Waiting For a Visa--Part I

Waiting for a Visa

It comes as something of a shock to one recently arrived from Kuwait to realise just how un-green Amman truly is. To those of us who are regular visitors from the Gulf, the name of Jordan’s capital city brings to mind the aroma of citrus and mulberry trees wafting down on hill-inclined residential boulevards. Coming into the town from the outlying airport, the pine forests are like a diminutive Yosemite, the difference being more donkey-pulled carts bringing the early watermelons to road-side stalls. Then grass changes everything.

While you wait outside the awning-covered entrance to the WorldBridge Visa Center in Amman—British connections notwithstanding, it’s the American spelling which carries the day in today’s Middle East—you come across that rarest of luxuries in the Levant, a grass lawn. Between the awnings and the pavement in the smart Shmeisani neighbourhood, in an area not much more than 10 meters squared, the blades of grass insult your senses, telling you that the cedar trees were a mirage, you have been in a desert all along. In a country where drought is a perennial menace to drinking water in homes, the grass screams to be sent to another, more green, perhaps even more pleasant, little piece of land tucked away in the North Sea and off the coast of Europe. Here, on this patch of grass, eagerly anticipating crowds gather to get news of their visa applications to England, to Britain, the United Kingdom; usually London.

Here, over the English lawn in the desert city of Amman, the wealthy villa-dwellers of Abdoun, collecting visit visas for their annual shopping trips, stand next to Iraqi refugees—Amman being deemed a safer destination than Baghdad to apply for a visa—seeking to join family members in Kensal Green. Here too stand young academics from BirZeit, having crossed the River Jordan, who now wait for their student visas to complete PhDs in archaeology at the University of London. Together with them are Damascene merchants, and a motley crew of young and old, some assuredly wealthy, others self-consciously middle class and still others desperately aspiring to escape some perilous non-existence in Jordan and the surrounding countries.

For those waiting to find out if they have been granted a visa, the doors open at 4:00; we began arriving at 3:00. By 3:30, the first numbers are assigned to the grass-stomping crowd. The signs all over the visa centre let you know that “WorldBridge… a business operation in association with the UK Border Agency… our employees … not involved in the decision-making process …” Maybe it’s the mild sun-induced delirium, or maybe just the pure chaos of humanity, but neither the security guards outside the centre nor the waiting crowds paid any attention to the meaning of this sign; instead, a sort of theatrical exchange played itself out.

“You can’t stand on the grass … do you want to get your number? Want your visa today? Get off that square, that’s being monitored by CCTV!...I don’t care, just shut up!”

After some abuse from the security guards, a chorus of replies comes back from some of the older men gathered outside.

“What good are you anyway? You can’t even tell me if my application has been processed or not! I’ve been coming here every day for 2 weeks and you can’t tell me a thing! Who do you think you are?”

The thought of standing outside, every day for 2 weeks in the dusty and hot Amman summer came over the people waiting outside. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Called in by number, one-by-one, we were searched and passed through the revolving gates, reminders of prison dramas, to the seating area indoors. A security guard, clearly a man whose passion to work in airport customs was thwarted, but never crushed, a long time ago, goes through your pockets with sadistic completeness. Quite why any of this was necessary was beyond me. A television screen elevated in the top corner of the room lets out the BBC World Service. Posters on the walls urge you to visit Edinburgh, and another reminds any curious applicant that lying on your visa application will “bring shame onto you and your family”. The whole place has the sanitised and unwelcoming feel of an airport waiting lounge, before people thought of making those a bit more comfortable. Now again the sadism of the security guards forces its way onto us.

“Sit there … don’t leave that chair empty, sit right next to that man over there if you could …no, no, you can’t take that jumper off… do you have to fill a cup from the water cooler right now?”

The spectacle having been carried out to the guards’ pleasure—they always win in the end—we are left alone to sit and wait for a few moments and, some nervous conversation grows out of nowhere. Ghassan, sitting next to me in remarkably casual polo shirt and jeans, was a new face to me.

