We’ve read dozens of reviews of The Monk of Mokha, the book about Mokhtar Alkhanshali’s journey to bring Yemeni coffee to prominence. Here’s a coffee person’s take—looking from the inside out.
BY ASHLEY RODRIGUEZ
BARISTA MAGAZINE ONLINE
It’s interesting to read a book about a person you know. It’s not like I’m best friends with Mokhtar Alkhanshali, owner of Port of Mokha and the subject of Dave Eggers’ biography, The Monk of Mokha. I’ve been lucky enough to cup coffees with him and his team, and I wrote a “Master Q&A” article on him for the December 2017 + January 2018 issue of Barista Magazine. But I don’t see him around town or grab coffee with him on the regular. In fact, when I saw him at an event promoting the book a few weeks ago in Chicago, he walked past me quickly, and it didn’t even occur to me to try to say hi or imagine he remembered me. But just as quickly as he walked by me, he did a double take and then walked back to ask what I was doing there. (I knew him in Oakland, Calif., so seeing me in Chicago was unexpected.)
It’s also interesting to read reviews of a book about your industry, penned by folks who have never worked in coffee. We’ve been anticipating the release of The Monk of Mokha—the story of Mokhtar and his attempt to bring Yemeni coffee back to prominence while knowing little about coffee and dodging civil war—for months. His story begins in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, where Mokhtar was the oldest of seven children in his Yemeni family, and follows him as he shuffles around, trying to figure out what direction his life is meant to go. After a seemingly innocuous text from a friend to check out a statue of a coffee producer outside the building he works in (as a “lobby ambassador,” also known as a doorman), he embarks on a journey to learn as much as he can about Yemen’s rise and fall from prominence as early cultivators of coffee.
So finding out that Dave Eggers was writing the book roused multiple emotions. Eggers is a well-known author of books like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a memoir about losing his parents within weeks of each other to cancer and raising his 8-year-old brother, and Zeitoun, a story about a Syrian-American who was accused of being a member of a terrorist group after surviving Hurricane Katrina. In one way, it seemed natural for Eggers to write this book, as Mokhtar’s story is compelling and falls in line with the series of books Eggers has written about immigrants in America. But part of me was also suspicious: I wondered what someone who doesn’t work in the coffee world has to say not just about Mokhtar, but about our entire industry, and whether I would care.
In the book, Mokhtar is painted as the nicest wise guy you’ve ever met. He’s able to talk his way out of almost any situation, but it’s always for the good of the group, a blip in a noble endeavor he’s about to complete. In Yemen, he repeatedly emerges unscathed from altercations with armed guards at various checkpoints, playing the studied academic and employing his classical Arabic. In the United States, after landing a job at a fancy clothing store and dressing the part, he notices an instant change in the way people address him, and his friends start calling him Rupert, a reference to a fancy British cartoon bear. The Rupert character becomes part of Mokhtar, like another identity he can assume when he needs it.
I’m fascinated by what others think of this book. Reading the New York Times review of this book, the author seems wary of this portrait of Mokhtar. “In essence, this is the character Eggers introduces us to—the Rupert bear version of Alkhanshali, agreeable to the hilt, whose strongest emotion appears to be mild vexation,” writes Parul Sehgal. Despite this reserved reluctance, the book is performing well—it’s a New York Times bestseller, and though we can imagine many of the purchasers are excited coffee folks, we simply don’t have the numbers to make a dent on that list. And it’s understandable that Eggers paints Mokhtar in a continuously positive light because the book isn’t quite about Mokhtar, but about possibility, opportunity, and chance.
Mokhtar is currently on a two-month tour to promote the book—Eggers jumps in from time to time—so he may very well show up in your town. Even if you don’t see him on the tour, look up a video or recording of him speaking, perhaps at Bloom in San Francisco, or on the latest episode of the podcast Snap Judgment. The Rupert caricature fades away and you see a person who is just surprisingly honest and passionate about what he does and is sort of just grateful to be here sharing Yemeni coffee. To describe Mokhtar’s strongest emotion as “mild vexation” is to ignore not just the plight he went through to get Yemeni coffee here—he fled a worn-torn country!—but to dismiss him as a complete human being. Eggers did not write a fictional story; he told a very real tale that Mokhtar is still in the process of writing.
In the beginning, Eggers admits falling victim to the narrative that good coffee is elitist. “Before embarking on this project, I was a casual coffee drink and a great skeptic of specialty coffee,” Eggers writes within the first few pages. “I thought it was too expensive, and that anyone who cared so much about how coffee was brewed, or where it came from, or waited in line for certain coffees made certain ways, was pretentious and a fool.”
Kind of hard to come off that opinion, but Eggers goes all in on specialty coffee. Throughout the story, he stops to give detailed accounts of the history of coffee, tracing its agricultural history in Ethiopia and its cultivation in Yemen. Eggers explains, in exactingly simple detail, how processing works, how coffee came to South America, and what the heck a Q Grader is. In a way, Eggers wrote a book about coffee that you’d give to your relative who doesn’t understand what you do in coffee or why coffee can’t just cost $1, no matter how many times you explain it. Mokhtar’s story draws the narrative along, but sometimes the book feels like Eggers’ own struggle with his former opinions of coffee and the information he learns by following Mokhtar for the last three years. However, he comes out the other end a convert—it’s not like he would have written this book if he (and many other prominent leaders in coffee like James Freeman of Blue Bottle or George Howell, who are both mentioned in the book) didn’t believe in what Mokhtar was doing. By the end of this book, you not only believe in Mokhtar, you implicitly believe in his mission and journey.
By playing the skeptic at the beginning, Eggers brings in readers who doubt the veracity of his subject. Reading this book, almost anyone can come away understanding just how complicated it is to grow and import coffee, and how damaging it can be to misunderstand that relationship. “Chances were some person—or many people, or hundreds of people,” Eggers writes, “along the line were being taken, underpaid, exploited.”
“I’m not the Monk of Mokha,” Mokhtar opens with at the beginning of his talk to a group of 40, sitting around a projected PowerPoint picture of Yemen, sipping coffee on a cold February night in Chicago. He tells the story about the actual Monk of Mokha, Ali Ibn Umar al-Shadhili, who is credited with brewing the first cup of what we now know to be coffee (previously, most folks chewed on the beans or made a weak tea out of them). I think knowing Mokhtar or seeing him speak makes this book more powerful. In some reviews, Eggers gets a lot of credit for the book—and it’s not always positive. Not that these criticisms aren’t without warrant, but they assume Mokhtar isn’t in the driver’s seat of his own story, and that Eggers simply picked up a vaguely compelling story to illustrate some universal truth about the American Dream through another overused (and potentially dangerous) trope, the Ideal Immigrant.
Regardless of how Eggers decided to write about Mokhtar, his story is captivating, it breaks down barriers between coffee and non-coffee folks that we as an industry have yet to figure out, and it highlights not just a coffee region, but a history of coffee that can change and influence how we think about coffee now. Is this quite a review? Perhaps not—but I’d encourage everyone to pick up The Monk of Mokha and see for yourself. Or at least give it to your obstinate aunt who insists you get a “real job.”
