killing time ii/ by aissa h.deebi

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To Jaime . . .

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[ Killing Time | Aissa Deebi 2006 ]

An exhibition of a new work commissioned by

the Queens Museum of Art

and Mizna, a forum for Arab American art.

California Building Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota

May 19-June 19, 2006

Queens International, 2004

Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York

November 7, 2004-February 6, 2005

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What is the experience of the world's displaced

who are forced to find a new homeland? Those who

are disconnected from all that is familiar—memory,

place, and community—find themselves navigating

new cultural terrains with the vivid awareness of

their un-belonging and alienation. They are caught

between who they are and who they willl become in

this new place. While this is the perhaps the reality

that afflicts all exilic people, for the Arab immigrant

in the US at this juncture of time, the struggle is

more formidable. In this country and at this time,

the figure of the Arab as the metaphorical cultural

other, we are told, threatens our very way of life.

And the latest incarnation of the Arab in the West

is something wholly incomprehensible and strange,

a person who does not share even our basic human

desire to live in peace and freedom. In attempting to

negotiate this cultural and political climate, Arabs are

forced to prove themselves to be harmless, nothing

more than benign cultural curiosities.

It is the force of this historical and cultural

experience that formed the principal narratives

behind Aissa Deebi's exhibit, Killing Time. Deebi

found himself newly arrived in New York and

needing something familiar when he came across the

Introduction

Mizna is an organization devoted to promoting Arab American culture, providing a forum for its expression. Mizna values diversity in our community and is committed to giving voice to Arab Americans through literature and art.


What is the experience of the world's displaced

who are forced to find a new homeland? Those who

are disconnected from all that is familiar—memory,

place, and community—find themselves navigating

new cultural terrains with the vivid awareness of

their un-belonging and alienation. They are caught

between who they are and who they willl become in

this new place. While this is the perhaps the reality

that afflicts all exilic people, for the Arab immigrant

in the US at this juncture of time, the struggle is

more formidable. In this country and at this time,

the figure of the Arab as the metaphorical cultural

other, we are told, threatens our very way of life.

And the latest incarnation of the Arab in the West

is something wholly incomprehensible and strange,

a person who does not share even our basic human

desire to live in peace and freedom. In attempting to

negotiate this cultural and political climate, Arabs are

forced to prove themselves to be harmless, nothing

more than benign cultural curiosities.

It is the force of this historical and cultural

experience that formed the principal narratives

behind Aissa Deebi's exhibit, Killing Time. Deebi

found himself newly arrived in New York and

needing something familiar when he came across the

coffeehouse that would become the stage for the

luminous photographs in this exhibit. What we see

reflected in these photographs is the search for a

community and the desire to create a familiar space.

The men depicted in this exhibit are attempting to

recreate the sense of community they have left be--

hind. The images profoundly point to this commu--

nity that is clearly out of place, haunted by distance,

separation, and displacement.

The artist holds a prism to this world and sees a

culture that is refracted by the ambient American

setting. The attempt to recreate the coffeehouse of

memory is impossible—the circumstance of their

experiences in America has fundamentally changed

these exiles, and the act of being photographed

changes them still. This exhibit's photographs and

accompanying sounds draw the viewer into this

world. In the various images, the viewer is up-close,

overhead, looking through a mirror—observing the

men in the café from different vantages. And make

no mistake, this is a man's space. Cast in a soft,

yellow light, the men and their gestures are

ponderous, questioning, caught momentarily

between here and there.

The title of the exhibit speaks to the ritualized

monotony of the coffeehouse culture. In the

context of its American setting, this lethargy can be

viewed as revolt against the glorification of notions

of productivity and efficiency. Or perhaps killing time

reflects something else—a perpetual

mourning for a lost past that continually haunts but

cannot be resurrected. Memories torment the exile,

who would prefer, on some level, to kill the past for

a bit of reprieve.

We are proud and honored to debut Aissa Deebi's

work in Minnesota. He serves as Mizna's adroit

visual arts curator, and is an accomplished artist in

his own right.

Arab American arts are thriving at this moment, with

the creation of literature, cinema, music, and visual

art that tells the artists' stories or reflects the world

as they see it. Aissa Deebi's work is foremost in this

groundswell—often focused on the intersection of

the Arab and the West, and the power relations and

mutual effects each has on the other.

Lana Salah Barkawi,

Associate Editor, Mizna

2006

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As I moved to Queens from rural New Hampshire, I wanted to search my new location for places that reminded me of home. Walking north past 28th Avenue I was welcomed home: the street is lined with Arabic grocery stores, sweets shops, Islamic fashion boutiques, cafés full of surly-looking men, halal meat shops, and more. I found that my homesickness was easily soothed with a plate of labaneh with olive oil and pita bread.

