Page 179 - Arabian Studies (V)

Women's Inheritance of Land in Highland Yemen 167
one time when I had gone to visit a young married woman only
some hours after she had borne a child. The delivery had been diffi­
cult, the placenta having remained inside the woman for hours
after the delivery of the infant. The mother was extremely tired. As
we sat together in silence and the woman’s mother moved quietly
about the room, we heard men’s voices and loud banging down­
stairs. Soon the woman’s husband and father burst into the room.
It appeared that the father had accused his son-in-law of not
providing well for his wife. By way of reply, the husband proceeded
to pound on a sack of grain in one corner, to drag out of an adjoin­
ing room a large tin of vegetable ghee, and to pile up in the middle
of the floor all the provisions he had purchased for his wife’s
resting period after birth. The fundamental issue between the
father and husband was not resolved by this noisy scene. The
underlying subject of contention was that the husband had never
built his wife the separate kitchen and bathroom—the house being
crowded with another related family—that he had promised at
marriage. The woman sat silent in tears, but it was negotiation of a
sort.
In many cases a woman’s share in the family estate may be paid
off by the continuation of such payments from her brother in later
years. This is most likely in families with relatively little-land and
where there are many siblings to inherit a single estate. If there are
many surviving daughters, few sons, and a relatively small property
base, women hesitate to make their claims explicit. To demand
division would dismember the family base, undoing, even from the
woman’s husband’s point of view, any value in the alliance created
by marriage. For the wife herself, such action not only strips her of
her name, but also of her security, the alternative home of her natal
family that allows her to negotiate with her husband for better
conditions during her marriage.
A brother finds it hard not to be more niggardly than a father.
Regardless of whether the woman’s land is actually marked off or
whether it remains as a share in an undivided estate, her brother(s)
usually farm(s) her portion for quite some years after the father’s
demise. What this represents was revealed in a conversation
repeated among women gathered to mourn an important woman (S
in the diagram). S had been ill, then recovered, and later died very
suddenly at about fifty years of age. The exchange was said to have
taken place between her and her youngest daughter, then about ten
years old, not long before S died. Complaining of her daughter’s
disobedience, the mother threatened to leave the girl and to go
home to her family home. ‘But you can’t go home’, said the girl.
‘You took the land from my uncle (khali).’ The mother rejoined