Adam's Ambles

Leaving London, Ch. 7

True story: My second night in London I was at a pub, the Rocket, I believe, in Euston. This was right after the orientation for international students, and I was sitting with some European fellow SOASians. One of them was a Dutch girl, the daughter of two Amsterdam lesbians who had grown up on a houseboat in a canal. Of course. She was starting research on her phd. When I started making the case for Western humanitarian intervention, she vehemently disagreed. Soldiers, she said, invariably harm civilians.

This is true, if one ignores the fact that civilians often harm civilians (Rwanda, Bosnia, the Poles, Ukrainians, Byelorussians and many more during the Holocaust). You can counter-argue military action caused the social upheavals that conditionally allow for widespread massacres of people by people, but then my counterargument is that stopping such violence goes beyond diplomacy, that it takes armies to stop roving death squads. I know the response—‘You’re only perpetuating a cycle of violence’—but intervention stopped the Serbians from wiping out Bosnian Muslims, and Serbia and NATO are hardly locked in a never-ending war.

I made that analogy, and the further one that if the world has followed her policy, her native Netherlands would still be run by Nazi Germany. “I hate that argument,” the Dutch girl said, with true anger. “That’s always the argument, that the Nazis would have stayed in Holland as occupiers. How do you know? How can anyone say whether this is true or not?”

So you can imagine my surprise when I found myself agreeing with the same girl at a lecture given by Sue Blackwell, a Birmingham professor who has lead the charge on a British academic boycott of Israel. In her blind rhetoric she believes universities, institutions devoted to dialogue, are dialoguing with the ideological equivalent of Nazi Germany (a good example of Reductio ad Hitlerium) when they hire Israeli professors and accept Israeli students. That it is impossible to differentiate individual Israelis from Israeli policy, and that Israeli policy itself could never be, in even the tiniest way, justified, although the speaker she appeared with said, in so many words, that suicide bombings were. That the crimes and deaths caused by Israel (always ‘Israel’; she never, in any way, suggested Israel-Palestine or any sort of shared culpability by both sides in that conflict) outweighed human rights abuses by China, Sudan, Burma, Iran, North Korea, or even, if we want to appeal to her ideological base, America. But why boycott America when Americans contribute so much money, publishing opportunities and tenure-ships to the comfortably ensconced European academic establishment?

Dutch girl attacked Blackwell at the latter’s lecture, and therein were the sort of alliances I was forced to make at SOAS: revisionists versus extremists.

Yet the school wasn’t all anti-Israel or anti-America. After the Blackwell lecture I went to a Klezmer concert in the student union and danced to Jewish traditional music with the Muslim son of a Bangladeshi diplomat. A dark-haired girl in my Southeast Asian politics class was enraged when I told her about the Blackwell speech—“These bloody radicals are trying to take over this school!” she said. “I’m Cypriot; do you hear me calling for a ban on Turks?”

Indeed, and especially at the postgraduate level, many of my fellow SOASians had extremely nuanced, interesting takes on current events and world politics. Unfortunately, the fringe, the people with signs that read “Nuclear weapons for North Korea and Iran!”, the neo-Communists (“I’ll tell them what life in a worker’s paradise is really like,” said a Czech friend as we walked by a Socialist Worker’s Party literature table, a dryly-delivered line that made me love her forever), were the visible side of the SOAS experience. And in a way, this was a good thing.

Because being at SOAS, packed as it is with Africans, Asians and Arabs (or their British-and European-born descendants) taught me my country and the West in general are, rightly or wrongly, pretty much reviled by a lot of people who suffered through colonialism. Those who don’t outright loathe the West still often view it with a high degree of suspicion. Then are those who actually embrace the West, transnational elites, who are usually viewed as sell-outs by their own people—who often happen to be the subjects, either outrightly politically or essentially economically—of the same transnational elites. In the West the nice-guy Left talk about engaging with the Third World but bemoan terrorism and violent militias. We assume the folks we dialogue with are moderates in our cause, people who balance between our diplomats and local interests. But at SOAS I realized a lot of these “moderate” Muslims, Africans, Asians, whatever, are often considered radical by their own.

