The Sad Decline of Yemen, the Best Country You’ll Never Get to See

diaspora:

diaspora:

Yemen is one of the world’s oldest centers of civilization. Nestled in a corner of the Arabian Peninsula along the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, many of its towns were already thriving and trading for spices and frankincense when the Greek geographer Ptolemy depicted them on maps 2,000 years ago. The land was called Arabia Felix, or Happy Arabia, for its fertile land and adequate rainfall.

I’ve traveled in more than 160 countries, and Yemen is my favorite. Sanaa is the country’s jewel. According to tradition, this ancient city was founded by Shem, the son of Noah of the Biblical ark. The entirety of Sanaa’s old town, cram-filled with six- to eight-story “tower houses” made of mud bricks, has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. Many of these venerable old houses are now tilting with age, leaning toward each other like elderly couples reaching for support. Their sand-colored exterior walls are fancifully decorated with artistic designs on the plasterwork and enlivened by colorful geometrically shaped stained-glass windows that are highly effective to draw in light. Sanaa has thousands of these houses, which have been called the world’s first skyscrapers.

Throughout my travels around Yemen, I often gasped in amazement encountering sights that pulled me into medieval times. In Yemen’s far eastern Hadhramaut Valley is the oasis town of Shibam. Inhabited for more than 1,700 years, the town contains a tight collection of some 500 skyscrapers soaring up from the desert sand and surrounded by a protective earthen wall. It is deservedly called the Manhattan of the Desert.

From my own experience, Yemen is indeed one of the best places on earth, if not the best. 

Although I’ve only lived there for 4-5 years, they were the best years of my life. Everything about Yemen was beautiful and enchanting, whether it was the culture, cuisine, nature, climate, history, or the people and their kindness and hospitality. 

I’ve lived in many places in the diaspora after fleeing Palestine, and Yemen was the only place that felt closest to home. While living there, not for a second I felt as a stranger, people over there treated me as if I was one of them. 

I remember I would walk down the streets of Sana’a, where the weather was spectacular and random people who I walked past would greet me and whenever I walked by street restaurants or street vendors people would invite me to eat with them and whenever I did, they would refuse to take my money and would be insulted if I ever tried to pay them. And I remember whenever I took a cab to get somewhere and the cab driver knew I wasn’t from around, he too would also refuse to take my money and would tell me “till next time” (although I would never see him again) or “you’re a guest in our country, you’re not supposed to pay.” 

And wherever you went in Yemen, the nature over there was just breathtaking, My favorite thing in Yemen was going on road trips, where you would get to drive on high and narrow mountain roads that would literally let you drive into clouds. 

I am so lucky that I got to live in Yemen and I wish and hope the country and its people witness peace again.

The Sad Decline of Yemen, the Best Country You’ll Never Get to See

amadryades:

“ਰੁੱਤਾਂ ਨੇ ਜਾਦੂ ਛੋਹਣੀਆਂ, ਚੰਨਾਂ ਨੇ ਪਾਈਆਂ ਆਣ ਕੇ ਰਾਤਾਂ ਦੇ ਮੱਥੇ ਦੌਣੀਆਂ – ਤੂੰ ਨਹੀਂ ਆਇਆ Night has adorned its forehead with the moon The season of enchantment has arrived [yet] You aren’t here.”

— Amrita Pritam (via honeyandelixir)

shihlun:

shihlun:

Magdalena Jetelova, Atlantic Wall, 1995.

The defense line of the wehrmacht bunkers, the Atlantic Wall, stretches along the Atlantic Coast from Norway all the way down to Spain. It was built between 1942 and 1944 to forestall the invasion of the allied forces into Europe. The concrete monoliths have not withstood the forces of nature over time: they do not have deep foundations and for that reason they are slanting and falling into the sea.  Today, more than fifty years on, their concrete corpses are being gnawed away like large rocks by the pounding of the waves. The bunkers on the coast of the Jutland peninsula provide the backdrop for the laser projection of texts. The shifting of the original position and exact shape of the bunker is stressed by the shift in the meaning and shape of the text.  The projected inscriptions are paraphrases of quotations with altered meaning from the book by the french philosopher Paul Virilio, published in 1975 under the title the Archeology of the bunker. In his book Virilio presents a typology of the bunker and the philosophy of the ‘military area’, reflecting on categories of violence and humanity in the context of war and military operations. The altered quotations from Virilio are adjoined to individual bunkers in such a manner that they evoke entirely new configurations of forms and situations: the ‘displaced’ text on the background of a shifting bunker.  The whole that we see only exists virtually on photograph. The luminous inscription temporarily combined in the half-dark night with the mass of the bunker and the surrounding landscape: the meeting of human time with that of nature; a written text at the point of their intersection.

(source)

RIP Paul Virilio (1932-2018)