After a few months I started to regularly attend the shisha (water pipe) cafés on Steinway Street, which

incidentally are the types of places I never actually go to at home. I had always had serious discomfort with the inert, manly atmosphere of such places: spots where tea and coffee are sipped, water pipes smoked, and cards, dominoes, and shesh besh (back--gammon) are played for hours at a time.

One small café in particular caught my attention with its large sign topped with an American flag and emblazoned with the message: The Arab American Community Center of Queens. The first time I went inside and sat down for a cup of tea, I made the

Killing Time, an idea . . .

The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity, exiles cross borders, barriers of thought and experience. —EdwardSaid,ReflectionsonExile

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acquaintance of a waiter who, I learned, holds a degree in law from one of the best-known universities in the Arab world. He explained to me that the average income in his home country is $50–$70 a month, but that he makes $210 a week working in the café, a job in which he uses none of his academic qualifications. This was to be the first of many sobering stories that I heard during my daily visits to the café.

After a few weeks of visiting the café, I began positioning myself in a particular corner where I could observe the events, dialogues, and monologues of all visitors. Of particular interest for me were the regulars who come on a daily basis, occupy the same seat and table, and order the same thing: all they have to do is catch the waiter’s eye, and with an incline of their head, the waiter knows they will be having the usual. I began following the same practice: every night around 7 P.M. I would arrive, take my place and listen to the conversations around me.

At this time of the evening, the activity and conversation hinges on the wide-screen TV that dominates the café floor: every night at 8 P.M., a mustachioed and bespectacled man changes the channel from the Egyptian movie station to the Al Jazeera news channel and turns up the volume.

Immediately all the patrons turn their heads in the direction of the TV to watch the news. If, after a few minutes have passed, there is “nothing happening” in the world, they all shift back to their original positions to continue the daily routine. If there is

serious news being shown, everyone becomes a professional political analyst and lively debate ensues. The comments and conversation revolve around international politics, Arab politics, and especially the wars in Iraq and Palestine. The level of the conversation ranges from the most imaginary of conspiracy theories to a sophisticated discussion of American politics.

After attending this ritual for some time, I became friendly with the café owner and many of his patrons. I asked for permission to photograph the place, telling the owner that I’m an artist and want to do a project about the café. The owner was happy to oblige, thinking I was a sophisticated client who would make his establishment famous and help bring in extra money. And so began my practice of taking the R or V train each evening to Steinway Street, walking the few blocks to the café, and taking my seat near the television. From there I had an excellent shot of table #1: a small, 3-foot-square table encircled by a faux-leather couch and several chairs. On the wall behind the table hung a framed poster of Mecca, and near it, a fire extinguisher.

I had deduced over the period of my time at the café that this was the most popular table, and that there were always interactions to be observed in this spot. What really intrigued me about this place is that from my vantage point, I was able to observe the practice of boredom. I found that when I varied my routine to go to the café at a different time, the faces I saw were different, but the practices were still the same: a crowd dominated by regulars, sitting


in their usual spots, with their usual orders, rehashing the same themes in their conversation (or in the case of some, sitting stoically for hours with water pipes hanging from the corners of their mouths, pausing only to call the waiter for fresh coals or to sip at tiny cups of thick, aromatic Arabic coffee). I found that this routine was profoundly expressed in the photographs I took: even though they were taken over a period of a few weeks, the photos look as if they could have been taken in a single night, so invariable is the setting. I found that when a regular failed to show up as usual, none of the other clients registered any surprise, for the regulars were always sure to update the others on their planned deviations from schedule: “Ahmad has a dentist appointment,” or, “Imad is off for business.”

After a little over two weeks of photographing the café, I myself got bored with the routine. Work got busy, and it made a convenient excuse to take awhile off from the café. When I started going back a few weeks later, I found that the clients were surprised and full of questions: I had become part of their routine, and my unexplained absence was suspicious. Speculations had been raised that the guy with the camera was with the INS, the insurance company, or the IRS. One guy asked me (perhaps a bit suspiciousl-ly) where my photos were. I told him that I was still working on the project and that it would take awhile to finish, and he asked me to make sure to give him a copy of his photo as I had earlier promised to do.Visiting the shisha cafés on Steinway Street gave me a different perspective on the impact of such cafés among the exilic Arab community in Queens.

The role played by this café in the patrons’ lives is extraordinary and powerful. It is a place where you can step out of time and place: as you come through the door, you are immediately in a different world, where only Arabic is spoken, the décor and furni--ture looks like it was lifted directly from an Egyptian movie set, and the daily actors are always the same. There is little to suggest that you are not in Cairo.

