I’d walked the same square thousands of times as a child, teenager and young man and returned to it as a middle-aged Canadian at least twice since. During a twenty-four-hour stop in 2006, I gave up on a plan to visit the Egyptian Museum when I couldn’t cross the main street that cuts across one part of the square. The traffic had become that chaotic and frightening. But in the winter of 2011 a different kind of chaos was unfolding in the square. It’s still unfolding, of course, and no one knows how it will all work out for the average Egyptian, who has to survive on what I probably pay each month for my dog’s food and treats. I’m not optimistic. The protestors in Cairo and Western politicians and media have built up expectations of the Arab Spring that can’t be met in a few months, years or even a decade of post-revolutionary reforms. The economic disparities in Egypt took more than four decades to accumulate, during which time the population nearly doubled. The life of my own sister illustrates the stagnation in middle-class incomes and the explosion in birth rates and immigration into Cairo.
Farida married an Egyptian in 1980 and still lives in the same rented two-bedroom apartment with her now-retired husband and two children in their early thirties and mid-twenties. When she first moved into that apartment, their stretch of Soudan Street used to be virtually deserted at night. It was too far from her friends and family, my sister would often complain. Taxi drivers refused to go there late at night because there would be no chance of picking up a new fare for miles on the way back. But it was quiet and, all things considered, a safe and family-friendly street. By 2010 it had turned into a main thoroughfare, with new apartment buildings practically attached to each other and round-the-clock traffic jams and noise.
I can’t imagine the kind of pressure my first extended visit to Cairo in 2010 must have put on Farida’s budget, as she insisted on having me over for lunch at her place almost every day. My niece was now an English teacher in the same school where she (and I) once studied, and my nephew worked for a French bank. And yet what they made was literally barely enough to keep the roof over their heads. The building was by then over thirty years old and a casual observer could instantly spot the flaws in the structure and plumbing. I remembered how many buildings in Cairo were shoddily built in the 1970s and would collapse, sometimes with residents inside them. In fact, we lived near one such building and had to evacuate our own for a few weeks while engineers checked for any structural damage. I was racked with guilt at the financial pressure I was causing and tried to at least pay for the food, whereupon Farida cried from pride and embarrassment. I insisted on giving her two hundred US dollars as a thank-you, for which she was grateful and, eventually, was forced to accept.
Since the start of 2011, I’ve called Farida every few weeks to check in on her and to see how she has been living in the new, revolutionary Cairo. “Same old,” she’ll say, “only less safe than it used to be.” She tells me stories of thugs—baltagia—intimidating average citizens at night and carjacking in once-peaceful residential parts of Cairo. It was alleged that the Mubarak regime released them from prison in the early days and weeks of the revolution in order to intimidate and beat up the protestors. They remain on the loose.
That said, Farida has it easy. Egypt can fall back on a long tradition of civic institutions to protect rights and personal belongings. Despite all Mubarak’s oppressive policies, many Egyptians continued to believe in their right to a free and democratic society. The rest of my family in Sana’a wasn’t quite as lucky. Not long after the revolution in Egypt and Tunisia (and the protests in Bahrain), thousands of Yemeni citizens of different ages and social backgrounds took to the streets in Sana’a, Aden and Taiz, Yemen’s three largest cities, to demand, among other items on a long list of reforms, the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh. He had been in power for over thirty years. (He eventually stepped down in early 2012.) The protests started peacefully enough in the winter of 2011, and the revolutionaries saw Saleh’s pledge not to seek re-election in 2013 as a positive sign of an impending change. But by March events took a tragic turn when pro-government forces opened fire and killed almost fifty protestors outside Sana’a University, which had become Yemen’s version of Tahrir Square—a tent city where protestors ate, chewed khat, slept, prayed and demonstrated. It’s also where my sister Raja’a works as a librarian.
