By Layla Al-Barakani ~
Before ever they had set pen to page, Yemenis had known themselves by word. In golden light and glowing ember, poem and story and song had flowed down the centuries, pealing down the ages. Such tradition—full of metaphor and music and remembrance—is one of the most persistent and typical Yemeni props of culture.
Even today, in the screen and sound era, Yemeni oral tradition remains more treasury of values, identity, and pride than entertainment.
A Living Legacy Carried by Voice
Yemeni performance is not participatory event, performance. Seating men and women of any age in a circle about a ḥakawātī or shaʿir, their own term for reciter or poet, at weddings, public festivals of celebration, and sacred holidays is common. The performances are call-and-response with plenty of rhythmic chanting and ancient percussion like the ʿūd and darbuka thrown in to spice.
“Every family has a story-teller,” Yemeni culture observer and former Minister of Information Nadia Al-Sakkaf promises. “Not necessarily intellectuals or artists. People tell stories.” (Al Jazeera)
The worldliness of language and dialect
Multilinguality feels right at home in Yemen’s lush storytelling culture. Highland Ibb is but a single of so many neighborhood dialects—i.e., coastal Hadhramaut—into which tale-writers ground stories in rich, verbal life with wordplay and rich, grounded imagery. The standard forms are analogous to the zār, the classical rhythm chant, in sacral healing, and recited oral poetry in community majlis audience.
This is not something merely sentimental but a conjunction, a meeting, which unites human beings with passion and memory beyond. Yemeni legend is code of conduct and history too, British-Yemeni Society feels, generating communal value and communal identity along the way.
Story of Bravery, Identity, and Collective Memory
Yemen’s vibrant oral tradition is almost everything except for survival—on-time tale in a nation that has endured for centuries. Tribal warrior men, legendary queen women, and average man heroes are re-told in tales recalling the wonder of characters. Ancient legends of Queen Bilqis, Sheba’s mythical queen by custom, not only find themselves written down in scripture and ancient histories but also narrated out vocally to village communities in hundreds of villages and homes all over Yemen.
“Storytelling authenticates identity,” is the words of anthropologist Steven C. Caton, who learned so well about Yemeni oral poetry through his book Peaks of Yemen I Summon. “By common account of it all, groups establish what they are, whence they are from, and what they are concerned about.”
Lessons Wrapped in Lyrics
Not dank porn, but wholesome moral teaching: virtues like karam (courage), shajaʿa (kindness), and ṣidq (loyalty) are learned through the medium of stories told by grandchildren to children. Dismal or defeatist, there is a moral—a manner of interpreting the turns of life.
They are particularly replete with an unofficial mass culture of diffusion. Pedagogy remains oral tradition and affective point of reference among Yemeni youth.
Yemeni youth are uploading these tales on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok and making them into short movies, digital calligraphy, and animation. Podcasts such as Bishtar Podcast and groups such as Yemen Culture (@yemen.culture on Instagram) are spearheading the soft renaissance, making oral culture go viral in the international world.
In diaspora culture, in diaspora camps, they not only survive generation to generation but are still performed in exile. A grandmother’s story, read aloud in Adeni Arabic, as a voice message sent via WhatsApp, will be now read aloud to a grandchild in London or Djibouti.
A Voice That Endures
While war and destruction destroyed Yemen, its people give not just nostalgia but continuity. In each mangled people’s tale, in each poem so softly breathed, there is the people’s heartbeat that will never be silenced.
There will be given to the people more than words. More than love, pride, purpose, hope—breathed softly over the centuries but not yet lost.
References
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Al Jazeera. “Yemen’s rich cultural heritage under threat,” March 2015.
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Caton, Steven C. Peaks of Yemen I Summon: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe. University of California Press, 1990.
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British-Yemeni Society. “The Role of Oral History in Yemeni Cultural Preservation”