I realized how the endless conversations, the deadening routine, the long hours spent at the pipe or sipping inky Egyptian tea provided a welcome piece of home for these men, a place utterly familiar and predictable in a world that is otherwise so precarious and uncertain, in a city so foreign to even the patrons who are long-term residents. Edward Said’s writings on exile and the role of familiar places suddenly had new meaning, and I found myself wondering whether we should think of these places as escapes or cultural prisons.

Aissa DeebiNew York 2006

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[ Diary ]

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Monday

I took the V train to Steinway Street and walked to the café. After taking my place, an Egyptian acting student named Fadi approached me, introduced himself, and asked me if I do headshots, offering to act in my movie for free in return. ‘What movie?’ I asked, then realized that he was referring to my photography project. I took some of photos of him in the café and we agreed to set a time later to take the headshots. In the meantime ev--eryone else was absorbed in the soccer game between the Egyptian teams of Ahli and Zamalak.


Tuesday

Today was one of my longest days in the café. The day started with a long discussion over lemonade with a friend. As the hours passed by, I met with several group of friends and other acquaintances. One of the people I spoke with was a Tunisian man, who had an interesting explanation for his visits to the café: “I come here to re--mind myself of the depression in Tunisia. All cafés there are the same—they all have a heavy, depressing envi--ronment.” Another man sitting closeby shared a related view with me, saying, “I’m here because I miss home and this place takes me back.” After 10 hours at the café I’ve gathered a wealth of photos and stories from the café’s patrons.


Wednesday

Most of the day crept by with the same uneventful--ness and sense of routine that normally dominates the café. But as evening came on, a fight erupted among four middle-aged men who were playing shesh besh. One of them had cheated, resulting in a vocal exchange of shouting and threats. I enjoyed the spectacle until one of them remembered my presence and warned me there would be no photos. I left immediately.

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Thursday

I came by the café at the same time as usual, but today I met someone new, a young Iraqi man named Hussein. He told me that he came to the United States as a refu--gee, and discovered the café as a place where he can come when he’s homesick. We spoke at length about Iraq and everything that is happening there, and he said several times that if he was in Iraq he would be dead by now.

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Friday

Today I came early to meet with my Syrian Kurdish friend. We stopped first at the nearby Morrocan sandl-wich shop to get kofta sandwiches to bring with us back to the café. As we sat eating among the café regulars, Abu Somer, in his usual gregarious manner, provoked many of the customers to conversation. This time one of the topics of discussion was what is going on in the Sudan and what we think of the atrocities be--ing committed in Darfur. The discussion was lively and even heated, so I took shots from table level in order to avoid disturbing the participants or interfering with their body language.

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Saturday

With the end of the week comes the most busy day in the café. The place floods with young adults who come to smoke shisha pipes in the backyard of the café, which has been converted into a tent. Many of them are young Arab men romancing foreign girlfriends: American, Chi--nese, even Pakistani, but Arab women are very few and far between in the café. Tonight, as I watched this weekly ritual, Gamal, the café owner, came to me with a busi--ness proposition. He asked me to take some shots of the backyard to put in the front window to show everyone what a nice tent he has to offer. “Let’s do some business, Mr. Photographer!” he insisted. “I need the photos to be as large as possible.”


Sunday

I came in the evening with my wife, who is American, to observe the reaction of the regulars. Everyone looked at us normally although none of them who have wives would bring them to the café. This is male territory, but there is some sort of unspoken concession to the oc--casional presence of foreign women. I take shots over shared rice pudding and tea with my wife.

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I inadvertently started to write this text while sitting through a few hours of waiting time at a Social Security Administration Office in Rego Park, Queens, in New York City, where I found myself in search of a replacement for a lost Social Security card. Like any other government office, this room was blandly furnished with linoleum tiles, fluorescent lights, and rows of folding chairs, and run by the typically indifferent and dispassionate—if not simply rude—employees at the windows.

I tried to make good use of an excruciatingly prolonged wait for my number “A148” to be called by reading through assorted fragments of Edward Said’s texts on the life of exiles. The ambience of the place started to fuse with the phrases and passages: “You can never fully arrive, be at once in your new home or situation . . .”1 “They belong in their surroundings, you feel, whereas an exile is always out of place. What is it like to be born in a place, to stay and live there, to know that you are of it, more or less forever?”2 It was an

Killing Time / Killing Time

Thosewhofindtheirhomelandsweetarestilltenderbeginners;thosetowhomeverysoilisastheirnativeonearealreadystrong;butthosewhoareperfectaretheonestowhomtheentire world is as a foreign land. — Hugo of St. Victor


almost hallucinatory experience of reading about the conditions that describe the very people with whom I was sharing the business of waiting. Against the bleak bureaucratic backdrop was this dazzling array of age, race, color, shape, and tongue. Many spoke in different languages; some brought their younger relatives or friends to assist with translation. And when English was heard, the various accents betrayed or gave clues to the origins of the speakers. Finally, the predominant clothing style—ethnic or not—punctuated the whole scene as if to collectively ratify the human conditions recurrent in Said’s texts: refugees, expatriates, émigrés, and the self-exiled.

