Emigration and the rise of the novel in Yemen.

Al-Jumly, Mohammed Saad ; Rollins, J. Barton

Well before the rise of the novel in post-World War II Yemen, emigration and its attendant alienation and dispossession had become a dominant theme in Yemeni poetry in response to harsh social and economic conditions resulting from hundreds of years of war and oppression. Known in classical times as Arabia Felix, Yemen had gradually lost its position as a happy land of beauty and wealth, becoming by the dawn of the twentieth century one of the poorest, most backward places on earth. Before the birth of Christ, its location in the heart of the Old World had made Yemen a rendezvous point on many of the most frequented commercial routes between Europe and Asia, a happy geological circumstance that allowed it to control much of the trade between East and West. This domination boosted Yemen's agricultural economy, and the country became famous for its dams and irrigation system. On the other hand, its strategic location made Yemen a target of increasingly formidable invasions from Greece, Rome, Ethiopia, Persia, Egypt, and eventually Turkey and Britain.

The Turkish (Ottoman) occupation, which lasted for over four hundred years (1517-1918), was dominated by conflict and corruption that finally left Yemen an economic wasteland. The Porte's administrators manipulated tax revenues for their private interests, which led to frequent local uprisings against the Turks. In 1839 The British took advantage of this turmoil and seized Aden in order to protect their route to India. Over the next few decades, they gradually established a protectorate in southern Yemen, pushing out the Ottomans as they advanced. In the north, however, the Turks continued to hold sway until forced to evacuate at the end of World War I, a turn of events resulting largely from the campaign waged against them by Imam Yahya, who had acceded to the throne in 1904. The exhausted country became independent in 1918 in a state of famine, destruction, and anarchy (Wenner, 46). At this point in its history Yemen was divided into a British protectorate in the south - including Aden and a group of sultanates, emirates, and sheikdoms - and the imamate in the north.

The British achieved relative stability in the south by allowing the sultans, emirs, and sheiks outside Aden a relatively free hand with their own people. In the north, to forge a semblance of political stability from ruin, Imam Yahya adopted such oppressive policies as the holding of hostages to ensure loyalty. He staffed powerful political and military posts with his own brothers or sons. Although these tactics may have protected the imam from overt opposition, they also encouraged hatred of his regime (Wenner, 18-19). In foreign relations, Yahya adopted isolationist policies to protect his sovereignty as he fought the British over Aden in the south and the Saudis over Asir in the north. When he was killed in 1948 and his son Ahmad came to power, the enmity Yahya's despotism had engendered grew into ever-widening opposition to the rule of the imams. Several reformist groups attempted to overthrow the government in hopes of changing the direction of Yemen's political system and floundering economy (Wenner, 20). Finally, in 1962, the Free Yemeni Party, which had carried out revolts in 1948 and 1955, succeeded in ending the imamate regime and establishing the Yemen Arab Republic. During this same period, the National Liberation Front was fighting the sultans and other rulers in the British protectorate. The NLF won independence for the south, including Aden, in 1967 and founded the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen.

Unfortunately for both Yemens, political and economic stability did not come with declarations of victory and independence. In the south, numerous coups within the NLF kept the country from true peace until unification of the two Yemens in 1990. In the north, only one month after the 26 September 1962 victory celebration, the country was plunged into a bitter civil war which lasted until 1970. The imam's sympathizers, supported by Saudi Arabia, led a Royalist counterrevolution against the Republican government supported by Egypt. The last Royalist attempt to regain power was the unsuccessful siege of Sana'a in 1970. Instability continued to plague the country, however, until Ali Abdullah Saleh rose to power in 1978. It was he who was elected president of the unified Yemen, the Yemeni Republic, in 1990.

Perhaps the most important social effect of the seemingly innumerable nineteenth- and twentieth-century Yemeni wars was the emigration of legions of Yemenis to other parts of the world. Thousands were forced from their homeland by the poverty and political fragmentation which resulted from conflict with the Turks and the British. Thousands more left in consequence of the high taxation and other repressive policies of the imams and sultans. Recurrent drought brought yet more emigration when farmers were unable to harvest enough to provide for their families after paying taxes to the rulers and rent to the land owners. An especially powerful push factor for Yemeni capital and labor was the economic attraction of Aden during British colonization. Aden also became the main exit port to the outside world for Yemenis who went to sea, eventually reaching India, Southeast Asia, France, Britain, and America. Other Yemeni emigrants found their way to East Africa, especially Ethiopia and the Sudan (Al-Sabah, 47-48). Most hoped simply to improve their own lives and those of their families, but a growing number - chanting "poverty, ignorance, famine, Imam" - escaped in order to support liberation movements.

