A 19-Year-Old Eloquent Boy in the Stressful Middle East

by Reza Jamili (Iran)

Making a local connection Iraq

A 19-Year-Old Eloquent Boy in the Stressful Middle East The old man with a turban wrapped around his head pulled the small table in front of him closer, took another puff on his cigarette, and said in a voice bearing the remnants of thousands of smoked cigarettes, “the coffee’s on me, be my guest.” Nodding toward the coffeehouse waiter, he made sure he got the message. The astringent taste of the aromatic Arabic coffee lingered in the back of my throat. We were sitting right around the grand square near the Citadel of Erbil. The city of Erbil, a surviving reminder of history with people who would warmly invite you to a coffee, stood before me. Just a few years ago, the terrifying shadow of the ISIS advanced as far as 25 km from the outskirts of the city . Now, however, Erbil welcomes strangers with its pleasant tranquility and peace. Erbil lies at the intersection of Arab and Kurdish cultures. Men and women dressed in Kurdish cloths and holding Iraqi dinars in their hands are trading whatever you can think of in the crowded Bazaar at the heart of the city. POS devices are nowhere to find in Erbil. You will get a better idea of this as you make your way through the vendors and enter a passage dedicated to currency exchange shops. Large stacks of bills are piled on the tables. It is as if the city is frozen in the 1980s. The youth, however, have managed to keep up with the rest of the world. At night, sitting in an Arabian coffeehouse wreathed in shisha smoke and watching the El Clásico, the picture becomes clearer. The coffeehouse waiter, a young Iranian Kurd immigrant, pours tea into a Turkish tea glass with a saucer and places them on the trestle-bed draped with a Kurdish kilim. It is the biggest coffeehouse I have ever seen, full of TV sets all showing the thrilling match between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona. According to the waiter, the youth of Erbil love soccer. They love getting together in coffeehouses to play backgammon and smoke shisha. I try to guess the average age of the over 500 young men at the venue; 25 at most! Just as in most Arab countries, people are always chatting. I do not know exactly what these endless chats are about. The noise of the lengthy and lively conversations mixed with the sweet Arab and Kurdish music is heard in all coffeehouses, shops, restaurants, streets, and every corner in Erbil. It is as if the nation has finally been given a chance to break its centuries-long silence and speak up. Erbil is a long endless conversation about life. My various trips have taught me that there is no better place to understand the culture of a city than where big business is done. I ask the locals and find the main venue where the daily commodities are traded wholesale. Business is where people and culture disclose themselves, unvarnished. Large stacks of dinars in the hands of business man are scanning the big American and Japanese pickups pulling up and unloading in the bustling and slightly dirty alleyways overflowing with irrepressible lust for life. Now that the goods are offloaded, all the haggling and bargaining starts. A real Bazaar, just like the ones in the tales of “Sinbad” and “A Thousand and One Nights”. I spent four days in Erbil. I walked for hours in Erbil, stopped at different coffeehouses, enjoyed delicious spicy Arabian cuisine, and struck up conversations with complete strangers with a smile, all to see what Erbil was like. Erbil, through my eyes, is a 19-year old boy who never stops talking and can be counted on whenever his help is needed. A city with big coffeehouses, cheap food, and calm, polite, and helpful people. It is one o’clock in the morning. In the coffeehouse, the smoke has cleared and the waiter is turning off the last TV. Real Madrid and FC Barcelona played out a draw . . . just like the peaceful coexistence of Kurdish and Arab cultures in Erbil.