The Monk of Mokha

by Dave Eggers

about how Americans like Mokhtar Alkhanshali—U.S. citizens who maintain strong ties to the countries of their ancestors and who, through entrepreneurial zeal and dogged labor, create indispensable bridges between the developed and developing worlds, between nations that produce and those that consume. And how these bridgemakers exquisitely and bravely embody this nation’s reason for being, a place of radical opportunity and ceaseless welcome. And how when we forget that this is central to all that is best about this country, we forget ourselves—a blended people united not by stasis and cowardice and fear, but by irrational exuberance, by global enterprise on a human scale, by the inherent rightness of pressing forward, always forward, driven by courage unfettered and unyielding.

This highlight is basically a microcosm of the whole book, so you can read it and decide if this story sounds like it's for you.

By eighteen, he knew these people, who had gone to college and could live wherever they wanted, had nothing he didn’t have. They weren’t any smarter, this was clear. They weren’t quicker. They weren’t even more ruthless. If anything, they were softer. But they had advantages. Or they had expectations. Or assumptions. It was assumed they’d go to college. It was assumed they’d find jobs befitting their upbringing and education. There were no such assumptions in Mokhtar’s world.

A hard-scrabble life can breed ingenuity and resourcefulness. It can also breed despondency, which makes for a much more lame story. Glad this book is about the former.

Mokhtar told him they had been speaking Arabic. “Arabic, huh?” the officer said, and his eyes seemed to register, for a moment, that he was onto something potentially serious. “You mind if I see your IDs?”

You want to know how privileged I am? The first thing I thought I'd want to say back is, "Sure, officer, how about I do one better and hand you a pilot's license?"

“Officer,” he said, “what if I told you that I’m an American citizen, and that we just came back from the State Department and the White House, where we were asked to speak? And after a day speaking to important people and feeling good about our democracy, now this will be my experience in D.C.? Because that’s what just happened. If Lincoln were alive, what would he say?” Mokhtar went on this way for a while, until the officer’s face seemed to soften. His eyes weren’t the eyes of a zealot or an ignorant man. They were the eyes of a man acting on orders and with limited information. “Well, I’m sorry,” the man said. He apologized a few more times, and seemed to actually mean it. He jogged down the steps, and back into the car, and the car rolled away.

This is a heart-breaking anecdote about the sheer stupidity of a process designed to protect us based on radical stereo-typing.

Apparently Khaldi was far afield with his sheep, allowing them to graze on any vegetation they could find. Every night he slept near them, and all was peaceful until late one night, when he expected them to be resting, he found that his sheep were still up and about. More than up and about—they were jumping, prancing, braying. Khaldi was mystified. He thought they might be possessed. But soon it became clear that they’d been eating beans from the bushes nearby. These were coffee beans. And when Khaldi ate the beans himself, they had the same effect on him—he was shot through with new vigor and mental acuity. He had discovered the coffee bean.

What a wonderful origin story. Incidentally, this is very similar to how I utilized coffee. I'd prepare a pot of coffee so I could stay up and write papers in college. I'd get the papers completed and spend the rest of the night "jumping, prancing, braying." I may have made it too strong.

According to legend, it was in Mokha, a port city on the Yemeni coast, that the bean was first brewed. For centuries after Khaldi the shepherd had come and gone, Ethiopians chewed the beans and made weak tea from them, but it was Ali Ibn Omar al-Shadhili, a Sufi holy man living in Mokha, who first brewed the bean into a semblance of what we now recognize as coffee—then known as qahwa. He and his fellow Sufi monks used the beverage in their ceremonies celebrating God, which lasted long into the night. The coffee helped bring them to a kind of religious ecstasy, and because the Sufis were travelers, they brought coffee to all corners of North Africa and the Middle East. The Turks turned qahwa into kahve, which became, in other languages, coffee.

Coffee started in Yemen.

Al-Shadhili became known as the Monk of Mokha, and Mokha became the primary point of departure for all the coffee grown in Yemen and destined for faraway markets.

They reach their flavor peak three days after roasting, and after seven, they begin to decline. Grinding the coffee three days after roasting is ideal, and it’s best to brew it immediately after grinding.

A practical highlight: I should probably buy smaller batches of coffee so that the beans do not sit as long as the ones I currently use.

Any given cup of coffee, then, might have been touched by twenty hands, from farm to cup, yet these cups only cost two or three dollars. Even a four-dollar cup was miraculous, given how many people were involved, and how much individual human attention and expertise was lavished on the beans dissolved in that four-dollar cup. So much human attention and expertise, in fact, that even at four dollars a cup, chances were some person—or many people, or hundreds of people—along the line were being taken, underpaid, exploited.

Coffee is an expense I never question. I will look for free trade wherever possible.

