You may have seen the tree that I use as an icon for An Odd Geography. It’s a Dragon’s Blood tree that is endemic to the island of Socotra which is a part of Yemen and sits in the northern Indian Ocean. The above image is also in Yemen. It’s the house of Imam Yahya Muhammad Hamid ed-Din just outside the country’s capital, Sana’a, which you can see in the following photos:
Isn’t the architecture amazing? It looks like a freehand illustration of a city from a children’s book. The mud brick high rise style is distinct to Yemen, creating fortressed communities with cheap materials that protect residents at once from flooding, fire and the heat of the desert. Sana’a is one of the longest inhabited cities on the planet and one note from visitors of antiquity is that it always smelled wonderful — the buildings had one of the best sewerage systems of the old world, separating and taking the waste down deep below the street, the excrement eventually dried and used as a fertiliser. You can see a more compact example of Yemen’s centuries-old high rise architecture in the country’s eastern ‘wadi’ wild at Shibam, below, dubbed the ‘Manhattan of the Desert’.
Yemen is the home of the legendary Queen of Sheba and a treasure trove of ancient history and innovation, but these days it is relegated to World News that describes bleak, ongoing conflict. The multi-directional civil wars that have raged there for over a decade, exacerbated by foreign powers (Western-backed Saudis and Iran), have created a catastrophic humanitarian crisis. Hospitals have been destroyed by bombs and missile attacks amid an outbreak of cholera from contaminated water sources and other fatal diseases. People are starving.
I’ve buried the lede here. Yemen has been on my mind not only because I’ve been obsessed with Socotra Island and Shibam for a decade and I’ve been studying Arabic during lockdown, but because Yemen is the only Muslim country to be celebrating Ramadan as per usual. It was COVID-19 free until April 10 when one man in his 60s reported symptoms in a southern oil port. He is believed to have recovered since, but because of the drastic lack of medical equipment available to support patients of the pandemic the country is on high alert to stop further outbreaks. Even though a cease-fire was declared by the Saudi-led coalition to control the coronavirus spreading, a cluster of 5 more cases has just been announced. And to rub salt into the wound, airstrikes in the country’s north have actually increased during the cease-fire.
While Australia is watching numbers closely and quietly celebrating our flattening of the curve, countries around the world with inferior medical infrastructure and political unrest are at risk of being torn apart by the disease. I highlight Yemen because it has become abstracted in the minds of 21 century ‘Westerners’ who have no memory of the country being part of the British Commonwealth and who dismiss the entire Arabian peninsula as ‘backwards’. The reason it’s in such conflict is because of its strategic geographical location and natural resources and men who want to play games with people’s lives and livelihoods. We’re already seeing in the US how irresponsible leaders throw their citizens to the wolves during crises — this is not just a ‘developing’ country issue. The slither of silver lining to all this is the fact that a hyperconnected world means stories of Yemeni women putting the pieces back together are coming out.
One day I hope I can visit Yemen. I hope it can celebrate its whimsical buildings and gobsmacking scenery with tourists again. In the meantime, I’ll settle for its peaceful neighbour Oman… Once this virus is under control, of course.
More on Yemen
Other COVID-19 stuff
How news photographers skew images of social distancing (Are people really clustered together?). This article is in Danish, but the photos tell the story.
How Vietnam “eradicated” Coronavirus.
The following video is a very concise explainer on why ‘Covidiots’ are protesting isolation orders in the US:
A Couple of Fun Things