Chapter Fourteen
Post on my wall on f*******::
There are poems of sadness over Yemen’s decline, and poems of nostalgia for the Aden of earlier days, but I’ve always been drawn to a tragic poem by Ahmed Ali Abdellah. It’s called ‘Young Abdelrahim’, and tells the story of a young man from Aden. He was first swept along by the revolutionary wave of the 1970s and 80s, when Aden was known as ‘the beacon of scientific socialism’ in the Arab world. Then, after the 1994 Yemeni Civil War, when Aden was occupied and South Yemen became no more than war booty for the victorious Northern tribes, he was dragged down by the Salafi obscurantist tide. He turned into another person: one obsessed with the coming of the Mahdi.
One day (buckle up, now!), Abdelrahim dreamed the sky asked him to murder his el
