by Kate Kelley
We met at a café, talking about football. I don’t know what he did to go to jail. He said, “you’re just like my sister”. I was dropped in a moonscape with no friends, young. James was familiar, despite the skull-cap, the beard, and the name. —“Should I call you James or Mohammed?” —“Either”.
Weeks before I met James-Mohammed, he’d come back to the city. Six years with giardia and a Qur’an in a village, goes the story. Characters included an eagle and a monkey. At first I didn’t really believe him about primates living in Yemen. But one weekend I saw a group of baboons pacing on the second story of a cinder-block construction outside the public bathhouse at Jebel Hammam Demt—a town beside a volcano in which locals dumped broken furniture and plastic bags. The alpha-male pounded his chest at the uninterested market buzz below.
When he’d first arrived in Yemen, near a decade before me, war broke out, as it did intermittently. Or rather, for the Houthis in the north there was war. For me these wars manifested as occasional rumbles from the hills and our maids skipping work to help at the hospitals. James said that during one of these wars he couldn’t leave the northern village that had taken him in. He read the Qur’an and grew a prayer bump, the biggest I’d ever seen.
Manager smirking-Bill was shocked from the start, “a convert, ex-Crip, muttawa, stay away from this guy, are you stupid?” and nearly got me fired for my ill judgement. When Bill spoke he always almost whispered, and it sounded like he was always almost screaming. Later I found out he lost $30 on me the day I arrived, having bet the owner I would never get on the plane. I was fresh out of college in Canada, and he understood innocence as weakness.
Bill soon left to Saudi Arabia with a woman who was his sometimes maid— just at the time that a poor Yemeni woman fell pregnant by him. I couldn’t read the politics in any detail, but it was clear that the situation was very precarious for the girl. Now, his child has no passport, neither Yemeni, nor American. And Bill is gone. In most situations, men are as dangerous as you let them be.
If you’d asked James about himself, he was ‘not fucked up’. I saw him gentle. It was not a gentleness from weakness, fear or lust, as I thought I often saw in men; it was both innocent and powerful gentleness, “a warrior’s gentleness” I joked with the little bird, in those days.
The Coiffeur, Taizz (Photo by Kate Kelley)
In some people you sense there is danger of explosive change in course, and once it happens, you suspect they are prone to do it again. Unstable people. Like those girls we met who went from Midwest Christian to Niqabi wife. I didn’t think Mohammed was like that. He had come through, come out of James, but he moved methodically. And I think he shook hands with all his selves. I knew James-Mohammed. But was there a violent, unstable James or Mohammed somewhere, the one the world thought inevitable? Maybe I didn’t meet him because I’m a woman, like his sister.
I wrote, “Run DMC and Rummy / Chicken Adobo / Our third: ex-boxer, Buddhist,/ later Muslim called Rojo / Our fourth: a blonde little bird, / ex-baptist atheist/I painted us as Last Supper/ on our wall by the piano”.
James was from Compton, California (circa 1992) before jail and before north Yemen. When he was a kid, and his house was riddled with bullets, his mother screamed “wake up and go after them, damnit!”
He said, “I’m happy, you know I called my mom and told her I’m happy”. Other signs of moderation: he trusted us with his spliff when it was time to pray. We took up an exercise regime together, taking before and after photos of him, his rough-tattooed blue-and-green chest revealed like a brother’s for the camera. I don’t know what he did to go to jail.
We went jogging together in the streets, of all incongruous scenes. Someone yelled in Arabic—Mohammed translated: “Where’s your beard?”. His long beard, a symbol of his conversion to Islam. But most people didn’t pay attention. I thought, you often don’t experience something when there is no ready word for it. An abandoned crossword.
I’d bought an old piano soon after I arrived. Bill had thought it a terrible idea “you shouldn’t tie yourself down to this place”. I told him if I live somewhere, I really want to live there. James and Rojo helped me move it in a pick-up truck through the streets of Sana’a. It was a muggy day, and it began to rain fist-sized hail on us, standing in the back of the truck, holding the piano. If it was a fateful message from God, it was lost in our laughter, in the hail, our laughter.
Walking in the evening once, Mohammed pointed out a constellation in the sky, a big arrow pointing to Mecca, “it always points to Mecca, no matter where you are”. Myself I thought of Mecca the bingo chain, lucky numbers on ping-pong balls.
There was a great Rushdie and dominos Christmas, and at New Year’s, 3 – 2 – 1—Haaappppy blackout in the apartment. Just at the stroke of midnight. Not a mistake, the neighbors still had power. Our landlord didn’t appreciate the loud Madonna; I remembered his glance at our parade of sinful clicking heels and giggles under our abayas in the stairwell up.
The time we had was good. He cooked Hadrami-style baby shark for us and talked about health. We played football with ragamuffin boys. But as weeks became months in my new home, I began to spend time at the embassies; that wasn’t Mohammed’s scene, and probably, anyways, he wouldn’t have been let in. Soon the little bird, for a while his girl, had to move on. He left her apartment quietly one day. We saw him less. He stopped drinking, we heard.
The last time I saw Mohammed was after an absence of a year or so, in a sports shop on Hadda street. His new Hadrami wife had had twin girls (perfect for Mohammed-James, I thought!), and he was buying a football. I was buying a football, too. But the last word I heard of Mohammed was later from Rojo: Mohammed had divorced his wife— she was possessed by a jinn.
I have no idea where he is today, but I suspect he left the city. I am still advised not to ask. I like to think the crossword is still blank, “7 across, James-Mohammed” _ _ _ _ _ _ _
Romulus Magazine 