The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

by Jennifer Steil

  We began by discussing the role of newspapers, the definition of news, kinds of stories, and how to cover a beat, but I ended up talking about a much wider variety of subjects than I had planned, because they had so many questions. Shyness and modesty are prized in Yemeni women, so Theo had warned me the girls might not be as vocal. Yet Zuhra was one of my most avid interrogators. “What do you think of anonymous sources? Do we have to put a byline on a story if we worry it could get us killed? What’s the difference between news and features?” She was relentless. She was, in short, a true journalist.

  But I didn’t want my class to be all talk, theory without practice. “I want to get all of you out of this office and onto the streets,” I told them. “News doesn’t happen in this building.”

  “How do you find stories on the streets?” they asked. They told me they left the office mainly to go to press conferences. It didn’t occur to them that their corner grocer or a taxi driver or the local midwife might give them an idea for a story. Only press spokesmen and politicians were deemed worthy of quoting. Yet I knew from long experience that PR people and those in power were the least likely to have a good story. I would have to explain to my reporters how to wire a beat, how to cultivate sources, and how to convince people to trust them. I added these to my list of essential things to teach them, which was growing longer by the minute. I was starting to sweat.

  And then the women told me that they weren’t really allowed to approach men on the streets. And that they couldn’t ride in cars with men. This meant that if a woman went out to report a story, she had to take a separate taxi from the photographer (all of whom were male).

  “What are your other major barriers to getting stories?” I asked, curious.

  “Well, no one wants to talk to reporters,” said Farouq. “Or give us their name.”

  “That is a problem.” It seemed it wasn’t just this group of reporters who needed to know the various ways the press could serve society, it was the entire society itself. Almost all of Yemen’s newspapers were blatantly partisan, and so anyone interviewed would of course assume a reporter had an agenda other than the truth.

  I planned to assign them stories that they could publish in the paper, coaching them along the way. I wanted everything I taught them to contribute to the betterment of the Yemen Observer. There was much that needed bettering, starting with the English. For example: “The security source denied any dead incidents happened during the riots.” Or, from another reporter, “Nemah Yahia, an elderly lady, said that they went to a mill in Raid, have an hour takes them, to crash the cereal.” I suppose that “crash the cereal” isn’t all that inappropriate a phrase to describe what occurs at a mill. But still.

  Then there was the utter lack of structure to the stories, the dearth of legitimate sources, the three-paragraph-long sentences, and the nonsensical headlines. One notorious headline in the Observer, before my time, accidentally referred to the Ministry of Tourism as the Ministry of Terrorism. The folks at the U.S. embassy were so entertained by this that they pinned the story to their bulletin board. It was hard to know where to begin, but I figured I couldn’t go wrong by starting with the country’s biggest news story.

  “There’s a presidential election coming up in September,” I said. “What role do you think a newspaper can play in the months before the elections? What are its obligations to its readers? In other words, how does the press contribute to the creation of a true democracy?”

  The mention of democracy immediately perked them all up. The Yemeni government is officially quite keen on democracy and forever issuing statements about the glorious progress of its march toward such a political system. Yet at the moment, true democracy is but a speck on the horizon. Yemen has existed as a unified country only since 1990. After the end of Turkish occupation in 1918, the North was ruled as a quasi-monarchy by a series of politico-religious leaders called imams. In 1962, a civil war in the North resulted in the overthrow of the imamate and the establishment of the Yemen Arab Republic.

  South Yemen was under British rule from 1839 to 1967, when the last British forces withdrew from Aden and the country became the People’s Republic of South Yemen (renamed the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in 1970), the only Arab Marxist state in history. After the Soviet Union began to dissolve in 1989, North and South Yemen began talking seriously about unification. They unified formally on May 22, 1990, though a bloody civil war erupted in 1994 between the (still unmerged) northern and southern armed forces.

