These opposing taftish made sure no one had full control of the capital.
“Sanaa love Ali Abdullah Saleh,” AK said disappointedly. “Sanaa I think all the people, all the home, there is one person he work in the army.” (Yemen has more than a quarter the number of military personnel as the United States in a country one-fifteenth the size. Top brass were all Saleh’s tribal allies.)
AK had not surrounded himself with the like-minded. Not only did he live in the regime’s stronghold, he also worked in the barren offices of the government’s Ministry of Youth and Sport. His uncle worked for the state-run Saleh-loyalist newspaper Al-Thawra, “The Revolution,” named for the overthrow of the religious monarchy that established the Yemen Arab Republic, “North Yemen.” (A month after Hadi took office, Al-Thawra halted publishing indefinitely.)
AK spoke of his mudir, his boss; the ma‘arada, the opposition; a masiira, a demonstration. “I sometimes can’t talk about Ali Abdullah Saleh in my work. I think my mudir he see me with ma’arada, masira, I walk with ‘Irhal! Irhal!’ ”—a sign saying GET OUT!—“he see me, ‘You go with ma‘arada.’ I say, ‘Yes I do.’ I need change. Twenty-three years Ali Abdullah Saleh, why come new four years and come another . . . no good?”
In moments like this, his indignation spewed faster than his English could handle. Everything that AK said was said in absolute honesty, in earnestness that bordered on reckless. He couldn’t pretend—he could only choose when to show himself. “I don’t talk with Naji anything,” he affirmed.
And yet, he had friends who supported the revolution and who hated the revolution. Was it hard to talk openly with them? “No. Not difficult.”
I hardly have any friends who vote differently for president, let alone ones who would take opposite sides on the Civil War. It isn’t deliberate. Possibly, some combination of political convictions is refracted by more friendship-relevant ideals. Maybe those are just the circles I run in. But something bigger than politics united these Sanaanis as friends, something that shaped their lives far more than the revolution, with consequences far more permanent than the future of Yemen’s government. It was a lifestyle choice like vegetarianism or neck tattoos or playing a lot of golf:
None of them ever chewed gat.
IN THE LONG HOURS after sunset, Neal and I walked through the outer edges of the old city looking for lights—a janbiya shop with walls covered in daggers, a biqala selling phone credit. Across a four-hundred-year-old bridge built by the Ottomans before they were ousted for the first time, there was a well-known tea shop with unsteady tables outside. Inside, a man angrily stirred milky tea in black iron cauldrons. He scooped the shai into glasses with a metal cup and brought them to us, scowling.
Moments later, AK showed up with four friends. We had only just said good-bye, but there really weren’t many other places to hang out. Sometimes for a certain type of people—expats, non-gat chewers—the country could feel like a college campus. In other cases, Old Sanaa alone might seem bigger than the solar system.
The friends wore their politics on the sleeves of their blazers and army jackets. On each side there was one Muhammad—AK and Muhammad al-Sukari were revolutionaries; a second Muhammad and Abdullah supported Ali Abdullah Saleh. The fifth, a goalie for a local soccer club, was totally apathetic. “He sees the future and he’s okay with anything,” said AK.
“You like Real Madrid or Barca?” asked the goalie.
“I like Inter Milan,” I said. I’d be neutral, too.
“It’s a draw. Two with the thawra two with president Ali Abdullah Saleh,” AK said. Amazingly, both he and Muhammad were government employees. Muhammad was even in the army.
“Are there other people like you in the army?”
“Five percent or ten percent, like this,” he said. He was not a deserter or a man fed up with Saleh as a direct result of the uprising. He was a Zaidi Shia (like Saleh) and part of the Houthi rebel campaign that had challenged the central government for greater autonomy in intermittent skirmishes since 2004. He explained himself simply: “Just Houthi. Ideologia Houthi.”
“He just want justice in all this. But he don’t like America,” AK said.
“Equality between people. But there isn’t equality with this government,” Muhammad said.
In 2014, Houthis stormed the capital; soon, they dissolved parliament. Saleh’s replacement Hadi was forced out, replaced by the “Revolutionary Committee” and a new iteration of civil war in whose name, heeding Hadi’s calls for support, Saudi Arabia would bomb the nation to smithereens.