Abdulla Al-Baradoni, an eminent Yemeni poet and critic, has declared that being forced to leave one's homeland, the most agonizing of events, produces the saddest, most creative folk songs (272). One of the most widely known songs, which also serves as an excellent example of Yemeni folk poetry, narrates the sufferings of an emigrant who escapes the tyranny of the imam's soldiers only to live a miserable life of loneliness and sorrow.

Al-Balah(1)

And tonight, Al-Bal, why comes tonight the gentle breeze Winding from the East, smelling of kadhia, Smelling of coffee, with its soothing whisper, Recalling boyhood memories in our precious land.

Tonight the feast and I far from home, The despairing flood of my heart overwhelming, My heart infatuated with the valleys of Bana, Abyan, and Zabid, And my body a captive of cruel emigration.

I set out from my homeland, the land of death. "The days of the plague season," they said, "are near," My companions died, and in my misfortune I have lived. I have lived by planting the land and sowing my ex- hausted soul.

I remember my brother, a trader. Wherever he went he spread goods. The demon's soldiers came and took all he had, all his bugash.(2)

He set out early. Where are you going? "Ethiopia," he said. And he went. . . . Today they say, "He is doing well."

Like him, I emigrated early; success comes in being early. My provisions were bread and two stony rials.(3) And I sailed on a ship carrying cow hides and coffee For the fortunate merchant and the tyrant.

I searched for work at the port of Asab and in the city, In road and building construction, but I did not find what I needed. I complained to my brothers of my trouble and pro- longed toil. They said, "The sea." I replied, "The sea. Oh, ship!"

And I lived as a worker on the sea for fifteen years, On the ship of a one-eyed, severe Greek captain, And the coal blackened my skin like a chimney. And I traveled around many a far land.

Like traveling birds, I saw all islands. I traveled aimlessly until I hated it. And I chose Adanakil's Plain and selling mats. From one place to another. Oh, ship without a canvas!

A stranger's body put down upon the Western shore, His soul in the East, his heart gone. If only the Red Sea were narrowed or bridged Across to the other shore.

Stranger away from home like me with no resting place, What if you weep and weep the stones and trees. You weep and weep, and tears pour down like rain, And you let your tears flow from the heart's blood.

In my emigration I sing, "Oh, God, don't degrade us." And longing consumes my soul in exhaustive flames. I will return, oh my homeland, oh happy home, Oh, my paradise! Oh, my refuge! Oh, my precious mother!

- Motahar Al-Iryani(4)

Another famous Yemeni emigration poem depicts the torturous loss of identity resulting from life away from the homeland.

Al-Ghareeb(5)

There he lived many years, His old name but a memory, His new one engraved on papers written in a non- Arabic script. And he wandered the seas and desolate regions of the earth, Changing names and changing papers. In his pocket many papers, And the name! Any name, Any name - no matter.

- Mohammed An'am Ghalib

That the novel, struggling to gain a foothold within Yemeni literature after World War II, should also focus on what many Yemenis consider the greatest of national tragedies is no surprise. The coming together of such an overarching theme with that of the fight for freedom from despotic government gave Yemeni fiction the cultural authority it needed to find a public. In addition, the surging growth of a cultivated middle class after the end of the civil war in 1970 provided Yemeni novelists with an audience acutely aware of the political and economic difficulties their people had faced for generations. These readers were avid advocates of a new national literature that could attract worldwide attention. They wanted Yemen to break out of its cultural isolation, to take an honored place among the world's nations. Fiction dramatizing the suffering and heroism of the revolutionary generation was the perfect medium through which to present this ancient yet new nation on the world stage.

The first published Yemeni novel appeared in 1959. Written by Ali Mohammed Abdo, it was entitled The Cart-Horse.(6) Wag Al-Wag Tragedy was published the following year by Mohammed Mahmoud Al-Zubari. In 1966 came Ali Mohammed Abdo's Labor Memoirs. Then began what Yemeni scholars sometimes refer to as "the golden age of the Yemeni novel" with the rise of "the Seventies Generation." 1971 brought Mohammed Abdul-Wali's They Die Strangers, 1976 Ahmad Mohammed Al-Mu'alime's Strangers in Their Homelands, 1977 Hussein Salim Basideeg's The Fogway, and 1979 Mohammed Honaybir's Al-Batool Village. All of these 1970s novels focused on the expatriation of Yemeni men in search of a better life for themselves and their families at home either through the accumulation of money to be sent back to Yemen or through the overthrow of their people's rulers. In the early 1980s came The Old Port by Mahmoud Sa'gheeri and The Hostage by Zaid Motie Damag, dealing with the imam's policy of ensuring loyalty among powerful Yemenis by holding their children in prison.

