The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

by Jennifer Steil

  So far he is trying to be nice to me, so I get the taxi money for the women. I have to talk to Faris about providing transportation for our reporters; they do not have enough money to pay for these things themselves. I am amazed that Faris fails to provide his staff with so many essentials. My reporters are not given business cards, telephones, or press IDs and are even required to buy their own notebooks and pens. But they cannot afford these things on their salaries of $100 to $200 per month. No wonder they make a notebook last for weeks. I buy a stack of notebooks for them. I would buy them phones too, but my salary does not stretch that far.

  I spend the morning editing the Panorama page, a collection of editorials from other Yemeni papers, and Najma’s article about a course that trains women to manage money. It’s an interesting story, but she hasn’t talked with any of the women at the workshop, other than the instructor. “You should have talked with a minimum of fifteen women who participated in the workshop,” I say. “Their personal stories are what would really make this interesting.” Too late for this issue. (I have to let a lot of things slide in this first issue.) But Najma seems to understand. So. It’s a start.

  I write and edit all day, with no break, save for the twenty minutes I spend walking to the Jordanian sandwich shop with Zuhra. “You need to take a breath,” she says. Back at the office, Zuhra helps me figure out which pages are missing stories. Farouq still hasn’t turned up, so we have nothing for the front or local pages. I try not to panic. I ring Ibrahim at his home office to ask him about the election page, and he sends over two stories, promising a third by noon. Al-Asaadi promises at least one front-page story. Clearly we need more staff.

  Luke swings around my doorjamb toward lunch, flushed with excitement. “Did you hear?” he says. “The crocodile hunter died.”

  “No! Steve Irwin?”

  “Yes.”

  “What killed him, a crocodile?”

  “Stingray. Right through the heart.”

  “Jesus.”

  “So—front page?”

  “Perfect. We have nothing else.”

  “It’s definitely of global significance.”

  Luke pops into my office often, to chat or to trade stories. A half hour later, he walks in holding an enormous jar of amber liquid. “I just accidentally bought thirty dollars’ worth of honey,” he says.

  “Accidentally?”

  “Well, I was with al-Asaadi, and there was this guy he usually gets honey from, so I ordered some too, but I didn’t realize it would be this big! Or that it would cost thirty dollars.” He looks forlornly at the enormous jar in his hand. “I have enough honey to last me a year.”

  “Well,” I say, “I guess you’d better learn to bake.”

  “You don’t bake with Yemeni honey! It’s too special for that.”

  “It can’t be really good Yemeni honey,” says Zuhra, who has just walked in. “If it were really good honey, it would have cost you eighty dollars. At least.”

  Later in the afternoon, al-Asaadi pops his head into our office. “How about we don’t have a front page this issue? What do you think?”

  I shrug. “I can live without it.”

  But the banter hides a growing panic. The later it gets, the more we shuffle stories from page to page. We don’t have enough local stories, so I suggest we move a story on the back page to the local page and that I quickly write the story on the batik exhibit to replace the back page. It is infinitely easier to churn out a story myself than to rewrite one of theirs. I feel some guilt over this, but not much. It’s just one story.

  ZUHRA LEAVES WORK around three P.M., as she and the other girls must be home before dark. She is distressed to leave me on my own, worried I will never survive without her.

  “I’ll be fine,” I say with a complete lack of conviction. “We just might not have a front page.”

  She looks at me with concern.

  “Do you maybe need to swim?” she says.

  I laugh. “Not today,” I say, gesturing toward the stack of pages waiting to be edited. “Tomorrow.”

  AL-ASAADI RETURNS from a long lunch around four P.M. and throws a handful of qat next to my computer. “This will help,” he says. My energy flagging, I follow his lead. The qat tastes extra bitter, and the shiny leaves are hard to chew. But I imagine that al-Asaadi knows where to buy the best qat, so I assume it is a good vintage. It must be, given how much I immediately perk up. With newfound vigor, I whip out a 955-word story on the batik exhibit in less than an hour. No wonder everyone loves this drug.

  I file the story and run upstairs to choose photos with Mas, the paper’s precocious nineteen-year-old photographer. When I return, a pile of new things to edit is waiting on my desk. Ibrahim’s election stories are thin; everything I edit ends up half its original length. My reporters repeat themselves ad nauseam.

  Around ten P.M., when I finally start to crash from the qat, dinner arrives. We all eat outside in the courtyard, standing around a table piled with roti (Yemeni baguettes) and plates of fasooleah (beans), eggs, ful, cheese, and tea. We fall upon the food like a pack of wolves. I am the last to leave the table, reluctantly, with a fistful of bread.

  My energy is back. Good thing, too, given how much is still left to do. The flash-drive-passing between me and Luke accelerates. I edit the stories, then he edits them, then I see them again on the page, and then he sees them one last time. I don’t take a step out of the building from the time I get there—eight thirty A.M.—until the time I leave, in the early hours of the following morning. Yet I am so busy that the day feels short. So many times in those first few weeks, when my reporters come to me with a question, I instinctively think I should run it by someone else. Someone in charge. But slowly, it begins to sink in that the only person responsible for these decisions is me.

