Word of the Day: Homogeneity

Although the Syrians claim that historically Lebanon has been part of its territory and therefore should still be, accepting such logic would not account for how different both societies are nowadays. Whereas Lebanon strikes by its diversity, Syria, at first sights, shocks by its homogeneity.

There are few mountains right after the border but they quickly disappear to make way for a wide highly cultivated plain with only a couple of small hills in the background. From then on as you head further to the North of the country, you cross a repetitive succession of wheat fields and olive trees plantations. Here and there, a basic one-storey high rectangular house hosts a family of peasants. Unadorned, built with either cement bricks or beige rocksm they blend in with their surroundings. As you get closer to Aleppo, the land becomes a little more arid, loosing its intense chocolate brown color to become something looking more and more like sand. The city itself also surprises by its uniformity. Standing at the top of the Citadelle in the middle of the city, the panorama at your feet is composed of buildings of more or less the same height and in the same greyish color. The only thing that stands out is the decadent mosque that is currently under construction whose walls are still white and which is decorated with green domes. Even the clothes line on the sides or the rooftops seem to be the same from one home to the next, whether in the countryside or in the city. The same succession of sombre clothes with the occasional pink or orange shirt. Those clothes lines are revealing of the local fashion (if you may call it fashion). Men will either wear a colorless djellabah with a keffieh expertly tied around their head or a dress shirt tucked in kaki pants. Most of them sport a thick brown moustache. The women too conform to a simple dress code. Their silhouette, whether corpulent or thin, is hidden under a shapeless dresscoat. Their face made even rounder by their veil. Shockingly, many of them don a black veil that cover their eyes, like a Madonna mourning her son. This sight never fails to remind of the condition of inequality and submission most local women live in. They also bear a strange resemblance to the image of Death, like a scary omen. Their presence can bring uneasiness. You don't want to stare or be disrespectful but at the same time you don't want to ignore it and cast it as normal or to be expected.

This uniformity in the dresscode, the repetitiveness of the landscape, the anonymity in which many women remain gives the impression of a very homogeneous country. One in which most people belong to the same socioeconomic class. There must be some important social cleavages but they are well dissimulated. Men wearing suits, expensive cars and other signs of wealth are few and far between. Either people don't exhibit their wealth as in Lebanon, or I have yet to visit their neighborhoods. One thing is for sure a few days in Aleppo and two weeks in Syria will not be enough to break through Syria's shell.