Islands of Heritage by Peutz Nathalie

Author:Peutz, Nathalie [Peutz, Nathalie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2018-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 10. Soqotra Folk Museum, Riqeleh, 2013.

CHAPTER 5

REORIENTING HERITAGE

Soqotra is an ocean jewel resembled by no other.

Her reputation throughout the world is well known.

But this trauma has been stamped upon her body.

The wound remains open and will not heal quickly.

—Hajar al-Asas, “The Foundation Stone”

In early 2003, several audiocassettes made their way from Oman and the UAE to Soqotra, where they were swiftly dubbed and disseminated. Captured on these cassettes was the voice of a Soqotran emigrant (then, an Omani citizen) reciting his newest poem, “The Foundation Stone” (Hajar al-Asas): a twenty-minute elegy about the 1974 Haybak executions of Sultan Isa’s relatives and vizier. Even to my ears, an outsider with only partial understanding of the Soqotri language and historical context, the poem was—and remains—stirring. For the islanders, who had long regarded any mention of this event as an unspeakable blight on their past and an incitement to discord (fitna) in the present, the poem was electrifying, if not incendiary. Indeed, when the adult son of one of the “martyrs” boomed the cassette directly outside a shop owned by one of the alleged perpetrators, a street brawl ensued. Eventually, the bereaved son and his father’s accused executioner were pried apart. But the poet’s outcry, thirty years after Haybak, reverberated throughout the island with every cassette that exchanged hands: “Where are the avengers? / Why have you forsaken them?” Why have you forsaken us?

In the same years that the islanders countenanced the arrival of the conservation regime, they found themselves contending with the burgeoning influence of the diaspora in local politics. This influence was manifest materially through the emigrants’ growing entanglement in land disputes and incipient investments in hotels, restaurants, and trade. It was also manifest ideologically through their various attempts to frame Soqotran identity, culture, history, and heritage against the formulations of international, state, and local actors. This ideological investment in Soqotran heritage acquired an acute sense of urgency in the mid-2000s, it seemed, precisely because of the island’s ascendant reputation as a globally significant ecoregion and a national treasure. For at the same time that Soqotra was gaining prominence nationally and internationally, it seemed to be losing—according to its emigrants, at least—more and more of its distinctive identity, culture, and traditions. Due to Soqotra’s prior protection as a restricted military site and the climate of fear precipitated by the 1974 executions, an entire generation of Soqotran emigrants—including the composer of “The Foundation Stone”—had been exiled from their homeland for a good twenty to twenty-five years. Those who returned following Yemen’s unification were surprised to see just how much had changed. Bu Abbas, a Soqotran resident of Ajman (and UAE citizen), waxed nostalgic about the sultanate-era customs of conservation, cooperation, and mutual aid. “Life was orderly then,” he said, detailing how all land-use and social practices had been highly regulated—before the socialists arrived and upended everything. Ahmad Sa‘d, a Soqotran citizen of Oman and founder of the island’s first museum, recalled his dismay when he first returned in 1991 to discover

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