Then a bemused (or confused) curiosity crept in my thoughts: are Social Security and Medicare exclusive concerns to immigrants in particular? Of course, I instantly reminded myself of the location of the office itself. Queens County is the most ethnically diverse locale in the most ethnically diverse region in the United States. What seems to be a group made up exclusively of “immigrants” is just a standard profile of the local population among whom some 168 different languages and dialects are spoken. As a Japanese national having lived in this country for nearly 16 years on a series of visas, I am one of them.

Taking its stage in a café in the area called “Little Egypt” located in Astoria, Queens, Aissa Deebi’s Killing Time portrays fellow Arab Americans, fragments of a diasporic reality of Arab America that hardly appear in mainstream media. It is not

about a present-day Café Voltaire where artistic, intellectual, and political left wings assemble and plot a new society, and it is certainly not about an exotic version of Starbucks where ideologically unencumbered souls congregate with shared membership of the mega-corporate–driven, consumer society.

Killing Time is an audio/visual installation consisting of seven large-format photographs (30 x 49 inches), texts, and sound set in an enclosed space that simulates the original site, the El Khaiam Café. Each photographic image is accompanied by Deebi’s diary-style text. As the viewer steps into the installation, recorded ambient sound is triggered, and one becomes awash in indistinct layers of low voices conversing in Arabic, the hypnotic bubbling of shisha pipes, and the sound from Egyptian movies constantly playing on a large-screen TV in the corner of the café. The installation dramatizes what the artist calls “the practice of boredom,” a relatively short menu of everyday rituals performed by the predominantly male clients of the café. Regulars occupy their tables at the same time each day, and smoke their shisha pipes, and sip thick Arabian coffees to fritter their time away.

El Khaiam has been run by the same owner for over 20 years in this location. Blue neon signs lit on its glass façade read “cappuccino” and “espresso,” and a pair of cheap home-use ceiling fans hang from the ceiling that has more than a few panels punched out for better ventilation in the smoke-filled café’s interior. Each element of its interior


could use some facelift, if not a total renovation. Furthermore, the café’s aging state is not the kind that could be poetically read as charm. There is no notable characteristic in either the café’s appearance or the customers. One could only imagine that its remarkably unremarkable condition evokes cafés in Cairo that may just look like this one and perhaps that’s what matters most to its habitués, many of whom claim that they gravitate towards this café as a salve to their homesick blues.

Two weeks into his mission of observation, this spectacle of boredom bored even Deebi himself. Despite the fact that photos were taken over the period of a few weeks, they appear as if taken on a single visit to the place. From the more than 50 pictures taken, the artist finally selected seven, all in a horizontal format. All but one depicts the café’s customers, captured alone in each image, seemingly absorbed in their respective solitary routines. Hints of interaction among them are only given to the two cropped images of gesturing hands that do not identify the “gesturers.”

While these photos were taken with the permission of the café owner and the vast majority of the individual customers, Deebi exercised careful discretion by quietly pressing down the shutter of his camera, which was nonchalantly placed on the corner table that became his own regular spot. This coffee table is the vantage point of most of the photographs. None of his subjects seemed to be aware of their being photographed in the resulting images. And the two images depicting only

subject’s hands are the most expressive element in the prevailing antisocial behavior in the café. They suggest a form of verbal communication taking place, far more expressive than any other inert gesture displayed by people in the other photographs: reading a newspaper, lost in the haze of tobacco smoke, talking on a cell-phone with a pipe hanging from the edge of the mouth. This is not to say that there is no shared camaraderie and social interaction among them. But it is the introverted solitary acts of boredom that were the single most remarkable characteristic of the place that impressed Deebi.

Deebi’s depiction is deliberately uneventful. It is as if to counter a particular media hype around Arab communities in this country in the recent years. As an Haifa -born Palestinian who has lived away from home for over a dozen years, the artist’s initial selection of El Khaiam to satisfy his need of a place that reminded him of home is an honest one. But as an artist whose “non-romantic inquisitiveness” equipped him with an effectively operative distance in structuring this project, Deebi maintained a neutral position—both emotional and political.

