Sarah Al-Yaseen
Palestinian Poet and Writer
I arrived in Sana’a in late 2006, a city that instantly captivated me with the warmth of its people and their profound love for Palestine. Yet Yemen had never been present in my memory before. In my childhood, Egypt filled our streets with its songs, Iraq with its grand history, Syria with its dramas, and Lebanon with Fairuz. Yemen, however, remained absent, as if it had chosen isolation for itself. It appeared in no schoolbook, no song, not even in the stories we grew up with.
Landing at Sana’a Airport and seeing the flag with its three colors, I asked myself a simple question: Had the Arab revolutions also passed through here? I did not know that this city, so deeply affectionate toward Palestine, had witnessed a great republican revolution decades earlier. It had not occurred to me that Yemen was part of the Arab nationalist wave that shook the region in the 1950s and 1960s.
Revolutions often endure in the collective memory when they are immortalized in song. Egypt’s July Revolution, for example, would never have remained so deeply rooted without Mohammed Abdel Wahab’s anthem to freedom or the broadcasts of Sawt al-Arab featuring Abdel Halim and Umm Kulthum. Iraq, too, left behind a political stage, poems, and folk songs. Syria etched its image into Arab consciousness through its novels and dramas. Yemen, by contrast, stood alone. No major Arab song was produced about its revolution. No drama told its story. Even Yemeni music remained largely confined to local circles, never breaking into the broader Arab space. Thus Yemen seemed unknown, as though it lingered on the margins of the map.
Gradually, however, a clearer picture formed for me: Yemen before 1962 was under the rule of the Mutawakkilite Imamate—marked by harsh isolation, a rigid traditionalist system, and an entrenched fear of change. A country without modern institutions, without broad education, without openness to the world. While Egypt, Iraq, and Syria pursued modernization projects, northern Yemen remained trapped in the past.
The revolution, therefore, was not merely a political change, but an attempt to shatter a long wall of isolation. This history had been unknown to me, as though Yemen lay outside the core of Arab revolutions and their presence in music, drama, or literature. I only grasped it once I came close enough to understand the long struggle Yemenis had to wage—over years, against various forces intent on crushing the revolution and imprisoning its people in the past, denying them any chance to build a just future free of a monarchy that enslaved its citizens and drained their resources.
The discoveries were shocking. The monarchy had denied Yemenis the right to a just life and proved harder to defeat than the revolution of hope, dream, and republic could easily overcome. Even when victory came, it was muted and hesitant. This revolution, intertwined with Egypt’s July Revolution and resembling the transformations in Iraq and Syria, never received the same recognition in Arab discourse. Yemen seemed weighed down by the burden of a rigid, traditional order. Its long isolation made the Yemeni revolution appear delayed, as if it had come too late in Arab time.
Looking at Yemen’s trajectory after the revolution reveals many complexities. The republic was indeed founded, education expanded, and Yemenis emerged from isolation. Yet the political system remained fragile, unstable, subject to tribal dominance, and lacking clear projects to break free from the legacy of the Imamate and to forge a popular will strong enough to prevent its return.
Even the experience of unification with the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen was gradually absorbed into the Imamate’s legacy. Instead of the North seizing the future by forging a unique historical moment—making unity a space for exchanging experiences and mutual learning—political conflict gave new life to the Imamate’s legacy and squandered the opportunity to benefit from some of the progressive elements the South had known during its years as an independent state: greater visibility of women’s rights, moves toward social equality, and certain socialist ideas that, despite their flaws, sought to narrow class divides and build modern institutions.
In the South, women’s participation in education and employment was more prominent, and there were attempts to build a more civic-oriented state that limited the role and influence of tribes in political and social life. The North, however, did not benefit from these advantages. On the contrary, many of its problems spread to the South: tribal structures, corrupt political practices, and remnants of the Imamate’s heritage.
Thus unity, which could have been a path to salvation, became a missed opportunity. It entrenched feelings of betrayal among many Southerners who saw their previous gains not preserved but erased.
For me, the September Revolution was more than a historical event. It was a key to understanding Yemen—a country absent from my childhood, discovered by chance when I lived there. I often wondered: How could an entire country be absent from Arab memory? Why had it no share in song, drama, or even school curricula?
I came to realize that this absence was no coincidence. It was the outcome of accumulated factors: long isolation, absent political will, popular submission, weak cultural representation, and neglect from Arab centers of power. The result was that Yemen remained distant from our awareness, as though it had never been one of the makers of Arab and Islamic history.
This absence made discovering Yemen for me a deeply personal experience, like stumbling upon a missing part of the Arab world. The September Revolution did not reach me through songs or books, but through streets, names, and faces—through a simple question about the name of a square or the plaque of a school.
Today, years later, the question still hangs in the air: How could a revolution of such magnitude remain invisible to us all? Perhaps because the Imamate was never fully defeated. Perhaps because the regimes that followed the revolution failed to build a solid state. Or perhaps because Arabs, quite simply, never paid Yemen the attention it deserved.
What is certain is that Yemen’s story needs to be told. Its revolution must be sung. It must enter Arab memory not as a shadow on the margins but as one of its pillars. For a nation that forgets its revolutions—or allows some to fade into silence—is a nation doomed to repeat its failures and to witness its enemies resurface from within at the first opportunity.
