BOOK REVIEW: THE WOMAN WHO FELL FROM THE SKY: AN AMERICAN JOURNALIST IN YEMEN
When Jennifer Steil accepted a job running an English-language newspaper and teaching journalism inYemen for a year, she must have known that her experiences would yield a droll story or two. An unattached 37-year-old from Manhattan, she liked drinking beer (“I love bars, everything about them,” she writes) and flirting with strangers on subways. The ancient city of Sana would be her new home, in a harsh and poor Islamic land that required her to cover up in public and never meet the gaze of a man.
What she couldn’t have imagined is that her actions there would spark a diplomatic crisis, uproot several lives (her own included) and result in this completely winning account of her adventures as a feminist mentor and boss.
Yemen is an unlikely country in which to preach the gospel of a free press. Mocked by the Arab world as so backward that Noah would still recognize the place, it has no radio stations and a largely illiterate populace. The owner of the newspaper that Ms. Steil is hired to oversee was educated in the United States but works as a media adviser to the president and keeps the paper afloat with advertorials. Her students have been taught to value neither objectivity nor accuracy. The paper is a joke at the United States Embassy for its misprints: a headline about Yemen’s “Ministry of Tourism” came out as its “Ministry of Terrorism.”
The professor has less success whipping her staff into shape than in lifting the curtain on a society hidden from Western eyes or caricatured as an outpost for Al Qaeda. Without ignoring the terrible restrictions on intimacy faced by her students in their daily lives — in a country where, she notes, homosexuality and adultery are punishable by death — Ms. Steil manages to form a series of touching, often hilarious friendships with young men and women who do not let their wariness of her thwart their curiosity.
More personal than historical, her book doesn’t claim to plumb the depths of Yemeni culture. Her contacts were mainly among the English-speaking elite. And some sections seem too brazenly aimed at disabusing American readers of stereotypes of Muslim women. (The opening scene is a wedding in which a Yemeni bride searches in a panic for her birth control pills.)
Only in the last chapters does the author briefly discuss her romance with the married British ambassador to Yemen; and nowhere is there mention that she had a baby with him, or that the London tabloids pilloried her as a temptress. These episodes in no way detract from — and in some ways only enhance — her riveting tale of a life’s journey that reads as if it will need a sequel.