The compelling subject matter of these works notwithstanding, the Yemeni critic Abdul-Aziz Al-Magaleh, writing in the late 1980s, saw the Yemeni novel as "a newborn attempt and stumbling effort." Our writers, he explained, "are unable to express [themselves well] through the novel . . . which requires long contemplation and observation" (11). Following a line of development common to the rise of the novel in other countries, the Yemeni novel began as a weak genre dominated by reporting and moralizing, its art and creativity often overwhelmed by political and social commentary. By the mid-1980s, Al-Magaleh felt, Yemeni novelists had not yet arrived at an advanced state of creativity and mastery of the genre. Al-Magaleh found Honaybir's theme in Al-Batool Village effective but his narration too direct and spontaneous: "It does not penetrate into the boiling, uproaring depths" (12). He felt that Basideeg's novel The Fogway fails to achieve a "balance between the action and artistic structure" (12).

Despite such reservations, the Yemeni novel deserves attention for its unflinching focus on the displacement and dispossession of a people so tyrannized that emigration becomes their only avenue of hope. The best of these novels develop the idea that, although expatriation may solve an individual's temporary social, economic, and political problems, one pays dearly for leaving the homeland. The emigration of Yemenis, particularly from the late 1940s through the end of the revolution in 1970, almost inevitably turned into a torturous experience for the individual and his family both at home and abroad rather than an easy way out of life's difficulties. Like other Yemeni intellectuals, as well as outside observers, Al-Magaleh feels that emigration is "the problem of problems for the Yemeni people. There are emigrants from almost every home. The villages' strongest youths have been taken away by emigration" (9).

Perhaps the best example of a Yemeni fictionist who devoted himself to the emigration theme is the late Mohammed Abdul-Wali. Among the writers of the "seventies generation," Abdul-Wali is generally accepted by the Yemeni literary establishment as the most accomplished. It is often said in Yemen that Abdul-Wali is one of the most masterful fiction writers not only of Yemen but of the Arab world, particularly among those whose works focus on the flight from their motherland of the persecuted and economically disadvantaged.

Born of Yemeni immigrants in Ethiopia in 1940, Abdul-Wali was raised and educated away from his family's homeland. Not merely a close observer of Yemeni expatriate life, Abdul-Wali was a full participant in it. His novel They Die Strangers, often considered by Yemenis to be the greatest work of fiction yet produced by one of their countrymen, brings this experience to literature by developing three main themes connected to emigration and the alienation and dispossession it produces: first, the pain of life in Yemen before the revolution and how most Yemenis accepted misery as their lot in life and refused to fight for liberation from their oppressive rulers; second, emigration as a way to escape misfortune and attain personal goals; and third, the intolerable situation of half-breed children.

Most of the characters in They Die Strangers are impotent and defeated. Wahb Romeyah, another Yemeni critic, sees them as "prisoners of historical circumstances. In attempting to challenge these circumstances, they follow a way which leads to nothing but complication of the problem. . . . They all choose emigration" (84). These characters leave their homeland in order to pursue their personal dreams rather than the welfare of their nation. Al-Haj Abdul-Lateef, one of the richest Yemenis in Addis Ababa, is a member of the Yemeni Liberation Party. He is its mouthpiece, collects donations, and delivers enthusiastic speeches in support of the liberation of Yemen; yet he mocks Abdo Sa'id when the latter vows to go home, accusing him of being mad. Naively, Abdul-Lateef insists that the tyrannical imamate regime remains in power because young Yemenis are abandoning religion. On the other hand, although he often speaks of his own virtuous deeds and sees religion as the only way out, he comforts himself with such irreligious activities as drinking alcohol and visiting prostitutes. In defeat, Al-Haj Abdul-Lateef ends up dreaming of nothing but having a grave like Abdo Sa'id's. Salih Safe, who, as the novel progresses, gradually loses enthusiasm for the revolutionary movement, dreams primarily of making money. As a young man, he supports the Liberation Party and plans to return to Yemen to live under the new government. After the failure of the 1948 uprising, however, he loses faith and stops collecting donations for the movement. At that point, his life begins to spiral downward into despair.

