Full On War

Full On War

2001 Years Later

jp melville

It is just about here that you would think that I would get back to Imishli.  And I do.  But not for long.  There is a call from Buck, the guy they call regional director.  Works out of New York.  So guess where I end up.  Yup.  New York.  But just long enough to get fired from my post.  I arrived in the city in the evening.  Into the office at eight in the morning.  Fired by eight thirty.  Fired by a guy who is not paid for his job.  Just sort of always been around.  Which got my mind going on conspiracy theory.  Actually, I had been doing the surfing on the internet from Baku.  International Rescue Committee run by Cherne and pals, friends with Haliburton.  The gas pipeline through Afghanistan, which is about the only reason we have Canadian troops in the land of the Khyber Pass.  Why on earth would Canadian babies be defending somebody’s gas pipeline on the other side of the planet?  How the hell did I end up in Imishli losing all that mattered to me?  Sorry about the connection, but I am talking community development, all lies, to refugees raked over the geopolitical coals just so that somebody in America can buy another cheap can of Coke?

Well, I repeatedly surprise myself with how little I know and how presumptuous I am based on such skimpy premises.  Call it naïve.  Call it stupid.  Only sitting here in retrospect, years later, do I now fail to have faith in anything that I am told.  Oddly, I also see how much folly we invest in our personal interests, believing, in a state of denial, that the world will not interfere.  Some of us are lucky that no one interferes.  Usually no one interferes so long as you are not trying to reach beyond your allotted grasp.  But if just happen to be Ogonis, Fur, Anuaks, or some other unlucky soul living over top of oil somebody else claims as their own or the wrong ethnicity in places like Burma or Bhutan or Bangladesh, well, expect a hand slap or more.

Anyway, there you are, sitting in a fancy airport in Istanbul, wondering what the hell is going on, wondering why they don’t call the place Constantinople, wondering what Natig and Elnur and Zemfira and Million and Gurbanali and Mizanur are going to do and Dr. Rasul getting raked over the coals.  And Manoj who flew in from Nepal to manage the agriculture program taking me aside, saying, “Either resign or be prepared to withstand the aftershock.”  At another time in strict confidence, “The Muslims are taking over the world.”  And most importantly, “Here,” he said, “Taste my chicken recipe.”  It was good.  While I shared a meal with him we did not worry about the world.  We agreed and laughed that nothing about our work in Azerbaijan had anything to do with our professions, myself still amazingly too young to know what that might imply, Manoj too cryptically obscure to even wish to begin to try to explain to my unseasoned mind.

My eyes ought to have opened with Colin Maddock, the nine year navy veteran from Newfoundland who ended up on the floor of our shared apartment in Baku, bloody from someone bashing him on the street and stealing his wallet and doubly bloody from me smashing him down again as he tried to leave the apartment through our bolted door when there remained the loud voices of hooligans on the opposite side and, classically, women and children on our side.  This was a nine year navy veteran who appeared with a business degree and was going to run a over budgeted, unplanned, mobile meat and dairy processing plant in used shipping containers with no air conditioning in fifty degree Celsius weather.  No qualifications.  No project.  Military.  Hmmm.  My eyes ought to have opened.

And if they did?  Would that have prevented me from finding myself upside west side Central Park in an apartment, twenty four hours to kill before I hopped back on a flight to Persia and the land of the Mohammedans, oil sheiks, and buffalo milk yoghurt?  These are things that one never knows, the if worlds that none of us have ever lived in.  I mean, what was real about this whole trip to New York and back to the end of my life as I once knew it, what was real was being in the Istanbul airport and getting in through customs to get onto a plane that would fly to New York.  I mean, all the newspapers in the airport were pronouncing on terrorism this and terrorism that and all the world was changing for most everyone I worked with in Azerbaijan and the police were shooting people and nobody was talking and all the cars with dark windows in Azerbaijan had to have them pulled and clear glass put in and, really, there was some major change going on.  Palpable.  Yet here in this Istanbul airport getting ready to get onto an airplane there is all this extra security, questions about my bags, where I live, where I am coming from, where I am going to, who I work for, and extra wanding and extra beepers and complete bag searches, like major change type stuff, yet all the Americans, God bless their souls, were chatting about food and how much they had eaten in Istanbul and how nice it would be to get back home and everybody being nice and smiling to each other.  Then on the airplane there is a comedy movie and everybody is laughing.  It was surreal.  Like, were they in denial?  Were they having plane old apple pie good natured fun?  Or was their experience of reality distinct from the guards and the other travelers and all the other people I knew in the world?  I think that realities are distinct from each other.  It explains why it is so hard to communicate sometimes with people, why we war, kill each other, stuff like that.

Different realities explain why on one side someone will call you kind and hard working and notice that almost all the non-Americans were losing their jobs in Azerbaijan while on the other someone will call you a loser, not a real man, and blame you for failing to maintain peace and good order in the family.

Once upon a time I met two European women, both French speaking, but they would kill me if I described them as French.  One was Parisian, the other Belgian.  One described Americans as always smiling and happy and so you could never trust them, because we all know that anyone cornered will bite, but if they are always smiling how do you know when they are feeling cornered?  The other described the soft, childlike features of American men’s faces, faces that never matured, as though reality had never quite reached their personal experience.

I read somewhere that facial structure is as much a consequence of culture as it is genetics.  For example, how, when, where, and how much we smile is based on how we learn to behave and understand the world; if you exercise your biceps in one way your arms are going to look a certain way and your skin is going to stretch a certain way and over time you will have a particular kind of look, like those guys who do weights and always look like they’ve got helium in their chest.  So I guess that there are apple pie faces and chocolate croissant faces.  Working a big chunk of mushy apple is going to shape your face differently than savouring chewy dough.

