Abstract
Observers interested in Yemen often worry about the near collapse of the Yemeni state. Such worries assume that the death of the state will lead to a complete social disintegration. With a brief reflection on the 2011 Gulf Cooperation Council Initiative, the recent US–Saudi-led intervention, this article argues that thinking about the Yemeni state through public worry is an exercise in symbolic violence. This violence articulates itself through the erasure of Yemenis’ communitarian culture; an erasure that becomes the condition for perpetuating the life of the discursively produced ‘weak’ state, and the domination of regional-international powers. This article proposes an alternative approach towards rethinking the ‘weak’ Yemeni state. It suggests that rethinking the Yemeni state through mourning its death could possibly give birth to a novel form of political community. It is through acts of mourning the injury and (imagined) death of the weak Yemeni state that the promise of the state as a unifying apparatus is reclaimed.
Keywords
Observers and international and regional actors often declare their worries about the collapse of the weak Yemeni state and the consequences of such a collapse for Yemeni unity. These worries have further intensified since the 2011 uprising. On the surface, their concerns are justified. For it is only through saving the waning power of this political entity that hope of retaining a united Yemeni nation can be restored. Yet, in practice, there is evidence to the contrary. International and regional actors’ worries have often been intertwined with political and military interventions that seem to be more polarizing than unifying. The 2012 Gulf Cooperation Council Initiative (GCCI hereafter) and the current Operation Decisive Storm are only two examples of such interventions. This article gives a two-fold response to these views. First, it examines the instances of symbolic violence exercised through international and regional reiteration of concerns over the life of the weak Yemeni state, hope for restoring its dwindling power as a prerequisite to restore unity and order. Second, and like other contributors to this special issue, it draws attention to new cultural modes of creative expressions through which Yemenis respond to ongoing socio-political changes. I contend that these cultural responses seek to reclaim ethical-national agency and public political space. Particularly, they propose an alternative mode of rethinking the Yemeni state as a community, expressed through mourning the imagined death of the weak state.
This article is divided into three parts. The first part dwells on the rhetoric that animated the international, regional and national worries about the collapse of the Yemeni state during the 2011 uprising before it shifts to the military intervention of 2015. To fathom the incessant effect of this rhetoric, the second part traces the role worry/hope played in the formation of the 1962 first Yemeni Republic. It argues that such worry/hope, as an exercise in symbolic violence, was shaped by concerns over the perceived legitimate security logic that dominated international powers during the Cold War.
It is because of this violent effect that I propose an alternative approach to the predominant apprehensive rhetoric vis-à-vis the weak/failing Yemeni state. The third part suggests rethinking the state outside the statist security logic of worry/hope. It examines two initiatives circulated in the public domain (1) a song and (2) a poem by Yemenis. Specifically, this approach highlights ethical attempts to solidify the national bonds among Yemenis through mourning the injury and imagined death of the weak Yemeni state. This way of reclaiming community is generally overlooked by observers of Yemeni affairs. The article makes use of my own personal observations as well as ethnographic materials I collected in Yemen between February 2011 and October 2012. It also utilizes my ongoing conversation with activists/journalists on the ground as well as discourse analysis of media and diplomatic reports. This article is less about the history of alliances on the ground and more on the effect of foreign policy on the Yemeni polity.
Worrying as an imperial gesture
From the outset of the 2011 uprising, Yemen became an object of amplified worries, animating as it did responses from the international and regional powers and their diplomatic missions. On 4 April 2011, the US Ambassador to Yemen, Mr Gerald Feierstein, declared his concerns about the situation in Yemen. He stated that ‘the continued political crisis in Yemen is challenging the country’s security and stability’ (Feierstein, 2011).
In the same month, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) held an extraordinary meeting in Riyadh to end the crisis in Yemen (Saudi Embassy, 2011). The goal, according to Rashid al-Zayāni, the GCC Secretary-General, was to end the ‘crisis’ in Yemen and to reach a compromise within the framework of the GCCI (Saudi Embassy, 2011). On 8 April, in a press statement, Mark Toner, the State Department spokesman, welcomed the GCCI ‘to address the challenging political situation in Yemen’ (Toner, 2011). The UK Minister for the Middle East, Alistair Burt, asserted that the UK ‘warmly welcomes the proactive role of the GCC [and that] the GCC Initiative represents our best hope for a … peaceful way forward in Yemen’ (Burt, 2011). Around the same period, security experts published articles in media and academic outlets about Yemen. The titles of these articles and reports conveyed a deep sense of worry: ‘To save Yemen’ (Hull, 2011), ‘The last best chance to save Yemen’ (Gude and Sofer, 2011) and ‘What can Britain do to protect Yemen from itself?’ (Barakat et al., 2011).