Abdul-Wali's most powerful political/moral point in the novel is that the lives of such expatriates are dominated by an egotism and separatism which will never help change the desperate situation in Yemen. This lesson is brought home forcefully by Abdul-Lateef's secretary. Given no other name in the novel, the secretary criticizes the emigrants, represented by his employer, who talk about Yemeni liberation but never do anything to bring it about. He tells his boss disdainfully, "You talk twenty-four hours a day about your country's liberation, but you will never liberate it. You have escaped. You know, from here you can only . . . shout . . . 'We will avenge.' But you open your mouth and no one can hear you except us [in Ethiopia]" (81). The secretary believes that confrontation is essential: "The liberation of your country requires first . . . to liberate yourself . . . not to be afraid and to fight, not from overseas but there, face to face with the enemy. . . You have escaped from the ghost of the Imam. . . Frankly speaking, you will never liberate your country, and if anybody does it will be those who remain there" (82).

Romeyah characterizes Abdul-Wali's novel as a depiction of "a collapsing human world. . . . Its people are sick - they carry the seeds of destruction within themselves, and they move toward their demise with determination. Their lives, relationships, and dreams are strong, but emigration kills their souls as they get used to it and submit to it. . . . And from the heart of this split world which is about to break apart and fall come the half-breeds torn apart by the duality of their allegiance to home or the absence of any allegiance at all (51). Himself half-Yemeni, half-Ethiopian, Abdul-Wali dramatizes his view of the mixed-blood issue through the secretary, a character obviously drawn after himself. That such a central character remains nameless is symbolic of his position, or lack of one, in Yemeni or Ethiopian society. In essence, he is a man without a country, a race, or an identity. The son of a Yemeni immigrant and an Ethiopian mother, he has never been to Yemen. When Abdo Sa'id rejects his own half-breed son born of an illicit relationship with an Ethiopian woman, the secretary takes the child in. His own tragic life has rendered him kindhearted and humanitarian. He knows what it is to feel illegitimate and reviled. He explains to Abdul-Lateef, "Yes, I decided to take him. He will be like a brother, . . . my younger brother. . . . I don't want him to be alienated. Do you know that a person without roots - that would be difficult for you to understand easily, but I do. . . . We are a new nation. . . . [We] don't know you" (81). In his obsessive pondering of the half-breeds' hopeless social situation, he reflects on how Abdo Sa'id's son is

. . . torn up like him[self], does not know a homeland to belong to. . . . His father dreams of his land, of the future there in Yemen when they 'liberate' it. . . . As for [the child], he is cut off a rootless tree. He is 'no one.' Yes, no one. And his mother . . . has a land and home, [but] . . . he is strange. He cannot say that he is Yemeni, he does not know Yemen and has never seen it in his life. . . . What if he went there? How would it receive him? It might spit him out just as this land [Ethiopia] does. (78-79)

Abdo Sa'id himself serves to unify Abdul-Wali's themes of overwhelming oppression in the homeland, the futility of escape, and the agony of mixed blood. Rather than joining with other victims to face his oppressors at home, he abandons his country and people to pursue the individualistic, selfish goal of becoming the richest person in his village. He leaves his family because he envies others'. He becomes a victim of what Al-Baradoni calls "money fever" brought on by the success of some who have left the country and then returned with their earnings. When Salih, a returned emigrant from Abdo Sa'id's village, builds a glimmering semi-palace, Abdo Sa'id determines to seek his own fortune abroad. His decision is confirmed when he hears the talk of women in the field, including his wife: "all who go to sea return wealthy" (27). In an especially powerful scene, Abdo Sa'id's half-naked son reproaches his father for not giving him dates like those Salih hands out to the village children upon his return. Thus Abdo Sa'id embarks for Ethiopia with the desire to build a better house than Salih's, to buy land for his son and silk clothes for his wife.

Once in Ethiopia, Abdo Sa'id never thinks about the liberation of Yemen, never contributes to the revolutionary cause nor attends a community council. When Abdul-Lateef tries to persuade him to abandon his plan to return to Yemen, he answers, "I don't care about the [political] situation. I will return to my village, plow my land, and remain with my wife and son" (72). Naive and shortsighted, Abdo Sa'id imagines that money will solve all his problems, whatever they are. He thinks he can return home and live peacefully without anything disturbing his fantasy. In pursuing his dream, however, Abdo Sa'id allows himself to backslide into miserliness, immoral relationships with women - one of which produces his half-breed son - and religious hypocrisy. Although he achieves a measure of prosperity, these actions make him an object of suspicion and fear in the Yemeni and Ethiopian communities. His alienation from both is dramatically expressed in his rejection of his mixed-blood son. In the end, he dies alone on a filthy pile of empty sacks in the back room of his canteen far short of his dream.

Such a life astonishes the Italian physician who examines Abdo Sa'id in the hospital. In a conversation between the physician and a male nurse, the irate doctor powerfully drives home Abdul-Wali's most persistent point as he condemns the inhumane circumstances of Abdo Sa'id's life in particular and those of Yemeni emigrants in general.

