Paradoxes and Unknown Paradises
Every so often I get a reminder of the appropriateness of Libya’s second name, the geographical hyphen, something I probably first started thinking about on my first day of school when I had to explain to the teacher where exactly Libya is situated on the world map.
Often it seems that what is known about Libya is that little is known about Libya. Eliminate the Bulgarian nurses, Lockerbie, and celebratory Libya “coming in from the cold” stories, and there’s not much left. The fact that a high percentage of this very limited amount of available information is plain wrong, stereotypical or out of date doesn’t exactly help.
Looking for a restaurant in Benghazi, for example, I was informed that “when talking about Libyan cuisine one would refer to it as “tent cookery” that can be labelled as tasty and healthy and not sophisticated.” Also, several rules I’m not sure I’ve heard of before, apparently ‘governed’ by Islam: “In this Moslem land, there is a strict tradition that tends to govern most of the eating habits. For instance… in Libya the food in the very center of each tray is never consumed as it is intended as an offering to heaven.” And then adventurous souls considering visiting Libya are reassured that “although food is traditionally eaten with the right hand only, knives and forks will generally be available”.
Yet somewhat paradoxically, Libya’s unknown quality has increasingly been touted as one of its greatest attractions. Compared to Tunisia and Egypt, Libya is relatively tourist-free, a quality which apparently commends it to those looking for authenticity, adventure and the bragging factor: i.e. go someplace your friends haven’t even heard of! There’s a mass of potential for pandering to the taste for the authentic and the untouched, deep in the pure clean desert myth of the undiscovered land waiting for the intrepid explorer. But paradoxically, in this enterprise to succeed is to fail: to succeed in drawing tourists would also mean to destroy that very untouched quality. And there lies the paradox. How is it possible to maintain this tourist-free atmosphere while citing it as a tourist attraction? The answer seems to lie in eco-tourism, concentrating on small numbers and supposedly environmentally friendly sustainable projects such as The “Green Mountain Sustainable Development Area”, with plans for a national park, organic farms, eco-friendly hotels, and the restoration of archaeological sites. Apparently, one idea is to hollow out one of the mountains to ‘hide’ a tourist resort to be built there. Sacrilege, in my opinion. But then, the one word that can perhaps best describe this project is the ambivalent “ambitious.”
