“But what makes my story special?” So asks a mother whose three children were killed by indiscriminate shelling. “It’s the same for the many thousands of women who have lost their children to war. In every house in this city there’s a story.”
This could be Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine. But it is a woman named Sumaiyya Ahmad Saeed, in Taiz, Yemen. Houthi rebels were responsible for the shelling, she tells Yemeni journalist Bushra al-Maqtari, who collected Saeed’s story in What Have You Left Behind?, an oral history of the war in Yemen.
First published in Arabic in 2018 and newly translated into English by Sawad Hussain, What Have You Left Behind? is an intimate look at the lives of everyday Yemenis affected by unimaginable violence in a war that often receives cursory coverage in the international press: famine looms, aid blocked, wedding party bombed, 12 civilians killed, the fighting continues.
In this light, al-Maqtari’s writing has the moral force missing from international coverage because it takes us to the heart of the civilian experience of war. It gives voice and agency to Yemenis who would otherwise be nameless statistics to the outside world.
“As the late Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti wrote, ‘We remain governed by hope.’”
“I wanted to write a narrative of the destruction and atrocities happening in Yemen, and journalism and personal writing did not feel sufficient,” al-Maqtari told me in an email interview that I translated from its original Arabic. She explained that she decided to document Yemen’s war in a way that “begins from the bottom, from the margins that neither the world nor the warring parties care to see.” The book opens with al-Maqtari’s personal reflections on the war, followed by 200 pages of firsthand testimonies from civilians with very little commentary besides sparse specifics about the attacks they survived and the occasional austere parenthetical aside: “[He cries.]”
Yemenis have watched their country ruined over the past decade by fragmented political leadership violently vying for power. Though that pattern had started much earlier, it escalated in 2015. That’s when a Saudi-led Arab coalition, with tactical and strategic support from the United States and United Kingdom, began bombing Yemen in hopes of dislodging the Houthi rebels, a militia group that had taken control of the northern part of the country, which includes the capital Sanaa. In a familiar narrative that has been replayed the world over when a strong state tries to attack a perceived weaker one, a war that was supposed to be won quickly is still dragging on. Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen has created a humanitarian disaster and thrown the poorest country in the Arab world into economic freefall. Hundreds of thousands have died as a result of the war. Meanwhile, southern Yemen, nominally controlled by the Yemeni government but, in reality, mostly run by a splintered southern separatist group with a variety of allegiances, has been engaged in a civil war with the Houthi rebels, as well as embroiled in its own internal power struggle.
I first met al-Maqtari in 2011 amid unrest of a more hopeful sort. She was a leader in the anti-government, pro-democracy Arab Spring protest movement in her hometown, Taiz, a beautiful city of stone homes set among the lush green mountains of central Yemen. Taiz has been ground zero for Houthi retaliation against civilians during the past decade of war. But back in 2011, Taiz was the center of the protest movement attempting to topple the regime of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The city was charged with energy for a brighter future, away from the aging dictators who had ruled the Arab world for decades.
At that time, I was an American reporter living in Yemen. I found that in Taiz, al-Maqtari had attracted a following, especially among the so-called non-partisan young people of Yemen, young men and women who did not identify with Yemen’s entrenched political parties. This despite the fact that al-Maqtari was, and is still, a member of Yemen’s socialist party; Yemen, once divided into two states — Marxist South Yemen and the northern Yemen Arab Republic — has long had a somewhat influential socialist party, and Taiz was a party stronghold. The city is known as more educated and liberal, especially when compared to Sanaa, and it’s unsurprising that a woman active in oppositional politics from Taiz, such as al-Maqtari, would be a socialist.
But the era in Yemen during which I met al-Maqtari is not Yemen now. The country is divided, with ill will spewing from all sides. Freedom of expression, a privilege Yemenis used to enjoy relative to other autocratic Arab states, has rapidly deteriorated across the country. On one side is Houthi leadership, who have detained and tortured activists and journalists. On the other side, United Arab Emirates-supported prisons are holding captive those critical of the southern separatist regime.
As of early 2024, Yemen is in the headlines once again: In response to Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza, the Houthis have attacked shipping vessels in the Red Sea, and the U.S. and U.K. have retaliated by bombing Houthi targets in Yemen. The Houthis’ allegiance to the Palestinian cause isn’t new (it has always been a central part of their ideology), but their bravado and the U.S.’s flailing response (“are they stopping the Houthis, no. Are they going to continue? Yes,” Joe Biden said of missile strikes he ordered in January) have led some on the left to cheer the rebel group’s attacks. This despite the fact that the Houthis are a fiercely conservative militia group that has recruited child soldiers, indiscriminately shelled neighborhoods, and blocked food from reaching civilians.
It’s not only these recent developments that made me think of Gaza when reading al-Maqtari’s book. The testimonies she has collected speak of the raw suffering that comes from civilian bloodshed, which we have also seen in the words and images flowing from Gaza. “No matter how terrible the situation in Yemen is, it cannot be compared in any way to the devastation and human tragedy in the Gaza Strip, at which the world doesn’t even bat an eyelid,” al-Maqtari wrote me, a viewpoint that reflects a widespread Yemeni solidarity with Palestinians. Nonetheless, What Have You Left Behind? is often brutal. The only relief the reader is afforded is that the chapters are short, but they come in quick succession, one testimony after another from grieving parents, spouses, or friends:
“I lost my family and don’t have a single photo of them, not a single photo that I can slip into my wallet and remember that I had a family once. A photo for me to look at, on those sleepless nights I spend searching through the rubble of our house of the life that I once had,” says Yassin Abdelqawi Saleh al-Jabri, from Taiz. At least 10 members of his family were killed and his home destroyed when the Saudi coalition bombed his house.