Houthis are famous for their catchy slogan: “God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Damn the Jews, Victory for Islam.” Shia activism tends to provoke actors on all sides—the Yemeni government; Saudi Arabia, afraid of Shia incursion and effects on its domestic politics; and Al-Qaeda, which markets its terrorism under an orthodox “Sunni” label.
It didn’t really follow that Muhammad could actually be a member of the Yemen Army, seeing as his Houthi compatriots had been actively killing them for years. But it didn’t have to make sense. Jobs were scarce and he had one, or so he said, for the moment.
“You know why I like thawra? Because this,” AK said. “Some person he have four job, three job, and there is some person there isn’t any work, he sleep all the time in the home. There is no any work.” In the hearts of revolutionaries, at least, the revolution had at its heart the revival of a middle class. AK was the most vocal about his opinions—the others seemed content just to be their characters as the world changed. Muhammad was Houthi, and that was all. He endorsed justice and equality for people.
The other Muhammad was a comfortable economics teacher, but AK was most enviously critical of his friend Abdullah. Abdullah did, in fact, hold four jobs: in the police, in the army, for the government’s Al-Thawra newspaper, and as a doctoral student of journalism. If the regime fell, he would lose three of those.
“This is why he won’t change president Ali Abdullah Saleh, because this. Because there is man he have four jobs.” Apparently, Abdullah spent a fair amount of time in the Police Club and the Army Club. Supposedly he was the best at billiards.
Abdullah smiled politely and pulled out a stack of ID cards from his wallet. This one showed him in army gear, that one licensed him to report in Jordan. One was for the university.
“You’ll still have that one,” I said.
Everything about it seemed like a sitcom. The boisterous and silly cabbie-cum-ministerial seat-filler and his gang of activists, soldiers, and goalies who all grew up with one another. The rebel whose movement “officially” cursed Jews. His new Jewish friends.
After lunch, these were probably the only guys in town who moved.
More tea came, sweet with condensed milk. “Like you!” I said to Muhammad. His last name, Al-Sukari, means “sugary.” It might have been my most successful joke in Arabia.
After a short back and forth where Muhammad granted that Israelis were no more like the Israeli government than Yemenis were like theirs, he was wondering where I was from. “Citizens are not the government, true or no? Sah walilaa?” I asked. “Cor-rrect,” said AK, rolling his Rs until they popped.
In my Arabic, they had picked out influences from all over. They knew Egyptian from films, Syrian from the superpopular Ramadan series Bab al-Hara. “You talk like Maghribi. Or Lubnani.” Moroccan and Lebanese dialects couldn’t be further apart, but they were right. I tended to borrow whatever I could remember, like making do with unmatched socks. Still, I sort of liked the perplexed eyebrow raises.
“Your origin is Arab?”
“Jewish.”
“Origin, I mean, country.”
It was a delightful change: ethnicity or nearly irrelevant ancestry had always been the goal of the where-are-you-from-from question, so refreshingly untaboo across the Middle East and beyond. “America” is almost never a satisfactory answer, especially not after conversations out of English with confusingly named foreigners. (“Neal” i
s pronounced in Arabic like the longest river in the world; “Adam” is equal-opportunity Semitic.)
“America,” I said. And for however much that was meaningful, it seemed to mean something good to them; and for however much it was meaningless, it was great for me—leaving space for a teatime’s worth of conclusions to do more than a name could overwrite. And as we agreed our citizenship was a weak indicator of our identities, our systems of preconception began to fall apart. The army isn’t all for the army, the Houthis aren’t all for anything, and we foreigners weren’t always totally foreign.
SOMEWHERE TO THE WEST of Sanaa facing away from Mount Nuqum, there is a neighborhood known as Al-Ga‘a, “The Plain.” If you ask for directions, a local will always repeat its full name, just to make sure you know what you’re looking for.
“Ga‘a al-Yehud?” they say. The Jews’ Plain?
Eventually, the chain of finger-pointing leads to a crossroads down Gamal Abdel Nasser Street near Salta Hut where there is a brown sign—the emblem of all tourist attractions: ALGA‘A QUARTER
“This was the Jewish neighborhood?”