“We support the Sheikh, mate,” a group of Muslim medical students at UCL told me once, and by ‘the Sheikh’ they meant Osama bin Laden. “So do most Arabs. Even if they don’t agree with his actual attacks, they support what he’s doing. They think America and Israel have to pay for their aggression on Muslims.” It was funny; I got along with these guys, watched them leer at three girls in hijabs, thought, ‘These could have been my friends if they weren’t in, well, a different tribe.” SOAS brought me face to face with the other tribe, the flip-side civilization in Huntington’s clash. I found I clicked with these people on an individual level, that we liked and respected each other (generally) if not all our ideas, that they were even willing to elect me as a student leader and go out with me for drinks (if they drank).

I learned they have the same trouble talking with us. Once the SOAS student union, which is famously pro-Palestine, tried to show it’s even-handedness by inviting Israeli jazz musician Gilad Atzmon to campus. Atzmon, the same Israeli who said "[W]e must begin to take the accusation that the Jewish people are trying to control the world very seriously...American Jewry makes any debate on whether the 'Protocols of the elder of Zion' are an authentic document or rather a forgery irrelevant. American Jews (in fact Zionists) do control the world." It was laughable, even if it was sad, like using Irshad Manji or Ayaan Hirsi Ali to speak for campus Muslims.

But I learned to ignore all this, because I did get along with people on individual levels and that, I figured, was my strike against the radicals on both sides of the fence (and having been back in the states since, I realize American hawks are just as intractable and idiotic as SOAS Islamists). And to take that analogy further, I realize the vast majority of Americans are mildly suspicious of Muslims but have no problem with having one as a neighbor, that in the end, we want to get on with our lives. I realize most Muslims are the same. I learned that within every Muslim there is not necessarily an American, but there are humans, with their own alliances and loyalties and biases and in the end, weaknesses, for women, bad TV and fast food, and that’s as good. If we don’t want to wipe each other out, it has to be.

Leaving London, Ch. 6

There are moments so quintessentially London they rise in my mind like steam off a tube grating. Walking down Wandsworth Road and buying my meats and cheese at the Portuguese deli, my cooking oil and beans from the West African grocer, chilies, onions and garlic from the Chinese fastmart, an oyster-card top-up and a side of Polish bacon from the Pakistani shopkeeper. Maybe some fried chicken for lunch from a Halal KFC knock-off (that’s right, Southern America: Muslim Brits have embraced fried chicken. I am as equally amazed as you).

Walking from Southwark (say it: Suthurk) station to Waterloo, past bars packed with attractive city workers and under neon signs, that cold, wet bite of London quickening your step and cutting your lungs all at once. Walking from Westminster across the South Bank at night and watching the lights across the river glisten in the oily slicks of the Thames, or making the same walk by day and buying fresh pancetta from the Borough market. A beautiful girl singing in a lonely voice under the bridge near the OXO towers, the one frescoed with scenes from the old Thames Frost Fairs, her voice as cold as the ice on the walls of the bridge and as fragile, shimmering in the echoed chambers and shattering in your ears, and it’s so damn beautiful I pause and have to go back, listen more, leave and then the river is in front of me again. I live by the river, like The Clash said. I loved that song before I came to London, love it more now, with London calling all the time, its spell, its dark spaces, its wet air, like a nighttime blanket.

