Devil’s Lake

I don’t remember the spring of 1996; it was all winter for me. If outside the sun peeked through the clouds melting the snow on our roof; if patches of green sprouted everywhere through the thinning blanket of compacted snow; if the permafrost thawed or the ptarmigans were already flying northward through the Anaktuvuk pass, I never knew. Inside my house, winter was still running its dreary course, almost as if a stern bleakness had spared everyone in Anchorage, except us. Us. I charged that winter with attempted murder. It tried to kill Hunter’s spirit and with it our desire to remain together as a couple.

Hunter and I had a rocky marriage. In 1992, I left Colombia to be with him. The novelty of his homeland, Alaska, and his easygoing nature brought us together in the early months of our married life. But this was not enough and soon after the honeymoon we were faced with the realities of a relationship fraught with cultural differences and conflicting professional pursuits and dreams. He was an oiler; I was an anthropologist. He couldn’t conceive living anywhere but in Alaska; I wanted to see the world. He was a good Christian; I hadn’t gone to church in years. He felt whole in silence and solitude; I craved people, noise, music. Our marriage was doomed from the start but we plodded on, stubbornly, determined to create something out of nothing, firmly believing that if we ignored the shaky foundation of our marriage, we could build a solid life together.

When his company offered him a four-year contract in Kuwait, I was elated. It was my chance to do anthropological field work in the Middle East, my opportunity to continue my research on cross-cultural dance ethnography. Initially, Hunter declined BP’s offer. He couldn’t forfeit the buffalo hunting license the state of Alaska had granted him after five years of anxious waiting. Trout fishing was particularly good that summer and he had planned some serious hiking trips up the Alaskan Mountain Range. I wanted to get away from it all. From his hunting gear with its bows and arrows and rifles—all that killing paraphernalia that never settled well with my pacifist principles; away from the stillness of Alaska, the cold, the dark winters, and the 6’10” black bear skin rug with head Hunter had killed himself and proudly displayed in the middle of our living room. We masked the problems in our failing marriage with arguments about geographic relocation.

I wanted to leave.

He wanted to stay.

I won.

Hunter came to the airport to pick me up. He had been in Kuwait for three weeks trying to finalize the required paperwork for my entry. It was the summer of 1996. My arrival coincided with the last hours of an unwelcoming sandstorm that had clouded the sky for a few days. When the sun came out, Kuwait simmered in a miasma at 120 °F. On our way to the hotel, I rolled the car window down to have a taste of the summer heat. A violent searing puff of sand hit my face, fogged up my glasses, and punched me nice and square in my throat. This new kind of heat felt red, caulky and unwavering, like a discordant violin that sears and pierces and breaks the skin all the way to the other side of the skull.

I quickly learned the laws of this unforgiving land: do not leave valuables locked in your car during the summer, as the heat reduces plastic bottles, toys, and anything malleable into an amorphous mass of twisted polymers. Do not attempt fastening your seat belt as soon as you get in the car. The buckle will sear your fingers before you click the strap. If you don't have the time to wait for your air conditioning to cool down the steering wheel to a manageable temperature, wear gloves. You’ll feel as ridiculous as you look, but the gloves will protect your hands. Sprinkle the suffocation with sparkles of levity. Don't take the heat too seriously. It is temporary. Play with it. Cook eggs on the hood of your car. Amuse yourself watching the whites bubble up and curl like the pages of an old book.

Day-to-day life was grand for oil families like ours. Coffee in the morning by the pool—black no sugar, salad bar at the club overlooking the Persian Gulf—Chilean seedless grapes please, sunglasses on, feet up on a bench, Arabic lessons in the afternoon, a game of squash in the evening, beach parties on weekends.

Soon after we arrived in Kuwait, Patsy and Kim, a couple of oil wives, contacted me. They wanted to welcome me, to make me feel at home. At first I got together with them because in the midst of such foreignness, it was comforting to know that there were people like me around the corner. Also because they had been in Kuwait for quite a while and I needed to know where to look for a job.

Before Kuwait, Patsy Willington and her husband, a petroleum engineer, lived in a small ranch on the outskirts of Houston. They had a big front yard that screamed dandelions from spring to fall and a nursery in the back of their house where Patsy spent most of her time on all fours growing vegetables. Like everybody else, she did the grocery shopping, drove her own van, and took out her own garbage. That stopped in Kuwait. Soon after their arrival, she hired a driver, a gardener, a cook, and a maid. It was paramount that she offered her twin geniuses some “continuity,” so the kids could enjoy the same lifestyle they had in the USA.