Deebi’s distance from his subjects is further demonstrated in the photo of a shisha-smoking young man that was shot from a higher vantage point. While the close-up of hands suggests a notion of voyeurism, this work’s dominant vantage point—ruled by the camera on the table—and the absolute absence of eye contact between the subjects and the artist/camera generate an oblique tension


Simon Cafe, Wadi Al Nisnas, Haifa, Alkhyam Cafe, Queens New York, 2006


akin to that of tacit surveillance. The way these photographs were shot and the notions they achieve help to navigate the viewers in their own inquiries. While it seems paradoxical that the elaborate effort of monitoring reveals in the end an image unlikely to be found in mass media regarding present day Arab-Americans, boredom, neither does it aggressively challenge the public notion of “Arabs” or “Arab Americans.” Here in “Little Egypt” (merely a 10-munite subway ride from mid-town Manhattan), however, prevails an atmosphere of lethargy, induced in part by the types of customers who are willing to indulge themselves in it, and in part by the café owner’s renowned policy prohibiting political discussions in his café (including a restriction on watching CNN or Al-Jazeera3). For the El Khaiam regulars, the café is first and foremost a place that is just like what they had back home in Egypt, Syria, or Iraq. Deebi’s investigation isn’t about each individual with a story to tell, but is about illuminating a sense of group solidarity immersed in the practice of boredom, and the café that is a willing accomplice.

But what brings about a management policy like this?The café’s owner started to impose his mandate amid the post-9/11 paranoia after many suspicious visits from the police and fire department officials.4) The party line toed by the café owner seems to have been a response to the unmistakable injunction levied by President Bush, “Either you’re with us or against us.” While it may very well be understood as simple as a business owner setting out to protect the interests of his enterprise and the safety of his customers, the “political silence” within the walls of

this café could serve as a searing metaphor for the present-day triangulated complexities of immigration,

anti-Arab sentiment, and the Patriot Act. There is some irony here. The most predominant theme among immigrants coming to the US is seeking the fat of the land—the American Dream. But there are also immigrants who come to seek political asylum, those who had to flee their respective countries not in pursuit of the proverbial greener pastures but to escape the repression of the governments of the countries they fled. An aspect of the American Dream is the power and allure of self-determination that is not just licensed but supposedly celebrated by the ideals of religious, political, and economic freedom. In a word: democracy. Is the self determination that the owner of the café exercised self-censure in the midst of an increasingly anti-Arab milieu? In his desire to protect his own American Dream, he seems to have elected to impose suppression of political talk. Whether it is fear-driven self-censure or indifference as a result of paralysis, the “boredom” of the café customers in Deebi’s Killing Time can be seen as an innocuous façade that has been constructed within the community in order to protect themselves and their safe-harbor, El Khaiam.

In the end, this silence—the practice of boredom—in Killing Time can be interpreted in various ways. Where is the line between boredom indulged and boredom foisted? Are the motivations of either equally rooted in a sense of helplessness?


Is boredom apathy? Is its “practice” resignation and its “policy” capitulation? And in the refusal to engage the most glaring discourse begging to be debated and in the denial of any formulated political viewpoint as one “kills time,” does it then somehow in fact impact—from one’s quiet table in a café in Queens—the wars elsewhere?

“Killing Time” is an expression for the practice of boredom. But “killing time” also has the ravenous ring of hunters run amok in the wild, at a corporate merger negotiation table, over a game of poker, in the deserts, mountains, or caves abroad. The fundamentalist jihad calls for the utter and complete demolition of American civilization. Meanwhile, what’s a chilling war cry amongst some of young US soldiers? “I’m gonna kill me some raghead.” It’s chow time. It’s sleeping time. Hands clamped over one’s own mouth, eyes, and ears. It’s too grim out there. It’s killing time.And thus the aching poignancy in Deebi’s photographs of the gesturing hands. Their flutter pregnant with the unspoken, they are hands unclamped.

Hitomi Iwasaki Associate Curator Queens Museum of Art

End notes:1 & 2: Excerpts taken from Edward Said, “Reflection on Exile” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, The New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press. 1990.3 & 4: Abeer Allam, “Astoria Jounal; Where Tea Doesn’t Mix With Political Sympathies,” The New York Times, August 28, 2005.


From inside the Main Gate of the American University of Beirut, one can look out onto the red sign that marks McDonald’s fast food restaurant on Bliss Street. This franchise of the multinational chain now occupies the space once filled by Faisal’s Café, a favorite haunt of PLO leaders and the University’s politically active students.