Drunk, drunk and stumbling off an impossibly long night bus ride from North London to my flat south of the river, but at the same time it feels good, like by crossing this huge space I am crossing a world, making a journey worth making every time I stay out too late and the tube shuts down and I have to rely on London’s sometimes unreliable night buses. Always getting dropped off in Trafalgar Square, purple under the lights of the city, and stumbling past Nelson’s Column, this center of the British Empire, spire at the heart of Europe, and the birds swinging around the top and then another memory, Trafalgar during the day, a couple lounging on one of the bronze lions, the girl in a yellow sundress over skinny jeans and pointed shoes straddling her boyfriend, shirtless and pale white and a shag of straight brown hair falling in an attractive dishevelment across his face.  Then I am in Trafalgar again, drunk again, and I smoke by the bus stop that sits in the shadow of Big Ben and wait for the number 155 that will take me home, across the river and that stupid, ugly London Eye, more like eyesore, peering back at me, sometimes blue and sometimes bright, blood red, and then home through Union Road and Union Grove under the rained-on leaves and the overturned rubbish bins and past the African and Turkish and Eastern European boys, all of them out for a little blood tonight, but I’m too gone to care.

Bethnal Green. Like a Third World country transported to England, that lovely old street packed with Africans and Pakistanis and Arabs hawking their wares like they don’t know what country they’re in. Old Street and Shoreditch, packed with the beautiful packed into black jackets and black shirts and painted-on jeans and boots and beads. Seven Sisters, where I wanted to live at first, on top of the Victoria line, this odd blend of Jews and Nigerians, rabbis and rastamen, the most mixed-up place in the European Union.

Coming home one morning and it’s far too early. I’ve been having too much fun, somewhere, maybe on Old Street, maybe Angel or Islington and the sky is grey and the clouds are like damp cotton. I’m at Vauxhall. I’m watching fine lines of snow mixed with rain slash across the sky and people in grey suits walk by the grey river under a grey horizon, and I really, really love it.

(Vauxhall in the morning)

Walking to StokeFest with a crowd of people, white, black, Asian, European, American, Londoners all, the weather good and fresh, breathing in that green in the space between oxygen molecules that let’s you know spring is here. The original crew of us, maybe seven people, picking up followers and stragglers like a boulder rolling down the mountain until we’re some huge, throbbing mass of every color, shade, nationality and religion, off to a park to welcome in the spring, listen to music, eat food and drink beer. And I think, in my stupidly melodramatic way, If I have learned anything this year, it is that this is what the world should aspire to. If we take the sum of human experience, if we take all of our history, this is the pinnacle of mankind’s achievements: people from everywhere getting together to have a good time.

Leaving London, Ch. 5

They made you class president?” my friend asked over the phone.

“Sorta.”

“Huh,” he said, after a pause, an unspoken space that screamed, “What school is he going to anyways?”

In fairness, I split the position with another American (SOAS, for all its perceived anti-Americanism, had no problem electing two as class leaders) who did the lion’s share of the true organizing work that goes into making a class function. If you’re out there, Eunice, I salute you.

Days went by too quickly at SOAS. I don’t remember much about class; as difficult as this year may have seemed, we were saddled with a very low amount of classwork. A paper, per class, per semester — six assignments in all. It hardly seemed fair, yet there were students all around who constantly needed essay extensions. I know; as a student rep, I often had to ask for them.

Maybe the extensions weren’t all that surprising given the amount everyone drank, smoked, socialized and otherwise avoided things as trivial as school. I don’t really remember much of SOAS the classroom. I do remember SOAS the student union bar, sipping pints after class and laughing with your mates, a passionate debate here or there over things we had little to no experience with, cracking the windows of the bar open to get a cig out (SOAS students, for all their professed love of minorities, were always happy to blow smoke in the face of non-smokers; for all they rant about the rights of university employees, they treated school security guards like shit when the guards asked us to not smoke).

I remember SOAS the King’s Crown, the grotty bar near King’s Cross that invariably become the ‘Scrown, more of a crater in the street than a hole in the wall, a place so greasy it probably dissolved the adjoining spoon in the adjective. SOAS the club and pub nights, places like the Roxy where I jumped like a dervish to Kaiser Chiefs, fortified on 3-pound specials of triple-Karlsbergs, and ‘The Bar,’ where I watched Oxford classics students and future HSBC bankers knock over glasses and cossak-dance over their shattered remains.

