The Woman Who Fell from the Sky

by Jennifer Steil

  Faris suggests that I move into my own office. We could transform the conference room, he says. I remind Faris that al-Asaadi is due to leave the country in fourteen days, so it’s absurd to move me now. I am thrilled that al-Asaadi has received a fellowship to spend four months studying in the United States, because this means that I might finally be able to do what I want with the paper.

  ZAID HAS RETURNED to the paper on holiday from his studies in London. He is full of enthusiasm, and I am grateful to have him. Still, it surprises me to read his stories and to see that his English has not noticeably improved in the four months he spent in England. I hope that this will change in the second semester. In fact, I am counting on it. Now that it is clear that al-Asaadi is uninterested in learning anything new and has no intention of carrying on my reforms when I leave, I have become anxious about finding a successor. I’m determined to create changes that are sustainable.

  I figure Zaid is my best bet. He is due to finish his program in London in June, which means I will have at least two months to train him before I leave. When he is back in December, I sit him down and explain that I would like him to succeed me—assuming we can get Faris’s support.

  It distresses me deeply that I have failed to win al-Asaadi over, even after months of attempting to bond. No one else at the paper is surprised, however. Luke tells me that no other editor has survived even this long trying to power-share with al-Asaadi.

  Al-Asaadi has promised me, as a result of his conversation with Faris, that I will have his pages by six thirty P.M. Despite the fact that he himself picked that deadline, he fails to show up at the office until eight P.M. When I open my mouth to remind him of the deadline, he shrugs.

  “You only have six more days, khalas.”

  Six days, two issues, one hundred and forty-four hours. Not that I’m counting.

  AL-ASAADI COMES IN the next day around eleven A.M., dressed all in black and looking somber.

  “Kayf halak?” (How are you?) I ask.

  He shakes his head. “Mish tammam. Not good at all.”

  “Are you going to a funeral today?”

  He looks surprised. “You knew?”

  “You’re dressed in mourning.”

  “Yes, a friend of mine died.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  A little while later I find out a second reason for his distress. “I didn’t get my visa,” he says. “So I cannot go to the States.”

  My heart falls straight through the floor.

  “What?”

  No sooner are the words out of his mouth than I am e-mailing my friend Nabeel, the deputy U.S. ambassador. I am desperate. All of my hopes and dreams for this newspaper are at stake. “Please,” I beg him. “Is there anyway you can fast-track al-Asaadi’s visa? If he doesn’t go to the States I will never be able to do anything with this paper.”

  Nabeel’s response is prompt and reassuring. He tells me that he is aware of the delay and says they are waiting for Washington to give al-Asaadi security clearance. “Tell him not to fret,” says Nabeel. “We will take care of him (and you).”

  A few days later, al-Asaadi is on a plane.

  Now, I think, the work can really begin.

  THIRTEEN

  pillars of rayon

  I am impressed that Najma is still with us in January. During my first few months, she often appears in my office panicky and on the verge of tears. She can’t finish her story on time, she says. There is no driver to take her where she needs to go. Or she can’t find the sources I want her to interview. She becomes so hysterical about these things that it is difficult for me to reassure her that we can find solutions. I keep expecting her to give up, to decide it is simply too much to handle.

  But she doesn’t. No matter how traumatized she is over a story, she always perseveres. If anything, Najma works too hard. She stays in the office straight through lunch and sometimes into the early evenings, struggling to finish her page.

  She has only just finished university and has no journalism experience. She also lacks a sense of what information is critical to a story and what can be left out. Almost everything she turns in is three or four times the length it should be. To be fair, she is not the only one with this problem. My reporters seem to think that it is perfectly reasonable to fill an entire page with one twenty-five-hundred-word story.

  “No one reads stories that long,” I tell them. “No matter how interesting. You’re lucky if people read past the first few paragraphs.” I want three or four stories on the Health and Science page instead of one or two.

  In my first month, Najma turns in a story on children’s health that is thirty-six hundred words long. Two full pages.

  “There is a lot of important information in it!” she protests.

  “I am sure there is! But people don’t need to know everything.” My reporters themselves would never read a story that long. In fact, they don’t read. Almost no one in Yemen reads. Even the most educated people I meet have few books on their shelves. The only book anyone ever seems to pick up is the Qur’an.

  Granted, Arabs do have a strong oral tradition, so poetry and other literature have historically been transmitted that way, rather than through written texts. And half of Yemenis are illiterate. Yemenis’ resistance to reading may also be due to their experiences in school, which often drain the joy out of books. They are beaten and mocked when they fail and so live in terror of making mistakes. Zuhra tells me how a teacher once used her, when she was just five years old, to punish another little girl. The girl had been unable to read an Arabic word on the board, and the teacher had asked Zuhra to read it, to show the girl how stupid she was. She then forced little Zuhra to write the insult “donkey” on the other girl’s forehead. Zuhra was so horrified by this experience that she lived in fear of meeting a similar fate for the rest of her school years.

