With an ongoing conflict, economic insecurity, widespread malnutrition, and a fragile healthcare system, Yemenis have been facing a multitude of crises for over a decade. But rarely do we ever hear about their plight from their voice.
However, with the recently published The Book of Sana’a, readers can finally get an insight into the myriad ways that war and oppressive regimes have touched the lives of ordinary Yemenis.
Edited by Laura Kasinof and published by Comma Press in April, the anthology presents ten short stories by Yemeni writers, which unfold in one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, Sanaa.
In The Book of Sana’a, the stories act like vignettes or layers peeling off the capital city’s many streets, home interiors, and lives, taking us on sinuous roads, not unlike the Old City’s ancient alleyways, which prominently feature across the book’s diverse chapters.
In Borrowing a Head (translated by Andrew Leber), Abdoo Taj explores memories and trauma in an absurdist tale of heads falling off and being swapped, revealing insights into their owners’ feelings and troubles.
Human heads have their way of deciphering the world and an individual’s contact with it. We also learn that heads are detachable as if they exist in relation yet autonomously with the rest of one’s body.
"My head fell off for the second time. It rolled along down the road, like an empty can blown by the wind, as I kept running after it," the text from the story reads.
The unnamed narrator in this short story is a man curious about the people around him. He speculates about their lives. "My appetite for borrowing heads knows no limits," he confesses as he recalls lending his head to his cousin Bashir, which resulted in their thoughts and memories interjoining.
"Ever since he started borrowing my head, our memories have started to mix." But this interest is not shared by everyone — a distinction that highlights mental health woes faced by many in conflict zones.
"Not everyone is curious about what happens to heads. One thing I’ve learned since the war broke out is that people try to steer clear of their heads as though they were landmines. They flee painful memories that their heads tempt them to revisit."
The narrator ends his bus journey in Bab al-Yemen, the famous gate of Sanaa’s Old City, to meet his friend Reyhana, whom we guess might be a love interest.
Together, they go to the famed Burj al-Salam hotel, with its panoramic view over the city and its surrounding mountains, only to be refused entry by the receptionist as they could not produce a marriage certificate.
They sit, and Reyhana asks the narrator about happiness — a touchy subject. "I’ve never tasted it," he replies to her. The narrator struggles with a malaise he can’t quite communicate and contemplates, in a concluding thought, whether he should "take off" his head for Reyhana to better understand him.
It is easy to understand why Borrowing a Head won the 2022-2023 al-Rabadi Award for Short Stories; it is a beautiful narrative that touches upon themes that cut across the anthology: the omnipresence of trauma-induced violence and an existence that involves navigating daily struggles, often with social overtones.
We encounter a desire to tackle norms and social impositions in several other stories, such as Questions of Running and Trembling (translated by Laura Kasinof) and The Girl of the Fountain (translated by Mohammed Ghalayini).
In the former, Gehad Garallah revisits mother-daughter relations, girlhood and freedom through a girl’s desire to run and her mother’s resistance to it.
In The Girl of the Fountain, Afaf al-Qubati's story follows the moral dilemma of a midwife’s daughter who is told to abandon a newborn by a fountain, abiding by her mother's precise instructions. It’s a strong debut for Afaf al-Qubati, a member of the Yemen Story Club who graduated from Sana’a University in 2004.
These stories, as well as others included in The Book of Sana’a, remind us of the hardships that Yemeni girls and women face and must overcome, including high standards and social shame in an honour-based society, which often leads many to repress their desires and agency in the name of respectability.
Yemen ranks among the lowest countries in global indices related to gender equality.
The Book of Sana’a also includes historical and fantastical stories that revolve around war, violence, and fate.
Atiaf Alwazir’s The Road to Destiny (translated by Maisa Almanasreh) is set in 1967, during the 1962-1970 internationalised civil war that opposed Egypt-backed Republicans to Royalists in the north.
Here, as with Gamal Alsha’ari’s Sana’a’s Missiles (translated by Basma Ghalayini), the writers grapple with untimely deaths and the human cost of war.
The 2011 protests leading to Ali Abdullah Saleh’s removal and police brutality are revisited in A Photo and a Half-Full Glass from Badr Ahmed (translated by Raph Cormack).
Meanwhile, enlarging the fringes of the human world, Maysoon al-Eryani’s story of jinn encounters and interventions in Shadows of Sana’a’ (translated by Katherine Van de Vate) injects supernatural elements to engage with what keeps people apart and what brings them closer.
All of these coalesce into a polyphonic book where seasoned and emerging writers meet in the literary realm of Sana’a.
The book follows a familiar and tested formula: short fiction by local writers with a city in common. But what does it mean to devote an anthology of fiction to a city?
The innovation of such an approach is to explore different vantage points, and in doing so, to push the boundaries of form and subject matter to interrogate the city as a literary device and character.
We regret the absence of such a bold proposition in Kasinof’s introductory essay, which situates Sanaa’s terrain — the Old City, the mosques, desert mountains, etc —for uninitiated audiences but misses anchoring editorial choices that explain what the compilation of short stories amounts to.
This is perhaps why we find Sanaa somewhat limited to a scenic background and decorum that connects kaleidoscopic short stories, and it leaves us wanting.
Italian writer Italo Calvino had explored the various faces of Venice in Invisible Cities (1972), an ingenious mirage in which the mysterious place is home to the writer’s many fantasies.
There would have been ample space in this anthology to depart from a predetermined publishing template to unleash the potency of language beyond a geography. This could have questioned how this city, Sanaa, shapes the human experience, in mythical and profane ways.
Sanaa is not an interchangeable abstraction in which one substitutes Bab al-Yemen for a beach and becomes a ‘book of Aden’. The writers, who overwhelmingly drive their stories in first-person point of view, drawing us close, render their city in atmospheric sound and sight, a texture at once charming and haunting.
Music pierces through the drums of war and the dreadful impact of deadly missiles. The ancestral beauty of the Old City’s mud houses coexist with urban normalcy, and checkpoint encounters turned fatal.
While the stories touch upon political issues, regarding women's emancipation, for example, the stories themselves are stripped of overt political affiliation. Even the character who participates in a revolutionary march during the 2011 revolutionary protests does so accidentally.
This perhaps makes a point about the randomness of violence and its toll on civilians, but also conveys that the city can easily slip into a literary ornament that may seem reductive at a time of geopolitical turmoil amidst a ten-year-long civil war.
Some may argue that aesthetics provides a sanctuary against censorship, which also comforts expectations (whose?). These two entanglements constrain literature’s radical transformative power.
The book breaks translation barriers, bringing a range of writers to an English-language readership. This is a commendable effort to keep real-life borders at bay in contrast to shrinking empathy and curiosity elsewhere.
With much of Sanaa shaped by externally imposed frames and narratives, we only long to know what the city represents for these writers individually, intimately, in addition to being a site of fecund creation and storytelling.
Farah Abdessamad is a New York City-based essayist/critic, from France and Tunisia
Follow her on X: @farahstlouis