Photo, Jaime-Faye Bean © 2004


At first glance the idle passerby might assume the typical Arabic café to be a place of inertia where men aimlessly wile away the hours over coffee and shisha. In fact, since its first appearance in Aleppo, Syria in the 16th century, the Arabic café has been essential to the exchange of intellectual ideas and transmission of culture throughout the Middle East. By the mid-20th century, the perception of cafés as meeting places where writers, artists and filmmakers gathered to discuss matters of intellect, art and philosophy was firmly cemented in the

Arab world. When modern times brought political foment to the region, cafés also became regular haunts for revolutionaries, ultimately becoming fertile ground for the formation of contemporary Middle Eastern politics and history. The Parliament Café in Cairo played host to leaders of the Arab nihda (renaissance), including Jamaluddin Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, while decades later Faisal’s Café in Beirut became the favored meeting place for exiled PLO leaders and their protegés. Today, the beloved Egyptian author Nagib Mahfuz still frequents

The Arabic Cafe and the Performance of Arab Masculinity

ال تسدق شب تغرب وال ختيار راحت ايامه - مثل شعبي فلسطيني“Never trust a young man who has been in exile, or an old man who longs for his younger days.” — Arabic proverb


his favorite table at the Ali Baba Café in Cairo, where he can read his newspaper in relative peace as various admirers and acolytes pay their regards or watch from a respectful distance.

To discuss the café in its context as an intellectual arena, however, is not to suggest that cafés in the Arab world are elitist establishments. On the contrary, the Arabic café is a place where any man who can afford the price of a cup of coffee can sit for hours, debating politics, negotiating business, playing backgammon, reading his newspaper while enjoying a shisha—in other words, engaging in a man’s business, for one of the quintessential features of the Arabic café is its atmosphere of complete masculinity. It provides a space for a man to express his freedom from domestic responsibilities, regardless of whether he is a successful businessmen or among of the region’s many un- or underemployed. When a man is at a café, his control over his life and his time is asserted: his absence from home implies not only his non-involvement in duties like childcare, housework, and meal preparation, but also demonstrates his confidence that he has managed his household to run smoothly without his constant intervention. Those who frequent a given café most often are regarded with a special status of sorts—they are often called upon to give their advice, mediate arguments, or, in the case of the surliest grandmasters, are given wide berth and shown extraordinary deference. In a region where being male comes with an extra measure of authority, these patrons are quite simply the manliest of men.

In the typical exilic context, the Arabic café’s role as a staging ground for the performance of masculinity seems to intensify in proportion to the outside threat to their traditional male role or identity. Some contemporary residents of Tel Aviv remember that with the arrival of large numbers of Jews from Arab countries in the 1950s and ‘60s came the appearance of shisha cafés like those the arrivals had known in Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus. It was in these cafés that the new transplants found respite from the realities of living as Israeli Mizrahim, including treatment as second-class citizens by Ashkenazi Jews and the constant exposure to social mores significantly more liberal than those to which they were accustomed. Contemporary artist Aissa Deebi highlights a similar phenomenon in his installation Killing Time, in which Deebi documents day-to-day life in an Arabic shisha café, Al Khayam, in Astoria, Queens. A day spent at the café reveals a clientele that consists disproportionately of middle-aged Arab men, most of whom are new immigrants to the United States. Many of them work on the lower end of the wage scale as taxi drivers, street vendors, grocers, and the like. Most of them have wives and children (whom are rarely discussed directly), but they are as likely to be back in Cairo, Beirut, or Fez as they are to be in the United States. The patrons are almost all religiously observant, and would unequivocally describe themselves as traditional (taqlidi) in their values and relationships.

Nevertheless, in exile, many of Al Khayam Café’s patrons have been stripped of the essential responsibilities, privileges, and influence that so


essentially define manhood in the Middle East. Those who are geographically separated from most of their families are functioning as financial providers to their wives, children, and even extended families, but distance renders them useless as providers of protection, guardians of honor, and primary decision makers. Those with families in the United States face an inverse problem: they may maintain wide-ranging authority over their family within the home, but are all but ineffectual in controlling their family’s exposure to American culture, particularly the aggressive sexuality and promiscuity of pop culture.

In their working lives, many of the men who frequent Al Khayam are also stripped of much of their (nonlfinancial) power and authority. For the most educated among these men, like Naji, the Egyptian lawyer-turned-waiter, the irony is clear: while their jobs in the United States allow them to support their families much more adequately, their relative social and economic status has declined dramatically in their new environment. For the significant number of men who are out of status or undocumented workers, they have also traded their former jobs, which were often extremely low-paid but also extremely stable, for the constant uncertainty and instability faced by illegal immigrants in the United States. Swarthy complexions, thick accents, foreign names, and the veil of suspicion surrounding anyone even vaguely Middle Eastern also make the men targets for racism, ridicule, and surveillance once outside the café walls, robbing them of the dignity and individual identity that defines them when they are “home.”

