YEMEN- SPACES IN-BETWEEN
Khalid swings a nine-inch dagger above his head and sings to the gyrating quiver crackling from a favourite cassette. His other hand rolls a ball of qat to add to the wad already protruding from his cheek. The less important task of driving is delegated to elbows.
“You like my music? Good, no?”
“Good!” Patrick and I chime in high-pitched tandem. Khalid’s toothy smile turns back to the road as he swerves to avoid a renegade donkey. We will the jagged Hajar Mountains above us to divert our attention.
Stopping on the outskirts of an almost-village for a security check, my New Zealand passport creates confusion.
“How do you say it?”
“Where is this place?”
Well, where is this place? I want to ask, but the comfort with which the soldiers exist in the midst of this desolate space suggests the answer would simply be ‘home’.
The almost-village is a row of stone huts that look organic in construction. Khalid pulls to a stop, “Market. Good qat. We buy.”
A seller appears, gesturing frantically.
I smile in defence; “No thanks, no qat.”
Do my trousers make me proxy-male in Yemen? I’ve been invited to sit and chew the afternoon away a few times already but haven’t acquired a taste for the bitter, numbing leaves.
Khalid interprets, “No buying, he just wants you to see.”
The seller flourishes his hands over the hut walls like a car model. Men bearing guns and well-waxed moustaches stare back at me. Here they all are, the many guises of Saddam Hussein: over-striped general, suit-clad intellectual, suave wearer of fedoras. The curator dons a satisfied grin for his foreign audience; now people beyond this market will know his historical sympathies.
Three teenage boys are drawn to my camera. They look similar, all voluminous suit jacket held up by lanky limbs, but the lens captures individual ambitions: the Conqueror holding his victory bouquet of qat; the Politician’s tense hands resting on authoritative knees; the Playboy of the Eastern World lounging in a doorway. I leave with these imagined entities; they stay where reality is brewing in the dust they long to shake off.
In the middle of nowhere (but very definitely somewhere, according to Khalid), five women wearing black abayat punctuate a honey-brown hillside. Each is crowned with a bundle of hay, thus necessitating slow, purposeful movements. The flowing gowns and synchronized steps create an optical illusion: the women skim the earth’s surface rather than leave footprints. Hypnotized, we watch these apparitions until they shimmer and become one entity, a black question mark, in the glare of the afternoon sun.
At some point, the conversation turns to family. Khalid has one wife and three children but wants more of both. When we mention that we’ve no children, Khalid lowers his voice and advises Patrick of the right to a girlfriend if I’m barren. So my proxy-maleness is an illusion; instead, I’m a silent apparition but can’t seem to fade away.
