Abstract
Writer
Jonathan Tel, whose story (right) on jokes in a Syrian prison is inspired by interviews he has done with Syrian refugees
CREDIT: Jonathan Tel
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One of the inspirations for his latest tale, Old Jokes are the Worst, came from the Syrian refugees he is working with, and an academic course he is teaching in Germany.
Tel, who won the Sunday Times short-story prize in 2016, is in Berlin collecting material for his next project, and it is from there he speaks to Index on Censorship about the new short story that he wrote exclusively for this magazine.
Another part of the inspiration for this story is the power of humour in incredibly traumatic circumstances. Set among people in a prison in Damascus, Syria, and the jokes they tell, it also gives a sense of how some people keep going.
“Some of them are, indeed, inspired by jokes going around the Arab world for centuries,” he said. “I am particularly interested in jokes from other cultures and other periods of history.”
Tel is obviously interested in the power of humour and the differences and connections it can make. “If they find it funny and I didn’t, what does that say about the differences in our cultures?”
In the past, many of Tel’s stories have been set in China, including his prize-winning story The Human Phonograph, in which a woman is reunited with her geologist husband at a remote Chinese nuclear base in the early years of the Cultural Revolution. Tel has spent time in China and is clearly fascinated by it. Although he is not writing about it at the moment, he doesn’t rule out featuring it in the future. He also has a book with a Chinese theme coming out in the USA in January called Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao.
Tel hasn’t yet visited Syria, although he has travelled widely in the Middle East. But he is very interested in the country following his interactions with the Syrians he has met so far.
He is also intrigued by how the Syrian refugees in Germany and the Germans get on. “There can be mutual understanding and mutual misunderstandings,” he said.
“The frame is pretty bleak because the situation is pretty bleak,” said Tel of his decision to set the short story in a prison. But he talks about how it shows a window into this world, where there is laughter and people try to make their lives a little better by telling jokes. And he hopes that readers will feel that the prisoners are real and will see them as human beings.
People find some kind of freedom in a repressive society by telling jokes, adds Tel, referring to why the jokes are so important to the sense of place.
The prisoners in this story are so used to telling jokes that they don’t even have to tell them any more, referring to them as just numbers and still understanding how they end.
Old Jokes are the Worst
Jonathan Tel
A newcomer has just been thrown into the cell, his right arm broken, his legs in shackles – both in reality and in the joke.
*
‘One of the old-timers calls out, “Forty-eight!” and the others laugh.
Somebody else shouts, “Thirty-seven!” Gales of laughter.
Another prisoner: “Twenty-nine!” Even more laughter and applause.
The newcomer asks what’s going on, and it’s explained: they’ve told their stock of jokes so many times they know them by heart, and have assigned them numbers on a list. No need to repeat the whole joke then, just the number.
The newcomer calls out, “Twenty-two!” Followed by silence. “How come nobody laughs?”
“It’s the way you tell it.”
*
The newcomer tries to smile, but he’s in pain and, besides, he’s heard the joke before.
“Twenty-two,” he groans. “What kind of joke is that anyway?” And a skinny, almost skeletal, man answers him:
*
‘Everybody was hungry.
‘A woman said to her husband, “Go to the river. Maybe you can catch a fish.”
‘So the man put a worm on a hook, and he stood by the Euphrates. He stood there all morning, and he stood there all afternoon. He sang, “Come to me, fish! I invite you to my home!” Then he sang, “Come to me fish! You are guest of honour at my banquet!” Then he sang, “Come to me, fish! I will fry you in olive oil, and I will bite your crispy skin, and I will swallow your succulent flesh, and I will suck your bones, and I will crunch your head between my teeth!”
‘It was almost sunset, and the man was about to give up. Just then, a fat fish took the bait, and the man reeled it in. He called out to his wife, “My darling, my dearest! Light a fire, and put oil in the pan. The guest of honour is on the way!”
‘His wife called back, “What oil? There’s no oil to be had for love or money anywhere in the village!”
‘The man cursed, and he threw the fish back in the river.
‘And the fish shouted, “Long live Bashar al-Assad!”
*
“I’ve heard this one before, too,” the newcomer says.
The skinny man glares. “The joke’s not over yet.”
*
‘The first person to tell the joke of The Patriotic Fish was arrested by the “ghost” police, and was never seen again.
‘The next person to tell it was careful to whisper. All the same he was caught and executed. ‘The third person didn’t tell the whole joke; there was no need, since everybody knew it already.
Instead he alluded to it by reciting the punchline, “Long live Bashar al-Assad!” He was buried in an unmarked grave.
‘The subsequent tellers paraphrased the punchline. For example, they might say “Hurrah for Bashar al-Assad!” Or “Three cheers for Bashar al-Assad!” Or a slogan such as “Allah, Syria, Bashar, and nothing but!” The more they praised the President, the more they were mocking him. To be on the safe side, the police shot everyone in the village, and threw their bodies into the river.
‘And the fish in the Euphrates feasted on the jokesters. They leaped into the air, shouting, “Long live Bashar al-Assad!”.’
*
Silence. Somebody says, “When I first heard it, it was told about Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad.”
Another prisoner says, “I was living in Iraq, and they told the same joke about Saddam Hussein.” —
CREDIT: Alex Green
A calendar drawn by a prisoner in the abandoned Tabweh prison in Douma, Syria, found in 2018
CREDIT: Hassan Ammar/Shutterstock
An older man: “In Egypt, they told it about Abdul Gamal Nasser, and the fish weren’t in the Euphrates, they were in the Nile. It probably goes back to the Pharaohs.”
