And many more in the same vein.
Weightier matters are discussed at qat chews, and they are a major forum for the transaction of business and for religious and political debate. Many people also chew to aid concentration on study or work, and qat is the inevitable accompaniment to all-important occasions from weddings to funerals. A funeral chew is known as mujabarah, a word which also means ‘the setting of broken bones’. But at the classic San’ani chew, it is ‘lightness of blood’ – charm, amiability – that is admired, not gravitas. At a qat chew, one walks what a ninth-century poet called ‘the sword-edge that separates the serious from the frivolous’.
My qat was good, a Hamdani form Tuzan. Qat is a dicotyledon known to science as Catha edulis. Unremarkable though it appears, chewers recognise a huge variety of types and are fascinated by its origin: when one buys qat one first establishes its pedigree. Quality is judged by region, by the district within a region, even by the field where the individual tree is grown and by the position of leaf on it. The product of a tree planted inadvertently on a grave is to be avoided – it brings sorrow. Qat can be any colour from lettuce-green to bruise-purple. It comes long or short, bound in bundles or loose, packed in plastic, alfalfa or banana leaves. In San’a, as a rule of thumb, the longer the branch, the more prestigious it is: less image-conscious chewers – and I am one of them – buy qatal, the pickings from the lower branches.
Just as in the West there are wine snobs, in Yemen there are qat snobs. I once found myself opposite one. Fastidiously, he broke the heads off his yard-long branches and wrapped them in a damp towel. It was almost an act of consecration. When he had finished, he drew on his water pipe and appraised my bag of qatal with a look that threatened to wither it. ‘Everything,’ he said in audible whisper, ‘has pubic hair. Qatal is the pubic hair of qat. Besides, dogs cock their legs over it. He tossed me one of the tips from inside his towel. It was as thick as asparagus, its leaves edged with a delicate russet, and it tasted nutty, with the patrician bitter sweetness of an almond. There was a tactile pleasure too, like that of eating pomegranates – a slight resistance between the teeth followed by a burst of juice. I chased it with a slurp of water infused with the smoke of incense made from sandalwood, eaglewood, mastic and cloves.
Qat does not alter your perception. It simply enhances it by rooting you in one place. There is a story in the Arabian Nights about a prince who sat and sat in his palace. Sentient from the waist up, his lower half had been turned to porphyry. ‘I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true,’ said Cardinal Newman. They usually are, to some extent.
After the zabj and the jokes, conversations took place in smaller groups, then pairs, then, towards the end of the afternoon, ceased. I looked out of the windows at the city.
I find myself looking towards the place where the sun must have just disappeared. This high above sea level we are spared the more vulgar sort of sunset. The afterglow is dusty, the sky above the city like the inside of a shell. But I’m looking towards it, not at it – there’s a distortion in the window pane, interesting and annoying at the same time. A man that looks on glass, on it may stay his eye.
It is six o’clock, or five to twelve in the Islamic day that starts with the sunset prayer. But, for a time, it is neither: the Hour of Solomon has begun, al-Sa’ah al-Sulaymaniyyah. Sa’ah has among its root meanings in the dictionary ‘to be lost, to procrastinate’. At the Hour of Solomon time refracts, as if bent by a prism.
No one speaks. Introspection has replaced conviviality. Somewhere, my fingers are working at the qat, polishing, plucking. When it was still light I found a fat-horned caterpillar. A good sign – no DDT – but you don’t want to chew one.
Were there a singer here, this would be his time. But the songs of the Hour of Solomon are as perilous as they are beautiful. Earlier this century in the days of Imam Yahya, singers could only perform in locked rooms, their windows stuffed with cushions. They had to hide their instruments for fear of imprisonment (fortunately, the old lute of San’a was small enough to be carried in the voluminous sleeves then worn). The Iman had banned singing with good reason: the songs are siren songs that tell of the flash of teeth beneath a veil like a silver coin in a well, of the saliva of lovers’ kisses intoxicating like wine, of beauty that is cruelly ephemeral – Lasting we thought it, yet it did not last.
