A Story of Two Sunrises

A Boxing tournament Episode #6

There are two times of the day, which cannot be explained no matter how hard we look up words, metaphors or phrases. It does not matter how much combined physics and philosophy one can put into those times, for the bulk of events that occur within them are just beyond comprehension. Sun rise and sun set are basically the essence of any day and the essence of every beginning and end. One of my most extra ordinary mornings ever came after a very long night. Now I don’t really measure length here by how long I stayed up as I slept 9 hours that night! Yet,  it was very long with all the bitter tears I shared with myself as the closest person to me back then decided to leave me over an online chat as I was miles away by myself in a sad corner in Cairo International Airport waiting for my flight to Paris.

On the plane, I cried my eyes until I slept, and even during my sleep questions were haunting me.. Why did I have to be so different from everyone else in my society? Am I going to die alone? And all the whys kept chasing me while I was awake on my next plane from Charles De Gaulle Airport to Strasbourg where I was supposed to give a testimony to the equality committee in the Council of Europe then attend their briefing on my testimony as well as the other Libyan, Syrian and Egyptian ladies in the European Parliament session.

I arrived in Strasbourg around 7 p.m and couldn’t help the tears again. I quietly wiped the tears during dinner then slept. Next morning, I woke up to Strasbourg’s sunrise, and opened my window to this huge billboard across the street saying: “I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself”  –Simone de Beauvoir-

There are very few moments in life when hearts break in a way that makes us hear the sound of the shattered pieces falling to a very solid floor only to shatter more. But then there are women like me who simply know that their message in life makes it so difficult for them to be unconditionally loved since those rules that bend and break women to deprive them from being human beings instead of the human attachments those rules justify injustice to turn women into are simply inapplicable to me. And the package the comes with my struggle as a feminist makes my company unbearable to everyone around me who made a choice not to question the rules that we were taught to take for granted; therefore, people tend to say goodbye to me more often than they stay.

That sun rise in Strasbourg simply gave me one hell of a morning to remember, the strength I needed to cherish the good memories I had and the sensibility not to hate those who left me as not everyone is up to the struggle I made a choice to carry on. After all, life is all about choices.

I remembered all of this today, as Sanaa’s sunrise was not a very promising one when I couldn’t decide how I really feel about a photograph of dead bodies moved by a garbage truck. My reputable intelligence could not help me answer the too many questions my senses were posing all at once. Why did we get caught in the middle of an elite armed conflict last year in Al-Hasaba? Why did Saleh and Al Ahmars enjoy their mansions as they let those simple men fight their ugly war? Why are those men wrapped in blood stained sheets without any name tags? How did their bodies lay in the morgue for over a year without anyone identifying them? Do they have mothers who want to smell them when they hug the way mothers do to us as if we are still newborns? Do they have lovers who hid their new dresses to wear for them when they come back? Do they have daughters who wanted to know more about life than their mothers’ tears and poverty? Who are those men and why in the world are they on the back of a garbage truck? And why is there a child staring at them as if he were in a toy store?
All those questions attacked my heart the way cancer attacks organs.. So brutally and merciless.. All those questions hit me today even though I saw the picture a week ago. Why today? Because activists called for a protest in front of President Hadi’s house this morning demanding an explanation for what happened in that picture.. And I simply started getting too overwhelmed as I knew that President Hadi’s house fences are too high for him to see what time of the day it was! Let alone hear a bunch of people wondering about the bodies on the back of a garbage truck…
As I expected, the protest was small but that is not worth deep thinking as much as people who drove and walked around the protest. Only then, I remembered a very important part of that picture! The qat dealers who sat to sell all kinds of qat when the truck passed..If people can sit to buy and sell when a garbage truck full of dead bodies passes by, how is it possible for people on a main road to notice protestors asking about a truck they never saw?!!! If the ones who saw were not moved, how are we asking the ones who didn’t for solidarity?!!!

Around noon, I stopped a taxi and kept thinking all the way home of this: If a regime attacks protests, it is creating heroes out of the protestors and this is what happened last year on March 18^th. 2011 Friday of Dignity/Karama. But, if a regime wants to make protests invisible, all it has to do is make people get used to them; more importantly, make people get used to the idea of dead bodies so that when masses of them die, they would still hit the market to sell and buy.