“Yes,” said a young boy, about twelve and aging fast. He hardly looked at me—he just watched his smaller neighbors watching us. “They are not here anymore.”
Some Yemeni Jews held that their ancestors broke from Moses’s train during the exodus from Egypt, heading south and settling in Arabia. (In 1992, though, genetic testing showed that Yemeni Jews were far closer to other Yemenis than they are to other Jews.) Historians posit Jewish genesis here in the early years of the first millennium AD when the spice-trading Himyarite Kingdom controlled much of modern-day Yemen. Somewhere during the reign of their last king, Yusuf Ashar Dhu Nuwas (named for his curly hair), the kingdom converted to Judaism and began to execute Byzantine traders for apostasy. Soon the Byzantines came with their Ethiopian allies. The Jewish Encyclopedia says this: “Preferring death to capture, Dhu Nuwas rode into the sea and was drowned.” Curly hair and all.
The synagogues have vanished from Al-Ga‘a. Within two years after 1948, the vast majority of the sixty thousand Jews in northern Yemen and Aden and Hadhramout had left their homes to emigrate to Israel. The portal that first opened was not on the flank of Mount Nuqum—where local legend predicted a gate to Jerusalem would appear upon the Messiah’s return—but above the staircase to an Alaska Airlines propeller plane. With the cooperation of the ruling imam, the controversial Operation Magic Carpet whisked Jews away to their scriptural homeland. By 2014, the last of the tiny communities were disbanding; hardly anyone with sidelocks stuck around to cope with the Houthi insurgency (“Death to Israel, Damn the Jews . . .”)—these days, Yemen’s Jewish population numbers around fifty and falling.
The streets narrow quickly, always in shadow except for minutes when the sun is exactly overhead. At the tops of low buildings, molded into the walls or the qamariyya—“moon windows,” crescent-shaped patterns of colored glass—there are clear Stars of David. There is Arabic graffiti across bolted metal doors and down the alleys blocked with broken cinder block and empty plastic bags. Other passageways are neat, quiet. Houses have faces of white plaster and large stones, unlike the more decorative icing elsewhere in the Old City.
When we were tracing our exit from the quarter, a young man was hustling home with his father and bread and a clear plastic bag of gat hanging from the handle of his dagger. If only because of our foreign faces, eye contact was enough for invitation (and this was a place where eyes always made contact). We must come and eat with them, they said, and ducked into their house. Soon, they were shouting into the street. Come!
I bowed to enter and guarded my head from the ceiling, stepping up to a room where a few men and a boy were lounging against the walls, waiting for boiling salta. This time it was light green, coagulated hilba (blended fenugreek) bubbling at the edges of the iron pot. Salta is Yemen’s national dish, ostensibly derived from the Turkish word for “leftovers” during Ottoman times when Yemenis made due with whatever they could find. Meat is involved, tomatoes and onions usually, leeks, spices, garlic, broth. It is different everywhere, most popular in Sanaa, and ferried scalding hot to the face on folded scoops of pita. There was skhug, too, a spicy condiment I knew from Israel. It had been introduced by Yemeni immigrants. With the belly warmed, the digestive system is primed for the gat chew.
Our young host had the kindest of faces under a short beard. He was more religious than the others, the older man said, and they teased him for it.
“Osama! Osama!”
They wondered if I wouldn’t like to convert to Islam. I said something like, “not on such a full stomach,” and sat back against the wall to digest. Plastic bags were opened.
ELSEWHERE IN THE SWARMING gat market at the Souq al-Milh, casual religious conversations took a different turn. The “Salt Market” inside the Bab al-Yemen is a labyrinth of spices and appliances and housewares and food, and salt, probably. One alley is dedicated solely to the mongering of the leaves of Catha edulis. Vendors sit on the sills of their stands, mouths overflowing, beckoning for a sale or waiting carelessly. When I told one man with teeth freshly green that I was Jewish, he beamed proudly.
“Oh, from Yemen?”
“I’m from America.”
“The origin of Jews is from Yemen.”
“No habibi, I’m from America.”
“Before zamanin they were from Yemen. Your origin is from Yemen.”
