Culture Meets Culture BAGHDAD WITHOUT A MAP is a series of articles Tony Horwitz wrote while trying to spark a freelance journalism career in the Middle East. The title is somewhat misleading as the articles cover a wide spectrum of Middle Eastern countries.
Horwitz does not always have an assignment as was the case when he visited Yemen, one of the most unusual countries in the book. Almost everyone in Yemen is high on Qat, a hallucinogenic shrub that the inhabitants chew like tobacco. Horwitz, who's always game for anything, samples the shrub, losing the feeling in his arms and legs when he does.
One of the most enlightening episodes was when Horwitz got an assignment to cover the tanker war on the "Strait of Hoummos." Horwitz hitches a ride on a sixty-foot Bombay boat. On board, Horwitz met the ship's engineer, a man named Jesudasyn "with the unflinching bluntness of a four-year-old." Jesudasyn wanted to know if it was true that men and women lived in America without getting married, and, if so, how could the women still be virgins when they married. In India the woman must be a virgin. They go on to discuss reincarnation and the use of condoms. This conversation goes on for all of two pages, but with culture meeting culture, there was enough material for a book of its own.
Cairo, Egypt, was almost a home base for Horwitz and his wife, noted author Geraldine Brooks. There's a concept called "Malesh" in Egypt, loosely translated to mean "whatever." Even new building in Cairo begin to fall apart almost immediately as there isn't much maintenance. There are constant blackouts and the elevators don't work in the apartment buildings. The idea that you couldn't do anything about these inconveniences anyway was prevalent in Egyptian society. After awhile even Horwitz began to experience "Malesh."
Most of the places Horwitz visited, such as The Sudan and Libya, were pretty desolate places, but then there was the Arab Emirates, one of the richest places on earth where the natives have free health care, free education, and an assurance of a job, if they want one. Guest workers outnumber natives five to one. Dubai's port was "duty free, regulation free, everything free." Compared to The Sudan, Dubai would be Heaven, The Sudan hell.
Tony Horwitz won the Pulitzer for his travelogue style writing. Other writers might emulate his ability to communicate with the native peoples, despite his inability to speak the language in some cases.
When it comes down to it, we're all the same Bagdad Without a Map is the account of a journalist working in the Middle East for some odd number of years in the 1990's. In this book he published the notes that are not really suitable for any journalistic account, but as such it probably adds more insights in the area then any format account would be. It seems Horwitz is able to get more out of your average interviewee for most seem to be sharing more then they normally would, even in countries in which Horwitz's home land and religion aren't on the list of biggest mates. Horwitz created an excellent balance between proper journalism (as in gathering facts) and a more personal account of the matter without a preoccupied opinion. Plus it comes with a pleasant writing style. While reading these it seems the people in the middle east are pretty much occupied by the same troubles and ambitions as westerners do, it's just that they are being governed by quite a different system.
You'll embarrass yourself reading this. This may be the best travelouge I've ever read. Horwitz has an uncanny ability with words, to paint the scene and make the reader feel like they are there with him. I felt myself transported back to the countries I have visited, and can affirm that they were accurately represented. Horwitz is complimentary to the myriad cultures of the Middle East while being honest about the difficulties of the countries. And his adventures would be completely inplausible, if they had been in a novel. The book is laugh-out-loud funny. I mean that. I found myself on the bus unable to stop chorteling, or explain myself to the passengers around me. Looking for a good time? Read this book.
Read It And Find Out What The Arab Phrase "Cus ummak!" Means In the able hands of Pulitzer prize winner Tony Horwitz, Baghdad Without A Map is the sort of book that never lets a reader get complacent. Mr. Horwitz' prose simultaneously fascinates and dazzles with its up-close descriptions of the array of delights and wonders ever-present in the Arab nations, and stuns with its frank revelations of such Third World horrors as a Sudanese leper colony, the Iranian front in the aftermath of a "successful" Iraqi offensive, and the brutality of tribal armies in Yemen. It is brave, it is deep, and it is sometimes almost too overwhelmingly honest.