The only way Mokhtar could revive coffee in Yemen, then, was to raise the price paid for Yemeni coffee above that paid for qat. To do that, he had to deal directly with the farmers, and determine a price based on what he could get from international specialty roasters. And to garner a higher price from these specialty roasters, he had to drastically raise the quality of Yemeni coffee cultivation. And he had to begin without having set foot on a Yemeni coffee farm.

The entire business plan. The good news is that there are very few competitors. The bad news is that it is expensive and dangerous.

Kopi luwak became popular, and its purveyors were able to demand a premium for it. Willem was not impressed. He liked to repeat an expression coined by George Howell, a well-known coffee roaster. “Coffee from assholes, for assholes,” he said.

My brother-in-law brought me some Kopi Luwak from Indonesia (the humane stuff collected from wild civets — so really expensive). It was super mild and smooth, but not at all worth the expense, or the horrors, that it has since caused.

He wandered Sana’a that day, feeling trampled upon but then again free of the burden of dreams. He had had a dream, and dreams are heavy things, requiring constant care and pruning. Now his dream was gone, and he walked the streets like a man without anything to lose. He could do anything. He could do nothing.

Mokhtar continued to go into tribal areas, hours or days from Sana’a, and every time he packed his dagger, and a SIG Sauer pistol. His driver had a semiautomatic rifle. When he was in more troubled or unknown districts, he brought along another man who carried an AK-47 and a grenade. None of this was unusual. There were twenty-five million people in Yemen and at least thirteen million guns—after the United States, it was, per capita the world’s most armed nation. Men wore AKs walking down the street. They brought them to weddings.

I do not want to live in a society where adult males freely choose to carry guns. I want to live where it is patently obvious that guns are unnecessary to everyone.

“He’s the problem,” the woman continued. “Men like that are holding the whole country back.” Mokhtar had work to do, and he was tired, but the orator in him was awake and ready. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said in English. “You’re the problem.” The woman’s mouth dropped open. She looked at Mokhtar like he was an animal that had somehow learned to speak.

This is a hilarious exchange but I always wonder how true to life these exchanges are when written in biographies.

Mokhtar had to get back to the United States. He needed to test the samples he’d collected—he planned to bring twenty-one lots home—and visit family and see about raising a few hundred thousand dollars so he could come back and actually buy the coffee, if any, that scored well.

How do you go from scraping for low single-digit thousand dollar loans to just expecting a couple hundred thousand so flippantly? I guess we will find out.

Mokhtar and Nurideen got out and pushed the taxi backward. They laughed. They couldn’t help it. “Been nice knowing you,” Mokhtar said. He figured the odds of survival were about sixty–forty. As they pushed the taxi, Mokhtar noticed a propane tank attached to the trunk. This was common in Yemen, given the gasoline shortages—drivers rigged their engines to run on propane. Mokhtar and Nuri laughed harder. They were pushing a taxi with an exposed propane tank while machine-gun fire rattled over their heads. They couldn’t run away. All their coffee was in the taxi.

These war torn countries always come with fatalistic stories like this. We only hear the tales from the survivors.

He paid, and she gave him his new tickets, which bore the code that indicated they’d been singled out for extra screenings. “You know what?” he said. “You work in a racist institution. You should know about these things. I’ve been through four hours of screenings and I missed the flight. That’s why I’m here getting a new flight. And you’re putting me through another screening because I’m brown.” Mokhtar was on a roll, his voice rising. People around him were listening. He went on—Are you in a union? You work for a racist organization. This is a racist system—until the African American agent, and the white male agent next to her, began apologizing and until the white man came around and leaned down to Dena. “You want a sticker?” the man asked. “We don’t want your stickers!” Mokhtar said. “We want dignity.”

More sad... ;^(

Mokhtar walked out of his captivity in bright camaraderie with his former jailers.

Mokhtar had grown up in San Francisco, surrounded by water—oceans and bays and rivers, estuaries and lakes. He’d spent years in Yemen, a country with a twelve-hundred-mile coast. He’d gone to middle school on Treasure Island, an actual island. But he’d never been on a boat. He’d always wanted to, but the ferries and yachts and sailboats he’d seen throughout his youth seemed part of some unattainable other world. His first experience with any watercraft was going to be in a tiny skiff leaving Yemen in the middle of a civil war. He stepped in and they left the shore. They were carrying the first coffee to leave the port of Mokha in eighty years.

A momentous occasion, perhaps not marked with the appropriate pomp.

They were being detained. Not in a hostile way. Not in a way that felt especially menacing—not yet at least. It was more like the disorganized and irrational detentions common at American airports, the kind of detention that came from the officers feeling they’d been confronted with something beyond their immediate comprehension, something too unusual to simply allow.

Kafka brings Mokha to Amerika.