I didn’t argue. Yemenis often claimed the birthplace of coffee (Ethiopia) and gat (also Ethiopia). It was nice to feel wanted—not simply tolerated or accepted, but claimed.
The seller, stuffing more leaves in his cheeks, had refocused on more important matters.
“You want to buy gat?” he said, offering a bundle. “This is . . . our vodka.”
The insides of my gums were torn and sore, my jaws exhausted and swollen. All along the street, sitting on the ground around piles of filled bags, men were buying and chewing, cheeks puffed. Hands in camouflaged uniforms, in lily-white thobes, reached down to grab bags. It was six or seven dollars for a standard rubta, more for something fancier.
While gat chewing was once the province of the rich, it is now everyman’s pastime. An average sample of families in Old Sanaa spent more than 10 percent of their salary on gat. Later case studies have found men who spend upward of a third, or, relying on remittances, more than everything they’ve ever earned.
I remembered Tal and his friends coming down from their chew, coolly drinking tea. Muhammad wondered aloud about the price of diesel. Someone hazarded a number of rial.
“No no, not in Yemen,” said Muhammad. “In the real world, man.”
I thought it was hysterical. But how true was it? How far from “reality” had Yemen slipped, high up into its many mafaarij where the windows looked out on anywhere at all. Each single-serving bag of gat requires approximately five hundred liters of water to cultivate. The industry takes a third of the nation’s water. Avoiding the consequences by choice or necessity, Sanaa will likely be the first world capital to run dry, possibly within ten years.
THE NEXT EVENING, we finally reached the woman who had told the airport officer that she was not our friend. It had been a bit of don’t-talk-to-strangers self-defense. When Anoud heard we were coming, she e-mailed a very warm welcome with her contact instructions:
what a kuck i openned my mail today!! NO shit, our friend Gert just got kidnapped a few days ago and u got a visa!!!!! Woooooow.
I suggested the scowling man’s tea shop over the Ottoman bridge, but said she couldn’t sit there without being stared out of her otherwise expansive comfort zone, and so we arranged to meet on the rooftop of the Dawood Hotel.
The waiter carried a pot and cups up seven flights of the spiraling seventeenth-century staircase to the table outdoors that overlooked the city—the sun had set behind the mountains, leaving a pink-purple sky and a hint of chilliness. Jacketless, the three of us hopped in a cab to the new part of the cit
y. On the way, near a cluster of police cars, someone had set something on fire.
Anoud had thick, dark hair dyed bright red for the moment. She worked for a French company, laughed loud and often, and supported the Saleh regime. The cab bounced toward Hadda Street, the one place in Sanaa where foreigners might be at all numerous. In a pizza place that had electricity all day long we ran into friends of hers, Judith and Boudweijn, a Dutch reporter and her businessman husband. We exchanged contact info as we did with almost everyone, just in case. Expats unite.
Later, in the leafy garden of a coffee shop that might have been grafted from Portland, Anoud, Neal and I drank more tea. It was a shock that someone so open, worldly, foreign friendly would support “the regime.” My default assumption for Arab Spring uprisings was that the educated and modern (except those with a direct stake in the current leadership) would support the revolution. Anoud acknowledged Saleh’s suppressive tendencies, but defended him nonetheless. Despite her position on the outside of ultraconservative Yemeni society—she did not hide that she was a single mother, living with no male presence—she did not want to see the government change. After all, the attitudes that scorned her were not the attitudes on the chopping block.
The lights were always lit on Hadda Street, KFC and Pizza Hut, Ethiopian food and more pizza. This was Anoud’s world, or at least half of it. In the morning, there would still be scowls from crusty cafés, and something on fire.
So many Yemenis saw the malls and franchised glory of Hadda Street as the epitome of class and culture. Our driver felt the same way—but he saw the other side, too.
“There was a German man living in the Old City, I ask him why you not live outside on Hadda Street—big buildings new building. He said, ‘In my country I have the best from Hadda Street, but I don’t have this.’ ”
THE SUN APPEARED behind schedule over Mount Nuqum, washing the old city in orange where the mountain’s shadow was on the ebb. Purples turned to pink and gold as Sanaa woke up. We met AK in the predawn alleyways outside the Golden Daar, permits in hand, looking south.
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 26