The Collector of Bodies

      Concern for Syria and the Middle East

      Copyright © 2016 Diane Glancy. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

      Resource Publications

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

      Eugene, OR 97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-0300-6

      hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-0302-0

      ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-0301-3

      Manufactured in the U.S.A. November 28, 2016

      PART ONE

      A Journey into Syria and Jordan

      Our writing comes from forgetfulness, not from memory.

      Ahmad Iskander Suleiman, Writer, Damascus, Syria

      Hide me from the secret counsel . . . from the insurrection

      [of those] who whet their tongue like a sword and bend

      their bows to shoot their arrows—Psalm 64:2-3

      Notebook of a Trip

      Over a ten-day spring break, between the two wars of the two Bush administrations, I went to Syria and Jordan as an Arts America speaker for the United States Information Agency, when it was still in operation. I gave readings and lectured about Native American culture. I answered questions about America. They asked about the violence. Was I afraid to leave my house?

      I remember stopping at the airport in Athens, Greece, where armed soldiers boarded the plane to search it. I remember landing in Cairo, taking off again, seeing a pyramid like a thimble on the barren land. I remember the square in Damascus where the driver pointed, that’s where they hold public executions.

      In Syria, I visited Aleppo University, the University of Damascus, Tishrin University in Lattakia, and Ba’th University in Homs, sometimes traveling a hundred miles between cities in an American Embassy van with a US cultural attaché, a visiting Fulbright fellow and the Syrian driver. In Jordan, I visited the Jordan Writer’s Union, the Arab Writer’s Union, Al Isra University in Amman, the Jordan University for Women, and various other groups.

      Afterwards, the trip settled like an encampment on a hill. Maybe the trip was more intense because I was on land that connected to Christianity. The trip uncovered thoughts that had been pushed down by an academic setting. I heard, we’re people of the book—Jews, Christians, Muslims, from the Muslims more than once. I was asked to explain Christianity—How it meant different things to different people. But for me, it meant salvation through faith in the death and resurrection of Christ.

      Maybe the trip was more intense because Syria was the first time I was in a van stopped at check points by armed soldiers along the highway. Maybe it was because standing at the ruins of Ebla in Syria, there was an older old than any of the history I knew in America.

      I wanted to make use of the disconnected sights jotted down during travel, the stops and intrusions, the interrupted fragments, the unrest of students in the universities I visited. I don’t want to be told what to believe, they said. I heard their lack of possibility, their frustration, their anger.

      I wanted to connect the Syria and Jordan trip to my other travels that semester, not always in chronological order. I wanted to work with the way memory works when there isn’t time to order events. I wanted to convey the sense of hurry before I left—the papers to grade, a small roll-on bag to pack, a visiting writer who would not come to the door of the hotel when I picked her up the days and evenings before I left, but made me park and come in for her and wait.

      What did I find on the USIA trip, but a glimpse of something I was a stranger to?—a subtle and diminutive shock wave, a silent yet definite detonation somewhere in the neighborhood—the clearing of smoke afterwards—the rubble. I wanted to record the quick look into a volatile place because it was all I was offered—and to leave with a sense that our words were something like tissue paper held over an open flame.

      Damascus, March 24, 1994

      There was darkness in landing. The streets inaccessible to light. The road from the airport—you didn’t know what was there until you passed it. The walled palace in the city, a bedpost electricity had reached. The traffic circling at the foot of its hill. A voice from the palace saying, if only we can keep them asleep.

      Down to the Simplest Wire in the Human Voice

      1.

      Once I was in a van in Syria.

      The roads were like riding a camel.

      There was desert cluttered with pebbles that seemed rubble,

      but was standard for the houses in villages

      made of stone and mortar

      and next door the olive orchards and women picking there.

      Or doing the work in fields where the country

      was broken into with mountains and of course

      the Mediterranean Sea.

      By day, I traveled place to place,

      making steady passage into the distance.

      I took notes on the passing land—

      a bump in the road, and the words I wrote

      could not be read.

      Or I made run-on statements of what I saw.

      There is brightness of sunlight there is remoteness—

      until I looked for meaning in my notes and found none

      though I looked under the mountains and in the sea.

      At night, the open windows. The dark sea by Jableh.

      The waves of Arabic language rich with a new horizon.

      I saw the eyes of people floating with curiosity

      and mine at them as well.

      2.

      Every time I left a town I took the view of a boat

      leaving the sea vacant there on the shore

      as if the whole world were a broken slice of the moon

      across the Mediterranean.

      I tell you these valleys will run with blood

      if these wars of nations continue—

      these open, running sores

      in the general way the world is moving

      as if draining to a close

      the way I shut my purse with a click

      in the Damascus marketplace, the suk,

      the burro with his dosser, the stalls of meat,

      the home-spun silver pin I bought.

      3.

      Yet the road rippled as though a field

      where an ancient farmer plowed his furrows,

      and