And there was my father. Almost a decade after relocating the family to its ancestral home he was still without meaningful income or any chance of resuming that thriving career as a real-estate developer. His world consisted of watching the news on TV and whiling away the time playing with his grandchildren. At sixty-seven he, too, looked much older. Thinner as well. We didn’t know it then, but the cancer that killed him three years later had probably begun to invade his body. For the first time in my adult life, he replied in Arabic every time I started a conversation in English. I knew that in the past he took any opportunity to practise his English, so I often volunteered to keep him talking. Not now. His English was fading, and while I associated the language with my liberation, he linked it with his long-gone glory days. From here on, it had to be Arabic for this former anglophile.
As much as I felt for my parents, my main concern was for my sisters. It was their life, and if religion pleased them, then so be it. But to me it looked like their faith was a refuge, a necessity, and not an intellectual choice. Still, there was a spark in them and a desire to find out about my life (and Faiza’s) in England. The same didn’t apply to my brothers, who had begun to see the West as being synonymous with the oppression of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan and, later, Eastern Europe. If my sisters were curious, my brothers were confrontational. I may have been successfully working towards a doctorate in English—in itself a major academic achievement no matter what my motivations were—but my brothers saw me as someone who’d betrayed his heritage and was brainwashed by the permissive West. We once lived in a world where East and West overlapped, where liking Western music didn’t suggest a cultural betrayal but merely a preference. The dividing lines between Eastern and Western cultures were firmly in place now. The attitude would soften considerably when Bill Clinton took office later that year, but the divisive legacy of the first Gulf War in political and social terms in Yemen couldn’t be underestimated.
If I had any lingering doubts regarding Yemen, that trip took care of them. My path in life couldn’t just be different from my own flesh and blood; I needed to be free of the legacy of guilt and abandonment I felt when visiting them. Back in England, I convinced myself to keep my distance from them. Their suffering forced me to examine a life that I didn’t want for myself, and I could do nothing to change it for them. I don’t know when and how I became so heartless and selfish. Family members drift apart and reconcile all the time, and certainly events of 2011 made me sick with worry about their safety and well-being. But back then, as my sisters’ embrace of Islam and their integration into Yemeni society became more complete, I saw no point in having this family as a compass for my life. History hasn’t helped, and larger ideological shifts made the gulf even bigger.
The next came two years later, in 1994, when a civil war broke out between the formerly communist South and the pro-capital North Yemen—the two having been united in a shotgun wedding in 1990 to avoid fighting over oil and gas revenues. My family had coped with all kinds of turmoil in the Arab world: a nationalist revolution in Aden, sectarian acts of violence in Beirut and fundamentalism and political assassinations in Cairo. But this was their first taste of a civil war—although not the last, as events in 2011 proved. Forces in the southern faction targeted Sana’a with missiles, which initially fell well outside our neighbourhood. In the days before the internet, I followed the news on TV and in newspapers with a sense of despair. I had nightmares about my mother being trapped at home while my siblings and father ran away to escape the rockets falling on our neighbourhood. Which, as I was told later, wasn’t that far from what they had to do, but without leaving Safia behind. The last thing that country needed was a civil war. Whatever infrastructure it had was being devastated, and no one was quite sure how its cities could be rebuilt.
Since I was living at the time in a graduate hall of residence at Nottingham University with one pay phone for eighteen students, it made more sense for me to spend some time with Faiza in Liverpool. This way we could call Sana’a every day to make sure no one was hurt in the war. That visit brought home the difference between Faiza and me. My sister was devastated by the news coming from Yemen; I, on the other hand, was determined to use this war as an excuse never to return to that country again. I knew that my relationship with my mother would be the one serious hitch in my plans. Even as I kept repeating her words in my head—“escape,” “there’s nothing to come back to”—I knew that she was secretly hoping I’d come home and keep her company. A few weeks later, a truce was called and normal life of sorts resumed in Yemen. But I had already made up my mind not to go back even for a visit.
I was now in a relationship with my first real partner, a German doctor in London called Jochem, and my circle of friends in Nottingham and elsewhere in England expanded. Staying on in England would be a difficult task, as it’d been more than twenty-five years since my father had given up our British passports. (The taxation rate for British nationals during the 1970s would have eaten into the income he relied on to raise his eleven children.) The paperwork involved to reclaim my British citizenship was too complicated, and the whole process could take years without any guarantee of success. I wasn’t really keen on staying in England, anyway. I had visited the United States again in the summer of 1993 and fallen in love with its more egalitarian spirit. I pictured myself living in Seattle or San Francisco. I’d got what I wanted out of England: the education and the time to plan my next move.
IF I WERE TO FIND a new home, it would have to be after finishing my Ph.D., and it would have to be in the New World: either the United States or Canada, or Australia or New Zealand. I focused all my energy on the latter two, borrowing money from my sister to hire an immigration consultant for New Zealand, which seemed the most likely choice. But just like in that adage “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,” Canada moved to the top of my list by pure chance.