“A job?” Patsy asked me. “Why the hell do you want to work in this shithole?”

Kim Ngweyn. She and her husband were an energetic young couple from California who vehemently denied their Vietnamese ancestry. Both sets of parents were boat people who arrived in the USA in a post-Vietnam war wave of refugees. The Ngweyns spoke Vietnamese to each other when nobody else was around. She cooked Vietnamese food, he listened to Vietnamese music. Yet they insisted that since their passports were American and they had never been to Vietnam, there was no Asian in them. Whenever I asked her to tell me stories about her Vietnamese parents, she would retort: “We know nothing about Vietnam. We are just a couple of yuppies from San Francisco.”

With my fellow Americans out of the social scene in Kuwait, I was left with the British. The British wives that is: pale women from the North Sea who had readily established their very own England in Kuwait. They drank only Earl Grey tea with shortbread biscuits, exchanged old Black Adder videos, which I never understood, threw parties where everybody ate and nobody danced, and organized dreadful quiz-nights that inevitably ended in everybody singing in unison “God Save the Queen.” The British Women Society also had a “Stitch and Bitch” club that they claimed to be “great fun.” After twenty minutes of my first and only visit to the stitch and bitch club I realized that it was neither great nor fun: the bitching was unbearable and the stitching mind numbing.

I didn’t fit in. I was neither American nor British. I was a Hispanic woman who spoke American English with a Colombian accent. I looked Hispanic, Indian, Arab, African even; anything but American or British. Neither of the two groups of people would be my home away from home. I had to find my own niche. I needed a job.

A few months after my arrival, I started to inquire about belly-dance lessons. But try as I might to find dance academies in Kuwait, they were non-existent. Every time I asked, I was sent to Egypt. Nobody had heard about belly dancing in Kuwait. Nobody except Elena.

She was an unconventional English woman married to a BP geologist, although she was quick to clarify soon after we were introduced that their marriage certificate was a fake. She and Ian were common law partners, long live-in companions, but they would not have been allowed in Kuwait without being legally married. They found an easy fix in downtown London. An English notary sold them a bogus certificate for a few hundred quid.

“I heard you’re keen on belly dancing,” Elena said, letting out of her mouth big rings of Marlboro smoke. She was young, tall, slender, blonde, blue-eyed, outspoken, witty, and had a sultry voice, which helped her get a job as DJ at the only radio station in Kuwait airing the American Top 40. “I’ll let you know when the Syrian stewardesses are in town. They are, among some other things, smashing belly dancers,” Elena said, digging her pink elbow in my arm, and we left it at that. She was the only BP wife that I knew of who had a salaried job, which I pointed out to her the same night we met at a company party.

“You could be the second one if you want to. How do you fancy working at the radio station?” she asked me, as if she had the power to hire me on the spot. With my Colombian accent and no experience in the radio broadcasting world, I instantly assumed that she had made the offer out of courtesy. But as it turned out, she meant it. We exchanged numbers, kept in touch, and a few days later, I received a phone call from Fatima, a young Kuwaiti shaikha, or princess, acting on behalf of the ministry of communications.

Fatima, fluent in English and soft-spoken, interviewed me over the phone. She wanted to know about my credentials, why I thought I’d make a good co-host, and how much I knew about international music. Upon hearing that I was an anthropologist, she stopped asking questions and announced that I had been hired.

“Do you mind if we pay you in kind?” she asked.

“What kind of kind?” I asked jokingly.

“The usual,” she said. “Spa vouchers, hotel packages, restaurant coupons. You know.”

No, I didn’t know, but I was too excited about the prospect of a job to object. She hired me to co-host a pilot program called The International Hour. The show would air for one hour every other Wednesday, and it would take about six months to get it going, she speculated, but it would run for as long as I managed to make it a success.

“That hour is yours,” Fatima said over the phone. “Be creative, be innovative, play things we’ve never heard before,” she said before hanging up.

I wondered what she looked like. Tall, olive skin, coat upon coat of makeup meant to make her skin look softer, thick eyeliner so her eyes could be seen from the moon, a lustrous dark mane with henna highlights that shimmered under the sun, expensive clothes bought during a spontaneous shopping trip to Paris with her cousins, Hermès or Cartier shoes that matched her oversized handbag, costly sunglasses with white rims and an attitude that said, “I’m a princess, you’re not, move out of my way.” In all fairness, she had been extremely kind over the phone, and her voice didn’t match my imagined Fatima, which was a replica of a few princesses I had already come across at the club.

