Woman Who Fell From the Sky - Jennifer Steil [98]
“Okay,” I say, looking up from my computer screen. “What is it?”
“Are you really leaving in September?” She sits on the very edge of her chair, leaning toward me, her dark eyes serious.
“Well, that’s my plan.”
“Jennifer, this is a very big problem for us. A very big problem. Noor and I were talking. No one else will read our stories so closely; no one else will help us like you do.”
“Najma,” I say, tears pricking the back of my eyes, “my goal in coming here is not to help you for a year and then abandon you. My goal is to train you, and train a person to take my place, so that you won’t need me as much.”
I am suddenly panicked about my reporters’ future. No matter how good Zaid is—and he has his flaws—he is not a woman, and Najma is right; he won’t care as much about their work. This, unfortunately, will be truer than I could ever guess.
The men resent the attention I pay the women. “You like the women better,” they say accusingly.
“I like all of you the same,” I lie. “But the women happen to always show up for work on time. They don’t take cigarette breaks. They don’t chew qat. They turn their work in on time. If you want to be treated like the women, try following their example.”
This makes them grumpy. They believe it is their God-given right to smoke cigarettes and chew qat! It is their God-given right to take a nap for several hours after lunch! They should be considered better reporters simply because they are men!
One day I am joking around with Bashir, who has written a story about a group that works for women’s rights and to preserve culture. “Well, what if the culture they want to preserve doesn’t grant women rights; then what?” I tease. “Then they have a conflict. They can either preserve the women’s rights or the culture, but not both.”
This is said in jest, and he laughs. But then I make a reference to women not being free in Yemen, and he looks shocked and retorts that women are totally free in Yemen.
“Women can do whatever they want here,” he says. “Noor doesn’t have to wear her abaya if she doesn’t want to.”
While it may be true that Yemeni women are legally freer than most women in the region—they can drive cars and the dress code is not enforced by law—they can hardly be said to be unfettered.
“Bashir,” I say, “do you have any idea what it is like to be a woman here and walk around without an abaya? She would be harassed constantly. I get harassed constantly, even dressed as I am, and it is much worse for Yemeni women.”
Zuhra once put it like this: “A woman in Yemen would get harassed even if she were wrapped in an abaya, shut in a cardboard box, and on the outside of the box was written ‘THIS IS NOT A WOMAN.’”
My dark-skinned foreign friends who could pass for Yemeni get hassled even more on the streets because they appear to be fallen Muslims rather than heretical foreigners. My Dutch-Indonesian friend Jilles had acid thrown at her and was handed a slip of paper with an illustration of how women ought to dress.
When I tell Bashir what kind of harassment women would face on the street here if they went without an abaya or hijab, Noor turns around in her chair. “It’s true,” she says.
Thus begins a debate on the status of women in Yemen. Noor claims that Islam does not require the hijab, culture does. This is news to Bashir, who argues that the Qur’an orders the hijab. The conversation gets heated, with more reporters joining in, but I have so much editing to do that I retreat to my office. When I return to the newsroom a half hour later, they are still locked in combat. I have to break up the discussion three times before they settle down and focus on their stories. “I know this is my fault!” I tell them. “But could you please go back to work?”
They dutifully turn back to their computers. But the second I leave the room, I hear the battle resume.
MY WOMEN ARE TEACHING ME at least as much as I teach them. Radia and Zuhra and occasionally the others take turns helping me with my Arabic, delighted to be able to correct me for a change. Every time I get something