Dreaming under a 'niqab' in Yemen

"We don't care about the

niqab

[full face veil], what we want is to study and live!" Rau enthusiastically says, a pseudonym chosen by this 20-year-old Yemeni girl.

Lying has become the only way to survive in the double life that this teenager leads, something evident when she takes off the

niqab

and black gloves.

"I work at home with one hand and keep the other covered so my father doesn't see the nail polish," she says, showing the backs of her hands.

Worn skin on his right hand, with bitten nails blackened by hours of washing and scrubbing are signs of his daily life.

Long false nails painted a metallic purple on the left hand, with a smoother and more hydrated skin, mirror of her dreams.

The rest of the five young women present at the interview remove their gloves at the same time and, laughing, show off their striking manicures, always on the left hand.

The lives of a group of young rebellious and dreamy twenty-somethings weighs little in the statistics of Yemen, where eight out of ten people need humanitarian aid.

But their lives are a sample of the wounds of a war that has lasted six years.

Rau and her friend Sanal, 19, have accumulated six suicide attempts.

Scars on the wrists and, less visible on the stomach after swallowing methanol, attest to this.

They met during the month that they took cosmetic classes together in Ataq, capital of Shabwa province, located on the Yemeni coast.

Of the 25 students, 20 decided to form a group that they baptized in social networks as "Everywhere there is rain."

By "rain", Rau points out, they refer to the "hope" that, even trapped in their homes, young Yemeni women can "succeed as people, dream and develop their own projects."

Nothing is easy for these women in a war-exacerbated patriarchal and tribal society that has progressively expelled them from all public spaces for fear that “something will happen to them on the street”.

These movement restrictions include institutes and universities - those that have not yet been destroyed by the armed conflict - to be confined in a territory whose borders are defined by the four walls of the home.

Meanwhile, the

niqab

and the

galabiya

(a tunic that covers the body down to the feet), always in black and with only the slit of the eyes in sight, relegates them to invisibility.

Going beyond socially accepted limits has serious consequences.

"When I fell in love I lost everything," Rau sighs.

The young man was a friend of his older brother who sneaked into the house at dawn to play video games on nights when there was Internet.

The day Rau's father discovered the courtship, he took his cell phone away, forbade him to go out and even attend his classes, after beating him up.

He tried to kill himself for the first time.

"I want to be remembered for something I have done in this life," insists the young woman, who dreams of traveling to the United States to study fashion.

Running away from home is not an option, he says, and getting parental approval is "impossible."

But keep dreaming.

In a moment of relief, the young women relate the continuous physical abuse to which they are subjected by their older brothers and by their parents, always before the helpless gaze of their mothers.

Or not.

"Sometimes the mother is more macho than the men," quickly contradicts Sahar, 17 and Sanal's younger sister, both fatherless.

When Yemen's last war broke out in 2015, they were teenagers and didn't have much to compare with.

They proclaim themselves outside of politics and talk about cinema, music, fashion and beauty.

They are covered from head to toe, but they define themselves as "fashionistas."

They speak from southern Yemen, the part of the country that was communist until it joined the north in 1990.

Today it is the conservative Islamist Al Islah party, a local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, that is gaining ground in the southern provinces.

"In the communist era women were freer," says Balqisa, a professor in her forties who teaches at a local high school in Ataq.

Then, the teacher continues, "women could play a political, social and even military role without having to wear these curtains," she adds, pulling her veil between her thumb and forefinger.

Today, in Yemen, young women are married in arranged marriages between families at the ages of 14-16 in the villages, and at 18 in the cities.

"Divorces are more common in Abyan than in Shabwa," says Salem el Aulaki, in charge of security for the governor of Shabwa.

The reason is due to the amount that the local tribes have stipulated in each locality for compensation in case of divorce: 440 euros in Abyan and 4,400 in Shabwa.

"We pay hundreds of millions of Yemeni Reais every year for offenses against honor due to disputes between young people on Facebook walls," admits Septuagenarian tribal leader Sheikh Saleh Jarbou al Nassi.

In Yemen, the laws of honor continue to dictate family law.

The young women look with envy towards the capitals of the two Yemen confronted in the conflict, the Huthi Sana'a and Aden, formal capital of the Government in exile after their expulsion from Sana'a by the Huthi at the end of 2014. In these cities women go to coffees with hookahs and graduate from universities.

“In Aden, women can chew

qat

[a narcotic plant with effects similar to amphetamines] and even go only with the veil,” intervenes Sahar, 17-year-old Sanal's younger sister.

In Aden, women play political roles such as the group called The Mothers of the Kidnapped, which groups together the mothers, sisters and daughters of men held in the secret prisons that help to keep the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, which support the Government, in the south of the country.

Dozens of women journalists and activists have had to flee from both this city and Sanaa to neighboring countries in the region after being tortured and receiving death threats.

Maja is, at 23, the oldest of the group of women interviewed.

It was her father who insisted that his three daughters should study and thus "be able to face their husbands on equal terms."

Maja has become one of the two women who this year have graduated in petrochemical engineering among 128 students.

The road has not been easy.

“They would break the legs of the chairs before entering class and when we sat down we would fall to the ground;

it was humiliating, ”he recalls with a frown.

They had the support of Professor Salem el Auni, he reiterates.

Even so, one of her classmates gave in to pressure and dropped out of school to get married and "have two children, as we all should at our age," says Maja.

"I love freedom, whatever it costs me," says who after graduating has become one of the unemployed in a sector that needs foreign investment to function in the country.

Rau's father knocks on the door of a hotel room in Aqaq, indicating that the interview is coming to an end and that the young women have to cover their faces again before leaving the room.

"There are friends who complain to our parents because they say they have seen us on the Internet," Maja grumbled.

“Then it turns out that they saw an eye on Instagram, a piece of a mouth on Facebook and part of a nose on Twitter and, from there, they made the map of our face like a puzzle!”, The engineer attacks to unleash a river of laughter among the friends.

"Smile for the picture!"

Until now, none had published their full face.

Laughter snorts under the black veil with slanted eyes with laughter.

In an act of rebellion that can cost them dearly, the six young women decide to pose with their faces uncovered.

"So the gossips will have the entire map of our faces instead of searching for pieces," says one of them in a challenging tone.