A collection of short stories entitled “Book of the Yemeni Diaspora” by the Yemeni diplomat, writer, and poet Khaled Alyemany was published in the series “Mirit’s Cultural Book,” Cairo, accompanying the July 2022 issue of the magazine.
The short story collection of 120 pages includes five stories written in Arabic and translated into English to address the Arab and foreign readers together. It sheds light on the suffering of the Yemeni people far from the war and its horrors and the deep wounds it has left in the collective memory of the Yemeni nation. It tries to vindicate for the Yemeni refugees as they go through painful conditions in their search for safe havens. The writer was inspired by real events surrounding the harsh realities of asylum-seekers along the Belarusian border with Poland, the Hungarian border with Germany, and the Moroccan border with Spain, as well as along the corridors of illegal immigration through Central America and towards the United States of America and Canada.
The language used in Alyemany’s collection is simple, compact, and sharp in reaching the depth of the current Yemeni scene, both at home and in the diaspora, deepened by the writer’s presence in all the places witnessing the tragedy, whether at home, in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or The USA.
Ambassador Alyemany is a Yemeni diplomat who joined the diplomatic service in 1991 and rose to become an ambassador in 2013. He served in several missions, including in Kuala Lumpur, Washington, London, and the United Nations. He was appointed Permanent Representative of the Republic of Yemen to the United Nations in 2014, then Minister of Foreign Affairs with the rank of Deputy Prime Minister in 2018, before resigning from the Yemeni government in 2019.
He is currently a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council in Washington DC. He also publishes weekly articles on Yemen and International Affairs in The Independent Arabia newspaper in London. His hobbies include drawing and calligraphy, and he has made many literary contributions such as poetry and short stories.
Washington Center for Yemeni Studies
2 Responses
I do not have a comment.I simply wish to buy this book and would like to know how i can do that.I myself write and so am interested to read anything written by a yemeni especially someone like khaled alyamany who has a wide experience of all the suffering of the yemeni people scattered all over the world.
Hello Samira, thank you for your kind words. The book is available for purchase on Amazon.