* Uncivilized people. How can they live in this filth?

* But they live.

* To die like animals. . . .

* I can't imagine how this man lives in that hole. How is it possible? My goodness, that life is like hell. . . .

* But what could they do except that? They left their land and their families to make a living.

- . . . A nation that leaves its land betrays it.

- Injustice makes betrayal a simple thing.

- But it doesn't justify escape. (94-95)

In a contemplative moment after Abdo Sa'id's burial, the secretary expresses the pathetic futility of Yemeni emigration.

"Are graves the end of wandering about, of this struggle and searching? . . . Graves are the right place for individualistic emigration. . . . [Abdo Sa'id] died without leaving anything in his life except pain. A wife deserted for years . . . and a son who doesn't know him. And a land to which he gives no drop of his blood. He died a stranger like hundreds of Yemenis all around the earth. They live and die strangers without knowing solid ground to stand on. As for this grave, it is not his. . . . It is the grave of another people. The graves we [Yemenis] occupy are Ethiopian. Isn't it enough that we take our living from their mouths, much less take their graves? My god, what strangers we are, what strangers we are!!" (95-96)

Although They Die Strangers may be one of the works Al-Magaleh had in mind when he wrote that the Yemeni novel is a "stumbling effort," it attains true dramatic power in this scene. Abdul-Wali's social/political/moral message may sometimes intrude upon the narration, but the human devastation suffered by the emigrants comes squarely before the reader's eyes and heart in the secretary's words. For a few moments at least, the characters, and particularly the secretary, come to life.

Hussein Salim Basideeg's novel The Fogway, published in 1977, is more directly didactic than They Die Strangers. In effect, The Fogway is a sociopolitical tract written as a proletarian novel. It sees Yemeni society as polarized between a tyrannical ruling class and a downtrodden working class and reads like a revolutionary's manual when it discusses how one should go about organizing the people and then confronting the regime in power. Still, Basideeg achieves notable artistic effect in his emphasis, reminiscent of Abdul-Wali's, on the need to remain in Yemen in order to defeat the forces of oppression which perpetuate the conditions that have forced so many to flee.

Early in the novel, Basideeg points out that leaving the homeland has been the fate of almost every young man in his country. It has been the only way one could make a living for oneself and one's family. As part of his sociopolitical message, Basideeg summarizes the push factors of Yemeni emigration in a chat between Salih, his main character, and the young men with whom Salih discusses Yemen's problems: "The homeland has dried up, the Sultan and the Imam exploit it from all sides. . . . And people have escaped to search for their living abroad. Only women, children, and old men remain at home" (11). A member of the southern lower class victimized by the sultans, Salih is someone we would expect to leave Yemen as such young men had been doing for years, but he is not a quitter like most characters in these novels. He is decisive and stubborn. Rather than accepting emigration as inevitable, Salih insists on remaining in Yemen in order to work with other youth to prepare for the revolution. His group rejects emigration when they realize that, to improve their own lives and those of their loved ones, they must achieve freedom for all the people of their country: "No, no, no, the young men should stay [at home] to work. . . . We will squeeze the stone to get our living" (13). Accordingly, they "decide to work in secret and to continue their march to put an end to injustice and corruption in their land" (8).

To prepare for revolt, the young men determine to build a school "to be followed by other schools, then factories and stores . . . [and] the power which was not in their hands." The school would provide "the strongest base for obtaining other powers" (80). The people's struggle would include two phases, the first concentrating on education. Basideeg emphasizes the importance of education for Yemen by introducing Salih to the reader with a book in his hand. Salih and his companions know the secret behind the authorities' refusal to build a school in their village, so they build one themselves. It is during the construction of the school in Al-Garn village that the novel's first confrontation between irate laborers and ruthless soldiers and officials takes place, and it is upon prevailing in this struggle that the workers first fully comprehend their power.

When Salih becomes the leader of the young men who promise to remain in Yemen rather than emigrate, he realizes that he himself will not be able to remain at home but must "follow a new way" (11). He must find help for his fellows. He must provoke the people into putting an end to the Sultan's rule. This choice to become a political leader in opposition to the despotic government eventually forces him to become a fugitive. To organize the people and to teach the gospel of mass revolution, he must move about the country and work in disguise. Thus he begins a series of clandestine displacements, a sort of internal emigration, which forces upon him "the drudgery and sufferings of travel and migration . . . [for] the accomplishment of the wide-range incitement to revolution in three big cities and some villages . . . for the continuation of their march . . . to his desired aim" (47). The displacement and loss of outward identity he undergoes, however, are essentially positive, not debilitating and defeating like those experienced by the desperate, hopeless characters in other Yemeni emigration novels.