The 2011 GCCI, crafted by the international and regional powers, was designed to end the popular uprising. It was claimed that the uprising had allowed al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) to take over parts of Yemen. The GCCI was offered as being the only hope for containing the AQAP expansion, and restoring security and stability. In October 2011, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) issued a statement and passed Resolution 2014. The resolution expressed its ‘serious concerns of the worsening of the security situation in Yemen’ and urged all opposition groups to implement the GCC ‘Peace Plan’ (UNSC, 2011).
While hope for the GCC’s proposed settlement grew, its ability to restore security in Yemen relied on ending all forms of ‘tension’ (i.e. Yemen’s democratic protests). Effectively reducing the Yemeni uprising into a political ‘crisis’ that needed to be resolved by any means, the GCCI stated that early presidential elections, taking the form of a national referendum, would be held. A single candidate, Yemen’s Vice-President Abdu Rabbu Hādi, was proposed by a consensus reached between the Yemeni political elites. Concerned that the country would collapse, allowing AQAP to launch assaults against its enemies within and without, the fragmented national elites – the ruling party, General People’s Congress (GPC), led by the late former President Ṣāliḥ, and the opposition, the Joint Meeting Parties (JMPs) led by Iṣlāḥ 1 eventually signed the GCCI in Riyadh on 23 November 2011. They both presented the GCCI as the only hope for restoring the sovereignty over the Yemeni territory and retaining national unity. Ultimately, to secure the waning power of the Yemeni state, the GCCI, crafted and backed by the USA, European Union (EU), UK, GCC and UNSC, successfully curtailed the uprising and its democratic possibilities. It recycled the old regime back in a power-sharing agreement with the opposition and a figurehead president was imposed by international policy.
On 20 February 2012, Hādi’s speech reiterated the regional-international concerns and endorsed the GCCI as the only cure to ‘rehabilitate the dying Yemeni state’ (al-Dawmanī, 2012). On the following day, voting centres across Yemen opened early in the morning. Voters had started to line up since early morning. Voters’ deep worries, due to the lived chaos ‘fauda’ over the last 12 months of ongoing protests, the absence of state security, and the shortages of water, fuel and food, had turned into the hope that voting for Hādi, the GCCI’s single candidate, would bring about ‘Amnn wa Isteqrār’ stability and security. Further, Yemenis were polarized between Mu’tamar vs. Mushtarak (GPC vs. JMPs), generating suspicion about the capacity of either to bring about change. Many Yemenis, some of whom also participated in the uprising, queued up to cast their votes.2,3 Voting for the GCCI was an embodiment of worry/hope that kept them captive to one of two possibilities: a GCCI-led revival of the waning power of the Yemeni state, or chaos. 4 In the end, hope attached to the GCCI made the suspicious stance of some revolutionary youth ‘rather marginal compared to the positions taken by the mass of voters’ (Bonnefoy, 2014: 89).
The first phase of GCCI implementation consisted of forming a ‘national consensus government’, commencing with electing Hādi as president. The second phase was to hold a National Dialogue Conference (NDC). The purpose of the NDC was to address national issues of southern movement, Ḥouthīs and terrorism. On 18 March 2013, the NDC inaugurated its sessions that lasted for almost one year. The NDC was hailed by policy makers and observers as the only hope to bring Yemen back to security and retain national harmony.
The NDC was composed of 565 members, of whom 40 were representatives of the young protesters (almost all affiliated with political parties). Bonnefoy observes that the marginalization of the revolutionary youth by the political elites was because the ‘institutionalized actors, [were] deemed by the [NDC’s] mediators to be more “serious” and “responsible”’ (2014: 100). The marginalization of the revolutionary youth and their democratic demands was not the only issue that should invite us to interrogate the view of the NDC as a hopeful way towards a peaceful future for Yemen. Indeed, participation in the NDC was decided by the UN Secretary-General’s Special Adviser to Yemen, Jamāl Benomar. The participation criteria were neither nationally independent, nor an amalgamation of Yemenis’ collective demands. The criteria were based on regionalism that fragmented Yemenis along different identities. 5
Federalism was endorsed by the international and national eliets even before the NDC’s sessions had commenced. The six federations 6 reflected the vision of the international consultants rather than the local realities (Yadav and Carapico, 2014). Western consultants ran workshops and seminars to evoke federalism as the ultimate solution for Yemen’s socio-economic crises. This was part of what Sāmi Ghalib, a Yemeni journalist, termed ‘manufacturing consensus’, which made critiquing the way federalism was proposed almost impossible. 7 Hael Salām, a lawyer and a political activist asserted that federalism became something akin to a creed for which the NDC’s participants did not hesitate to divide Yemenis into different sects and identities to justify a form of federalism for Yemen. Such a belief, Salām averred, ‘was no more than a blind hypothesis of presumed conflict in Yemenis’ multiple identities’. 8 A year later, after the launch of the NDC, the collective political grievances expressed by the 2011 uprising were remapped as regional issues and a system of federalism was propagated as the only cure. 9 A nation, which has nursed multiple national identifications under the larger identification marker of being a Yemeni was judged as being unable to allow its people to coexist with each other. 10 Ultimately, ‘the donor-sponsored Dialogue among political elites can be seen as security-driven or even hegemonic projects on the part of the US and its ally, the KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia]’ (Carapico, 2014: 30).
