ISTANBUL, TURKEY — Özgur, my barber, is underwhelmed. If the blue-jawed men reading magazines by the door are typical customers, then I present a modest challenge: an uneven, month-old beard (three or four smears of stubble, a lot of naked cheek) and ears entirely bereft of fuzz. A few quick strokes of the straight razor should do the trick. But Özgur is a Turkish barber and, true to his profession, he takes care: lather spread thick, a slow shave, hot towels, balm, a massage.

“Now you no shave three weeks,” he jokes, working the balm’s sting from my puttied face. I am very relaxed. When a flame jumps from his hand I barely register that my ears are about to be set alight. Hair I didn’t know I had whispers as it burns, briefly, before being patted out.

Seeking my cultural bearings I’ve come to Üsküdar, a neighbourhood on Istanbul’s Asian shore, for a cheap haircut and a look at one of the city’s unheralded places of worship. I climb the streets past nail salons and discount furniture stores to Çinili Camii, the Tiled Mosque.

From the outside it’s not much. The courtyard is bare and weedy. A single minaret flanks the dome, which sits atop an ungainly modern extension. Of an age with the imperial mosques for which the city is famous, Çinili Camii is classical Ottoman architecture at its simplest.

Inside, however, the mosque is aswirl with flowers and Arabic calligraphy. Hand-painted Iznik tiles cover the walls and ceiling, a bequest, in 1640, of Mahpeyker Kösem, the wife of Sultan Ahmet I. Artisans in Western Anatolia developed Iznik pottery to meet the Ottoman court’s demand for Chinese porcelain. Using the materials available to them — glass, silica, clay, and tin — the potters married Islamic and Chinese styles, retaining the traditional emphasis on decorative symmetry while adopting the Ming palette of blues and turquoises. Rinsed with morning light, the tiles glow softly and the prayer hall feels serene, aquatic.

Today is Friday, Jumu’ah, and in a couple of hours the observant will fill Istanbul’s mosques. I cross the Bosporus to Sultanahmet, the seat of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, to get a better look. As the ferry rounds the Golden Horn I can see the domes of Süleymaniye Camii surrounded by four soaring minarets. It is the last and grandest of the city’s imperial mosques, commissioned by Süleymaniye the Magnificent in the 16th century.

On the steps leading to the courtyard peddlers sell tespih, prayer beads strung 99 to a loop, one bead for each of Allah’s names. A boy and his father hawk birdseed. They advertise their packets with lovely trilling birdcalls that seem to confuse the nesting sparrows and annoy the crowds. Pigeons swarm the pavement.

Süleymaniye Camii attracts a large and varied congregation of students, labourers, and businesspeople. Some of the women wear hijabs; many have obviously donned scarves for the occasion. At the ablution taps a man washes his feet and talks on a cell phone — I can’t help but think about modern Turkey’s embrace of French-style secularism and wonder where the people here would locate themselves on the continuum between cultural and religious Islam.

A Turkish friend once told me that love of their city is Istanbulites’ true religion, one that reconciles Turkey’s apparent contradictions, its zealous secularism and liberal Islam. It’s an observation that resonates with the familiarity and truth of cliché. Eternally cosmopolitan and eternally great, Istanbul has embraced disparate cultures and cultural ideas for two thousand years.

At Nuruosmaniye Camii, a baroque mosque near the Grand Bazaar, I watch a shopkeeper devise a prayer mat from a piece of cardboard. Squaring it with the other mats, he joins the last row of men. He seems anxious. The imam begins the prayer. His words are languid, urgent. The men fall to their knees, their backs to the sky. They stand. They kneel again.

When the prayers are over, the shopkeeper hurries towards the gate. A man claps his shoulder and he’s ushered into conversation with friends, two of them, heavyset and greying where the shopkeeper is thin and dark. They tease him and he laughs. They laugh. He is helpless, happy. Together they wander off.

I’ve recorded the prayer. Listening to it as I write this, a few weeks later, its ordinariness strikes me as beautiful: the whoosh of two hundred people falling to their knees, the plaiting of birdsong and prayer, the falling away of footsteps and laughter as the crowd breaks.

A makeshift prayer mat.

What follows is the first quarter or so of a chapter (still in progress) that lands somewhere in the middle of the book. Hence, the ‘interlude’. The chapter pokes around issues of tourism and globalization, with references to ‘authenticity’ and historical urbanity. Note that Pelourinho means pillory, or whipping post. This is the old district of Salvador where many of its slaves were quartered, and as the name suggests, bought, sold and brutally flogged. -Cf.

*

SALVADOR DA BAHIA, BRAZIL

The favela chief was on the other side of the door, barking threats at us and stamping his feet. Andre hollered back while I sat on a stool, watching him gesture crudely at the angry man we couldn’t see. Because Andre’s room had no ceiling of its own, their shouting bounded off the corrugated iron sheeting that roofed the entire building, flooding the landing, the stairway and probably the street below with their argument.

The chief didn’t like the idea of me hanging around on his turf.

Andre flung open the door and charged onto the landing. He pulled the door shut behind him so I wouldn’t get a look at the other man. They argued with each other for a minute more, until everything was tranquilo. Andre came back inside and locked the door.

“It sounds like I should go,” I said.

“No, you can stay,” he said. “Everything is cool now.” Andre changed the discs in his CD player, and out came thumping, robotic dancehall reggae. He retrieved a pair of modish, ladies’ wraparound sunglasses from the pocket of his shiny sweatpants and mounted them on his head. He re-adjusted the Velcro straps of the fiberglass brace on his left forearm — the by-product of a recent scrap — and then articulated himself into some kung fu, or maybe it was capoeira, or Brazilian ju-jitsu, pose. A very futuristic, The Matrix meets Shaolin Monk, cyborgian assassin. He liked that I was watching him.