(The Bar)

I remember SOAS the University of London Union bar and the Marlborough Arms and its 8-pound two-meal lunch specials, and of course SOAS the practical exercises, where we all played diplomats for a day, when I was interviewed by the elegant, intelligent daughter of a Jordanian ambassador on American policy in Iraq and found myself tripping over my journalist’s tongue, or when I played George Bush and my friend played Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and we both tried to out-cliché each other and push our respective countries to the brink of war.

I remember Bangladeshi fighter pilots who wanted to work for the UN and Greek heiresses just out of university, Arabs and Chinese arguing over financial markets, the grandson of a Caribbean prime minister, bemused English, the loud Americans, the drunk Irish, the warm Indians, the posh French, all of us embracing our stereotypes and finding friendship in between.

During my first trip to Australia, in 2004, I worked as a bartender for most of my time in country and bemoaned the fact to a German friend, a waitress in the same bar. She turned to me.

“Adam, I don’t think you came here for the country. I think, yes, you go places to see things. But I think you really go places for the people.”

She was right.

Leaving London, Ch. 4

And then I was. I had boarded the London/LHR flight, sat on my bag in the Tube all the way in from Terminal 3 and a million variations of “Hounslow” (West, East, etc), tried to find a place to doss. I had heard the SOAS bar was cool and had a decidedly accepting attitude towards bad behavior, so when I walked onto campus that first day and (quite frankly) sighed inside at the sight of the campus, that stupid, 60’s power block building, I strolled into the first bar I saw and asked for a job and got one.

Except this was the Institute of Education bar. Not the SOAS bar. This wasn’t the fabled asylum of U. of London rumors. It was a pissy Irish manager and a staff made up of Portuguese, Venezuelans, and gay Greeks, who at least improved my fashion sense (“You look like sheet today, gringo”). I was walking away from that bar when I saw a tough-looking guy carrying a Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy syllabus, and I thought, Hey, That’s my course (and then I thought, ‘Course,’ instead of major — sounds so English), so I stopped him and we talked and I made my first friend in the programme. He was intelligent and sharp and funny and I thought, This might be a Good Year.

Then I went with a Swiss-French guy to LSE (screw ‘the’ LSE—I know that’s their preferred mode of address.  Fuck ‘em) where we marveled at glittering ivory towers, new libraries and clean buildings that can only be built via the donations of very wealthy, connected alumni, which probably aren’t that hard to find when 13 of them have won Nobel Prizes (a fact LSE never lets you forget). 

There were American accents everywhere, and I realized this felt like an American school, a sort of university on steroids (i.e. money), as over-pumped as any American frat boy (who, I guess, happens to be really good at economics. And any other social science). I talked with a few douche-y looking American guys in the LSE bar, told them I was at SOAS.  They kept their friendly, all-American smiles plastered right above their Brown t-shirts but there was the slightest of pauses.

“That’s, like, a pretty extreme place isn’t it?”  I thought back to the night before, watching a Norwegian passing around a spliff by the SOAS front steps.

“Welcome, man <cough>.  This will be one of the best years of your life. There’s university <cough>…and there’s SOAS.”

Gaspard, my Swiss friend, glanced around the LSE bar with a look that said, “What is all this merde?” and said to me, “If this school were The Police, SOAS would be The Clash.”

I liked that.  I picked up the ball.  “If LSE is Gerhard Schroeder, SOAS is Daniel Cohn-Bendit.”

“If LSE is Karl Marx, SOAS is Leon Trotsky.”

“If LSE is DC, SOAS is Baltimore.”

“If LSE is Jay-Z, SOAS is Public Enemy.”

That last one was Gaspard’s, and I have to say, he won.

Later on we were drinking at 101 Bar near Dionysus, the big Greek place on Tottenham Court Road that does the excellent garlic, cheese and chips, the edible personification of the Bacchanalian impulse implied by its namesake, largely because a full cone of garlic, cheese and chips leads from drunken revelry to the cleansing act of vomit. In the bar the chatter was about who should take on the job of student rep, a sort of class diplomat to the powers that be. Someone suggested I take a shot at it. I was drunk, so I said, OK.

