Transcriber: Yujin Jung Reviewer: Robert Tucker
Poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote: "I come from there and I have memories."
Like him, many people refer to home as "there."
My parents left Yemen many years ago,
and they never stopped talking to us about "there."
Mama told us about her cat, Lulu,
who used to walk her to school every single day.
They became even closer
after mama's 9-year-old sister was killed by a stray bullet.
Baba told us about the mountains where he was born and grew up,
and later about how much he missed the mountain breeze
when he was jailed as a teenager for political reasons.
Every time they told us stories from "there,"
I was transported to a place
filled with love, adventure, sacrifice and longing.
"There" is where I was born,
in Sana'a, Yemen.
In fact, in this very same room -
this is me and my mother -
I was born in 1979.
I'll leave it up to you to calculate how old I am.
As a child, we left Yemen,
and eventually as a teenager, we settled here in the US.
But then, 18 years later,
I decided to move to Yemen,
and I got the amazing opportunity
to live in a place I've always dreamed of living in,
the old city of Sana'a.
We lived in this house, here on the third floor,
my husband and I.
In January 2011, protests began, and I quickly joined the revolution,
chanting, "Ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam,"
"The people want an end to the regime."
For the next couple of years,
I wrote about the situation in my blog and op-eds,
I documented human rights violations,
interviewed many women in prison,
and photographed way too many young, dead bodies.
It was an extremely difficult time, to say the least.
But not entirely.
It was actually one of the best times of my life.
I connected with people on a very, very deep level.
People from all different backgrounds were in the same place.
People were filled with hope, and love, and vibrancy, and so much art.
Once, I decided to write about this revolutionary art,
and my editor added the line, wanted to add the line:
"Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden."
As though that was the definition of the country.
Now, imagine if you wrote an article
about the opening of a new art gallery in somewhere in New York State,
and your editor added the line:
"New York, the birth state of Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh."
(Laughter)
That wouldn't make sense, right?
What also didn't make sense to me
was the complete disconnect
between the Yemen I was living in, the Yemen I was experiencing,
and the Yemen he thought he knew while living thousands of miles away.
But he saw Yemen only through one stereotypical lens.
And the problem with stereotypes,
as author Chimamanda Adichie said in her TED Talk,
is not that they're untrue, but that they're incomplete.
They make one story become the only story.
I left Yemen in January 2015, when conflict began to escalate.
The privilege to flee the country so quickly
caused me immense shame, guilt,
and I felt like a coward.
I didn't say "bye" to people I loved.
And then two months later,
US-made bombs hit the capital of Yemen, where I was born.
And although during the revolution I was extremely active in the movement,
this time I was frozen.
I felt helpless watching the war from abroad.
And the guilt really consumed me.
I felt guilty when I went grocery shopping,
guilty when I took a warm shower,
and guilty when I visited the doctor, even though I was pregnant at the time.
That's because, in Yemen,
people were deprived, and continued to be deprived,
of basic services, such as healthcare and electricity.
Children aren't just starving like the media tell us,
they're actually being deliberately starved
as a weapon of war
due to an internationally supported blockade.
The thing is about war is that it forces us into decisions
we should never have to make.
While the trolley dilemma -
would you derail this train to kill one person,
in order to save these five -
is simply an ethical debate or discussion,
for many of us;
for some people, it's an actual reality.
For some parents in Yemen, for example,
they have to choose between
either buying cholera medicine to save one sick child,
or using that money to feed an entire family.
Now, in either case,
someone's probably going to die,
and the parents have to make that hard choice,
and watch as their children die slowly in front of them.
As a parent of a four-year-old and another on it's way,
I can't imagine the trauma
of having to make such a soul-wrenching decision.
No one should be put in that place, no one.
I think of these parents often,
in fact, I see them in my dreams.
I see them running away from bombs,
hiding,
but trying to protect their children.
And in one particularly disturbing dream,
I was chopping a body into pieces and putting those pieces in plastic bags.
I don't want to know what that means, or says about me.
But the war follows us everywhere,
it even follows us in the diaspora,
it follows us in our dreams.
Soon enough, the images that I was seeing on television
overshadowed my own memories of Yemen.
And I turned into a dictator's love:
a politically apathetic person.
And then, one time, I was going through my old photos,
and I came across this photograph
that reminded me of a night in 2011 when I woke up at 3 a.m.
from the sound of loud gunshots and artillery.
The clashes lasted until noon that same day.
And that afternoon was actually my cousin's wedding.
I thought they would naturally postpone it, right?
But they didn't.
