Good morning

Writing the bulletin this week seems harder than usual. I am in one of those good-mood-with-no-reason kind of days and my energy is positively restless. Now, sitting in front of my computer screen trying to reorganise the thoughts of the last few days, it seems that people, small events, sand storm all crowd in front of me and I find it hard to detect a red thread…

I proceed through images – I will tell a little story and keep the rest cooking for next episode.

This semester I teach Urban Sociology: it is such a pleasure to do what I really like and it becomes somehow easier to try and explore (and force) the boundaries of teaching limits, conventions and habits. It is a MA class and I think I am among the youngest in the group: most of the students went back to study after years, they all work and the majority of them are married. It is a very interesting and diverse group: there are representatives of all the four parts of Kurdistan and an Arab woman from Baghdad . Three of the five women wear a headscarf, the other two are radically secular. Of the men: one is a pilot (but maybe he will become a mullah), one teaches literature in university and translated Ignazio Silone (an Italian writer who happened to come from my home town, how bizarre!) into Kurdish, one is a lawyer and a human rights activist and one is a politician.

At the beginning I was a little intimidated by the idea of teaching to this group, but considering that there was no real way out I decided to bet on doing the things I like in the way I like – so far it seems to be right strategy (touch wood)… I am slowly slowly trying to force the limits of what is normal, the pressure and the fear of making mistakes are big, but my first two “experiments” so far produced smiles and consensus, so I guess I can be quite confident…

The first “revolutionary” thing has been a class at the Citadel. Dimitris, one of the architects who work for UNESCO took us around fro three hours telling us the story of the place, reconstructing the succession of building phases and designing, through walking, the different social stratifications. It has been an intense and generous visit that has revealed many more things that I could imagine. For some of them it was the first visit to the citadel despite of being born and bred here in Erbil – it has been thus a moment of emotions and discoveries. The big surprise for me has been to realise the excitement connected to the fact that an outdoors class is something completely new. Here education is absolutely formal and the proposal of going for a walk to learn from the city seems to be quite “revolutionary”. It is funny how little you need to sound radical, but it is also quite a hard work to keep on reminding myself that there is very little I can take for granted…

In the last years I have been teaching urban stories to architects and urbanists – here there is a whole world to negotiate starting from the fact that there is a common language that needs to be constructed. This is obviously something that has to be done every time, but in this case it is more demanding for me as it is my daily bread. Maybe though it is true that being in the condition of making accessible and understandable what you think you know allows you to sharpen your thoughts and make them much sharper and nuanced.

Looking at the class walking through the Citadel, observing, asking questions and trying to understand how all this can be fun and still maintain an academic dignity was for me a very exiting moment, but also a huge responsibility. It was in fact a moment of deep awareness: if you manage to find a way to communicate the values and potentials of a different way of doing things, then you can challenge conventions and open new possibilities without offending anyone.

Excited by the positive post-Citadel effect, I decided to risk and make a second attempt. I had to introduce the theoretical approach of the whole Urban Sociology course, I needed to communicate, (not too humanistically) the importance of the presence of people in studying urban questions. The idea is not to put men at the centre of the world, it is rather to focus the attention on the relation between people and space so as to be able to address questions of social justice, sustainability, memory and (obviously) the possibility of storytelling. In my lecture I tried to retrace the theoretical skeleton of what we physically did at the Citadel: walking as an independent form of thinking, the discovery of the urban dimension through sensorial perceptions, the observation of the urban fabric from within – in the relation between body and space.

And so, thinking about Wittgenstein and about how Farinelli talks about him, at the beginning of my lecture I asked the students to stand up, to close their eyes and stretch their arms as much as they could. To understand where does the instinct of measuring the world come from, to feel where does love for maps come from, to discover how addressing space you address the relation among people, to grasp that in the end it is not too hard to embrace the world.

It has been a very moving moment; scepticism turned into a smile and the tension of dealing with one’s own body – women and men in the same room – was released in a liberating laughter.

At the end of the class they told me that after our little experiment they will never forget these concepts… I am sure that those two minutes of closed eyes and embarrassed but satisfied smile will be impossible for me to forget!