We’d met on the street only an hour before. My first night in Salvador, I was wandering the lesser-lit, dodgier streets of the historic Pelourinho district, the city’s old centre. Jumbled, sloping cobblestone lane ways, pastel coloured Portuguese colonial buildings dating back to the seventeenth century in various states of disrepair, baroque churches and convents. It was already late when Andre approached me, like so many others had — costumed Baiana ladies in their big hoop skirts and turbans, crack-afflicted kids — trying to vend some kitschy, beaded Candomblé jewelry. Somehow we got to talking, parked on a curb, Andre suggesting we speak in French, because that was better than his English. After a half-hour of chatter, he invited me back to his place — “in the favela.” He said he was a respected man there and that we’d encounter no problems. “Come, see how I live. I live with my sister. It’s not far from here.” I was feeling lonely and a little reckless, so I didn’t think twice about going along. I followed Andre as he tried to conceal a limp.

It wasn’t a favela in the usual sense. Rather than a shantytown jerry-rigged whole out of brick, poured concrete, rebar, timber and iron sheeting, Andre’s favela was set within the façade of an old colonial manse, on the run-down edges of the Pelourinho. The police had put up barricades at either end of the block to ward tourists off from gamboling this way. At the ground floor, there was a tavern that spilled onto the street. The insides of the original building had been gutted, substituted with a warren of perilous, roughly slabbed cement stairways and landings, the available space divvied up into clammy, single room apartments. Most of the old windows had been bricked-in.

Andre wanted me to make myself at home.

“Take off your shirt,” he said. Or ordered more like, tugging the basketball jersey he wore over his head and pitching it into the corner. His black, rawboned torso was lashed with a hatchwork of scars, as though he had rolled across a bed of sharp coral. He pivoted to one side and then the other, modeling his stab wounds. I was about to ask how he got them, when he rolled back his shoulders and said blandly, “Le crime.” He insisted I take some pictures, but I didn’t have my camera with me.

“Come on, take off your shirt,” he said again.

“But, why?” I asked.

“It’s too hot in here.”

“Really Andre, I’m okay.”

“You don’t want to take off your shirt?”

“No.”

Andre paced agitatedly in the small room. Was he devising a plan? Expecting someone? Working off excess energies? His limp rhymed with the downbeat of the music. I asked him to sit down and chill. He was making me nervous.

Before all the shouting had started, Andre had dispatched his sister, Christiana, to fetch us some more wine. When the shouting was done she reappeared with two plastic bottles of sacchariferous, Brazilian plonk. While Andre poured the wine into plastic cups, Christiana dutifully set about tidying the place for the visitor’s benefit. The room was no larger than 10 x 6 feet, with an adjoining shower stall that also housed a toilet. Christiana crouched down with a wire brush and pushed all the dust and grime into an open drainpipe. Andre made a toast to friendship and rubbed the wine drops from his fingertips across his chest, the matted curlicues of hair painted shiny. (It was then I noticed how much he looked like the ubiquitously shirtless, Nigerian Afrobeat bandleader Fela Kuti.) There was a rectangle of discarded carpet in one corner, which was where they both slept. Clothes were neatly folded on two racks of wire shelving salvaged from the rubbish pile; half of an old door lain atop the racks provided a counter top. Two empty propane gas canisters supported a wooden bench against one wall. I kept to the stool. The walls were painted egg-yolk yellow, but for the many craters and cracks where the grey mortar showed through. The walls had been randomly tagged with small Spiderman decals.

Done tidying, Christiana dragged a Styrofoam cooler out from the shower stall. I must have watched her for a few shakes too many, Andre noticing this. “Do you like my sister,” he asked, encouraged at the prospect that I might. “Sure,” I said. “But not in the way you’re thinking.”

Christiana put a camp stove on the bench and lit the gas with a match. She retrieved some slabs of bacon from the cooler and a bag of farofa. When she asked Andre to get her the knife, he got down on his knees and rummaged underneath the wire shelving, which is where they kept it hid — why it was necessary to keep the knife hidden I didn’t ask. After ten seconds of feeling around he pulled out a ten-inch homemade cutlass and handed it to her. She sliced the bacon strips into bite-sized cubes on the bench, and threw them into a pan with some butter. Then she dashed in the farofa, mixing it all together with a fork.

As Christiana made supper, Andre started pacing again, occasionally punching the air and striking capoeira poses. But there wasn’t much room to move. “Outside, with more space I will show my capoeira,” he said. He mumbled something to his sister in Portuguese, she said something back and he interpreted. “She thinks I should be serious about capoeira, that I can teach.” There was little chance of that, I thought. The Pelô was full of chiseled street hustlers putting on faux-capoeira displays; the tourists usually didn’t know well enough that these were simply showmen, not properly affiliated with any escola, just repeating gestures they’d picked up as kids, with more showy athleticism than refined technique.

After the close-quartered capoeira display, Andre pretended to fire lasers from the arm with the brace and declared, “I am modern man!”

Christiana spun a finger around her ear and said, “He is a crazy man.” But she obviously adored him, too. They were tight. Whatever she asked him to do, he did it.

We ate, the bacon fat and manioc pellets soaking up the booze. Andre finally sat down and inhaled his dinner like an underfed soldier spooning madly into his rations. I asked about his life of crime.

“A little everything. Stealing, selling drugs, sometimes I have to fight someone. I get money for this.”

Christiana picked out enough of the words in French that she felt the need to reproach him. “Don’t tell him everything! You will make him leave.”

“It’s okay, I am done with crime,” he said. “I promise. No more.” Then he repeated this in Portuguese for her benefit.

“What will you do for money,” I asked. The beaded trinkets and ribbons he was trying to sell me were pretty much worthless.

