Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (4 page)

It’s hard to believe, but in between bringing children into the world and building new apartment blocks, Safia and Mohamed liked to go on holidays with the whole family. In the 1960s, when air travel became more widespread and relatively affordable, my parents would take the whole family (and assorted aunts to help with the younger children) for month-long trips to Cairo, then and now the centre of the Arab world. While I was too young to remember these trips, an extended visual record of them hangs on the walls of my Toronto home. These photographs were my father’s way of documenting his success for any doubters. The snapshots serve a different purpose for me, as they’re my way to prove to the world (or at least visitors) that there was once a great cosmopolitan and curious Yemeni society that is very different from the images we see in the media of khat-chewing, gun-carrying tribesmen and burkawearing women.

The three big trips (in 1963, 1965 and 1966) have become the stuff of legend in my family, partly because of logistics. Imagine booking airline tickets for around fifteen family members, renting one or two large apartments in downtown Cairo and making plans to keep children who ranged from young women to toddlers happy and busy for a whole month. And calling that a vacation.

The entire family and two cab drivers (far right) in an Egyptian nightclub before a concert by the singer Abdel Halim Hafez in 1965 or 1966. I’m seated on my mother’s lap, of course (second from the left).

My mother was still expected to cook at least one meal a day during these so-called holidays. Whether in Cairo or back in Aden, she never liked servants to help with food preparation for her family and limited their role in the kitchen to cleaning dishes or scouring pots and pans. When not visiting parks, the zoo or going to the movies, my sisters would spend most of the day shopping for clothes. Most Arabs considered Cairo the Paris of the Middle East when it came to fashion, and nowhere was more fashionable than its downtown core, especially a little market named after its red marble floors: the Red Corridor (Mamar el Ahmar). A couple of stores there just sold fabrics, which my sisters (and mother) bought by the yard and had turned into dresses by seamstresses in nearby apartments. You dropped off the fabric on a Monday, selected the design from a pile of Egyptian fashion magazines, went back on Wednesday for a fitting (in Arabic, you use the same word for rehearsal,
prova
) and picked up the dress by Thursday afternoon—just in time for one of the big concerts by such Egyptian singers as Abdel Halim Hafez. By the time we moved to Cairo in 1971, that market had lost much of its glamour but remained our first stop for the annual back-to-school shopping trips.

The choice of Cairo as a summer destination for a Yemeni family was an obvious but emotionally complicated one for Mohamed. By the early 1960s, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s nationalist president and leader of the Free Officers Movement, which in 1952 had ousted the royal family and ended British rule in Egypt, was busy importing revolutions to other parts of the Arab world. The nationalist, anticolonial movements sweeping the Arab world—a clear predecessor of the revolutions of 2011—posed a real threat to my father. His real-estate empire was built on Aden’s stability as a gateway port city open to business and trade, with the British keeping order. He was invested in empire as a commercial enterprise and as a way of life. Nasser’s agenda came to fruition in the northern parts of Yemen in 1962, when his troops toppled the ruling monarchy and helped create a republic in the shape of Egypt. It was just a matter of time before the same Arab socialist sentiments would spread south to Aden. Still, Mohamed loved, in theory, the nationalist rhetoric of Nasser, and as with many Arabs, Nasser’s role in the frontline against Israel made him a sympathetic figure even to those who stood to lose it all to his politics. Egyptian popular music from the likes of Shadia, Oum Kalthoum, Abdel Halim Hafez and Mohamed Abdel Wahab glorified Nasser and his steadfast position against Western influences. Most of that music was banned during the Sadat and Mubarak years when I was growing up, but now the songs that moved a whole generation of Egyptians are there for anyone to hear on YouTube.

After a number of skirmishes and small-scale protests, the situation in Aden escalated in December 1963 when a group of North Yemen–backed rebels threw a grenade at largely unarmed British officials. The action started what would become known as the Aden Emergency. According to several historians, the British recognized that their time was up in Aden, as vital as that port city was to trade, and whatever was left of the British Empire in the neighbouring Gulf states. So while the Royal Air Force maintained a state of preparedness, diplomats sought other divestment solutions, including declaring Aden and the southern regions of Yemen part of the larger Federation of the Arab Emirates of the South. That solution didn’t fly with the two now-competing nationalist factions in Aden: the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the Front for the Liberation of South Yemen, which had the unfortunate
Sesame Street
–appropriate acronym of FLOSY.

