And still the struggle goes on

How did an impoverished Yemeni girl’s destiny lead her to study at Washington DC and subsequently become Yemen’s first female film producer and then the cultural attache at her country’s embassy in Paris?

Khadija al-Salami’s story is an amazing one, not just for her achievements, but also for the obstacles that she had to overcome as a child and as a woman:

A dysfunctional family life was the first ordeal. Khadija’s mother was reportedly a victim of physical abuse by her husband and the girl grew up during the Yemeni Civil War, witnessing death in her neighbourhood even as a two-year-old toddler. After her dad became deranged and uncontrollably violent with battlefield shell-shock, her mother Fatima lost hope and remarried a tribesman sending Khadija to live with her grandmother in Sanaa.

Then, rape at the age of 11 was devastating. Khadija was that age when her uncle, Ali, arranged her marriage to a friend living in Damascus “before something unfortunate happens”. To get her mother’s consent,

her uncle assured her that he had a pact with her future husband not to have intercourse with her for three years, until she reached the age of 14. Yet  hours after her marriage, after a brief and unequal struggle, she was sexually violated by her ‘husband’. After three weeks of fighting, the man admitted defeat and brought the pre-teen back to her mother in Sanaa.

Khadija resumed school and to help her mother who was struggling financially to care for her children, she looked for a job, at 11. Looking almost 14, she began work as a telephone operator. Soon after a friend introduced her to a Sanaa TV director who wanted to develop a children’s programme and was looking for a child to host the show. She got the job. From then on, her life took a turn for the better. At secondary school she decided to learn English and she went for a month to Cambridge, UK. Then she won a scholarship to further her studies in English at Georgetown University. So in 1983 the 16-year-old Khadija landed in Washington DC where she would live for almost four years. She writes, “In America the burden of my past, of trying to keep it all hidden, miraculously lifted ... For the first time in my life, I lived in the present, and stopped dwelling on a painful past”.

From America her life took on a different dimension as she met prominent Yemeni political leaders who mentored her and where she also began to discover her own talents as a filmmaker. Today Khadija, who’s now 48, has made more than 20 films, most of them dealing with women’s rights issues and freedom. She’s also written an autobiography Tears of Sheba (2003).   Most recently, from Paris where she was with the Yemen embassy, al-Salami watched the Arab Spring unfold and felt an understandable kinship with the women struggling to be heard. So she headed back home to Yemen.

In Yemen she met hundreds of other women risking their lives each day to attend the protests. Her film The Scream follows a number of these women, as they gather to protest against Ali Abdullah Saleh. As she spent more time with her subjects, al-Salami’s film became as much about the disappointment and frustrations that the women felt with their husbands and male family members as they decided to buck tradition and voice their opinions but met with a wall of resistance. “I feel it’s my role to be there and document (these women).  I left a long time ago, but the fight is still going on. I don’t know when it’s going to end.”

The author is a spiritual writer with dna