In September 2014, the Ḥouthīs, who had been subjected to six wars (between 2004 and 2010) waged by the late Ṣāliḥ regime, allied with Ṣāliḥ and captured the capital San’a.
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This move was not opposed by Yemenis (Yadav and Carapico, 2014). Worried about Ḥouthī-Iranian expansion in Arabia, a US–Saudi-led coalition launched its first airstrike on Yemen on 25 March 2015. In a press release, Adel al-Jubeir, the KSA ambassador to the US, announced that the KSA, in close collaboration with the US, had begun a military operation against the Ḥouthīs insurgency in Yemen. Al-Jubeir stated: We will do whatever is necessary to protect the legitimate government in Yemen, prevent it from falling and to encounter the dangers of the [Ḥouthī] militia. The situation in Yemen is dangerous … what is happening in Yemen has a direct impact on the KSA. (SPA, 2015)
To ‘reaffirm the value of the Washington–Riyadh security axis’ (Aronson, 2015), US Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken maintained that the KSA was sending a ‘strong message to the Ḥouthīs and their allies that they cannot overrun Yemen by force .[…]’. As a result, ‘we have expedited weapons deliveries, we have increased our intelligence sharing, and we have established a joint coordination planning cell in the Saudi operation center’ (Al Jazeera, 2015).
Al-Jubeir’s words exhibited deep concerns about the state of affairs in Yemen. The KSA launched Operation Decisive Storm, hoping it would overcome those worries; the aim of the military operation was to ‘prevent [the Yemeni state] from falling’ (SPA, 2015). Al-Jubeir’s justification was that the life of the Yemeni state was bound up with the life of the KSA state. These worries were reiterated two weeks later by Hādi, ‘the legitimate President of Yemen’. Hādi wrote (from exile in Riyadh) in an op-ed for The New York Times: Our neighbors are certain of what they see: one house in the neighborhood is on fire, and that fire must first be contained and then extinguished lest the entire neighborhood turns to ashes. Having a hostile government in a nation bordering the Bab al-Mandeb strait – the highly trafficked shipping lane leading to the Suez Canal – is in no nation’s interest. If the Ḥouthīs are not stopped, they are destined to become the next Hezbollah, deployed by Iran to threaten the people in the region and beyond…. Al Qaida and other radical groups will be allowed to flourish. (Hādi, 2015)
Hādi’s op-ed attests to why the fall of the Yemeni state at the hands of the Ḥouthīs should be a matter of international apprehension. Hādi emphasized the importance of adhering to the GCCI of 2012 and that KSA military support was the only hope to counter the Ḥouthīs’ threat (Hādi, 2015). The US–KSA–UAE (United Arab Emirates) coalition bombarded Yemen because Ḥouthīs and Ṣāliḥ (whose power was restored by the GCCI) had lost faith in the GCCI and the outcomes of the NDC.
Hādi himself was trying to give hope to Yemenis by representing the brutish intervention to ‘restore his legitimacy’ as necessary to bring about security and stability. Indeed, according to Hādi, the intervention was not only necessary to secure Yemen from the Ḥouthī militia, but also to ward off the threat of Iran and Shī’īsm, which not only poses a threat to Yemen, but also to its Saudi neighbour and to Western interests. 12
On 22 April 2015, after 26 days of bombardment, the consequent death of thousands of civilians, and the destruction of valuable military, economic and social infrastructure, the coalition announced the end of Operation Decisive Storm. Brigadier-General Ahmed al-Asiri, the coalition’s spokesperson, stated that the coalition had achieved its military goals in Yemen and Operation Restore Hope was begun, ostensibly to protect civilians and combat ‘terrorism’ (Al Jazeera, 2015a). More than three years later, the military operations have not ended but have intensified. The numbers of injured and dead Yemenis, the victims of the violence of hope, continue to escalate. 13 But how did the Yemeni elites come to effectively embody worry/hope over the Yemeni state and as iterated by international and regional powers?
Worry/hope: an exercise in symbolic violence
How did the Yemeni state security, perhaps the modern state in general, come to embody the pivotal political fears/hopes today? The answer can be found in the Hobbsian philosophical interests in the legitimate modern sovereign state, in 17th-century Europe. Thomas Hobbes and his followers argued for a new political order distanced from emotions that fuelled religious wars. However, the new order was anything but devoid of emotions. The willingness of citizens to enter the social contract and submit to the Leviathan emerges from fear of insecurity and violence (Hobbes, 1985 [1651]). State power, embodied in the unifying body politic of the Leviathan became the source of a new hope, a one-way route to security. The demise of European monarchies coincided with the rising demands for rights to popular and national sovereignty. Nationalists’ struggle to capture the state apparatus encapsulated possibilities for a unified and prosperous national community in one totalizing vision of political hope, the state.