I read this travelogue in 2007, long enough after Horwitz (author of the excellent Confederates In The Attic) undertook the journalistic voyages written about in this book for its subject matter to acquire the haze of nostalgia as well as retaining the shock value inherent in its tales of exotic foreign places. As Horwitz, a brave man indeed, doubly so since he is both an American and Jewish, makes the rounds of the Middle East and extended Islamic world from Iran to Libya, Sudan to Baghdad---"the land without weather"---a reader is simultaneously struck by the changes that have come to nations such as Iraq (during Horwitz's time a state locked in a xenophobic, Orwellian stranglehold, courtesy of the late Saddam Hussein) and appalled at the living conditions in which many Africans and west Asians dwell and take for granted.
In Baghdad Without A Map, we also meet a cast of characters few authors could possibly begin to invent, among them an Iraqi dissident who hides a pro-Saddam Hussein rug near his door, so it may be unfurled in case company comes; the patrons of a Cairo nightclub in which the much-prized bellydancers have the build of East German wrestlers; a daring fishing crew, playing their trade in the Persian Gulf amid primed Iranian mines; and an Iranian mourner at Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral, a one-time student at UCLA, who shouts anti-American slogans, even as he confides to Horwitz that he'd greatly love to take a trip to Disneyland. Horwitz also has much praise for the polished courtesy of the average Arab, and having lived among Arabs for many months, writes of the culture shock he experiences when he, though ethnically a Jew, enters Israel, which he describes as the rudest nation in the region.
Baghdad Without A Map is not a book to warm to but it is a respectable read that sheds light on places most of us will gladly never get to visit. It is a well-written exploration of the cultures and geography of distant lands, and it is at times a funny book as well. After its three-hundred pages are done, the reader, like the author, will be more than ready to leave the Middle East behind, but I doubt anyone will regret the time spent trailing Horwitz on his visits far and wide.
A fine book covering an important topic for our time.
****1/2 stars.
Accent on the misadventures and the irony... This book was written in 1991, just as Desert Storm was beginning; it gives only two chapters and an epilogue to Iraq itself. However, those chapters vividly remind us just how dreadful Iraq was under Saddam. And if you're thinking of going to Yemen, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Libya, Sudan, Lebanon, or Iran, this book will give you a taste of each country, with the accent on its irrational side, guaranteed to destroy your romantic notions. Con artists, urban decay, disintegrating vehicles, and an amazing variety of characters are common to all.
The best chapters to me were those on Sudan - Horwitz joins a engineer's wife who goes three times a week to a leper colony near Khartoum to dress wounds. Horwitz writes: "After visiting the Iran-Iraq front, I'd thought nothing could faze me. But a corpse, however disfigured, is past its pain...It is quite another matter to confront humans whose flesh is still being ravaged almost as you watch." Overcome, he rushes for the outside air and steps in a pool of sewage. "Two male lepers, squatting against the wall, broke out laughing, clapping their stumps together. The American is standing in shit! Their mirth was contagious and I stood there for a moment, knee-deep in gunk, gulping the foul air and chuckling along with them. It was the least I could do, lighten a leper's day."
In Southern Sudan, Horwitz visits the Dinka people whose rebellion is being snuffed out by the Sudanese government and Arab mercenaries. The Dinka society revolves around cattle: "the Dinka worshiped their cows, sang to the animals, even recited love poetry to them." He follows the sound of clapping and singing and discovers several hundred emaciated and starving women dancing, mimicking cattle, remembering their former lives, "uninhibited and ecstatic."
Several days later, a congressional "fact-finding" committee lands, with Gary Ackerman on board (a Democratic congressman who is "real involved in this hunger thing.") He hustles over to talk to Horwitz: "`Did you meet any slaves? Do they appreciate the American aid? Tell me about shopping in Khartoum. Is it junk?' Before I could answer, he cut in - `sorry, got to run' - and rushed off with the others for yet another photo-op."
As other reviewers have mentioned, much of the book IS funny, but surrealistic irony is the prevailing tone, and to me this tended to overwhelm the individual portraits of each country. One can't help but like Horwitz - he is a caring man as well as a journalist with an eye to the snappy story - and I wondered if his interest in the Middle East had been an enduring one. However, his subsequent books are on other subjects. He gives thumbnail histories of each country, but the anecdotes are the memorable part of the book. If you want to learn more, you'll have to look to another writer, but this book will make you want to know more.
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