She is back in my office the next day. “Please,” she says. “Let me translate something! I must learn!” She stands stubbornly on my gray carpet, refusing to be dismissed.
I believe in rewarding persistence. I relent and let her translate part of the Q & A for Jabr. She’s right; she’s not a good translator. But at least I can figure out what she means, and as we are not paying her, I can’t complain. I allow her to stay.
When I get to the office the next morning, Adhara is waiting. She comes again the next day and the day after that. Her translation slowly gets better. I assign her the Panorama page, which contains translated editorials from Arabic papers. This used to be al-Matari’s responsibility, but he has constantly been out sick. Adhara, on the other hand, never misses a day.
One afternoon, she walks into my office holding a flash drive aloft.
“Zuhra asked me to write a back-page story. She said you needed one,” she says. “And I did it!” There is triumph in her voice.
“Fantastic!” I take the disk. I am desperate for a back-page story.
It’s a piece about the conflicting views of the Internet in Yemen. It is crudely written, contains no real news, and is mostly made up of huge blocks of quotations with no transitions. But my standards are not what they once were. I decide to run it anyway. Together, Adhara and I rework the structure and impose some segues. She is immensely pleased. She follows this first story with a piece on a new course that trains women to paint on glass and sell their art. It needs massive work, but I sit her down and explain what to do. Now that the paper is on a schedule, I have time for training. It’s thrilling to be able to watch and aid Adhara’s diligent and measurable progress.
She begins to tail Zuhra, who takes her on reporting expeditions to the Old City and shows her how to conduct interviews. My women welcome little Adhara into their fold, thrilled to see their ranks expand. I tease my men by telling them that soon we will have an all-female staff—this seems to motivate them more than anything else.
By the end of my year, I will have to officially hire Adhara. There is nothing else to do. She won’t stop showing up and we cannot in good conscience let her keep working for free, I explain to Faris. He finds the money to pay her.
One day Zuhra runs into my office, Adhara on her heels.
“Tell her,” says Zuhra.
Adhara shakes her head, turning red.
“Leysh? It’s okay.”
“Please,” says Adhara. “Please, Zuhra.”
“What is it?” I say.
Earlier, I had told Adhara to give her story to Ali to copyedit. It didn’t even occur to me that this might be awkward. But the prospect of talking to the handsomest man in the office overwhelmed Adhara, who is painfully shy. It was as if I had asked her to please interview Brad Pitt. Petrified, she had gone to Zuhra for help.
“Ali is very nice,” I reassure Adhara. “You don’t need to worry.”
“I told her!” says Zuhra, who no longer fears men, handsome or otherwise.
Eventually, Adhara and Zuhra together get the story to Ali. And over time, Adhara’s fear ebbs. One day, I walk out of my office and look out the front door to see Adhara and Ali sitting on the steps side by side. Ali is smoking a cigarette, and Adhara is talking easily to him. Almost as if he is just another human being. I can’t stop smiling at the sight.
LIKE NAJMA AND NOOR, Adhara is fortunate to have parents supportive of her ambitions. But this doesn’t mean all three don’t face barriers at work. The carefully cultivated modesty of women is at odds with the requirements of their profession. My women are often nervous about approaching men or about being perceived as too aggressive. Najma and Noor deal with this by working as a team. They accompany each other on reporting excursions, write stories for each other’s pages, and edit each other’s English. Rarely does one leave the office without the other. I’m impressed with their cooperation and the creativity they use to find their way around restrictions. The men could take a lesson.
Radia, whose official title is Faris’s personal secretary, has also begun reporting and writing stories. Like Adhara, she doesn’t ask me if she can become a reporter. She simply hands me a story one day. She writes in Arabic and gets one of the men or Zuhra to translate. Her reporting is good, though her writing and storytelling are weak. I spend hours with her, helping her find the news angles and fill in reporting gaps. One of her first pieces is a back-page story on the rising price of fabric. It sounds dull until she tells me that these rising prices are hurting brides in particular, many of whom have begun sewing their own dresses and settling for plainer fabrics. We refocus the story on the plight of brides, and it transforms into something eminently printable.