It is now quite dark. The coloured windows of neighbouring houses are lighting up, like Advent calendars.
We qat chewers, if we are to believe everything that is said about us, are at best profligates, at worst irretrievable sinners. We are in the thrall of ‘the curse of Yemen’ and ‘the greatest corrupting influence on the country’ (two British ambassadors to San’a); we are in danger of ‘loss of memory irritability, general weakness and constipation’, and from our water pipes ‘there is certainly a danger of getting a chancre on the lips’ (Handbook of Arabia, 1917); worse, we are prone to ‘anorexia’ and to becoming ‘emotionally unstable, irritable, hyperactive and easily provoked to anger, eventually becoming violent’ (Journal of Substance Abuse, 5988), while in Somalia, qat has ‘starved the country’s children’ and ‘exacerbates a culture of guns and violence’ (San Francisco Chronicle, 1993); even if we don’t turn nasty, we ‘doze and dribble green saliva like cretinous infants with a packet of bulls-eyes’ (the English writer David Holden). In Saudi Arabia we would be punished more severely than alcohol drinkers; in Syria blue-eyed Muhammad would be swinging on the end of a rope.
In contrast to the above quasi-scientific poppycock, the only full and serious study of the effects of qat (Kennedy’s – funded, it should be noted, by the US National Institute of Drug Abuse) concludes that the practice appears to have no serious physical or psychological effects. Yemenis themselves, while admitting that their habit is expensive, defend it on the grounds that it stimulates mental activity and concentration; they point out that at least the money spent on it remains within the national economy.
Qat has inspired a substantial body of literature. Compare, for example, Holden’s dribbling infants with a description of a handsome chewer by the seventeenth-century poet Ibrahim al-Hindi:
Hearts melted at his slenderness. And as he chewed, his mouth resembled Pearls which have formed on carnelian and, between them, an emerald, melting.
As well as poetry, there is a weighty corpus of scholarly literature. On the legality of qat in Islam, it has been unable to find any analogy between the effects of the leaf and those of the prohibited narcotics. In the end, though, the question of its desirability and permissibility revolves around matters of politics, taste, ethnocentrism and sectarian prejudice.
I can just make out my watch. Half past seven. Time, which had melted, is resolidifying. It is now that I sometimes wonder why I am sitting here in the dark with a huge green bolus in my cheek; why I, and millions of others, spend as much time buying and chewing qat as sleeping, and more money on it than on food.
If we are to believe another major Western study of qat, we are ‘making symbolic statements about the social order’ and engaging in an activity that is ‘individual, hierarchical, competitive’. Where you chew, and with whom, is certainly important. But to reduce it all to a neat theory – rumino ergo sum – is to oversimplify. It ignores the importance of the qat effect – something almost impossibly difficult to pin down, for it is as subtle and as hard to analyse as the alkaloids that cause it. It takes long practice to be able to recognise the effect consciously, and even then it sidesteps definition except in terms of metaphor, and by that untranslatable word, kayf.
Kayf – if you achieve it, and you will do if you choose the qat and the setting carefully – enables you to think, work and study. It enables you to be still. Kayf stretches the attention span, so that you can watch the same view for hours, the only change being the movement of the sun. A journey ceases to be motion through changing scenery – it is you who are stationary while the world is moved past, like a travelling-flat in an old film. Even if briefly, the
chewer who reaches this kayf feels he is in the right place at the right time – at the pivot of a revolving pre-Copernican universe, the still point of the turning world.
One day I was buying qat when a group of tourists walked past. Blue-eyed Muhammad said to me, ‘Why do people spend thousands of dollars rushing round the world, when they can chew qat?’ There is Africa and all her prodigies in us.
I’ve chewed in taxis, on buses, on my motor cycle, on a truckload of firewood, in a military-transport plane, in an overturning jeep, on the 5.30 from Victoria to Sutton. In retrospect the movement was incidental. Back in the Oriental Institute, they didn’t teach us the meaning of kayf – they couldn’t have. Now, I would venture to call it a form of untravel.
