Postcards from Egypt and Yemen

February 2005: After three months in Cairo, I board a plane to Addis Ababa, where my girlfriend and I plan to begin an overland journey to Djibouti after witnessing the bizarre spectacle of a concert given by Rita and Ziggy and the gang in tribute to what would have been Bob Marley's 60th birthday in a hardscrabble country that needs Rastafarianism like a fish needs a bicycle. I left Egypt with a sense of relief. Studying Arabic at the 4U Arabic School on Mizan Talat Harb had been rewarding, and I had enjoyed the splendors left behind by pharaohs and sultans, but in the end, the inescapable filth and poverty and petty grifting became too much. I was too aware of the sorry state of the city and its people to find refuge in the seductions of orientalism or pure language for too long. I had come to think ill of Egyptians, seeing in them some especially pernicious version of the petty scheming and frustrated passion that characterize all the world's oppressed and dispossessed in varying ways. I did not feel much better about the heirs to the architecture of dispossession I met in Cairo. Of all the Americans I knew there, only one struck me as particularly interesting. He was a gay man, of whom it was said that he took a new Egyptian lover three times a week. He had been in Egypt for a long time. I can't remember how long--eight years, twelve. He worked at an English-language daily and earned an Egyptian wage. In all his years in Egypt, he said, he had only returned to the States once. He hadn't been able to stop crying, he said, while abroad in the country of his birth. The other Americans I met were Fulbright kids doing a lot of eating and drinking on Zamalek (a rich and westerized island in the Nile), backpackers on a factory schedule, ugly girls who insisted on dressing scantily wherever they went in the 15-million person Islamic city, rich dilettante kids talking about their esoteric and exclusive tastes in music and film. I may not have been so damned interesting myself in those days.

June 2005: After three months studying Arabic in Sana'a, Yemen, I and my companion fly to Sri Lanka by way of despicable Dubai. Yemen had been fascinating. No revelations about human freedom, perhaps, but this was my second spin on the merry-go-round of exotic escapism. I would make a quip about the Arabian peninsula not being the best place to explore one's freedom, but that is hardly the point. Certainly Arab culture places constraints on behavior, but the threads of custom often exercise a lighter touch than enforcement officials. Sana'a did have its share of boys with slapsticks, but I certainly never felt as nervous around the agents of state power in Yemen as I do in today's America, where the state has begun to approximate Mussolini's Hegelian ideal: "Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state." But comparing the machinery of global domination backed by H-bombs to tribal clashes in the desert gets us nowhere, and I don't want to overwhelm the margin of this postcard with an excursion into comparative parasitism. The point, I think, is that I was less in a position to appreciate what the Yemenis had to offer than I might have been some years prior or thence. Hindsight has made me wise to the problem. It was less than two years since I had undergone surgery to repair a cranial ailment. A serious matter indeed. To put it very simply, in those days I was still scared. Of death, yes, but also of winking out before I had seen what I thought was mine to see, do what I thought was mine to do, feel what certainly was mine to feel. I think that the long voyage of 2005 was ultimately an unconscious hedging maneuver. If it is my lot to be stricken down by this cranial thing, I (unconsciously) reasoned, let me first see the world. Yes, I was privileged even in my quiet desperation. My search for fulfillment followed the cheap and easy paths charted by this comparative privilege. Let it be fast, easy, exotic; let it come with enough sound and fury to keep the fear in abeyance. The fear is inside us all. But if it is not kept in abeyance by a rigorous discipline of honesty and love, the kernel of it swells into an inert mass with its own gravity, a weight that burdens every action and tarnishes every joy, a millstone that gathers unto itself more and more of the spirit's vitality, always more, until one day...actually I do not know how to conclude this sentence, having somehow scraped through the grinder with my soul intact. But I know that the body of death was hanging off me like a spare tire in those days, and was considerably tarnishing my prospects for enjoyment. And that it may have led, for a time, to the serial consumption of exotic experience as a way of shuffling my piece around the board before joining the game.

Now that the excuses are out of the way, here is Yemen's due: Enchanting from the first glimpse, it got stranger, deeper and vaster by orders of magnitude. We enrolled in the Sana'a Institute for Arabic Studies and took private lessons from dapper young teachers named Osama and 'Afif. The unfortunate John Walker Lindh had passed through the same institute before opting for more religiously flavored instruction, first in the Hadramawt and ultimately in distant Afghanistan. We made journeys to mountain villages, ten story mud buildings rising from desert oases, forlorn malarial cities on the Red Sea, and the seething crater of 'Aden. We rented a 5-story house in Sana'a for 300 dollars a month and furnished one room to live in. We adopted a kitten off the street and named it Qamr, moon. We were studying Fusha Arabic now, the official version. Sometimes I felt that I was getting a good grip on it, like when sat down to discuss life with 'Abdullah Soeid in his shop. I remember asking him if he was religious, and him answering of course, religion was the essence life, that God had made him for that purpose, and him citing a passage from the Qur'an, and me understanding everything. At other times, most times, I felt completely lost. The Arabic word for dictionary, qamus, also denotes the ocean. Indeed. I remember telling my teachers that I would return to Yemen sometime soon as I left, and honestly thinking that I would. I haven't gone back yet. Is soon over yet?

Just a note: American immigration officials never questioned me about the Yemeni residence permit pasted into passport--perhaps my Ivy League degree is worth something after all.