PETER GOODCHILD - TAXI DRIVER FROM BAGHDAD.

Arktos
London 2020

Copyright 2020 by Arktos Media Ltd.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means (whether electronic or mechanical), including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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ISBN

978-1-912975-82-2 (Softcover)

978-1-912975-83-9 (Ebook)

Editing

John Bruce Leonard

Cover & Layout

Tor Westman

W hen I first arrived in Nizka, what I saw was a town of perhaps thirty thousand people on a flat desert. On much of the land, away from the buildings, there were widely-spaced shrubs of some kind. Further away, in most directions, there were hills and mountains consisting of great piles of loose and angular rock fragments. The native Omani men wore long white robes and mumbled into their mobile phones as they zipped along recklessly in their Toyotas. Most Omani women wore scarves and ankle-length robes of a thin material. The students at the college had that same medieval clothing. Any manual work at the college was done by men from Pakistan or India.

There were flocks of goats that wandered all over the neighborhood. A lizard as long as my arm nearly ran over me once. The houses were all white or cream with flat roofs, and looked like Arab versions of tiny medieval castles. The area where I lived was called Falaj a Sharah (The Water Channel of Sharah), a five-minute drive north of the college.

After my second week in Oman, I still had no passport (the recruiter had it), no work visa, no residency permit, no bank account, and not much chance to use email. I had very little access to money, food, drinking water, or medicine (I had a cold).

I didnt really know what I was expected to teach, except that I was supposed to turn Arabic college students, English majors, into teachers of English to Omani children. I spent hours every day trading small scraps of information with other Anglophone teachers, since there was no means for all of us to have access to all the basic information. The holy month of Ramadan meant that everything was closed at the most inopportune moments. At the end of every day, I was totally exhausted, although I had accomplished very little.

The classrooms were nearly impossible to find, partly because I had never before seen Eastern Arabic numerals, which are not closely related to those used in the modern Western world. But even after I had mastered those numerals I realized that the numbers of the classroom doors were utterly random anyway, out of sequence they had been scribbled on (or tacked onto) the doors whenever someone in the past had found a liking to a particular room. Several decades of oil revenues have had quite a deadening effect on Omani intellectual energy.

The job had been offered to me only a few weeks before I had to get on the airplane, but I was already starting to learn some Arabic. I had managed to acquire a basic knowledge of several languages over the years, not from a passion for linguistics, but merely from the exigencies of living on my wits. The memorization of a language is neither a sign of intelligence nor a creative use of the mind. I would swear that each expedition from familiar Indo-European to unsettling petroglyphs would be the last. I have always been a reluctant traveler.

*

I met a Chinese woman named Helen more than a year later, in early November, on her first day at a massage parlor, a health club, which was also her first day in Oman. She said she was thirty-nine, though from my Western perspective she looked at least ten years younger. Over the next few days I saw her several times, partly because the club was on the ground floor and my new apartment was on the top floor. She would barely speak to me, however, although the other women were quite friendly. About ten days after making Helens acquaintance, I asked her boss, a woman named San San, to get her to call me later in the week. After a few days of phone calls and text messages going back and forth with San San and getting nowhere, I felt like telling all those women to go to hell and stop wasting my time. Then she fooled me by sending me her first text message, although it wasnt much more than a brief greeting.

*

Attitudes towards both heterosexuality and homosexuality in Oman go against the prevailing Western wisdom. What I mean is that the academic literature, as summarized below, does not support the prevalent non-academic Western attitude toward homosexuality. Yes, homosexuality can be found in many cultures, and in some it is (or was) quite common. This cannot be disputed. One has only to read the standard works of the ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, to see that this was the case, although mainly in post-Homeric times.

However, we are going beyond the facts if we say that permissive cultures such as those of Africa, South America, or the Pacific had a larger proportion of homosexuals than other cultures. On the contrary, the case was quite the opposite. In fact, it would probably be a safe generalization to say that in these areas homosexuality was neither suppressed nor banned, but that it was simply seen as boring and pointless. In other words, homosexuality is generally correlated with a lack of general sexual freedom, not with the prevalence of it. Homosexuality is largely an outlet in societies where heterosexuality is suppressed.

Perhaps it could even be said that homosexuality is more common in patriarchal societies, i.e. those in which male and female roles are sharply differentiated, and in which power and decision-making are a male prerogative again, ancient Greece and Rome come to mind. In a patriarchal society, the females are closely guarded, and opportunities for extramarital sex are therefore rather limited.

However, this creates a prisoners dilemma: one man cannot let go of his wives, sisters, or daughters unless other men do the same. In such societies, oddly enough, it is not only the sexual property that is of concern but also the status of the property-owner. In fact, what really matters in a highly patriarchal society is not so much jealousy as ridicule. A man may be utterly bored with his women and wish they would disappear, but gossip about their behavior would be a sharp blow to his esteem, his social status; needs of this sort can be powerful.

This is exactly what I saw during my years in Oman: to touch another mans women would be dangerous, and yet that same property owner must live with his own sexual frustration when viewing his neighbors property. The result is a large population of foreign i.e. permissible prostitutes, generally Chinese, Thai, and Filipino. There are a few Omani prostitutes, mainly in the big hotels. There is also a high incidence of homosexuality. Yes, although there is in the West a common belief that Muslims are greatly opposed to homosexuality, what I saw was largely the opposite, to the extent that the brothels of which there are many are often staffed by more male prostitutes than females.

*

I wrote back to Helen the next day, asking her to come upstairs to my apartment to visit me. In that strange English-like language that is now the worlds most widespread means of communication, she said (translated into more-standard English), San San isnt here. I have to stay at the desk. Come downstairs to the club to talk. We had a long conversation, and she even fed me some dinner. She told me bluntly, I dont want to be your girlfriend, but then we roughly agreed that I would meet her the next day at the club at about 2 pm , or perhaps she would come up to my place. At one point she insisted, I need money, whatever that meant.