Soon, Radia isn’t just writing back-page features. She is covering car accidents, human rights issues, and explosions, turning in several stories for each issue. One day she runs into my office to tell me that she has a good story about a “hot phone.” I have no idea what she is talking about. When she can’t make me understand, she fetches Enass, who laughs. “She means hotline,” she says.
Yet she is not a reporter and continues to make the mere $100 a month Faris pays her to be his secretary. She asks Faris for more money, which he denies her, because she is “not a real reporter.” Never mind that she writes more stories per issue than any of my men. She accepts this as something she is helpless to change. I’ve repeatedly tried to get higher pay for my women, but every time Faris just tells me he is paying the fair market wage. My hands are tied.
ZUHRA IS ALSO FLOURISHING, largely because she asks more questions than anyone else and never leaves my side when I am editing her work. One day, Luke comes into my office after editing a raw story of Zuhra’s. “I didn’t realize how good her English has gotten!” he says. “It’s been so long since I saw her raw copy. I’m amazed at how much better her stories are than they were in the fall.”
Her stories are so intriguing that it is weeks before I realize how often she is quoting Kamil al-Samawi. It’s clear why HOOD is such a crucial source of human rights stories, but Kamil can’t be the organization’s only lawyer.
“What’s the deal with Kamil al-Samawi?” I ask her one day. “You’ve quoted him in your last three stories.”
Zuhra smiles mysteriously. “He’s the lawyer on all these cases. I have to quote him!”
“Well, try to figure out what cases the other lawyers are working on and write about them,” I say. “You are banned from mentioning Kamil al-Samawi for a month.”
DESPITE HER NEAR-CONSTANT PRESENCE in my office, Zuhra is still careful about what she reveals to me about her life. She tells me all about her career ambitions, her mood swings, and her physical ills, but when she falls in love in the middle of my tenure, she holds this secret close to her chest. It will be months before she can confess it all to me. For a Yemeni woman to admit to love before marriage is to risk social ruin. Women are not supposed to have friendly contact with men who are not close relatives, let alone spend enough time with one to fall in love. Very few Yemeni women choose their husbands, and most matches are arranged.
Thus, Zuhra has plenty of reasons to keep quiet. To confess to even one person is to risk exposure and censure. She lives in a conservative neighborhood, where her neighbors gossip, and the women are particularly vicious about each other. “Sex is the most important thing in all of our society,” Zuhra tells me with bitterness in her voice. “Even homosexuality isn’t as bad as a woman committing sex outside of marriage. A woman isn’t just representing herself as a person; she is representing the whole family, the whole tribe. If my sister’s reputation is bad, my reputation is bad.” When one of Zuhra’s sisters broke off an engagement, the whole family suffered the condemnation of their community. Zuhra fears what her family would say if they knew of her secret love. Because her father is dead, Zuhra needs permission from her brothers and uncles in order to marry. Or to travel. Or to do so many things.
ON MY RECOMMENDATION, Zuhra has applied to the Colum
bia University Graduate School of Journalism, my alma mater. She is the one person on my staff with what my Columbia professors liked to call the “fire in the belly” necessary to become a brilliant journalist. So I think she would thrive there. I’d especially like her to be admitted because she plans to return to Yemen afterward and eventually launch her own newspaper. Then, in a way, she can carry on my work after I leave. As part of the application process, she is required to take a news-writing test, which I proctor on the last day before the deadline. It must be postmarked that day, but because it’s the end of the month, no one has enough money to pay for postage with DHL, one of the only reliable mail services to the United States. I give Zuhra my last YR1,000, which isn’t even close to enough. We have to take up an office collection. Manel, Hassan, Jabr, and Jelena all contribute their last riyals. We send Hassan off to fax a copy to New York, and Manel runs to DHL to mail it. It’s inspiring to see that even the poorest among us empties her pockets.