“I will find something,” he said.

After finishing two helpings of the bacon, Andre stood up, put his shirt back on, and hit me up for some money. “To pay for the wine,” he explained. I gave him some bills, but Andre kept his hand out, saying “we” needed more, many more Reais apparently than what the foul wine might have cost. “Do you trust me? You must trust me,” he said. He went out again. (He was forever disappearing and rematerializing, like a gangland fairy.) I figured some of the money was going to the favela chief to placate him — my tourist fee, the charge for my safe passage.

Andre had left me alone with his sister, which was, I also figured, purposeful. He’d leered at me before closing the door behind him.

Christiana and I tried talking in Portuguese. I understood the first thing she said: “He’s crazy, but he is a good man.” Out of necessity, I kept my questions simple. How long had she lived here? About a year. Did she like it? Yes, it was better than the favela she grew up in, where their mother still lived. Better how? When it rained, it didn’t flood here on the third floor. The electricity was reliable. And it was more fun living in Pelô, there were always foreigners around, which meant money. Isn’t this place small for you and your brother? Maybe, she liked to be independent, but was glad to have her brother here. They were a team. What about work? At that she embarked on a long explanation. I understood none of it, although I nodded as if I did.

When Andre came back, he told me to stay where I was and ducked into the shower stall with his sister. They drew shut the green curtain. Their voices turned into low-frequency murmurs. I heard a flint strike and quickly the room filled with the crack cocaine tang of burning condom and rotten grapefruit. After a few minutes they emerged, Christiana burping up a brume of smoke, then shoving the pipe between some clothes on the wire shelving.

“Let’s go,” Andre said. “We’ll have a drink, downstairs.”

The crack must’ve had some curative properties because Andre’s limp was gone. He leaped down the steps two at a time.

At the tavern, a chorus went up as Andre circulated. Middle-aged women giggled and stroked his biceps affectionately. The men gruffly clasped his hand, leaned in close and bumped shoulders with him. So Andre was a respected man! He had, as they say, social capital. Arms were extended to me in greeting. I was offered one date, and then another. I felt almost a part of the fold. Andre ordered beers for Christiana and I. Where were these people from, I asked. From all over the northeast, he said, the northeast was very poor, the poorest in Brazil. The northeast is a place you leave, you come to Salvador, or Amazônia, or all the way south to Sao Paulo. It was always this way. The Pelô, he said, was a good place to come to forget about what you left behind. A woman came up to me then, one of those who had offered a date, and showed off a gimpy leg, stippled with scar tissue. A car accident, Andre explained. I bought her a drink and she put the leg away.

When it was time for me to leave, Andre followed me out of the tavern and into the street. What are you doing tomorrow, and the next day, he asked. I didn’t know yet. “Come look for me,” he said. As I walked away he grabbed a rubber ball off the street and threw it up against one of the sealed-off windows on the building’s façade. Then he ran to catch it as it ricocheted back to earth.

*

I was staying only a few blocks from where Andre lived, on a side street just outside the Pelô, where a row of hotels catered to sojourns mostly of the hourly-charge variety. They had promising names such as Hotel Paris and Hotel Don Juan, and signs that welcomed check-ins at any hour. I had been assured that my hotel was a proper pousada — it was cheap and a little shabby, without air-con but family-run; a sign advised that guests were not permitted in the rooms. Perhaps it was for this reason that the hotel was almost always empty. During my two weeks there, only three other rooms were ever occupied. I had the place to myself. The pousada’s staff either ignored me or rendered themselves mostly invisible. I imagined them dissolving into secret cubby-holes or well shafts like in a Murakami novel. But I had some company: every night, a transvestite trawled the streets below, usually in the rain, picking through the trash bags left for morning pick-up. She serenaded herself in a garbled, sandpapery basso profundo, the incantation of Ruy Barbosa street.

It seemed the rains had shadowed me from Manaus. Wicked downpours, worse than normal for this, the wettest season, were falling across much of Brazil’s northeast, causing floods and deaths in the favelas from mudslides. The daily showers curtailed my usual happy habit of the full-day walkabout. (And Brazilians, I found, tend not to get up to very much when it does rain.) My first couple days in Salvador had left me a little miserable. I enjoyed the clove-infused cachaça at O Cravinho; I spent an evening with the Argentine percussionist and composer Ramiro Musotto, who studied traditional Bahian rhythms from local masters and expounded on same like a giddy, pot-addled mathematician. For once I was more or less a tourist, I had come here as a break between researches elsewhere, with no assignments, no pre-arranged purpose or interviews. I am, however, a lousy tourist. I never know what to do with myself.

Every day I thought: I could go to the beach! But it was almost always raining, or about to.

So, I kept drifting back to the Pelô, drawn to its rough and tumble floating world, its ransacked evanescence, making friends with artisans, shop owners and general hangers-around. At least it was the off-season, which meant the neighborhood was less thick with tourists than normal, although in turn that meant the touts, hustlers, street waifs and hookers seemed to outnumber everyone else. The worst I got it was when some young woman fell in beside me one night as I was trotting between bars. She began nattering at me in Spanish, because she assumed I was Argentine. I mostly ignored her. Then she followed me into a packed bar and began screaming that I owed her money in front of the other patrons. The bartender ejected her, but she stayed outside on the sidewalk for a while, still frantically yelling at me through the big wooden doors.

Then, an hour later, I could find myself having the time of my life in a scuzzy hole-in-the-wall, jammed with locals dancing to old-school samba de roda, in the embrace of a lovely 27-year-old mullata beautician with whom I could barely communicate a few sentences.

Which pretty much summed up the Pelô, spurning or haranguing you one minute, then pulling you in so tightly and with such sweetness the next that you never want to leave.

