The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (28 page)

I keep all of this to myself. I tell al-Asaadi that I won’t change anything that is factual.

“Your editorial isn’t factual.”

“It is.”

“You need to say Americans killed Saddam.”

“I am not going to perpetuate untruths.”

“Then I will pull the editorial,” he says imperiously, attempting to yank the paper out of my hands.

“You will
not
pull the editorial,” I say, hanging on to the paper. “That is not your decision to make.”

“Hadi, kill the editorial,” he calls to our designer.

“Hadi, do
not
kill that editorial!”

Our reporters have all stopped working and turned around to watch us, their mouths hanging open. Their eyes are frightened, like those of children watching their parents fight. I’m glad the women aren’t here to see this. They miss my battles with al-Asaadi because they’re nearly always gone before he arrives.

We are both still tugging on the page. “Don’t make me behave in a bad way,” says al-Asaadi.

“You are responsible for your own behavior. If you behave in a bad way that’s
your
decision, not mine,” I say, refusing to loosen my grip.

He drops the page.

“You kill that editorial and I am going to Faris.”

“Go ahead, call Faris.”

I run to my office for my phone. My fingers are shaking as I dial. I have had it with al-Asaadi.

Faris, miraculously, answers his phone. I take the phone out to our courtyard and pour out my frustrations. I tell him about the editorial and about how al-Asaadi has been trying to sabotage every issue. I also remind him that my contract grants me total editorial control.

Faris tells me a story. “Jennifer, you know the tale of the robe?”

“No.”

“A man went out shopping one evening, and his wife asked him, while he was out, to please pick up a robe for her. Well, when the man came back later, he had everything else but had forgotten the robe. And the wife was very angry and yelled at him, and they had a huge fight. But the fight was not about the robe; it was about everything else in their relationship. Do you understand me?”

I do.

Faris tells me to e-mail him the editorial. He reads it and rings me back immediately. “You can run this if you want,” he says. “It would be best, however, if you run it as an opinion piece instead of an editorial. You see, I am trying to keep people from throwing bombs at the paper.”

“This would get bombs thrown at us?” I have failed to consider this.

“It’s possible.”

“Which part?”

“You cannot say that there is any argument against capital punishment. It is part of Islam.”

I am surprised. This is not the part of the editorial that I thought might get us killed.

“Oh,” I say. “I hadn’t realized.”

“Other than that it’s fine.”

I think for a moment. “I think maybe I won’t run it. Or I’ll run it as an opinion piece in the next issue.”

“It’s up to you.”

“I actually don’t want to get the paper bombed.”

Faris says he will sit down with us to talk this out on Saturday.

After I hang up, I tell al-Asaadi what Faris has said, adding, “You want a new editorial, you write it. I’m leaving. I’ve been here thirteen hours already and you’ve been here—what? Two?”

“Fine.” He is sitting at his desk, waiting for me to leave. He often stays until I am gone so he can change things without me finding out until it’s too late.

I pick up my things and go.

On my way out I stop in the newsroom, where only Hadi and Farouq are still working. I tell Hadi what we’re doing with the page, thank him for his work, and say good-bye. When I thank Farouq, he says, “It will be okay. These things happen. Just be patient.”

“Farouq,” I say wearily, “I get tired of being patient.”

He smiles at me. “Allah will help you.”

“Shukrahn
, Farouq, I hope so.”

The worst thing about arguments with al-Asaadi is that by the end of them I feel as angry and disappointed with myself as I do with him. This is what I vowed I would avoid. The last thing I wanted to do was to come off like a patronizing, domineering, aggressive, culturally insensitive westerner steamrolling the locals. Yet somehow I too often end up in shouting matches with al-Asaadi, Qasim, or the Doctor. Given that
no one
ever shouts at the Doctor, there is great excitement in the office when this happens, and everyone gathers around to watch. I get the feeling that a few of them would cheer were that possible.

But I hate to shout. I’ve never been a shouter and I’ve certainly never yelled at anyone at work. I am uncomfortable with the discovery of this angry, frustrated, dictatorial part of me. After battles with al-Asaadi or the others, I am always in tears and full of self-loathing for losing control once again. Then I swear to myself that it won’t happen again, that I will reason calmly with my staff and hope that I can cajole them around to my point of view instead.

Thankfully, I rarely have to yell at the women, mostly because they rarely argue with me. When I do raise my voice, I feel particularly awful because they would never do the same to me. This happened with Najma in the early months, and I called her into my office.

“I am sorry,” she said as soon as she walked into my office. “I will do better.”

“Najma, I am the one who should apologize to you. I should never yell at you; there is no excuse.”

“No, you should. We deserve it.” Her eyes are dark and earnest.

This breaks my heart. “You do
not
deserve it. No one deserves to be yelled at. I will try not to do it again.”

“But you can—”

“I don’t want to. I don’t like to yell. I should be able to talk with you about work without getting upset. I make mistakes. I am sorry.”

On Saturday, Faris finally appears at the office, and we talk about al-Asaadi. He does not seem surprised by his behavior and tells me that al-Asaadi has an ego problem. He wants to be a media superstar without doing any of the actual work. Al-Asaadi has the potential to become a really good reporter, I say, and a better manager. The problem is that he is unwilling to learn or to work within a schedule. Faris agrees that al-Asaadi is a poor manager and is better suited for a glad-handing job in public relations. He promises to have a word with him.

Then he introduces me to an attractive, charming young man named Ali who wants to join our staff. The product of a Yemeni father and American mother, Ali grew up in Oregon and speaks perfect English. I am thrilled to have him and put him straight to work. He immediately earns my undying gratitude by turning my reporters’ stories into passable English.

The women are even more thrilled. They turn into adolescents around him, giggling and awkward and shy. When Zuhra comes to fetch her tea from Radia at reception, Radia tells her to go back into the newsroom. “I will bring you the tea,” she whispers. “Just so I can come look at him again!”

Even Manel, a fine-looking man himself, is impressed. “He
is
the best-looking Yemeni I have ever seen,” he says.

Ali is either unaware of the stir he creates or is simply accustomed to it. He types away at his desk, oblivious to the little black pillars of rayon swooning in his wake.

I’m feeling much more cheerful until Faris rings me again to tell me that al-Asaadi claims he cannot turn in his pages on deadline because he wants the news to be as fresh as possible. My dark mood instantly returns. “Look,” I say to Faris, “if he cannot turn in his pages by one
P.M
., when precisely will he turn them in? The point is that I need him to pick a deadline that he can stick to
every single issue.”

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 than 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?”