Yemen and Coffee

Eggers, Dave. Monk of Mokha. New York: Vintage Books, 2019.

I chose to buy this book because I was intrigued myself that the origins of coffee, this drink that I cannot start my day without, includes Yemen, of all places. I also thought it would be a good break from reading articles on the conflict and humanitarian situation in that country.

The first chapter of the book deftly hooks you into the story with a satchel filled with money and a new laptop only to get lost as fatigue caught up with the boundless energy of dreams for a bright future. It reminded me of how I felt sunk and very stupid, when I lost my new Surface 3 laptop, in circumstances carrying lesser dreams than what the protagonist found himself in but gut-wrenching nevertheless. And with that, I wanted to know how our hero, Mokhtar, overcome such a loss to become the founder of Port of Mokha, a company selling highly-rated coffee from Yemen.

The next chapters offer that joyful possibility that an individual, struck by a knowledge that makes him or her dream of big things, will open himself/herself to opportunities and key people along the way and somehow carve out a path, circuitous and perilous that may be, and make a dream a reality. Mokhtar wasn’t even a coffee drinker when he got excited upon learning that coffee had its origins in a Yemeni port called Mokha. Why did that discovery stirred and drove him to learn more and, against all odds, to bring Yemeni coffee to the U.S. and beyond?

We could look at the story from several angles but still the angle that I can understand is that of an immigrant whose identity was otherwise linked to war, conflict, terrorism, religious backwardness and poverty but who found something worth redeeming about his country of origin’s link to coffee. He embarked on an uncertain path whose twists and turns were guided by a network of family, friends, mentors, employers, colleagues and other people along his way.

There was money to be made but also a lot of money needed to get the dream become a reality. There were several points in the story when we worried that Mokhtar will not be able to get anything going because of lack of money to pay the coffee farmers, to build a mill, etc. But the guiding principle behind Mokhtar’s journey can best be summed up in a saying that his grandfather instilled in him, “Keep the money in your hand, never in your heart.” Or as fully stated from a quote from the medieval Islamic imam, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya,

“When there is money in your hand and not in your heart, it will not harm you even if it is a lot; and when it is in your heart, it will harm you even if there is none in your hands.”

That's my big take anyway from the story. For a review of the book as one of Dave Egger's series of books on immigrants to America 'caught in the jaws of history', see the New York Times review.

Following the immigrant angle, I got curious how many Yemenis immigrated to the U.S. On the website of the Migration Policy Institute (which draws its data from the U.S. Census Bureau), I see that for the period 2014-2018, there were 51,800 - mostly in the states of Michigan, New York, California and Illinois. Interesting to note that almost 30% of that number is for Wayne County, Michigan where Detroit is the county seat. As to how these numbers compare to other countries of origin and other time periods, that's for another day of browsing the web.