Leaving London, Ch. 3

I had come home from a year in Asia and after a few weeks of being very bored and unemployed at home I went up to see Ben at the 18th Street Lounge off M street. He was hanging out with some of his new Georgetown friends. They were all smart, attractive, funny and likeable, and they all seemed to want to have sex with each other. I was driving my mom to the grocery store every other day and trying, and failing, to avoid the Green Door, the bar that is the death of many a young man in St. Mary’s County.

I watched a girl named Virginia swing a pair of gorgeous legs around a guy from Texas and then they started kissing each other on a couch, and then Ben introduced me to the daughter of a Greek shipping magnate who was arguing about something with a half-Haitian, half-Nigerian American who now works in the US Embassy in Ethiopia, and I thought, A Master’s Degree Wouldn’t be a Bad Idea. I was torn for awhile between SOAS, LSE and Trinity College in Dublin.

Trinity was the first to go, partly because I have a friend who went there and didn’t want to double up on schools (it felt cooler if we all went to different places), and partly because based off my first visit there — and subsequent returns — I have decided (sorry Dylan) Dublin sucks. It’s like a weak attempt at being every other city in the world, with the added charms of rampant alcoholism, heroin abuse and a shitty excuse for a tram called the Luas (which as far as I can tell means ‘Amoeba-slow”). The Temple Bar district is particularly sad, like someone plunked everything bad and commercial and cheap and tasteless about America into the center of a city that Joyce practically turned into its own literary genre, and raped it, mind, body and soul, and the Irish, the poor, deluded Irish, have embraced it with all the fervor of a people gone mad. Also, Trinity itself, and particularly my prospective department, the School of Ecumenical Studies — an interesting take on peace studies via a focus on religious dialogue — seemed like a (too) quiet school tucked into a (too) quiet corner of an afore-mentioned not all that appealing city. I was still looking longingly at the London/LHR lights at the departure gates.

And then there were two. I was at another DC party and at this stage I had found a job and I wasn’t taking mom out for groceries anymore and I wasn’t as impressed with the Capitol set. A lot of them came off as snobby, pretentious and self-absorbed. Of course everyone is snobby everywhere, but people in DC are justifiably snobby because a lot of them are actually doing something important, which I was not — I was covering local politics for the Podunk Weekly Shitrag — which made me jealous. Anyways, the epitome of this sort of DC, a girl at the party, was drinking white wine and smoking (and if it was the ‘80s it would have been a Virginia Slim, but now we’re post-hip, so it was probably a Camel) and complaining about covering Capitol Hill for Congressional Quarterly, a job that is so coveted and brag-worthy for a 25-year old reporter (which she was; I was 24) I wanted to tell her to Fuck Off, had I not also been trying to take her home. She was doing that thing where you complain about a job while simultaneously acknowledging how cool it is. Done in the right way this comes off as admirable self-deprecation, but here it just came across as false modesty. Then she said she was quitting her job (“And I can get you in touch with my editors if you want” — bitch) and that she was going to LSE next year to do a master’s in International Relations. And I realized that every American I had ever met who was going to LSE — and there were a lot of them — was, more or less, this girl.

That left SOAS. I liked the name: SOAS. “School of Oriental and African Studies” — the name reeked of colonial pretension and tweedy sensibility, old, tenured men with big white beards smoking pipes in offices cluttered with artifacts looted from some far corner of the Empire. It focused on Africa and Asia, and I had studied in South Africa and done my undergraduate thesis in Asia. Drawbacks: No one in America seemed to know what SOAS was (except Africa and Asia specialists). It ranked below LSE. Upon closer inspection, it seemed a nesting ground for the Respect Left, a silly, white-bellied version of the Left that will sleep in whatever bed happens to be railing against America and Israel, no matter how distasteful the occupants of said bed are. SOAS had been so Left in the ‘70s one of its professors had defended the Khmer Rouge (he was later killed by the same KR when he visited Cambodia — oh irony, you and your dark sense of humor.  For more on this sad, if blackly funny story, click here and do a control+F search for Malcolm Caldwell). Advantages: SOAS accepted me. And SOAS was in London.