I was ecstatic. I called Elena to share the news and say thank you. She already knew. Very little happened in that radio station, or in Kuwait, that Elena wasn’t aware of.

“There is a party tonight at one of the sheikhs’ palaces. You fancy going?”

“Sure. Wait. One of the sheikhs? How many are there? I thought there was only one.”

Elena laughed with one of her sultry-sounding laughs. “Every member of the royal family is either a prince or a princess. If each prince marries more than one woman and has kids with all of them, how many princes and princesses do you think we end up bloody having?”

“Are you serious?”

“Listen, you can party round the clock in this country. There will be a better party tomorrow and a better one the day after. No rush to attend the one tonight,” Elena said. She could either hook me up with a friend who would take me to the palace or wait a couple of days when there would be a party on one of the islands. “This place is brilliant,” Elena coughed into the receiver. “Bloody brilliant!”

A few weeks after my telephone conversation with Fatima, I was on my way to the studio ready to record my first show. I was nervous. I had never met a princess in person before and didn’t know whether I should be aware of a particular protocol. It crossed my mind that maybe I was expected to curtsy or to bow and I didn’t know the proper way to do either. I figured that being a princess, Fatima surely would wear at least a tiara and would have an entourage of several maidens following her around, turning her slightest whim into sweet reality. I felt inadequate. I wasn’t even dressed for the occasion: a peasant blouse and a long broom-style skirt. I looked like a flower girl from the sixties, like a commoner about to meet a princess.

I arrived at the Ministry of Communications, where the radio stations were located, drenched in sweat. I wiped my damp hands on my skirt while the guard checked my ID. To my alarm, I wasn’t allowed in. I started to panic. What would the princess think if I didn’t show up for my chance to become a radio personality? My name was not on his list of expected visitors for the evening. I tried to convince him that I had a very important meeting with a shaikha. I repeated emphatically shaikha Fatima. In my haste to be understood by the guard, who didn’t speak English, I dared to accompany the words shaikha Fatima with a crown, which I represented with both of my hands pressed against my forehead, fingers sticking up in the air. The guard laughed through his thick, black mustache, but still he wouldn’t let me in. Maybe he understood that I had an appointment with a moose.

“Is there any problem?” a woman asked as she came out of the building. She was wearing the black attire that makes one woman indistinguishable from the next: black long robe, black scarf fastened tightly around her face. She and the guard exchanged a few words, and a few minutes later I was walking toward the building with her. I imagined she was a supervisor of some sort.

“Sorry about the inconvenience,” she said once we were inside the air-conditioned building. “I’m Fatima. I’m so pleased to meet you.” Fatima stood in front of me, offering me her delicate hand and a timid smile. She looked like a little girl. I sighed with relief as we shook hands. No entourage, no tiaras, no royal quirks. Neither her unassuming appearance nor her private personality hinted at her royal upbringing. I’d been fooled by her title.

She took me to the studio and locked the door behind her. “Ishmael, your co-host, will be here in ten minutes,” she said. The princess covered the narrow window on the door with a piece of cardboard, checked that the door was properly locked, and proceeded to take the scarf off. The sight left me breathless. Her hair was meticulously styled and straightened under the scarf; thick blue-black strands cascaded down her shoulders like a mantle. Her hair was amazing. She was petite and shapely, had short nails, fine fingers, and no jewelry, a detail I found unusual for a Kuwaiti woman. With the first chin-long layer of hair tucked behind her ears, headphones on, and her frameless glasses slipping down her nose, she looked like the girl next door.

The right sleeve of her robe was caught in a master knob several times. She unbuttoned her robe, letting it fall down to her waist. One sleeve dangled over the armrest like a ghost. Under the robe, she wore a black turtleneck with a single splash of color on the left side and a pin button with an Arabian butterfly on the left.

She sprang in her chair at the sound of a knock on the door.

“Give us a second, ya Ishmael,” she said, as she dashed for her scarf and wrapped it around her head, leaving exposed only the pale, dewy oval of her face. She buttoned up her robe as she walked toward the door. I watched her in silence. The exuberance of her hidden mane was, without a doubt, her only excess. And that’s why she hid it from Ishmael or any other man. There was a lot of woman in that mane and like her body itself, meant to be seen only by her husband, if she had one.

“Everything is ready to go, habbibi,” Fatima said, patting Ishmael on the back. She introduced me to my young co-host, assured me that I was in good hands, and bent over my chair to kiss me goodbye. She blew one kiss in the air as we pressed together our right cheeks. A plebe and a princess. A second kiss followed. This time I felt her left cheek on mine. Then, as unassumingly as she had approached me at the gate of the building, she disappeared through the door.