For these men, the Al Khayam Café is a slice of home and a place for the aggressive assertion of their masculinity. Once within the walls of the café, the men know that they will be greeted by name, served with the familiar Arabic coffee, tea, and shisha, and welcomed with televised news from Al Jazeera. The café provides a place like no other, where conspiracy theories can be discussed freely, politics debated heatedly and business deals struck. Inside the café, patrons can forget about the messiness of life in exile for a while and pretend that their potency still extends beyond the paycheck they are able to send home. In short, the café provides a stage for the performance of traditional Arab masculinity, a rare place where the façade of male competency and control can be comfortably maintained in the midst of chaos.

Jaime - Faye BeanNew York 2006


From inside the Alkyam Cafe, New York, (detail).


Astoria Journal; Where Tea Doesn’t Mix With Political Sympathies

At El Khaiam cafe on Steinway Street in the middle of what is known as Little Egypt in Astoria, Queens, Arab immigrants sit around imitation marble tables and chat animatedly as they play backgammon or cards. They sip ink-black Egyptian tea or tart lemon--ade and smoke fruitlflavored tobacco from stainedlglass water pipes.

The décor evokes a tourist knock-off of Egypt replete with murals of the pyramids, the Nile and a

smiling King Tut, and the bustling cafe recreates the friendly ambience of similar establishments in the Arab world. If the cafe owner, Gamal Dewidar, had been there, the conversations would not have been about international

politics. But Mr. Dewidar is not there on this day nd some customers hijack the television remote to watch Al Jazeera Arab satellite TV news. All conversa--tion ceases. The news anchor relates stories about sectarian violence in Iraq and strife in the Palestinian territories as the water pipes bubble and the swirl--ing smoke condenses into a sweet fog. When the broadcast ends, patrons break off into small groups and heatedly discuss in Arabic events in the Middle East and criticize governments back home.

‘’He said it was a crusade,’’ said Farid El Baghdadi


a 47-year-old Egyptian immigrant, referring to President Bush’s war on terror. ‘’And he turned it into a religious war.’’

Others nodded in approval.

‘’He says he is bringing democracy to Iraq, but he sup--ports the Egyptian and Saudi regimes that suppress dem--onstrators,’’ added Farzat Souliman, a 34-year-old Kurdish immigrant from Syria. There were also conspiracy theories about American plans to occupy Saudi oil fields and to detain young Arab-Americans at the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

It is the kind of conversation that most patrons would not dare have if Mr. Dewidar, the owner of El Khaiam, had been at the cafe.

For him, tea and politics do not mix. Mr. Dewidar does not allow customers to watch Al Jazeera or CNN, and permits only Egyptian movies or Arab music videos on the huge television set up on a dark brown table in a corner of the cafe. Mr. Dewidar strictly enforces his rule against political discussions. If he suspects customers are whispering about politics, he turns up the volume on the TV to drown them out. If they retreat into the back patio to continue their discussions, Mr. Dewidar sends his brother outside to turn up the volume on the stereo out there.

If customers still do not get the message, Mr. Dewidar will scold them. Sometimes, he will kick them out.

‘’They talk nonsense,’’ said Mr. Dewidar, a 45-year-old Egyptian with a salt-and-pepper goatee and short-cropped hair who moved to New York from Cairo 26 years ago. ‘’They say the same thing we hear on Al Jazeera or CNN. America is good. America is bad. People come here to relax, not to hear the political views of jobless, miserable

men with no wives, no girlfriends, and no money.’’

If such brusque customer treatment seems unorthodox, Mr. Dewidar doesn’t care. He sees it as the best way to protect his cafe. He started censoring patrons after what he described as a ‘’mysterious’’ surge in visits by health and fire inspectors from the city. He worried that with anti-Arab sentiment aroused after the Sept. 11 attacks, his patrons’ conversations might attract too much attention from city authorities.

‘’This country is not the same,’’ he said. ‘’Before, we were all equal. Now we are not equal.’’

The Fire Department and the city health department denied deliberately singling out any establishments because of their clientele. Sid Dinsay, a spokesman for the city health department, said that a few months ago ‘’the department responded to a complaint of tobacco smoke entering a residence from various establishments in the area’’ where El Khaiam is located.

Maria Lamberti, a spokeswoman for the Fire Department, said that Mr. Dewidar had received a summons in 2003, but according to department records, the problem had been corrected. She said the records did not specify the nature of the summons.

