By Darrel Bristow-Bovey,
as published in the Sunday Independent 20th May 2001

"It is the policy of this newspaper not to speak approvingly of drugs, and quite right too. Drugs are bad. What is more, drug-taking has many bad consequences. It encourages drug dealers, for instance, and causes you to be unhealthy and to misplace your car keys, and it doesn’t make you quite as witty as you seem to imagine when you rejoin the dinner table from the bathroom, twitching your nose and yelling about the idea you’ve had for a new television gameshow.

But when is a drug not a drug? When it is qat. In Yemen, a lovely and ancient land on the Arabian peninsula, qat is not merely the recreational drug of choice, it is the principal agricultural crop. Wherever you travel in the Yemeni highlands you see great fields and hillsides of small green trees in rows, watched over by small boys carrying sticks and AK-47s, and crouching men in centuries-old mud-brick watchtowers. The watchmen are not crouching to be sinister, but because they are chewing qat, and no one chews qat standing up.

Qat is pronounced “cut”, not “cat”, which is important to remember when buying your day’s supply at the local market, if you want to avoid the embarrassment of joining your friends with a bundle of fur and claws, rather than leaves. Qat is legal and all but official. A qat session is the Yemeni equivalent of a drink in the pub, or a round of golf. It is where business is done, where policies are decided and jokes are told, where men go to get away from women and women go to get away from men. Everyone chews qat, and many people chew it every day, between 2pm and 6pm, reclining on low mats in darkened rooms, or on the sidewalks of the capital.

I bought my first bundle in the suq in Sana’a, with the assistance of Rassam who had befriended me beside the old city gates. Part of the preparation for a chew is wrangling over the price. It heats the blood and raises a sweat and gets you ready. “It warms the molar,” said Rassam. In ancient times, dedicated chewers would run, singing, halfway up Jabal Nuqum, the mountain overlooking Sana’a, in preparation for the session.

When one buys qat, one establishes the pedigree. Price is determined by region of origin, by district within the region, by the field in which the individual tree was grown, by the position of the leaf on the tree. It comes bound in plastic or wrapped in alfafa leaves. To settle on a fair price, be prepared for much yelling and shaking of fists. If you really want a bargain, you may be called upon to wrestle, or to tweak his nose. Afterwards, all is tranquility. “You are from Africa?” the merchant said, counting his money and massaging his throat where I had held him in a headlock. “My qat is of such quality, soon you will see Africa here in Sana’a.”

Although everyone you see in the afternoon is chewing qat – if you look closely you sometimes see jaws moving beneath the veils of the women you pass in the street – the classical chew takes place in the chewing room, called the mafraj, on the rooftops of the multistorey clay brick houses. The mafraj is small and clean, lined with carpets and cushions, decorated with polished brass incense burners and rosewater sprinklers and water-pipes. There are stained-glass windows and fanlights, some fashioned from panes of alabaster, shaved so thin they are translucent, through which you can make out the shadows of crows and circling kites.

I joined Rassam’s friends in the mafraj of someone’s house in the Old Town. We climbed the four storeys through a narrow staircase, Rassam yelling “Allah! Allah!” to warn the women that there were strange men in the house. The women have a separate room for chewing.

To chew you recline on your left side, your qat spread before you, and pick and polish and pop into your mouth only the smallest, most succulant buds. You chew and push the ground-up green pulp into your cheek, adding to it throughout the afternoon so that by the end your cheek bulges perfectly round, as though you have shoplifted a cricket ball and are hiding it from the store detective. The size of your bulge is a measurement of macho and manliness. There is a description of a qat chewer by the 17th century poet Ibrahim al-Hindi:

“And as he chewed, his mouth resembled
Pearls which have formed on carnelian,
And between them an emerald, melting.”

Take it from me: the emerald doesn’t melt. What does qat taste like? It tastes much as you would expect the green leaves of a small tree to taste. It tastes like cud. Apparently you grow accustomed to the taste, and come to appreciate it, but then again that is what my mother once told me about marmalade.

Just as there are wine snobs, there are qat snobs. One portly old gent with moustaches like Hercule Poirot inspected our bundles in turn, rubbing his belly with the pleasure of discovering that none were as fabulous as his own. Conversation was lively but, being Arabic, difficult to follow. There was much good-natured mutual insulting and telling of jokes. Later in the day, they discussed politics in serious tones. Politely, they asked me about Africa. Every so often, someone would ask me how I was enjoying my chew.

The truth is, I’m not sure that qat is the drug for me. I am more comfortable with bourbon, or James Ellroy novels. Qat doesn’t alter the perceptions (unlike bourbon or James Ellroy novels), it intensifies the perceptions by making you immobile. Outside the alabaster panes the world is moving and turning but you are not. You are going nowhere, you are the still centre of the universe, and each moment stretches itself around you. Some people may well enjoy being the still centre of the universe, but it made me sweat, as though my blood were being slowly heated over candleflame.

There is obviously much that is wrong about qat. It takes up arable land, it consumes too much water, it halves the Yemeni working day, and at R50 a chew it is an expensive habit in a poor country. But it is a chain that stretches straight back into the past. The fathers of these men sat in this room and chewed qat and looked across the rooftops, and their fathers and fathers before them. The qat will cause none of those men to beat their wives or crash their cars or try to kiss their colleagues at the staff party. It brings them together, to talk and to be Yemeni together.

The silver handles of curved ornamental daggers gleamed soft in the last light, and the faces of my friends were blank and content. In the gathering dusk of that time of evening the Yemeni call the Hour of Solomon, my heart filled with the simple happiness of being there. The first keening sounds of the call to prayer rang across the city. We climbed to our feet and grumbled about our backs, and shuffled out together."

Reproduced with permission