Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes

by Kamal Al-Solaylee

  BY THE END OF 1999 I qualified for Canadian citizenship. I wanted it so badly for one reason: Canada, or at least Toronto, was home. It was the fifth country I had lived in but the one that welcomed me the most. I loved its liberal society and what was then its neutral stance in the Middle East. I consider myself very lucky to have landed in Canada during the tenure of a Liberal government. I would have got a completely different impression of the country and its culture had I arrived here on Stephen Harper’s watch. I certainly wouldn’t have felt as welcome as an immigrant of Arab origin. On a more practical note, travelling on a Yemeni passport, especially to the US, took the fun out of any holiday plans. I’d go early to the airport, but I’d still miss my flight to New York or Los Angeles because I’d be pulled aside for questioning. I could see no benefit in continuing to hold that passport if I didn’t have to. Technically, it was the only official connection between my homeland and me, and I’d checked out of that country many years ago. In fact, I checked out of the Arab world as soon as I first arrived in England in the late 1980s. I couldn’t wait to get my Canadian citizenship, and in the summer of 2000 I did, at a swearing-in ceremony at St. Clair Avenue and Yonge Street in midtown Toronto. I was in the middle of covering the Toronto Fringe Festival for Eye Weekly but wouldn’t have missed that ceremony for the world. I invited my dear friend Shane, himself an immigrant from Australia and now a naturalized Canadian. We were the poster boys for immigration, we joked.

  Home at last. I was Canadian now and proud of it. I’d reached my final destination after three decades of travelling and relocating, with my family and alone. Not only that, but I was settling into a city that had given me so much in such a short time—a home, a social life, a partner and above all a place to be who I was, without fear, shame or risk of life.

  The only snag was that I got laid off the same summer from the online agency and faced more months of unemployment. I hated that job, but at least it provided a regular paycheque. I was better prepared this time. I had some contacts for freelance writing; I had put away some money in a savings account; and I had a partner to look after me if I needed it. But I knew one thing about myself: I liked the security of a paycheque, no matter how small, and I wasn’t one for hustling as a freelancer. When my editor at Eye Weekly mentioned that the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business magazine was looking for a production editor, I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I made the call to the contact there. In twenty-four hours I had a job interview and an offer to start immediately. I think the editors there were desperate to find someone to take the job, and I was desperate for one. Perfect match. Desperation worked to my advantage again. Because of my copyediting experience, I picked up the intricacies of production editing very quickly. Working at the Globe and Mail—the paper I was told to check out at Canada House in London if I wanted to learn more about Canada—was the chance of a lifetime for someone whose career was now focused on journalism.

  My charmed life in Toronto continued. The Globe job qualified as a crash course in professional journalism, and I shared it with a great team. The hours were long, but I lived just a few streetcar stops away, so no commuting to add to my day like some of my colleagues. I was freelancing more for Eye Weekly and establishing my name as a theatre critic. I liked the low-key and accessible nature of local Toronto theatre. Soon thereafter I started writing for Globe Television, the newspaper’s TV magazine, and an editor at the soon-to-be-launched Elle Canada approached me to become their regular theatre contributor. That dream I had when I boarded the plane for Toronto had come true: I’d carved out an alternative family and tradition for myself. I never understood, and will never be able to, all the Toronto bashing from those who live outside it. I don’t know if there’s a special trick or magic formula to living here. The way the city opened its doors to me makes me think it’s their loss.

  It was perhaps too good to be true. And I may have jinxed it all by succumbing to family pressure to visit them in Yemen—for the first time in nearly eight years. Having been away for so long, there was no need for me to worry any longer about the unspoken issue of my sexuality. The less they knew about my life, the happier they and I were. My friends would often ask me to explain how I came out to my family, given their religious and social views. The truth is that I never did. The whole coming out scene—the “Mom, Dad, I have something to tell you” scenario—is part of the Western narrative of being gay. My sisters in particular figured it out soon enough without me having to come out. They dealt with it by either ignoring it or by telling extended family members to leave me alone whenever any of them suggested a suitable bride.

