‘We are so made, that we can only derive intense enjoyment from a contrast, and only very little from a state of things.’
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents
WE REACHED SAN’A at the time when the qat is finished, when the airy castles have evaporated, the time of regrets. Relentless as an advancing oil slick, the city was lapping at Hizyaz, where a cairn had once marked the place of Imam Yahya’s murder. At Dar Salm I used to go out with a tommy gun and shoot cans off cacti; now the land was being gobbled up by an insatiable suburban tapeworm. Then the traffic jams began. Men leaned on their horns and cursed in a dialect that was harsh and brutal. The language I thought I had learned, and the people I had come to understand through their language, now seemed foreign. I might have been in Babel. What would Thani have made of San’a, this city founded after the Flood?
Al-Razi, who compiled his great History of the City of San’a in the eleventh century, littered the work with grim predictions: San’a will fill the space between its mountains and ‘there will be no pleasure in dwelling there’; San’a will be so crowded that its very roofs will be sold for living space; and, concluding an immense digression on the fate of Sodom, the historian warns that ‘at the end of time, God will likewise cause San’a and Aden to be swallowed up’. There were latter-day Cassandras, too, lamenting in the press and on the airwaves the nosediving riyal and the Current Political Crisis: for months Ali Salim al-Bid, son of the Hadrami sayyid charm-writer, pre-Unification leader of the Marxist People’s Democratic Republic and now Vice-President, had been sulking incommunicado in Aden, embittered by the loss of absolute power; Unity was at stake; there would be war …
I knew I loved San’a. Why then, looking out of the taxi window, was it so alien? Like Odysseus returning to Ithaca – ‘Alas! Whose country have I come to now?’ – I seemed not to know the place that was my home. At Bab al-Yaman I shouldered my bag, said goodbye to Kevin, and sighed for Suqutra, for sailing over the turtled ocean to a land of herdsmen and heroic feasts.
Along the narrow way to the Great Mosque, houses leaned towards each other in parallax, shutting out the sky. Noise did not penetrate. Going into the dark silence was like being swallowed by a whale. My heart pounded in my neck.
A hiss cut into the silence – a man making tea on a paraffin burner, the sweet milky tea you drink after qat. I sat on a metal bench and a glass was placed in front of me. And, as I drank, my heartbeat slowed. The dislocation of homecoming, which for Odysseus was caused by a jealous goddess, had been for me the work of qat.
After a second glass of tea, the dark and the leaning houses ceased to threaten. The traffic jams outside now seemed a necessity: without them the long afternoons chewing would be empty. The Arabs are an ambivalent people for whom pleasure only comes after its absence – and no more so than in San’a, the city founded under the contradictory influences of Venus and Mars.
My mind went back to Suqutra. It was beginning to seem less like the land of the Phaeacians, more like those other islands of the Odyssey where amid all the voluptuousness there is always a catch. In Suqutra the snag was the lack of health facilities, essential foods and communications. The myth of the island paradise has bewitched us all. The Suqutris are the best enchanters in the world, but their island is even better. You have to turn your back on it and pinch yourself to see that cities and conflicts are the reality. Most of us – including the qat-chewers – live in Troy-town, not Lotus-land.
I left the maze of lanes and entered al-Zumur, the broad straight street where I live. Something was different or, rather, the same as it had always been: the street traders were back. San’a was refusing to be turned into a museum.
I shut the door of the house behind me. Even now, a smell of basil lingered on the seventy-eight stairs. (Strange, it never seems to be the same number; like the length of Hud’s tomb.) Up in the belvedere on the roof, I sat and looked over the lights of the city. They licked the feet of Jabal Nuqum and Jabal Ayban. San’a was filling the space between its mountains, fulfilling its destiny.
At 8.10 p.m. on Wednesday, 4 May 1994, while I was in the room on the roof, the lights went out and stayed out. The night was abnormally quiet.
