“A poem for every activity in life”: Yemeni-American poet Threa Almontaser on Yemeni resistance poetry as U.S bombs Yemen
(*artwork by Incé Husain)
“Taxi drivers recited poems to me during traffic. Newspapers displayed poems on the front page. Most villagers were illiterate, capable only of passing down stories through songs and oral poetry,” says Yemeni-American writer Threa Almontaser, author of award-winning poetry book The Wild Fox of Yemen. “It was sung when courting someone or cursing someone or beating your child—there was a poem for every activity in life, including and especially the political. My people become bits of poetry themselves that stick to me like burrs.”
Almontaser calls The Wild Fox of Yemen “a love letter to Yemen”. The poems reel with clarity, longing, pain, wit, revolt, love of one’s people, and walking the diasporic tightrope of Yemen and the U.S. They are intimate and politically loaded. They fuse the intimate and the politically loaded. Arabic words are interspersed throughout the English poems; verses by Yemeni poet Abdullah Al-Baradouni, “one of the best contemporary Arab poets to enrich Arabic literature”, are translated from Arabic by Almontaser. The image of the titular fox - called “wild”, “sly”, and “lost” - unites the many natures of the poems. In “Dream Interpretation [Fox]”, Almontaser writes:
Get myself a triple cheeseburger, bacon this time. Very American. Because that’s what I am now, right? (...) Most of my cousins are dying. The littlest leads me by the hand into a cave streaked with limestone, handprints, a swollen matriarchy. I find our famished ancestors cooking beside orange tatters. In their circle, a fox, her body ready for the fire.
“The fox, to me, still hungers to trouble and resist, especially of larger institutions,” says Almontaser. “It teaches me to wander into mystery without galloping toward some hasty and inorganic conclusion. Which in turn informs my living.”
These days, Almontaser’s minds’ eye is filled with memories of Yemen.
“My great-grandma bandaging my fingernails with flower petals. My cousins and I asleep on the cool diwan floor. The scent of melted butter in a barrel. Leather sandals fitted on my feet,” she lists. “Standing closely to an aunt I hadn’t met before at the airport, gloved hands squeezing my face like a morning orange, breast pulpy against mine as she kissed me repeatedly, her exposed face stained lightly ginger from the turmeric.”
Her poem “Stained Skin” honours henna communally stenciled on palms, wrists, feet. She is a twelve-year old child, carefree and endearingly vain; her aunts are regal, draped on couches while henna dries.
My aunties can leap their henna off their wrists.
The flowers dance on tabletops, fragrant us
into a brief history. Their patterns too detailed
to boggle. The careful speed in which they draw
on themselves. How they squeeze just the right
sum from cones: gooped paste, needled tip,
spool of zigzags in twenty minutes. My grandma cakes
only her soles. Fat circles in the middle of her palms.
Leaves the bodygarden for us younger girls, her skin
not what it once was. I know she sees me showing-off,
rubbed raw with banana peels, olive oil, things
off YouTube, trying to smooth herself back.
None of us can escape the pure henna shipped
in suitcases of honeycombs and unseen relatives,
sunbaked stones. My aunties are spread-eagle
on the couch, still as gargoyles in a graveyard,
unable to eat, dress, wipe their asses. I can’t imagine
a day with their patience, turning lanky limbs
into a mysterious mural. I don’t even see them
breathe, sleeping beauties, their little deaths, a cousin
paid to fan their odic skin until the stain dries,
cracks, the first crumble, a fresco flowering beneath.
Since mid-March, the U.S has been bombing Yemen.
Al Jazeera reports that a young man in the Yemeni province of Sanaa had been eager to share iftar with his wife’s family on March 15th. The streets were filled with festivity, fragrant foods, and prayers resounding from minarets. He was “a stone’s throw away” from the house when it was bombed by the U.S.
“Just like that, the house had collapsed into a smouldering heap of rubble and twisted metal… All 12 [family members] who were inside on a peaceful Ramadan evening were killed,” he said. “This was a family breaking their fast together, not a military base. Americans make no distinction between a rebel and a child.”
U.S attacks across Yemen have killed at least 53 people and wounded 100.
“Great work all. Powerful start,” reads a leaked Signal message from a group chat of U.S national security leaders on their bombing of Yemen. The chat praised the attacks and released emojis of fire, fist, and American flag.
The airstrikes on Yemen have cost the U.S nearly one billion dollars so far. The Houthis, a rebel group that has controlled most of Yemen since 2014, began targeting Israel-bound ships in November 2023 to resist Israel’s U.S-backed genocidal violence in Gaza. They sank two vessels, seized one, and launched over 100 attacks on ships in the Red Sea bordering their coast.
“We say to everyone in the world: there is no problem for you to traverse and pass through the Red Sea. The only targets exclusively are ships linked to Israel,” said Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi in January 2024, and March and April 2025, respectively. “The Israeli enemy, with American support, is committing genocide in Gaza, and this cannot be tolerated… [We] will not abandon [our] moral, religious, and humanitarian duties towards the oppressed Palestinian people, no matter the consequences.”
The Houthis’ Red Sea resistance has frazzled the U.S, harming global trade by threatening over one trillion dollars in annual merchandise. In the leaked Signal group chat, Trump administration officials discussed bombing Yemen to restore “freedom of navigation” and extract “economic gain” from the Red Sea.
“Why didn’t I remember the Red Sea’s tide?” says Almontaser. “Was it ebbing or full? Did the whirlpools ever calm? I couldn’t remember any of it. I suddenly had no prior life over there. I couldn’t keep the deep well of memories from going dry. Those memories defaulted to the less flattering footage churned out by the media… Memory is an uneasy matador, a bull charging through a bodega… A village that once belonged to me was gone. Was never mine. I dreamt it. Invented it. Made it all up. Recollections faded and conformed to what I thought were echoes of a real past. The ghost deceiving its descendants.”
