The Woman Who Fell from the Sky (38 page)

“Farouq,” I say, “tell me what percentage of Americans you think are Jews.”

“I don’t know.”

“Just guess. I am curious what you think.”

He considers for a moment. “Twenty percent?”

I hold up two fingers.
“Ithnayn
. Two percent. Tops.”

He is shocked. He had assumed that the entire United States was ruled by a Zionist cabal.

I sigh. “Farouq. I have been in the media for twelve years and I don’t recall ever having been controlled by Jews.” In fact, I reflect, my last three bosses were Catholic. “And while there are certainly plenty of biases evident in newspapers and magazines, I’ve read quite a few pro-Muslim stories. Even in the
New York Times
. Which is, in fact, owned by a Jew. The U.S. media is not one big anti-Muslim block.”

The United States was founded on the idea of religious freedom, I add. “It’s illegal to persecute anyone for his or her religion.”

It’s strange to hear myself sounding so patriotic. I’ve spent a great deal of time agitating
against
the U.S. government—going to anti-Bush demonstrations, signing petitions, marching for peace, and supporting gay rights. Yet in Yemen, I find myself defending the government I have done nothing but complain about for years. And it’s true that in comparison with the corrupt and inefficient Yemeni government, mine is beginning to rise—just a bit—in my esteem.

Farouq is surprised that it is illegal to persecute Muslims in the United States and surprised that any paper has written anything pro-Muslim. Even more, he seems surprised that the United States encompasses diverse viewpoints.

In his story about the students’ Islam project, a source claims that the reason the United States is so afraid of Islam is that it is worried that its entire population will convert.

“I don’t think that’s
quite
it,” I tell Farouq. “The reason some people in the U.S. worry about Islam is that terrorists have used it as an excuse to attack our country.” But I leave the quotation in anyway.

Farouq doesn’t argue with me. He listens. This alone is progress. He has begun to ask me more questions and seems to be trying harder to impress me. Last week he redesigned the front page. He does this fairly often now, coming into my office to show me the two pages side by side in the hopes I will choose his. Sometimes he is right; I am the first to admit I have little design sense. But in this issue I have been quite firm about where I wanted which stories, and when I express this to Farouq, he just shrugs. “You’re the boss,” he says. “It’s your call.”

His deference makes me feel so warm and fuzzy that when he tells me he needs to leave just before deadline to go buy drugs, I don’t try to stop him.

NINETEEN
bright days before deluge

I have stopped fantasizing about going back to New York. I have stopped thinking
of anywhere as home other than my own lovely gingerbread house in Sana’a. I sleep through the night more often than not. I eat meals. When I return to the Old City at sunset and see the gold and rose evening light setting the houses aglow against a darkening sky, I feel like the luckiest person on earth. The paper has never run more smoothly; we’re on such a predictable schedule now that I can make plans with friends even on closing days.

This is how it happens. My canny reporters figure out that meeting deadlines means getting out of work earlier. Getting out of work earlier means spending more time napping, chewing
qat
, or, in rare cases, with their families. In other words, all it takes is for them to realize that they are not just making me happy—there is something in it for
them
.

It sounds so simple. I suppose every manager realizes this at some point: that you must convince your staff that they themselves will benefit from doing what you want them to do. There’s a big difference, however, between reading this seemingly simple philosophy in a management self-help book and trying to implement it at a newspaper in a foreign culture. Not that I’ve ever read a management book. Or—until now—been a manager in a foreign culture. I just fumbled in the dark until one day, light dawned, the paper closed at three
P.M
., and we all sat around marveling at ourselves and wondering how it happened.

Almost everything I learn in Yemen happens through improvisation, through feeling my way over each hurdle, each newsroom battle, and—after 1,001 mistakes—actually hitting upon a successful strategy. For example, one closing day in June, I discover that it isn’t just Faris who can be manipulated with peanut butter cups.

I arrive at work that morning feeling cheerful and excited about social plans I have later. “I don’t feel like dawdling around here today,” I announce to the newsroom. “How about we have the earliest close ever?”

My reporters look up from their computers.
“Insha’allah,”
they say, looking dubious.

I have three front-page stories edited before eleven thirty
A.M.,
which gives me plenty of time to hustle my staff. It is then I am struck with genius.

“The first person to get me his or her front-page story gets five peanut butter cups,” I say. “The second person gets four, the third person gets three, et cetera. Now, go!”

I cannot believe how well this works. Noor gets her story in first, followed by Jabr and Radia. Soon, the men all have chocolate-swollen cheeks, and the women’s hands keep disappearing under their
niqabs
.

As I am in the middle of designing a page with Samir, who is filling in for a tardy Hadi; ringing Sharabi to demand that he come in and give us photos; and ordering my reporters about, Luke swings away from his computer to look at me.

“When you leave here, you really ought to think about joining the circus,” he says. “You have all the skills to be a ringmaster.”

My stomach tightens.
When I leave here?
The phrase fills me with panic.

It is a frenetic day, but we do indeed close early. Farouq turns in a decent story about two brand-new X-ray machines that were intended to screen containers entering Yemen’s ports but that failed embarrassingly in a public demonstration. When the officials put a machine gun through one of the machines, it failed to detect it.

Ibrahim files a story about three officials in Dhamar who were fired on corruption allegations. Zuhra writes another story about Anisa al-Shuaibi, whose rape case goes to trial this week. Luke and I joke that Zuhra is on the sodomy beat after she turns in a series of stories on abused prisoners, raped women, and sodomized men. Every story she reports seems to involve some kind of bodily violation. My little human rights crusader.

Najma gives us a story about how an overabundance of fluoride in the water of some villages is turning children’s teeth brown, and Noor writes a piece about a march through Sana’a to demand funding for children’s programs.

