Marketplace

Naming conventions

When I was traveling in Jordan, I didn't always tell people where I was really from. But when I did, it inevitably seemed like they had relatives in Chicago or New York -- or at least knew somebody who did. And looking at the names of some of the businesses I saw, maybe they were right. Except it seemed like maybe those relatives actually live in Tempe and Tenafly.

I mean, if I were going to name a business after something American, I might choose The Ritz. Or the Golden Gate. Instead, I found places like the gas station in West Amman called Grand Central Station (It was neither very grand, nor very central. I suppose it was, indeed, a station.) Smack up against the divided highway that runs between Amman and Zarqa –- not far from my favorite road sign ever, indicating exits for Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia -- was a furniture store named Newjersey (sic) Furniture. And around the corner in the same building was Newjersey Majestic Hall for Celebrations. Maybe living in New York I'm biased, but majestic is not a word I usually associate with the Garden State.

On a charming little street in West Amman, I found a business, called -- appropriately, I thought -- Arizona Dry Cleaners. After all, you wouldn't want to take your dry cleaning to a place named after someplace damp, like Seattle or New Orleans, right?

There was the American Doors business that advertised on a billboard along the road to the airport. I wasn't sure what that was supposed to imply. But perhaps my favorite of all was the Biggly-Wiggly supermarket. I imagine it's probably a bastardization of the southern grocery store chain, Piggly Wiggly (P's in English tend to become B's in Arabic, so you drink Bebsi, which you can buy at the Subermarket.) But I like to imagine that it was intentional, to avoid a run-in with the original's attorneys. Or maybe just in deference to the Islamic prohibition on anything to do with pigs.

-- Alisa Roth

No place for a woman

"No, I can't take you there," Yusra, my Iraqi translator told me. "It's not acceptable." I wanted to go to one of the coffeeshops in Amman's downtown where Iraqi refugees like to hang out. The reason? I'm a woman.

I was skeptical. Yusra's a liberal 40-something divorcee, who says what she thinks, and would never consider covering her head. Plus, she had lived in Baghdad through much of the worst. Could a coffeeshop really be worse than suicide bombers?

So I asked Rana, my secular Jordanian friend if she'd take me. "No," she said. "You could go there because you're a foreigner. But I can't." The most I could get out of her was that it would raise serious doubts about her reputation. And bring ruin to her family if anybody saw her.

I didn't want to be rude, but the idea still seems almost funny to me. I tried to think of a place in the U.S. where I simply can't go. There are places I'd be afraid to go. Or places that I can't imagine wanting to go. But can't go?

But I got a hint of what she and Yusra meant the day Rana and I went to interview Egyptian day laborers on a bitterly cold January day. We'd barely made it out of the car when we were surrounded by what felt like an enormous crowd of men. All staring at us.

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