Since our return from Suqutra the Aden media, under Ali Salim al-Bid’s direction, had been attacking the Socialists’ partners in government. The two other members of the ruling coalition – the General People’s Congress led by President Ali Abdullah Salih, and the Islah Party led by Shaykh Abdullah ibn Husayn al-Ahmar – had a very different background to that of al-Bid’s Yemeni Socialist Party. Since the late 1960s, successive leaders of the YAR had performed a juggling act with the various elements of society – tribesmen and townsmen, progressives and conservatives. Politics had reflected this pluralist structure; rule was by consensus. In foreign relations, the YAR had taken a pragmatic and non-aligned stance: its armed forces, for example, were equipped with both US- and Soviet-supplied hardware. The PDRY, however, had thrown itself into the arms of the Eastern bloc; the hardliners who had come to power in the bloody events of 1986 in Aden ruled by coercion. Four years later, their Eastern European counterparts were toppling under popular pressure, and al-Bid’s agreement to a merger of the two Yemens in 1990 had less to do with a desire for unity than with the need to save his own skin. By nature unable to participate in a democratic coalition, his apparent transformation from dictator to statesman was a sham.
Al-Bid did not have to wait long for an excuse to attack his coalition partners. Yemen’s attempt to promote an Arab solution to the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq, only three months after Unification, and the expulsion of Yemeni migrant workers from the Gulf States, led to a dramatic decline in national income. The YSP leader began to blame the resulting economic problems on ‘reactionary northerners’. Then, in Yemen’s first democratic general election of April 1993, the YSP came third; al-Bid, although he was allowed to retain the post of Vice-President, was incensed. Following a trip abroad, ostensibly for medical treatment, he arrived in Aden in August 1993. And there he stayed, refusing to participate in the business of government and ignoring all attempts at mediation. Chances of an agreement faded. Then, in a surprise meeting in Amman on 20 February 1994, Ali Abdullah Salih and Ali Salim al-Bid agreed to forget their differences. The unity of Yemen was back on track.
The Amman Accord was announced as people were breaking their Ramadan fast. In the saltah restaurant where I was having supper, the fast-breakers stopped eating when they heard the news; some, I noticed, had tears of joy in their eyes. The sense of relief was palpable. We all thanked God.
I arrived home elated, with a bunch of particularly good qat in celebration, and went to discuss the news with my neighbour the goldsmith. His face, however, was grave. ‘Have you heard what’s happened?’ he asked.
Within minutes of the smiles and handshakes, units of the former PDRY army had opened fire on the Amaliqah Brigade of the old YAR, stationed in Abyan east of Aden. The assault was beaten off, but the Amman Accord lay in pieces. Two months later there was a repeat of the Abyan incident, when the former PDRY 3rd Armoured Brigade attacked their 1st Armoured Brigade comrades north of San’a, starting a twenty-hour tank battle in which seventy-nine were killed. Still, many Yemenis hoped against hope. The stupidity, the utter tragedy of the threatened break-up was too nightmarish to be real. About this time, trees in the region of San’a were struck by a disease that made them drop tears of sap; it was, some said, a warning – as if a warning were needed.
At dawn on 5 May the storm broke. I was awoken by an apocalyptic din and ran up to the roof: the earth was pumping out fire, the sky was a rash of tracers and explosions. On another roof nearby a lone figure was firing an assault rifle into the air. Below, dazed men were stumbling on to the street. I shouted at them over the parapet, ‘What the fuck are you doing to yourselves?’ No one heard.
Over the next week the air raids continued fitfully, but with no effect. It seemed that the ancient notion of San’a being a divinely protected city was true. I would sit in the room on the roof, watching the anti-aircraft fire. And then the Scuds came. The Scud missile is a weapon of terror, a monstrous airborne car bomb a stage or two up the evolutionary scale from the V2. One of them landed behind the Republican Hospital, killing or injuring 120. I visited the scene soon after. My diary reads:
Four houses have disappeared into the ground. Others are missing entire sides. There are a lot of sightseers, all moving about in silence. A man is selling sweets from a barrow under a Rothmans umbrella. At the back of the Republican Hospital, all the windows are gone. Even the name of these missiles is terrifying: Scud – an amalgam of skim/scream/thud. Half-embedded in the dust is a woman’s navy blue cardigan – like the scraps of indigo cloth sticking out of the dust at Baraqish.
But Baraqish had taken two thousand years to become a ruin. History happens more quickly now.
Kevin’s house was not far from the place where the missile had landed. When the raids had started, he took his wife and children to the safety of Yorkshire. He had left the key with me, and I went to see if there was any damage. The windows and doors facing the blast had been blown in, and fallen plaster littered the courtyard. I peered into the rooms, then went down the steps into the kitchen. There, on the table, among the children’s drawings and covered with a layer of dust and rat droppings, was the account of our journey to Suqutra. Before the war, I had left it with Kevin to comment on. I blew the dust off, started reading, and got as far as the second paragraph: ‘It might as well have been a place in a dream.’
