A Bard Against Bullets

The men squat along the walls of the salon with daggers strapped against their bellies and pistols on their hips, bathed in the buttery light of a low sun shining through stained-glass windows.

The days in this remote village run through a simple cycle: In the mornings, the farmers work their fields, growing almost nothing except qat, the narcotic leaves Yemenis chew as a sort of national pastime. When the light grows long, they bundle some of their fresh-cut leaves and gather to get stoned, recite poetry and talk politics.

This afternoon, the farmers have come to hear Amin Mashrigi, an itinerant poet who has traveled miles across the mountains, past homes of mud brick and through scabby orchards, to see them. His voice rings out, proud and acrobatic, gliding up and falling low to perch on a single, long-stretched syllable.

Shame on you, kidnapper

Take your clothes and leave from here

Don’t be mad or extreme

You’ve gone too far and there’s no honor there

His audience listens, rapt.

Now the ships can’t come to Yemen and the country is suffering

The World Bank is paying the debt

Neither New York nor Texas banks paid the price

Your victim is not the right one

Wrapped around the Saudi Arabian outback on the lowest tip of the Arabian Peninsula, this rugged, remote country is best known to the outside world as a lawless badland where tribesmen kidnap foreigners for ransom, Islamic extremists find haven in desert villages and terrorists bombed the USS Cole.

But Yemen can no longer afford the lawlessness. Under massive American pressure and backed by infusions of U.S. cash, the central government has been forced to attempt a daunting task: taming the violent underside of Yemen’s storied tribal culture, which exists in relative autonomy from the rulers in Sana, the capital.

Mashrigi’s poetry tours are part of the campaign. Funded by the government, the 32-year-old bard travels tirelessly through Yemen’s rough countryside, using tribal logic and honor codes to dissuade the locals from kidnapping foreigners, toting heavy weaponry or sheltering fugitives.

To an outsider, the idea of fighting terrorism with poetry may sound naive -- even a little desperate. But in these ancient farmlands of rock and dust, spoken verse still holds a power that’s hard to fathom in the e-mail-driven West.

In rural Yemen, illiteracy is rampant, and chanted poems remain the language of power and politics. A man is judged more noble if his tongue is suave, his vocabulary supple. Poetry has the power to wed and divorce; to protect or condemn. It is a fundamentally political tool, applied to everything from water rights to vengeance.

Tribes craft poems to settle quarrels over grazing rights, land boundaries and the honor of women. When tribesmen make their way to mediations, they come chanting odes to advertise their stance on the issue at hand. Listening to the singsong of the various tribes’ poets helps the sheiks gauge the mood before starting negotiations that may stretch for days.

“This is a very vigorous way of debating issues,” said Steven C. Caton, a Harvard University anthropologist who spent years in the countryside researching his book on poetry, “Peaks of Yemen I Summon.”

“Talk about a democratic discourse -- this is it for tribal elements,” he said. “This is a highly controlled, complex, witty medium of debate.”

But the same tribal traditions that have nurtured Yemen’s poets have also bedeviled government efforts to root out armed extremists. In many of the remote areas, tribal sheiks wield far more power than the federal government, and militants have long been able to exploit tribal codes to gain “protection” -- a promise that a tribal chief will fight for his visitor’s life against any foe. Even if that means taking up arms against government soldiers who come looking for a suspect.

Finances also figure strongly in the equation, as Yemen’s tribes have fallen on hard times. Descended from raiders who lived off their booty, they are now struggling to feed, clothe and provide water for their people. The combination of desperation and the ancient codes of hospitality has helped turn northern Yemen into a haven for illicit activity and a comfortable nesting ground for extremists.

“If you give enough money to the sheik, he’ll protect you,” a Western diplomat in Sana said recently. “If you’re in the area and under his protection, that’s it.”

It is still fairly easy for terrorists to find shelter among the tribes, said Sheik Faisal Aburas of the northern province of Al Jawf, an impoverished wash of desert and mountain along the Saudi border. Aburas said he knew of many such cases. Once a tribe takes payment for protection, they have to shelter the guest or lose face.