  In the summer of 2001 I made the trip back home. I don’t think any phone conversation or letter could have prepared me for what I experienced there.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CANADA

  Reality

  No wonder there are very few direct flights from Toronto to virtually anywhere in the Arab world now, and none back in 2001. You need a connection in that middle ground of Europe to link the two. That’s what I was thinking when I reached Sana’a, after a long stopover in Frankfurt. It’s difficult to explain the feeling I, as an Arab person, get whenever I visit the Middle East, and especially Yemen. There’s a sickness in the belly, a nervousness all over. Every trip back could turn into a long-term prison sentence. The prison could be emotional, as I confront a family that has changed and is visibly suffering, trapping me in guilt and uncertainty. Or physical, should the temperamental government declare me an abomination for writing in gay magazines or curating a program of short films for a gay and lesbian film festival. I realize it’s my paranoia, and I’ve probably inherited it from my own father, but this is not what going home should feel like. And who’s to say that this is home, except in a blood memory sort of way? My roots are in Yemen, but everything else remains firmly fixed in Canada, my real home.

  At the immigration booth my worst fears were confirmed. I was flying on my Canadian passport, which clearly stated Aden as my place of birth. According to a staffer at the Yemeni embassy in Ottawa, I didn’t need a visa if my passport spelled that out. The officer checking my passport at Sana’a International Airport hemmed and hawed about the fact that I should have applied for a visa. Although I didn’t believe a word of it, I protested that this was my homeland and I had the right to visit my family whenever I wanted. The usual barrage of questions followed. Where did my family live? I honestly wasn’t sure, as houses in Sana’a didn’t always have street numbers. It was somewhere on the Ring Road in the Hasaba district, I replied. When did I last see them? About eight years before. Why so long?

  That I couldn’t answer in a sentence or two. Eventually, he let me in, but asked that I register with local security as an alien. Finally we were in agreement on something. At Customs, the security guard asked why I had brought so much chocolate with me all the way from Canada. It was the only request from my sisters for their children. Most of the chocolate sold in local stores tasted stale or was too expensive to be a daily treat.

  Khairy waited for me at the arrivals gate. The drive home took longer than usual. Traffic had something to do with it. Even more cars, more people. We didn’t pass an intersection without a filthy-looking child or an older bedraggled woman begging for money. “Displaced Iraqis,” my brother explained, in case I thought they were native Yemenis. Then he broke it to me. “I want you to be prepared when we get home. Things have got a bit difficult for the family.” That sickness in my stomach returned instantly. I asked him to elaborate. “You’ll see.” His tone was that of an older brother providing counsel, but it contained hints of a resentment that the passage of time had not eased. After all, I was the one who’d selfishly thought I deserved better than the rest of my family and had chosen a different life for myself. I’d also refused to visit them for so many years, despite several invitations. They took it personally, and I didn’t blame them.

  Posing with my closest sisters, Ferial (right) and Hoda, while holding my nephe
w Motaz in Sana’a in 2001. It was the last time I saw Ferial, who died a year later from a brain aneurism.

  The changes Khairy had tried to prepare me for were easy to spot. It was more than simply the passage of time. Two of my sisters—Hoda and Ferial—were thin to the point of looking sick and anemic. Hoda was only forty-six but was missing half her teeth and using dentures. Ferial, fifty, had lost her job at the USAID after the USS Cole incident and suffered a deep and long depression, in a country that barely recognized mental health issues or knew how to deal with them. The idea of therapy would sit alongside Botox or liposuction as an example of Western vanity and decadence, even though our father relied on counselling in the 1970s to get over his losses. Raja’a, forty-two, had gone from wearing the hijab to a full-scale niqab, where only her eyes were visible. She said she preferred the anonymity it gave her. Still working as a librarian at Sana’a University, she occasionally got stopped by students in the market if she wasn’t wearing the niqab, just for a chat or to ask library-related questions. She said the niqab made her feel more mobile, free to move from one store to the next. I didn’t think that was a good excuse, but wearing it was not just camouflage to her. It felt right, she said.

