“Her name is Yameelah Semela.” Zahra Bayda mentions the woman’s name to make her real and get me to do it, I know that strategy. “There’s no hope for her, it’s a fatal illness. She comes from a Christian community from the high plateaus of Ethiopia.”
This Zahra Bayda. What a character. A doctor, for starters. MoreAfrican than Arab, because she isn’t Yemeni as I initially thought, but Somali. That explains her self-confidence, her bare face, her colorful shawl, her freedom of movement. She drives the 4x4 at high speed and with flair, windows rolled down, left arm outside and right hand on the steering wheel, while she stays in touch with her base by radio. I don’t know how she keeps to the highway, blurred as it is by gusts of wind and sand. To top it off, the sun is blinding.
“Does it happen a lot?” I ask.
“Does what?”
“What we heard in Safia. Children tied to a bed.”
“It happens.”
The 4x4 starts to gallop across ever-higher, shifting crests of sand. Zahra Bayda maneuvers like a helmswoman through ferocious seas. The SUV bucks, buffeted by the desert, shaking violently; I hold fast to the door handle as if I were in a rodeo. Our heads hit the roof. We’re shuddering our way across this treacherous wasteland that, in ancient history, devoured the Roman general Aelius Gallus and his whole legion of centurions in one gulp.
About twenty minutes later, the wind quiets down. As if by miracle, the surface beneath our tires levels out, calm is restored, and we’re moving forward again at a prudent speed, on a straight and somewhat visible road. The shaking is over. It was time; that skiing on dry land was getting ugly.
“What a way to have fun,” I say to Zahra Bayda, “driving at full speed on shifting dunes.”
“You think I did it on purpose?” she shoots back, pulling out a handkerchief to wipe the sweat that’s streaming down her face and neck and sliding between her breasts. “I don’t know how I veered from the road, we dove into the sand and if I hadn’t accelerated hard, we would have gotten buried.”
“Like Aelius Gallus and his legionnaires.”
We travel on for a good while, through an unchanging landscape marked with clean horizontal lines. That’s it. No more waves,ripples, crests, valleys, or dunes, just a pure, flat geometry and lifeless terrain where nothing could grow. And yet I see them come.
They emerge out of nowhere and walk the desert without leaving a trace. Gustave Flaubert described them as dressed in gold brocade adorned with pearls, jet, and sapphire. Legend has them wrapped in silks as subtle as the air. But before my eyes, they appear shabby, barefoot, worn. Sand in their mouths, an empty gaze, bodies flayed by sun and salt.
Could they be looking for a faraway king? Do a palace and lover await them somewhere? Somewhere, will they be loved?
They approach like a storm and surround the vehicle. They tell us their names, Ashia, Waris Dirie, Dinka, Zulai, each one immediately adding: “I’m a descendant of the Queen of Sheba.”
I am a descendant of the Queen of Sheba.What I hear hits me with the force of revelation.I’m descended from the Queen of Sheba, they say it so naturally and with such conviction, as if that were their surname, their nationality, a stamp of identity. Myth and reality suddenly fuse into a single thing.
So here she is: the Queen of Sheba. Not in books, nor in museums, nor in some lost palace. Not even in Marib, but here. And she isn’t one, but many. They are her. Daughters of Sheba, myth made flesh, heiresses of Goat Foot and her immemorial tribe.
They’ve taken this great journey.
“What do they seek, in the middle of nowhere?” I ask Zahra Bayda.
“They seek everything or nothing. They’re looking for the impossible place where life can be possible.”
They come, rising. From Somalia and Ethiopia, Kenya and Eritrea, Djibouti, Uganda. Hundreds of women with their children. Do they know that many will die on the road, that they’ll have to bury the sickest among them, the old? Zahra Bayda says yes, they know. They know and they accept it, the decision is made, they won’t stop until they find a door that opens. They will not stop. No matter the cost,no matter who stands in their way. They are their own house, and what Patti Smith callsthe living architecture.2
The SUV is blocked by the throng, we can’t go forward, the Horn of Africa seems to be rising up whole, migrant, roving, on a pilgrimage. The crowd of women has just crossed the Gulf of Aden on one of the riskiest and most inhuman journeys imaginable. They placed their destinies in God’s hands, or in Allah’s, begging in ancient cities ravaged or soon to be ravaged by disease. They’re fleeing from the four faces of death: war, hate,the snakes of madness, the furious bitches of Hunger.3
They’re thin and tall, you could even say they look down on us. Though they don’t have shoes, there’s an imperial air about them. They’re besieged by hunger and thirst, but they keep going with military discipline and a battalion’s courage.
We get out of the SUV. Zahra Bayda asks them questions and translates for me. They say they’re headed to Saudi Arabia and, from there, to Europe, because they want to study.
“Study?” I’m surprised by this. Before food or shelter, they want education?
“Study, learn, work, see and experience things, that’s what they all dream of.”
They’re devoted to knowledge, just like their ancestor the Queen of Sheba, who crossed this desert and others to test King Solomon’s wisdom. I’m amazed to hear them insist on their descendancy from Sheba; this poetic certainty about their origins strikes me as extraordinary. But Zahra Bayda warns me that you have to know how to interpret it.
“Careful,” she says, “watch out, it’s a double-edged blade.”
On the one hand, it holds the dignity of dispossessed and exiled women, the vindication of who they are, a testament to female power in the face of all adversity. But on the other, there lurks a historical background of bloody hierarchies and ancestral hatred among noble tribes and enslaved ones. In a cruel and tangled powerstructure, those who can claim a direct line to the Queen of Sheba are considered of superior caste.
“Do not underestimate these people’s pride,” Zahra Bayda tells me. “When they throw the Queen of Sheba in your face, they’re indirectly challenging you, you who have everything, but who are nothing, while they who have nothing are royal, with a queen’s blood in their veins. ‘I’m a descendant of the Queen of Sheba’: If they use that line on you, don’t take it lightly, it’s more than folklore. Deep down, it means, ‘Today I’ve got to beg and you see me in squalor, but I come from a thousand-year dynasty and my tradition will endure when yours is reduced to ash.’”
