Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [77]
There was so much lying and hiding going on that you couldn’t believe much of anything unless you saw it yourself, and the things I saw never seemed to match what people said about them. My job would have been easier if I could have been more credulous. “I think maybe this is happening,” says one reporter to the other, who will likely reply, “It can’t be, because so-and-so told us X.” Nobody tells you how to proceed if so-and-so is lying to you, if X is false. Still, you have to file something. The newspaper bawls its big, inky hunger. If you think you know one tiny thing, if somebody has said something, at least it’s something to write about. So you write.
The public affairs officer at the U.S. embassy begrudgingly agreed to a meeting, but it came studded with conditions. “I don’t know how helpful I can be,” he warned grimly.
I breezed straight over as if he’d sent an embossed invitation. By then, I was in a quiet panic. The days had flown and still I had nothing but bits and scraps.
He was talking about ground rules as soon as I sat down. I will speak to you about culture, he said. No security. No terrorism. No politics. Only culture, and only on deep background. A second diplomat joined us for reasons nobody explained. Just sitting, and listening.
“Okay,” I said slowly, running my eyes over the questions I’d jotted, scanning for something that fit his demands. This was unusual. In other Arab capitals, you could have tea with the ambassador, or at least a political counselor. The quasi-interviews were never on the record and often disingenuous, but a trip to the embassy was helpful. You couldn’t expect any hard information, or let yourself think that they were on your side because you were all American. But if you paid attention to what they didn’t say, to questions that made them testy, the tone they used to talk about the locals, the mistakes they made—all of this gave a glimpse of what the U.S. government wanted, and how it hoped to be perceived.
In Yemen, America had nothing to say.
I sat with the diplomat and chatted about tribes. He told me guardedly, haltingly, about water wells. If a question veered into the perilous territory of the newsworthy, he’d cut me off. “Sorry,” he’d say archly. “I can only talk about culture.” I’d sigh. He’d shrug. The minute hand dragged itself in a ring around the clock.
One of my last nights in Yemen, Mohammed and I drove out of Sanaa to hear a poetry recitation in the countryside. At the edge of the capital, thin mountain air was blown with fine dust and rank with rotten perfumes of garbage and sewage. We passed trucks sagging under the weight of broken basalt; fruit stands heaped with rusty grapes, oranges, pomegranates; mountains of piping and tile to build or adorn a home. The road sank, rose, and rolled behind the rocks, wrapping a black cord up the mountain. “You whose beauty is killing me, you still live in my eyes,” wailed the radio. “I am suffering but I have no other choice.” The mountains were slumped and rounded shoulders, worn by the seasons, skimmed by the shadows of clouds. We were far from the city now. Wild dogs roamed the roads. Mud houses crouched in the scabby clearings of qat orchards.
They don’t grow anything except qat, Mohammed said. Qat is killing our country, deadening our soil, squeezing out other crops. People here, they live only to grow and chew qat. Drums throbbed dryly from the radio. Mohammed’s own plastic sack of qat lay at his side.
We were meeting a poet named Amin Mashrigi, who penned verses scornful of terrorism. The government paid him to roam around the hardscrabble, qat-addled countryside, reciting his poems and encouraging the villagers to come up with their own rhymes.