On the upper west side of Central Park I was in fact hanging with Americans.  My cousin, actually.  She and her husband and two kids.  It was like home.  I always feel at home in her home.  One of those real kinds of cousins that you can really identify with, or even if you didn’t, you felt comfortable enough to walk into her apartment and look into the fridge without asking.  She was taking a bit of time off work, knowing that I was walking through New York on a strange trajectory, so that we could say hello.  “Worst stereotype,” she said, “Ever coming out of this women’s renaissance over the past fifty years was that men are naturally ambitious, power hungry, and money grubbers.  We women got that so damned ingrained in us that we hate our men we are close to if they are not.  Just like this lost cause.”  She grabbed her husband around the shoulders and squeezed him.  He hadn’t worked for years.  House dad.  That was their story.  Not mine.  Everybody’s story is different.

Mr. Buck Northrup’s version of my story was that the situation was untenable.  That I was authoritarian.  I smiled at him, knowing what he was referring to.  There was a day there in Imishli when good old Corporal Colin, my friendly nine years marine turned business man, was telling me in hysterics that he was going out to the regional government representative to yell at him and give him a damned piece of his Maddock mind and I said, “No you are not.”  I told the drivers of the cars not to take him anywhere until he cooled down.  I guess that when you tell the Corporal Colin of the world that it is not polite, never mind lacking in wisdom, to yell at your hosts, the Corporal Colins remember that you punched them to the floor one night and so they choose to tell stories behind your back, so to speak.  Whatever.  If this is authoritarian and you lose a job, so be it.

It occurs to me that my logic at the time in Imishli was not correct.  Fault of my fuzzy liberal minded warm and socially democratic pink glasses that I am only just now learning to not wear.  Corporal Colin was not going out to yell at hosts.  He was going out to yell at the conquered.  And you got to keep the conquered in their place or else they might just fight back.  After all, by this time we were bombing the hell out of Afghanistan and bomber run refueling was happening in Baku.  Complete capitulation.  It was a brief twenty three months from 1919 to 1920 that Azerbaijan was independent, caught between the death throes of the Russian Empire, the flailing Turks, and the rising Bolsheviks.  This time round they made it from, what, 1991 to 2001, with a fair bit of turmoil inbetween.  Maybe I am just naïve enough to choose not to accept a sell out.  And you know the old adage: if you’re not with us, you’re against us.  So getting on the wrong side of the fence and all, they push you over the edge.

Hey, I’m an ambitious guy.  Here I am writing book number whatever it is, number five I think.  But money and nice four wheel drive vehicles and holidays on a beach somewhere where the natives can serve you nice cocktails while you read the Economist?  Oh yah, and Harpers, just to show that you’ve got a liberal mind you know?  Ambitious for the wrong things.

And here I am, still in this damned airport in Istanbul.  Stuck between nowhere and nowhere, knowing that there is no going back and no welcoming arms anywhere that I might go.  It is like, once you have been through some of this kind of odyssey, there is never any home to return to.  Ulysses did not sail around in a world where his mobile phone kept him in touch with the wife’s worries.  He was gone, and gone meant gone.  Then he came back.  But in this dissonance of a world wishing to believe that all is well while not all is well at all, whether it be mangrove swamps disappearing or ice caps melting or refugees never going home to refuge nowhere ever, you name it, in this world once you have crossed the border from belief in a global good, a Thomas Moore take on utopia ever so close on the horizon, when you have passed into the quagmire of a Hobbesian and Malthusian nightmare, there is no going back to the land of the apple pie smile.

Yah, still in Istanbul.  One of those empty, mindless, nowhere wait overs of ten hours before I catch my last flight to Azerbaijan.  Take a cup of coffee to stay awake and kick myself off jet lag.  Was watching people for a while.  From many places.  Turbans.  Many pocketed travel vests.  Suits.  Casual summer wear.  Bare midrifts.  Saris.  Blue jeans.  Brown leather sandals.  Sneakers.  Gucci.  Rolex.  Caviar and other high end products.  People wandering in and out of the tax free shops.  Indians.  Germans.  Chinese.  Strange languages.  Waist pouches.  Veiled Muslim women all in black.  Backpacks.  Briefcases.  Rolling travel bags.  Background noise of clicking heels.  Voices.  Vaguely thumping pop music.  Whir of air conditioning.  Flight announcements.  Crinkle of plastic bags with chocolate gifts inside.  Beep beep of electronic cash registers.  Radio voices from hand held security devices.  Various smells.  Food mixed with perfume.  In the end, non-descript.  Less than domesticated.  The light, sunlight, diffuse in the roof windows, fades.  Evening coming on.

Time.  Space.  What I have here today.  What I experience now.  Was not here yesterday.  Will not be here tomorrow.

Full on war.

I think, therefore my thought exists.

Powerless in all that exists around me.

Powerful in perception, how I am perceived.

Choice, deliberation, has little if anything to do with it.

I am.

I’m ready.

Yes I exist.

Anyone exists.

The philosophers who wish to dispute this are they themselves a mute point.

Flowing like a stream, energy flowing like a stream.

I, shaping the plastic world around me.

The world shaping me as I lose all.

Entering dark night of the soul.

Willing I go.

And my flight begins to board.

I put my pen away.

My book in my briefcase.

Gather my travel bag.

Armed in mind, eyes on all.

And walk toward the gate.