I agree with Partha Chatterjee’s proposition that nationalism and state formation in the non-West, differs from the ‘universal’ European model due to the coming-into-being of different cultural and historical trajectories (Chatterjee, 1993: 6). Moreover, as rendered by Bourdieu and Chatterjee, the subjective or spiritual domain that is galvanized by nationalists must adapt to the state’s objective structure of security and law, thereby reasserting its universality as a regime of power (Bourdieu, 1985; Chatterjee, 1993: 26). This is because ‘structuring principles of the world view are rooted in the objective structures of the social world’ (Bourdieu, 1985: 727) that cannot be reduced to subjective positions. How can worry/hope become a form of symbolic violence through which the modern state effectively exerts its polarizing power? How can this be translated in the context of Yemen?
Drawing on the work of Max Weber, Bourdieu defines the state as that ‘which successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical and symbolic violence over a definite territory and over the totality of the corresponding population’ (Bourdieu, 1994: 3). However, ‘it is in the realm of symbolic production that the grip of the state is felt most powerfully’ (1994: 3).
In Bourdieu’s rendition, the legitimate monopoly of symbolic violence is exemplified in the legitimate monopoly over categorizing through which public truth is constituted (Bourdieu, 2014: 9–10). It operates through its monopoly over the function of naming the state’s supposed enemy who threatens public order. Social agents (e.g. state officials) reproduce categories by virtue of their position in a specific space of cultural production, allowing them to culturally reinterpret and integrate these categories. I am interested in the way a social space of security was constituted to produce worry/hope over the 1962 first Republic of Yemen. I focus on the northern Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) because the 1994 civil war between traditional (northern) and socialist (southern) elites brought the united Yemen of 1990 under the control of the northern regime after pacifying the socialists.
Taking Bourdieu to Yemen
The 1962 republicans in Yemen identified themselves as traditionalists or tribal and Islamists led by Mohammad al-Zubayyri and Abdullah al-Aḥmar, 14 and socialist Nasserites led by President Abdullah al Salāl. 15 Conceiving North Yemen as deeply backward, the republicans criticized the Imam, who discaeded most modernizing efforts introduced by the Ottomans. Imam Yaḥya Ḥamīd al-Dīn supported zuhd (asceticism), opposing material consumption. This led to a deterring of modernization in North Yemen. Both republican factions worried about the security of the new republic; for it embodied a new hope that would allow Yemenis to catch up with the world in its march towards modernity.
A space of state security emerged. To Bourdieu (1985: 723), a social space of cultural production is a ‘relational space’. It is represented by social agents who are authorized by the state to construct the social world. The ‘social world can be represented as a space (with multi-dimensions) constructed on the bases of principles of differentiation’ and embodied by the social agents’ different positions in this space (1985: 723). In the first dimension, ‘agents are distributed according to the overall volume of the capital they all possess’ (1985: 724). Following Bourdieu, one can refer to the republicans as possessing the equivalent social capital of republicanism. Their commitment to the republic was manifest in their constant cultivation of worries over protecting it from the royalists (backed by the KSA) wanting to restore the Imamate. This embodied objective position guaranteed the republicans public recognition and a dominant position in this space. The second dimension of the agents’ subjective position is the different capitals the two groups possessed: religious-tribal capital for the traditionalists and socialist capital for the Nasserites. These different dispositions/capitals were pitted against each other, for both saw a hopeful future for Yemen materialized through a different state identity – tribal-Islamic or socialist (al-Eriani, 2016).
These different positions were translated into categories of difference (backward tribes vs. socialist infidels); the category ‘enemy of the state’, was discussed and constructed by republicans as ‘the delegated agents of the State, the holders of the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence’ (Bourdieu, 1985: 732). That is precisely what makes these categories that constitute the social world ‘the stakes par excellence for political struggle’ (1985: 729). However, accepting the social world ‘implies a tacit acceptance of one’s place, a sense of limits’ (1985: 729). It is this limit, set by the objectively constructed categories underpinning the state’s legitimate security logic, which becomes a regime of power that forecloses other alternatives imagined by nationalists. But these limiting worries/hopes that strive to conform to the objective structure of state security logic and the categories they generate are not innate to the Yemeni state. Rather, they are constituted by the international apprehensive security norms, diffused by international-regional powers, and cultivated by domestic elites to secure recognition.