…

Check out BA contributor Tyler Stiem’s awesome essay on Liberia, “Goodbye, Babylon King”, in the current issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Time, in the Somali desert, exerts itself gently on the visitor. There’s little to mark its passage, such is the constancy of the light, so that the days seem at once eternal and evanescent. Which is to say the afternoon caught us by surprise. We’d spent the morning in the hills north of Hargeisa, filming a pair of doctors as they reminisced about the civil war. They were like joshing schoolboys, each trying to outdo the other with his stories of hasty amputations and midnight supply runs fraught with engine trouble. Who was the first to run for cover when the Somali Air Force strafed their makeshift field hospital? Who saw the worst cases of gangrene? It had been twenty years; they couldn’t agree.

The field hospital, what remained of it, spanned a few acres of thin, sun-washed forest — a string of vanishing footpaths, a few clearings. As we followed the two men, sidestepping acacia bushes and camel dung, I began to grasp the logic of the place. The clearings had been wards: here, beneath this tree, they had performed triage; there, at the foot of that tree, they’d buried the dead. They lingered over every detail, incredulous, luxuriating in dangers past from the safety of the present.

“At night, when the MiGs were gone, this place became a city of light,” the big doctor marvelled. “Cooking fires under every tree. What a sight it was.” His nickname was Bergeel — Camel Liver — on account of his father’s dark complexion. The Somalis love teasing nicknames. The other doctor, the thin one, pried a broken ampoule from the dirt. He coughed and spat. “The children played in the dark while we worked,” he said, scraping at it with his thumbnail. “It was a great relief to hear their laughter.”

Bergeel grasped his forearm. “Remember the old man who used to count the cries of the hyenas?”

The thin doctor laughed. “Every night he said to us, ‘If it is an odd number, we are going to be okay.’ And if there were ten cries, he always heard eleven, even when nobody else could — but we believed him!” The memories of terror and uncertainty were yielding to a pleasurable romanticism, for the doctors’ stories ended happily: they’d fled to the West, reinvented themselves. This last-minute excursion into the desert was going to be our little documentary’s piece de resistance. Now it was time to move on.

And so we found ourselves rattling across plains grey and vast towards the Ethiopian border. One hundred and forty kilometres separate Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland, and Jijiga, the capital of the Ogaden — Somali Ethiopia — but the cities are a world apart. Somaliland broke away from Somalia during the civil war, in 1991, abandoning the irredentist dream of Greater Somalia (an ethnic mega-state comprised of Somalia, Somaliland, Djibouti, and swaths of Ethiopian and Kenyan desert) in favour of realpolitik. Hargeisa, a bombed-out ghost town fifteen years ago, was now thriving. Across the border, though, there was trouble. The Ogadenis were fighting their own, doomed war of secession. Recently the Ogaden National Liberation Front had stepped up its guerrilla campaign against the Ethiopian government, provoking vicious reprisals, and a mantle of military paranoia had settled over the region. I anticipated our passage to Jijiga with grim curiosity.

*

“You are beautiful, no matter what they saaay,” sang the taxi driver, trying to make eye contact with the girl in the backseat. He divided his attention between the girl, the road, and the treats arrayed in his lap: khat, a half-litre of Sprite, a packet of cigarettes. His name was Abdurahman. He was young and spoke English with a North American accent. The girl didn’t look up. Abdurahman pretended to receive a text message. “Words can’t bri-ing me down,” he mumbled. Abdurahman had grown up in the refugee camps across the border and, later, in Canada. He was taking classes at the vocational college in Hargeisa and driving his uncle’s taxi for something to do. Recognizing a missed opportunity, he asked us how much we would’ve paid him to be our translator. I suspected he was what locals would call a dhaqanelis: ‘a person without culture.’ It was an epithet usually reserved for diaspora Somalilanders who’d run afoul of their parents (or worse, the law) and been dispatched here for cultural rehabilitation.

Villages accumulated along the road, a human sediment deposited by the recent flood of cross-border commerce. There were rumours Ethiopia would be the first to recognize Somaliland’s claim to independence. But Hargeisa always buzzed with talk of impending statehood: A visit from a Canadian official two years earlier occasioned feverish speculation that the West would throw its weight behind the aspiring republic. Nothing ever materialized. And so the Ethiopians remained Somaliland’s closest ally and primary trading partner, even as they oppressed the Ogadenis and occupied Mogadishu. Horn of Africa politics were nothing if not complicated.

To the north, rubbly fields yielded to pasture land, erupting into mangy hillocks as the landscape emptied out. Cloudshadow streaked the grass like errant cue-strokes on an old billiard table. When a young shepherd dared to steer his flock down the middle of the highway — by now a loose curl of tracks sketched across the green expanse — Abdurahman lost his temper. He stomped the brakes, whipped the door open, grabbed the boy, and kicked him roundly in the ass. The shepherd threw a hurt look over his shoulder as he ran limping after his sheep. One of the stragglers received a brutal kick of its own.

“Boy,” Abdurahman said. A cruel appraisal. We drove on. The amphetamine effect rolled in on euphoric waves and every so often he seemed newly awake to the world and the possibilities it presented. He savoured everything: the traffic, the sun, even the rancour of his slow-burning argument with a man in the back. When the man thumped the driver’s seat with his fist, Abdurahman only grinned and disagreed more loudly. Another glimpse, perhaps, of his erstwhile delinquency. He described the Internet business he would someday run, back in Ottawa, and the places he would travel. At one point he tried to steer with his knees, the better to defoliate the khat, but another curve in the road sent us briefly, terrifyingly, into the other lane. Experiment over.