  MIRACULOUSLY, BY THREE A.M. we have a front page. And a Local page. And an Election page, a Health page, a Reports page, and Panorama and Middle East and Op-Ed. In fact, we have an entire newspaper! We all high-ten each other and say, “Mabrouk!” (Congratulations!). I am briefly euphoric before a terrifying thought occurs to me: We have to do it all over again. Starting in about six hours.

  SEVEN

  my yemeni shadow

  Zuhra has adopted me. Never mind that she is twenty-three and I am technically old enough to be her mother. When she isn’t out running after a story, Zuhra is chronically at my elbow, asking me what I need. A back-page story? The telephone number of the foreign minister? Lunch? She’ll help me get it. When I head to the small grocery store at the end of our block in search of matches, milk, and peanuts, she won’t let me go until she has written me a shopping list in Arabic—even though I have become quite capable of asking for what I want in Arabic.

  “Zuhra, I already have a mother!” I protest. “Really, I can manage.”

  “Motherhood is a feeling,” she says. “It is not an age.”

  When other people try to take me tea or walk me to the sandwich shop, she bristles. “You are my Jennifer,” she says. “I want to be the one to take care of you.”

  All of my women must be home well before dark, and so their work day ends earlier than the men’s, at one P.M. But this stretches later and later throughout the year, until the women only rarely leave before three P.M. and sometimes stay until five P.M. It makes Zuhra anxious that she has to leave me alone at night, especially when I am closing an issue. She wants to be there to help me. When I arrive at work the day after my first endless close, Zuhra is waiting. “I can stay with you until three P.M.!” she announces with as much excitement as someone who has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

  It is a long time before I truly understand how much it means to Zuhra to be in the office of the Yemen Observer at all, a long time before I understand her improbable journey to me.

  The other reporters tease her for her possessiveness and call her Jennifer’s Shadow. She is certainly dressed for the role. Her sisters, she tells me later, also tease her about her newfound passion
for work. “When are you and Jennifer getting married?” they ask. It takes Zuhra months to tell me this, because she is afraid I will think they are implying I am a lesbian and that I will be offended.

  She is just as energetic about chasing stories as she is about following me around. While Noor and Najma are timid about leaving the office and cling to each other for support, Zuhra often waltzes off on her own. She takes the dabaabs (small buses) around town, walks, or cajoles a friend into giving her a ride. When I am at a loss for a back-page story, Zuhra always finds one. Rummaging around in the back alleys of Old Sana’a, she comes up with, say, a story on the demise of Yemeni lanterns called fanous, which are being replaced by electric lights. Zuhra’s story-shopping in the souqs of Old Sana’a also results in pieces on jewelry and fashion fads, the persistence of the illegal trade in rhinoceros-horn jambiyas, and the increasing popularity of Indian goods over Yemeni products.

  She is even better at finding front-page stories. I like to have a minimum of five on every front page, and this always involves a lot of last-minute scrambling. When I need hard news, Zuhra heads to the courts. Or to the streets. Or to anywhere she can find a bit of news to bring triumphantly back to me.

  I FIND OUT Zuhra’s personal story gradually. Not until late fall, when she and I are curled up in my mafraj looking over her essays for an application to graduate school, do I finally piece together the general outline of her life. This is a different Zuhra than the little black shadow who trails me around the office. In an aqua jogging suit with her hair in a ponytail, she looks like any Western girl kicking back at home on a weekend afternoon. I try not to stare. Though I’ve seen her a few times without the abaya and veil, I’m still not used to seeing the contours of her body, the strands of hair falling across her dark eyes.

  We sit side by side on my red and gold cushions as the late afternoon sun streams through my jeweled windows, sending bits of colored light cavorting around the room. My laptop is propped in front of us, and slowly we read through her application. In her personal essay, she describes her long battle with her family to seek education and eventually a career. Her written English still confuses me, so we go through each line together as she explains how she came to work at the Observer.

  “My father died when I was ten.” This is the centerpiece of her story. It is the root of all of her pain, the beginning of her struggle, and the explanation for her loneliness. “I get depressed because I have an unbalanced life,” she says. “I have no men in my life.”

  Her father, Sultan, lost his own father when he was twelve and took off alone for the southern port city of Aden, then part of South Yemen. He was a socialist, a revolutionary against the British, and a supporter of unification. In Aden, Zuhra told me, he arranged many secret meetings. Yet the details of this part of his life remain a mystery to her. After marrying and divorcing his cousin, Sultan met Zuhra’s mother, Sadira, a young teenager known for her beauty, who hailed from his home village of Ammar in Ibb Governorate. They married. But she became increasingly worried about her husband’s political activities and the safety of her family. After the first three children were born, the family moved north to Sana’a and Sultan took a job with the government water corporation.

  Zuhra is the fifth of eight children, two of whom are dead. One was miscarried, and the other died in her first few years of life. The surviving six are tight. Zuhra worships her oldest brother, Fahmi, thirty-five, who lives in Brooklyn, and her sisters are her dearest friends. Their early life, Zuhra says, was idyllic. “My father treated us equally, girls and boys. He insisted that the younger respect the older, not that the girls have to respect the boys. Maybe for that we have some kind of problems in our life, because this was the way our father raised us. This is why we have trouble with the restrictions of society. He hates us to wear a veil.”

