Libya: Is it me you’re looking for?
When an Arabized version of The Simpsons debuted on a Saudi television station two years ago, pop-culture commentator Richard Poplak was so intrigued he began an odyssey to uncover other examples of North American taste translated and reinterpreted for a Muslim audience. Poplak’s adventures brought him to 16 countries, where he studied everything from hip hop to muscle cars. But, like so many great stories, it all begins with Lionel Richie.
The following is a preview of Poplak’s upcoming The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World (Penguin, 2009).
“There, ahead,” yelled Eder, over thumps of Timbaland. “You see it?”
I did. Behind a tangle of traffic, a vast, fortified compound, walls indented with the occasional Islamic tessellation. There were slats for gun barrels and high turrets manned by men with machine guns.
“That’s what we call al-Qa’ida—the Fortress. Or al-Aziziyah. Seven checkpoints you have to drive through to get to the house. Lovely place.”
Al-Aziziyah resembled nothing so much as a maximumsecurity prison: as we passed, a gate opened to admit a small convoy of armoured trucks. I craned my neck, saw another series of gates, another contingent of armed men. Nestled inside all of this, like the final f gure in a highly explosive matryoshka doll set, was the remains of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi ’s weddingcake- style private residence. It had never been repaired—in his preternatural understanding of the symbolic power of martyrdom, he had left it as a shrine, a reliquary.
Al-Aziziyah holds a special place in the history of the War on Terror. At 2:30 a.m. on the morning of April 15, 1986, Tripoli’s main military compound was the strategic focal point in an American bombing campaign called Operation El Dorado Canyon. This was the Reagan administration’s “measured response” to The Colonel’s extracurricular activities as the number one state sponsor of international terrorism. Indeed, The Colonel was lucky to escape with his life. His adopted daughter Hanna was not so fortunate; she died at al-Aziziyah that incendiary morning.
The compound had become a strategic focal point for me, albeit for very different reasons. Eder and I approached it from the north, following the trajectory of those long-ago F-111 bombers, along a ring road that changed in character from Mediterranean boulevard to desert highway in the space of a couple of miles, embracing downtown Tripoli in a languid hug. At noon, the city was stunned into torpor by its North African brightness; as the car crawled further south, the Italianate buildings of the old city gave way to unfinished concrete structures that sent tangled columns of metal toward a flawless sky. Men sat idly on their haunches, shading their scalps with scraps of corrugated cardboard. The car stereo burped the syncopated beats of Timbaland and Nelly Furtado; between tracks, I heard the call of the muezzin.
At the wheel: Eder, ostensibly my tour guide, actually my minder. His seat was reclined to an almost horizontal position; one buffed arm gripped the steering wheel, the other fiddled with his PDA. His mirrored aviator shades, something of a trademark, reflected the traffic ahead. The soft briefcase at Eder’s knee contained the reams of official documentation allowing me to be in the country. This made me feel like a highend puppy, but there was an essential equation at work: no papers, no Libya.
The tour-group operator I’d retained to organize my Libyan visa—an almost impossible process—was accommodating when I’d requested a guide in his mid-20s, thinking that a younger man would be a little more open to my very specific requests. And while Eder was indeed in his mid-20s, his biceps were enormous; I thus broached the fact that I was in the country on false pretences with no small amount of trepidation. My reasons for being there sounded silly when I said them out loud, so I wasn’t sure how I’d explain that I’d travelled to Libya to confirm the story of a music video reenactment that had occurred in the Tripoli medina. But told him I did, bracing myself for a blow that never came. It was, in fact, remarkably easy convincing my chiselled praetorian to forgo the usual itinerary for some investigative work.
“So, you don’t want to go with the Germans on a walking tour of the ruins?” asked Eder.
“No,” I said. “I sort of lied about that on the visa application form.”
“You want to find out about this music video?”
“Yes. That’s why I’m here.”
Eder shook his head. “Man, people come here and ask the weirdest shit. But what you are asking—this is not to fuck little boys or such.”
I agreed. Vigorously.
“But I warn you,” he said, presaging the fact that working in Libya was the journalistic equivalent of sculpting quicksilver, “the tour group will only allow you so much freedom before you make people suspicious. And people here don’t like to give information. They’re afraid, and maybe they should be.”