Abdurahman had been living in Hargeisa for nearly a year: “It’s amazing, man. They know you’re not a local just by the way you walk down the street. The dudes here have a different kind of swagger, you know? But I love this place, it’s like a second home to me, know what I’m saying?” I wasn’t convinced. He seemed adrift, beset by a deep, undefined hunger that manifested itself physically: in the haggard youthfulness of his face, which pulled at the cheekbones and bibbed around the eyes, in the open parentheses of his bony shoulders. His clothes, probably new and certainly fashionable when he’d arrived, at least by the standards of local kids, looked outmoded, carelessly worn. Abdurahman radiated an aura of anxiety, exhaustion, false cheer. I thought he might be the loneliest person we’d met. Perhaps it was the khat, and this was what acculturation looked like. After all, half the men in Somaliland looked strung-out and underfed by two in the afternoon.

Born a decade earlier, he would’ve sought his fortunes with the Somali National Movement, a teenage guerrilla fighter like the ones we’d met in the dried-out settlements beyond the capital. These were young men who’d settled into middle age by their early thirties, contented, uncurious men for whom the stretch of desert they’d wrested from the once-mighty dictatorship of Siad Barre and could now call their own was world enough. One veteran, an engineer at the water sanitation plant in Gadabiley, had shown me the jagged stump of his arm. He was haunted, still, by the ghost of his hand, which sometimes curled into an invisible fist, but the sacrifice, he explained, squinting at my translated question, had been worth it. “We are free,” he said, “and that is enough.” (The thin doctor admitted he’d performed the amputation: “You can see the tools we used were not made for people.”)

Another veteran bore a shrapnel scar that bloomed, caramel-coloured, around his misshapen bicep. Half the muscle was gone and what remained squirmed up his arm like a vine. He’d been at the front line on the outskirts of the capital when his unit was strafed by MiGs. By the time he saw a doctor, the wound was badly infected and the muscle had to be cut away. It was strange, he said, but he’d seldom dreamed about the war, even during combat.

Almost to a person, the Somalilanders we’d met believed statehood was their right and their future. Demographics played a role in this. The older generation recalled the postcolonial fever-dream that had unified Somaliland and Somalia in the early sixties with a certain nostalgia, but for most people the civil war was the defining moment of their lives. It helped, too, that Somalilanders belonged overwhelmingly to a single, persecuted clan — the Isaaq. They had suffered the most under Barre and been the first to rise up against him. But we met others (Issa, Gadabursi, Darod) who shared their sense of grievance and their optimism. The beginnings of a national identity, one that might some day supercede clan, had been forged in the crucible of war. It was a rare thing in Africa and boded well, I thought, for the future of the breakaway republic.

I asked Abdurahman what he remembered of the fighting. “I remember the camp where I lived with my family. I remember having fun because there was no school, and I remember my uncle going away to fight against Siad Barre. My father and my brothers went to Jijiga and they bought scrap metal. The Ogadenis, they looted our empty houses and sold them back to us, piece by piece. It’s weird, but those were happy days.”

No one wanted to talk about the crisis in the Ogaden. Somalilanders regarded the ONLF as a band of dreamers and criminals, but towards the Ogadenis they felt an estranged kinship. They owed them nothing but they didn’t feel right about the way they were being made to suffer, either. In Ethiopia itself, the Ogaden wasn’t — couldn’t be — talked about. At an airport bar in Addis Ababa I’d met a relief worker headed back to Jijiga. I was reckless with my questions: What kind of work was he doing there? Had he seen evidence of a scorched-earth campaign? He smiled. The situation was not good, he said. Then he stubbed out his cigarette and excused himself.

*

The mood was light as the taxi pulled into the border town of Wachaale. We’d arrived in time for a football match between local teams. The khat vendors had locked up their stalls and a moneychanger was bagging huge, filthy bricks of currency in a plastic sheet. The roads were gutted, the day’s rain filled the potholes. A yellow froth scummed the puddles. But the pitch, around which a crowd began to form, was striking: a neat white grid laid over manicured grass. The players, too, in their immaculate kits, green and black, red and gold. I wanted to stay for the game but we had too far to go.

We said goodbye to Abdurahman (he tried to sell me his iPod, settled for my email address) and hired a wheelbarrow-boy to port our equipment across the border. The Ethiopian customs officer was an elegant man in his thirties, better dressed, in his shirt and tie, than he probably needed to be, managing a provincial outpost like this one. Pasted to the filing cabinet behind his desk was a photo of two little girls, their hair in plaits, giggling.

“Why did you go to Somaliland?”

“We were making a tourist video,” said Sean, hopefully.

“Moment.” The customs officer stepped into the back room.

From my seat against the wall I watched him consult with a man who lay curled around a bowl of steaming wat on the floor. The soles of his feet were cracked. I stepped outside. Past the low wooden houses, with their bare, churned-up gardens, a pack of ruderal children chased a soccer ball. Locals wandered in no man’s land.

We left Wachaale in the dark. Inside the bus the women held their children close and the men pretended to sleep. There had been a fight for the last seats: Everyone was anxious to move on. Outside a storm was gathering. Bean fields swished under a hard, crystalline sky. Then: a roadblock, manned by Ethiopian soldiers. They were fit, well-equipped, their expressions grim. We stepped off the bus into wind. Distant clouds drifted across the sky like a smack of luminous jellyfish, aswim in spectral light. Lightning tentacled from their blackening underbellies.

The women lined up first, documents in hand, and they were searched while the men looked on in silence. The soldier tasked with the pat-downs was careful, almost deferential. Old and young, slender and stooped, the women cut austere figures. Their dresses — flickering yellows, reds, turquoises, purples — bled into the dusk, a mess of colour expressing what their inscrutable faces did not. They were a pageant of ghosts. I was taken aback by their beauty. So, I think, was the soldier. As they climbed back onto the bus they were apparitions become flesh once again: mothers nursing bug-eyed infants, old women minding arithritic joints.

