Yemen: The Unknown Arabia (I’ll come back to that) is usually categorised as a ‘travel’ book. But, as I’ve suggested, it is perhaps more correctly a book of untravel, a book about being in a place rather than passing through it. (Certainly I am an intrepid untraveller: I still live in Yemen, chewing qat in my top room, looking at the tremendous view.) Also, it is more about continuity than change – about the procession through its landscape ‘of sons and sons of sons’, as the epigraph puts it – and in that sense it is also a book of unhistory. It would be strange, therefore, to end here with a recital of recent and current events. To me, personally, to add to a book I was writing twenty years ago seems like trying to write on the surface – iridescent, unattainable – of a bubble.
But things do change. Those sons of sons have multiplied exponentially, putting even more pressure on already limited resources. Water, for instance, used to rise under its own pressure to my tank on the sixth floor; now I’m lucky if the odd drop drips in at ground level. The suburban tapeworm of San’a has become a hyperactive hydra. Most people are poorer – much poorer – than they were, and not least those guardians of any ancient civilization’s society and culture, the urban middle classes. As for foreigners wandering distant mountain ranges, they are now, if the received wisdom is true, less likely to be travel writers or tourists than terrorists. (Curiously, there is a theory that the surname of the terrorists’ inspiration, the late Mr Bin Laden, derives from his pre-Islamic ancestors in Hadramawt having been gatherers of ladin, the Classicists’ ladanum, that gum that Herodotus says sticks to billy-goats’ beards).*
In a sense, however, the most obvious change is not so radical as it might have seemed. After that short sharp war of ‘94 and my final chapter, leaves that should have been turned were not; bullets should have been bitten, but instead were shot. The rot of corruption, long vigorous at the centre, spread outwards, insidious, tentacular. In the further north, in the new millennium, Mars was often in the ascendant once again as the government in San’a fought against (why not talked with?) a neo-Zaydi opposition movement. In the south, citizens complained of marginalization and misrule; their allegations, ignored, grew ever more bitter and more real. President Ali Abdullah Salih, who is supposed to have compared ruling Yemen to ‘dancing on the heads of snakes’,* should have kept a much older Yemeni saying in mind – ‘In the end, the snake always gets the snake-charmer’. For that is what happened: a revolution begun by the idealistic young, surfing the wider wave of Arab protest, was soon hijacked by those serpentine elements of society – disaffected shaykhs, army officers, secessionists, sectarians. Ali’s dangerous dance, masquerading as a third of a century of rule, ended in February 2012. It was the idealistic young who, as usual, paid the highest price for the apparent change. One incident alone – the killing of 52 of them at their protest camp outside the university on 18 March 2011 – was the equivalent, per head of population, of the death-toll from a couple of Tiananmen Square massacres. The camp centred on an obelisk inscribed with those words of the Prophet Muhammad: faith is Yemeni, wisdom is Yemeni.
So the presidential face on the hoardings and the TV screens has changed; or rather morphed into that of its predecessor’s deputy. And a much publicized National Dialogue – a fresh breath of ‘real’ politics in which the diverse elements of society actually told each other what they thought, for once – has laid a primrose path of good intentions, but has so far done little to found the footings of a more just society. Meanwhile, the idealistic voices that survived the bullets are being drowned out by a clamour of competing self-interests. Perhaps the old story of the Marib Dam’s collapse is a parable: the rat, the rot within; the warning voices unheeded; the drowning of those thousand youths on their thousand skewbald horses.
In Yemen, as I wrote,† the past is always present; and that includes its more baleful aspects. Now, as I write, I want to look to the future, to proclaim that Yemen could be the pioneering state of the region, certainly politically, maybe even economically (what a workforce! what a history of enterprise! what a marketplace!); if … But at the moment there are too many Ifs. And as another old saying goes, ‘I sowed “if” in the valley of “it might be”, and I reaped “would that it had been”.’
Back to the beginning, to that title, Yemen: The Unknown Arabia. It is in fact the title of the American edition, and I used never to be entirely comfortable with it.* Yemen might have been ‘unknown’ in the past; but I was putting that right, wasn’t I? Yet it is a title that has grown on me, and partly because in a sense it has grown more accurate. If Yemen is ‘known’ abroad, now, it tends to be as a lair for those lurking terrorists (I have yet to meet one, knowingly, thank goodness). The richer, stranger, subtler reality – the diversity of land and people, those plural genii of place that I have tried to grasp and portray – is probably even less known outside than it was two decades ago.
Indeed, in some ways Yemen is receding from the rest of the region and of the planet. To revisit the parable of the Marib Dam, the Qur’an says that in the aftermath of its collapse the ancient Sabaean Yemenis brought yet more doom upon themselves, by asking God to lengthen the distances they travelled to their neighbours: ‘And they wronged themselves, and We made them as but tales.’ Today, the neighbouring, fellow-Arab Gulf states, a couple of hours’ flying time away, are an impossibly distant dream for almost all Yemenis; to me they seem a sort of parallel universe, a looking-glass Arabia. That said, the distancing is mutual. Eating my breakfast beans in the suq the other week, my place mat – the usual torn sheet of newsprint from the Gulf – had an article about a Hollywood actress opening a ‘table tennis themed’ restaurant in Dubai, where you can play the game (as apéritif or a digestif?) as well as sample the international cuisine. One of the tables, the article said, is gold-plated. I confess I felt a passing urge for gilded ping-pong and foie gras. But I think I’ll stick with my beans.
If The Unknown Arabia has proved a prophetic title as far as the rest of the world goes, then the greater sadness would be if Yemen – the diverse, plural Yemen of this book – were to become unknown to the Yemenis themselves. It will do, if they listen only to the more strident slogans of the present – for example the ‘You are our homeland, O Ali!’ of the partisans of the former president (l’état, c’est lui? I thought Yemen was meant to be a republic),* or the ‘Death to America!’ of the neo-Zaydis (why not death to poverty, corruption, ignorance?). The people of Yemen should listen to the gentler, more polyphonic voices of the past.
Then again, the most vital voices to heed are the hardest of all to hear. They are the voices of those processions of Yemeni sons and Yemeni daughters yet unborn. Listen to them … Are they blessing the graves of their sleeping ancestors, alive today, or cursing them?
Tim Mackintosh-Smith
San’a, Yemen
March 2014