The Rachel Corrie Foundation is honored to present the photography exhibit, “A Day in the Life of Yemen”, showcasing the work of the late photojournalist Luke Somers for the month of September 2018 at the Capitol Theater (206 5th Ave SE, Olympia, WA 98501) in partnership with the Olympia Film Society. The exhibit is open to ticket-holding guests of the theater. 

In addition to the month-long display, Luke’s family members will be in attendance at the 2018 Peace Works: Middle Eastern Film Festival to meet community members and answer questions about Luke and his work. 

About Luke Somers

Luke Somers, a British-born American freelance photographic journalist and resident of Yemen, was killed in a failed raid attempt in December 2014, one year and three months after his abduction by armed tribesmen. Luke arrived in Sana’a, Yemen in 2011 as an English teacher; and, although revered by his students and colleagues, Luke began to shift gears into photojournalism, bearing witness to the visceral realities – both bleak and inspiring – of the country, as well as the cultural phenomena of the Arab Spring as it swept through the region.

As time unraveled, Luke became a full-time freelance journalist who worked for several Yemeni newspaper outlets throughout Sana’a, including National Yemen and Yemen Times.  In the process, Luke began submitting photo essays to prestigious news organizations, including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, BBC and NPR, highlighting cultural, personal and political facets of the country’s people.  Luke spent much of his time in Tent City, Change Square – the protestors’ main area of living and congregating – where he had spent countless hours, days, weeks and
months sharing food, plans, conversation, and stories.  This was Luke’s home.

Purpose of the Exhibit

Luke, amid his many human qualities, was a thoughtful, intensely passionate, sensitive soul who arrived in Yemen with no agenda but to simply be.  His authentic and outgoing outlook toward the Yemeni people – as well as those of any other origin – led to his work as a photojournalist, as it not only allowed him to spend the bulk of his time with everyday citizens but also to continue his skilled hobby as a photographer while receiving a subsistent wage.  A primary purpose of this exhibition is to not only celebrate the life of Luke– as a human being and as a citizen of the world – but to also appreciate the beautiful, highly detailed and telling work that he created from 2011 to 2013.

After Luke’s death, the state of Yemen has only become direr.  Due to political corruption, the former and present administration’s use of drone strikes, as well as Saudi-led and U.S. backed sanctions, airstrikes, and bombings, Yemen has been reduced to a deplorable state, where malnutrition and youth mortality have skyrocketed.  Luke knew, befriended and loved the very people who are now either gone or struggling for their survival.  Through this
exhibition, we will be providing a lens through Luke’s – and, in turn, our – eyes to the hospitality, generosity, beauty and sheer authenticity of the people of Yemen.  In doing so, we hope to bridge the wide gap in understanding that defines our “us-and-them” mentality, as well as to provide a glimpse into a day in the life of a Yemeni citizen.

We invite you to participate in a journey of Luke’s powerful and transformative years in Yemen.

Words from Luke

Revolution Reflection

By Luke Somers

After moving to Sana’a in early February, Yemen’s (now “Honorary”) President Ali Abdullah Saleh long remained unreal in my imagination.  I didn’t watch television much, but did hear people speak about him to an inordinate degree. Pictures of him, plastered about the city, again inordinately contributed to my sense of the man.  Based simply on the pictures, he was waxy, vibrant, stern and yes, rather unreal.

Saleh, Yemen’s 33-year-long president, soon found a firmer foothold in my imagination.  Not through personally witnessing him issuing directives and giving orders, but through coming into close contact with people daily affected by such directives and orders.  Seeing with my own eyes (but thankfully, somehow, with my camera’s viewfinder acting as something of a buffer) how sniper fire from paid “balatiga” (“thugs”) could make a man’s face unrecognizable; how young people who, after a frantic motorcycle ride and who mere minutes earlier were forming the peace sign with their hands can then be deposited on a mosque floor, bleeding and unable to breathe.   

Saleh has, from early this year, met his country’s brightest hopes for the future head on, and with unmitigated brutality.  He, like many of the youth that desire some hope for themselves and their children (whether at home or in their future imaginings) have learned, understands that the world, simply put, generally cares as much as it knows about Yemen and its people – that is, very little.  The difference is, while Saleh’s regime manages to capitalize on this lack of knowledge and interest to extract funds from more powerful nations for military equipment and training, Yemen’s pro-democracy protesters managed to see the world around them not with cynicism, but with hope.