  Yemen has had the same president for more than thirty years. Well, technically President Ali Abdullah Saleh has only been president of all of Yemen since unification. But before that he ruled North Yemen for twelve years. While grumbling about President Saleh’s leadership is a popular national pastime, the Yemeni people have not experienced a peaceful transfer of power in their lifetime and thus struggle to imagine such a thing.

  Still, this year, for the first time, Yemen has a real opposition candidate. In 1999, when the country held its first direct presidential election, Saleh handily defeated a candidate from his own party with a majority of 96 percent. Now, opposition candidate Faisal bin Shamlan is providing the press with the thrilling opportunity to write about someone other than Saleh and about a political party other than the ruling party, the General People’s Congress. My reporters were bursting with pride about their country’s democratic efforts. They seemed to feel that this transition could finally earn Yemen the respect it deserved. Even so, no one really doubted that Saleh would win reelection.

  “But the press has an obligation to report impartially about both candidates,” I told my class. “And to give voters as much information as they can, so that they can make informed choices.” No easy task when it’s against the law to directly criticize the president in the paper. And when the owner of the paper actually works for that president. Theo had explained to me that the Yemen Observer was just one of Faris’s many enterprises. His main job was working as the president’s media adviser. He also owned a security franchise, campaigned against corruption, helped organize investment conferences, and had his industrious fingers in many other ventures. While I found it clearly unethical for the owner of a newspaper to work for the president, it seemed best to keep my thoughts to myself. I was there for only three weeks. I would just have to try to get my reporters to report as fairly as possible and hope Faris wouldn’t meddle too much.

  The concept of even-handed reporting seemed to be going over remarkably well with my students, who said they wanted their stories to read like those in the New York Times. It remained to be seen how well they could execute this. They gave me several different ideas for kinds of election stories they could write: candidate profiles, issue-specific stories (on the eradication of weapons, say, or fighting corruption), and news stories about the direction of the candidates’ campaigns. Farouq, the paper’s main political reporter, was already working on a story about the opposition party’s threatened boycott of the election.

  I ended class by giving them each an assignment related to their beat, due at six P.M. This would help me learn more about Yemen as well as more about what my reporters considered news.

  Arwa, for example, wanted to do a story about an all-women sports club, but I had trouble getting her to tell me what was new about it.

  “We need a reason that we are writing about it today,” I told her. “Tell me what is new. Did it just open? Is it the first club for women?”

  “No …”

  “Did it just introduce some new kind of sport? Or is it part of a growing trend? Are more women than ever before doing sports?”

  “Yes!” she said to the last one. “More women are doing it.”

  “Good,” I said. “So that is the information we lead with.”

  I kept referring to it as a health club, and she kept correcting me. “Not health! Sports!”

  Adel went off to report on the recent Guantánamo suicide, Radia to write about street children, and little
Zuhra to write about the new respect hairstylists were getting in Yemen.

  After class, a tall, chubby man with greenish eyes and a shiny round face lingered in the classroom with visible anxiety. He had arrived halfway through class, just before my staged fight with Theo. “I am so sorry for being late,” he said. “I had to take my wife to the hospital. She had surgery on her eye, and now there is something wrong with her—” He glanced at Theo, who was standing with us.

  “Cornea,” Theo supplied.

  “Yes. Cornea. And she will need another surgery.”

  This was Zaid. I expressed my sympathy and sat down with him to go over everything he had missed. I liked him immediately. He was obviously bright, joked with me, and told me he had just won a scholarship to study next year in Britain. He was frothing with excitement.

  I was beginning to sag with the relief that the first class had finished without catastrophe when Theo reminded me that I still had a hurdle ahead (other than the 1,001 new challenges I had just uncovered): I had to impress the Boss. He gave me a minute to take a breath and collect my papers, and led me upstairs to meet Faris.

  FARIS AL-SANABANI was tall, dark, and handsome, with just about the worst case of attention deficit disorder I’ve ever seen. He did nothing in real time. He moved in fast-forward, spoke in fast-forward, and demanded an equally speedy response. A conference with Faris was an aerobic workout.

