”There’s an unusual mix here—a very graceful, very proud mix of cultures and languages,“ Tony Bourdain said of the Sultanate of Oman, during one of his few sojourns to the Middle East, in 2017. “You know this cat … or just a village cat?” That, and a mention of The Simpsons too.
Why Oman? “Our Bedouin hosts took to their tea and their songs, laughing and telling stories in Arabic among themselves,” Anthony Bourdain wrote in his Field Notes for CNN, back in June 2017, when Parts Unknown was making a rare foray into the Arabian Peninsular, toward the end of the program’s ninth season.
“We, the non-Muslim contingent, slipped discreetly away to a nearby dune, where a bottle of bourbon was produced, a speaker that played music off our iPhones. In time, our senses pleasurably deranged, we—all of us, the shooters, producers, camera assistants, and I—sat there in the soft, yielding sand, listening to The Prodigy and Marvin Gaye, looking wordlessly out at an endless sand sea, a nearly full moon hanging swollen over the dunes. In the mountains near Jebel Akhdar, in a small village, I asked a woman about her children, her hopes and dreams for her daughters. She wept with pride. In Muscat I looked out at the sea. Black crows, like augurs, landed on the balustrade, looked at me, then took off. A Scotsman in a pub, a veteran of a war few remember, talked of fierce battles in the interior, a struggle whose global strategic importance dwarfed that of Vietnam or Laos. He fought side by side with the Omanis. We drank Guinness while he remembered the smells of blood and frankincense.
“Oman, if you haven’t gathered already, is a remarkable place.”
And there it is. The reason Bourdain went, knowing full well — both before and after — that viewers, his minders at CNN, and possibly even the movers and shakers at Zero Point Zero, the production company behind No Reservations, Parts Unknown and other Bourdain programs, would consider the Oman episode an oddity, an outlier, an eccentricity, a footnote in a season that had already touched on Laos, Antarctica, San Sebástian, and would soon carry on to Trinidad and Porto, Portugal, before taking a brief midsummer break and then onto Singapore for the next season, Parts Unknown’s milestone 10th.
Oman came at a time when Bourdain was looking for a respite, far away from big cities, and in the desert, the world’s largest, biggest and hottest sand desert, larger even than the grand ergs in the Algerian Sahara, with its sand seas covering an area the size of France.
Bourdain found something both elemental and elementary in Oman, a place to pause, consider life, reflect on the past and wonder about the future. A future, as fate would have it, that would prove all too brief, though he could not have known that at the time.
“It’s morning in the Arabian Desert, the place explorer Bertram Thomas called the ‘Abode of Death,’ Bourdain said in his voiceover. “But it’s a beautiful place, the kind of place I look for more and more these days: stark, empty, clean sand that stretches out seemingly forever.”
Oman, on the southeastern coast of the Arabian Peninsular overlooking the Straits of Hormuz and bordered by the United Arab Emirates or UAE (stable) to the north, Saudi Arabia (stable) to the northwest and Yemen (not so much) to the immediate west is, interestingly enough, the oldest continuously independent state in the Arab world and remains to this day the spiritual and possibly literal home of the folk classic One Thousand One Nights, aka Alf Laylah wa-Laylah, أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ, a collection of Middle Eastern folktales curated and published in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age (8th century to 13th century). The first English-language version was published in 1706, long before The Simpsons.
That’s instructive because there’s a disarming moment midway through the program in which Bourdain, immersed in a culture far away from the pop-cultural obsessions of the West, is recognized by some local women for a bit part he played in a Simpsons episode. The women burst out laughing … and to say Bourdain is caught off-guard is a little like saying the Washington Nationals are odds-on favourites to bag this year’s World Series.
Then there’s the food. Oman would not be a Bourdain show without a mention of food, and after the bare bones fare of Antarctica — vegans, beware — Bourdain was in the mood for more adventurous fare, at least where food was concerned. The food of Oman, Bourdain noted, is a mix of flavours and ingredients and tastes from Arabia and the wider reach of Oman’s former empire, as embodied in shuwa, Oman’s signature dish for special occasions.
“They do one version or another of this all over the world, but shuwa is special,” Bourdain noted. “They slather a goat with a spicy paste consisting of cumin, coriander, red pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, and nutmeg, then wrap the meat in palm or banana leaves, dig a hole, throw in some meat, cover it up, and leave underground for a day or two over hot coals.”
Yes, you read that right — a day or two. In this world, a microwave doesn’t cut it.
But wait, there’s more. (That’s a recurring Simpsons line.)
Bourdain: “Kabuli laham is slow-cooked goat in a rich rice pilaf scented with star anise. Musanif djaj, a local specialty, are pan-seared dumplings stuffed with chicken, pepper, ginger, turmeric and onions. And of course there’s Omani bread with honey.”
Of course.
Oman is a sea-faring nations by geographic proximity, but wherever one goes, the desert is not far away. It’s what drew Bourdain there in the first place.
“One hundred and thirty miles south of Muscat [Oman’s national capital, an ancient port city linking east and west since the first century], the pavement ends and you hit this: Sharqiya Sands, on the edge of Rub’ al Khali, the largest sand desert in the world. Once you get up in the soft sand, things change. Everything changes. You change ... “
Bourdain didn’t just change.
The Bedouin desert, with its shifting sands and vast, seemingly endless landscapes, made an indelible impression on his heart. Bourdain followed in the sands forged by explorers Sir Richard Francis Burton, Charles Doughty, TE Lawrence, Bertram Thomas, Gertrude Bell and Wilfred Thesiger, and found his own peace.
“The question of what’s next,” he said, in a moment of quiet reflection, “is a big, if often unspoken one.”
Fi amanillah.
Supplementary reading:
https://explorepartsunknown.com/oman/episode-intel-from-oman/
https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-oman/
The full episode is available on YouTube at:
CNN