Salih's movements through the narrative and South Yemen form a three-stage journey: 1) determination to remain at home and fight, 2) incitement of the people to revolt, and 3) confrontation with the sultanate regime. The first, which culminates with Salih and his companions' decision not to emigrate, develops along with the growing, unavoidable realization of the Yemeni people that they are mistreated by their government. The second begins with Salih's decision to leave home "in order to press the issue and support his companions successfully" (87). He tells his wife, "Don't be afraid, Nora. Allah is with us. . . . I will disappear . . . to think the matter over with my companions and to end this corrupt situation. We will change the atmosphere for our children" (90). Leaving his home village of Si'on, Saleh introduces people throughout South Yemen to ideas of freedom and independence. Through his efforts, the workers and common people begin to see the necessity of unity in order to confront those rulers who are determined to keep them divided, ignorant, and backward. Salih attracts people, especially oppressed workers, wherever he goes. His sincere desire to help his people endears him to them.

Basideeg finds his surest voice in the second stage of Salih's journey. The series of scenes in which Salih convinces the tobacco planters to stand together against the forces of the Sultan are the most successful in the novel dramatically, although the action is often handicapped by the social and political commentary which characterizes the novel as a whole. These scenes begin with Salih's drawing the attention of the hard-working planters to their trade monopoly, then advising them to establish an association that will allow them to go to market and buy sardine fertilizer without having to deal with greedy middlemen. He also encourages them to employ their own agent for tobacco exports and to form a cooperative with the sardine fishermen. When the planters take his advice, their actions lead to a climax of revolutionary fervor and a conflict with wealthy merchants. Finally, they promise Salih, "We will work together. There is no power on earth that will separate us" (220).

The third stage of Salih's journey, confrontation, is less developed and less convincing than the first two, but it does clarify the novel's most important symbols. The confrontation takes place on two levels - individual and national. Individually, Salih faces the Sultan's most dangerous henchmen - the Chief of Guards, who murders Salih's wife, and Om Al-Sa'ad, the Chief of Guards's sweetheart as well as mistress and confidante of the Sultan. Salih feels that assassinating "these two horrible symbols of betrayal . . . will help bring about the revolution or at least limit the people's pain . . . or perhaps stir up fear in [the Sultan's] followers" (14). On the national level, Salih determines to revolt "whatever the situation is" (230). The people will gather together "and eventually totally destroy the statues" (237) symbolic of the Sultan and his forces. The novel ends with Salih's dream that Si'on has been blessed with heavy rains symbolic of renewal and revolution. The fog, symbolic of tyranny and oppression, is dispersed by the rain, and the sultanate is swept aside by the people.

Like Abdul-Wali, Mohammed Honaybir actually lived emigrant life in North Africa, in his case the Sudan, and used his experience to create a tableau of the losing battle waged by Yemenis who had left their homeland. His novel Al-Batool Village (1979) is more overtly political than They Die Strangers, more like The Fogway in this respect. A strong advocate of unity between North and South Yemen, Honaybir uses his two main characters, Salih Hussein and Fadhl Al-Yafi - a northerner and a southerner respectively - as mouthpieces for his political message.

In the north, Salih decides to leave his pregnant wife and emigrate south to Aden after his father is killed by the imam's soldiers: "I will emigrate like tens of thousands of Yemenis who have spread to the East and West of the earth, escaping injustice and searching for their living. . . . I will do like them . . . [and] others will do like me since the prevailing logic in my homeland is that of injustice" (32). In the south, Fadhl and his mother decide to leave for the north after the deaths of Fadhl's father and sister. The Sultan of lower Yafi, in order to take over the family's land, imprisons the father, who dies in confinement, and causes the rape of Fadhl's eldest sister, Fatima, who then commits suicide. Desperate, Fadhl's mother knows that she and her son must abandon their ancestral home.

"We will leave Al-Garah," the mother says.

"To where, Ma?" says Fadhl.

"Allah's land is wide."

"I know . . . but to which place . . . ?"

"To any place where there are no sultans "

"But all places around us are sultanates."

"To the land of the Imam, in the north, We will go to Al-Bayda." (108-9)

After a short time in the north, however, Fadhl and his mother realize that tyranny bedevils both parts of Yemen "as if the imams and sultans have sucked oppression from one mother's breasts" (113). After the death of his mother and experiences with the oppression of the imam's governors, sheiks, and soldiers, Fadhl sets out to leave Yemen altogether: "to any land in which there are no sultans, imams, or sheiks" (115). He returns south, to Aden, where he takes a job on board the Satirani, an English vessel. Salih already works on that ship, and thus the two men meet and agree that they are victims of the same cruel monster which is ravaging North and South Yemen. To escape this monster, both, like the speaker in Al-Iryani's "Al-Balah," accept the prospect of an endless journey of emigration in which no land, only the sea, will be their home.

