Chewing Qat in Yemen
On a rock the size of a football field, pushed, driven upwards out of the earth there lies an abandoned fort. It towers above a tiny village of bricks, cows butchers, men with daggers and women with veils. A village labyrinth of interconnected streets climbing towards the forts entrance gate. A climb, a cough, a spit with a nose that runs to reach the top of a fort with a commanding view of the valley. I can see the invading army approaching, the villages scampering through the labyrinth and up the fort as the men draw their daggers. I am getting carried away. I am on the fort alone but for an American with a camera and phone that refuses to be found. Four men approach dressed in skirts, cheap suit jackets, towels on their heads, daggers hanging from the front of their belts and a golf ball sized mash of half chewed leaf sitting under one protruding cheek, lop siding the face in an unconscious act of defiance against the beauty of symmetry, Salaam’s are exchanged, photos taken, with no common language and no will to overcome they move on.
I climb turrets, I test my vertigo, the ramparts are solid, I check the empty granaries tunneled straight down into the rock, the empty rock and the empty pool. Abandoned by an age that has forsaken tribalism for the barely plausible brotherhood of Islam and more recently for the tenuous notion of nation. In the centre of the fort, at its highest point a staircase spirals upwards through a tower to reveal the magnificent view. At the top we find a school, twenty boys with daggers, four teachers with daggers and one assumed girl under an all encompassing sheath of black cloth. We are invited to eat, a communal feast ensues, bread piled in the middle, two bags of sauce, a Medusa’s web of arms claw through all available spaces, ripping, dipping and consuming. Photos are taken, the American and myself are invited to chew. In a school we climb down the fort, down the rock and into a car of defined make or model.
Through the valley we roam until we come across another, fort, village, perched atop a hill that the land has fallen away from. On the side of a sheer hill, in the jaws of an overhanging rock we sit, watch the rainfall and begin our Arabic lessons. They ask, “Are you interested in marrying a Yemeni girl?” What else can I reply but “I don’t know, I have no idea what Yemeni girls look like.” Plastic shopping bags of green leaf, qat or khat, are produced, the local intoxicant of choice. Seventy percent of arable land is dedicated to growing it in a country on the Arabian peninsula that is largely desert. I respect a people who forsake the production of food in favour of a narcotic. It is pure nihilism, an affirmation of all that is human and the little that is animal, our break from the evolutionary process in favour of pleasure over the struggle for survival. Mohammad banned alcohol so the Yemenites took to a new drug with a fervour that no man or God could dare ban without fear of complete and permanent insurrection. The police, the army, immigration, the rich, poor, farmers and city folk, the young the old, men and women are all chewing. If it is Allah that unites the Arabs then it is qat/khat that unites the Yemenites. We sit and chew, the first half an hour the taste is bitter and it invites ejection. Then the taste disappears, more leaf is added unconsciously, the soft leaves picked from branches, cleaned with a wipe of the fingers. A subtle aura comes into effect, everyone is talking and laughing but coherent, not wasted, all on the same topic, convergent not divergent worlds. Vitality increase, life force enhanced but not set into overdrive, not overpowering like speed or ego driving like coke it has a subtle barely conscious effect. So long as the chewing continues sleep will never occur, its like cocoa leaves, it removes the appetite and can only be quenched with beer or ganja. I give this drug my fullest of recommendations. Do not consume any other drug first, it is a starter, a gateway into the day and night. It is addictive but after chewing all through Ethiopia and Yemen I felt no withdrawal. With the afternoon finished the American guy and I got in a nine seat car and returned through the three checkpoint to Sa’na with our permits that we photocopied from someone else to the maze of the capital.