Next Thursday I will be in Bethlehem – I hope I’ll manage to write, otherwise the bulletin will be back in two weeks.

Hugs

Sumac is a spice that is commonly used in Middle Eastern cuisine, it looks like a lentil and has a lemony taste. It is defined a subtropical plant, but my dad told me that it also grows in the mountains around my hometown and it was used by shepherds to dye fabric for its purplish colour.

In order to properly make dolma you need a lot of time, dedication and patience. Here families erat it at least once a week, but for us foreigners it is quite an unusual treat. The preparation time is about four hours so the advice is to find good company and take advantage of the kitchen to share good stories! The list of ingredients is long but simple: rice, minced lamb, beef, aubergines, courgettes, onions, vine leaves, kale leaves, tomato paste, dill, salt, pepper, sumac. Obviously the same list without lamb and beef works for the vegetarian version.

Dolma is basically stuffed vegetables with rice and meet, but in my opinion it is something you don’t forget once you have tasted it.

The whole process begins with carving the veggies. You need a sharp knife with a thin, short blade. Aubergines and courgettes have to be cut in halves on the length side and then carved. An experienced hand can carve even three layers out of half of an aubergine – for a beginner, being able to carve a thin one without breaking the skin is already quite an achievement. But no worries, you will not waste anything: the leftovers of the carving can be used later to dress the rice. Once you are done with the carving, sprinkle the inside of the “little boats” of aubergines and courgettes with salt – which you will rinse off before starting the stuffing. Now it is time to peel the onions. Take off top and bottom and make a deep cut in the in the opposite direction of the rings. Put the onion in your hand, cross your fingers and squeeze: the layers of the onions will magically come out one after the other… Vine leaves often come pickled in a jar: you therefore need to rinse and soak them. The same goes for the rise (that has to be the one with short, round grains): while finishing the preparation soak it in cold water.

Now you cut the beef in big chunks and marinate it with lemon, salt and sumac.

When you are done with this it is time to prepare the stuffing. In a pan fry the minced lamb – apparently you need seed oil… I am not totally convinced about it, but I guess there is not much to discuss about it!) – with thinly chopped dill, loads of lemon, salt, pepper and tomato paste. When the minced meet is ready has to be mixed with the rice – that by now you have drained. Yes, rice has to be raw: it seems that this is one of the big secrets… or maybe it is just obvious, but I still want to think of it as a big secret!

And now comes the fun part: the stuffing! You need a large, deep pot for it. On the bottom you prepare a layer of beef chunks – you might want to clean them of some of the sumac seeds beforehand.

The vegetables have to be stuffed by hand and not with a spoon, and you start with aubergines and courgettes. The “little boats” have to be only half full and you don’t have to push the stuffing inside. Now every half needs to find its partner: they don’t need to be homogeneous – so it is not that half aubergine can only meet another half aubergine. The only thing that is important is that the half veggies are “closed” through a precise matching game. Every vegetable needs to find a missing half in order to construct a new whole so that while cooking they won’t lose the stuffing. If some of the veggies are resistant towards finding a partner than you can use some of the leftovers of the carving as a lid.

When the first layer of aubergine and courgettes is complete, then you move on to the onions – which are the really friendly bit: you just but a bit of stuffing in the middle and they will automatically wrap themselves around it. The vine and kale leaves are the most complicated – I confess here my total ineptitude towards this bit of the job. You put the open leave on the palm of your left hand while the right one picks a bit of the stuffing then with both hands you roll the leave around the stuffing and fold the edges as in a small parcel. It is important that they come out properly wrapped otherwise they will break while cooking. With the leftovers of kale leaves you can make a kind of lid on top of all the different layers.

Now you put the pot on the stove and cook dolma on a slow fire. You cover the pot with a frying pan where you have put water salt lemon and sumac seeds that you will use to moisten the dolma throughout the stewing. The cooking time is one, one and a half hours: there is no specific rule for it. What comes out is a timeless delicacy as well as a micro-portrait of Kurdish women.

This story wouldn’t have been possible without a wonderful Friday afternoon of laughter, storytelling and discovery with Anna and Kamaran.