“My son Khalid was digging to get his siblings out. He held up a small foot and my legs gave way,” says Sabah Abda Ahmad Fare, from Sanaa. Her home was bombed by the Saudi coalition.
“I tried to find my wife and the rest of my family. The bodies were in pieces, hands on one side. Heads on the other. A human barbeque,” says Rahib Abdelkarim Abdelhamin, from the poor coastal city of al-Hudaydah, who lost five family members in a Saudi-coalition bombing.
“My son Khalid was digging to get his siblings out. He held up a small foot and my legs gave way.”
Al-Maqtari’s book includes testimonies from both sides of the war, and sometimes, it is difficult to tell who is who and where they are, even for someone who knows Yemen. But I think that is the point.
In collecting these testimonies, al-Maqtari is engaged in the kind of bearing witness that is a main goal of traditional journalism and human rights activism. “Their voices are a finger in the eyes of the murderers and the hunting dogs whom they hide behind,” she writes in her introductory essay to her book. “They are a testament to ward against forgetting, against feigning ignorance, against indifference.”
But al-Maqtari’s subjects ask something more. Their traumas seem to lie not just in the horrific acts of violence but in the gnawing questions they’re left with after the fact. In the words of Munira Mahyoub Qaid al-Hamidi, a woman whose two daughters, husband and uncle were killed by the Houthis in Taiz: “But tell me, this war that has killed my family, what is it for? Why all this death and destruction? What are they fighting over? What is worth all this death?”
This is where Gaza and Yemen differ. In Gaza, many believe that Benjamin Netanyahu’s goal is to violently push Palestinians out of Gaza in order to claim the territory. For onlookers in the U.S. and other countries, it’s also easy to locate our stakes in the conflict, given our government’s unwavering support for Israel. Yemen’s war feels more nebulous, lost in the tit-for-tat of geopolitics as Saudi Arabia tries to confront Iran’s strength in the Arab world. (The Houthis are Iran-aligned and receiving support from Tehran.) It’s a war without definition, and thus a war without a clear end.
And so, as outsiders tuning into Yemen, seeking a deeper understanding through al-Maqtari’s book or elsewhere, what can we do? We can protest the U.S. involvement in the war, which has only complicated efforts toward peace and bolstered Saudi Arabia’s military action. There are campaigns in the U.S. targeting major weapons companies like Raytheon, which grow rich from selling weapons to Saudi Arabia. There are small but potent organizations on the ground in Yemen doing noble work, like Mwatana for Human Rights. Celebrate their efforts. Support Yemenis in the U.S. who have fought against the Muslim ban and other efforts from the U.S. government to peg them as Al Qaeda (or an even more generic enemy). Fight against anyone and anything who wants to paint the Arab world with broad, racist strokes, stereotypes from which Yemenis have especially suffered.
And just as Yemen is complex, so was al-Maqtari’s answer when I asked her what happened to the hope that we had both witnessed in Yemen during the pro-democracy protests of 2011. It was easy for me to imagine that she would have become cynical after a decade of war, after a youth revolutionary movement was hijacked by power-hungry politicians, after so many Arab Spring activists have fled the country. But I wouldn’t describe her responses to my questions exactly like that. They were laced with sadness, of course, but not with despair. She espoused a healthy realism that made sense coming from someone who has not been afraid to look away from all the pain, but she also maintained a firm understanding that this moment of catastrophe is not the last word.
“As the late Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti wrote, ‘We remain governed by hope,’” she wrote me. “Hope is what pushes us to continue living.”
Since 2015, I have watched from afar and seen al-Maqtari and other Yemenis step up, either to document abuse under threat of great physical harm or to lend a hand to their neighbors, those with more providing for those with less when it comes to basics like food and water. That this social fabric still exists in the face of brutal violence is proof that some of what was so beautiful about 2011 in Yemen still exists today. The country is not only a hotbed of violence. Yemen’s heart should not be reduced to its incompetent, venal politicians — it belongs to average people surviving in the face of great atrocity. Each testimony in al-Maqtari’s book speaks to that fact.
Al-Maqtari stressed that there must be justice for Yemen’s civilians in some form — that all the suffering must not be swept under the rug but intentionally confronted. The subjects in her book ask the same: “What I want is for the killers to be brought to justice. Can you make that happen?” Naima Ali Ghalib asks al-Maqtari after her son was killed by a Houthi bomb in Taiz.
It’s a daunting task, but if it happens, al-Maqtari’s book — a record of the ubiquity of the suffering, which could bind Yemen’s ordinary people together against those that have oppressed them, on all sides — will certainly have helped.
I asked al-Maqtari how she envisions her future, when peace finally comes. “As for me,” she answered, “I wish to live a normal life like other Yemenis, to restore the normalcy of daily life that I have lost, to write without fear, to walk around freely, and to grow old quietly.”
Her first novel, Behind the Sun, is forthcoming in English from Tilted Axis Press (also translated by Sawad Hussain). In the book, three characters — two men and one woman with different backstories — reflect on their lives within the tumultuous, often violent political history of Yemen.
And now al-Maqtari is at work on a new book. “It’s a novel,” she said, but didn’t want to reveal any details. Just: “I hope to finish it.”
Laura Kasinof is an award-winning freelance journalist who has written from or about Yemen since 2009. Her reporting memoir, Don’t Be Afraid of the Bullets: An Accidental War Correspondent in Yemen, is about her time as the Yemen correspondent for the New York Times during the Arab Spring.
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