Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [51]
She was unaware of how much she had already impressed al-Asaadi, who saw her potential immediately. “Journalism isn’t a job; it’s a passion,” he told me. “Zuhra had that passion. Even the first time I met her, I could tell how much she wanted to work.” She was also unafraid to admit how much she didn’t know, a rarity in the male reporters. Zuhra could kill you with questions—but they helped her to learn her job faster than anyone else.
When al-Asaadi told her she had the job but had to work evenings as well as mornings, her heart sank. She told him that she could not work nights. “He told me, you won’t be a good journalist. And I thought he was right. I can’t do work if I can’t be available all the time.”
But a week later two things happened. Al-Asaadi decided he could allow Zuhra to work only mornings, and Aziz realized how much it meant to Zuhra to have this job. “My brother said, ‘I trust you like a blind person.’”
She began work. Her first hurdle was a fear of talking with men. Not because she was shy—not Zuhra!—but because she feared that the men would lose respect for her if they saw her speaking to other men. Never before had Zuhra mixed with men outside her family. “The nightmare of being a woman followed me when I started my career. Men do not say openly that we cannot do the job; they say it behind our backs and amongst themselves.” I nod. I’ve seen the men do this.
“I felt like a cripple when I first started the job, since such weakness is expected of a Yemeni woman. Even more difficult was interviewing Yemeni men in such a conservative society. It was a hard time for me. I was fighting the many ideas of what constitutes a woman’s role that were planted in me.”
When Zuhra arrived at the Observer, she heard rumors about the women who worked there. “They are killing their reputation by working with men,” people whispered. One girl in particular was derided for talking and laughing with men. “The men said she wasn’t a good girl and she was having affairs outside of the job. That scares me,” says Zuhra. She made herself strict rules to protect herself from gossip. She never laughed with men. She never gave out her phone number. She never got into cars with men. “I didn’t want anyone to say anything bad about me,” she says. “I lived in horror all the time.”
Only slowly did her nervousness disappear. “When you came, I don’t know what happens to me, but you take off some of this fear,” she tells me. “I was asking you about objectivity. If you have belief in what you are doing it gives you more strength. Because I know what journalism can do and why it is there.” She came to believe that it wasn’t she who should feel ashamed—it was anyone who would give her a hard time for following a noble calling.
At the same time, Zuhra was grappling with the rudiments of journalism. “I had no real model. I didn’t know what was good journalism,” she tells me. “I got to know that when you come. Do you remember what I first told you? It was very eye-opening for me when you told me we had to be objective. When you said that, what made me believe was that you said [if you report objectively] then people will believe you.”
Zuhra has an instinctive distrust of partisan media, because she loathes other people telling her what to feel or think or do. She would rather be presented with all of the facts in as balanced a way as possible and make up her own mind than read an editorial.
So when I began to define objective journalism for her, she was immediately attracted to the idea. “It seems the highest way of thinking,” she said. “I met you, started thinking about going to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and my dreams started to have a face and legs.”
EIGHT
kidnappings, stampedes, and suicide bombings
It is late on a Sunday afternoon when we hear about a kidnapping of French tourists in Shabwa Governorate. First we hear there are five hostages, then four. Then we hear that only two are French. Then we hear that three are French and one German. Such is the accuracy of reporting in Yemen.
We