Some mornings are extra ordinary because they remind us how valuable we are, just like that morning of mine in Strasbourg when I improvised while giving my testimony and taught EU MPs how a 24 year old Yemeni woman cannot be bent or broken. And some mornings come as a reminder of how worthless one’s life can be in the country she/he was taught to call home but all it has offered so far is a garbage truck that, who knows, might be where my dead body rests when my day comes.

Good Night Everyone : )

Then They Came for Me, and There Was No one Left to Speak Out for Me

Martin Niemöller  was a German clergyman who once described the program of the Nazi Party as a "Renewal movement based on a Christian moral foundation".

  Deep down inside, Niemöller did not remotely consider that he and Hitler had different perceptions of nationalism until Hitler eventually declared the rule of state over religion. After that, Niemöller became on the Nazi’s wanted list of executions as he started a clergymen war against the Nazis.

The world does not quite remember Martin Niemöller as much as it remembers what he said later about the Nazis:


“First they came for the communists

and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak out for me.”

Later in his life, Niemöller became against any sort of violence that he even opposed the cold war because, as he explained, the church cannot be saved by the same sort of violence it rejects.

You might be wondering why I remembered this story today… Well, today I happened to be 30 minutes away from a bombing that killed at least 17 men inside and around the Intelligence HQ in Aden, Yemen. I am not going to describe the scene as I was not there. However, I can go on and on for hours describing the scene everywhere else.

People in Yemen managed to get used to death. The media is too busy with holiday’s songs since tomorrow is the first day of Eid, a Muslim holiday that comes after one month of fasting. Life does not stop  here and Yemenis do not stop even for one second of silence when people die. Malls are loaded and so are the streets. People here live by a principle that allows them to rejoice and live normally as long as what is happening one block away is not related to them. More importantly, people refuse to relate to whatever is different from what they believe in or live by.
The state gets a big part of the blame here. When the state does not stop  not even for a second in official events and media, those souls become cheaper and cheaper every day. If people do not feel the importance of a Yemeni citizen’s soul, how are we expecting communities to get involved in fighting terrorism? And yes! Of course I want to involve people in fighting terrorism, for Saleh’s alliance with the US drones’ policy is not the answer in my opinion.  And I won’t spend more space in this blog to speak about how I am against US drones in Yemen since Jeremy Scahill  expressed most of what I would want to say.

And Ibrahim Mothana  summed up the whole story when he wrote: “DEAR OBAMA, when a U.S. drone missile kills a child in Yemen, the father will go to war with you, guaranteed. Nothing to do with Al Qaeda,”  


Bottom line is that people in Yemen started to form their own groups and each group hides within a bubble. What scares me the most is how every bubble is closed from the inside and at the same time wants a piece of the "New" state without wanting to be part of the wide society that forms the so called new state. Moreover, those bubbles are fed by all external petro-dollar stakeholders starting with the US and Saudi Arabia and ending with Iran.

Two days ago, this picture was all over the internet. It is simply a manifestation of how stinky those two figures can be. A very obvious example is how  for months, both of the Saudi and Iranian media invested in changing the image of the Syrian revolution to an ugly sectarian war. All those TV channels and newspapers on the both sides telling the world their sectarian version of the story while scores of Syrians bleed, and only in a picture like this, one can witness the blood stains on those hands that managed to shake in a 7 star conference.  Similarly, religion was used by both of Saudi Arabia and Iran redirect any sort of real reform in Yemen. 

Niemöller wanted his side of the story and he did not care who was going to sink in the Nazi madness as long as he is not included. Yet, he eventually got to learn that watching blood pouring into the ocean from a distant shore can only delay his own bloodshed and not save him from the inevitable.

Politicians of the world are sitting back and grinning behind their expensive crystal glasses as Yemenis kill each other under the orders of “Men of God” who secretly drink toasts of our blood with the same politicians who wash away our blood stains with petrol and dollars.
All theocratic poles in Yemen are growing in their own bubbles forming a timed bomb and the one thing that can stop the bomb’s clock from ticking is the anti-terrorism recipe: Food, infrastructure and education; in other words SOCIAL JUSTICE.