Until next Thursday

A big hug

It is Thursday again and it has been a few weeks since my last bulletin. I am happy to be back writing, I was missing the micro-discipline that comes from having a weekly writing appointment!

The “returns” this time have been really pleasant on both ends of my trip. The “cultural shock” I experienced over Christmas and the following bit of thinking helped me understanding that there is no chance to “square the circle”: the ends of the two lives I live will never perfectly match… It took me a while to understand – and I hope I really understood – and thinking retrospectively I really appretiate both the patience and the uneasiness of those who endured my phase of alienation and disorientation to which I couldn’t give name shape and meaning.

This time the return both here and there has been smooth – trying to make the most of what both lives can offer… I decided to go for greed rather than for a painful attempt (both for myself and those who are around me) to self- containment!

Today here they celebrate the first day of the uprising against Saddam in 1991. in the cafeteria over lunch there was loud patriotic music and apparently local TV stations continuously screen celebratory dances. Most of the guys in university came today in the traditional outfit – including those whose style is more westernized on a “normal” day. It is an occasion of celebration and pride – it is interesting to see how deeply certain moments touch the souls of people and construct a sense of belonging. It is a feeling that – despite my resentment against Italy and years of wanderings – I share and understand: there is something deep that awakens in me every 25^th of April (Italian Liberation day) and it is something I have had the impression I could feel here as well today.

In university they have been good, they manage to open today, just in time for the celebrations, the newly built ping pong hall. The construction is in itself as surreal as the scene I had in front of my eyes when I opened the door. The ping pong hall is a prefab white container with an electric blue sloping roof and a white and acid green tiled floor. Inside the hall there are aligned five ping pong tables that barely fit the size of the room. For the opening, the Student Union had organized a photo exhibition on the uprising which of course I was curious to go and see. I open the door and tens of heads turn to look at me; the stench is that of the boys changing room after the sports’ hour in high school and a bunch of boys play simultaneously crammed around the tables to the symphonic rhythm of the ping pong balls. The photo exhibit doesn’t seem to meet anyone’s interest and I avoid a couple of balls and jumping kids in order to get to the end of the first wall and before being able to rush out and breathe! I don’t even want to think of how it would feel in terms of smell and temperature when it will become vvery hot here!

For this week I stop here.

A big hug

Good morning

There is a village at the border between Iraq and Iran called Holshou; it is the ending point of a narrow lane that slowly slowly crosses a meadow that mountains suddenly interrupt. These are mountains that seem to have been there forever, before the beginning of time, barren and raw rocks: fascinating, eternal, austere. The first mountain you meet at the end of the meadow is called Black Mountain – they named it so because it is dark, naked and sterile, pure rock where nothing grows.

If I were writing an adventure book, I would probably start telling my story this way: “Our forefathers told us: follow the narrow path that bends towards the right at the Black Mountain, walk along the rock walls, up and down between the steep foggy hills until you reach Holshou…”

I am not writing an adventure book but my trip to Holshou has been a jump back in time, the accomplishment of the orientalist dream of a 19^th century traveler: here it is Kurdistan as I imagined it would be.

A village made of mud and stones with wooden flat roofs isolated by a layer of compact mud. A village carved in stone that climbs onto the side of an ancient mountain – one of those montains that expose you to the power of nature, one of those mountains that don’t allow you to separate fear from fascination.

A village where there is so much and so little at the same time. A village where people’s faces are shaped by the weather so deeply that makes it impossible to tell the flow of time.

A village where satellite dishes cling to mud roofs, where the elders wear turbans and use walking sticks that are so tall that reach their ribs, where women dye their hair an impossibly bright red and the chenille dresses are patches of colour against the grey landscape.

A village where the majority of the adults can’t read or write and sign their names with their finger print. A village where generation after generation of men cross the mountains to smuggle alcohol and mobile phone (imported from Dubai ) to an Iran that is incredibly thirsty of forbidden goods.

A village where a white woman is remembered to set foot possibly once every fifty years.

A village where you realise that despite the daily struggles, the fascinations of an orientalist gaze are hard to keep at bay….

I will come back with my bulletins at the beginning of March.

A hug