  As for my mother, I hid a sigh when I saw her hunched walk and wrinkled face. She could only get from her room to the bathroom or kitchen by holding on to the walls for support. My sisters would take turns ensuring that the bathroom floor was dry, as a slip could be fatal. She was just seventy. Years of inadequate medical care, intense political and social pressures after the civil war ended in 1994 and various family arguments after my father’s death had taken a toll on everyone. But my mother seemed to have borne the brunt of it.

  The men hadn’t fared much better. As Helmi told me, raising a family in Sana’a was a daily challenge. Public schools are underfunded, there were no playgrounds for children to be children—and God forbid any one of them got seriously sick. You took your life in your hands every time you went to a hospital in Sana’a. “You’ve escaped all this,” he said. I answered with a simple “Can you blame me?” While deep down I didn’t think they really did, there seemed to be a collective will to punish me for abandoning them. At least Faiza had returned home when her life in England came to what the family might call a natural end. When I showed them copies of Elle Canada magazine and a few of my Eye Weekly and Globe stories, they seemed less impressed and more concerned with the fact that someone with a Ph.D. in English made a living out of writing for newspapers and magazines. It seemed so beneath my education, and in a field not worthy of a Muslim’s attention. If they asked me any questions at all about my career choices, they tended to focus on how I made money or spent it.

  It seemed we needed an interpreter—someone who could explain to them how my life had panned out in Canada and, in turn, tell me how theirs had unfolded against Yemen’s many crises. I understood the words they were saying, but my mind couldn’t piece together their meanings. It wasn’t very long before I started counting the hours until bedtime so I could get relief from our struggle to comprehend one another.

  But it was the level of religiosity that truly startled me. My sisters were checking in on each other to make sure they prayed. When the TV was not tuned to Egyptian or Lebanese soap operas, it was on networks as diverse as Al Jazeera and Al-Manar, the latter the PR wing of Hezbollah. It was on one of Al-Manar’s programs that I encountered the name Osama bin Laden for the first time. I don’t think I had heard of him before. He was presented not as a threat but as one of the forces that were keeping the West worried about the return to Islam. I made no note of it. Just another radical jihadist from Saudi Arabia’s elite—a spoiled rich kid who needed a cause to latch on to.

  In the past, we’d all watched Hollywood movies or TV shows as a family, but now, despite all the TV watching, there seemed to be very little room for curiosity about the Western world. We’d grown up on episodes of The Rockford Files, Columbo and The Bionic Woman on the American side, and Upstairs Downstairs on the British. Classic Hollywood movies from the 1940s and ‘50s were essential viewing. Now, Voyager, starring Bette Davis, had become a firm favourite for me and my sisters. Ferial loved Humphrey Bogart; I, Claudette Colbert.

  I did notice that my nieces had a passing interest in episodes of Friends, which some Gulf TV station showed with Arabic subtitles. I don’t know if they ever saw the episode where Chandler pretends to be going to Yemen to escape the annoying and persistent girlfriend Janice. Joey, the Italian jock in the show, congratulates Chandler on choosing a name that sounds like a real country.

  Attempts to engage my sisters in old stories about life in Cairo or Beirut were successful, but would be followed with remarks like, “Those days are long gone.” We’d talk, at first tentatively, and then they’d open up until they got too nostalgic and teary eyed. This happened whenever we went through old family photos, of which there must have been hundreds. My father had insisted on a pictorial record of his children’s lives—a tradition that stopped a few years after the family moved to Sana’a. It was as if the new life was not worth documenting. I saw the look on my sisters’ faces as they gazed at their younger selves. Pictures of them in swimsuits on our summer vacations in Alexandria were quickly thrown back to the bottom of the pile. It was one thing to see their younger selves but another to recall the freedoms that came with that youth. Later during that visit, I put a handful of those old black-and-white photos in an envelope and dropped it in my briefcase. I had an unsettling fear that my sisters themselves or one of my brothers would destroy the photos. (So far this hasn’t happened, but I know that when I published one of them many years later for a Globe and Mail article, they were mad at me for months.)

