i demand parades of treasures from the conquered lands.
The previously civil and civilized Syrians will be slaughtered when Assad falls and his followers know it. The brutal insanity seems to be fairly universal throughout the region doesn’t it? Who can do what to end it unless and until one side kills everybody on the other side and there are so many sides that isn’t going to happen either is it? Still the shot across the bow was probably a good thing it reminds them that there ought to be limits to brutality and showed everybody else the US has capacity and will. That is what power is composed of.
This is silly.
A sympathetic person can think, “What could we really accomplish?” Mainstream news paints a picture of barbarians fighting barbarians. Of course, there are good people in Syria. But they don’t seem to be a faction of any power. The choice is between Assad, ISIS, some other Al Qaeda or sharia sympathizers, or outright conquest by the US. Only the last, which is untenable to different people for different reasons, would stop the rampant murders and abuse. Again, maybe that is incorrect, but that’s how it looks to anyone not digging hour upon hour into intelligence reports every week.
A sympathetic person can think, “Why this one? Why not the last?” Genocide is a historical constant, from a global perspective. There is always some people being butchered by mobs or a dictator. There are always nations where rape, slavery, and abuse are rampant for a time. So how do we choose when to intervene? Could we ever not be at war? Is constant war the only respectable, obvious choice?
A sympathetic person could be reluctant to risk another World War by coming into direct military confrontation with Russia. If such a war was ignited, millions of people around the world would share Syrians’ pain.
If you want to help Syrians, address these and other concerns. Stop insulting your allies.
I believe it’s a case of nationlising the costs while privatising the profits.
I hope any of your interlocutors who plan to blow up the Eiffel Tower, or who might be breeding or sheltering someone who might–
were, in fact, deported.
I looked up the “joke” about Abu Ivanka alAmreeki. Seems to me it’s more of an honorific title… oh except for the fact that she’s a daughter and not a son! That, of course, makes it hilarious to the Arabs!
I think there is little anyone can do. It is sad.
Is it a riff on President Lady Hands? Oh say that it is!!!!!
Syria wasn’t about Syria. It was about China/North Korea. Haven’t you figured that out yet?
I heard that theory. Not sure I agree, but was interesting.
Claire – in India I’m sure you met many fine, decent, empathetic people. But I will bet you folding money that all of them had the unquestioned ability to walk by obvious human tragedies unfolding less than two feet from them in real life, as opposed to uploaded and streamed onto their computer screens, on their way to lunch. Humans are deeply, deeply selfish. We become callous to other people’s suffering, especially when we are convinced that it can’t happen to us personally, very quickly.
This is not the first time global communication was united with wartime atrocities. Vietnam was known as the “living room war”. We saw the days’ events every nightly news hour. That’s why, during the First Gulf War, we saw absolutely nothing live, just clean graphic charts and animations of planes.
As I recall, “we” (if by that you mean Americans) and the rest of the world also contemporaneously viewed the killing fields in Cambodia. I remember thinking then about how Germans, and “we” , had claimed not to know about the death camps in WW II–but in 1974, everybody did know, and did nothing. Plus ça change, as your French friends would say.
Not a theory because it can’t be demonstrated unless Trump says that was his calculation, but it is a reasonable conclusion. It is also about Syria however because we needed the right situation to demonstrate our will and capacity and it will have an impact there as well.
?????I’m glad you find it so funny! From what I’ve read, a lot of Syrians are very happy about Trump’s action. It could be a matter of life and death to them. But hey, yuck it up!
OK, pendant
Yeah, did you hear that they were grateful that he’d banned refugees from Syria entering the US?
I heard that too!
The world has gotta recognise his genius now, it’s just gotta!!!
This is right on point. In fact, we have to be this way. You and Ms Berlinsky are no doubt familiar with Millay’s poem “Renascence”:
“A man was starving in Capri
He moved his eyes and looked at me
I felt his gaze, I heard his moan
And knew his hunger as my own.
. . . .
But East and West will pinch the heart
That cannot keep them pushed apart,
And he whose soul is flat–the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.”
Keeping them safe where they are is a better option. That’s what this strike was about.
First they came for———–.
I’m not Syrian.
I think it’s a combination of this and a sense of helplessness. The anti-gassing-kids team has everything on its side: reason, morality, nukes. You would think the Syrian butchers (of whatever ilk) would be ashamed or, if not ashamed, frightened. They are neither, it seems.
On the left, there is the belief that what the butchers need is empathy, an understanding of “legitimate grievances…” and when that fails, a reminder of our Shared Values, perhaps even a loud-ish lamentation before the U.N. general assembly.
On the right, perhaps, we imagine that a good saber-rattling will do the trick, a credible threat of violence or…okay, really? Fine, here’s a Tomahawk! Now these people will shape up!
Given that, I think Trump did some interesting things with this. First, he seemed to extend a sort of olive branch (or at least a twig) last week, with his “we aren’t going to overthrow Assad” and his non-criticism of Putin. They had an opportunity to get their act together.
Second, he declared (via Nicki Haley) wholly legitimate moral umbrage had been taken.
Third, there was clearly a plan already in place and the willingness to carry it out without a lot of unnecessary posturing, threats and preliminaries. Just “you gassed children.” BAM. (Thanks, Mad Dog!)
Syria is a horrible, cruel mess and is going to continue to be a mess. But at least, this time, a price was paid, and swiftly. I hope it hurt a lot. I hope, that is, that it hurt enough.
This is interesting. Let’s just pick a group at random: first they came for the Jews, and I said nothing because I’m not a Jew. So far, so good–except I think the next line should be:
Then they came for the useful idiots who refused to even recognize an enemy because they think every measured response to a crisis makes a leader a Hitler.
On a less depressing note, my high school French is about 65.4% effective.
Don’t forget that they need to provide their people with jobs programs, health care, and abortion clinics. Never mind that those butchers are catering to people who are resisting or resentful of a world that thinks in those terms.
I know, right? I’da thought “empirer” meant “to establish an empire”. But it means “to make worse”. What Ms. Berlinsky’s interlocutor who does not agree with Trump’s action was saying was, “every time America gets involved, it makes things worse!”
An alien?
From what planet?
That anyone could say that,
in French,
on French soil–
Incroyable! ( meaning, in this context “what an uninformed, ludicrously ignorant idiot”!)
Just to be clear:
First, French standards are sufficiently high or your journalistic credentials sufficiently low that you can’t otherwise qualify for French residence.
Second, you do not denounce those standards and claim they are ruining France and seek to repatriate your family to the US to escape the misery of not enjoying the company of those excluded from France by those standards.
Third, you seek to deny the US even the slightest fraction of that French enforcement and those French standards.
You are why Trump.
Claire, friends tell friends. Thanks for the international perspective and detail you throw on many headline news understandings I often content myself with. In return, here’s my American perspective: return to writing like a conservative. Honestly this piece belong somewhere in the Nation Voices sidebar. Between Zoe Carpenter and John Nichols. There’s your quotidian personal travails, a very lazy Holocaust parallel, and moralizing directed outwards (always outwards) at the ugly Americans who are responsible, actively or passively, for all the unrighted wrongs on the planet.
We even get the recycled, grossly inaccurate Kitty Genovese meme, because why let the facts disrupt such a delicious touchstone of the sick American soul, right?
Yeah, it’s a false cognate (what they call ‘un faux ami,” a false friend). “Pire” means “worse.” So it’s to “emworsen,” with the French using the em- prefix just as we would, e.g., “empower.”)
French is full of these traps. Some of them are really embarrassing, too, like the classic: “Est-ce que cette confiture est faite sans préservatif?”