To my great disappointment, Zuhra’s improved English is not quite good enough to get her into Columbia. A professor on the admissions committee calls me personally to tell me that although the committee absolutely loves her application, they have reservations about her English. Zuhra takes the news like someone accustomed to disappointment and vows to try next year.
“We will find another way to get you to the U.S.,” I say. “I promise.” She needs to perfect her English abroad, as there is little chance of doing so in Yemen. Diligently, Zuhra begins applying for every fellowship abroad she can find. So many, in fact, that if a fellowship were offered for applying for the most fellowships, Zuhra would definitely win it.
It is Zuhra, and the rest of my women, I am most desperate to help. The men will be all right. They will always find work in Yemen; they will always have society’s approval. My women I worry about. What will become of them when I am gone?
ONE DAY, I am editing a health story with Najma when she says, “Jennifer, I need to tell you something.”
“Okay,” I say, looking up from my computer screen. “What is it?”
“Are you really leaving in September?” She sits on the very edge of her chair, leaning toward me, her dark eyes serious.
“Well, that’s my plan.”
“Jennifer, this is a very big problem for us. A very big problem. Noor and I were talking. No one else will read our stories so closely; no one else will help us like you do.”
“Najma,” I say, tears pricking the back of my eyes, “my goal in coming here is not to help you for a year and then abandon you. My goal is to train you, and train a person to take my place, so that you won’t need me as much.”
I am suddenly panicked about my reporters’ future. No matter how good Zaid is—and he has his flaws—he is not a woman, and Najma is right; he won’t care as much about their work. This, unfortunately, will be truer than I could ever guess.
The men resent the attention I pay the women. “You like the women better,” they say accusingly.
“I like all of you the same,” I lie. “But the women happen to always show up for work on time. They don’t take cigarette breaks. They don’t chew qat. They turn their work in on time. If you want to be treated like the women, try following their example.”
This makes them grumpy. They believe it is their God-given right to smoke cigarettes and chew qat! It is their God-given right to take a nap for several hours after lunch! They should be considered better reporters simply because they are men!
One day I am joking around with Bashir, who has written a story about a group that works for women’s rights and to preserve culture. “Well, what if the culture they want to preserve doesn’t grant women rights; then what?” I tease. “Then they have a conflict. They can either preserve the women’s rights or the culture, but not both.”
This is said in jest, and he laughs. But then I make a reference to women not being free in Yemen, and he looks shocked and retorts that women are totally free in Yemen.
“Women can do whatever they want here,” he says. “Noor doesn’t have to wear her abaya if she doesn’t want to.”
While it may be true that Yemeni women are legally freer than most women in the region—they can drive cars and the dress code is not enforced by law—they can hardly be said to be unfettered.
“Bashir,” I say, “do you have any idea what it is like to be a woman here and walk around without an abaya? She would be harassed constantly. I get harassed constantly, even dressed as I am, and it is much worse for Yemeni women.”
Zuhra once put it like this: “A woman in Yemen would get harassed even if she were wrapped in an abaya, shut in a cardboard box, and on the outside of the box was written ‘THIS IS NOT A WOMAN.’”
My dark-skinned foreign friends who could pass for Yemeni get hassled even more on the streets because they appear to be fallen Muslims rather than heretical foreigners. My Dutch-Indonesian friend Jilles had acid thrown at her and was handed a slip of paper with an illustration of how women ought to dress.
When I tell Bashir what kind of harassment women would face on the street here if they went without an abaya or hijab, Noor turns around in her chair. “It’s true,” she says.
Thus begins a debate on the status of women in Yemen. Noor claims that Islam does not require the hijab, culture does. This is news to Bashir, who argues that the Qur’an orders the hijab. The conversation gets heated, with more reporters joining in, but I have so much editing to do that I retreat to my office. When I return to the newsroom a half hour later, they are still locked in combat. I have to break up the discussion three times before they settle down and focus on their stories. “I know this is my fault!” I tell them. “But could you please go back to work?”
