Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (3 page)

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

E
verything 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 relationship 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
F
s 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.

My family’s first picture of me, taken in our Aden home in July 1964.

To the harried parents of today, in Yemen or in the West, this arrangement may sound like the best of both worlds, but it often created tensions between my mother and her older children. Faiza and my mother often competed for my affection as a child and teenager, in part because Faiza was never able to conceive during her two marriages. But to me, there was never any real competition. I was Mama’s boy. In fact the Arabic phrase
dalo’o omo
(his mother’s spoiled child) became my nickname. In public. My own father called me that in front of friends and neighbours—not to tease me so much as to divert any blame that might have come his way for raising an identifiably weak and sports-averse boy who loved watching his mother in the kitchen. Later, even my mother would discourage my too-regular kitchen visits, as if she feared that keeping her company would turn me gay. “The kitchen is no place for real men,” she said repeatedly, but she ultimately caved in to my requests to stay put—usually on the condition that I didn’t prepare, or get involved in, any food. Her fear of my turning out gay came true, but she needn’t have worried about my kitchen skills. I remain a lousy cook with an intense dislike of doing anything in the kitchen other than making tea or toast. My brothers all feel the same way.