On Airports
A widespread recent phenomenon is that almost all the airports in the world are turning or have turned into silent airports. Silence is perhaps to commemorate the state of modernity we live in, most people wrapped around their cocoon unable to communicate freely. Airports could be seen as a breaker of barriers as people from all over the world can be found there-well only people from a certain class privilege. But no, silence must prevail as if it is an emblem of modernity and on its polar end stands a fish market probably. We all remember our school teacher’s favorite sentence about the classroom and the fish market. I am standing in front of the carousel as luggage, small and large, packed loosely and tightly, rucksacks and trolleys of all shapes, size and color pass me by like children on a merry go round. It reminds me of CD's and DVDs whirring as they are played. Like noise, they too are being replaced, with technology that makes storage smaller and smaller and even physically absent like cloud storage for example. My claim is that technology with its claim to bridge the gap between human interactions have replaced it, and we ought to be scared by that. This tangent about technology reminds me of Donna Harroway’s Cyborg manifesto. I see cyborgs and zombies in suits and ties travelling in and out of airports, offices and hotels across the globe in a circular motion day in and day out and the money keeps rolling into the bank. They are plugged to their favorite apple products, bite onto the rotten yet overpriced airport sandwich and life goes on. I have a friend and she says she loves hotel rooms because they are so impersonal. There are no memories attached like you wouldn’t find an armchair where your grandfather used to smoke a pipe in your hotel room. In hotels you’re invisible and so is your neighbor. A little toddler slips and falls, bursting into tears, and I am so relieved like some burden of existence has been removed. His mother immediately picks him up, makes silly faces as one one does to distract a child, and rocks him in her laps until the crying stops. The gloom of silence returns again as people go back to their grind of everyday life. The security beep, the checking of your identity cards, the woman on the counter saying "Thank you for flying with us" and all that jazz. Funny how the colonial language is. You can use the most chaotic genre of music to describe a place where perfect order is being maintained. It reminds me a bit about North Korea and no Kim Jong Un isn’t as dumb as he looks. In North Korea everyone has a job and people over there are very nice to each other, never rude, never being unruly or noisy, and all sounds like a yellow submarine except an interesting phenomenon has recently come to surface. My friend tells me that in North Korea people are paying money willingly to go to prison. However, airports aren’t entirely the hub of existential angst, a picture I may be carelessly painted so far. It’s a place of reunion, a place of convergence and also divergence. It is not, however, like the movie industry fantasies where the mad lover does something theatrical to stop their significant other from leaving the country forever by jumping onto the wings of an airplane or crashing the inside of an airport on horseback but happiness is expressed joyously as they rush into the arms of their loved ones and grief expressed more subtly in hushed tears and wiping a watery pair of spectacles. It is also a place of false promises where the son goes to hump the American dream never to turn back and fly to his parents who provided him with capital, both cultural and money, to raise him as this hunky dory fluent English speaking American lawyer that he is soon to be. The parents are aware that this is probably their final goodbye but does not express such as deep down they want to believe that one day their son will probably return. We shall never know. For now, they console themselves in the thought that their son’s happiness equates to theirs. On the other end of my peripheral vision, I see a man waiting with a placard in his hand, bearing a name, with a red heart drawn next to the name. It will fit better into my allegory if he’s waiting for Godot but he, I presume, is waiting for his other and a true lover always waits. I don’t know what it is that makes me claustrophobic about airports –is it the indomitable silence, the mechanical decor , the rigid levy of order or the lack of art, I cannot figure. Confusion has always enveloped me endearingly like the arms of a loving mother. I sometimes envy, and at most times, are in awe of people who always have answers. Perhaps answers fly by me while I am lost in the plane of imagination which leads me to think that perhaps my luggage has also made one or two turns around the carousel by now. It is just a suspicion I have. I finally see my grey rucksack. Praise observation, the wait is over.
