The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (17 page)

One day, having noticed Zuhra’s decline, one of her maternal uncles persuaded her other uncles to work together to convince Aziz to let Zuhra go to school. One of these uncles had consulted a religious scholar who had said that it was forbidden to stop her from an education if she wanted one.

At first, Aziz refused. He didn’t want to admit he was wrong. By that time, Zuhra’s health was in danger. She had lost weight, was often faint, and had developed eye problems and allergies. Her family was afraid for her.

Fear at last prompted Aziz to relent. “He said that it seemed like I was going to die, and he didn’t want anything to happen to me.”

Zuhra still wanted to study medicine, but her brother said that was out of the question. If she insisted on going to college, she would go to the College of Education, which was a more suitable place for girls.

Hardly daring to believe she had been reprieved, Zuhra began classes, majoring in English. But still she struggled, feeling that she was being forced to study at a place she did not freely choose. The only thing she chose was English. “I chose this field because I knew that the English language would empower me,” she says. “Most of my diaries are in English, because I can speak freely. And through English I was exposed to another culture that I was curious to know.”

Her college years were difficult socially. Many of her peers were more conservative than she was, with rigid ideas about how to dress, how to study, and how to express an opinion. But Zuhra refused to be cowed. She spoke often in class and was not afraid to debate the professor. She worked feverishly, constantly fearful that her brother would change his mind and pull her out of school.

Despite the fact that she was training to be a teacher, Zuhra had nightmares about joining the profession. “I remember after I graduated I was praying day and night not to be a teacher. But it was hard for me to look for another job.”

When she was offered a teaching post at a school, she panicked and confessed her fears to her brother Fahmi. The school was run by religious zealots from the Islah (Reform) Party, she said. “They impose their opinions on others and I told Fahmi I hated that.”

Her supportive older brother told her that it was okay to follow her heart. But she didn’t know of an alternative to teaching. Her career choices were restricted by the fact that her family did not want her working with men.

Not knowing what to try, Zuhra put together the best résumé she could, adding a note at the bottom saying, “I know that I am not qualified, but I have what it takes to be successful.” And she set out on a quest.

Clutching this piece of paper, Zuhra walked into the offices of the
Yemen Observer
. It was the first place she tried.

At reception, Enass took her résumé and said she would show it to al-Asaadi. “I waited. Al-Asaadi came in. You know him, he likes to show off. But I still remember that I was very confident and he was saying to me, what do you want to be? And I said I want to work as a journalist, if not, then as a translator.”

Al-Asaadi told her that he would speak to Faris. Zuhra didn’t hold out much hope. Not only was she inexperienced, but she was sure that her family would not allow her to be a journalist. “It was a huge fear. Exactly like when I go to my college. As important as that.”

She was unaware of how much she had already impressed al-Asaadi, who saw her potential immediately. “Journalism isn’t a job; it’s a passion,” he told me. “Zuhra had that passion. Even the first time I met her, I could tell how much she wanted to
work.”
She was also unafraid to admit how much she didn’t know, a rarity in the male reporters. Zuhra could kill you with questions—but they helped her to learn her job faster than anyone else.

When al-Asaadi told her she had the job but had to work evenings as well as mornings, her heart sank. She told him that she could not work nights. “He told me, you won’t be a good journalist. And I thought he was right. I can’t do work if I can’t be available all the time.”

But a week later two things happened. Al-Asaadi decided he could allow Zuhra to work only mornings, and Aziz realized how much it meant to Zuhra to have this job. “My brother said, ‘I trust you like a blind person.’”

She began work. Her first hurdle was a fear of talking with men. Not because she was shy—not Zuhra!—but because she feared that the men would lose respect for her if they saw her speaking to other men. Never before had Zuhra mixed with men outside her family. “The nightmare of being a woman followed me when I started my career. Men do not say openly that we cannot do the job; they say it behind our backs and amongst themselves.” I nod. I’ve seen the men do this.

“I felt like a cripple when I first started the job, since such weakness is expected of a Yemeni woman. Even more difficult was interviewing Yemeni men in such a conservative society. It was a hard time for me. I was fighting the many ideas of what constitutes a woman’s role that were planted in me.”

When Zuhra arrived at the
Observer
, she heard rumors about the women who worked there. “They are killing their reputation by working with men,” people whispered. One girl in particular was derided for talking and laughing with men. “The men said she wasn’t a good girl and she was having affairs outside of the job. That scares me,” says Zuhra. She made herself strict rules to protect herself from gossip. She never laughed with men. She never gave out her phone number. She never got into cars with men. “I didn’t want anyone to say anything bad about me,” she says. “I lived in horror all the time.”

Only slowly did her nervousness disappear. “When you came, I don’t know what happens to me, but you take off some of this fear,” she tells me. “I was asking you about objectivity. If you have belief in what you are doing it gives you more strength. Because I know what journalism can do and why it is there.” She came to believe that it wasn’t she who should feel ashamed—it was anyone who would give her a hard time for following a noble calling.