  I tried to find something that connected the pictures with the flesh and blood. And yes, there were traces of my old girls. The same generosity with whatever little cash they had. Hoda spent most of her salary buying clothes and toys for her nephews and nieces, whose parents were struggling just to house and feed them. Every few months, rent from properties in Aden that my uncle there collected and sent in moneybags with trusted travellers on a bus (can you imagine that?) was distributed evenly among the siblings, but in months when one of my brothers was going through a rough patch—a sick child, unemployment, overdue tuition—my sisters were the first to pass along their share to whoever needed it the most. Despite such generosity, money turned into a constant source of argument and stress. Over here, we’d turn to credit cards, overdrafts and lines of credit to make up the shortfall. None of my siblings had a credit card or an overdraft. Receiving a line of credit was simply accepting money from one brother or sister and repaying it if and when the situation changed. Even my mother, who seemed to have forgotten much of her past life, got involved in discussions about money and expenses. She felt that the little that my sisters bought for themselves was excessive and a sign of vanity. They started hiding from Safia whatever they bought, or only indulging in small things she wouldn’t notice: earrings or perfume.

  Like my sisters, Safia rarely discussed the past and lived for the present. My father’s name was mentioned only once and in passing; she still blamed him for dragging the family back to Yemen. The past came with too heavy an emotional cost to relive. And the future as a concept was loaded with worry about a country that had been spiralling deeper into debt and poverty for over a decade. Safia seemed content to live in her room and watch TV for hours. Her last outing had been a trip to the dentist nearly six months before. I still remember how nice she always smelled during my visit, even though she couldn’t take a daily bath anymore. Still, she insisted on changing her clothes and using traditional scents to keep herself refreshed. She looked somewhat self-conscious about using her hands to eat in front of me instead of the spoon that my father taught her to use when she was a young mother. She refused to let me drink tap water in case I got sick, but she herself wouldn’t touch the bottled water. A waste of money, she’d say. A week into my visit she noticed that Motaz, my partn
er in Canada, was calling every few days. “He must really love you,” she said in as neutral a statement as she could muster. I don’t know if by then she’d really figured out my true relationship, but that remains my only delightful memory of that difficult trip.

  The most difficult part, however, came halfway through it when Helmi insisted that I visit my father’s grave and say the traditional prayer for the dead—the fatiha, the opening chapter of the Quran, which by that point I had forgotten and had no desire to recite. I protested as much as I could, but he wouldn’t listen to any objection. To him, going back to Canada without making that pilgrimage was one act of defiance he wouldn’t tolerate. The entire visit took less than five minutes. It was an unmarked grave near the very front of an unremarkable burial ground. The local guard guided us to it, while children and poor widows stood nearby waiting for us to hand over alms. Once again, I felt like a voyeur on a scene of my own life. Wasn’t I just buying a round of drinks at a bar on Queen Street in Toronto only two weeks before? Wasn’t my biggest decision back then whether to take a cab home or wait for the streetcar? How had I suddenly found myself standing in a cemetery on the edge of Sana’a with a brother who proceeded to recite from the Quran as the un-merry widows waited for handouts? Something told me that even my father—the old Mohamed, who was chased out of Aden apartments by angry fathers and husbands and who took pride in speaking like an Englishman—would have found that scene a little too operatic. He would probably have told me to go home and salvage the rest of the day. I’d agree, but to me going home meant boarding a plane back to Frankfurt and connecting with the first flight home to Toronto, where I got to review performances and not act in them.