Inspired by protests that swept dictators from Tunisia and Egypt, young men and women put down their books and individual aspirations with the aim of doing the same for their own country.  This point can’t be emphasized enough. Living in a poor country, a country largely cut off from the daily swirl of world affairs, these young men and women realized that opportunities for individual betterment don’t come cheap – and may come around only once.  Even so, modest numbers of university students took to the streets, unarmed, with peace signs held high, their safety receiving no guarantees. Their numbers only grew.

That the “shabab” – the youth – are less savvy when it comes to political affairs, and less organized than one might hope shouldn’t come as a surprise.  The man they have been struggling to depose has been in power for more than most people in this young country have lived. It has, in fact, been both heartbreaking and beautiful to witness, to photograph, to spend hours with people who expect the best from the world and who have dared to believe in one of the best, most absurd ideas imaginable: that of peaceful protest.   

Barely-conscious protesters, sprayed with chemicals and shot at close range, have raised the peace sign in the hope that a camera would see and that a world would care.  Meanwhile, reality says that these same young Yemenis would, blindly, be more easily associated with al-Qaeda than with peace, even while it is impossible to find citizens from any part of the country who consider the local branch of the terrorist organization to be anything more than a ragtag band of men not numbering more than a hundred but who have, skillfully, been used by Saleh’s government to extract concessions, funds, equipment, and military training from foreign powers.

Ali Abdullah Saleh has since signed a power transfer deal.  Government ministries have been divvied up between Saleh’s General People’s Congress party and opposition parties.  Meanwhile, youths around the country have not left their “tent cities”. Resolving Yemen’s various states of crises has very possibly – and purposefully – been allowed to take precedence over meaningful change and grounds for future hope.

Saleh’s signing of the GCC power transfer deal may have seemed like an apt opportunity for the youth to celebrate.  Some did, but many others resisted the temptation. I communicated with and photographed the 20-or-so denizens of the “Deaf and Dumb Youth Revolution Alliance” tent, not far from opposition-held Change Square, in the moments before and after Saleh’s signing.  Gesticulating with fervor but managing not to overwhelm the lone translator, their comments ran from “Yemeni blood is precious, there must be a trial” to “As for the west, we tell them not to have double standards and use us to test their weapons. You demand human rights – where are our human rights in Yemen?”  Their manner was nonetheless warm and their dedication to peaceful protest unquestionable. Their pointed words reflect frustration that their revolution – after so much blood has been shed and so much hope put into action – may somehow be lost. After ten months in Yemen, after being in the midst of its Yemenis in the most trying and revealing of circumstances, I don’t see such young men becoming future threats to global security.  Rather, if their revolution and their positive outlooks have, in the end, proven to be futile, I see them growing older, living with dignity in impoverished conditions, and wondering where the rest of the world – and where their youthful, naïve hopes – went.

Special Thanks to: 

• The Somers family for making this exhibit possible and for generously sharing Luke’s work with the world.
• The Olympia Film Society for providing the space and logistical support in sharing this exhibit with the Olympia community.

Rachel: Memory and Commitment

Lin Nelson and Anne Fischel

February 2018

We were Rachel’s teachers in Local Knowledge, an interdisciplinary, full time program that carried through the academic year 2001-2002. When Rachel was killed in Gaza on March 16, 2003, we, like so many others, had to come to terms with the shocking reality of a promising life cut short. We are grateful to her mother, Cindy, who said, “Parents can be awakened by their children,” to her father, Craig and sister Sarah, and to the staff of the Rachel Corrie Foundation who have honored Rachel’s commitment to justice for Palestinians, her love of writing and expressive art, her focus on community connection, and her search for ways to engage in social justice work with her neighbors.

To us, Rachel was a humble and gentle person; she did not see herself as “larger than life”, much less a hero or martyr in the making. In 2003 we wrote, “We choose to remember her learning and growing, finding her voice, testing out her capabilities and figuring out what mattered to her. We remember her in the context in which we knew her best—as part of a learning community of students with whom we worked during the academic year 2001-2002. At her 2003 memorial those students shared some of their memories:

 We are reminded of the lessons we shared and poked and prodded with Rachel. So many words and ideas, so many acts and attempts at discovering our own ability to act, and collaborate, and build and discuss.

 One of the first things we noticed about Rachel when she joined Local Knowledge was her ability to observe and reflect. She was quiet, serious, her forehead often creased in wrinkles. We got to know her through her writings, which were distinctive in their searching analysis, intensity and humor. With one eye on regional history and the other on the global present, Rachel’s work cultivated a sense of the injustice of lives forgotten or taken for granted, communities struggling for their place and voice, people working against great odds to create a life for themselves.  She wrote about her home community:

Studying the history of this area roots me. It makes me more conscious of the land and more conscious of myself and of the people around me as actors in history…We’ve certainly waded in the same water and wandered on the same beaches as some very brave people.