Leaving London ch. 2

It could have been this year, but I reckon earlier. Maybe in 2002, after I studied for a semester in Prague and started doing the requisite American backpack around Europe, and I had a night, a crazy fucking night, of walking into a strip club in Soho and bumping a prostitute in the street and trying to dodge her big, Eastern European pimp and then walking to Trafalgar Square and watching South Africa House at night. Or earlier that year, walking from Westminster to Green Park, marveling at how many ugly people I spotted along the way, and the horizontal rain, and the cost of a 10-pack of Marlboros. Or even earlier, when I was 12 and came for the first time to visit my uncle and auntie and figured all of England would be one giant chapter from the Chronicles of Narnia. Somewhere along the line London exerted a tremendous pull on me. Somewhere along the line, every time I walked through an airport — and there have been more than a few — I would run my finger over the glowing departure time and gate for London/LHR.

Leaving London Ch. 1

It’s a good trick to give a city an anthropomorphic representation, which is to say, a human personification. It reduces a thriving, throbbing urban mass to an individual focal point, makes all that mess of population and contradiction into a person you could sit with at a café or a bar. Give your character enough dimension and history and gradually a city-cum-character approaches the complexity of the individual, which is in actuality far more complicated than the city, which is just an aggregation of individuals. The thing is, the depth and stories and histories we assign cities — the personality traits, so to say — are like the little events that shape our own lives, but on a much grander scale.

Boston is an Irish-American Celtics-Bruins-Sox fan who works for ConEd and drinks at Revere Beach on sunny days and can hold their own in a Harvard pub quiz because all those traits can be applied to Boston across a wide swathe. New York becomes an Italian-Jewish Wall Streeter with a flash pad who grew up on 93rd and Amsterdam, played stickball with black kids and Puerto Ricans back in the day and occasionally cheats on his real-estate broker wife with an NYU student who works in an art gallery on weekends. Hanoi? A middling, not-entirely-happy member of the Communist Party who likes to sit at the edge of Hoa Kiem lake in the morning and sip coffee and eat bun cha and read his fortune by flipping to random pages in the Tale of Khieu, a veteran of the American War (as it is called there) whose children have no recollection of that conflict but think instead about overhead costs for their new export business and whether to shop in Hong Kong for holiday.

So if London were a city, what would she be? Mixed-race, I think, a little wiseass, a little torn between wanting to be well-read and wanting to have a drink and maybe having a snort of blow in the toilet, flush with financial success sometimes and skinned others, comfortable with other cultures but always skating around their surface and wary of plunging into the nuances of too many different communities, a smoker that feels bad about it, alternately generous and often stingy. Or is that me? Maybe a reserved City banker who compensates for his shyness by roaring down the street in a Lotus. Or a solidly built black woman in Hackney wearing a big red hat with a feather in it, on her way to church on the 73 bus on a Sunday morning.

Or the Turkish kid in Lambeth who kicked his soccer ball against the walls of the council courtyard I lived in and asked me, “What you doin’ here then, bruv?” while I stood guard over my roommates’ furniture, piled in a moving van, on the day we moved into 13 Newton House, SW8 2RZ (Our leasing agent? Sherlock Homes. Really). “I’m moving in.” “Where you from, then?” “The States. Washington.” “Ah yeah? Well fuck Bush and fuck Blair too, then!” He laughed at his own crudeness and seemed embarrassed about it and proud too, and I couldn’t tell if I thought he was a shit or likeable, but anyways every time I saw him after that — sometimes when I was stumbling home a little drunk past two Yardies who would let their pit bulls have the run of the front courtyard lawn, the smoke of the Big Smoke settling onto the bricks and the rain slicks making everything glisten to its core — we would give each other a high five. It was the sort of exaggerated high five you see the older American give the cheeky foreign kid in a dozen movies, except we really did it every now and then.