All of our pages are done by two
P.M
., though I stick around a bit to prod my staff along, proof pages, and make sure all of the captions are written and grammatical. “Do you need me?” I ask Hadi before making my escape.

“No,” he says without hesitation. “Go home.”

“Yes,” says Luke, turning to me.
“Please
go home.”

EVEN WHEN DAYS
don’t go this smoothly, I now find my reporters’ mistakes more entertaining than exasperating. Take Bashir’s translation of Farouq’s story about the Huthis: “The minister of endowment and giddiness Hamoud al-Hitar said, ‘We will try to convince the rebels to surrender and lay down arms and stop the war against the camps of the State.’ He adds, ‘Last Saturday, the scholarship committee arrived to Sa’ada to transfer massage from the scholarship to the rebels about the war there.’”

I am sure that a massage by the minister of endowment and giddiness could play a productive part in conflict resolution. But it seems unlikely to happen.

Jabr turns in another of my favorite leads, for a story about a fundraiser for a charity that helps children with cleft palates. “One thousand and seven hundreds dollars for work of Yemeni smile that provide operations for children who have genital problems and who can not smile, said Nerys Loveridge, the Principle of the school. The money delivered to the ambassador of British during the open day that held in Sana’a British School on Wednesday.”

It’s common for Arabic speakers to mix up the P and B sounds. There is no P in Arabic. Thus I often get sentences like this: “There are some teams of masked soldiers called IRF (Instant Response Force). ‘They enter the cell and beat the crab out of the prisoners,’ he said.”

Zuhra pulls her weight in the malapropism department too. When she is assigned to write a story on the celebration of Passover by fifty Yemeni Jews who live in the North and are under government protection in Sana’a after threats were made against them, she describes their food restrictions as such: “Jews are not allowed to eat inflated bread during this time.” In a story about a group of people protesting shoddy medical treatment, she refers to them as “people who have had kidney plantations.”

But perhaps my favorite is this paragraph from a health story she wrote on fertility treatments, which—alarmingly, given the country’s already astronomical birth rate—are increasing. “Women must take medicines that stimulates the ovaries to produce eggs, and the men must stimulate their male liquid. Then, the mother will be in stupefaction in order to take out the eggs. Laser peels the chosen egg from the surrounding cells to guarantee that it will be fertilized appropriately.”

I relish having time to discuss these errors with my reporters. The macro structure of our paper has fallen into place, allowing me to focus on the micro structure of my staff’s stories. Now, instead of hurriedly rewriting everything alone in my drab office, I have reporters come sit with me while I edit their stories. This allows me to explain every change I make.

It’s good that I now have time for these editorial tête-à-têtes, because in the spring I acquire Zaki, who replaces Hassan as the Business page editor. Charming to the point of obsequiousness, pudgy, bespectacled Zaki has a mere passing acquaintance with the English language. I spend hours coaching him and trying to break his habit of using meaningless business jargon sure to befuddle our readers. His stories are full of sentences like this: “Professor, Mohammed Muammar al-Shamiri, Supervisor of Group Insurance, said awareness on the importance of securing is very important either individuals or institutions on the all economic fields in Yemen.” Decipher if you dare.

Zaki is eager to learn and gets me his page before deadline, so I don’t complain. Besides, by now my standards for staff run something along the lines of “Must type with at least two fingers and sometimes show up.”

Zaki is also a source of intriguing cultural information. One afternoon, he bursts into my office, wildly excited.

“Jennifer,” he says, settling into the chair next to my desk and leaning toward me. “I met with the
jinni
yesterday!”

“Oh, great!” I say, thinking he has met my journalist friend Ginny. “I had dinner with her just last night!”

Zaki looks at me in horror. “You did?”

“Yeah,” I say. “At the Indian restaurant.”

“At the
Indian restaurant?”
Zaki looks very confused. I suddenly realize that Zaki means
jinni
as in
jinn
—the oft-evil spirits made of fire and capable of possessing people. It turns out that Zaki was recently called in to help with the exorcism of a possessed woman. And this may not surprise anyone, but it turns out that the bad
jinni
, in this case, spoke English, with an American accent. This is why the sheikh who was reading the Qur’an over the possessed woman needed Zaki to translate.

“Her face changed shape!” he says. “And she turned colors!”

“You saw this?” I say, eyebrow arched.

“Yes!”

“And you really believe in the
jinn?”

He looks offended. “Every Muslim believes in the
jinn!”

“Ah,” I say. This was all before I actually read about the
jinn
in the Qur’an some months later. Not only do all Muslims believe in the
jinn
, they find it inconceivable that there are countries without
jinn
. I tell my Yemeni friends that the closest thing I can think of are ghosts, but they are the leftover energy or spirits of dead people, whereas the
jinn
were never human. I suppose the evil spirits or demons that possess evangelicals in the South and make them speak in tongues are the best Western version of the
jinn
, but with a different backstory.

Zaki describes how the woman writhed and moaned in American English before he returns to the newsroom. I’ve told him that he can write about the
jinn
, but I would like to see if scientists and doctors have any possible alternative explanations for the physical changes in the woman. Perhaps this is too secular a demand, but I am curious to hear what they might say.

I sit mulling this all over and then walk to the newsroom. Something is bothering me.

“Zaki,” I say. “Did this woman know English?”

“No!” he says. “She is completely illiterate!”

“Hmmm.”

“I know a woman like that too,” says Bashir (who often stops in to help, despite having quit months ago). “She was completely illiterate, but when the
jinni
possessed her, she spoke perfect English with an American accent.”

It turns out that pretty much everyone in Yemen knows a woman like this. At a loss for words, I turn back toward my office.

“You had better watch out,” says Najma. “Since the
jinni
is American!”

“If the
jinni
is American,” I say, smiling, “then I don’t think I have to worry.”