Getting to her office on campus has never been easy for Raja’a, one of my eight siblings who live in Sana’a, along with, at last count, my twelve nephews and nieces. This divorced single mother of my twenty-four-year-old niece daily navigates the city’s traffic-light-free streets, crowded dababs (minibuses) and airport-style checkpoints at the university gates. Once throngs of youths had turned the campus and its surroundings into the nerve centre of their revolution, her commute became dangerous as well as difficult. “I used a roundabout, back-of-back-streets path,” she told me on the phone during one of our now-weekly checkup calls. That was in March of 2011. By early June, a full civil war had erupted right in the downtown core—less than a mile from our family home in Sana’a’s Ring Road—between Saleh’s Republican Guard and a ragtag of tribal militia led by Major General Ali Mohsen, the highest-ranking army officer to support the protesters and add his loyal forces to their cause. For the first time ever, my sisters and my niece, who still lived in the family home, had to leave it behind and seek shelter with siblings and cousins who lived outside the city centre. They returned home only in late June, even as daily skirmishes continued and the sounds of gunfire or explosives could be heard in the distance. It’s amazing what you get used to, my sisters told me on the phone. Later in June, Saleh escaped an assassination attempt but was flown into Saudi Arabia for treatment, leaving the country in shambles and, for once, living up to its international reputation as a failed state. Electricity was limited to a few hours a day, and everything from gas to food to water doubled in price in a matter of weeks. Saleh’s sudden return in September plunged the country into a second round of civil war.
As I followed news of the stalemate between protestors and government forces from the comfort of my Toronto condo, I understood, even sympathized with, the anger that fuelled it. Since he seized power in 1978 over what was then the Yemen Arab Republic in the north, President Ali Abdullah Saleh has followed the “Blueprint for Arab Dictators” to the letter. He defused pro-democracy sentiments by presiding over a largely symbolic parliamentary system while cracking down on political dissent and placing family members in key government positions. In early 1987 I worked for a few months as a translator for Saleh’s brother, Mohammed, who ran the internal security apparatus. Six days a week, I translated and responded to private business letters and proposals from European investors—and the odd arms dealer.
The Saleh clan ran the country like a private venture fund. International aid money, intended to better the lives of the country’s now 24.3 million citizens, found its way into the president’s inner circle, while the infrastructure of Sana’a—let alone smaller cities and villages—crumbled. Despite some modest oil revenues, inflation and unemployment made daily life almost impossible in a country where over 45 percent of the population survives on less than two dollars a day.
Yemenis have long been the butt of jokes in the Arab world, but they’ve adapted smartly to water shortages and daily blackouts. My sister Hoda—an executive assistant with nearly thirty years’ experience, who late last year secured a low-paying job after eighteen months of unemployment—spends much of her spare time negotiating lower water rates with the private sellers who drive up and down the streets of Sana’a with water tanks. Khairy, a soccer fanatic and father of four, invested in his second electric generator, just in time for the 2010 World Cup.
The 2011 uprising in Yemen and the civil wars that followed have made Yemenis’ lives more miserable and are more likely to leave the country devastated than improved economically. Perhaps that’s why I have mixed feelings about the so-called Arab Spring, which, a year into it, could stand some revisionist history—at th
e very least more realistic expectations from everyone there and beyond.
In the midst of all the celebration and suffering in the Arab world today, I want to step back and tell the story of how we got to this boiling point. How did we get from the promise of the post-colonial liberationist era of Nasser, to the dictatorships and social decline of Mubarak in Egypt, Gadhafi in Libya and Saleh in Yemen, to this new liberation movement? Perhaps the journeys that my family and I took weren’t always in opposite directions from each other. In committing parts of this story to print, I hope to understand what happened before and during my lifetime to my Arab clan of Al-Solaylee. So much of Arab and Middle Eastern history has travelled through their veins and mine. Maybe I’m trying to live up to my name with the perfectly representative story, if not the perfect representation of a story. And maybe I’m just trying to fill in the gaps, not just between one family, but between the Arab and Western worlds.
I don’t know when, how or if the changes in the Arab world will end, but I know that my story begins in Aden.
CHAPTER ONE
ADEN
Camelot
Everything I heard about Aden from my parents made it sound like a place I’d missed out on by being born too late. My older siblings—all ten of them—spoke of it in an equally glowing tone. Forget New York and fly over London; Aden was the place to be, family lore would have me believe. It all came to a violent end in 1967, when the wave of decolonization spreading throughout the Arab world and beyond reached Aden. The Brits were out, the nationalist socialists in and the party over.