Indeed, they should be. The Colonel, while he has mellowed in his dotage, long ago wiped his enemies from the earth like so many crumbs from his lap. Eder, however, was not afraid. For one thing, there was his relative size and muscle mass. Furthermore, as I would later learn, he was a demographically significant anomaly: his eyes, beneath the mirrored shades, were the telltale hazel/green of the Berber. Although he was fluent in Arabic, he was an Amazigh—literally, “free man”—and spoke the nomad tongue of North Africa called Tamazight. Once, 40 percent of Tripoli was Amazigh, until The Colonel decreed that there was no such cohort, enforcing a strict mandate of Arab nationalism that had the (predictably) adverse effect of stoking Amazigh national identity and creating a class of young Tripolitans who were both alien and alienated. Eder felt more allegiance to East coast hip hop than he did to Middle-Eastern Arab culture. American popular culture was his popular culture.
“You know what is the word wasta?” asked Eder as he brought the car into the far left lane, as close to al-Aziziyah as we could come without inviting an anti-tank round.
I was familiar with the term. It translates roughly as “influence,” or “pull”; it implies a connection, familial or otherwise, with the ruling strongman.
“You need big-time wasta to get inside there,” said Eder. “Big time. You will never set foot in that place. That’s for sure.”
I knew al-Aziziyah was off limits, but the house was as much a symbol for me as it was for The Colonel: it was the starting point, the catalyst for my journey. The Tripolitan shore is, after all, where America’s centuries-long relationship with the Muslim world properly began. Operation El Dorado Canyon was but another in a long line of American military engagements with the variegated rulers of Libya, a legacy that dates back over 200 years. Within the DNA of those dusty, forgotten battles lies the code of enmity that continues unabated. But this concomitant history also hints at a lengthy cultural involvement— a mutual fascination that was tinged with both revulsion and wonder. In this, al-Aziziyah represented a small but telling instance in an ongoing entwinement. It was, from my perspective, both an answer and a question.
I turned my head as we left the compound behind, parsing for details, clues.
“Don’t look at the guards,” said Eder sharply. I quickly averted my gaze. “Don’t be fooled, my friend,” he said. “It’s sunny and bright here. But you can still get hurt.”
Shortly after midnight, April 15, 2006: A convoy of latemodel vehicles rolls toward al-Aziziyah. Armed guards open the gates, swing flashlights into the cabins, check papers, wave the cars inside. Mercedes and Lexuses and Lincolns purr into the compound, followed by busses packed with dignitaries, foreign and otherwise. There is a festive element to the proceedings. After all, it’s the 20th anniversary of Operation El Dorado Canyon; a celebration of peace and reconciliation (with whom, and what for, remains undefined) is underway. The Colonel has a propensity for marking dates—the Libyan calendar is littered with commemorations revolutionary, religious or otherwise— and April 15 is now remembered as Hanna Peace Day. As gate after gate opens to allow revellers closer to the epicenter, green and red spots swing wildly, a clownish imitation of the antiaircraft lights that vainly followed F-111 bombers 20 years earlier.
Half an hour later, 1,000 dignitaries assemble before the house. It is lit from below, pillars of gnarled concrete and wires hanging like low vines. The crowd politely applauds as Italian tenor Jose Carreras takes to the stage. After his brief set, The Colonel’s other, living daughter, Aisha, stands before the microphone. She was once dubbed “the Claudia Schiffer of the Middle East” for her model-like mien and hallmark blond highlights, but has of late taken the headscarf, becoming demonstrably more conservative. Underneath the skeletal remains of the building in which Hanna perished, she says, “Today we try to heal our wounds and shake hands with those who are here with us tonight. Yes for peace! No for destruction!”
The stage darkens. Lights swing back and forth, illuminating the Hanna House. Then all goes quiet. An icon of the 1980s— onetime member of R’n’B supergroup the Commodores, 90 million solo records sold, over a dozen Top 10 singles on the Billboard charts—stalks up to the spotlight, a smile on his face, the velvety Mediterranean breeze fluttering his navy-blue shirt. He then belts out five of his most beloved hits in front of the enraptured guests, culminating in a rousing sing-along, accompanied by 40 angel-costumed children typical to this sort of proceeding, of the “We Are the World” anthem he co-wrote with Michael Jackson.
