Manakha trip - or - Mohammad the widower

[Mid-August on a trip to Manakha, I had the luck to spend a whole night chewing qat with and talking to two hotel employees and a tourist driver.]














There were eight wedding ceremonies being held in the hilltop town and earlier there had been much firework- and Kalashnikov shooting all over the town to celebrate the arrival of the brides.
Now it was after midnight, the musicians in the dining hall had stopped playing an hour ago, the other tourists had stopped dancing and gone to bed. There was a few men still in the dining hall who worked either in the hotel or as guides or drivers for the tourists; they had made their beds on the seating cushions that lined the walls of the hall. The lights were turned down, outside – the fireworks had ceased and Mohammad, Abdallah and a second Mohammad invited me to stay in the musician’s corner of the hall with them, where the left-over qat had been collected and where the three of them were preparing the elder Mohammad for his night-watch: he had to guard the tourist’s cars until the morning. Neither of the three spoke much English, so it was time for my Arabic to prove itself useful. Preparing for the night-watch only really involved chewing as much qat as you could fit into your cheek, so as to be able to stay up till 7 am.
I spoke to Abdallah for a while – a lovely 34-year old father of 2 children (not really a great effort for a Yemeni man). He convinced me somehow, that he really NEEDED to marry a second wife, but he was determined that she should not be Yemeni: - she should be GERMAN! “German women are tall, beautiful, hard-working and diligent”, he said. So he asked me a dozen questions as to how to go about this, since I was German… whether German girls had prejudices against Arabs, whether they had any objections to marrying a man who’s already married once, what his chances would be of meeting a German girl who’d come to the Yemen with him, without him speaking any German (“Love needs no words” he said with a cheeky smile on his face) and how much a flight to Germany was. Would she pay for her own flight to the Yemen? Etc… He had heard that if European girls are drunk, in a club etc, it’d be quite easy to catch them… it was not the first time that I’d been asked questions like these and I was astonished at how easy these men seem to think it would be to make their dreams of foreign wives come true.
The two Mohammads also voiced their interest in German wives and before I knew it, I had promised to found an agency that would find German wives for Yemeni men. They were thrilled at the proposal and for a frightful minute I wasn’t sure whether they’d realised that I was joking. I quickly changed the subject.
Abdallah found himself a space on the cushions and went to sleep – no doubt dreaming of a beautiful, tall German. I was ready to sleep, too, but I wasn’t ‘allowed’ yet – I was to join Mohammad for his night-watch on the hotel’s balcony. So we wrapped ourselves up in a big blanket, overlooking the car park and most of the small town with its tall houses miraculously built against the slope. In the distance I could make out the dark blue silhouettes of the surrounding mountains and the lights of al-Hajara, the next village.
Mohammad started telling me about his life, which, much like Abdallah’s, seemed to revolve mostly around marriage, but in a very different, more tragic way. His poor wife, who he had married five months ago, died only two months after the wedding. He had spent his and his family’s savings and probably his next 5 year’s income on the dowry, the wedding and subsequently the funeral ceremony.
Weddings are a very expensive business in the Yemen. Mohammad had to ‘pay’ [strictly of course, it’s seen as a ‘gift’ in return for which a favour is granted, rather than a payment] an average month’s wage (roughly 50 $) just to be able to see his future wife without the hejaab once before marrying her – a girl from his wider family who he’d met a few times when he was still a child, but not met or known until a few weeks before the wedding. The wedding itself is one of the most stressful and nerve-wrecking of days in the life of a Yemeni man. “The happiest day of your life” is not really what springs to mind when you hear the descriptions – I would say fear is rather more descriptive of the couple’s feelings than happiness. Fear of the end of the night, when the two who have only seen each other a few times, if at all, and who have only heard about sex from hushed, whispering voices, if at all, are locked in a room together to perform the act, while their family and friends are waiting outside.
I confessed to Mohammad that I did not approve of the gender separation of Yemeni society and of practices like these that it has led to. He agreed with me and told me a story of the prophet’s life: When Mohammad, peace be upon him, met his wife and they got married, all he gave her was a simple iron ring. No money, no riches, etc. They married in simple dress and had a simple feast. The deeds of the prophet serve as the ultimate example for and arbiter of Islamic life, however, many customs have developed, especially in backward and remote places, that often directly contradict the prophet’s actions, as in this case, but they have become so entrenched in society, in people’s minds that they are too powerful to overcome. Most people agree, if you talk to them in private, that the custom of dowry is nothing but a heavy burden on the freshly wed and the groom’s family, but there is no way in which you could marry a woman without paying the dowry. Even intellectual, sophisticated, foreign-educated Yemenis cannot or do not.
As we were discussing these societal pressures and how one can or cannot deal with them, suddenly, into the quiet of the night – everyone was sleeping, most lights had gone out – burst a series of gunshots, then tracing bullets could be seen shooting through the sky and fireworks burst out again. I inquired what this was about. Mohammad explained: The act had been performed and the couple had joined the wedding company again.