Self-portrait at the Hotel Al-Jamia Al-Arabia in Deir Ez-Zur, Syria
The following was written in June 2010 from a sweltering (but fondly remembered) room at the Hotel Al-Jamia Al-Arabia in Deir ez-Zur, Syria.
It has happened again: after several months on the road, walking and photographing throughout the day in the less-than-moderate Middle Eastern heat, I’ve lost weight. I’ve lost so much, in fact, that on some days I feel a little frail, a little bit like I’m disappearing. And I can’t say that I like that much, because I want to be whole.
But here’s what I do like about my partial disappearance: in looking at my body — in seeing my scrawniness, my sagging pants, the ripple of a beating heart visible on the surface of my chest — I identify with the weak. I have joined their ranks, in a sense, and I share their brokenness. When I see the fit and strong, people whose pants aren’t sliding down and whose arms are connected to full shoulders, or whose faces are rounded by smooth and pampered skin, I feel an outsider. I even feel envy, and at times embarrassment and shame.
I also feel something very much like rage. Rage at the emaciation, the poverty, the disgusting imbalance that blights history and our own time. Rage at the lack of wholeness in people’s lives. Rage at broken bodies, at the audible sounds of hunger (if we pause to look and listen), at the hands on Wall Street and Main Street, in South Carolina and Syria, that move more to fatten themselves than to nourish the weak. Rage at the way that, just this afternoon, I witnessed a helpless old woman being abused by strong young men. She had cried out as they harassed her, yanking on her headscarf and mocking her, and the last thing she said to me was, “I’m sorry you are seeing this!” But I wasn’t sorry I saw it, for in seeing it my rage only grew, and there are things for which it is better to be enraged than ignorant.
It is partly because of rage that I do what I do, even though at times it costs me some of my own strength and mass. And what do I do? Though sometimes even I forget, when I see a weak woman abused on the street it comes back to me with the force of a slamming door in a hurricane. I photograph and write about our world, and I do it not because it pays well but because every street on Earth has people aching, and sometimes downright screaming, for wholeness. I do it because the Earth is full of the emaciated.
The old woman in Deir ez-Zur, Syria. She surprised me in two ways: First, her impeccable English. Second, the desperation with which she said she was “trapped” in this town but had no way to leave, hadn’t had a way for years.