At the same time, Zuhra was grappling with the rudiments of journalism. “I had no real model. I didn’t know what was good journalism,” she tells me. “I got to know that when you come. Do you remember what I first told you? It was very eye-opening for me when you told me we had to be objective. When you said that, what made me believe was that you said [if you report objectively] then people will believe you.”

Zuhra has an instinctive distrust of partisan media, because she loathes other people telling her what to feel or think or do. She would rather be presented with all of the facts in as balanced a way as possible and make up her own mind than read an editorial.

So when I began to define objective journalism for her, she was immediately attracted to the idea. “It seems the highest way of thinking,” she said. “I met you, started thinking about going to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and my dreams started to have a face and legs.”

EIGHT
kidnappings, stampedes, and suicide bombings

It is late on a Sunday afternoon when we hear about a kidnapping of French
tourists in Shabwa Governorate. First we hear there are five hostages, then four. Then we hear that only two are French. Then we hear that three are French and one German. Such is the accuracy of reporting in Yemen.

We at least know who the kidnappers are: the al-Abdullah tribe. The kidnapping is a result of a long-running feud with the neighboring al-Riyad tribe. The al-Abdullah are the same tribe that kidnapped five Germans the previous December. Apparently, the government didn’t keep the promises it made to get those Germans released, so tribesmen took a few French people to underscore their disappointment.

I’d heard a great deal about the kidnappings before I came to Yemen, as it was one of the few things westerners seemed to know about the place. “Aren’t you worried you’ll be kidnapped?” was one of the first things people asked me. That is, if they had heard of Yemen at all.

I wasn’t worried that I would be kidnapped. Most kidnappings don’t have anything to do with hostility toward foreigners. Tribesmen just see tourists as handy bargaining chips in their disputes with the government. Thus they sometimes capture a convoy or two to pressure the government to, say, build a school or improve the water system. (My parents, being parents, did worry I would get kidnapped. When I explained that my kidnappers would probably just want a mosque or a school in return for me, they fretted that they couldn’t afford a whole building. “We could afford a stop sign,” they said. “Tell them that.”) Almost all of the approximately two hundred tourists kidnapped in Yemen in the past fifteen years have been treated kindly by their captors and released unharmed, though there are a few exceptions. In 1998, sixteen westerners were kidnapped by a group called the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army. Four were killed during a botched rescue attempt by the Yemeni government. Another tourist was killed in 2000, again as a result of a shootout between the government and the kidnappers. “If I ever get kidnapped,” I say to al-Asaadi, “don’t let the government try to rescue me.”

Another reason I don’t waste too much time worrying about kidnappings is that they very rarely happen to foreigners in Sana’a. Most attacks occur as tourists travel in conspicuous convoys through more remote parts of the country where there are active tribal conflicts.

Now that the al-Abdullah tribe has the government’s attention, it is demanding that some of their incarcerated tribesmen be released in return for the French tourists. Al-Asaadi gives me ten stories he wrote about the kidnappings last year to get me up to speed. He also draws me a chart of the tribes and their various disputes, which started with the murder of some members of the al-Abdullah tribe years ago. My head reels.

Yemen is home to hundreds of tribes, which play an integral role in Yemeni politics and lives. Divisions among tribes are largely territorial. Before 1990, when Yemen was divided into North and South Yemen, both the British and the Communists in turn endeavored to weaken tribal allegiances in the South, in an effort to create a more cohesive society. But in the North, tribal ties remain strong.

President Saleh belongs to the Sanhan, a Hashid tribe from near Sana’a. The Hashid and Bakil tribal confederations are the most powerful in the country. But Saleh’s control over tribesmen diminishes the farther one gets from Sana’a. Rural people are far more likely to turn to their tribal leaders, called sheikhs, than to the government to resolve disputes over land, grievances, or natural resources. Sheikhs serve as spokesmen for their tribes, arbitrating conflicts, helping parties agree on appropriate amends, and wielding political influence. For example, oil companies working in Yemen often must negotiate separate deals with the government and with the sheikhs of tribes upon whose land they are working. Otherwise they can find their buildings suddenly surrounded by angry, AK-47-wielding tribesmen.

Most Yemenis’ first loyalty is to tribe and family rather than to their country. Whenever I get into a taxi with my reporters, the first thing they do is figure out what tribe our driver belongs to. Mohammed al-Matari, my elder-statesman reporter, is the most adept. He can find out the tribe, hometown, and family of a driver within the first three minutes of the journey. All of this has to be ascertained before conversation can continue.

I CAN’T FIND ANYONE
free to work on the kidnapping story, so when Farouq—the paper’s main political reporter—walks into the office that day for the first time since my arrival, I nearly weep with joy. It is a struggle not to hug him; his face is pale with sorrow over the death of his daughter. The skin is pulled tight across his skull; Farouq is so skeletally thin that my first impulse every time I see him is to hand him a sandwich. “I am so sorry, Farouq,” I say. “I am so sorry to hear of your tragedy.”