Salih and Fadhl dream of nothing in their forced exile but the collapse of the regimes in the north and south. They pity the Yemenis they see toiling desperately in ports all around the world. The only hope for them is in revolt. Listening to Salih tell about the French Revolution, Fadhl declares:

"If there were men of this kind inciting our people to revolt, there would be neither imams nor sultans in it. . . . How I hope that all the sons of the Yemeni nation will read this story. To know how the French people revolted, crushed the tyrants, and destroyed that prison which they called 'Al-Bastel.' The imams and sultans do not intend to build schools because if we know how to read and write, and we read such stories as this one about other peoples' lives, no doubt we will revolt against their tyranny and destroy their palaces just as the French people did." (147-48)

Although he has lost all of his family, Fadhl is optimistic about Yemen's future: "The day will come when our nation will take up its position among the civilized nations of the world" (74).

Honaybir's message is clear: only through unity and education can the Yemeni people defeat the oppression that has beset their nation for hundreds of years. Fadhl and Salih agree that the only way to put an end to the imamate and sultanate regimes is through confrontation in all of Yemen, both north and south. Salih's experiences with corruption and disorder have rendered him keenly observant, so he pays careful attention to the foreigner-imposed discipline on board the Satirani. In a letter to Haj Manie he declares, "All workers on the ship form one family. . . . Cooperation and hard work are obvious when the sea hinders the peaceful passage of the ship. Then you will see all workers on board become one power to resist its roughness. Despite its strength and tyranny, the crew's unity in resisting always wins victory" (123). But Salih knows that an ignorant people cannot confront tyranny. He tells Fadhl, "We who have understood and know how world nations live should educate our sons so that they can fulfill our dreams. That is why I say to you that my hope is to educate my son" (148).

Haj Manie, who has been away from his village in Yemen for ten years, is pessimistic about his own chances for happiness - his wife is dead and he has lost contact with his only son, who works on a ship he knows not where - but the wisdom which comes from years of dislocation and dispossession allows him to understand what it will take to change the homeland. His advice to Salih upon hearing of the birth of the latter's son back home articulates his hope for the Yemeni people: "He [Salih's son] might be, with his age group, their nation's hope. . . . Accordingly, my son, take care of him and educate [him]. Don't let him face what you and your father did . . . and what all Yemenis are still facing" (46). Following Haj Manie's advice, Salih determines to send home all his earnings. This will be his way of contributing to the welfare of the Yemeni nation. Years later, never having seen his child, he reflects, "My son has reached fourteen by now and I want him to continue his education. I will not leave him without education even if I do not save a pound, and if I have to remain an emigrant all my life" (241).

Honaybir's concern for the children of Yemeni emigrants recalls Abdul-Wali's poignant dramatization of the half-breed problem in Ethiopia. Al-Haythami, a Yemeni native, hesitates to marry a Yemeni woman who has just arrived in Port Sudan. He fears that although marriage may solve some of his personal problems, it may also result in children who will suffer for being conceived outside Yemen: "If I, who was born in the heart of Yemeni country, feel lost and alienated, how about those who will be conceived in another country? Here, the Sudanese . . . will treat them as Yemeni emigrants like their father. And if they are destined one day to return to their homeland in Yemen, they might be treated there as Sudanese emigrants or at most half-Yemeni" (233). But Salih responds convincingly: "Don't you know that Yemeni emigrants, all around the world, form the main support for the Yemeni liberation movement which struggles to put an end to the Imam's regime in our land? . . . Isn't the agony of displacement and the bitterness of emigration enough to give them a fulfilling . . . decent life in their homeland?" (234).

Most characters in Al-Batool Village are impotent, intimidated victims who do nothing but pray to "Allah" to demolish the imamate and sultanate systems in Yemen. Salih's mother, Fadhl's mother, and Mohammed Al'Shatibi are powerless when attacked by their rulers' soldiers. As a result, they give up and abandon their homes. They no longer believe life in Yemen will improve. Mahdi Al-Gayfi, who sees no point in talking about Yemen's problems, compares the injustice there to "an incurable disease in a place where there is no doctor" (251). Salih also tries to take vengeance on his rulers by imploring "Allah" to support him and his downtrodden people, but like Abdul-Wali's secretary and Basideeg's Salih, he is against emigration as an escape from oppression. Leaving one's homeland, he declares, "is the fate of the weak. Allah likes the strong believer and hates the weak believer. And since we respond to injustice by escaping through emigration, the injustice will continue" (32).

