Celebrating the Year of the Dragon (2012), Bangkok.
Bradley University’s alumni publication, Hilltopics, published some of my photos on Yemen in its most recent issue, Summer 2011.
Read the PDF version: PDF
Read the text version on the Hilltopics page: online
Yemen is often perceived, by Yemenis and foreigners alike, as an insular entity, impervious to cultural interchange. Nowhere is the falsity of this perception more evident than in Malaysia. Yemeni culture, customs and history are evident in every corner of this multi-ethnic Southeast Asia country.
On a main street in Sanaa, Mohannad smiles down daily from a Turkish Airlines billboard at drivers and pedestrians. He should be happy. The finale of the Turkish soap opera he starred in, titled “Noor” in its Arabic version on MBC, was watched by 85 million Arab viewers aged 15 and older, MBC Marketing Director Mazen Hayek announced at a conference in Beirut last year. That’s a quarter of the total Arab population, or 1 in 4 Arabs who watched it. And the majority of them were women. 2008 and 2009 saw the unprecedented Mohannad fever spread across the Middle East, T-shirts of him and Noor reportedly outselling Saddam’s.
The popularity of “Noor” says something significant about the state of Arabs today.
CNN featured clips of the Sanaa Music Festival videos on its monthly show iReport, along with a chat with Mira on the growing hip hop trend among the urban youth in Yemen. Mira’s blog, The Bohemian and The Bulbul, got a mention as well. (Click to watch the CNN spot.)
CNN International is showing clips of the Sanaa Music Festival videos and an interview with Mira on its iReport show this week at these times. Not to be missed!
Asian youth pose creatively in front of a depiction of the Great Battle of Yuthahathi, with warriors riding elephants, in Muang Boran, Thailand.
Members of the Mon tribe are contracted from Burma to work in Thailand. The video shows clips of a Mon dance performance in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. This is the most interesting music I’ve heard in recent years! Look out for the little girl’s dance with lit candles in her hand, the drummer’s “flying” hair and the jester’s head movements. A must-see!
Celebrating the Year of the Dragon (2012), Bangkok.
The Arabic word for “crazy”, majnoon, has the word “jinn” as its root. In Islamic teachings, jinn are spirits that live in a parallel realm and can be good or evil. Therefore, perhaps a lost meaning of the Arabic word for insane is “with jinn”.
And it was spirits that we were seeking on the trip to Radaa, one of Yemen’s least safe places to be due to constant tribal battles.
Gunshots rang out in the distance. A wedding? It was an odd time for a wedding.
After lunch at a restaurant, where Yemeni men with wild Jimi Hendrix hair and bandanas casually kept their Kalashnikovs very close to them, it was time to go meet al-Obali, one of Yemen’s famed exorcists whose reputation had spread to other Arab countries.
He received “patients” at his Yemeni-style home.