Now, it was not only Suqutra: the whole book seemed to be fading into unreality. I had been trying to write about the steady and ordered progress of history, and history had suddenly gone on the rampage, a beast escaped from the theme park. It was, in its way, grimly fascinating; but how would it all end? The pessimists were predicting months, maybe years, of conflict.
And then the Scuds stopped – miraculously, only two had caused casualties. Government forces were moving south, slicing through Abyan towards the coast. Resistance on the ground crumbled, although there was a heavy battering from the air. Both sides were fighting, they said, for Unity. On 20 May the President announced a unilateral three-day ceasefire to mark the Festival of Sacrifices. Al-Bid’s response was to declare the secession of the southern part of Yemen and the restoration of the old border. ‘The unity of Yemen’, he added, paradoxically, ‘remains the basic goal of the State.’
Some of Yemen’s neighbours were delighted – not least the Kuwaitis, still smarting from Yemen’s decision to call for an Arab solution to the 1990 invasion of their country.* The Saudi-backed MBC satellite channel, meanwhile, in what was either a flash of ghostly prescience or a ghastly PR blunder, had broadcast al-Bid reading the declaration of secession eighty minutes before the official announcement on Aden Radio.
No one, however, recognized the self-proclaimed state. In the south, such public support as al-Bid had enjoyed plummeted with the declaration to secede. Militarily, too, the rebels were losing ground. Brigade after brigade deserted; then came the fall of al-Anad, the massive Soviet-built base north of Aden. Al-Bid left for al-Mukalla and shut himself in his seaside house, blocking all incoming calls. By mid-June, communications between Aden and the outside were severed and by the end of the month the huge province of Hadramawt, where the rebels had been expected to make a last and bloody stand, had been taken. On 7 July Government forces moved without opposition into the heart of Aden. The war was over.
During the war I often recalled the old border post, out in the finger of desert beyond Marib, the place from which the early Yemenis set out to leave their names across the map. Now, those ugly cement-block buildings would, in time, disappear into the sand like Iram of the Columns, the city of Ad. Ever since the days of the incense caravans, traders and travellers, nomads, pilgrims and smugglers have passed through that barren short-cut. Even under partition, communication carried on. And if the secessionist gamble had paid off, if the border had been restored, the traffic would have continued behind the next range of dunes, or the one after. Yemenis do not abandon their ancestral routes.
Nearly two years on, history is back to a more regular rhythm. Down on my street, the processions come and go as San’anis bring in their brides and take out their dead. From time to time, the men from the Municipality chase off the pavement shopkeepers, who surge away, whooping, in a cohort of barrows, then skulk back with wheels squeaking. Rain also sees them off, and since the war the rain has been good. (During one heavy storm the street flowed red. Ripe tomatoes, thousands of them, were bobbing along in the flood. As I watched, a veiled woman jumped in and filled her skirts with them.) From the room on the roof, I can follow the slow climb of the outer suburbs up the mountains; nearer to hand is a roofscape of sprouting satellite dishes which contrive, now, to look like dragon’s blood trees.
At night, sitting in my belvedere, I sometimes revisit that other Dictionary Land. There are still discoveries to be made there: laqayt minhu banat awbar, ‘I have experienced many a disappointment from his part’, literally, ‘he has given me small and bad truffles’, or, even more literally, ‘I have received from him the daughters of a furry one’; dabbab, ‘to feed another with butter and rob’, cognate with dabub, ‘to abound in lizards (land)’ and adabb, ‘to be misty (day), to be numerous, to remain silent, to speak, to scream’; qarqar, ‘Grumbling loudly (camel). Be quiet! (said to a woman)’; sinn, ‘Basket. Urine of the hyrax’. And Dictionary Land is, like the universe, continually expanding. I suppose I am responsible for a recent addition, a word that appears in neither the lexica nor the works on dialect: bartan, cognate with Britani, ‘to speak about strange matters, to speak at length’.
And when I’m done exploring I close the dictionary, switch off the lights, and look out of the window. All around, marked by panels of coloured glass, late chewers sit in other belvederes, high above the noise of the street, hard by heaven like the lords of Ghumdan.
