We had spent much of the evening before screaming in the nearby office of the Tourist Police, or sitting cross-legged and docile in quiet submission. The man behind the desk had been experimenting with all the variants of negation in two languages; the road to Aden was dangerous now, he said through green teeth. No foreigners, not in private taxis, not in buses. As we pushed, he hardened further. More shouting. If we wanted to see the seaside south of Happy Arabia, he said, we should fly.
The most active domestic Yemeni airline carries this ancient optimism in its name, Al-Saeeda, “Happy,” Airways. It was on strike every day we stayed in Yemen. We might have bought seats on more stable, less frequent Yemenia, but the forty-minute flight would have skipped over thousands of years of highland history and the irreplaceable sense of a place gleaned from soaking up small towns with your forehead stuck to the glass of a backseat window.
Our window of opportunity was closing. Twice, the man stormed into the unlit back room to lay on a cot and ignore us. It was 5:30 in the evening, and our one hope for a permit was descending further into a gat-fueled fury.
“I stay off the roads then,” Anoud had said. “People are crazy then.” As the alkaloids in the leaf kicked in, business dealings grew more aggressive.
Yousif, the kindly, wandering Tourist Policeman, appeared to mediate. At least officially, the man with the permits was worried for our safety. Our taxi driver was well seasoned, we said (his license had expired, we discovered). And we had an efendim, and he would protect us with his array of firearms. We had adopted AK’s habit of referring to Naji in the third person as the efendim (once a mark of formal address: “my sir”).
Yousif coaxed his colleague off the bed and advised us: if we wanted to use our officer escort as a defense, we would need his paperwork. But Naji was almost unreachable, and his identification cards were not in the same governorate as the nearest fax machine.
Finally, we agreed with a wink: Okay, he’s “not” coming. We proposed our plan the same as when we walked in, we two tourists and our taxi man. Nothing had changed in those hours, except the notary’s willingness to submit our application to the Interior Ministry. “We will call you if the Ministry rejects it,” he said, like they always did. But they never would. And with that, we shook hands and disappeared.
The men at the other end of the fax machine were asleep now. And we would be gone by the time they were awake, a world away by the time they were chewing gat.
AT 6 A.M. WE GATHERED the efendim from his friend’s village on the way out of town. He brought paper cups of boiling tea that we held gingerly as AK swerved around holes in the road. Reprimands were uncouth. Once, as the car nearly fused with a massive speed bump, I issued an Oh fuck! in surprise. Naji thought it had been directed at our driver, and wouldn’t talk to me for hours.
The southern highway took us high above the valleys, over the clouds that settled sometimes among the terraced fields. Driver, soldier, and tourists—we all thought it was unfathomably beautiful, even without the explosion of greenery that comes every spring.
“Waa-oww!” Naji grinned. He always rode shotgun.
The corners and highlands of Yemen where the edges of the monsoons bring rain, where Arabia Deserta turns green and fertile, were once the envy of the world outside. Ptolemy dubbed the entire peninsula Eudaimon Arabia, a name popularized by its Latin translation, Arabia Felix, “Happy Arabia.” Legends of the luxurious smells of the East—of the sensuous resins frankincense and myrrh, of cinnamon imported from India—cast Yemen as a rich utopia. Were it not for the gat industry’s profligate use of water, the country might still have a chance to be the region’s fruit basket. But for farmers, growing gat is many times more lucrative than fruits, less prone to drought and pestilence. It grows best above a mile high, up to altitudes higher than the Sanaa valley. The crop grows quickly and can be harvested often.
“The happiness of this region has seldom been noticeable, and its woes have waxed with ripening years until they bid fair to culminate in a crop which the sword alone can harvest,” G. Wyman Bury opined in his 1915 Arabia Infelix. The “crop” were the human struggles, as the Ottomon Empire collapsed and foreign powers swirled and the longtime religious authorities of the Yemeni highlands prepared to declare their new state’s independence. Bury was a scientist and explorer completely in love with Yemen, but at a loss for solutions to avoid impending bloodshed. Appreciating its intricately braided history is essential, he said (mentioning tribes as far back as Moses’s father-in-law). The preface ends: “In any case, that ‘most distressful country’ has my best wishes.”