  Yemeni culture overall doesn’t encourage reading as a pastime. Leisure time is instead whiled away chewing qat and gossiping. The women don’t have as much free time for this as the men, given that they are generally kept busy at home with children and cooking—or out herding or farming—while their husbands gad about with friends. Even my women reporters, who still live with their parents and thus have fewer responsibilities, do not read. Their leisure time seems to be chiefly occupied with helping cousins or sisters or friends prepare for weddings.

  I remind them that reading is the best thing they can do to improve their language and journalistic skills. “It doesn’t matter what you read. Novels, cereal boxes, comics. Find something you enjoy. But read.”

  This learned aversion to education and absence of a culture of reading puts my journalists and the entire Yemeni population at an immense disadvantage when it comes to understanding the world at large and the range of human experience. How can people understand other ways of life and the world beyond their borders without the aid of books and newspapers? How does one develop compassion for someone with a completely different set of values without reading something from their point of view? Books are one of the few ways in which we can truly get into the heads of people we would never meet in our ordinary lives and travel to countries we would otherwise never visit.

  I suppose that the harsh existence of most Yemenis leaves them little time to contemplate other ways of life. Perhaps it is only when our own lives are comfortable that we can afford to look out at the world beyond our personal borders.

  GIVEN ALL OF THIS, one would think Najma would understand why our readers would be unlikely to make it through a thirty-six-hundred-word story. I explain to her how to pare down quotes to a sentence or two, eliminate redundancies, and delete irrelevant information. This is a significant problem for all of my reporters, who include paragraph-long quotations in their articles rather than selecting one or two meaningful sentences. They also frequently include information that bewilders them. When I ask questions, they look at me with wide eyes and shrug. My reporters assume that their readers are much, much smarter tha
n they are and will understand things they do not—perhaps because it saves them the effort of figuring things out themselves.

  Despite their challenges, it doesn’t take long for me to realize that my women are the paper’s most reliable strength. While they have no more training than the men—indeed, often less—they have the requisite will. They are harder and more persistent workers than the men, and none of them chews qat or smokes. They arrive promptly and do not disappear for three or four hours during lunch. They either eat sandwiches in the back room or wait until they finish their work to go home and eat.

  The discrepancy between male and female work ethics is not limited to the Yemen Observer. Friends who manage oil companies, NGOs, or embassies often rave to me about their female Yemeni employees and decry the sloth of the men. This is partly because the women don’t have the same sense of entitlement that the men do; they feel fortunate to have the opportunity to work. It is still unusual for women to work outside of the home in Yemen, and it takes a tough, driven woman to convince her family to allow her to pursue education and seek employment. By the time women get to the workplace, they are already seasoned fighters, whereas men are often handed jobs simply because of family connections.

  Najma is lucky; her mother has always encouraged her to do what she wants. “And your father?” I ask. She hasn’t mentioned him. She waves a hand dismissively. “He’s not like my mother.”

  But she still has to fight to prove to the men at the office that she is as capable as they are. In fact, she is quickly growing more capable, solely as a result of her determination. By late autumn, her Health and Science page is at last improving. One Saturday, she turns in a three-thousand-word breast cancer story. I had told her that the story must be at most a thousand words. “Most readers won’t read past five hundred,” I say. “Please make this a thousand words and then give it back to me. I want you to make the cuts yourself. And I need you to put the news up front. We are not producing a medical textbook; you can leave out these lengthy and technical medical explanations. What I want to know is, what is happening in Yemen? How many Yemeni women have breast cancer? And what treatments are available to them in Yemen? This is what our readers care about—not women worldwide.”

  Najma looks at me as though I have just shot her mother.

  “Okay,” she says bleakly.

  “And I want it back before you leave today.”

  Her eyes widen over her kheemaar.

  “You can do it,” I say.

  And she does. It takes her until nearly six P.M., working nonstop, but she does it. When she hands it back to me, it is twelve hundred words long (close enough) and she has reworked the structure and reporting exactly as I asked her to do. How far she has come! And Najma has found some real news, in that Yemen has just acquired its first clinic specializing in the treatment and prevention of breast cancer.

  I am so proud of her! I thank her for staying late, and she tells me her mother is very upset with her. “Please tell her it’s my fault,” I say. “I promise to send you home early tomorrow.”

  When I arrive the next morning, I make a beeline for her.

  “Najma, I was really happy with your rewrite of your story. You did exactly what I wanted you to do. So shukrahn.”

  Her eyes crinkle with happiness over her veil. That look is enough to make me think, Well, maybe I’ll try to survive another month.

  I GIVE NAJMA her biggest challenge yet on World AIDS Day, celebrated on December 1, which hands us a news peg for writing an update on the progress of the disease in Yemen. This is Najma’s first attempt at tackling this subject, and I am curious to see how she will handle it.