I don’t want to sit back and watch just because I am safe, for I know that when the time comes for me, no one would be left to save me…

Masks of Yemeni, Arab Women.. Masks in Russia

A Boxing Tournament Episode #5

                                  

 I am not big on holidays.. The whole list.. The religious ones and the national ones.. Holidays are not my time of the year to play dress up and chill.. I am a person who enjoys seasonal vacations with a good company of friends and books. And even though I live in a country where the minority always imposes life choices on the majority, I still cannot say that I want holidays to be cancelled. Yet, I wish they would be less of the ugly reminder they are on both of the private and public level.

In order for anyone to fully understand my relationship with holidays, it is important to imagine my city in detail. Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with architectural facts here, for all what it takes to describe my city is one word: Veiled. Yes, my city is covered; it hides under layers and layers of masks. Of course those layers differ from one level to another, but the final result is always the same and this is why it takes quite some time to really understand the reality and truth of this place. On one hand, take the beautiful old city as an example.. A whole city with its own fences, tiny windows, huge stairs, sesame oil camel labs, silver shops, music, Tuesdays’ donkeys’ market.. etc. All of that is hiding within a collective punishment of bumpy roads that turn to rivers of dirt during rainy seasons, damaged sewage system, dead trees, unbelievably absent traffic system and poorly designed buildings.

On the other hand, there are the many traditional, religious and socio-economic layers under which women hide. If you take a walk around in Sana’a, you can see one thing in common between women who walk on the street: The layers of black. Even though there are degrees of black fabric that women can go around and invade with colors here and there at times or simply surrender to its thick symbolism most of the time, the masks women have to wear everyday in my neighborhood; city and country go beyond fabric and cloth.

Women in Yemen have their own set of Dos and Don’ts but maybe the biggest set rests within their list of what I like to call: “Cannot be exposed.” That is of course one long list of limitations to women’s exposure or basically what women can share. And of course, within the narrow allies, the layers of fabric and the hundreds of songs and folklore story-based dances, women hide secrets of everything their bodies and souls have witnessed.

This holiday is a bit different.. As tonight I am living the last moments of August17th. 2012,a historical day on which three brave Russian women were sentenced to spend two years in jail. The masks  Yekaterina Samutsevitch, Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova wore during their Pussy Riot performances are not by any means different from those women in my country wear. Most importantly the Pussy Riot’s fight is not any different from a feminist’s fight in Yemen, Tunisia or Egypt. The fight of the punk rock three feminists is basically the same of Tunisian women who are trying to save their citizenships from Ennahda’s tricky alterations of the constitution. Pussy Riot’s battle is the same of Egyptian women who stood tall in the face of humiliating virginity tests last year. And those masks Pussy Riot wore are simply the same pieces of cloth that Yemeni women used as veils to break walls that fathers, brothers, husbands and sons built to drag the same Yemeni woman who was a queen only 200 years ago to become a protester for a year and a half trying to find a place in a new state where the tribe flirts with clergymen in order to confine Yemeni women to bedrooms and kitchens. 

This holiday season holds the same bitterness of every year’s usual scenes of poverty, sickness and women silenced under layers of masks. Yet, tonight I cannot help but feel the rush within me for the thought of the very scared “Papa” Putin.. Yes! Scared! Scared of a prayer within a song, which terrified him and made him sense the need to lock that prayer inside the electrical guitar he thought he could get rid of.. But poor “Papa” Putin just like the rest of patriarchal “Papas”, he does not know that once a song is sung, it cannot be locked as it is carried by the air every woman breathes that gets through the tiny holes of veils and masks.

This season, I can see some future hope for women in my country. I know that tomorrow is dark with eight women dying every day because reproductive health is not a priority for Yemeni governments.  I know that more than half of the “Marriages” in Yemen are basically a lease to rape children with the consent of “Papas”. I know that behind bars, there are women who were found guilty for the same exact actions their partners are free outside and bragging about. However, I can still see hope within the spark of those eyes, which challenged those layers of black veils last year to scream: “Oh Yemenia Revolt Revolt” I have seen those women face the bullets on the front lines, treat the injured and lead the crowds. This land of queens cannot bend women for too long.
To women of the world, to Arab women, to Yemeni women.. To the masks we shall one day remove: Happy Holidays : )
And to Yekaterina , Maria and Nadezhda I say: солидарность!