I was just over three years old when we left and remembered nothing of it. Such was my father’s love for Aden that he would repeatedly ask me as a child if I recalled anything, anything at all, about those first three years. “How could you not remember?” he asked, over and over, teasingly but impatiently. “Leave him alone,” my mother would say, and park me back in front of the TV or at my desk. I perfected that rescue-me look and she often responded just in time. It probably wasn’t the city itself—its streets, ports or even the people—that Mohamed wished I’d remember but his life as one of its most powerful and influential businessmen. It was a far cry from the severely depressed, beaten-down middle-aged man who for thirty years after our exile kept trying and failing to come close to his glory days in Aden in the 1950s and ‘60s.
I wish I’d known that father and that Aden. History books tell a more complicated and less rosy story about the city, but as so much of my family’s experience was documented in photographs where everyone looked so happy and healthy, I’m siding with the Al-Solaylee version of this Camelot.
The youngest six children on an outing in the Port of Aden in 1966. (Left to right: Hanna, Wahbi, Raja’a, Khairy, Hoda and me.)
This little port city at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula became a safe haven for trade and an early colonial melting pot. The British administered it, the Indians lived within it, the Jews felt safe on its lands and Yemenis like my father saw opportunities for business and for family life. I’d say family and money were Mohamed’s main preoccupations, except that as a rich and handsome young man, he was also a certified womanizer. My uncle Oubad, my father’s youngest brother, often talked to me and my three brothers—these stories, he thought, were not for my sisters—of my father’s philandering ways. “The things your father has done! Your mother is a saint for forgiving him,” Oubad prefaced every tale. The stories ran along similar lines: Mohamed escaping over rooftops and through back alleys to avoid getting caught in flagrante by a paramour’s father or, in some cases, husband. Or Father inviting unsuspecting females to his office to show off the plans for his next development. My favourite, because of its Mad Men sordidness for is it glamour?), my father flirting with flight attendants on the local airline, skyborne and on the ground. Aden was the Monte Carlo of the Arabian Sea, and Mohamed was its Cary Grant. Growing up in Beirut and then Cairo, two cities I know and remember well, I could still see traces of the dapper ladies’ man in my father.
Right up to his last few weeks, in fact. As a last chance to stem the spread of cancer in his lungs, Mohamed travelled to England in 1995 for private treatment in Liverpool, where one of my sisters was living. I was still writing my doctoral thesis and commuted between Nottingham and Liverpool to spend time with him. He charmed the ladies even on his hospital bed. He knew there’d be female nurses in hospital and came prepared; he brought ties in dazzling quantity with him to England because he didn’t want to look underdressed (or poor) without a healthy rotation of them. He never made a will, even though he knew he was dying, but he made every effort to look good. I’m an out and proud gay man, but there was something about my father’s last gasp of heterosexuality and harmless flirting that I found appealing, even romantic. I never told my mother, of course.
It was fitting that his last act of gallantry took place in England. His awareness of himself as a virile young man came about in London in the late 1940s, when he left Aden, his wife and his three children for a year-long training in business. (Four decades later I’d follow a similar path to England, but for different reasons and outcomes.) He’d tell us about taking room and board near Marble Arch and having a close but undefined relationship with his landlady. My older brother Helmi found these stories unsavoury and didn’t trust their accuracy. We probably have some mixed-race brothers or sisters in London, Helmi would say disapprovingly. If only, I’d tell myself. I loved my father’s stories and wanted them to be true. Before my first trip to England in 1984, that country and its culture—from Charles Dickens novels to Cliff Richard songs—evoked nothing but romantic associations in my mind. That my father was part of that romantic tradition was all a young boy in Cairo of the early 1970s wanted to hear.