“Hanna will be honoured tonight because of the fact that you’ve attached peace to her name,” Lionel Richie tells the crowd. “I love you Libya! I’ll be back.”
Yes, but how did he come to be there in the first place?
I discovered news of the concert accidentally, idly surfing the website for National Public Radio. I initially mistook the radio segment for parody, chuckling with irony until I realized that no one was kidding. Andrew Corsello, who had recently written a profile on Richie for GQ, told NPR that in the Middle East, while Lionel Richie wasn’t quite bigger than Mohammed, he was pretty darn big. The Richie-in-Tripoli gig was a coup of a different sort for Libya, a country only recently upgraded from pariah status due to The Colonel’s renouncement of WMDs, terrorist fellowships, bad hairstyles and so on. By all accounts, Richie’s arrival was greeted with the rapture befitting a visiting deity; his hands were washed in rosewater, he was accorded the honorific “Brother.” The take-home message was that the man who wrote “Dancing on the Ceiling” was a greater nuncio for peace—or at least common ground—than any number of official envoys, roadmaps or summit meetings. But there was one item in the story that made me choke up, Beaches style. I played it again—just to make sure I hadn’t misheard. Then I made my way through the blustery autumnal day to the newsstand to purchase a copy of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. In print, the story hit me with a wallop I usually associate with passages from great literature (or first-edition comic books). Richie told GQ that when he visited the Tripoli medina, a contingent of Libyan children had massed around him, closed their eyes, made wavy gesticulations with their hands, and moaned “Hello.” This was not a séance, but rather a passable rendition of the “Hello” video clip (a staple on MTV in the station’s early years, and a landmark moment in the history of the music video), in which a gorgeous blind woman, who knows Richie only from his mellifluous voice, somehow sculpts a perfectly representative clay bust of his Jheri-curled visage.
“What’s going on here? How do you know?” begged Lionel Richie of the Libyan children. “How do you know?”
How did they know? Lionel Richie’s videos are prominent in the cultural memory of a generation of North Americans; a friend once described Richie’s “All Night Long” clip as “a profound piece of eschatological imagination.” Indeed, to a scion of the 1980s, the Richie oeuvre carries an almost oneiric weight. Like “All Night Long,” the “Hello” video was an indelible piece of my childhood, a kiln-fired shard of memory now flung into the quandary of the Muslim world.
The tale was a powerful, perfect metaphor: popular culture as a binding force. Hundreds of millions of people in over a 100 countries know Lionel Richie’s music, and adore it. According to the GQ article, anti-Ba’athist residents of Baghdad had blasted “All Night Long” as the Shock ’n’ Awe™ commenced. “The only thing Shiite and Sunni now share, aside from their hatred of each other and their worship of Allah and his prophet, is their abiding love for Lionel Brockman Richie Jr.,” wrote Mr. Corsello. What his rather narrow view of life in Baghdad elucidates is the surprise we North Americans feel when our culture— our collective memories—are embraced by them. Nonetheless, there were aspects of the “Hello” tale—little details—that troubled me. The “All Night Long” in Baghdad story went against all the anecdotal evidence about the fateful March evening in 2003. And as much as I wanted to believe it (and for some reason, believing had become unreasonably important to me), the “Hello” reenactment sounded, well, outlandish. What of Mr. Richie’s security detail? But more importantly: Did hundreds of young Libyan children really have the “Hello” video downloaded onto their cognitive hard drives the same way a Westerner born of the 1980s did? In no way did I think that GQ or Lionel Richie had willfully fabricated these details. I just wondered if something had become garbled in the translation. I had to find out if that video reenactment had happened. Mr. Corsello put it perfectly: “We … have a strategic, even moral, obligation to know: What is the freakin’ deal with Lionel Richie?”
Most mornings, Eder and I would play hooky from our itinerary and sit drinking espressos on a downtown patio, under a wide-brimmed umbrella, waiting for the medina to come to life. According to the GQ article, the reenactment occurred about 500 yards from where we sat. The plan, such as it existed, was to ask any shopkeepers Richie may have visited whether a contingent of locals had gathered around the star, mimicked blindness, and murmured “Hello.” I imagined such an occurrence would be hard to miss.