Her sadness shifted to anger. Her anger plateaued to shame. She calls Yemen “a country that will fight back responsibly and still be bombed for it”, a country whose fight for liberating Palestine is indistinguishable from the fight to liberate itself. But she and her family feel ashamed at their helplessness. Violence ravages Muslim-majority countries; all they can do is watch.
“The shame of being unable to do anything more than watch our Muslim brothers and sisters in Palestine and Sudan and Yemen and Lebanon and Syria go through atrocities and global affairs that have nothing to do with them.”
In The Wild Fox of Yemen, Almontaser writes in the poem “Hunting Girliness”:
I quit being cautious in third grade
when the towers fell &, later, wore
the city’s hatred as hijab.
The poem is rooted in a childhood memory. In post-9/11 New York, her home was arbitrarily raided at dawn by US officials. They busted down her house’s door and forced her family into vans. Her mother made calls, trying to “fight what happened”, but was met with “huge lists of other Arabs and Muslims” that the officials had also harassed. Her family was silenced; life in New York proceeded to bustle obliviously around them.
“My relationship with the hijab has always been a constant looking-over-my-shoulder when I stepped outside, and this past year only solidified that.”
She recently found a photo from eighty years ago of an aunt or grandmother. She saw herself in the photographed relative - “tall and skinny like a gangly calf, bulbous nose, sharp almond eyes glaring at the camera.” This sudden sense of time-severed duality in her existence - to live in the U.S, to find herself in an ancestor in Yemen - disturbed her.
“I hadn’t expected my face to appear from the past in a photograph like that. It looked odd and frightening, and sort of active. It made me think of the U.S and Yemen as physical entities in my life,” she says. “Was I simply rewriting memory the way white settlers rewrote history?”
When she was younger, she would dream of “alternate selves” by gazing at old photos. She would “borrow their faces”, conjure their exhaustions, joys, meal plans, and daily life rhythms, obsessed like a “stranger stage-directing their lives”. But by the end of the ritual, she felt faded.
“What remained was no better than gossip. Who was dead, and who was still alive? I couldn’t look at the dead like that without dying a little myself.”
She calls political poetry a way of “corralling people who have been broken on a spiritual level”. Yemeni poets are well-versed in this. Some consider writing the only survival strategy. Their words love, rage, mobilize, and rebuild. Almontaser believes that political poetry can “change the minds of the masses” into fighting for change. This collective action is necessary; the powerful are too deafened by greed to be swayed by poetry.
“Poets and beekeepers will heal and regrow Yemen later. If those two remain weak, the country also stays weak. Who was it that said the best medicine is honey and the Qur’an?” says Almontaser. “Everyone has a need to have their voices heard by listening to it from the mouth of a poet—their attachment to another voice expressing what was inside of them all along…Poetry is the main reason religious feeling survived inside of every Yemeni.”
In her poem “Recognized Language”, she writes:
Where did my old words go, my first words? Sometimes I dream
in Arabic without understanding. I search everyone’s pockets,
leave them hanging like panting tongues. I try calling Arabic back
like wild horses (...) Tonight, I’ll light a fire to
eat the dark, make myself inviting so ghost tendrils of my
missing words float back to me,
get comfortable again on the
cushion of my tongue.
As mainstream news on Yemen becomes clogged with American bombs and justifications for the bombs, Almontaser thinks of Yemeni resistance and ancient South Arabia.
Aden, a port city in modern-day Yemen, liberated itself from British colonial rule in 1967. The British occupied Aden in 1839 and asserted direct rule in 1937, stealing its oil, gas, and vibrant ports - “one of the busiest in the world”. But Yemeni resistance fighters ousted the British in a concentrated four-year rebellion. They established the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in South Yemen, the only Marxist state in the Arab world, which lasted until South and North Yemen merged into modern-day Yemen in 1990. Almontaser shares that the Yemeni village of Yafa3* similarly defeated the British.
The ancient kingdom of Saba in modern-day Yemen, dating back to the first millennium BCE, was rich with innovation. It mastered trade routes to East Africa and the Mediterranean, distributing aromatic resins for incense and perfumes; amassed wealth and cultural influence seated in the capital city of Ma’rib; sustained military might in the city of Sirwah; and offered pilgrimage routes dotted with the temples of Ḥarūnum, Awām and Bar’ān to all across the Arabian Peninsula. It cradled valleys, deserts, and mountains. The Great Dam of Mar’ib strategically nourished canals into the largest human-made oasis in ancient Arabia. Almontaser calls it “an engineering miracle”.
“I wish people knew more about ancient South Arabia—the more you read about it, the more you realize it was basically a sci-fi society for its time period,” says Almontaser. “A place where everything coasting came to a pause. A languid atmosphere, mounded low and moving slow, making one forget the meaning of time passing.”
Almontaser’s poem “Hidden Bombs in My Coochie” ends with a sense of identity deformed by the U.S.
amreeka settles my body
into place (...)
the news makes me believe
I was born to cock
back this rifle sleek and steady
like a true terrorist the news
makes me want to grab
my phone & gun
it out the country
the news makes me touch
myself find the panic
button of my body
& press hard ♦
*the ‘3’ in ‘Yafa3’ represents the Arabic letter ‘ayn’ (ع) in Latin script. ‘Ayn’ is “traditionally described as the sound of a heavily loaded camel when it gets up” or “to pronounce an ‘a’ as far back in the throat as possible, until it stops being a vowel and turns into a sort of cooing grunting.”