In the early months of Yemen’s war, in 2014, writer and activist Bushra al-Maqtari was convinced that the “so-called civilised world… wouldn’t stand by idly” as her country was torn apart. She was wrong.
More than 200,000 people have now died in the conflict, leading Yemen to be called the world’s “worst humanitarian crisis” by the UN. War heralded a return to “pre-civilisation”: full cities without electricity, where al-Maqtari wrote by candlelight. At the same time there was profiteering and aid diversion; a new elite financed by “stolen national revenue”.
As in all wars, ordinary civilians have paid the biggest price.
“How can life in the shadow of a war that has destroyed everything be fully encapsulated?” al-Maqtari asks in the foreword to this powerful book, which was originally published in Arabic in 2018.
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Citizens were split “into two warring camps, leaving the majority of us transformed into victims or voiceless beings,” she suggests. But this book proves that no one is voiceless.
What follows are some of the 400 testimonies that Al-Maqtari collected, with her publisher saying she was inspired by Belarusian-Ukrainian investigative journalist and Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich.
Al-Maqtari deliberately does not get caught up in political detail, and alternates between victims of the Houthi rebels and the Saudi-led coalition. The result is a cacophony of voices; an unrelenting tribute to the many murdered and those that survive them.
“Do you know how a cluster bomb kills its victims? It explodes in the air into small deadly fragments, sometimes you can’t even see them, and you think you’re safe, but then you feel nails digging into your body, your flesh becoming a sieve.”
So explains fish seller, Mohammed Ahmad Daghmoush, from a hospital bed. His 10-year-old brother had been killed by a Saudi Apache helicopter-dropped cluster bomb.
Elsewhere, bombs hit a potato chips factory; a funeral service; a mall; a cemetery; a bride preparing for her wedding; fishing boats; a boat of Somali refugees. Double tap strikes target medics and rescue workers.
A woman in al-Hudaydah watches her 27-year-old cousin and her cousin’s three-month-old baby burn to death in front of her.
A mother gazes at her two dead daughters: “a pool of blood and silence”.
There is a husband whose amputated leg is buried in a different cemetery to his body. “No one is helping us,” says the dead man’s widow, Fatima Mohammed Salam. “They only look after their own; those from the same sect.”
A wife describes a chasm of grief growing between herself and her husband, whose eyes would turn “black” when he thought of their dead children.
“In the early days, we would remember our children and cry - then, after some time, we would each grieve alone . . . Each of us has tried to keep our grief to ourselves, so as not to reopen the other’s wounds.”
There are accounts of torture and humiliation, along with bravery, like that of Khadija Mohammed Hassan, who played a significant role in breaking a blockade that the Houthi-Saleh militia imposed on the city of Taiz.
Widows are rejected by family and friends who see them as a burden. A brother sobs as his intestines spill out of his stomach. A burnt body is recognised by a charred silver ring. A son says he wants to get a gun and join the resistance. “Indifferent” doctors tire of “everyday murder”.
“Grief eats at our tired souls, grief is watchful like my father’s eyes fixed on the door, waiting for my mother and siblings to return,” one man explains.
Yemeni families hide photos of the dead. Many will no longer venture outside, hiding in basements instead with their remaining children, who are no longer allowed to play.
While the testimonies are first person, in brackets al-Maqtari occasionally gives us a description of the speaker’s reactions and behaviour (For example: “[She wails; I try to calm her down. Her weeping is lost in the roar of shells nearby.]”) or of their surroundings (“[Shacks are interspersed with gravestones.]”; [”He looks at what is left of his home.]”)
Al-Maqtari carries out interviews in hospitals, or sitting with people on the remains of their homes. In the process, she is also criticised: “You and those like you make us relive our sorrows and then don’t do anything for us,” a mother who lost her son charges. “You keep reopening our wounds only to disappear.”
But the writer, too, does not escape tragedy. She ends with her own dedication. “Who knew, even in my worst nightmares, that I’d be writing about you in this book… as a victim, not as a friend,” she says about the woman she planned to celebrate its publication with.
Sally Hayden is author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned, winner of the 2022 Orwell Prize for Political Writing