The men were frisked and shoved. A soldier climbed atop the bus and made the conductor pick through the luggage. They were on the lookout for arms coming across the border to supply the ONLF. “This is yours?” the soldier yelled down at us, tugging at one of our bags. Sean nodded. The soldier gestured for the key. He rooted through toiletries, clothes, notebooks. I was glad of the stock footage we’d recorded.

Half an hour later the storm was upon us. I watched my reflection float just beyond the window, disfigured by the rain. People were falling asleep. I thought about my wife, how in the heat of the Toronto summer we drag a mattress downstairs and sleep on the floor. Our own little island. The hiss of summer rain and the relief it brings. The sound of her feet peeling from the hardwood as she rises, an hour before I do, to wash and dress for work. It was the first time I’d thought of home in awhile.

*

The sky flinched and there it was: the second roadblock. A man with dreadlocks and a kerchief wrapped around his face boarded the bus while another guarded the door. These weren’t soldiers. If their masks didn’t give them away, their equipment did. A ragged satchel and an old Kalashnikov hung from the man’s back, their crisscrossed straps burrowing into his chest.

“What is this?” Sean whispered. There wasn’t the same alienated calm inside the bus this time.

“Nothing,” I hissed. “Don’t talk.” I hoped we’d be leaving the checkpoint with our cameras and tapes.

The man strode down the aisle, stopping halfway to loosen the kerchief. Something caught his attention (his own disembodied face, suddenly strange?) and he stared out the window. His long fingers caressed a seatback. He was a little younger than Abdurahman, about twenty, and in that instant reminded me of him. The same yearning look, the fuzziness around the edges. But it passed when he shook his reverie, and anyway the comparison was probably fanciful: there was a look of real impoverishment to him. He was counting us with his eyes.

The man spoke to the conductor in hushed Somali and the conductor handed over a wad of bills. I guessed now that such contingencies accounted for the higher nighttime fare. The man stepped off the bus and we pulled away. For awhile no one spoke. Then a cellphone flared in someone’s hand, illuminating a row of weary faces. Somali faces. A murmur issued from the broken silence and drifted through the bus. Rain struck the roof and settled into a thrum. Again the small talk dissolved into silence. In the distance I could see Jijiga, a smear of light along an invisible horizon. In the foreground, another roadblock.

Originally published in Descant, Issue 145, Summer 2009

By Craille Maguire Gillies

Unable to stand the crowds after spending several days in Barcelona over the holidays, I scoped out another vantage of La Sagrada Família, Gaudí’s enormous, yet-to-be-completed church. Lines of people waiting to enter snaked around one corner and, turning that corner, I discovered that they snaked around the next, too. I found a clearer panorama at the entrance to a KFC, where the lines were also long and spilled out the door. I tripped over a pigeon eating a French fry as I staked out my spot.

You can’t seem to walk three blocks in Barcelona without running into a Gaudí masterpiece — though by masterpiece I am referring to scale. In architecture, as in cities, grand has more than one meaning. This premise was challenged a week earlier in Vienna when I came upon the marble façade of Alfred Loos magnificent, but relatively diminutive Loos-Haus, directly opposite the grand palace, the Hopfburg, where Hitler declared Austria part of Germany in 1938.

[Loos-Haus, Vienna]

Despite the striking façade, Loos-Haus is unornamented and spare, a few flower boxes are the architect’s sole concession to then-emperor Franz Joseph, who is said to have called the building the “house without eyebrows.” One hundred years after the Loos building went up, after modernism and post-modernism, Loos’ iconoclasm is difficult to reconcile — until you realize that the plain façade of Loos Haas with the neo-Baroque apartments across the street were built at the same period. Masterpieces are often, but not always, large.

When seeking out suggestions on what to see in Barcelona, almost everyone I spoke with gave a list that included a few sights by the Spanish architect, prefaced with, “If you like Gaudí, you might visit…” In Paris, no one would suggest you visit the Eiffel Tower “if you like hideous, tall buildings.” Even Frank Gehry, an architect prone to odd shapes and a nearly monolithic style, doesn’t provoke the same response. As in, “If you like shiny, amorphous buildings that look like they were crafted from aluminum foil you might stop by the Guggenheim.” Gaudí, though, Gaudí is different. Which made me wonder, what do locals think of Gaudí? Do they think of Gaudí? Is he not simply there in the way that a birthmark is there, irrevocable, unnoticeable?

And yet his legacy is so recent. Few European cities have such a large catalogue of work by one architect who worked not so long ago.

Cranes and scaffolding are seemingly permanent fixtures along one side of Sagrada Família. Take or leave the buildings, but this is the most transparent metaphor for cities that I’ve seen these last few weeks in Europe: a city always in progress, never finished, crafted from layers of concrete and stone and glass. I like the idea of a city that is more of a collage than one person’s artistic statement, and this is where, during my outsider’s archi-tour of Barcelona, I find Gaudí’s iconoclasm difficult to square.

Alfred Loos is said to have proclaimed something along the lines of, “Ornament is crime.” The only ornament should come from the materials, he believed. This sentiment came to mind I stood in front of the KFC in a territorial battle for “view” with tourists and that lone pigeon. For Gaudí, the ornament was also in the materials. His buildings look like they were carved from enormous hoodoos by a violent wind, like the one that whipped gravel into my eyes when I jogged along Platja de la Nova Icària.

With some shame and embarrassment, I’ll admit that I prefer “pretty” buildings and would give up waiting in line for hours to see the inside of Sagrada Família to instead wander the barrios of Barcelona. I do not always find what I am looking for, but it never seems to matter.