All Yemenis in Al-Batool Village except Salih are defeated and dispossessed by the end of the novel. Forced to flee, all lose their hopes in the country to which they emigrate, and some die tragically. Haj Manie's long, difficult life ends with his death in the auction-market coffeehouse in Aden with only poorly paid porters and market mediators to donate money for his burial. Fadhl represents the complete defeat of his family when, the sole survivor, he drowns with the sinking of the Satirani. Only Salih lends the novel a glimmer of hope. He survives the sinking and, despite the loss of his savings of the last ten years, is more determined than ever to help his son. He vows to save enough money for his son's education whatever the consequences. Taking a job on the Shantele, therefore, he begins another journey.

Nearly every novel written by a Yemeni deals with some aspect of emigration, and nearly all do so with relatively heavy-handed didacticism. The three we have examined here, however, achieve at least occasional artistic success, Abdul-Wali's They Die Strangers being clearly the most accomplished in this respect. Although Abdul-Wali's writing can be faulted for moments of stylistic stiffness or narrative inconsistency and may be said to be superficial in its characterizations, his work contributes much of artistic and social value to the body of world literature devoted to the depiction of suffering caused by tyranny and oppression. The Fogway and Al-Batool Village, despite their more intrusive political/social commentary, should also be taken seriously as fictional records of a people's struggles against unjust government. Most important, Abdul-Wali, Basideeg, and Honaybir have laid a foundation upon which present and future Yemeni novelists can build more solid literary treasures for their homeland as Yemen, now fully unified between north and south, continues its journey back toward a central place in the world like that it knew in ancient times.

National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan

1 "Sinbad's Song." Thanks to Dr. Patricia Ta'ani for helping make the translation of this poem more poetic in English.

2 Old Yemeni coin, equal to two and one-half fils (100 fils per rial).

3 Maria Theresa coins.

4 Motahar Al-Iryani is the most widely known contemporary Yemeni poet of emigration and emigrants.

5 "The Stranger."

6 All English titles referred to in the text of this article, and all quotations from both primary and secondary sources, are translations of the original Arabic by Mohammed Saad Al-Jumly. The original Arabic titles are given in the "Works Cited" listing below, with the English titles in brackets.

WORKS CITED

Abdul-Wali, Mohammed. Yamutoon Ghuraba [They Die Strangers]. Beirut. Dar Al-Awadah. 1971.

Al-Baradoni, Abdulla. "Aghani Al-Ghurbah" [Migration Songs]. In Fonoon Al-Adab Al-Sha'bi Fi Al-Yaman [The Art of Folk Literature in Yemen]. N.p. 1981.

Al-Magaleh, Abdul-Aziz. "Fi Tareeg Al-Ghiyoom Wa Al-Bahth Ain Tareeg Lil-Riwaya fi Al-Yaman" [The Fogway and the Search for the Novel Route in Yemen]. Al-Yaman Al-Gadeed, 11 (1987), pp. 8-16.

Al-Sabah, Aml Yousif. "Al-Heigra Wal-Heigrah Al-Mu'akisah" [Emigration and Counter-Emigration]. Alam Al-Fikr, 17 (1986), pp. 47-48.

Basideeg, Hussein Salim. Tareeg Al-Ghiyoom [The Fogway]. Beirut. Dar Al-Farabi. 1977.

Honaybir, Mohammed. Garyat Al-Batool [Al-Batool Village]. Cairo. Aim Al-Kutob. 1979.

Romeyah, Wahb. "Mushkilat Al-Heigrah fi A'mal Mohammed Abdul-Wali" [Emigration Problems in Mohammed Abdul-Wali's Works]. Al-Yaman Al-Gadeed, 6 (1987), pp. 27-91.

Wenner, Manfred W. Modern Yemen, 1918-1966. Baltimore. Johns Hopkins University Press. 1967.

MOHAMMED SAAD AL-JUMLY received his M.A. in English from Sana'a University (Yemen) in 1989 with a thesis titled "Human Displacement and Dispossession in Modern American and Yemeni Fiction." He has since been working on an introduction to Yemeni fiction and a comparison of the writing of Mohammed Abdul-Wali and John Steinbeck.

J. BARTON ROLLINS is Professor of English at National Chung Cheng University in Taiwan. He served as Senior Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature at Sana'a University (Yemen) from 1987 to 1989. He has also taught at the Institut Bourghiba des Langues Vivantes in Tunisia and the Indiana University Cooperative Program in Malaysia. His articles on American poetry and fiction have appeared in American Literature, the Journal of Modern Literature, the Markham Review, and other scholarly journals.