Concerns over the security of the Yemeni state is embedded in the history of the Cold War and the US struggle to constitute legitimate international security norms. The Cold War witnessed the postcolonial moment, associated with the rise of the US security concerns over the emergence of new unfriendly ‘communist’ states, controlled by the USSR. This trepidation was evident in the the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957, when exporting Cold War to the Middle East became official, following Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal.
The fall of the Mutawakeli Imamate in North Yemen and the birth of the first republic in Arabia, in 1962, frightened the House of Saud. The Gulf monarchs had to watch Nasser’s troops land in Yemen to support al-Salāl’s government only a few weeks after the republican government was proclaimed. The main worry was that the sentiments stirred up by Arab nationalists led by Egypt’s Nasser, would spill over to the KSA and other Gulf monarchies. The YAR became a terrain of a proxy war between Egypt and the KSA, the regional allies of the USA and the USSR. It was precisely this proxy war that informed the social space of state security in Yemen and categories of threat constituted by it – a proxy war that was shaped by the US and USSR’s struggle over defining and producing a legitimate international security logic.
As the rift between Nasser and the traditional republicans increased, the traditional republicans, who later formed the power base for Ṣāliḥ, cultivated concerns that demarcated the ‘socialist-communist’ as the enemy of the neophyte republic. By cultivating these concerns, the traditionalists were, in reality, cultivating capital that guaranteed them political recognition by both the US and the KSA in the space of security. They embraced the discourse of protecting the ‘neophyte fragile’ republic; a ‘liberal’ republic that did not pose a threat to the security of the Gulf monarchies and the US oil interests.
In 1967, Nasser was defeated in Yemen and, with the support of the KSA, the traditionalist-republicans dominated power as they cracked down on those they viewed as the republic’s enemies, the Nasserites. The rise of communists in the south, who collaborated with marginalized elements of Nasserites and other leftist groups in the north made the security of the new republic all the more pressing. For the outlaws had attempted to topple what they called the ‘backward’ government in the north and to export revolution to the Gulf.
The Gulf War and the ‘War on Terror’ amplified apprehension over Yemen, reconfiguring it from a regional to a global threat as the enemy changed from ‘communist’ to ‘Islamist’. International and regional recognition of domestic elites was conditional on the latter going along with the security concerns over Yemen held by the former. These historically constructed categories denoted the enemy of the Yemeni state, whose security has become part and parcel of the Gulf states’ security, as central to US–European security interests in the region (al-Eriani, 2018).
It was through this history that the Yemeni state was discursively constructed as ‘weak’ for its inability to secure itself (aka its nighbours), confining worry/hope in its waning power to its security. And it was through this worry/hope that the Yemeni state exerted its symbolic violence on political dissent. The Ṣāliḥ regime relied on mobilizing national worries by reproducing spaces of disorder inhabited by presumed enemies, which allowed both the regime and the weak state to endure and exert control (Wedeen, 2008: 151). 16 As was evident during 2011, worry/hope promoted by the weak Yemeni state, controlled by the Ṣāliḥ, had expressed itself among Yemenis through their perpetual lamentation about the absence of and desire for ‘Amnn wa Isteqrār’. The state withdrwal from the public domain, associated with news about al-Qaida taking over parts of Yemen, increased their anxiety. The regime accused the JMPs and protesters of colluding with al-Qaida, allowing ‘Islamic terrorism’ to thrive. The JMPs accused the regime of the same. Ending the protests became the only hope to retain security. This was the same claim as was uttered by international-regional powers. In the end, Ṣāliḥ and the JMPs gained recognition after both vowed to collaborate with the West in its war on ‘Islamic’ terrorism (GCCI).
Although many Yemenis were suspicious of national elites as well as the GCCI, the fragile and chaotic ‘reality’ of their state forced them to calculate the risks and act rationally to save Yemen. Worries/hopes cultivated over the years due to a culture of security imposed on Yemen from without and nurtured within acted as a regime of power. This disciplining power, generated over the state security, permitted Yemenis to cultivate and embody hope mobilized by international and regional powers to retain the waning power of the Yemeni state. By voting for the GCCI, they reproduced the domination of US–GCC states over Yemen. It is this polarizing hope that is sponsored by the NDC’s six-region federation and continues to be promoted by the ‘legitimate government’. Hope that comes from without is a colonizing and fragmenting hope because it seeks to annihiliate hope from within that acknowledges Yemenis’ political agency. It erases the self-asserting hope that generated democratic and communitarian possibilities from within Yemen, like that of 2011.
