“If I know a song of Africa,
of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back,
of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers,
does Africa know a song of me?”-Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
The house and garden had quickly become my home, where in the mornings I fed my regular guests the Bulbuls and Serins, and found serenity when, through watching them, I meditated on existence, on cycles, on life, on everything and nothingness. Out there was Yemen. Within the garden walls, and all the walls, was me, inside my head.
How do you pack your life into a suitcase? How do you sift through every piece of your life and decide which memories to discard and which to keep?
In this corner were the stored decorations from the last Christmas dinner. And over here in this spot was the scattered dust from when I stood on the roof and surveyed sunset after surreal sunset in the Sanaa sky. I’d look from up here at the street below to see, near where the boisterous neighborhood kids played, the gaping hole in the asphalt, a reminder of the incident. (One day that mark, too, will be paved over.) This view offered me perspective, so that sights seen day after day did not grow too familiar, and, seen from above, acquired new meaning. A traveler’s worst enemy is familiarity. But nothing is more difficult than leaving.
“I got so upset when the Koreans came to visit Yemen and the kid blew himself up, killing them,” says Yemeni-American hip hop artist AJ. “I kept thinking, ‘Why did they have to die, because they were curious and wanted to visit Yemen?’ I was so upset with it, and I felt like, he was a young kid who was influenced by other people. That was probably the bottom line.”
When Mahmoud was brought to the Safe Childhood Center the first time, he hated it, he says with a hint of independence. It felt like a prison. So he ran away the same day.
Having escaped from an abusive foster family, he had been homeless for a month, and after his flight from the center, spent another two months on the street. He found an abandoned building to sleep in and work at a store that sells gas canisters. His job was to load canisters into customers’ trunks and fill up empty ones. For this work he was paid $2.50 per day, and the store owner gave him $1.50 for breakfast and lunch. He was 12.
Yemeni women are often married off young. Their mahr, money paid by the groom, helps their father’s finances. They have children of their own. They follow in their mothers’ path, working in the field, dexterously balancing firewood on their head as they walk back home later, preceded by the goats, followed by their daughters, bravely carrying their family’s burdens.
Mentalities and traditions are difficult to change. But they could evolve if the conditions change.
If Noor Al-Sharif stands accused of being gay – let him be gay. It’s none of our business. And let’s start calling things by their names; the magazine being discussed is called Jassad.
So exclaimed, emphatically, provocatively, the young Lebanese journalist in the audience, not in those exact words but stating those opinions in no uncertain terms. Her voice was resolute. She was assertive and loud, the way parents have traditionally told their children not to be. Her belly-revealing top seemed to underscore each word.
A storm approaching Phi Phi Island, Thailand.
On any given day in Bangkok, you’re bound to see something new, something exciting, or something unusual. This dog was hanging out near a Skytrain station in central Bangkok. I later found him sleeping under the stairs nearby.
“If I know a song of Africa,
of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back,
of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers,
does Africa know a song of me?”-Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
The house and garden had quickly become my home, where in the mornings I fed my regular guests the Bulbuls and Serins, and found serenity when, through watching them, I meditated on existence, on cycles, on life, on everything and nothingness. Out there was Yemen. Within the garden walls, and all the walls, was me, inside my head.
How do you pack your life into a suitcase? How do you sift through every piece of your life and decide which memories to discard and which to keep?
In this corner were the stored decorations from the last Christmas dinner. And over here in this spot was the scattered dust from when I stood on the roof and surveyed sunset after surreal sunset in the Sanaa sky. I’d look from up here at the street below to see, near where the boisterous neighborhood kids played, the gaping hole in the asphalt, a reminder of the incident. (One day that mark, too, will be paved over.) This view offered me perspective, so that sights seen day after day did not grow too familiar, and, seen from above, acquired new meaning. A traveler’s worst enemy is familiarity. But nothing is more difficult than leaving.
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.