  This is how Najma begins her story:

  A Muslim scholar has reached a result concluded by thought and study. AIDS is regarded as one of God’s strong soldiers. Any people contradict God’s right way are punished by a kind of torture. So AIDS is a torture firstly and violently infects some societies which have declared sexual revolution, allowed man to marry another man, and made the obscene acts as usual things.

  It goes on like this for, oh, three thousand words or so and includes all kinds of misinformation, including the fact that Kofi Annan is the “secretary general of the United States.” I am sure he would be interested to know that.

  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Particularly when I see passages like this:

  The first cases infected with AIDS in the world comes as evidence to prove what is told in the Hadith, Mohammed’s prophetic tradition. The prophet Mohammed has told us … the bad results caused by appearing and spreading practicing the adultery in one society. Declaring carelessly practicing such things bring God’s torture. God may send the plague disease as a torture on those people or some other strange diseases which are not known by their ancestors. So AIDS … comes to prove the prophet’s speech and as a torture fallen down on the humanity that keeps away from God’s right way.

  The disease, she also informs us, “is not limited to the sexual odd people” and will spread more rapidly with the advent of the Internet in Yemen, because education is very dangerous.

  I cannot possibly run the story. It’s a judgmental rant and contains almost no facts. I am sitting at my desk staring at the piece when Luke walks in.

  “What now?” he says when he sees my face.

  “Believe me, you don’t want to know.” What would Najma say, I wonder, if she knew that Luke is gay? The cognitive dissonance might just do her in. Everyone loves Luke.

  “Let me see the story,” he says when I tell him.

  I do, and a few minutes later Luke is back in my office, equally appalled. “Okay, I can see why we’re not running it.”

  “On a technical note,” I say, “if AIDS is meant to punish homosexuals, why is it that lesbians have the lowest infection rate?”

  “God likes lesbians better?”

  “Funny, I always picture God as a straight man.”

  “Straight men love lesbians.”

  “Incidentally, what’s the Arabic word for lesbians? For some reason my dictionary doesn’t have it.”

  “There are no lesbians in the Arab world. There are women who have sex with each other, but no lesbians.”

  The next day, I call Najma into my office and ask her to sit down next to me. I am so nervous that my hands tremble and I hide them in my skirts. It is important to me that I do this right. I do not want to risk offending her religious beliefs or losing my temper. Keeping my voice as calm and steady as possible, I explain to her that the Health and Science page is no place for opinion or judgment. What you have written, I say, is more a sermon than a piece of journalism.

  “I have great respect for your beliefs, and naturally you are free to think what you want, but you may not put your personal beliefs in this newspaper. The only place in the paper that should show any evidence of personal beliefs is the Op-Ed page.”

  She listens and nods, her dark eyes serious. She does not argue or resist what I am telling her.

  I go through her entire story, line by line, explaining to her every error. I explain which contentions go against science and which are simply un-provable. Education, I say, is much more likely to prevent the spread of AIDS than to increase it. I show her places where she is judging people. “It is not our role to judge,” I say. “It is our job to lay out the facts for people and let them make their own opinions. Let’s leave the judgment up to God.”

  She nods and seems almost ashamed. We talk about the definition of the word “fact.” We discuss the importance of studies being conducted by reputable universities and medical research centers, published in reputable journals, and peer reviewed. This is all news to her.

  And oh! I can’t help myself! I have to know what she will say! I ask her why lesbians so rarely get AIDS if it is meant to punish homosexuals.

  This is obviously not a point she has ever considered. “I don’t know,” she says.

  “Maybe something to think about,” I say.

  While she
seems to understand, I won’t really know if I have gotten through to her until I see her next story.

  Toward the end of our talk, she looks up at me pleadingly. “I worked so hard on this—”

  I stop her. “I know how hard you work. And I really appreciate that. This isn’t at all about how hard you work. This is just part of learning how to do this work better. It’s a continual process. We are all constantly learning. But I am well aware of how hard you work.”

  And we are through. She thanks me and leaves. I feel limp with relief and happy that I have managed to get through the entire conversation without once raising my voice or getting angry. Progress for both of us!

  The next time Najma turns in a story on AIDS, it addresses the bias against victims of the disease and the misperceptions about how it is spread. It is full of factual information and accurate statistics and contains no preaching whatsoever. I very nearly kiss her.

  A TINY BESPECTACLED WOMAN shows up in my office one morning, unannounced. She wears a hijab, but her face is uncovered. This is Adhara. “I want to be a translator,” she says.

  I sigh. She and half the country. Everyone who speaks even a few words of English thinks they can be a translator, and they all show up at the paper sooner or later.

  I politely inform her that we are not hiring translators—though we desperately need them—as Faris won’t give me the money to pay one.

  “But I need practice,” she says. “I will work as a volunteer. My translation is very bad.”

  Hardly an advertisement for her skills, but I’m impressed with her honesty. Most would-be translators consider themselves quite brilliant, despite the fact that they can’t put together a job application that isn’t riddled with errors. Still, I worry that shoddy translations will only create more work for me. I send her away.