And I didn't think it was appropriate to celebrate,
so I put on a dress I usually wear to funerals.
My aunt had a bright yellow dress, beaded,
and when she saw me, she was horrified.
I didn't have my hair done,
I didn't have makeup on,
my dress was, you know, inappropriate for the wedding.
And she quickly rummaged through her bag,
found a red lipstick and some bracelets,
and handed them to me.
And then I walked in, I walked into the tent,
and the music was blasting.
(She sings)
So many people were dancing ...
and I was appalled.
In my self-righteousness, I judged them.
How could they dance when 84 people had just died?
But then, about an hour later, I was dragged to the dance floor,
and I finally understood what poet Jalal al-Din Rumi said.
"Dance in the middle of the fighting,
dance in your blood,
dance when you're perfectly free."
This memory was truly, truly a gift,
because it reminded me of people's extraordinary ability to cope.
I decided that I would no longer look at Yemen the way I used to,
I will now look at it beyond the headlines,
and beyond my own part in perpetuating an incomplete narrative.
Hadn't I lived in Yemen?
I started to write again.
But this time, not lending my voice to the Yemen we see on television,
but the Yemen from my memories.
And I started to listen to people's voices,
their stories of everyday heroism.
And it hit me
that while they were the ones living the war,
I was the one stuck in my self-pity.
And the more I collected their stories,
the more I shook off that self-pity and hopelessness.
It's incredible to see how people cope during war,
how people truly live.
It's incredible to see how neighbors share the little food they have with each other,
how they help each other carry water for many, many miles,
how parents creatively try to distract their children from the sounds of bombs,
by, you know, singing out loud or blasting music,
how people try to normalize their day.
They still go to work, every single day,
even though they haven't received their salaries in months.
They still have the courage to fall in love.
Some break up;
others get married in halls as large as this or bigger,
to accommodate all the relatives.
And some, like this toy shop owner,
renovate their businesses -
this is in Ta'izz City -
even in a building that looks like this,
that was destroyed.
Others open new businesses,
like Arsheef in Sana'a,
the country's first contemporary art gallery.
And children still go to school, even in a building like this.
This is their school that was destroyed.
Now, these images are from Yemen,
but really their stories can be found in many other conflict areas,
whether it's in Congo, Kashmir, or Palestine, or ...
The intention behind showing these images
is not to glorify misery,
but rather to show the tenacious human spirit,
where children get up every single morning,
and still go to school,
even when the world tells them that they have no future.
When we tell children that Yemen is one of the worst places on earth,
what we are essentially telling them
[is] that they have no agency,
we're telling them that they should give up,
that they are worse than, less than, all of us here.
It's no wonder then that when immigrants from these countries -
are sometimes perceived
as unable to contribute to society,
or destined to become a burden on it,
because that's, unfortunately, how they're shown in the media,
with a few exceptions.
I understand the intention behind it:
we need to show suffering in order to advocate for a cause.
In my own activism, that's often what I did.
And I still do that, but now, I try to also show the other side.
I try to show stories of resilience
because as much as we need to talk about the war machine,
and arms trade, and war crimes,
we must also counterbalance that
with stories of how people survive when all hell breaks loose.
Because this too is part of their narrative.
We need to tell all the stories of war
because perceptions of reality
are reinforced by the stories we tell ourselves.
We need to tell the stories of ordinary people
doing ordinary, yet extraordinary things,
because they are the ones truly building peace.
This isn't just the end of fighting,
it's the mending of broken hearts and stitching of life back together.
We need to say that in real life,
even in tragedy,
humor is still present.
Life is still present even in war,
even in misery.
We need to share our own memories,
our own stories, our own jokes,
in order to begin the process of collective healing.
Share your memory, share your story,
share your jokes,
and I'll share mine.
I'll share mine with all of you,
and I'll share mine with my children,
just like my parents shared their stories with me.
This is my resistance,
and I urge you to join the resistance.
(Applause)(Cheering)
[MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU]
(Applause)(Cheering)
I urge you to help us reverse humanity's negativity bias
and our tendency to only focus on bleak events.
In this chaotic world,
it's truly an act of rebellion,
it's truly radical,
to think of what could go right.
I'm not saying invent something when you write,
just stop resisting that there may be other realities on the ground.
And finally, let's talk about the other sides of war,
in order to create a new narrative
where people aren't defined by limitations,
but rather endless possibilities.
As author Amin Maalouf said:
"For it is often the way we look at other people
that imprisons them within their own narrowest allegiances.
And it's also the way we look at them
that may set them free."
Thank you very much ... thank you.
(Applause)