I also knew how Mohamed loved my mother. Yes, theirs was an arranged marriage that would now be illegal in most parts of the world, since the bride had just turned fourteen, but somehow they survived fifty years, eleven children, four countries and a decade-long estrangement later in their lives. As Safia stayed home and cranked out children, Mohamed turned real-estate flipping into a viable business for the first time in Aden’s relatively short municipal history. He would either renovate or build low-rises, add storefronts and rent out every last square foot to the local business community or the British and Indian civil servants whose job it was to manage Aden. He was a businessman through and through, so when his own brother wanted to open a small business in one of his buildings, he charged him full rent—including a deposit. No wonder my siblings and I always sensed some resentment from our uncles towards their brother. My mother told me that they refused to take his hand-me-down clothes on principle, and in later years, when Safia or Mohamed was in a more sombre mood, they talked about how the uncles secretly relished his financial fall from grace.
I have a more realistic and sympathetic view of my father after talking about him more with my siblings. He wasn’t a ruthless man by any means, but he protected his business interests with a certain ferocity. The very nature of his livelihood depended on gentrifying and building on top of old houses, which inevitably meant buying out or simply evicting long-term residents. He did his best to find them suitable alternatives, but he cared nothing for their emotional attachment to place. Homes—aside from his own—were businesses and he liked to keep sentimentality at bay.
Mohamed was by nature a collector, of real estate, women and children. The thing he wanted most from Safia, however, was a male child. She let him down four times in a row. My mother gave birth to four girls: Fathia in 1946, Faiza in 1947, Farida in 1949 and Ferial in 1951. Their names all started with an F, as Mohamed admired the women in the Egyptian royal family of King Farouk, all of whose names started with that same letter. His own mother, Bahga, a Yemeni of distant Indian roots, thought Safia was the problem and began matchmaking for her son, doing the rounds of respectable families to check out potential new brides. I don’t think Safia ever forgave her mother-in-law for that, and the relationsh
ip between the two of them remained frosty and occasionally hostile until my grandmother’s death in 1977. For one thing, Bahga, who had very fair skin, never liked that her equally fair son had married a woman with such a dark complexion. She was determined that Wife Number Two would be bayda (white). But just as Mohamed was considering his mother’s suggestion of taking on a second wife, who might give him the male heir he wanted so much, Safia finally gave birth to a boy. Mohamed was so overwhelmed he broke the F monopoly and called him Helmi, Arabic for “my dream.”
But any dreams of adding a second male child to secure an heir and a spare to his little kingdom were shattered with the next three births, all girls. After Helmi in 1953, there was Hoda in 1955, Hanna in 1957 and Raja’a in 1959. It looked like Helmi, already a spoiled brat by all accounts, was destined to be the only male child. By early 1960, Safia was twenty-eight and Mohamed thirty-four. They had eight children. It’s staggering to think of a couple so young caring for so many children, even with the extended families of both nearby to lend a hand. I often marvel at my parents’ patience and determination when I, at forty-seven, struggle with the responsibilities of looking after one dog—a docile cocker spaniel.
Eight was not enough. Not in the Aden of the 1960s, where my father more or less dominated in business. In less than four years my mother had three more children, and to the infinite delight of my father all were boys: Wahbi in 1960, Khairy in 1962 and me, the youngest, in 1964, making my family the Yemeni equivalent of the original baby-boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1964. My name, Kamal, makes more sense in this context. I was the one to complete the collection of progeny, to bring this child-factory story to its conclusion.
It just so happens that I was born on the afternoon of the Fourth of July. My father claims to have skipped a reception at the American consulate to make it in time for my birth at a small hospital in the Tawahi district of Aden. He repeated the same story every year on my birthday. And every year my mother would repeat—though not to his face—that he was not ever really invited but bothered everyone for an invitation so much they let him attend. By the eleventh child, it was too dangerous for my weakened mother to give birth at home with the help of a midwife, as she had with her first eight or nine children. She had so many deliveries that accounts of our births got fuzzy in her head. My sister Faiza knew for sure that I was born in a hospital. She said she carried me home while my parents and older siblings walked behind her. Faiza would have been just two months shy of her seventeenth birthday and barely out of the convent school in the Badri district of Aden in which she and the three other Fs were enrolled. I was to be her child, so to speak, partly so she could train for her future and inevitable role as a mother, just as my oldest sister, Fathia, looked after Wahbi when he was born and my sister Farida tended Khairy.
Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes Page 2