I was wrong.
The Libyans I’d met so far were polite but reticent. “Such questions!” they’d remark, sounding like so many Peter Lorres in Casablanca. “Behind the questions, what do you hope to find, Mr. Richard? There is only darkness.” Indeed, it was impossible to get a peripheral sense of what was going on in Libya: I felt out of my depth, immersed in an ostensibly bright world that was defined by brutality. Securing an interview felt like pinning live butterfly specimens. I kept in mind the recent case of five Bulgarian nurses, sentenced to death on trumped-up charges of injecting the AIDS virus into poor Libyan children. They had been horribly mistreated; it took some filthy dealing on the part of European governments to secure their freedom. And I knew that any locals implicated in my quest could expect much worse.
As for Eder, his circumspection with regard to my mission was growing by the day. Despite his disavowals of Libyan nationality, he seemed embarrassed by the local attachment to Lionel Richie. Even after I told him that Richie wrote “Brick House” for the Commodores—“the single greatest encomium to the glory of a well-built woman’s ass,” as I believe I put it, if in not so many words—Eder was unconvinced that there was any merit in my quest.
“I dunno, maybe you think we’re backwards here,” said Eder, sipping his espresso. “That in 40 years—oooh!—maybe Christina Aguilera will come and rock us out.” “That’s not the point, Eder. And you’re not exactly being fair.” I understood that Eder did not want his carefully managed hipness tarred with the Lionel Richie brush; while his iPod was stocked with the latest urban hits, and while we spent our evenings haunting stores that sold bootleg DVDs of titles that had yet to be released stateside, most Libyans existed in a very different cultural milieu. Their culture was that of North African Islam, their connections atavistic: to kith and kin, to the old codes. Eder’s middle-class upbringing, and the fact that he was the oldest in a family of five kids, had allowed him semi-annual trips to Malta, where he had befriended and bedded a host of Westerners; in many respects, his worldview was more nuanced than most North Americans in their mid-20s. He was in the vanguard of a new Libyan generation, surfing the demographic wave of a massive Middle Eastern birthrate, pulled west by the accident of his tribal affiliations, plugged in because of an unprecedented technological sea-change in how media were disseminated. And that put him as much at odds with the Libyan mainstream as I was.
One thing I was slowly learning in the Muslim world: There is no Muslim world. There is no monolithic, stand-alone Other. Eder’s sensibilities proved just that. But questions of culture are fraught in Muslim culture. And questions of cultural complicity are even more dangerous. And I chose to start my journey in Libya partly because of its history: Culture after culture had passed through here, spilling (and leaving) blood by the vat, but also depositing remnants of their cultural brilliance, like the shards of clay that lay scattered in the myriad Roman ruins dotted along its shores.
Lionel Richie enjoyed one of the most successful recording careers of the 20th century; he earned hundreds of millions of dollars, was internationally famous, and had raised a daughter in such wanton privilege that it was played for a gag in The Simple Life. In short, he had nothing to prove. Yet, somehow, he needed this story. And I thought that I understood why: his success was meaningless if his music didn’t form a bridge, a wraithlike structure constructed from the collective memory of people who could otherwise be called enemies. The “Hello” reenactment, although I would find no evidence of it being precisely true, was a viable tale because of the very fact that Richie was big in Baghdad and throughout the Muslim world. In the telling of this story, Richie revealed a purpose that wasn’t so different from my own: to invest some humanity into a discourse that had degenerated into a host of gabbling talking heads, interrupted occasionally by complicated bombing runs. If we are woven into one another’s cultures, then what was the true source of our enmity?
I knew that there was no implicit meaning or message in “Hello” or its video clip. Cultural critic Greil Marcus once described early rock and pop as “music that affirmed meaninglessness and in that affirmation contained every conceivable kind of meaning.” This stands as a testament to what popular culture does best: unite us in an indefinable, unrefined moment of merriment, sadness, sentiment, titillation. There are two great equalizers: Death and pop culture. That’s what Lionel Richie meant by his story. And that’s why his story meant so much.