  Because Sultan never had the chance to finish his own schooling, it was deeply important to him that his children receive an education. “He was desperate to make all of us study,” said Zuhra. “He wanted Fahmi to be a doctor. He was amazing. He really fight for us. To be educated. He was a very modern man.”

  Nearly all of Zuhra’s siblings have a university education, except for Ghazal, who is still at school, and Shetha, who married young. But it was a condition of Shetha’s marriage that she be allowed to finish her studies. Sultan refused many suitors who came calling for his daughters’ hands. “He yelled at the suitors and said, ‘Are you crazy? They are too young! They must finish school!’” said Zuhra. “He was so protective, but not authoritarian.”

  Everything fell apart when Sultan died from a heart attack while visiting his home village.

  “He went to attend a funeral of my young cousin. Then he died there, alone,” said Zuhra. “He went there alone, and for lack of treatment—his brothers never got him to the hospital—he died. They lied and said our aunt died and that we had to come to the village. Then when we got there, all of us knew it was our father who died. He died without anyone next to him, even his brothers. It was really horrible.

  “My mom, for twenty days she didn’t speak. She cried day and night. She did not sleep. We were all afraid that she will die. She knew that. She held on because she felt that the uncles might try to take the children, so she became strong. She and Fahmi.”

  When Yemeni women and girls have no father or husband, their lives are handed over to their uncles or brothers. Women cannot be trusted with the reins of their own lives. This Yemeni emphasis on controlling and defending women is a result of the importance of sharaf (honor) in society. Nothing is more important to a Yemeni tribesman than his honor. Honor is communal as well as individual; when one man is shamed, his whole tribe is shamed. An assault on honor is called ayb, meaning shame or disgrace. Honor is a vulnerable thing; a man’s honor depends heavily on his wives and daughters. When a daughter misbehaves, particularly if that misbehavior is sexual, she damages her father’s honor. It is wise, therefore, for men to keep a close eye on their women.

  So without Sultan, and without her oldest brother, Fahmi, who had found work in the United States, Zuhra’s fate was left to her uncles. When she reached seventeen, she told them she wanted to go to medical school. Impossible, they told her flatly. They convinced her second-oldest brother, Aziz, to forbid Zuhra to attend. Zuhra’s theory is that her uncles were jealous of how clever she was and how well she performed in school, because their sons did not do as well. Even Zuhra’s mother, Sadira, who had supported her daughter’s education, acquiesced.

  Not only did the uncles refuse to allow Zuhra to go to medical school, they would not let her attend any kind of university. “They claimed that an educated woman would not find a husband and would become rebellious. This is the fear of most Yemeni men,” she says. “They say college will corrupt girls and they will not get married.”

  So she studied on the sly, hiding her schoolbooks in magazines so her family would not see that she was reading medical books. On the day of the exam, she veiled herself and sneaked out. Her heart pounding with the fear of discovery, she finished the exam. “I remember that while taking the exam, looking at my watch, I felt like Cinderella, afraid of being revealed.” A few days later, she found that she was one of twenty-nine people admitted to medical school.

  Her family was furious. Immediately, her brothers and paternal uncles forbade her to go. Zuhra was so desperate that she contemplated sneaking out to attend classes. But she knew that she would eventually be caught, and her motives for her clandestine outings could easily have been misconstrued.

  Thus began her darkest days. She was so angry with her family she decided to stop speaking. “I was locked up at home for an entire year. I waged a silent battle against them and refused to talk to them. I became ill and was close to death, making many more people support me. These people knew that if my father were alive, he would support me.

  “During this period of my life, I have realized lots of things and built lots of things. And lost lots of things. One of th
e things I built is that I know how to be strong. And that sometimes in your life you will be alone and nobody next to you,” she said. “And then I felt how horrible my father’s death was, because if he were alive this wouldn’t happen. So I learned how to be strong and not emotionally dependent on anybody in this world.”

  One of the things Zuhra lost during this time was belief and confidence in herself. To this day, insecurity plagues her.

  “I feel I am a second-class human, that I am not important. Because no one cared about my priorities, which really hurts,” she told me. “I know it’s not my fault that I can’t study, but I start to blame myself.”

  Soon, Zuhra had stopped doing any of her normal activities. She wasn’t allowed to go to work. She began to believe that she was a horrible person.

  “It was almost a prison. When you are an active person and smart and have many things in life waiting for you, but then you are stopped like a machine …

  “I still remember one day, I was taking some garbage outside the home. I saw my friends that day, they were going to their college, and then I felt it is the worst feeling ever when you really feel pathetic to yourself. I felt how horrible it was—I knew I was smarter than all of them, and there I was throwing garbage.”

  She became embarrassed to appear in society, worried that she would be thought pathetic and helpless. Because of this, she even lied sometimes and said that she didn’t want to go to college, just so no one would think she was controlled by other people.