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Obeya family

A life full of stories

Way back at the end of March I posted this piece about an exhibition at Gateshead’s Baltic Centre featuring photography and a short piece by film maker Tina Gharavi about the history of Yemeni and Arabic families in South Shields and the tales they had to tell.

Tina’s film and Youssef Nabil’s photographs have been a hit and the exhibition is now showing in the Yemen in a major artistic outing entitled Last of the Dictionary Men at the National Museum in Sana’a.

A piece in the Yemen Times features Abdu Ahmad Obeya from Ibb who sailed to South Shields in 1956 and made his life here, it is a story of our multi-cultural success indeed the exhibition includes many stories from 13 other Yemeni sailors who settled in South Shields.

“My life is like the 1,001 Nights,It’s full of stories,” said Obeya

Since 1890, Yemenis have traveled to the port town of South Shields in the north-east of England to work on the merchant ships there. These hard workers were popular with ship masters –notably because they had the good reputation of being reliable and sober- and their work took them all over the world on merchant navy ships.

Tina Gharavi, affectionately called “Princess Tina” by Obeya, worked with the remaining first-generation Yemenis of South Shields over the course of three years to produce both the exhibition and documentary of the same name. It all started when she moved to the small Tyneside coastal town a few years ago and heard that her childhood hero, boxing legend Muhammad Ali, was married in its mosque. As she set out to produce a documentary to commemorate the event, she met some of the elderly Yemenis living in town and learnt of their stories.

“It started a huge sense of responsibility, huge guilt,” she says. “I couldn’t turn my back on it. Here was a story of contribution to British colonial history, a story of integration of Muslims in Britain that was really successful.”

“Historically, integration has happened,” she adds, “Recent hysteria about Islam is unjustified.”

Tina’s filmed interviews with the last remaining Yemeni sailors in South Shields reveal an incredibly interesting story, one of contribution to their new community, of full integration and of sacrifice, particularly during the second world war, a staggering number lost their lives in the service of Britain and her allies.

I hope Tina is successful in her efforts to get a plaque erected at the Al-Azhar mosque to commemorate Mohammad Ali’s visit there in 1977, she hopes to have it in place by July, it would also be nice if her exhibition could be shown once more in the region, even better if it was in South Shields, as it is illustrative of many of the positive aspects of multi-cultural integration and the benefits that can be shared by the whole community. A wider audience for Last of the Dictionary Men would increase understanding and local unity as we all look forward to a slightly more positive international future with Barack Obama’s new attitude towards Islam in the White House.

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