jordan pulse -

By Mohammad Al-Subaihi

We are perhaps the people who repeat the word “belonging” (intimaa’) more than any other—until it has become a cliché, a refrain in every speech by an official, party member, or writer. Yet we are also among the least to live up to it, leaving the word as empty rhetoric with no reflection in reality.

Take a simple example of this illusion of belonging: a street in West Amman, the main Rabieh road. After midnight, this street—frequented by those whose wallets are never short of dinars—turns into a garbage dump. Shops that close their doors leave their trash piled on the sidewalks. Young men gathering around their cars eat and drink, then abandon empty cans and coffee cups on the roadside.

A sweets shop blocks the sidewalk and building setback entirely with tables and chairs, while no one from the municipality—despite its bloated staff—bothers to check, not even a single trash bin is fixed to a lamp post.

And the ones tossing waste from their car windows? Stylish young men and women, with carefully groomed hair and polished, expensive cars. This is the “street of the wealthy” and the “educated.” If this is Rabieh, what then of Downtown?

We block pavements, dig into streets, plant as we please, violate building codes, and shrug off fines that pile up into tens of thousands, while court orders from the municipality gather dust in warehouses, never enforced.

We are “loyal citizens”—but only when no traffic officer is around, no cameras monitoring us. Then we speed, run red lights, and grind traffic laws under our wheels.

Belonging is not hollow words, not a song or a poem, not flattery when a senior official shows up. Real belonging is action—on the street, at work, at home.

When I look around, I find true belonging only among the soldiers of the armed forces, public security, civil defense, intelligence services, and among the farmers in villages that have never heard of Rabieh, Dabouq, or Deir Ghbar. Some of them have never even entered Amman, which, as poet Haidar Mahmoud once said, “let down her braids”—without realizing that this “mother of braids” lacks even a comb and enough shampoo.