They dutifully turn back to their computers. But the second I leave the room, I hear the battle resume.
MY WOMEN ARE TEACHING ME at least as much as I teach them. Radia and Zuhra and occasionally the others take turns helping me with my Arabic, delighted to be able to correct me for a change. Every time I get something thing right, Zuhra claps her hands and says, “You’re so smart!” I feel embarrassingly like I am five, learning how to talk all over again.
My Arabic lessons are a source of entertainment for the entire office. On the day I learned negatives—“I am not your mother, you are not a baker, he is not the president”—I rushed into the newsroom to practice on my staff. “I am not bread!” I announced proudly. It was the first word that came to mind. My reporters dissolved into giggles.
But it’s not just Arabic they give me. They patiently explain to me bits of Yemeni history and culture, telling me about wedding rituals, Yemeni foods I haven’t tried, and tribal honor. They bring in cakes for me to taste, such as kubana, a crumbly cornbread. They introduce me to their families at weddings and other celebrations. It’s an enormous comfort to have such an enthusiastic pack of guides to help me navigate this multilayered world.
IT TAKES A LONG TIME for me to get to know Najma and Noor more personally. They are both shy and seem to find me intimidating despite my best efforts. My relationship with Zuhra may also be a barrier. She has a sense of ownership of me, and the other women thus defer to her and stay respectfully at a distance. (Whenever someone else makes me tea or helps me with something, Zuhra asks why I didn’t let her do it. “It’s just, I think of you as mine,” she tells me. “You’re my Jennifer.”)
By mid-January, I still haven’t seen Najma’s or Noor’s face, although Radia, Zuhra, and Enass all flip their veils back the second they cross my threshold. It takes another medical emergency for things to change.
It happens like this. One night we close the paper early. Manel and I are so pleased with ourselves that we head to his home in Hadda for a celebratory drink. Alex, Manel’s roommate, has just returned from England with a bottle of duty-free green-apple vodka. It is sweet and synthetic and awful. But this is Yemen, and you drink what is available.
I hadn’t thought I had had that much to drink, but I wake close t
o dawn feeling intensely nauseated. Thinking perhaps it hadn’t been a good idea to skip dinner, I go downstairs and eat a yogurt. Then I remember that I have little green pills from an earlier Yemeni illness. They had worked wonders on nausea! I rummage through my drawers, find the green pills, and take two.
Half an hour later I wake again feeling worse. I take two more pills and crawl downstairs to make coffee. But I am too sick to drink it. When Aisha arrives to clean my house, she finds me sitting at my kitchen table, staring mournfully at my full cup. “Hospital?” she says, looking concerned. I shake my head. I’m just hungover, I think. I will get better. Going to the pool will probably help. I take two Advil and two more green pills and go for a swim.
My first flip-turn nearly makes me vomit, and I wonder if I will have to get out. But lap by lap I begin to feel better. After forty-five minutes, I climb out, shivering, and head to the sauna to warm up. But I can’t seem to sweat; I just dry out and my fingers, oddly, stay cold.
The nausea worsens. I take two more green pills. After all, if I remember correctly, they can be taken every hour. I manage to keep from vomiting in the taxi and go home to collapse on my bed. I can’t eat. I can’t even get down water. I am exhausted but too ill to sleep. Zuhra calls me to find out why I’m not at work. She is worried.
“You should not be alone,” she says. “You need a hospital.”
“I’ll be okay. I just need to rest.”
I am still trying to sleep a half hour later when Noor rings me. “We are at your door,” she says. “We have come to take you to the hospital.”
Given my experiences with Yemeni hospitals, I’m not sure I want to go. But perhaps the doctors could give me some antinausea drugs, which might allow me to finally sleep.
The Woman Who Fell from the Sky Page 22