Vol. 2 No. 2 Specials

It all happened so suddenly. One moment I was outside the AIDS Prevention Center, clamoring for an opportunity to bypass the growing queue and receive my verification papers of health. The next, I was being ushered upstairs by two large nurses, who sat me forcibly down in an uncomfortable wooden chair, made me display the veins in both arms, and immediately stuck me in the not-yet-disinfected crook of my elbow. To make matters worse, I had not personally witnessed the nurse take out a brand new needle – a basic procedure that I felt should be second nature in an AIDS Prevention Center. My head swam.

I had not come to Damascus, the sunbaked capital of Syria not far from the disputed border with Israel, to get AIDS-tested in a run-down building staffed by apocryphally qualified health workers. I had come, rather, on an academic quest, in pursuit of an aging Syrian novelist named Haydar Haydar. Yale’s Jonathan Edwards College had offered me a generous grant in the summer of 2004 to travel to Syria, locate such pillars of the Arabic literary world as Haydar and some of his contemporaries, and interview them. I found Haydar in the smallest village I had ever seen, near the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, a short bus ride from the city of Tartous. Exiting the bus with no more information than his name, I hitched a ride with a villager who apparently had nothing better to do than drive me to Haydar’s house.

When not engaged in quixotic and often hopeless missions like this, however, I enjoyed a rather solitary existence in Damascus. On some days, my most social activity consisted in buying fresh vegetables from my favorite pushcart vendor. Eventually, I decided to take a class at the University of Damascus. In order to enroll, I was required to submit proof that I was free from HIV.