Muhammed Muharram, NUIEC Scholar Lecture Series

Country of Origin: Yemen
Location: Germany

“Water as Archive: Re-imagining Exile, Memory, and Identity through the Blue Humanities from Yemen to the World”

This talk approaches water not merely as geography, but as a living archive — a medium that holds histories of migration, displacement, and cultural memory that land-based narratives and conventional archives often erase. Drawing on the Blue Humanities as method, I trace a route from Yemen and the Bab al-Mandab Strait across the Indian Ocean and beyond, reading oceanic imagery — tides, crossings, coastlines, monsoon routes — through Arabic literary and cultural texts. Rather than treating exile only as rupture from homeland, I recover its long history as enabling: Yemeni seafarers connected Africa, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Japan, and eventually the Americas and Europe through centuries of maritime trade and scholarly exchange — coffee itself, now a daily ritual worldwide, originates from Yemen and traveled these same sea routes. That history of connection persists today, revived in the United States through Yemeni-owned coffeehouses bearing names drawn from ancient home — Haraz, Qamaria, Queen Arwa, Qahwa House — and even at Starbucks, where every “mocha” ordered is, unknowingly, a nod to Al-Mokha, the Yemeni port that once supplied the world. Indeed, exile is simultaneously our wound and window, as my colleague, Mansour Al-Maswari wonderfully puts it. The talk closes by reflecting on my own experience as a scholar from Yemen navigating displacement, and asks how oceanic perspectives on memory and mobility might enrich our understanding of academic freedom and scholarly solidarity across borders.    

Willing to share personal story.