Spring of '99, my lover dumped me. What was a lovelorn lesbo to do? I called an old friend, a Middle East expert with a seven-year-old son, and accepted a long-standing offer. Yes, I was a lesbian nanny in Yemen. If I had it to do over again, I would change nothing . . . except for a single word.

What with the occasional, albeit hospitable, tribal kidnapping of Westerners, and the recent attack on a U.S. Navy warship, Yemen gets a bad rap in the American media. And the Arab-speaking Middle East, its image burdened by Western anxiety, isn't exactly the vacation destination of choice for American Jewish women, let alone lesbian ones. "Oh. My. God," my suburban mother and aunt said simultaneously. "You can't let them know who you are." They took me to Loehmann's. I shopped for scarves, sun dresses, leggings, long-sleeved cotton blouses. Notwithstanding my shoe aisle—sensible sandals—lecture about how neither my ethnicity nor my sexuality were the sum total of me, I certainly didn't intend to let Yemenis "know who I was." It turned out to not matter what I had intended. They "knew" what they didn't know anyway.

Unlike that of Yemeni women, the public behavior of Western women in Yemen is not so fully proscribed. We can hang with women; we can hang with men. I took to hanging with men who wrote poems, primarily because the women who wrote poems were not meeting during the summer. I had written a poem while I was in Yemen for my newly-born niece. The poem was called Pearl. An American expatriate had introduced me to her Yemeni ex-husband, a soft-spoken bohemian who took me to the regular Sunday qat chew-cum-poetry salon at the cultural center. Poetry is the pre-eminent literary art form in the Arab world; everyone who was anyone showed up at the salon. There, in the cultural center's spacious mufraj—the pillowed, many-windowed room in which Yemenis eat, entertain, and chew the mildly stimulant qat—the most venerable Yemeni male poets declaimed. There, I offered up Pearl. Never mind the language barrier; the men were agog. The poem would be translated and published in a bilingual version in the Yemeni newspaper, Culture. The hubbub had begun.

I started receiving interviewers and call after call from young male poets. Two women arrived at our gate from a magazine entitled Adam and Eve. They kept fully veiled, but accepted tea and chocolate-mint cookies. Their questions were painfully probing: "What is love?" I pondered my latest romance, but fished for an answer about God. "What is man? What is woman?" What post-modern questions! "What did I think of relations between the genders?" I spoke about American feminism. When they asked for my poem, I ran to my room and pulled out my only spare copy. It was printed on the back of an announcement for a reading I had done for Brooklyn's Shades of Lavender. I scribbled sloppy ink over the text explaining that Shades was "created by lesbian, bisexual and transgender women." Although they did not know English, when I handed them the poem, my interrogators turned it over and inspected the flyer. I asked my friend, the Middle East expert, what would happen if someone could read it. She shrugged, "It would be a scandal."

If a Yemeni wants to mildly discredit someone, he says of him, "He drinks." If he wants slander someone, he labels him a homo. Sexual identity there, as anywhere, is political. As the Muslim North asserts dominance in the aftermath of civil war with the former socialist South, "homo" is thrown at Southern men as often as stones at Southern women who refuse the veil. So, my heart jumped when, having left a folder of notes typed on those naughty flyers beneath my shoes outside the poets' chew, I found it had been rifled through. Yemen pretends toward democracy, but, it is said, secret police are everywhere.

The self-selected translator for my poem was one of the founders of the poets' qat chew. He was marginally-bilingual and hard-of-hearing with an ego that did not lend itself to collaboration. My friend the Middle East expert, who—although she knew nothing about poetry and was obstinately literal—had been drafted to assist, could not get him to listen, let alone to fully hear her. This made for an interesting but laborious process that hit a particular snag on an unfortunate spelling gaffe.

It took fourteen hours in multiple sittings to translate my poem. As two days grew long beyond the windows of my translator's penthouse mufraj, my Middle East expert friend haggled over phrases like "dual-hearted house of intention and lip" and "naked a-bed the bric-a-brac sea" and "spoil of mooning rabble," and struggled to explicate references to Sir Thomas More and Romeo and Juliet. My young charge grew fidgety and, finally, fell asleep. I grew high on qat. The sun disappeared twice. The translation took its ill-fated shape.

When the poem was rendered in Arabic, my translator and I returned to the salon and re-read it to accolades. "It will be the poem of the year!" my translator waggled his finger in the air. "Lovely! You are a real poet. You have captured the true essence of the poem," my bohemian friend sat before us cross-legged stuffing his cheeks with qat and heaping praise upon my translator. As soon as we were out of earshot, my friend cleared his throat. "Did you mean here," he pointed to the text, "to speak of lesbians?" I did not. "But here he used the word for two women having sex."

I had meant "transgression," and I had used the word "breach," but I had made the mistake of spelling it with a double "e." My translator had consulted his dictionary and found for "breech" the definition, "buttocks." Situated as the word was in a line about a mother, my translator had made the poetic leap to lesbian sex, my friend the Middle East expert's protests notwithstanding. It was in a stanza referencing The Scarlet Letter, in which the archetypal mother's undefined transgression negatively impacts her daughter:

. . . Affirmative, breech [sic] by
mother of girl orphaned from chapel,
pried out of dome in heal splitting
dance on the beach alone under waves
of ebony hair

and so forth. But under my translator's creative interpretation, the transgression was (mis)defined. Now I was in the unseemly position of having come across in Arabic as condemning of lesbian sex. My bohemian friend assured me that he would see to it that the word was changed.

"These guys don't know what you're talking about. I kept telling them the poem is about language. They think that it is about semen," he said. He handed me a choice sprig of qat.

"Semen?" I asked. I chewed, nonplussed.

"Yes. Because it is called Pearl."

Now I understood the gushing attentions of the young male poets. My "alleged frankness signaled," as my Middle East expert friend put it, "sexual availability" to them. But, although they were hugely wrong in that matter, the Yemeni acceptance of what I considered an egregious mistranslation marked a moment of high heterosexist irony. Yemen had managed to have me speak the love that dare not speak its name. The poem was published the following week as the much-ballyhoed, many-typo-ed Preal, lesbian sex conspicuous in Arabic beside the circumspect English.

Inadvertent innuendo, resonant error, reverberant touch. This was my summer as a lezzie in Yemen. I learned, as I squirmed in the closet, that therein hangs the comedy between consciousness and intuition. What people express might be not what they think, rather what they don't think but still understand. My Middle East expert friend insists that Yemenis would not assume someone they knew was a homo, and I agree with her. Yemen is a polite country. No Yemeni would think such a thing of a friend. But if Yemenis did not know that they knew me, they engaged my sexual identity nevertheless in ways both discomforting and comforting. Would that I could retranslate that one word in Preal. But then I'd also want to remove every comma they inserted in place of my apostrophe, a queer mark of English-language punctuation much about which a person from Yemen might not know.

Betsy Andrews is a 1999 NYFA Fellow in Nonfiction Literature. She will participate in the Poetry Society of America's revisitation of Anne Sexton at Cooper Union on May 17, 2001. She lives in Brooklyn.