He blinks back tears. “Yes, I had something very bad happen in my life,” he says, unable to look at me.

“I am so, so sorry.”

He shows me photos on his cell phone of the infant daughter he just lost and kisses the small screen. I ask if he needs more time off, but he says he wants to work. We go over what stories I need, and he says, “Do not worry about the front page. I will take care of the front page. It is my specialty.”

There’s a catch, of course. Farouq writes only in Arabic and requires translators for all of his stories. We have no good translators. Bashir and Talha struggle along, but often I cannot understand the results of their labor. I’ll need to hire at least one translator in addition to several more reporters. If Faris will let me, that is.

Farouq asks me to call the French embassy, because I’m the only one in the office who speaks French. I speak to both the ambassador and the press attaché, but they have no new information. So Farouq taps his sources in the security department in the region and we get most of the story from them.

I end up writing the piece myself, based on Farouq’s notes and al-Asaadi’s background, and get it on the Web by ten fifteen
P.M
. the same day. This is thrilling, but I wish I could travel south to where the kidnappings happened to do some real reporting. It’s tough to be stuck in the office, orchestrating coverage. None of my journalists can go either. No one has a car, enough money to get down there, or—most significantly—the drive to get the story in person. Not one of my reporters has expressed the slightest interest in trying to get face-to-face interviews. But how else can we get to the truth about what happened?

I’m learning that in Yemen the truth is a slippery thing. Two days after the kidnapping, fifty-one Yemenis are killed in a stampede at one of Saleh’s election rallies at a stadium in Ibb, a city a couple hours south of Sana’a. As usual, the number of victims reported fluctuates throughout the day, from hundreds to dozens. Both the
Yemen Observer
and the
Yemen Times
report more than sixty dead, until the government news agency announces the official count as fifty-one.

The exact circumstances of the stampede depend on which newspaper you read. We report that the stampede was caused by overcrowding, as more than a hundred thousand people were crammed into a space meant to hold half that. Exits were poorly marked, and when people rushed out at the end of Saleh’s speech, they trampled each other. The
Yemen Times
reports that two hundred thousand people were packed into a stadium with a capacity of ten thousand. People were crushed when fences installed to control the crowd’s movement collapsed, trapping people underneath as the crowd swarmed over them. Still other reports say a hundred and fifty thousand people had been crammed into the stadium. The truth is elusive.

When Farouq asks the deputy security manager in Ibb how such tragedies could be prevented in the future, the man shrugs. “We don’t have another rally,” he says. “So it’s not really a concern.”

I am struck by the casual, fatalistic view Yemenis take of tragedy. Stampedes, car accidents, kidnappings, and terrorist attacks rarely seem overly to trouble anyone or trigger societal self-analysis. A stadium collapse and stampede in New York would provoke public outcry and a demand for improved safety standards and crowd control, but this doesn’t happen in Yemen. Perhaps it is simply that they believe all catastrophes are Allah’s will. For example, few Yemenis see any point in seat belts. If Allah decides it’s time for you to go, it’s time for you to go.

President Saleh issues a statement offering condolences and cash to the bereaved families, calling the deceased “martyrs of democracy.” Opposition parties, eager to use the tragedy to their political advantage, rush to blame Saleh, decrying his shoddy security and criticizing him for busing groups of students from schools to the rally to support him, contributing to overcrowding and putting young people in danger.

This stampede followed a smaller one in Ta’iz, a hundred and fifty miles south of Sana’a, which killed four or five people. Several papers report a third stampede, rumored to have killed five or six people in Zinjibar in Abyan Governorate in the south, but government spokesmen vigorously deny this. An auto accident killed a few people, they say. Not a stampede.

The kidnappings and stampedes, happening right on top of each other, underscore the near-impossibility of squeezing facts out of the Yemeni government or any other sources, although perhaps this isn’t surprising in a culture that values belief over empirical evidence.

Farouq keeps busy trying to sort out both tragedies. Big stories like these, I know from experience, are good at staving off grief. At least until deadline.

ONE GOOD THING
the kidnapping brings us is Karim, a Belgian-Tunisian photographer on freelance assignment for
Paris Match
. When I run up to Faris’s office with a lengthy list of demands—a residency visa, more staff, business cards, toilet paper—I find Karim sitting there. Tall, with dark curling hair and mischievous eyes, he’s possibly the most attractive person I’ve seen since arriving in Yemen. I am suddenly acutely aware of my untidy braids and spinsterish skirts.

Karim hopes to get photographs of the kidnapped tourists, so he’ll be staying in Yemen until they are released. I immediately want to go with him, though Faris tells me in no uncertain terms that I am not to endanger myself. “Maybe you can do some reporting for us then,” I say to Karim. No one seems to worry that any violence will befall the hostages. Farouq’s source says that they are being fed well. Yemen will not attempt to use military might to get them back; a new sheikh has begun mediating.

I linger in the office until Faris invites me to join them for dinner. “Faris says he’s taking me to some sort of five-star restaurant,” says Karim.

I laugh. “That would be Zorba’s.”