  Faris was educated in the United States at Eastern Michigan University. Michigan is home to the largest population of expatriate Yemenis. Because Faris was elected the university’s homecoming king—the first minority ever to win that honor—he was invited to many events held by campus organizations. One of these was a talk at a black fraternity on the theme of giving back to the ghetto. The speaker, Faris told me, said something like this: “You are at a good university. You have good lives, good educations. I want you to reach out to where you came from. I want you to let them see you. Not just as a basketball player or a singer. But as a successful educated person in another field.”

  And Faris sat there, thinking. He had been planning to accept a lucrative job in the United States as soon as he finished school. He had no intention of returning to Yemen. He was married to an American woman.

  “But I realized that Yemen is my ghetto,” he told me. “If everybody leaves the ghetto, dresses nice, and marries a nice white lady, then they in the ghetto will have nothing. They will have no hope. So I said, ‘I am going back to Yemen. I have to go to my people.’”

  He gave up the job offer and moved back to Yemen, where he took work as a translator, development worker, and government employee before deciding to launch the Yemen Observer.

  Until then, there was just one English-language newspaper, the Yemen Times. But Faris felt that this paper was too relentlessly critical of his country. How was Yemen ever going to attract tourists if all they ever read about the country was negative? He decided that starting his own newspaper would be the best way to contribute to Yemen’s development. An English-language paper would be most effective, he thought, because he wanted foreigners—especially Americans, because he had lived there—to be able to read about Yemen.

  His American wife helped him write and edit the paper on their one computer. One thousand copies were printed of his first issue, which he delivered himself on foot, by bicycle, and through friends. That was more than a decade ago, in 1996. Faris had since divorced his American wife, who hadn’t taken to life in Yemen, and married a Yemeni woman.

  By the time Theo summoned me, the paper was printing about five thousand copies of each issue. It still lost money, but it was important enough to Faris that he continued to personally fund it. Besides, Faris was a wealthy man. Profits from his business ventures—not government money—funded the Yemen Observer, Faris was quick to tell me. This was his way of claiming the paper was independent, despite his lofty connections. After all, serving as the president’s media adviser (and later his secretary) was not an ideal position for someone who owned a newspaper struggling to be seen as objective. But it was a perfect position for a driven, passionate man with infinite ambitions for his country.

  When I arrived in Faris’s office, he was seated behind an enormous desk, fiddling with his computer. He stood up to shake my hand. Only briefly did his eyes meet mine before darting around the room, as if making sure I hadn’t arrived with a retinue of spies. Faris’s eyes were always moving. I introduced myself and explained what I hoped to do with my class. He seemed properly impressed and expressed deep gratitude for my presence. I expressed deep gratitude for the opportunity to assist him. I gave him a copy of The Week, the magazine for which I write science, health, theatre, travel, and art pages, which he flipped through so quickly the pages blurred. I suddenly panicked as I realized I’d given him the copy with a cover story on gay marriage. The minimum punishment for homosexuality in Yemen is death. I stammered an explanation, but Faris didn’t seem concerned.

  “Of course we understand,” he said. “Things are different there.”

  Before I left, he handed me a stack of thirty issues of the Yemen Observer. “Read these and tell me how to make it better,” he said. “What sections are good, what sections to get rid of, and also, please read this interview I wrote and tell me what you think of it and how I can do better interviews in the future.”

  Staggering under the tower of newsprint, I took the papers to an empty office downstairs and read until my eyes dried out. I had managed only about an hour of sleep the night before. I can’t remember ever having had such terrible insomnia, a combination of jet lag, nervousness about teaching, and the wild euphoria of travel. I was in rough shape.

  Despite this, the excitement I felt about my class carried me along, and I managed to take about thirty pages of notes on the back issues of the Yemen Observer.

