What Have You Left Behind?

In 2015, a year after it started, Bushra al-Maqtari decided to document the suffering of civilians in the Yemeni Civil War, which has killed over 350,000 people according to the UN. Inspired by the work of Svetlana Alexievich, she spent two years visiting different parts of the country, putting her life at risk by speaking with her compatriots, and gathered over 400 testimonies, a selection of which appear in What Have You Left Behind? 

Purposefully alternating between accounts from the victims of the Houthi militia & those of the Saudi-led coalition, al-Maqtari highlights the disillusionment & anguish felt by those trapped in a war outside of their own making. As difficult to read as it is to put down, this unvarnished chronicle of the conflict serves as a vital reminder of the scale of the human tragedy behind the headlines, & offers a searing condemnation of the international community’s complicity in the war’s continuation.

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‘Bushra al-Maqtari’s boundlessly humane project of collecting firsthand accounts to document the nearly decade-long Yemeni Civil War – & the West’s complicity in it – is unblinking in its moral gaze. Every single voice collected in these pages is a blow to the heart. By the time I finished this book, I was consumed by sorrow & rage. This is an act of witnessing, & of making us engage in the witnessing of a disgraceful, criminal war that will shake your soul.’ — Neel Mukherjee, author of A State of Freedom

‘What sets this book apart is its narrative style, without being a novel, & its means of recording & documentation, without actually being a written record or document. ... What we read is painful, but our knowledge is enriched by the facts presented, as well as our literary experience with its language, marked by the pulse of life & death.’ — Al Quds