It is for all these reasons, I contend, that the worry/hope that dominates the way the Yemeni state has been conceived harbours symbolic violence in Bourdieu’s sense. Such a symbolic violence, to borrow from Ghassan Hage (2003: 23), has foreclosed possibilities of other forms of national belonging. Perhaps, we need to rethink the apprehensive perception through which the Yemeni state has been perceived. To recall Bourdieu, if we want to liberate our thought, to think of the state in a way that challenges orders of domination the state perpetuates, such thinking must be characterized by ‘radical doubts’ (Bourdieu, 1994: 2). As Bourdieu argues: ‘to have a chance to really think a state … it is imperative to submit to radical questioning of all the presuppositions inscribed in the reality to be thought and in the very thought of the analyst’ (Bourdieu, 1994: 2). That is, once we acknowledge that the way the Yemeni state has been thought of had no other end but to secure its life and maintain its own power and the domination of those more powerful states (USA, UK, KSA), 17 we should be able to pay attention to other means of hope for political and collective possibilities in Yemen.
Until the time comes when the modern state fulfils its promise, perhaps, we should give up hope in it. For it seems that being hostage to hope in a good life that will come only when restoring the power of the weak state of Yemen is no more than, to draw on Hage, ‘a deferral of life’ itself (Zournazi and Hage, 2002: 151). Perhaps hope in the powerful Yemeni state as it is imagined by international powers is yet to come, and is akin to Kafka’s hope that ‘[t]he Messiah will come only when he is no longer needed. He will only come one day after his advent. He will not come on the day of the last judgment, but on the day after’ (Desroche, 1979: 177). Such hope is ‘against life’; that is because those who speak from within the statist language of hope/fear dismiss other forms of hope that are ‘on the side of life’ (Zournazi and Hage, 2002: 151). Hage refers to the higher capacity to act ‘when we combine communally with others’, and when hope can be a basis of a radical critique of capitalist hope (Zournazi and Hage, 2002: 152). To capture such a hope, we should start to think of the Yemeni state using language outside the statist security fear/hope. I contend that rethinking the state through mourning its imagined death could possibly give birth to a novel form of political community. 18 For mourning and the sense of shared vulnerability it generates can allow new ties to emerge. Shared vulnerability involves recognition of a different kind. It involves a sense of dependency (Butler, 2006: 49) as the other exemplifies hope rather than worry.
Mourning a state’s death, reclaiming the life of a community
To think about the state through mourning its imagined injury and death could give birth to a form of hope that vests its power in the community. Unlike the violent hope that emanates from without, the hope I refer to emerges because of grief and loss. To this end, I concur with Seth Moglen’s proposition that mourning is hope, as one lets go of past attachment ‘to open oneself again to the possible future flourishing of imperiled human possibilities on this scale, is also to accept the responsibility for a daunting project of social change’ (2007: 25). In other words, mourning signifies a ‘political phenomenon’ through which community could ‘resolve political and social tensions that resist resolution through other means’ (Pool, 2012: 185). It is an ethical hope that comes from within Yemenis’ communitarian initiatives. It is hope that persistently reclaims life and community out of despair. A form of hope that is beyond imperial/statist colonizing hope, which has had one end: the perpetuation of domination over Yemen.
In the remainder of this article, I examine two examples of hope articulated through aesthetic initiatives that have recently flourished among young Yemeni artists in response to absurdity of violence on the ground. The first is a work of mourning, a song inspired by the Yemeni national anthem. The second is a poem on the injured Yemen as an allegory of a lamenting mother, whose children inflicted unbearable pain upon her. I select these two examples because they gained popularity among Yemenis in social media and national television. Although such practices take shape at the margin of mainstream politics, and perhaps have temporary unifying emotional effects while people are listening and watching, they mobilize certain communitarian sentiments nonetheless. 19 These ethical initiatives articulate hope that is ‘on the side of life’. It is that hope being cultivated, experienced, lived and enacted by Yemenis and, through utilizing their own capital, that makes them social agents of life.
Raddat al-Dunyā (Life has Recoiled)
Raddat al- Dunyā is a visual and musical work initiated by an organization of Yemeni artists and activists, named Hemmat Shabāb (Youth Mettle). The work, which aired on all Yemeni television channels and circulated in social media during the first week of the bombardment, in March 2015, was inspired by the Yemeni national anthem. According to Zaher al-Aghbari,
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the Secretary-General of Hemmat Shabāb, the national anthem was the source of their inspiration; for it encapsulates Yemen as a nation in its most noble sense. The national anthem originally celebrates the life of the newly born 1990 unified Republic of Yemen. As the song unfolds on a dark screen one hears a blurred singing of the original national anthem: ‘Oh life, sing with me my anthem.’ Slowly, an image of a man sitting on a chair, reading a newspaper, fades in. The newspaper is filled with news of incidents of violence and death that have become an aspect of everyday life in Yemen, particularly the systematic killing of Yemeni soldiers in the south. The news appears to be the cause of great distress for the middle-aged man, who starts weeping. Then the song begins mourning the death of Yemen as its soldiers are being slaughtered: Oh, life has recoiled from my salutation and from my national anthem Life has torn my dawn and is making me suffer again I am besieged by tyrants My heart aches for my Yemen Felix Oh, my country, we placed hope on your most loyal men Why are they left as prey? And why does the criminals’ hand never stop hurting you? The oppressed has been crushed with no ally Oh, dear country, has your Shebean [Sheba] bosom abandoned us? Or was it us, who abandoned you? Oh country, neither have you rested from agony nor have we We are dying with you. (Hemmat Shabāb, 2015)
The song starts with the word recoil ‘radat’, which has multiple meanings in Arabic; including almost its opposite. It alludes to the possibility of once again being embraced after rejection. It ends with an image of a group of Yemenis from different regions (evident from their different attire). They appear to have tapes over their mouths, and are dragging their luggage, both portraying acts of mourning: the dying of responsibility among Yemenis that is manifest in silence against injustice, and escaping responsibility towards Yemen by leaving the country and abandoning their responsibility for future generations. This is shown at the end of the clip, when a little girl runs after them as they are walking away and asks, ‘Where are you going?’ She then laments: ‘There will come a day and we will ask you about what you have contributed to our future!’ The group turns around, then shows the will to respond to their obligation as Yemenis, to take part in rebuilding Yemen, while reciting the original anthem.