My co-host, an attractive Kuwaiti in his mid-twenties, was a part-time DJ and a full time body builder.

“Call me a narcissist if you must, but, hey, how many narcissists look like this?” he joked, unzipping his Elvis Presley leather jacket. Under it he wore a white Lycra tank that hid no secrets about his physique. His chest bulged in parts where I didn’t even know men had muscles. Friendly and witty, he showed me what to do and how to carry myself at the microphone. Before long we were recording our first show together.

The first show was on African folklore. I chose a wide selection of native music that included rare Pygmy recordings, Moroccan trance Sufi chants, and a capella arrangements from South African Soweto. I also prepared a list of questions about African folklore that Ishmael asked me after each song. Everything was planned, everything rehearsed. I sounded smart, he sounded intrigued. We made a good team. The show was bound to be a hit.

Fatima called two days after the show was aired and a week after it was recorded. She hadn’t listened to it. So sorry. She had forgotten. And, could I please prepare a second show that was a tad less, umm, foreign? The powers that be had complained about the radio station dedicating one hour of airtime to “jungle music.”And also, would I mind not being paid any time soon? The radio station had recently acquired a state-of-the-art recording studio, and they were short of money.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I agreed to payment in kind, remember?”

“Yes, yes, but the show hasn’t won any sponsors yet. Sorry.”

I was slightly offended. First of all, I didn’t know that it was my responsibility to get sponsors; second, I didn’t know that no sponsors meant no payment. I explained this to Fatima.

“I know, habbibti, but I’m not in Kuwait right now. I can’t do anything from here. We’ll fix this when I get back, okay?”

Before I could protest any further, she said, goodbye my friend. “Ma’a Salama, hadiqati.”

It took me two weeks to put the hour-long show together. This one was dedicated to Brazilian music. I chose familiar bossa novas, well-known sambas, crazy Funk-Cariocas, a few Zouk-Lambadas and some capoeiras. I was determined to make the second show an unforgettable experience to the listeners. Unfortunately, the second recording session was not as straightforward as the first one had been. The recording studio was brand new, and Ishmael hadn’t learned to alternate dialogue with music. We would have to record the show in two halves: all the dialogue in the first half, and all the music in the second. Then Ishmael would hand the two tapes to the Palestinian sound engineer who would have to figure out how to mix the two recordings.

“I don’t know which buttons to push,” Ishmael said, nervously scratching his bulging chest. “I’m not a button pusher, you know? I’m a DJ and a body builder, but a button pusher? I think not.” He leaned against the door looking at the sound console helplessly, both his hands resting on his hips, chest out, eyelashes fluttering nervously. Ishmael’s hourglass-shaped body was in full view. He had done something to his lips; they looked fuller, pinker and glossier.

“Doesn’t this thing come with instructions?” I asked him. He grabbed the instructions manual between his right index and thumb and threw it on my lap like it was infected with a terrible virus.

“Be my guest,” he said.

The manual was written in German. It was of no use to us. I retreated to my chair in one corner of the brightly lit room as he fidgeted with the sound system. Some of the knobs were still wrapped in plastic, and the legs of a console were in their original packaging. The expensive studio had been stored in a warehouse for over three months. Nobody knew what to do with it.

“Some idiotic prince with a load of cash was sent to Europe on a shopping spree, okay?” he said pointing with an erect index finger at imaginary objects all over the studio. “I can see him saying Oh my God this shiny black console is so pretty, I’ve gotta have it. I won’t tell you who but I’ll give you a clue: he wears two Rolexes, one in each hand.”

I laughed at the thought of anyone wearing two watches, but just as I was done laughing, the two-Rolexes man walked in the studio to hand us the new sets of headphones and walked out without saying a word. Ishmael gave me a high five.

“Told you, girl,” he said, gyrating his wrists in the air.

Thirty minutes later, he had figured out the new system and was ready to start recording the show. “Welcome to…The International Hour,” Ishmael said and adjusted the headphone with the tips of his manicured fingers. “I’m your host Ish-ma-el,” he made a pause which was to indicate to the sound engineer the place where the fanfare music clip would go. “And here with me we have the great, A-dree-anaaa,” he said dragging the last “a”. He sounded like a boxing announcer.

Fatima called me a week after the second show was aired. She had been out of town and missed the show again. She was sorry, but could I record two shows in a row next time? And also, would I mind going downtown to pick up my payment at the Ministry of Communications?