In the room on the roof, sounds began to impinge: the rasp of a match, the noisy slurping of water, caged doves cooing; the snap of a twig to make a toothpick, someone buckling on his dagger. Then there was the click of the light switch. Everyone screwed up their eyes, blessed the Prophet, and went home.
There are a number of things you can do after chewing qat. You might start digging up the paving stones in your entrance hall to look for Solomon’s Seal, as a neighbour of mine used to do. Or, like the Turk early this century who had not seen his wife for sixteen years and was noted for his abstemiousness, you might involuntarily ejaculate. I tend to go home, have a glass of milky tea, and do some writing. Out of the corner of my eye I used to see my pencil sharpener move very slightly, around midnight, until I stopped buying that sort of qat.
Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land, 1999
Kevin Rushby
Eating the Flowers of Paradise – 1
CATHINONE IS A powerful psychoactive substance. And yet in Yemen qat cannot be separated from its social context – the drug is necessary, but only in the same way that frankincense has been needed at rituals for millennia. It is a prop, a token, something that symbolises more than it contains: the people have their faith in God and paradise and that He has sent them this leaf on which His name is written. Yemen, at least, would be secure form scientific ‘improvements’ to the flower of paradise. In AD 1543, Abdullah ibn Sharaf al-Din, son of the Imam, who first banned qat then accepted it back, wrote:
Do you not see the pen of the Mericful One has written His name upon its pages? Eat it for what you wish to attain from this world and the next.
The West could learn a great deal from the Yemen and its elegant ability to control a drug without recourse to laws, enforcement, or scientific fiddling.
Eating the Flowers of Paradise, 1999
Jason Parkinson
Acid: The journey through living-room walls
I THINK IT was about 7 p.m. on that mentally fatal Sunday evening that we dropped the first lot of LSD. The music blasting distorted sound from the speakers positioned on the floor. The room flooded with soft, dim lights. Candles created just enough extra light for your mind to really go to work on you. We sat about, smoked and ranted, waiting for the drugs to hit.
An hour passed. Boredom and frustration set in.
‘This was supposed to be strong,’ I said. ‘I say we do the rest, I’m just not getting anything.’
Now this statement was not entirely true, the arousal of faint double vision was there. And the copper-mouth too, lurking on the edge ready to bite you in the neck when you let your guard down.
The toilet trip was the ultimate test.
‘I’m going for a shit, okay?’
‘Vale, then we do the rest, no?’
‘Si.’
It was uninspiring. This toilet was no good, I thought. No cheap tiles with patterns on, no stark light, just a maroon bath, chipped and flaking and me sat shitting. It came quick and fast, cleaning my insides. That’s always a good sign, more with Ecstasy though. The carpet began moving, faint Aztec and geometric patterns pulsing and turning into more of the same.
Check the mirror.
All seemed well. I looked normal.
Flush chain, wash hands, leave toilet, take more acid!
Within ten minutes the living-room took on orange and red hues. Red and green neon darted over the walls, furniture and people. There are people in the room, I thought.
Guapa Morena started to dance. That would be the last I saw of her for a while, things were rising pretty damn fast. I was on the floor. Attempting to move, I crumpled into a heap on the futon managing to acquire what could have been a strewn duvet in the process. My body felt like it weighed a ton, the legs weren’t going to take it. Talk was not happening either. My mouth was rebelling against me. Believe me, I tried, but it just came out the same. A strange slurping sound and foul words.
I checked the clock. It took a while to aim at it but my sight finally broke through the bubble that has formed around me.
Jesus Christ, I thought, we only dropped the second lot twenty minutes ago. We must be in trouble. The music had become drunken, I think it was Ween, but I couldn’t be sure.
The TV spilled images of green and yellow women on to breathing floors. Stretched pallid skin with blue veins, spat golden sparks of ozone from ruptured warts. Wondrous squirts of stars absorbed by Arabic carvings. Pillars of gold and stone rose up to dark wooden structures. Vines and fruit clung to gazebos, high above North African buildings that framed the swirling clouds rolling high above the ceiling.