[Bryce Canyon, Utah]

Photos by Steve Wilson

1. Can an object have properties before we experience it? The ice on the Red River will support your body weight, if you haven’t had any breakfast that morning and if you don’t move a muscle once you’ve stepped on it. Stay absolutely still as the cracks spread. Don’t wink an eyelid. Hope the plunging cold of another Prairie nightfall will increase its thickness enough so you can ease off it, ever so gently…

2. Does the world have a cause? Lake ice presents us with a paradox:  it reflects everything in its nothingness like a 1000-carat cubist lollipop, but can it reflect its own nothingness, too? Hmmm… This chunk of gemology came from a pristine bay in Lake Winnipeg, a perfect gift for a hard-to-please Ice Queen who wants her world on a stick.

3. The mind only thinks in terms of causality. Crud ice is what they get at Portage and Main in downtown Winnipeg. The cement-like residue of frozen brown gunk sits on the curbs long after the robins return. It freezes and thaws and cracks the pavement and makes potholes and saves every tossed cigarette of winter like a rare pearl. We thought we avoided it, driving slowly, gingerly, through the city, but we still got a flat tire before lunch. Steve is shown paying it back.

4. Morality requires truly autonomous acts. Under green ice is where you find the desirable game fish of Canada – the walleye, called greenbacks on Lake Winnipeg. Stu McKay, the mysteriously black-masked outfitter of Cats on the Red, calls them “the epitome of a good eater.” He drops a sonar device into his hole just to watch fish hover by his bait.  Watching them doesn’t make them bite more, he admits, but at least it gives him something to do. We took turns posing with our solo catch of the trip, then tossed it back for its next photo-session. When my turn came I promptly stepped into an unmarked ice-hole and experienced the thrill of blue jean ice for the day.

5. The only possible argument in support of the existence of God: Is a blonde, with the ice-blue eyes.  Michelle Gunnarfson, 21, works as café hostess at the environmentally perfect Hecla Oasis Inn. She’s a descendant of Viking Icelanders who settled Hecla Island in the 1870’s and survived smallpox epidemics, floods, blizzards – the usual pioneer opera. Michelle moved back to Hecla in 2007 and now wins staring contests with wolves and male tourists. The guy on the left? Who cares?

6. Is it in our interest to accept a hypothetical? Shower ice can be found in Central Canada wherever there’s a stiff breeze. Here, Oz tourist Sue Hess shows top form as another cascade smacks her right in the face. She was enjoying the scenery during a Via Rail train trip from Winnipeg through the taiga to Churchill, in a long and futile search for the Northern Lights. “Outback with blizzards” was her only comment.

7. Know what ought to be done. Meat Ice is what they feed sled dogs in Churchill, after they give it forty whacks with a sharp ax. Don’t ever tease Chimo by grabbing his pink brick. Chains have been known to snap like twigs. What are you going to do when he comes at you dancing on two legs like Kid Chocolate with a steel muzzle?

8. Space and time are not concepts. Space and time are what surrounds this land of ours, one centimetre from Churchill. The man riding into the blue yonder is musher Charlie Lundy, 57, at the start of a 40-mile training run with his 10 sled dogs, for the Hudson Bay Quest race. The glow in the sky is qubuq, an Inuit word (western Arctic) for the reflected light on the horizon of sea-ice. Another word for it is polar bear country.

9. Resist dogmatic slumber! Tired of ice is what you get on your windshield when you return, limping in frozen jeans and smelling of raw fish, to your crystallized car with the flat tire. Tomorrow you can go snow-shoeing on apu ice, Inuit for the sharp crust covering the northern Prairie. Apu will support you if you use snowshoes properly, and won’t if you don’t. In the meantime you can use your cubist ice to chill whatever drink they decide to bring you, and brood about what you could have said to Miss Blue Eyes.

Contributor Craille Maguire Gillies posts from Barcelona on how she passed New Year’s Eve.

We stuffed ourselves into the metro car until no one more could fit, and then a few more people squeezed in. While we were waiting on the platform for the train to come, a group of a half dozen kids popped the cork on a bottle of champagne and hooted as it hit the roof of the metro station. Then they did it again. It was just shy of midnight and the train was going to downtown Barcelona. There was hardly room to breath, let alone swig champagne, and anyway, there would be time for that later.

We were quiet as the metro plugged along slowly, until people in one section of the metro car started counting down in a mélange of languages and then exploded in cheers as midnight arrived. The ceiling of the metro car seemed to drop a few inches with their cheers. In Barcelona, 2010 started underground, for us anyway.

By the time we arrived in Catalunya, the cheap champagne, costing only a few Euros at the tiny supermarkets on every street, was already flowing. Police in military-like blue uniforms, helmets and face guards, stood around in clusters or by the rows of blue vans lined up in case things got out of hand. A clean-up crew from the city handed out biodegradable disposable cups. Loud pops came from the crowds and smoke from these impromptu, unsanctioned fireworks floated over us.

All of La Rambla promenade was as full as the metro cars. People hung out of windows of restaurants, hotels and apartments to watch, well, a lot of nothing much. A block of partiers played a kind of soccer game with an enormous red fuzzy ball, which bounced over their heads and then away by a gust of wind. But there was no music, no dancing — except for the occasional drunken conga line. Simply gathering a bunch of people was enough entertainment, and anyway, clubs would be open all night.

A few minutes after midnight, a woman stood off to the side of the street nibbling absentmindedly on translucent white grapes. It is traditional to eat 12 grapes at midnight, one at each strike of the clock; all down La Rambla, the cobblestone was covered in smushed grapes.