We wound down into the flatlands through ramshackle gat farms and tiny hamlets. Camels grazed along the road, picking their way through prickly bushes and debris. It got hotter. Women begging in abayas came to the car windows, fully covered in all black but for their wide straw hats. It felt like an image from somewhere else—the caps were just like the woven paddy hats typical in Asian rice fields, with a softer cone that flattened into a brim. Naji gave a few bills, without comment.
By midday we were in Ibb, capital of the eponymous governorate nicknamed Al-Khodra’, “The Green Province.” Summers report triple the rainfall as in Sanaa, the trademark of the country’s southwest and the justification for its “happiness” in the eyes of early traveling Greeks. Even in January, the tightly packed hill town was striped with shades of asparagus and olive.
The city centers around its market, the mouth of which is dedicated to the trading of guns and ammunition, often under imported umbrellas branded with the Nestle logo and the word glidot written in Hebrew: “ice cream.”
Three or four men sat with their wares, bullets and holsters and Kalashnikov magazines, while a shop owner stood like a mannequin for his merchandise. He wore a silver Brazilian sidearm with a leather handle and a dagger at his navel. I started to feel like “dagger” wasn’t the right way to think about it—the way it sounded like a pirate’s weapon and painted Yemen against a romantic, swashbuckling backdrop. The janbiya—literally “side thing”—was far more style than function; the guns were both. For handguns from Brazil or Russia, about two hundred dollars, the man said. More for American.
Nearby, atop the hill called Jebel Rabi, there is a community pool with high walls guarded with broken glass, and an empty café where we had lunch outside with a view over the city between the mountains. Hummus came, then kebab, to our makeshift table on a stool, and Neal and I drank cans of Royalty ginger beer imported from the United Kingdom. Naji ate while squatting on the pavement. He couldn’t bear to eat when sitting in a chair, he said.
Out of nowhere, there was a man singing. He smiled under a short black mustache, crouched in a blazer and a patterned cloth like a sarong, an oud propped on his knee. Friends gathered. Over the occasional rumble of a motorcycle’s ignition, he wove the undulating pluck of oud strings with lines in guttural dialect. My Arabic faltered, and I crouched in with the others to sip at glasses of sweet black tea. “In my wedding, I call him!” AK declared triumphantly.
In the early afternoon, it seemed the entire population—totaling somewhere between Wichita Falls and Fremont—had jammed the two miles of north-south route that cut through town. AK drove us through choking traffic to the sister city of Jibla, like the suburb to Ibb’s commuter hell, and Naji produced bags of gat he had procured from the market. With my mouth half-healed from my first attempts, I set in again, putting my gums on the line in hopes of feeling something, plucking dry leaves—drier and more bitter by far than the last time—from a long red stalk.
Naji was always scrutinizing prices, always examining quality—of guns, of gat, of our mood. I spat green juices onto the steep streets, rubbing my face and trying to keep chewing.
Naji guffawed behind me. “My jaw is made in Japan, your jaw is made in Taiwan!”
In the car, his gat energy began to take hold. He drew a handgun from his holster, jokingly, loaded the magazine, and pointed it at AK’s head. His movements were l
ike exaggerated pantomime, except that he had a loaded gun as a prop. He positioned it closer, withdrew, and put it back again, watching our reactions ever so curiously in the backseat.
“Abdulkhaliq is not afraid!” said the policeman in Arabic.
AK was laughing in bursts. He took his hands off the wheel and raised them in mock surrender. “Kidnap me!” he giggled, in Arabic.
Naji turned back toward the road, still aiming the gun at our driver. Now he spoke to us in English: “My friend. My friend,” he said.
Suddenly, he whipped back around, grinning, in a James Bond pose, gun raised, cigarette in his other hand, gat oozing between his teeth and into his cheeks.
I was squealing, no! No! But it was a good kind of squeal. I felt shaken. That felt good. Even though it was all a joke, he was giving me inklings of the danger I craved. And, it wasn’t coming from the outside, from the wide world of terror. If someone killed me, I loved the idea that it would be a single unaffiliated guy. That way, the existential terrors of the world would have lost out to the power of something far more human.
