Qat 3 My First Qat Gathering in Sana a

Yemenat

Ahmed Saif Hashed

Shortly after my arrival in Sana’a following unification, I was overtaken by a subtle sense of isolation, confinement, and tension.

It was a feeling akin to imprisonment or turning inward upon oneself, within a society accustomed to qat, where people share a dominant daily ritual centered on chewing it and gathering in what is called al maqyal.

My move from Aden to Sana’a was not merely a change of place; it was a passage into an experience that had never entered my imagination before I arrived.

I felt that I would become an outcast, withdrawn into a bleak inner cell, unless I tried qat or at least attended its gatherings. I even felt the need for a private circle of my own, where acquaintances, friends, and those I wished to know more closely could meet.

Reality spoke plainly. There is no warmth without qat and its gatherings, and no escape from coexisting, to one degree or another, with a reality in which I found my estrangement both confined and imprisoned.

I felt an unfamiliar pressure, a sensation growing at an accelerating pace, that I was living in a society immersed and enclosed, where qat had become a pattern of life itself.

In such a society, the balanced individual appears aberrant, living in alienation, while the aberrant is deemed normal and continues unchallenged. The rule turns into the exception, and the exception becomes the rule. What is right is seen as wrong through the lens of a dominant and familiar consciousness.

I could not be idealized to perfection, even if I longed to be. I had no authority, no scepter, and no power to enact laws or impose them upon a society without an authority that decides and enforces.

Under such pressure, it was natural to bend