  Reporters kept popping in to see me. “About that argument with Theo,” said Adel. “Has he ever lied to you about money before?”

  I was impressed—I had thought that none of them would think to interview either Theo or myself. Bravo, Adel! Then al-Matari popped in to ask me several questions about his story and journalism in general. Several small boys visited me periodically to bring me silver cups of water. I had no idea where they came from. Several men stopped in my doorway simply to stare at me.

  During our meeting, Faris had asked me if I had any special needs during my stay, and I had told him that I would like to go for a swim if at all possible. I am hopelessly addicted to exercise. So after I had a quick falafel lunch with Theo, Faris sent one of his drivers to fetch me and drive me to the Sheraton, which has one of the only lap pools women can use. (All sports clubs in Yemen are sex-segregated, but the biggest hotels—the Sheraton and the Mövenpick—have coed pools.)

  Water is my second home, and the emotional relief submersion brought was instantaneous. Stripped of my Yemeni drapery, I was exhilarated to feel the water and sun on my skin. I was Jennifer again. I recognized myself. As my elbows began their rhythmic rise and fall, the anxieties of the morning dispersed, rising through my body and out my fingertips, dissolving in the chlorine.

  I swam for an hour, despite the best efforts of the small boys playing at the end of the pool to thwart me. At first, they just liked to get in my way and dodge me at the last minute, but then they began to imitate my stroke, splashing clumsily after me. I outlasted them, and finally they pulled their shivering grayish-brown bodies out of the pool and wrapped themselves in blanket-size towels, staring reproachfully at me as I serenely continued my laps.

  When I arrived back at the Observer, revivified and still damp (it wasn’t until nearly a year later that a Yemeni friend informed me that going about with wet hair was frowned upon, as it suggested one had just emerged from a bedroom romp—Yemenis shower after sex), I met with Faris and a new reporter named Hakim, a Detroit-born Yemeni. Hakim had joined us from the rival Yemen Times, where he and the editor had mutually decided to part ways. Faris had great hopes for him, as his English
was better than that of most of our reporters and he had a modicum of journalism training. They peppered me with questions about the paper’s format, and I told them exactly what I thought should be on every single page. After slaving away for other people for ten years, I was filled with the heady satisfaction of being treated like an authority. I was surprised by the things I knew and by how certain I felt that my suggestions were right.

  By eight P.M., I thought I might swoon from exhaustion. But just when I feared I would be there all night, Faris invited me to dinner with him and three Tunisian models for Arabia Felix. So, at nearly eight thirty, after more than twelve hours of work, we headed out of the office.

  Faris escorted us to a Chinese restaurant, where he ordered for all of us. Thirty dishes must have arrived, heaped with vegetables and fish and meats and rice and spring rolls. As soon as we were seated, the three stunning Tunisian women leaned back in their chairs and lighted their cigarettes in unison. They smoked through most of the meal. The chubbiest girl (still devastatingly beautiful) ate nothing but a few grains of rice, smoking cigarette after cigarette. Refusing an offer of food from a Yemeni is a major slight, so I ate twice as much to make up for her rudeness. But Faris was rude right back to her.

  “You are not eating much but you are a big girl,” he said. “Will you go eat when we are not watching?”

  The girls spent most of the meal complaining about Yemen in various tongues. They had so much fun in Tunisia. In Tunisia, women don’t have to cover their bodies. In Tunisia, the food is much better than Chinese food. Yet their contracts as flight attendants with Yemenia Airways would keep them in Yemen for the next three years. God help the Yemenis.

  “Tunisia is a dictatorship,” Faris told me. “But the dictator is liberal—he had all of the women remove their hijabs, and now they are free. But if Tunisia were to become a democracy, the Islamists would win an election in a landslide, and women would be sent back centuries.” This fascinated me. “In Algeria, this happened,” said Faris. “It used to be fairly liberal until it became a democracy, and the Islamists swept elections. They are still fighting there.”