As al-Aghbari explained, the song and images mourn the loss of Yemen and serve as a patriotic reminder to all Yemenis of their shared responsibility towards their country. The death of the Yemeni state, exemplified by the stories and images of slaughtered soldiers in the newspaper and in the later scenes in the clip, suggests that the protection promised by the state to its citizens has been lost. This act of mourning is an invitation to all Yemenis to reflect on their shared social vulnerability and the possibility of exposure to violence. When social vulnerability comes to the fore, it generates, according to Judith Butler, a political life or a form of community on the basis of their vulnerability and loss (Butler, 2006: 1920). As Butler maintains: ‘[w]here belonging now takes place in and through a common sense of loss … [l]oss becomes condition and necessity for a certain sense of community’ (Butler, 2003: 468).
The song also invites Yemenis to make this loss a reason for abandoning differences and embracing a collective sense of belonging to (the lost) Yemen. According to al-Aghbari, the song had powerful effects as it spread across the nation through local channels and social media. He stated: ‘we received emotional responses from the public, demonstrating how the song moved them to tears, and retained hope in the Yemeni people’s capacity to resist and rebuild a united Yemen’. 21 A community of mourning can form organically as a result of ‘common grief’, and this form of community is necessary to start together all over again and rebuild Yemen Felix. 22 More significantly, as an ethical endeavour, mourning ‘lies in the interpretation of what remains – how remains are produced and animated, how they are read and sustained’ (Eng and Kazanjian, 2003: ix). To Hemmat Shabāb, what was lost reminded them to appreciate what remains. The relationship between what was lost and what remains creates a desire to submit to a transformation (Butler, 2006: 21), to figure out how to start again. Surely, to them, what remains is hope in Yemenis themselves, in their capacity to stand collectively against injustice and against the national elites, whose main object is perpetuating their own self-interest at the expense of the lives of Yemen and Yemenis. Yemenis must condemn and challenge the nihilistic and absurd practices of the national political elites who are acting as tyrants and slaves to their narrow interests. The old regime gave the KSA rights over part of the Yemeni territory and signed contracts with oil and gas companies below market value. Today, they fight each other to secure international and regional interests, and to secure individualist economic and political gains. As such, to participate in rebuilding Yemen is a gesture of condemnation of the destructive behaviour of those elites. It is through such initiatives that Hemmat Shabāb seek to construct themselves as social agents of hope and of life, while calling upon every Yemeni who feels the loss of her/his country to be similarly willing to transform and live their lives meaningfully.
‘I am Yemen’, a lamenting mother
A video recording of Yemeni media presenter Maha al-Boraehī reciting a poem by the Yemeni poet Habīb al-Mekhlāfi was posted on YouTube, in 2014.
