AISSA H. DEEBI

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.

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 (backggammon) 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 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 suspiciouslly) 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 furnitture 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 Deebi
New York
2006