Silence resumes. Then the newcomer calls out, “Forty-eight!” and a prisoner with a thin moustache responds:
*
‘Other people may have excised this from their memory, but I remember how thrilled we all were when Bashar al-Assad came to power. He was young, with a pretty wife, and he’d studied in the UK. He would bring our country into the modern world. He was an ophthalmologist. We weren’t quite sure what an ophthalmologist does, but we knew he had looked into many eyes. “Allah, Syria, Bashar, and nothing but!” It was compulsory to chant this, but even if it hadn’t been, we would have done it of our own free will.
‘He had a thin moustache, a lisp, and a long neck. Many of us, too, cultivated a thin moustache, and affected a lisp, and tilted our chin up to make our neck seem longer. We’d be playing soccer with our pals, and it would seem there were eleven Bashars on the team.
‘Then, as the leader became less popular, our moustaches thickened, and our lisps vanished, and our necks shrank. All except for Qusay. He’d had a lisp ever since he was an infant, his neck was naturally long, and his moustache refused to grow; it looked like a moth had settled on his lip.
Naturally we teased him. We used to tug his moustache playfully, and declare the old-fashioned oath, “I swear by my moustache!” And there was a Ramadan soap opera popular back then, set a century ago, about a man who stakes his moustache as bond. We taunted him, “Did you lose your moustache in a business dealing, ha ha!?”
‘Qusay had enough of this. He told everybody he was going on holiday to Istanbul. When he came back, we realised he’d been to the moustache transplant clinic. He sported the kind of bushy moustache nicknamed a “Stalin”. He looked like everybody’s socialist uncle.
‘So we played a prank on him. We pretended not to recognise him. “Who are you?”
“It’s me! It’s me, Qusay!”
“No, I don’t know anybody of that name with a moustache like that. I never saw you before in my life!”
‘A month later he vanished. We think he was taken away by the “ghost” police. No one knows what he was accused of, or his fate.’
*
A man in the corner hides behind his moustache, ignored by the others.
The newcomer tries, “Thirty-seven!” and a fellow with a bushy beard says, “That’s the number of the joke I told the woman who was interrogating me when I applied for asylum in Berlin. Maybe that’s why I was deported back here. The Germans have no sense of humour – any more than we do.”
*
‘We were in a dugout on the outskirts of Kobane, three kilometres from the front. The sun set and we prayed the maghrib prayer, and Fazel began to sing. Ah, you should have heard him! You’d think you were in Jannah already! He sang a name for Allah, and he sang another name for Allah… We have ninety-nine names for Allah; you have ninety-nine names for sausage…Then he sang a nasheed about the hoor al-ayn, “O my brothers, how I yearn to be with her!” He sang the beauty of the virgin who awaits him in Jannah, with her eyes like pearls and her skin so fair she is transparent. Finally, the APC rolled up, and Fazel raised one finger aloft to signal his allegiance to Islamic State, and he strapped the belt packed with explosives around his waist, and he was driven away toward the front.
‘Then Jawdat took up the nasheed. Ah, you should have heard Jawdat! Maybe not such a pretty voice as Fazel’s, but he held up a Coke bottle like a microphone, and he imitated a contestant on Arab Idol. He grinned at the audience and twisted his hips. He slapped his belly to keep the beat going. “O my brothers, how I yearn to be with her!” Then the APC came back again, and the sergeant fastened the explosives around Jawdat, and he too was driven away.
‘So there were only two of us left, me and Alaeddin. Alaeddin began to sing. He sang the nasheed about the reward for the faithful, he sang about the beautiful hoor al-ayn waiting for him in Jannah, he sang like a tomcat bawling, he sang like a door creaking, he sang like fingernails scraping on a chalkboard, he sang like the screams of the Kuffar burning eternally in Jahannam. Alaeddin squeezed his eyes shut, the better to concentrate on his horrible nasheed. The only creature who could enjoy such a performance is a Jinn. He crept out of the darkness. To the Jinn it seemed this was the voice of his beloved, his Jinna, and she was singing of her love for him, her one true Jinn, for him alone. The Jinn crept closer and closer. He was ten metres tall when he stepped over the barbed wire, and he shrank to fit through the door frame, and he shrank even more so he could perch inside the ammo box on the floor between me and Alaeddin, and listen. “O my brothers, how I yearn to be with her!” I kicked the lid of the box shut.
‘The sergeant grabbed Alaeddin, shoved him into the APC, and drove away.
‘Me? No, I did not sing. I have no voice, and I know it. The nasheed continued only in my head, while the Jinn thrashed and battered inside the ammo box, begging to be let out. “I’ll give you anything you desire, in return for my freedom!”
‘I thought about all the places in this world and other worlds I could visit, all the fates that could be mine. It seemed ten thousand voices were singing, shouting, whispering, ululating, praising, cursing, begging to be heard. I picked the option which, I guess, most men in my situation would have chosen.
“I’ll let you go on condition you transport me instantly far from any battlefield. Put me in a warm, clean room in, let’s say, Germany; and, while you’re about it, give me four fifteen-year-old virgins with blonde hair and blue eyes, please!’”
‘I could hear the Jinn inside the box counting on his fingers (they’ve got no thumbs, you know) fifteen times, and he promised to make my wish come true.
‘“O my brothers, how I yearn to be with her!”
‘And that’s how I made it from Syria to Berlin, and how come I’m sitting here talking with you, a sixty-year-old virgin.’
*
The door opens, and guards drag the prisoners away, one by one. The newcomer is the last one left. He remains in the cell, locked up in solitary confinement. There he is, even now, while I’m writing this and you’re reading this. He’s shouting out numbers, and laughing, and laughing, and laughing.