“If a terrorist comes to my area, the thing that binds me to him is not ideology. It’s [financial] need,” Aburas said. A hospital in his region has been closed for three years, he said, and men spend whole days fetching water for their dusty villages. The province is known for gun-running, he said, but “try to convince them a living could be made differently.”

Firearms are carried as casually as a wallet in this country of 20 million, where there are an estimated three guns for every person. The government has cracked down on the sale of heavy arms at Yemen’s famed open-air gun markets, and launched an ambitious buyback program. But some Yemeni officials quietly concede that surface-to-air missiles and grenade launchers are still widely available.

Struggling against the inertia of tribal tradition, poverty and staunch independence, Mashrigi is badly outmatched, but conventional solutions have caused trouble here. Government soldiers have sometimes tried to force their way into tribal regions, only to spark bloody shootouts.

So Mashrigi presses on, rambling through the country. He recently organized a massive poetry competition at which 1,000 poets recited meditations on the question of terrorism. The 100 poems judged most favorably were printed in one of Yemen’s popular poetry anthologies.

“Folklore involves all aspects of life, especially for people in remote areas,” says Mashrigi, a long, thin man with mournful eyes. “Poetry has always been used to solve tribal conflicts, revenge and arbitration. From this I got the idea to shift the focus onto terrorism.”

Because Yemen remains a fundamentally oral society, its poetry holds the role given to drama in ancient Greece: It entertains, and teaches social mores and molds expectations along the way. Poems are recorded on scratchy cassette tapes and peddled in markets.

There are poems for death, and poems for visitors, easily translated from the Arabic:

The unending greetings from my voice reach the sky

And from the sky should fall every perfume on you, guest.

Dusk is thickening outside the qat-chewing salon in Jerif. Mashrigi falls quiet, and looks around at the ring of men. “Who else is writing poetry?” he calls out.

An arm shoots up; it belongs to a young farmer near the back of the room. Cupping his chin in his elbow and resting his fingers on his cheek, bulging with a wad of qat as if he had a golf ball in his mouth, Hussein Hussein Sheikh begins to recite:

The sky is clear for me

And all the universe is my shield

And the sun is my light

Better not to kill but to seek justice

In justice I will find refuge

Fantasy bleeds seamlessly into reality here in this room: The men tell stories that are not necessarily true or false; they are simply accepted, woven swiftly into the collective lore of the tribe.

Many of the tales hinge on the feats of clever poets. They say a man in this village recently defended his land from would-be confiscators by standing on the soil and chanting:

Oh God, mountains, valleys

This is my land and I’ll die fighting for it.

The men fell back in deference to his quick thinking.

“There are strong beliefs about language and the power of poetry which have to do with the idea that if you’re a human being, there are certain skills you should have,” Caton, the Harvard professor, said. A Yemeni man, Caton explained, should be a good Muslim, dance smoothly, shoot cleanly and have a fluent tongue for poetry.

“To be able to rise to a challenge with a verbal reply shows wit, intelligence. One’s moral compass, really,” he said.

Here in Jerif, the men recite poems about global affairs and hoot appreciatively for poems that deride Arab governments and American intervention, cheering at lines such as:

For dollars we sell our brothers to the States

We used to love Saddam; now we step on his picture.

And this one:

The Arab army is just to protect the leaders

They build their rule on the pain of the people

Democracy is for the rich

If the poor man tries it, they’ll call him a thief.

Mashrigi believes he was born to be a poet. He started young: His parents had quarreled, and his mother had stormed back to her childhood home to live with her father. Mashrigi’s distraught father herded six sheep to his father-in-law’s house, and asked for his wife to come home. His father-in-law refused the offering, and he came home dejected.

Mashrigi, then 9, made the weary journey to his grandfather’s house with a single lamb in tow. He stood before the old man, and ad-libbed a few lines of poetry. He still remembers the poem:

My grandfather, you are wise, you are like a castle

If my father is mistaken, I am here to please you.

I should have brought an ox, not a lamb,

But you can forgive me, and so you can forgive my father.

It worked: The old man relented, and Mashrigi’s mother came home. From that day on, the villagers began to call Mashrigi “Amin the poet.”

“Almost all Yemenis,” he said, “will trust a poet.”