Remembering Rachel is not so much a set of commemorative moments as it is a continual, ongoing journey. Our experiences with Rachel, in the classroom, at the awful moment of her death, and throughout the last 15 years raise fundamental questions about the rewards and perils of engaged learning. How can we create supportive learning moments and journeys that keep students safe, while at the same time making the classroom porous and permeable to the world? What are the implications and potential consequences of encouraging students to actualize their learning in the communities they are a part of, or seeking to become part of?  How do we serve as guides and witnesses to our students as they learn to contribute their skills and vision to a troubled world that sorely needs them?

These are some of the questions we raised in 2003. Then, as now, they are not questions with ready answers. One of the decisions we made was to join our voices to Rachel’s and to those of her classmates in a program we shaped together. One of the underlying values of the program was a shared belief that experience and knowledge are connected, and that they confer responsibilities. Rachel wrote of the importance of this connection:

We live in a curious geography…we have instantaneous access to products, information and currency from anywhere on earth.  On the other hand, we are often separated from the consequences of our actions by thousands of miles, strings of subcontracts…and a long parade of…ATM machines. This fracture deserves further examination. Its relationship to the way we form knowledge, and how we act on that knowledge is relevant to …our ability to function in a democracy.

In Local Knowledge students started community gardens, volunteered in food banks, participated in environmental movements, made films about homelessness, started a local peace organization, and much more. The rich variety of the work was—and is—united by their understanding that colleges are not outside the struggles communities are engaged in. This has never meant that all students are expected to participate in political activism, but rather that students are supported to seriously consider how their sense of their work, as it evolves, coexists with and interacts with a world that needs them. In turn, students and their faculty have much to learn from the broader community about resilience, survival and sustainable solutions to profoundly vexing problems.  Rachel’s peers understood the relationship between her work and theirs, a relationship they embraced in the painful days following her death.

She was willing to sacrifice everything she had been taught by popular culture to cherish – comfort, blind faith, complacency – and elevate herself to a place of transformation and compassion. She died, but we still have each other, the impact of her presence and commitment, the lessons we shared, and so much work to do.

Today, 15 years later, we remember Rachel for her passion, her quiet fire, her determination. She was not a tower of certainty, of unmovable thinking. She was a seeker, who asked a lot of questions, who asked a lot of herself and who knew there is always more to learn, more to question.

In her readings, writings, conversations and daily actions, she was on “the search.”  For us, Rachel is less of a symbol and more of a flickering beacon, a gesture to the rest of us to keep pressing on with our efforts. She was both courageous and careful. When learning about her home-community, she realized how much she had not seen, so she pushed to learn more. When learning about Palestine, she was a respectful visitor and student of the people who hosted her. Hers was a learning-life; she pressed beyond the borders of her experience to understand how others, in other parts of the world, struggled and persisted. Reflecting the perspective and necessity of a learning community that began in the throes of 9-11, she looked close to home and far away, always figuring out connections, the alternative to the rhetoric of “us or them.” In Gaza she used her much-vaunted privilege to understand others and tell the story of her learning through articulate, determined and grave messages that urged others to feel connected—and to continue to learn.

We remember Rachel’s youth and insight, her wisdom, and determined search for a better way. 15 years later we often wonder: what would she be learning and saying now in a landscape where so much has changed, yet where so much remains to be done?  In Palestine she was deeply connected to the youth, the children who have been denied so much, who hunger for justice. Today, she would no doubt champion the young Florida students who are speaking out against gun violence, demanding that it be challenged and prevented. She would embrace the courage of young people protesting police violence in Black communities, and the undocumented youth who are bravely advocating for immigrants rights and political/social inclusion. Young people speaking-their-minds was vital to Rachel and to her legacy.

We learned from Rachel that parents can be awakened by their children, and teachers can be re-awakened by their students. That is part of the legacy we live out as we remember Rachel. We try to be attentive to what might be forgotten, overlooked or excluded. We remember how important it is to speak out, as Rachel did, to take a stand, as Rachel did, and to keep observing and asking questions. We look for connection and seek out opportunities for engagement. And we continue to be inspired by the words of her friends-in-learning, who embraced her challenge to do right by her world.

Learn and speak, turn to each other and organize, right where your community needs it most. This is how to honor the humility of [her] death, not with banners and songs and slogans, but with strength, intelligence and critical compassion…she was extraordinary and ordinary; she cared about the world and threw herself into it, she was one of us.