Few cities in the world can be as unknown to outsiders as Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and The Book of Sana’a is the first major collection of Yemeni fiction in translation.
Each of the anthologies in Comma Press’s ever-interesting Reading the City series offers ten short stories, either specially commissioned or never previously translated into English, by ten different authors from the city in question. Collectively, the stories reveal what makes the featured city, the city it is. They take its people as narrators, protagonists, and antagonists; explore its neighbourhoods; uncover its historical layers; debate its contemporary politics; offer glimpses of its subcultures; explore its secrets. Overall, they offer diverse and conflicting impressions of the place the authors call home, but which may be startlingly unfamiliar to readers.
Sana’a has well documented problems. The editor, Laura Kasinof, makes clear in her introduction that despite its abject poverty, its rivalries and vendettas, and its desolation through war, it remains a city brimming with energy and possibility, one which Sana’anis continue to appreciate as their home, even as buildings collapse about them. It is, too, a city with a long literary history, for contemporary writers to draw upon.
Yemen has suffered a decade-long war between the Ansarallah movement (the “Houthis”) and the internationally-recognised Yemeni government, so it’s sadly inevitable that political upheaval and violence provide the backdrop to many of the stories.
Abdoo Taj and Wajdan Al-Shathali both turn to surrealism to explore aspects of war. “Borrowing a Head” by Abdoo Taj is a story in which people’s heads fall off, so they can lend them and borrow them, if they wish. Abdoo Taj uses this set-up to satirise the current conditions of Yemeni society:
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.
Wajdan Al-Shathali’s “The Jacket” concerns a visitor to Sana’a, there to attend a creative writing workshop, who is repeatedly ordered, at gunpoint, to relinquish his jacket—or is he? The story seems to question whether or how people hang onto their sanity in the face of the horrific repetitions of war.
“Sana’a’s Missiles” by Gamal Alsha’ari also deals with the effect on sanity of devastating loss. On the day after a perfect wedding, a groom can’t work out why all his relatives are gathered outside his bedroom dressed in mourning clothes, and similarly on subsequent days. Eventually, a psychiatrist helps him to understand his situation.
Rim Mugahed’s Ruse of Sana’a explores how war can upend childhood, and personal identity. Following her father’s kidnap by the Houthis, a young woman, who remains unnamed, but whose femininity was previously guarded and cherished by her mother, is forced to support her now-impoverished family by taking odd jobs, something she can do only by disguising herself as a boy. The Road to Destiny by Atiaf Alwazir also looks at the effects of war on a family. It is set in the late 1960s, during Yemen’s civil war between republicans and royalists. It explores memory, loss, familial love, trauma, and the emotional resonance of those two words, haunting in any language: if only. If only Jamila’s beloved younger sister Raja’ had not wanted to escape Sana’a for the country, she’d still be alive, but as it is, Jamila is left remembering her sister’s last day, and death.
A Photo and a Half-Full Glass by Badr Ahmed is set during the Arab Spring protests, and features graphic accounts of violence in counterpoint to a family tragedy in which overbearing parents insist their son sacrifice his dreams to their own desires, and yet still they cannot keep him safe.
Not all authors choose to address war and violence. The General Secretariat of Speed Bumps, by Hayel al-Mathabi is a very funny satire on incompetence, corruption and inefficiency in frankly loony local government. Though the contexts could scarcely be more different, Hayel al-Mathabi’s General Secretariat for Speed Bumps may remind readers of Dickens’ Circumlocution Office.
Questions of Running and Trembling by Gehad Garallah is a feminist meditation on the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship, conveyed through a story about a girl, properly dressed in an abaya and a niqab, who decides to run outside, rather than to walk. It argues for societal change: trust women enough to give them more freedom! It also includes some beautiful imagery. When the protagonist walks quickly, her abaya stirs up “waves of dust like a fluttering bird”.
Shadows of Sana’a by poet Maysoon al-Eryani, a Yemeni take on magic realism, offers a story of discord amongst a family of jinn living in Sana’a’s old city, a UNESCO world heritage site where people—and jinns—have lived for over two thousand years.
The Girl of the Fountain, by Afaf al-Qubati, is set during Ottoman rule over Yemen. It concerns a baby girl, given up by her mother, who appears to the fifteen-year-old narrator, to be no more than thirteen. Despite its grimness, the story is one of hope.
The anthology includes established novelists (Badr Ahmed, Hayel al-Mathabi), up and coming writers (Maysoon al-Eryani, Rim Mugahed) and debut authors (Afaf al-Qubati). It is pleasing to note that fully half of the writers are women. All the translations (by a bevy of different translators) read fluently in English, and notes explain culturally specific references likely to be obscure to Western readers. In all, this is a brave and fascinating anthology that deserves to be widely read.