I had arranged to meet up with my good friend Jago, a fellow Ph.D. student and now a professor at London’s Brunel University. We were to have lunch together on campus, but he called to say he’d be late. Since I was already dressed, I made my way to the café where we’d arranged to meet. I had time to spare, so I stopped by an employment and recruitment fair aimed at undergraduates. A poster for an agency that specialized in immigration to Canada caught my eye. It was the only immigration booth in the fair. The man working the booth asked me a few questions (age, education, work experience) and said that based on what I’d just told him I’d be a good candidate for immigration—so much so that he suggested I go it alone and apply directly to the Canadian Consular Services in London, skipping the middleman (himself). I wonder if this nice man, whose name I don’t think I caught, knows how he changed my life in that one brief encounter. Canada? What did I know about Canada except for Anne Murray and possibly The Kids in the Hall, then running on Channel 4? I must admit that I knew Murray very well. I discovered her music in Cairo in 1983 at a quaint little music shop in my old high-school neighbourhood of Zamalek. It was a “very best” compilation that charted her career from “Snowbird” until about 1982. Something about her gravelly voice and laidback melodies struck a chord with me. I don’t think I knew she was Canadian back then, and I don’t even think I had any associations with Canada. But a decade later in Nottingham, it seemed like Murray’s home country could be mine.
In those primitive, pre-internet days, I went to the library and flipped to “Canada” in the card index. My friend Liz was finishing a degree in American studies and suggested I look up a magazine called Maclean’s to get an idea of what life there was like. She knew it because her mother was a Canadian who had moved to England in the 1940s but kept up with her family in Ottawa. And next time I found myself in London, Liz suggested, I should also check out a paper called the Globe and Mail. I had never heard of that, either. I didn’t even know where in Canada I might settle, assuming I got a landed-immigrant visa. Weather-wise, British Columbia made the most sense. In 1
993, as part of my Ph.D., I’d attended an academic conference in Santa Cruz, California, and travelled up to Seattle, a city I’d previously visited in 1991 and loved instantly. In Seattle I met a friendly gay couple from Vancouver who had come down for the weekend, and they mentioned how their province of British Columbia boasted the mildest weather. That was about all the thinking I did on the subject of where to settle. At the very least I could also weekend in Seattle whenever I wanted to.
I completed the detailed application, sent a certified cheque to the receiver general and waited to hear from the Canadian Consular Services. After about three months, I received notification to show up for an interview in London in July 1995. I was nervous about it for weeks, but the actual interview felt more like a coffee chat. The officer in charge of my application suggested Toronto might be a better place than Vancouver. I had worked with my Ph.D. supervisor on scholarly and popular editions of Victorian novels, including a collection of short stories by Wilkie Collins, and so my most relevant work experience was in publishing. For that kind of work, he said, I should be in Toronto.
Toronto? I had vague recollections of reading some travel stories about the city in the weekend papers. The word “dull” always crept into the copy. I always mixed it up in my mind with Ottawa. But it was in North America, and the guidebooks I consulted in the library informed me that it was a largely liberal and gay-friendly destination. While I qualified in the points system that managed professional immigration to Canada, and passed the medical tests, a security clearance would prove more difficult. The same immigration officer asked me to be patient, as my place of birth, of course, was often treated suspiciously in applications. I waited and waited.
IT WAS JUST AS WELL that I couldn’t get the final approval as fast as I had hoped. My mind was preoccupied with a visit from my father, who had travelled to Liverpool in the hope of stopping the lung cancer from spreading. Khairy accompanied him, as Mohamed was too frail to travel alone. His visit marked the first and only time Mohamed and I were in England at the same time. A part of the Yemen that I’d tried to avoid for so many years had followed me to England.
It was a trying time, and not just because of the cancer. Mohamed’s England existed only in his memories, and this was his first visit to his daughter’s home in Liverpool since she got married in 1981. She lived in a working-class neighbourhood above the corner shop where she and her husband worked seven days a week. Mohamed had heard stories of her life and definitely knew she wasn’t living in Mayfair, but he still couldn’t adjust to seeing his daughter serving customers from behind the counter. Wasn’t she just like the people who’d rented his storefronts in Aden?
Although he was almost sixty-nine, he still showed traces of the old gentleman. He packed a large suitcase with several business suits, ties and more cufflinks than you’d see in a small menswear store. He didn’t forget the comb he always carried in the inside pocket of his jacket even when he had little hair left. All that was charming and, to my brother and sister and me, a distraction from the fact that his lung cancer had metastasized.
The doctors in the private hospital where we placed Mohamed had given him just a few weeks to live, a piece of news they didn’t tell him. For some reason, his doctor thought he wouldn’t be able to handle the news. Some patients, the doctor said, were better off not knowing. He called that one right. Mohamed refused to acknowledge that he even had cancer. When the doctors prescribed him morphine to alleviate the pain of chemotherapy, he voiced his concerns about its addictive nature. I strongly believe that he didn’t think he should die. Not when the second chapter of his life—the one that began in 1967 when we left Aden—had been such a failure. He still dreamed of that comeback, that return to his old glory. So much so that he never made a will, even when his own brother urged him to write one before he left for England.
