Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (2 page)

Closer to home, my brother Helmi, then in his early twenties, fell under the spell of the Brotherhood and began to scold my sisters for not wearing the hijab, for dyeing their hair or wearing too much makeup. Three of my older sisters had finished university or secretarial schools and were working in foreign embassies, ad agencies and antiques shops. Most people find the ritual of getting ready for work—what to wear, what to pack for lunch—a chore, but my sisters endured it to the soundtrack of a brother barraging them with sayings from the Prophet Mohamed or one of the imams Helmi was in the habit of listening to. He urged them to renounce vanity and cover up their hair. I don’t know how my sisters coped with this daily intimidation. My dad worked abroad for most of that time and his secular influence at home was waning.

Perhaps Helmi was trying to prepare my sisters for their future lives in Yemen, our homeland, where the family gradually retreated in the mid-1980s to escape political tensions in Cairo and to settle somewhere after nearly twenty years as expatriates. To my father there was no choice but to return to Yemen. Not the southern port of Aden, where he had found his fortune and started his family, but the northern city of Sana’a, which was slowly making contact with the outside world after decades of an insular, caste-based pseudo monarchy. (The northern part of Yemen became a republic in 1962 and united with the south in 1990 to form the Yemen of today.)

Sana’a? That medieval-looking city we knew only from travel books and poorly shot postcards that relatives sent us on special occasions? I knew instantly that I had to avoid spending the rest of my life in a place where public hangings were held in broad daylight as part of sharia law. I had come out to myself as a gay man and was embracing a Western version of gay identity. Although I joined my family in Sana’a for over a year—serving the mandatory military service, albeit as an interpreter in the central security forces—I was determined not to make Yemen my home and started a journey that would take me to the United Kingdom as a student and to Canada as a landed immigrant.

Some of the details of my own journey I have been able to describe with a certain ease in the chapters that follow. I was able to build on my good education in Cairo all the way to a doctorate in English in the UK and then make a new life for myself in Toronto not long after landing here in 1996. That part is straightforward enough. What happened to my family in the intervening decades is a story I have struggled to understand, explain and put into words. How do you write about, rationalize and call your own a family that still believes AIDS is a form of divine retribution and that men are superior to—and have the right to rule over—women, when you have no problem describing people who espouse similar views as bigots?

My first visit back to Yemen after moving to Canada in 1996 was in the summer of 2001. I found a family that acted a lot closer to the stereotype of regressive Muslim culture than the secular one I’d known. The veils were in full view. Everybody prayed five times a day. My brothers were unapologetically sexist in their dealings with their wives, hushing them whenever they expressed an opinion or telling me not to listen to them. “Women’s talk,” my brother Khairy said dismissively when his wife complained about life in Sana’a. Was this the same family that passed around the great works of literature and subscribed to several newspapers, three dailies in Arabic and one weekly in English?

The same brother who told his wife not to contribute to the conversation—himself once an M.B.A. candidate—was suggesting that his eldest daughter need not go to university because it wouldn’t help her much as a housewife. A sister who worked as a librarian at Sana’a University wore the full niqab, covering all her face except her eyes. When I visited again in 2006, she followed me around town for half an hour, just for fun, without revealing her identity to me. I never noticed or recognized her.

Collectively, they’d become TV addicts. Satellite TV, featuring hundreds of channels from the Arab world, Iran and beyond, had taken over from reading, socializing and going out as the main forms of entertainment. It turned my family from well-educated, intellectual stock into the worst kind of couch zombies. Why? In part because among the many channels they tuned in to were the more Islamist ones (Al-Manar TV of Hezbollah, for example) that promoted a rigid version of the faith. By 2006, anti-Western and pro-Islamist sympathies had intruded on virtually their every conversation with friends, neighbours and each other. They had accepted a need to return to Islam and away from the outside world—an acceptance that had been building slowly for over two decades and claimed even once-progressive families like mine.

But is all that about to change? If so, at what cost and how fast?

When I started writing this book, in the fall of 2010, the thought of a people’s revolution in Tunisia or Egypt, a military uprising in Libya or a copycat public revolt in Yemen—and all happening either simultaneously or in quick succession—would have been the stuff of fiction. When I visited Cairo in May of 2010, I thought Hosni Mubarak’s hold on power was as strong as it had been when I last lived there, in 1986. His crudely painted portraits and ridiculously airbrushed photographs still greeted travellers and commuters in Heliopolis, the suburb nearest the airport, where his presidential palace stood (and where a year later he was facing trial for corruption and ordering the mass killing of protestors). There was no mistaking the profound level of anger and frustration at the poverty, inequality and unemployment that my own sister—who still lives in Cairo—and her circle of friends shared with me. Cab drivers, old family friends and, when prodded, shopkeepers and hotel staff vented all too readily about the Mubarak regime. I witnessed a few protests outside downtown courthouses and saw banners calling for solidarity with silenced journalists or locked-out workers. But at no point did I hear any talk of a revolution, overthrow of government or an uprising, which made the images of Tahrir Square that I saw on TV from my safe Toronto home all the more unbelievable.

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 the very least more realistic expectations from everyone there and beyond.