Yemen's cultural isolation!

The war has surrounded Yemen’s neck, and imposed a stifling siege on it in the cultural aspect to the point that it has become culturally isolated. Isolation here means its separation from the Arab cultural scene on the one hand, and the emergence of an emerging alien culture that confirms this separation and enhances its presence, and exploiting the circumstances of the political conflict to exclude the cultural identity linked to the national identity, where the corridors of creativity, arts and theater have shifted to the battlefields and platforms of extremism, the discourse of violence and the language of hatred, the absence of books and the severing of ties with the world of education, reading, printing and publishing, and the replacement of the culture of death with the culture of life, and the culture of reactionism with the culture of civilization, urbanity and freedom.

This isolation has several forms, some of which are directly visible, and some of which are indirectly invisible. On the surface, cultural absence is present as a prominent sign. Since the moment of the coup, the concept has been erased and its tools have vanished from the lives of the elites. The cultural scene has completely collapsed and lost its features.

Officially, the Ministry of Culture was shattered and its trace disappeared. It no longer had any meaning within the framework of the coup government or the internationally recognized legitimate government, which merged it with the Ministries of Information and Tourism as one ministerial portfolio. This official marginalization dealt it the first slap in the face and diminished its importance, considering that the historical moment does not call for attention to cultural affairs and the activation of their effectiveness.

For a decade, not a single international book fair has been held in Yemen, after Sana’a used to host it annually. If Sana’a is occupied, then Aden is liberated, but the legitimate ministry concerned with the matter no longer thinks of such an event. Yemen has become forgotten by Arab publishing houses, and no book has entered Yemen since then, neither officially nor commercially. There are no longer local publishing houses that can print books locally and market them in Arab book fairs, or even contain the creative and intellectual output locally. The tragedy is that the Abbadi Center for Printing and Publishing closed its doors before the war, and the era of books in the Yemeni street has ended.

The Houthi militias in Sana'a have worked to paralyze the movement of official and private cultural institutions. They have turned institutions affiliated with the Ministry of Culture into commercial centers, such as the Cultural Center, and seized the building of the Yemeni Writers and Authors Union in Dhamar. They have also merged the Yemeni Studies and Research Center, which was headed by Abdulaziz Al-Maqaleh and is affiliated with Sana'a University, with the Educational Research Center, which has a great difference between their tasks and specializations, as a retaliatory ploy to obscure its great role in documenting the history of the Yemeni national and political movement for decades, and its profound contributions to establishing the foundations of national awareness and creative culture locally and in the Arab world.

Due to the Houthi repression there, many private cultural centers have been frozen, such as the Ibadah Foundation, Al-Afeef Foundation, Basmant Foundation, and political and intellectual research centers. The publication of magazines and periodicals has been completely stopped, and there are only Houthi pamphlets, sectarian booklets, and Shiite curricula that flood the various villages and cities under the grip of the coup.

Of course, this Houthi cultural scene has magnified the wall of cultural isolation of Yemen, and increased its distance from the map of Arab culture, whether at the level of behavior or creativity. The Yemeni creators residing in those areas have abandoned their talents and disavowed their cultural experiences; as long as they have lost their freedom, which is a basic condition for the flow of their production, big and brilliant names have disappeared because the cultural climate is filled with oppression and booby-trapped with sectarianism.

The legitimate Ministry of Culture was supposed to play a historic role in establishing Yemen’s cultural presence and redoubling its efforts to resume its role internally and externally, but it shamefully marginalized it and did not leave any trace of it that would prove its survival. It did not pay attention to creators, nor did it contain intellectuals, nor did it involve them in political life or motivate them to continue their role in light of intellectual and cultural challenges. It did not preserve the historical landmarks and Yemeni artifacts that were scattered in various auctions around the world, without the ministry showing any reaction to this cultural setback and historical obliteration of Yemen’s cultural identity, and the drying up of the sources of its conscience, imagination and creativity.

Lyrical symphonies and musical sessions held abroad under the sponsorship of unknown institutions. This is all that Yemen offers culturally, and the Ministry of Culture claims to supervise them without having any hand in holding them, as an attempt by those actually in charge of them to appear in an official manner that belongs to Yemen, its culture and art.

The only cultural thread linking Yemen to the outside world is the presence of two Yemeni commercial publishing houses in Cairo that participate in book fairs on behalf of Yemen. However, these two houses print for Yemeni creators and writers who are able to bear the costs of publishing in them. As for the rest of the writers who are unable to print their works abroad, they are many. Therefore, you find that Yemeni cultural production is small compared to the number of its creators, thinkers, and writers.

Many creative poets, novelists and talented people try to break the isolation circle by presenting Arab and international participations, but they fail in the first rounds, as they are treated with contempt and inferiority; due to the low level of their talents or the deliberate disregard for their abilities if they are highly professional; because they belong to a country torn apart by conflict and impotence like a geographical curse for which they pay a heavy price, and the country to which they belong bears part of their disappointment and the decline of their presence, by letting them down and hindering the display of their artistic and creative abilities abroad.

By carefully examining the dimensions of this problem, we will find that political fragmentation is accompanied by cultural fragmentation connected to the political action taking place in every Yemeni square, as culture has become a creative emotional state that transcends all narrow frameworks, shrinking into political dependency that adopts framed ideas and dwarfed illusions produced by the political crisis moment, so that cultural production slides into inciting sectarian, regional, and fragmentation features and ideological tendencies.

The political influence on culture has weakened its output and diminished its value. Creativity was a comprehensive cultural horizon that represented thought, identity, existential issues, features of the future, and immersion in the dilemmas of the Yemeni present. However, its data now have become mere contradictions, illusions, and frameworks that have scattered Yemeni cultural awareness and made its outputs pale in poetry, narration, art, formation, and thought. The reasons for isolation have multiplied and its forms have multiplied.

The most dangerous of all this is that there is a cultural erosion from within the cultural scene, and a strange creative decline, as the media has created a generation that is intrusive on culture, underestimating its nature and tools, and finding it easy to appear in its name and impersonate its character based on the awareness of a superficial audience that receives the product of this generation and takes it as a model. Not only that, but it has also undermined the Yemeni cultural and creative level achieved in the past decades, and diminished its importance and status, instead of taking it as a starting point towards development and modernization and balancing Arab creativity and representing its innovative methods.

If a cultural correction does not emerge, adopted by official and private entities, intellectual, cultural and creative elites, to reshape awareness and draw the features of overcoming its stumbling blocks, nullify the motives for this decadence and deterioration, take the hand of the true creator and block the way for every intruder, whether a writer, critic or reader addicted to trends and makers of fame waves with their absurd opinions that provoke ridicule and stupidity, then Yemen will withdraw into itself, its isolation and isolation will increase, and its bright cultural image will fade, which most of our cultural icons have worked for decades to highlight its cultural presence and compete with its peers from sister and friendly countries with great works, profound experiences, and artistic, intellectual and critical production witnessed in Arab culture.