In the hospital and at my sister’s home, this visit gave me a chance to talk to Mohamed more about the decisions he made in life, raising a large family that he’d moved around so much. His visit coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of VE day, and we watched the live celebrations on TV as he talked about his England of the 1940s, repeating the same stories that we grew up listening to. It was during those conversations that I learned how much he was in love with my mother and how their estrangement for the better part of the previous decade had depressed him almost as much as losing his property. He couldn’t understand how she’d turned her back on him after all he’d done for her. He thought she was ungrateful for resenting the fact he that lived off the income his children brought into the house. Hadn’t he shouldered the responsibility for her and all the children—and a host of relatives—for the previous four decades?
When it came to my life, he acknowledged that he was upset that I had distanced myself so much from my own family, language and culture. He said I had started acting selfishly ever since my first trip to England in 1984. “There’ll come a time when you’ll realize that your place is at home with your brothers and sisters,” he added. When I told him about my plan to immigrate to Canada, his reaction was instant. “This would devastate your mother.” He then went to sleep, his way of cutting the conversation short. So much for saying goodbyes and finding closure. While I knew he was proud of my achievements, to him I’d failed the one important test in life: sticking with your own family. In his estimation Faiza offered a better model, as she went home every year, called regularly and didn’t struggle speaking Arabic like I did.
I cried uncontrollably for the first time in my life on the last morning I saw him in Liverpool. Once he realized that there was nothing that England and its doctors could do to save his life, he decided he wanted to die in Yemen. I hired a minivan and driver for Gatwick Airport, put him, Khairy and Faiza in it, kissed them and waved goodbye. He died in August of that year, just six weeks short of his seventieth birthday.
AFTER RETURNING TO NOTTINGHAM to complete my Ph.D. thesis, which I had put on hold for six weeks during Mohamed’s visit, I resumed my periodic calls to the Canadian Consular Services to check in on the status of the application. I wish I could remember his name, but the same officer who interviewed me and had been handling my case told me to hang up and call back in a couple of hours. I didn’t know what to expect. When I did call back, he had wrestled my security clearance from wherever he had to. My immigration papers would be in the post in a few weeks. “Welcome to Canada,” he said and ended the call.
Early in December 1995, a brown envelope arrived in the communal mailbox of the graduate apartment building where I had been living for more than four years. It was nondescript and came with the regular delivery. It could easily have got lost in the Christmas rush. It contained that piece of paper I’d been dreaming of and chasing for many years: my right to claim residency in a Western democracy, as far away from Yemen and my family as possible. I rushed upstairs to my third-floor apartment, waited until the cleaning lady had left and sat alone in the kitchen, reading and re-reading the document and a one-page sheet of instructions about what to do when you first landed at a Canadian port of entry. I was still at least a couple of weeks away from wrapping up my thesis, but I could hardly concentrate on the copyediting and revisions that I was expected to complete before handing it to my internal and external examiners. Somehow it didn’t even matter if I passed or not. The whole point of doing the thesis was to get that piece of paper. I calmed down after a few days and knew I’d do better in Canada with a completed Ph.D. under my belt—which I had by April 1996, after revisions to my thesis that included adding a new chapter. My mind was on Canada, but until I finished that last chapter, part of it had to stay in Victorian England. I received the final approval for my thesis on April 13 or 14, booked a one-way ticket to Toronto around the same week, and was aboard a British Airways flight on April 20. A Saturday, since two friends insisted on driving me to Heathrow on their day off work. I had bought a travel guide in a bookstore in London, which I never really looked at until I was on that flight.
I didn’t tell my family, who were expecting me back in Yemen that spring, until the last minute. They had no frame of reference for Canada aside from another of my father’s many failed projects, which involved a Canadian company that sold wheat silos. I remember my sister Hoda telling me, somewhat sternly, that I had to break the news to my mother. Safia had been counting the days until she’d see me again. I just couldn’t tell her the whole truth at once, so I said I was going to live there for a few years to get more work experience. She probably saw through the lie but said nothing. Faiza took it badly, as my presence in England had given her some kind of family anchor outside a (beyond doubt now) childless marriage.
Worst of all, I had to break up a loving relationship with Jochem. It had taken almost ten years before I found someone to love me and to love. And now I had no choice but to leave him behind. My desire to move to the West legally and not just on a student visa outweighed all these disappointments and heartbreaks. By now I was also used to leading with my mind. I couldn’t afford to let my heart decide for me.
CHAPTER TEN
TORONTO
Home
As I settled into my seat on the flight from London to Toronto, I was terrified but arrogantly optimistic. I was now putting two continents and an ocean between me and my family and heritage. That should be enough physical and emotional distance. If Toronto lived up to the guidebook copy, I’d create a new family and traditions for myself. It was a lot to ask of a city (and a country) I’d never set foot in. My friend Liz from Nottingham University—the one who suggested I check out the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s—had moved there a few months before my arrival and was my only contact.
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