I write this blog for the people I’m close to. Living thousands of miles away from my tribe in America, this is a portal for them to see my life here in Yemen. I realize this is a public blog. It is as such so if a friend of a friend thinks something I’ve written is interesting, they can pass it along. I never imagined I’d gain any readership from the vast world I’ve never met.

I write to describe my life in Yemen. How I react to new experiences with these new people in this new culture. I write to try and show what I see, so that they can see it too. I try to include some day to day events, the struggles and the joys of full immersion. But I also aim at communicating the intangibles of this new life, the emotional reactions, those things that seem planted in your heart, or your stomach, which don’t have a name or a shape, but grow and poke you and make you feel all funny.

To express the abstracts, the intangibles, language only gets me so far. I cannot say, “I feel this way, because..”. I don’t know if this is because I’m not that great of a writer, or if these things are pretty much verbally inexpressible. However, I still try. I say what I can with the words I know, and I try to use all other conventions to bring them closer to what I really mean, to what I really feel. I hold the approach to my version of truth that lives in my gut above all else.

Words.
I play with words that bite, with words that hug, with words I only vaguely understand the meaning of. Sometimes I like to drop grammatical conventions, stringing together words that seemingly don’t relate, because the mess of the words relates to the mess of the feelings I’m trying to sort out. Sometimes a phrase feels absolutely perfect at the time I write it, and then I go back later and wonder what the hell I meant. Sometimes I use a dictionary to look up words I have published.

A selective gaze.
Often I’d like you to know what a place looks like. A picture can do that, and sometimes I post pictures. Usually, though, I try to explain it. I can give colors and shapes and sounds and tastes and smells and textures, but these relate only the sensory input data, and sometimes I hope to relate a place based on what happens after these senses are processed, my impressions given to me by my swirling brain. I’ll leave out the smog for a day that feels beautiful to me. I might focus on dirt or dust when I’m feeling out of place. So things are brighter or dirtier or better or worse or this or that based the tone or flow or emotion I’m hoping to achieve, on what I hope to evoke in my readers back home.

Medium.
I can’t help but be the main character in a narrative about my life and my experiences, but I try to back up from everything as much as I can. I don’t want to say too many, “I thinks” or “I feels.” I do what I can to express what’s inside, and language helps: certain words, sentences, paragraphs, keeping some details, tossing others out, embellishing these but not those. Projecting your feelings into the landscapes, or reshaping characters into your thoughts. These conventions become the vessels that fail at delivering that which I can’t even pin down myself. The heart of my experiences here are thus approached from many different angles, giving different perspectives and different impressions, using the world around me to describe what’s inside me. Thus a landscape is not just a landscape, someone I’ve met is not who they are. I can’t give a perfect description, but I can manipulate my writing to reflect how I feel.

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In short, this blog is a collaborative writing project in which I take the world I see, process it, imagine how I can convey my feelings to my readers, invent and toy with new ways to do so, try to do it, and then hear back from them to see how I did.

The people and places in this blog are creations of my mind.
They are based on the reality I live, but I do not aim to objectively represent this reality.
I aim to convey subjective reactions of not even the people, not even the place, but my processing of these things based on what I feel.

I’m not a journalist reporting facts.

Upon finding out that the people who inspired the characters I’ve invented for my expository purposes have found my blog and have read what I’ve written makes me sick to my stomach. I cast such an ugly light on these characters not to disparage real people, but to use them, these invented characters, as a medium to describe my distaste for American diplomacy, for the Western prejudice against Islam, and for everything else I feel.

For disliking some American policies, I cannot apologize. Criticizing government is one of the best ways to change minds so that government changes. I feel dissent is patriotic. If you don’t agree with something, speak out! This freedom of speech is a freedom to criticize, and it’s one of my most coveted aspects of our democratic nation. I love my country, but I’d like to see a lot of changes. To explain my feelings on government policy in Yemen, I equated the government (the policies, the state of the nation, etc.) with two people I met who work for the government. That these characters are so close to those I’ve met makes the sting all the more real when they stumbled upon what I’ve read, and for that I apologize sincerely.

It is my hope that this entry places what I write into context, that it expresses my intentions, and now, my apologies. But as I’ve said, I know that words fail.

One of my good friends wrote some very insightful reactions to some of my concerns, and I want to reprint them here:

“….
I also thought that the tone of the entry betrayed certain aspects of your own thinking. Although I thought that your reasoning was astute and the tone of bruised naivete was effective, it’s really strange that you did not cut those two people more slack. You write about Yemenis with such compassion, even the ones who harass you for money for hours. And I know that you’d never publicly post about one of your classmates that way, even someone that you hated.

I think that the reason you felt justified in making these comments was because these were two people in a position of power. But, honestly, these are not public figures. And it might have been better to think of them less as “diplomats” than as “social acquaintances who happen to work at the Embassy.” And see how, if you had thought of them more in the same way as you’d think of your classmates, whether how you wrote and talked about them might have changed.

So, to summarize. It was a fun, well-written post that had one or two genuine insights. But, real bloggers and columnist alienate and bash people because they know that someone is going to read what they write and that it’s somehow going to matter. Since your blog is small, the the net good is so much lower than it would be for them. Finally, it might be worth thinking about whether you actually did these people something of an injustice in ignoring their own feelings.
…..”

My blog is indeed small, and I never thought what I wrote would make it back to the source. I feel like a gossiping schoolchild, whose friend has found out I’d been bashing them to get ahead myself. I still believe words are weak to convey truth. But I’ve been reminded how incredibly powerful writing can be.