The gun lowered. I might have wanted him to keep playing with it. For reasons I never understood, AK made a mysterious suggestion with his sigh of relief. “Go my country!” he said, with long vowels.
WE MADE OUR APPROACH to Taiz from the coronet of hills to the flats that bumped and rolled away down below. For a moment, it seemed like we had found a hidden civilization in the shadow of the ten thousand-foot-high Saber Mountain. We slept here, in Yemen’s third-largest city, where six hundred thousand people’s worth of buildings appear to have grown from the ground like lichens on every patch of craggy rock.
In the morning Naji was wearing the Yemeni version of an off-green Hawaiian shirt, complete with matching pants. Free from the confines of his police uniform, and without a jambiya around his waist, he had wonderfully adopted all the charisma of a duvet cover.
He said something like, “I changed my clothes. Now no one can tell I’m not from the south.”
A few steps ahead, AK could hardly keep his giggles dignified. He intercepted not-quite whispers from the sides of the old town market, translating them for us perhaps as payback for the efendim’s snoring. “They are saying, ‘Who is this guy?’ ”
I wasn’t free from jeers either. I had just had the buckle of my own dagger belt fixed in a nearby shop and I’d put it on over a T-shirt so as not to have to carry it. The jambiya is always a distinguished accoutrement, and a far less common one in the south. To all the Taiz shopkeepers, I must have looked like I was wearing a bow tie over an apron.
I made it a few blocks before I felt self-conscious enough to take it off.
CHANGES IN LANDSCAPE begin to accelerate along the narrow highway between Taiz and Aden. Somewhere short of midway is where the fragile border once was between the nations known as North and South Yemen. We dropped out of the greenery into sandy plains with fewer bushes and more camels to graze at them. We rolled the windows down when the sand didn’t blow in. It got hot, hotter.
Before we landed in Sanaa, I never knew that Yemen had once been two independent countries. I figured, like other countries on the peninsula, it had arisen in recent times as a confederation of emirates or sheikhdoms, tribal federations coming together and unifying as a state, perhaps as part of gaining independence from colonial occupation. This was true in Yemen, but in two acts: the northern theocractic monarchy declared statehood from the collapsing Ottoman Empire in 1918, and the last king was dethroned by the founders of the Yemen Arab Republic in 1962.
In the south, warring nationalist groups ousted the British from Aden and unified with its former protectorates to the east, claiming independence in 1967.
According to a CIA report from January 1990: “Despite a sense of common national identity, Yemenis have traditionally been fragmented along regional, tribal, and class lines. Successive regimes in North Yemen (YAR) have coopted support of the country’s major Islamic figures to buttress regime legitimacy, while South Yemen (PDRY) has been among the most secular and radical states in the Arab World.” No wonder that, in 1970, Marxists had renamed it the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen.
Only as the Soviet Union fell did the halves of “Greater Yemen” unify for the first time in modern history.
Four years later: a civil war. Yemen became the theater for one of the last proxy battles of the Cold War, and a marker of American–Saudi tensions to come. Saudi Arabia backed the south for fear of a consolidated, Shia-controlled Yemen. The United States pushed for unity and the final dissolution of that Marxist state. With U.S. support, Sanaa bludgeoned Aden into submission.
Saleh, the Yemen Arab Republic’s president, kept that job; the general secretary of the south, Ali Salim al-Beidh, became vice president. From exile, al-Beidh had recently returned to politics to champion the separatist Hirak, “the Movement,” short for the fragmented “Peaceful Southern Movement” that seeks secession from the union. There were whispers about the execution of northerners at Hirak road stops. A honey trader and his wife told the Yemen Observer they’d barely escaped a stop just outside Aden where everyone in the car behind them was killed. But at our checkpoints, Naji always seemed to know the guards; if they waved us through without asking for our papers, he’d get out of the car and lecture them on how to do their jobs.
We rumbled toward the southern capital under a midday sun. When we passed the last checkpoint, I thought I could smell the sea.
IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when we dropped into Aden on the south coast, humid even in January, and I started thinking about Somalia. At our first night’s gat chew in Sanaa, Tal had mentioned whispers about cargo boats that might take passengers across the Gulf of Aden to Africa. Justified with professor Brittany’s book-delivering mission, our first trip was to the port.
At one entrance, guards reacted with suspicion but without aggression to the idea that tourists would want to snoop around the industrial loading docks. At another way in, I tried something that I had limited experience with in preliminary dealings with officials: honesty. “We’re looking for a boat,” I said. “To ride on. To Somalia.”
In fact, Berbera, the port we were shooting for, was no more like Mogadishu than Erbil is like Baghdad. It is the second city of secessionist Somaliland, something else entirely from Somalia: different currency, different government, different visas, and a wholly different respect for the rule of law.
But all I knew was rumor. I was told Somaliland had “the fastest Internet in Africa.” I had read on online forums that it was far more dangerous to sail in the other direction, into Yemen—this was the only way to see this stretch of sea. We had balked at the option of a four hundred-dollar one-way ticket on the weekly half-hour flight from Aden to Berbera and traded that near certainty for the possibility of something much cooler, cheaper, and potentially more fatal. Yet with that risk came a new ideal, a new best-case scenario. I felt a surge of honest, intestinal belief in the wisdom of fortune cookies: this trip became about the journey—not the destination! This was my chance to travel with the world’s original travelers, a ship of traders—the common man’s ambassadors and storytellers from distant lands to the neighbors of the faraway.
Ibrahim, the port official, had the blue shirt of his uniform open to the undershirt, black and gray scraggly chest hairs crawling out from underneath. He mentioned an “agency,” and gave directions that sounded clear enough—near the Lebanese Grocery and by the American Language Center—and seemed to suggest that boats left multiple times daily with passengers. My heart flew. The likely response I feared—Are you out of your gat-chewing mind!?!—never came.
But gun-toting Naji and loyal Abdulkhaliq were soon stumped as we twisted around the apocalyptic main drag of Aden’s Mualla neighborhood. An aisle of whitewashed buildings of even height sat on top of decrepit shops and graffitied storefronts and pink plastic bags. A tiny number of people milled about, a few children played with rocks or ran after their parents across the road�
��this was very clearly somewhere that once expected to be busier. Thousands of gray bricks were strewn almost deliberately like styled bed head, remnants of antigovernment protests the government hadn’t bothered to clean up. One bright sign indicated HA’IL WALID HA’IL MARTYR STREET, THE YOUNGEST MARTYR IN THE SOUTH. A constructed barrier three bricks high directed traffic; driving through the parking lots and avoiding the street, we squiggled into fish traps with no way out.
We circled back to the port with some difficulty to find Ibrahim and take him with us. To find the Bamadhaf Shipping Company (in the “Boston Language Institute” building), we were supposed to have pulled into the wrong lane of the functioning part of Mualla Main Street, U-turned again into oncoming traffic, and picked our way left onto a side street where no one had ever heard of any Lebanese anything. Ibrahim picked out the nondescript entrance of the five-story building—the door was already open.
Three women in black abayas manned the Bamadhaf office late on that Tuesday afternoon. Naima and Salma showed their faces under simple headscarves, Naima’s completely black, Salma’s a bright violet. A younger woman smiled from her cheeks and eyes over her niqab, and told me she was from Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland. She loved it. She never asked why I wanted to go there.
They considered this a noble journey. “He has to find his friends!” the women would say to anyone who asked, because I had mentioned Brittany’s books.
Salma was audibly and visibly of Indian descent and spoke wonderful English, but was born and raised, like many others whom Yemenis would call “Indian” or “Ethiopian” or “Somali,” in Yemen. She was studying business at the university and wore contact lenses that made her eyes a sharp sapphire (her e-mail handle is “lovebird”). Her laugh kept rising tempers in check. Naima was the office elder, maybe pushing twenty-eight or thirty-two—I didn’t fall for her trap to have me guess. She was “Yemeni Yemeni,” as those others would say, and was happy to speak only Arabic.
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 27