Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [92]
“No one reads stories that long,” I tell them. “No matter how interesting. You’re lucky if people read past the first few paragraphs.” I want three or four stories on the Health and Science page instead of one or two.
In my first month, Najma turns in a story on children’s health that is thirty-six hundred words long. Two full pages.
“There is a lot of important information in it!” she protests.
“I am sure there is! But people don’t need to know everything.” My reporters themselves would never read a story that long. In fact, they don’t read. Almost no one in Yemen reads. Even the most educated people I meet have few books on their shelves. The only book anyone ever seems to pick up is the Qur’an.
Granted, Arabs do have a strong oral tradition, so poetry and other literature have historically been transmitted that way, rather than through written texts. And half of Yemenis are illiterate. Yemenis’ resistance to reading may also be due to their experiences in school, which often drain the joy out of books. They are beaten and mocked when they fail and so live in terror of making mistakes. Zuhra tells me how a teacher once used her, when she was just five years old, to punish another little girl. The girl had been unable to read an Arabic word on the board, and the teacher had asked Zuhra to read it, to show the girl how stupid she was. She then forced little Zuhra to write the insult “donkey” on the other girl’s forehead. Zuhra was so horrified by this experience that she lived in fear of meeting a similar fate for the rest of her school years.
Yemeni culture overall doesn’t encourage reading as a pastime. Leisure time is instead whiled away chewing qat and gossiping. The women don’t have as much free time for this as the men, given that they are generally kept busy at home with children and cooking—or out herding or farming—while their husbands gad about with friends. Even my women reporters, who still live with their parents and thus have fewer responsibilities, do not read. Their leisure time seems to be chiefly occupied with helping cousins or sisters or friends prepare for weddings.
I remind them that reading is the best thing they can do to improve their language and journalistic skills. “It doesn’t matter what you read. Novels, cereal boxes, comics. Find something you enjoy. But read.”
This learned aversion to education and absence of a culture of reading puts my journalists and the entire Yemeni population at an immense disadvantage when it comes to understanding the world at large and the range of human experience. How can people understand other ways of life and the world beyond their borders without the aid of books and newspapers? How does one develop compassion for someone with a completely different set of values without reading something from their point of view? Books are one of the few ways in which we can truly get into the heads of people we would never meet in our ordinary lives and travel to countries we would otherwise never visit.
I suppose that the harsh existence of most Yemenis leaves them little time to contemplate other ways of life. Perhaps it is only when our own lives are comfortable that we can afford to look out at the world beyond our personal borders.
GIVEN ALL OF THIS, one would think Najma would understand why our readers would be unlikely to make it through a thirty-six-hundred-word story. I explain to her how to pare down quotes to a sentence or two, eliminate redundancies, and delete irrelevant information. This is a significant problem for all of my reporters, who include paragraph-long quotations in their articles rather than selecting one or two meaningful sentences. They also frequently