Despite his prohibition on news and political talk, Mr. Dewidar has attempted to create a little slice of Egypt in his cafe, importing tea, sugar, tobacco and water pipes. While other cafes in Little Egypt cater to a younger crowd of men and women, El Khaiam attracts older men seeking the camaraderie of the cafes they remember from their homelands.

To clarify his loyalties to his customers, Mr. Dewidar designed an unlikely montage. Mounted on a gaudy pink


background and hanging prominently on a wall are smiling photographs of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt; Gamal Mubarak, his son and likely successor; and President Bush. Mr. Dewidar said he designed the display. ‘’These are my presidents,’’ he said. ‘’It is as if your mother married twice. One is your biological father and the other is your stepfather. You have to love them both.’’

As guests in his cafe, most patrons refused to talk about Mr. Dewidar’s policies. When asked, some patrons looked over their shoulders and joked that Mr. Dewidar might be recording their conversations.

But one of the men who had watched the news on Al Jazeera, Mr. Souliman, did express his distaste for Mr. Dewidar’s montage because it reminded him of Middle Eastern dictators back home. ‘’I was very disappointed in him,’’ Mr. Souliman said. ‘’I could not believe Egyptians think this way. Here he is in America and he thinks this way?’’ Though he governs his cafe with an iron fist and has a mercurial temper, Mr. Dewidar still enjoys chatting and swapping amusing stories with customers. He even talks politics sometimes, but only as long as patrons agree with his opinions. He also helps newly arrived immigrants find jobs and a place to stay, and will lend them money. He attributes the frustration many recent Arab immigrants feel to unrealistic expectations.

‘’They think of America as a fancy dream,’’ he said. ‘’But not every American is a millionaire, has a house, a car and 10 girlfriends like they see on television. America will be good to their children, but not to them.’’

He has lost some regular customers, but Mr. Dewidar blames competition from about a half-dozen other Egyptian cafes in the area rather than his rules. And anyway, he said, he actually wouldn’t mind driving away all his Arab customers if he could replace them with the hip--

per younger residents who have moved to the neighbor--hood. ‘’Managing an Egyptian cafe is an art,’’ he said.

Abeer Allam

August 2�, 200�

Reprinted with permission from the New York Times


Artist Acknowledgements

Killing Time and this publication would not have been possible without the support of

many friends and colleagues. In particular, I wish to thank Hitomi Iwasaki, Associate

Curator of the Queens Museum of Art, who supported this project from the early

stages through its original showing as part of Queens International 2004. I also thank

Hitomi for taking the time and effort to contribute to this publication. Mizna’s staff and

board, particularly editor Lana Barkawi, were instrumental in expanding Killing Time’s

audience by bringing the exhibition to Minneapolis and supporting the publication of

this catalogue. My wife, Jaime, has given me her support, encouragement, time, and

help from day one of this project. Finally, I wish to thank my dear friends Dr. Bashir

Makhoul, Farzat Suleiman, Wael Wakeem, Ibrahim Zabalawi all of whom contributed

significantly to the conceptualization and production of this project through their

expertise. Moukhtar Kocache has my everlasting gratitude for having introduced me

to the folks at Mizna.


Published by:

Mizna, Inc.2205 California Street NE, Suite 109AMinneapolis, MN [email protected] www.mizna.org(612) 788-6920

Copyright © Mizna, Inc, the artist, and the authors.Article by Abeer Allam is copyrighted to the New York Times.

Designer: Aissa DeebiDesign Assistant: Wael WakeemEditors: Lana Barkawi, Jaime Faye Bean, and Carina Evangelista

California Building Gallery2205 California Street NE Suite 103Minneapolis, MN 55418

ISBN 1-4243-0268-4ISBN 978-1-4243-0268-0(Beginning 2007)

Mizna’s Board of Directors

Nassim AgahMazher Al-Zo’byMohammed BamyehLana BarkawiKristin DooleyMohannad GhawanmehRebecca HaddadMazen HalabiNahid KhanTaous KhazemRabi’h NahasNadia Boufous PhelpsKhaldoun SammanFouzi Slisli

Mizna’s Executive DirectorKathryn Haddad

Acknowledgements:

Abeer AllamMazher Al-Zo’byJaime-Faye BeanBassem ElboraniKathryn HaddadMazen HalabiHitomi IwasakiDr. Bashir MakhoulFadi MobadarAldo MoroniFouzi SlisliScott SmithFarzat SulimanWael WakeemJennifer YoungAbdullah OuchagourAlkhyam CaféCalifornia Building CaféNew York TimesQueens Museum of ArtPyramids Café

This exhibit is made possible by the support of the General Mills Foundation and generous donations from individual supporters of Mizna.

killing time ii/ by aissa h.deebi

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