The Hostage

Yemen in the 1940s, under the rule of the Imamate. A boy from a highland tribe is held as a hostage for his family's loyalty and made a page-servant in the governor's fortress. The map runs from the mountain city of Taiz below Jabal Sabir north across the highlands to the imamic capital at Sana'a, roughly 250 kilometres away.

The duwaydar

The boy's highland village

Chapter 1

The narrator is a boy taken from a tribal family in the Yemeni highlands and handed over as a hostage, a child whose safety guarantees his relatives' obedience to the state. His home is left behind at the start; the book locates it only as highland tribal country, so we place it in the green mountains around Ibb.

Chapter 1

inferred The novel does not name the narrator's home village, only that his family are highland tribespeople held to their loyalty by the hostage system. This marks a representative point in the fertile highlands around Ibb, north of Taiz, the kind of country such a family would have come from.

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