I see my life in fragments, scattered like pages torn from a book. I gather them up, read them in no particular order, and the through-line is always there: writing.
I was a child in Sana’a when I first understood that the world would not save me. I watched my mother fight battles she was destined to lose. A woman, wanting a divorce, trapped inside the machinery of Yemeni law—an apparatus built by men, for men, where women are nothing but footnotes. The discriminatory laws against women hindered my mother from having her freedom from her abusive partner. There was no justice for her. We all suffered. There was no escape. So I made my own. I wrote. Writing was my escape.
At fourteen, my journal became my confessional, my shield, my secret doorway into another world. A world where I could name things as they were. A world where I was not powerless. I wrote feverishly, obsessively, as if my life depended on it. Maybe it did.
Later, when it was time for me to go to college, everyone around me tried to make me choose another life. A reasonable life. A job in a bank, a degree in commerce, something stable, something practical. But what they didn’t understand—what they never understood—was that writing was not something I did. Writing was something I was.
I became a journalist. I fought for it. I fought my family. I fought the expectations of my culture. I fought during the 2011 revolution. I wrote when they told me to be silent. I wrote when it meant writing would lead me to a life in exile. I wrote when it meant losing everything I had known.
Even in Sweden, I kept writing. Through war, through pandemic, through solitude so deep it felt like drowning, I wrote. The words carried me forward. They placed me in rooms and panel discussions with
people who had studied at Harvard and Oxford, men and women who had walked smooth, untroubled paths to success, while I was just me, a young lady with a humble background. But none of that mattered. Writing was the great equalizer. Writing was the only passport I ever needed.
They gave me an international award for it once, by the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York. A beautiful, weighty thing. Recognition. Proof that the words I wrote mattered. But awards mean nothing. Not really. People tell me I’m a star. They look at me with admiration, with awe, as if I’ve transcended something.
But Yemen is the star.
I do not write about fashion, about fleeting pleasures, about things meant to dazzle and distract. I write about a people whose suffering is infinite. A people who bleed, who grieve, who endure.
My identity—half Yemeni, half Ethiopian—was supposed to be a liability. Something to be hidden, something to erase. But I wrote it into existence. I turned it into a strength. I wrote about my mother’s cancer, about the pain that lived in my bones, about every truth I was told not to speak.
And in the end, it was always the same: writing was the center. The anchor. The compass.
Everything else changes. Everything else slips through my fingers.
But writing remains.