Primitive caves in terracotta stone restrained snarling Dobermanns held back by their ferocious owners on dirty ropes. Drooling froth and blood-filled mouths of twisted teeth, which lay beyond lips of broken wooden branches.
I was lying on the sofa, covered in the duvet that I had pulled up to my chin. I couldn’t see Guapa but I knew she was there somewhere.
There was a massive rush, I remember images of massive freight trains hurtling towards me and then everything was green and alive.
Spanish women danced in circles of green and red, three and four arms stretching out their blue hands. Black-skinned legs covered in elastic metal, twisted and spun. Legs swapped sides and melted into thorny structures glistening like eel skin. Red skies filled with green and purple swirling clouds. Foreign skies, strange planets rose just off the shore of crashing alien seas. Jesus God, a cracked Earth of plain, dried, sun-scorched yellow soil.
Green and white iced terrain spun off into space. Abandon ship, goddammit, every man for himself.
Then everything fell silent, hanging in a vast black hole pulling me into another vast universe, stars passed by at high velocity. I could see the void opening up before me, into our universe. I had seen this sky before. Dark asteroids passed on close by, smashing into discarded space junk. I wonder how long they have been there, I thought. Jesus, this place is a mess.
From behind me Earth rolled into view. Clouds clinging to its surface, hanging over North Africa casting a vast shadow down the continent.
Raining in North Africa.
It’s raining.
The music had stopped. The sudden realisation of such abrupt silence rocked me. Was this the point in the movie where you see the silhouette of the killer in the kitchen doorway, your own knife in his hand? There was no one in the room, or even the house, it seemed, but me.
The rain lashed down outside. I could hear it spilling over the gutters and splashing down to the concrete patio.
Guapa Morena walked back into the room with the biggest grin on her face I had ever seen. I was lying on the sofa still. The duvet and several layers of clothing had been discarded. I was sweating heavily.
The silence was shattered by an amazing chorus of redneck jive that spiralled me off into signs of burning crosses and Nazi swastikas, fast cars and booze-fuelled rides. Down dark country lanes at high speed, the stereo cranking out Robert Mitchum’s Thunder Road. It was around this time that the hopelessness of the situation became apparent. Then the uncontrollable laughter started. I remember babbling something like, ‘This is the strongest acid I’ve had since the Double Dipped Red Dragon of Christmas ninety-one,’ then realising what had happened that ter
rible night. A case of the shits had jolted me hard. What I left in the toilet I interpreted as my lower digestive system. Everywhere was splattered with blood and I had an incredibly empty feeling where my arsehole used to be. The rest of the evening became a hellish ride in a room that filled with hate and fear.
What the hell is that?
A figure stood on the mantelpiece, fat pink worms slipped around its body and over the long trench coat.
Neon, green, red, purple green, red, purple. The figure slumped to the side, catching its step. On its shoulder a crow flapped its wings frantically. The figure tried to move. It looked down. Two large nails, more like chisels, had been hammered through its feet, securing it to a large resin stand.
Undeterred, it wrenched itself free, propping itself on the Remington shotgun. It looked up at me. He’s a soldier, I thought, probably First World War. Injured too.
Blood covered his bandaged face and the gun was replaced with a cheap dirty wooden crutch. He managed to limp a few steps then fell forwards. But he never hit the ground. The motion reversed, he recoiled back revealing a white skeletal face. A heavy black robe hid the rest of his body. He was sat in a great chair, in his right hand a large scythe, five foot long. The mists cleared behind him revealing a landscape that could only appear on a Yes album cover. Roger Dean castles surrounded by rolling hills and blue skies.
‘No! I don’t want that. Is this all you can give me after all these years of loyalty, fucking Yes album covers!’
It was then I recognised the skeletal man. The image conjured up thoughts of childhood half-dreams, in the time between you going to sleep and being asleep. And this guy was there.
‘I’ve seen you before too . . . So don’t give me that!’
There was a joint, half smoked in my hand. I fumbled around for a lighter. Smoking could be the only answer, the general feeling was getting ugly.
I was sat on the floor, now wearing shorts, a T-shirt with cut sleeves and sports sandals, black.