The next day was sunny and warm, but with winds that you could lean into and not fall down. Tourists had made their way back to La Rambla even though all the stores, save the farmàcias, were closed. Some kiosks along the promenade were open though, selling flowers, and one stall offered canaries, bunnies and turtles. (When regular business hours resumed, kiosks selling guinea hens, pigeons, chickens and roosters also re-opened.) On the promenade, street performers moved about quietly, including one guy dressed as a creepy insect reminiscent of the “non-humans” in the South African sci-fi movie District 9.

Nearby, one of the flower stalls had a small basket filled with neatly wrapped bouquets of el muérdago (mistletoe). The shopkeeper explained that muérdago bouquets were for good luck. Some of the berries were bright red, but other berries were the same translucent colour of the grapes people were eating the night before and were soggy and mashed up. The bouquets were on sale for just 3€, but no one seemed to be buying last year’s good luck charms.

Journal: Havana, Sept 14, 2009
Photographer Lorne Bridgman and I tool around Miramar, where the Spanish colonial, art nouveau and deco mansions of Havana’s pre-revolutionary rich have been given over to embassies and company headquarters. The most conspicuous foreign mission is the former U.S.S.R./now Russian embajada, which we get out of the car to gawk at. It seems to glower rather direly back at us. Some Cubans say it resembles a syringe—as in ‘the syringe used by the Russians to inject communism in Cuba!’ (Seriously, I’ve read that in several places.) But ‘monstrosity’ is the word I’ve seen most often used to describe the thirty-three story structure, whether by locals or foreigners.

I happen to enjoy the sight of it, but I have an unhealthy fascination with totalitarian architecture and design. Sure, the obelisk erupting from a brutalist tower block does suggest a periscope from which those inside might be surveilling the city—a menacing cyclopean eye on Havana. But its face has the kind of enigmatic expression one sees in primitivist stone statuary, like a Polynesian moai. I also find myself thinking how the building’s form mimics the distorted proportions and elongations of Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures of the human body. Those descriptions still make the building sound pretty creepy, and that’s probably not the best tone for an embassy’s architecture to convey. But in and of itself the building is compelling.

We only manage to squeeze in a few photographs of the building before security guards from other embassies in the area whistle and shoo us away. Lorne protests, “They build an architecturally provocative building and don’t expect people to want to take pictures of it?”

Los Carpinteros, Embajada Rusa

The work of local artist collective Los Carpinteros takes its cues from Havana’s built environment, and has produced a series of wooden sculptures that playfully reconfigure the city’s most iconic, landmark buildings. In 2003 they produced Embajada Rusa, a finely crafted cedar chest of drawers that replicates the Russian embassy. The tiny drawers like filing cabinets crammed with secret memos on all those potentially troublesome Habaneros.

Ed.: Tyler Stiem is just back in London after forays to Turkey and Syria.

With William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain as my on-again, off-again guide, I spent the past couple of weeks seeking out the points of intersection between Islam and Christianity in Turkey and Syria. While southern Anatolia bore few obvious traces of its rich and complicated religious history, Syria was a revelation. Especially Aleppo, with its still-thriving Armenian, Maronite, and Greek Orthodox communities and its Dead Cities with their splendid Byzantine churches. So, too, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Like the Aya Sofia, another magnificent house of worship from late antiquity, the mosque doubled, for a time, as a site of worship for both Christians and Muslims. Pictured above is a scene from inside.

During my travels I also managed to add a few more calls to prayer to my collection:

Ankara, Turkey (3:30). Broadcast over the p.a. system at the central bus station. The noise and neuroses of travellers hurrying onto buses probably explains its urgency. Very few people obliged.

Antakya, Turkey (3:08). I awoke to this on a black September morning. Dig the reverb. Haunting, lovely, maybe a little over-the-top.

Aleppo, Syria (1:45). The midday call to prayer from one of the mosques in the Old City. Very stern.

Aleppo, Syria (4:40). An Armenian marching band thrown in for good measure. We stayed in the Christian Quarter near the city’s main Armenian Cathedral. The band practiced their instruments by torchlight, jostling against the walls of the smoking alleyway as they passed beneath our window.

[Photo: Zingerman's Delicatessen, Michael Takasaki]

I’ve dreamed of visiting Ann Arbor, Michigan for years. Because that’s where Zingerman’s Delicatessen is. As soon as I read co-founder Ari Weinzweig’s book Zingerman’s Guide to Good Eating, I knew I had to go.

Last week, on the way back from Indiana with Chris, I finally made it. There was a sandwich involved, of course: a traditional, perfect Reuben. I realized ten minutes after finishing that I hadn’t even thought to add mustard, as I usually would. That should be the new test: if it makes you forget condiments, it’s a proper sandwich. It’s also an expensive sandwich. At $14.50 for a large, if I lived in Ann Arbor I’d be fat(ter) and poor(er).

You can eat for a lot less, too. As I gawked at the cheeses, a counter guy bounded out, asking what I wanted to taste. How about the $15/oz Spanish jamon iberico de bellota? The Iowa-raised, acorn fed Berkshire prosciutto I’d just read about in the New York Times? (“The best ham Jews have ever made,” according to the counter guy.) How about the farmhouse cheddars from Neal’s Yard Dairy in England, source of the filling for what Ruth Reichel deemed “the platonic ideal of the cheese sandwich”? No problem. Each sample is accompanied by a lesson in the where and the how of the thing.

Eventually I opt for a single $8 ounce of the Iowa acorn ham and some of the Neal’s Yard cheddar. But I want some bread as well. Nothing big—just enough for breakfast the next day. A half-baguette is suggested. Then I’m simply given a whole one. At the register, the cashier tells me, “That’s the best thing about coming at the end of the night: you almost always get something for free.”

They close at ten. If you’re likely to drop a bundle like I did, aim for nine-thirty and at least you might get a free brownie. If you don’t, you’ll still leave happy. And full.