Despite his choice of t-shirt, Ghassan, who would normally have been in RamAllah, was clearly not in the best of moods. Over a period of 2 months, he’d been rejected 3 times for a student visa, and didn’t seem too hopeful that his fourth attempt, about which he was enquiring today, would come back positively. Like so many in the Middle East, his attitude was characterised by one of total fatalism: By sheer force of will, he would either get the visa, or would not. How he had expected to get anywhere in the past was slightly mysterious as, he explained, “I didn’t even bother giving them anything other than the application form the first 2 times—how was I supposed to know they really wanted the stuff?”

Ghassan was a good guy, and, given his credentials, a lot more clever than he had given the British Consulate in Amman reason to believe. His thesis at BirZeit had been supervised by a cousin of mine, the sort of relative one likes to boast about, on account of his stature amongst Palestinian historians, but who in reality I met only once, at a stilted gathering. The Palestinian diaspora being what it is, we instantly found our ways from one mutual friend to another. Soon enough, my number was called and I waited to see what the envelope on the other side of the screen might hold for me.

“Ayyad? Serial number? Nope, not here…come back tomorrow”.

So it was. The suspense had been suspended hardly after I knew it had built up to begin with.

Back outside, Amman had cooled down slightly in between the time it took to arrive and wait and the moment it took them to tell me there was nothing to be known. A little meandering stroll, cigarette in hand, usually solves all problems, or so I told myself.

What was one other day when I had been stuck in Kuwait for 2 months waiting to make this application? When exactly did the days turn into weeks and the weeks into months? At what point did it make sense to wait for 2 months for a 24-month visa? Just how much had I lost through all of this? Was it worth it?

It was impossible not to bring these questions to the stress of the affair, and I wondered if it reflected itself on my completed forms. In fact, none of the really important stuff could be put down on the form. I could let them know that I was most definitely not a supporter of terrorism, nor had I committed any acts either in collaboration with the Nazis or the Red Army. I could—and did—undertake legally that none of those awful things were true about me. Yet there was no real place to let them know that I have been known to be the life and soul of many parties in London. That in fact my knowledge of some bits of English history rivalled most of the natives'. That I was the kind of guy who loved London every bit as much as she loved me. There was to be no place to tell them that I'd already suffered enough as a result of the last 2 months; on no question on the form was I asked if I had unduly placed my life in suspended animation as a result of this. There was no room for me to tell them that there had been once, not too long ago, a lovely young woman in London who loved me very much; and that all the waiting and frustration finally doused out a flame which once burnt brightly and warmly. Where was the compensation for this bureaucratic smouldering of human mystery?

Ghassan was probably thinking the same thing. With his palm to his forehead, he looked over the rejection letter and tried to make sense of his prospects. Adding insult to injury, Ghassan was told that he was, presumably, a cheat and a liar, and a negligent one at that: “You have submitted copies of purported bank statements… you did not submit original copies of these statements…” Purported. The cruelty lied in the way that a foreign speaker would not pick up on the hint, would not know how to purport in the first place, but was told all the same that it was not going to be good.

“Well, I really don’t understand, I gave them exactly the papers I got from the Arab Bank in RamAllah … these are the only sort of statements the bank can give me.” Kafka had written Jackals and Arabs about themes not too far away from this piece of land, and now his wit had returned to the region in the shape of a visa rejection letter.

It would be malicious, but nonetheless true, to admit that I took comfort from the fact that I wasn’t the only person to suffer with bureaucracy. It was reassuring that this was nothing personal; at least, there were other perfectly decent young Palestinian men who were slapped around in exactly the same way. I instinctively offered Ghassan a cigarette; even life in London, and longing to live in London anew, the habit of gifting cigarettes, in the sure knowledge that they will be appreciated, is only good manners in the Arab Middle East. So we smoked and talked.

Just as had happened with me, Ghassan’s last romance had fizzled in the midst of a bureaucratic to-and-fro. Standing between him and English pastures, between pints of warm beer at the pub with classmates who would quickly become friends, overturning the stereotypes most had of the English; all of these culture shocks would remain unreal by Ghassan. The exasperation was enough to bring out raw honesty; maybe everybody in Jordan smoked, and shared cigarettes, but sharing a drink was a sign of intimacy reserved for those who were truly special.

So time it was to find a beer.