Читать книгу Deadline Yemen (The Elizabeth Darcy Series) - Peggy Hanson - Страница 4

FOREWORD

It will be immediately obvious to the reader that I am a hopeless Yemenophile. The country has attracted me since before I went to live there 1975-1978. Those three years embedded themselves in my mind with dust-filled romantic memories that I felt compelled to put down in some form. I was fortunate enough to do some consulting work in 1980 that put a little flesh on the bones of memory.

I started writing Deadline Yemen while living in India, using only my memories and every book on Yemen I could get my hands on as background. It was a personally-integrating experience to picture myself on a street or in a mufraj as I had been years before. But I actually had little idea of how Yemen had changed over the years until 2004, when two women friends and I returned to the country. On that trip, besides reveling in Sana’a’s majesty, we traveled the route the British explorer, Freya Stark, had taken in 1936, in the remote Wadi Hadhramaut. It was back to the ancient incense route; unbelievably exciting. Each of us clutched a copy of Stark’s The Southern Gates of Arabia, in which she chronicled her travel on a donkey. We were in a comfortable SUV, but no matter. For those days we were explorers like Freya Stark. Around every corner lay new mysteries. Recent history intruded, such as passing the Bin Laden compound and encountering a section of the world where the activities of 9/11/2001 are routinely regarded as a David and Goliath story. (It has, in fact, become very dangerous for foreigners to travel in the wadis of the Hadhramaut because of al Qaeda actions.)

I have made several subsequent trips to Yemen since 2004, often with a friend who speaks Arabic and collects Yemeni silver jewelry and therefore leads me up into inaccessible mountain villages and down to desert outposts along the Red Sea. Always, the native hospitality of Yemeni Arabs has overwhelmed us.

In Deadline Yemen I have taken many liberties. The picture of Yemen spans decades and reflects my own rose-colored memories as well as current fact. The Dar al-Hamd, which used to be the principal hotel in Sana’a, is no longer in use and its gardens are withering from the chronic lack of water in the city. Sa’da has been banned to foreigners for several years because of the Houthi rebellion raging there. I have endowed Sa’da with an airport, which it never used to have and is now for military use. I have placed the story in 1997, before Osama bin Laden became a household name and before everyone carried cell phones. The time frame allows me to remember my years as a VOA journalist as they were before all the instant communications of today. The honey motif in the plot is based on a story I read in the New York Times some years ago about the arms smuggling network of bin Laden. The character of Nello is based on an Italian I knew in the 1970s who taught me to make tomato sauce from the ingredients then available. Sadly, he never had an Italian restaurant in Sana’a.

In short, Deadline Yemen is largely fantasy, based on certain inalienable truths. If it helps to spark interest in the most exotic country in the world, and perhaps to make its people more understandable, it has done the job its author intended.