The Oman Cafe
June 26, 2005
Oman is currently featured on the mall. The small country, located at the tip of the Arabian peninsula, gets a few weeks to show off its cultural heritage to Americans visiting Washington DC. Walking into various white tents you could hear music from Oman, or watch various Omanis engaged in traditional crafts.. such as metal work, weaving, or calligraphy. At the Oman Cafe we could buy meals and drinks.. although these were more generally Middle Eastern rather than peculiar to Oman. I settled for a lemonade instead of sampling the ice cold date juice.
At one tent an American young man, perhaps recently out of college, explained his work in trying to bring Omani crafts to the United States. He dreamed that someday the textiles and crafts of Oman might be available in Manhattan at Saks Fifth Avenue.. and his work for some no-profit organization was to find ways to connect the trade dots between Oman and the United States. Finally he urged visitors to buy these crafts at the trade store connected to the Folklife Festival.
Neither Emily nor myself were convinced that bringing Omani crafts to Saks Fifth Avenue was a positive goal.. for as soon as a new style was accepted (even making believe that an “Omani craze” were possible), clothing designers elsewhere would quickly mimick the style, and for much cheaper, and the Omani traditional craftsmen would hardly reap the benefits. Besides, the very act of aiming designs and clothes at such a radically different audience would transform the traditional crafts.. a process which is visible all over the world as traditional crafts are subtly altered to appeal to the tastes of tourists.
A bit later we wandered to the Sackler Museum, a compact museum located behind the distinctive red Smithsonian Castle. We took in two exhibits, with two of my friends from Cairo joining us.. Nadav and John.
The
first exhibit was about fine pottery traded between Baghdad and China from about 850 to 1050 AD. The Arabs perfected a deep blue on white format which became very popular in China, and after the trading network was disrupted, the Chinese continued to develop the style. The blue on white style which we so immediately recognize as fine “ China” seemed to originate in these early connections. In another case we saw how beautiful gold on white glazed pottery from Egypt mimicked stylistic elements in metalworking. It turned out to be a small workshop on the way creative energy gets worked and re-worked as it travels to different geographical settings, and even into different mediums.
A second exhibit was about the ancient trade in frankincense and mirrh.. two aromatics that grew primarily in what is now Yemen, at the south of the Arabian peninsula. On display were plenty of stone inscriptions in South Arabian.. a language that only survives in such inscriptions. I could swear that some of those strange characters looked a lot like the Ethiopian script that I am currently laboring to learn.
It was a day guaranteed to make me think about travel.. and how central it is to get a sense of how other people see the world. Seeing Omani drummers in a crowded tent on the mall was a little absurd.. but it does start to approximate the capital of my imagined America.. a place which opens out to the rest of the world.. and teaches us to look on other culures without fear. But we are often more interested in what we can buy from them..