<h2>WHEN THERE IS AN EAST AND A WEST EVEN IN AMMAN</h2>

Hasmi Shemali, street art telling the story of human rights
by Ciro Scuotto

Read the original article in Italian on Il Gazzettino Vesuviano

I have been living in Amman for more than a year now. I travel back and forth to Naples often, but here I no longer use a GPS, I speak broken Arabic—just enough to buy coffee and bread—and when I introduce myself, I often say my name is Abu Nour. It’s my way of saying: I’m trying to stay.

At first, Amman felt like a welcoming city, booming and expanding. New, expensive electric cars were everywhere. A widespread, almost ostentatious sense of wealth. I kept wondering where all that money came from, in a country that produces little and imports almost everything.

Over time, I realized that Amman only lets itself be understood on the surface. To truly know it, you have to move. Go inside. Look longer.

The first tour is always the same: downtown, the Roman Theatre, the souk, the Citadel. An ancient history, shaped also by colonialism. And it is precisely from the Citadel, next to the Roman temple, that you can see the city’s real wall.

It is not made of concrete. It is made of color, light, and absence.

In the East, buildings are old, worn out, yellowed. In Naples we would say sgarrupata—run-down. This is where the poorest part of Amman is concentrated.

In the West, instead, everything is whiter, more orderly, shining. Social differences are evident, physical, immediate. There’s no need to explain them: you can feel them. As almost everywhere in the world today, wealth has never been evenly distributed.

That day, looking at Amman from above, I understood that if I really wanted to tell this city’s story, I had to go East.

A few months later, I got in touch with a local NGO, the Collateral Repair Project (CRP). I started collaborating on communication. They asked me to write a documentary. I did—it was titled The Waiting Room.

But documentaries cost money. And having the right story is not always enough. We never managed to shoot it with CRP. So I kept returning to the neighborhood in another way: walking, listening, photographing.

When they call me in, I go to East Amman, to the neighborhood of Hasmi Shemali.

I immediately understand that yes, Hasmi Shemali is a poor neighborhood. But it is also something else.

It is a neighborhood of waiting.

Syrian, Iraqi, Yemeni, and Sudanese refugees live here. Families who fled wars and remain stuck for years. They fix their homes, make do, endure. Hasmi Shemali is not a destination, but it is not a quick stopover either: it is suspended time, a place where judgment gives way to coexistence and solidarity is tangible.

I step into a bakery and start chatting with a group of very young guys, also of Palestinian origin. We eat together some pastries called muʿajanāt. I tell them I’m Italian, that my name is Ciro but they can call me Abu Nour. They smile, and—as often happens here—they refuse to let me pay. I walk out with a sense of gratitude that is hard to handle. Kindness can be disarming.

The apartment blocks look like those in the outskirts of cities all over the world: reinforced concrete, three floors, narrow balconies. The same ones you find in the suburbs of Naples, Berlin, Paris—cities that grew too fast and were quickly forgotten.

After meetings at CRP, I often got lost in the neighborhood. I walked. I photographed. I watched the walls—until I came across a block of buildings covered in drawings and murals.

As I turn on my camera, I am welcomed by Abu Mustafa, himself Palestinian. He tells me that many Palestinian families live in these very buildings, the ones covered with murals. They arrived here many years ago, during different phases of the disastrous Israeli-Palestinian history. They never left.

I shoot. I walk. I look up.

On the walls of Hasmi Shemali, human rights are not written: they are drawn. One after another. I find many of them—the right to health, housing, childhood and play, education, bread. They are all there, visible, clear, colorful. Beautiful.

They are not abstract slogans. They are elementary rights, told in the very place where they are most often denied.

Over time, I learn that making this open-air museum possible is also a collective of artists and urban storytellers who, emerging from East Amman’s underground scene, organize walking tours in the neighborhood. They guide people through the murals, tell the stories of those who live here, and restore meaning and dignity to places that too often remain invisible. It is a form of grassroots storytelling rarely found in airport guidebooks.

Then I see a mural that strikes me more than the others. A woman rises upward, lifted by a balloon. Above her are study, work, a degree—books, drafting tools, microscopes. Below, dropped on the ground, lies a ring.

The message is simple and radical: for a woman, there is not only marriage.

It is an image that does not accuse or shout. It opens up a possible space.

I keep walking. I turn the corner.

And there, the discourse closes—without the need for further explanation.

A gas cylinder. A set of keys. A maid’s duster.

Three objects. Three of the most exhausting and poorly paid jobs in the city. Three forms of labor that keep Amman running while remaining invisible.

The doormen of luxury buildings in West Amman—from the Second to the Eighth Circle—are almost all Egyptian. They guard entrances they will never truly cross. They wash expensive SUVs for a few extra dinars.

Amman has no gas network. Gas cylinders are used instead. Trucks drive through the streets announcing themselves with the same repetitive tune. On the back, there is almost always a skinny young man, often in flip-flops, carrying cylinders up staircases. He powers homes that are not his own.

The third job is that of cleaning ladies and babysitters. Many are Filipino, Sri Lankan, Ethiopian. Very low wages, endless hours. To work, they need a sponsor and a contract. Without documents, they risk prison.

Here, irregularity is not precarity. It is incarceration.

Working with other organizations, I’ve learned that migration is a vast issue, intertwined with many other factors, deserving deeper analysis. Resettlement, too, is an enormous problem that would require its own investigation.

But the real tragedy for refugees here is not only the war they fled. It is not being allowed to work.

Many are registered with UNHCR and wait for an unlikely resettlement to third countries. In the meantime, they cannot work legally. If they work informally, they risk arrest.

And yet, they work. In secret. In restaurants, fields, cleaning jobs. They keep entire sectors of the city alive without being allowed to belong to it.

NGOs try to patch things up.

But it’s like treating a hemorrhage with a band-aid.

Hasmi Shemali is the poor part of Amman. And it is also the part that allows the city to function without ever being allowed to truly inhabit it.

And in the East, everyone knows this.