My payment was an envelope bursting with vouchers and coupons. Some were quite impressive, like a weekend for two at the Meridian Hotel, while others had expired a long time ago such as the one-day-pass at a spa that had closed down in 1995. It looked as though Fatima had prepared the envelope in haste. I recorded the next two shows as she asked me to: one on Cuban music and the second one on Indian folklore, but the latter was never aired. As I would find out, Kuwaitis would not listen to Indian music out of principle. Indians were servants and anything Indian from movies, to language, to music was perceived as backward.

“It’s like a white master listening to the music of his slaves,” Ishmael explained to me when I showed up with my Indian music collection.

“But they did,” I said. “And see what they ended up with?”

“Nu-uh,” Ishmael said with an exaggerated head shake.

“Jazz, blues, R&B. Should I keep going?”

“Stop. I’m bored already,” he said covering a loud yawn with a notebook.

Halfway through the recording of the Indian show Ishmael blurted: “Oh, I forgot. This is the last International Hour.”

“Is it?” I asked confused.

“No offense, but nobody listens to it. It’s too serious,” Ishmael twisted his hand in the air as if playing with a ball. “Don’t take it personal but the truth is, in this country nobody cares about Cuban music. Cha-cha, Backstreet Boys, Backstreet Boys, cha-cha,” he said, alternating both hands up and down. “Your music doesn’t stand a chance.”

“Are you saying that I wasted my time?”

“Girl, don’t get catty,” he said. “I’m just saying that we Arabs don’t dig cha-cha, if you know what I mean.”

The news of the ending of the show didn’t come as a surprise. The show had been a fiasco from the start. I had, out of curiosity and also vanity, asked people their opinion on the show. Nobody had heard of it, not even after I repeatedly invited my westerner friends, including the Stitch and Bitch club, to listen to it. Instead of every other Wednesday at seven being the day and time that everybody tuned in, it was the day and time that everybody switched the radio off. Including Elena, who never listened to the show either.

“They want new things, American and European things: hamburgers, Levi’s, fast cars, uncut movies, cell phones, anything they can associate with progress,” Elena said as we crossed paths in the hallway of the radio station. “There is this new chick. What’s her name? Britney Spears or something? She’s smashing. These people love her already. Maybe you went a wee too ethnic,” Elena said, and apologized for never listening to The International Hour. “Oh well, wasn’t it wicked anyway?” She was about to record her Top 40 show. Would I like to go with her and cheer up?

We walked together to her studio, her arms around my shoulders. Everything was already set up for her and the taping of her show was about to begin. The telephone lines were already on the verge of a major jam. Everybody loved her sultry voice, her vibrancy, and the gossip and music she brought to Kuwait from the USA and the UK but mainly from the States. Soon after the show started, she picked the phone call from line two by pushing with her Marlboro-yellow index finger a flickering button.

“Hello, you’re on the ai.” She said air without the final r, and the telephones flashed their red bulbs like there was an emergency somewhere in Kuwait and Elena was the help line.

“Yeah, this is E-le-naaah. I’m all yours.”

The way she said E-le-naaah was aural ecstasy to the audience. And the sound of her name must have brought a great deal of joy to her, too, because she kept muttering it to herself during commercials. E-le-naaah, I heard her murmur—tongue licking the upper lip once, like an invitation—as I walked out of the studio.

The more I thought about my short-lived DJ experience, the more I convinced myself that it wasn’t that I had gone a wee too ethnic as Elena had so politely said. It was that I was in a country going through its own rite of passage: from childhood to adulthood, from international isolation to worldwide recognition. Kuwait, my new home, was an old country having its body and heart in the operating room undergoing a fast and extreme makeover. I had to either learn to live with it or pack and leave. But I wasn’t ready to leave. The solution was simple. Turn off the pygmy chant, bring on “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” by this new chick in a school uniform. What’s her name again?

Outside was Kuwait. The sun had begun its low descent into the horizon. It seemed to be turning the whole city into ashes. It was one of those suns that sets wood ablaze, inflames stones, sucks in the water of rivers, strikes you square on your face, and throbs in your head with implacable shards of burning light. I put on my sunglasses and walked to my car. Detached from the ministry building were the servants’ living quarters. They were having camel for supper, an easy inference I made after spotting the animal carcass behind the house. Only in Kuwait, I thought as I got behind the wheel. I turned the ignition and before I put the car in reverse, E-le-naaah came on the radio.

“Let me give it to you, all the way from Norway, the No. 7 on the US Billboard Hot 100.”

It was a kitsch band called Aqua singing their hit “Barbie Girl.”