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The poem proceeds as follows: I found her walking on the pathway of sadness She was lamenting and sighing like a little poignant child I asked her: what is your name, she answered, I am Yemen, while her tears were streaming like a heavy rain down her face But I did not believe her and, thus, I repeated; who are you? She answered, I am Yemen, and to that I swear, just ask history about me Without knowing, my melancholic tears streamed down I asked: why are you crying? who made you cry? Who burnt your heart? Who ripped off your clothes, dear Yemen, who dared to distort your beautiful face? She answered: my injury is from my children … I don’t know to whom I should listen, everyone is fighting over me and they know if my body becomes disjointed all the children of Yemen would live in despair. I brought them up, I took care of them, I breast fed them, and in return they grew recalcitrant I heard her lamenting, and my tears further flowed and I laid my head in her bosom crying and shouting mother Yemen, mother Yemen, Oh mother Yemen … (Greenhandfs, 2014)
The poetic composition does not seek a patriotic evocation, which is usually allegorically represented in a father-figure. Instead, the lament uses the aesthetic pivot of Yemen as a grieving mother, whose pain is inflicted upon her by her children, to give a feel of an intimate allegory. 24 What are the significant effects of utilizing the allegory of a ‘motherland’? As Hage points out, mobilizing such conception of the nation, which is ‘rooted in the spatial images of the nation as container is symbolically important’, he continues, ‘for the container is an abstract projection of the imaginary womb: a place where one feels totally fulfilled … and fully nurtured’ (2003: 34). Hage, then, asserts that the nation is therefore represented as a motherland because, quoting from Phil Cohen, it is a space perceived to be of ‘absolute unity and solidarity’ (2003: 34). It is this absolute unity and solidarity that the Yemeni artist wanted to mobilize by invoking Yemen as a motherland. Intrinsically, the nation invoked as a motherland emphasizes the unconditional nurturing love of a mother. It assumes an ethical reciprocal mother/child relationship. Such an ethical reciprocal affiliation expresses itself through gratitude and appreciation that take the form of collective responsibility of the children (citizens) to solidify their brotherhood necessary for binding them all to their loving mother.
It appears that the poet attempted to relate and extend his own grief to other Yemenis through constructing Yemen as the mother of them all; a mother with whom they all can identify. Invoking Yemen as a motherland was meant to emphasize the ‘home’ where everyone belonged. ‘Home’, here, gestures to an alternative imagination of a nation free of violence. Belonging in this motherly space demands obligations from citizens. Here, the poet sought to construct the pain of ‘mother’ Yemen as a truth that should evoke Yemenis’ collective ethical obligation. A community that shares and feels the unifying pain of a grieving mother that has always given them a nurturing motherly care. To highlight the pain of Yemen as a lamenting mother, the poet seemed to realize the collective dimension of pain, given the formative capacity of emotions of pain to generate communities of pain and healing (Seremetakis, 1990: 484). The lamenting mother, mourning her children’s loss of thier sense of responsiblity, also hints at the threat of disintegration, looming large over Yemen as a community. It also is an attempt to call into being Yemenis as a community affected by the suffering of its mother so as to take responsibility, to honour and care for the motherland, which has always given and continues to give selflessly to her children, despite their irresponsible actions.
There is something more to this poem. The poet, like the young activists in the previous example, seemed to construct the self, or place the self in relation to the social and political structure (Seremetakis, 1990: 484). That is, the poet sought to compose a ‘new category of persons [who are] in conflict with the social structure’ (Seremetakis, 1990: 483). It is a category of person that the poet wanted to extend to include other Yemenis, who are invited to feel the pain of their mother Yemen; thus become a new source of hope for Yemen Filex. In both examples, the goal seems to be an attempt to occupy a counter space at the margins of political structure to reclaim ethical political agency as well as ‘hope on the side of life’ for Yemen and Yemenis.
Conclusion
This article draws attention to symbolic violence exercised through practices of worrying about the death of the ‘weak’ Yemeni state and the effect of such a death on national unity. I argued that such worry/hope has been invoked only to justify external interventions that perpetuate regional-international domination over Yemen. Apprehensive interventions have only succeeded in fragmenting Yemenis, ostensibly in order to save the weak Yemeni state. The current US–KSA military aggression has turned the country’s infrastructure into rubble. Yemenis have been bombed, terrorized and starved to force them into submission. The intervention has triggered a civil war among different factions (Ṣāliḥ, Ḥouthīs, Iṣlāḥ, Salafīs, Hirāk, etc.). Not only that, but currently KSA and UAE (an active alliance in the collation) are now fighting each other (through their local allies) to establish control over the south. 25 Scholars observing the development in Yemen reckon that the current damage inflicted on Yemen’s social fabric is unlikely to be mended easily (Schmitz, 2016). This growing rift is an expression of the effect of the discourse of worry about the collapse of the Yemeni state and hope in retaining its power, invoked by the international, regional and national elites. The purpose of this article was to draw attention to the form of symbolic violence exerted through such a discourse. Worry and hope, making their concern the preservation of the ‘collapsing’ power of the Yemeni state under the pretext of security and the unity of Yemen, have often served another end: perpetuating the domination of regional and international powers over Yemen at the expense of democracy and national unity.
To this end, the article proposed an alternative approach through which Yemen is reclaimed as one community. I suggest an alternative approach towards rethinking the possibility of seeing the ‘dying’ state of Yemen as a unifying instrument. The aim was to highlight ethical acts of mourning the death and injury of Yemen, situated at the margin of apprehansive state security politics, which seek to redeem Yemenis as a community. I argued that the difference between worrying about, and mourning the death of, the Yemeni state becomes equivalent to the difference between the state’s betrayal of political unifying possibilities and its fidelity to a political community.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.