Neither ranked particularly high on Mohamed’s wish list for a post-colonial Aden. But whether out of blind faith in the British or social prejudice against the largely working-class makeup of both liberation movements, Mohamed did little to prepare for the coming change. In 1965 he built his biggest and most luxurious apartment building—named Al-Azhar, not after the famous Egyptian mosque or university, but because the word means “flowers”—to the cost of roughly a million pounds sterling in today’s money. “The British will not let us down,” he told my oldest brother, Helmi, groomed from a young age to take over his business. It was around that time, my siblings tell me, that my father developed a lifelong dependence on the BBC World Service. He’d hush down everyone and listen intently to the news, teasing out every last meaning from what he heard. He often switched off the radio to his own announcement that we’d all be all right and that the new building would include an even bigger space for us. He’d hide from his wife and children any intimidating encounter with the young revolutionaries or the odd graffiti message scrawled on his storefronts that described him as traitor. The Brits would come to his rescue. Didn’t he speak English just as well as they did?

It was probably that final apartment building, that last act of defiance and faith in Aden as a colonial haven, that pitted the nationalists against Mohamed. We were one of several well-to-do clans, and other business people like my father were harassed, but for some reason my father’s presence in the city through real estate made him the kind of public enemy every nationalist movement needs as a target.

The beginning of the end came in 1967. By then infighting between NLF and FLOSY had reached the residential streets of Aden, while attacks on the British military bases and on civil servants continued. Nasser’s disastrous performance in the Six Day War against Israel in the same year did nothing to weaken his grip on the liberation movements, least of all in Aden. By November Britain started pulling out its troops from Aden, tacitly endorsing the NLF as the winner of the sectarian war and the new custodian of the city.

How could Mohamed not have predicted that his days, like those of the Brits, were numbered? I still don’t know the answer to that question, which haunted my father until his death. “There was nothing I could have done,” he often told us, as if to apologize for the fact that as soon as the NLF took power they confiscated all his properties. Five apartment buildings, two houses and numerous storefronts were all now in the possession of the socialist government. There was one thing that my dad held on to for dear life for the next three decades: a leather briefcase that contained the deeds to every last property he once owned. With the reunification of the north and south of Yemen in 1990, a shotgun wedding to avoid bloodshed over newly discovered oil wells, my father lived to see most of his properties restored to him or received token compensation for ones that were literally beyond repair. “Now you see why I held on to those deeds,” he’d say triumphantly.

But my father’s most frightening encounter with the NLF took place in November 1967, when a small masked group kidnapped him from his office, gangster-style, and held him hostage for thirty-six hours. My siblings and I grew up on several renditions of the kidnapping story. For years it was a story Mohamed would tell guests over dinner in Beirut and Cairo. It’s hard to reconcile the different details, but the broad strokes remained the same. “I was tied to a chair,”—that much he always kept consistent. “I asked for a cigarette.” I believed that one as well, as he was a compulsive smoker until he quit in 1972. “Their faces were the picture of envy,” he’d say of his kidnappers, who took off their masks as an act of defiance. He claimed not to have recognized any of them, although in all probability, my mother would say, some were former contactors who worked for him and resented his hubris. The ransom amount went up or down, depending on who was listening to the story, but it was a few thousand pounds.

One thing was incontestable. Mohamed was given less than a day to leave Aden. Imagine having to find a new home in a new country for a large family (and other dependants) in less than a day. Imagine leaving everything you own and everyone you know and not knowing if you’ll ever see them again. I’ve always felt lucky to have been too young to understand what tearing a family away from their homeland meant. The financial loss was enormous, but the emotional one incalculable. In Beirut and later in Cairo, I grew up watching my father in the grip of what I now recognize as severe depression. By 1972 he was still so traumatized by his losses that he became too sick to see a psychiatrist. The family doctor would visit him in his room and the door would be locked for hours. The TV and radio sets got switched off and we all milled about quietly until that door opened again. Sometimes it was just the doctor asking for more tea or a glass of water, which one of my sisters hurriedly supplied, and further waiting would follow. At other times, Mohamed would sit on the balcony of our Cairo apartment overlooking Tahrir Street and watch the world going by without saying a word to any of us for hours. He’d break his silence only if we had guests.

For my older sisters, the exile from Aden meant the end of their lives as young rich girls. It would be more of a social than a psychological adjustment, the first of many in their lives. It seemed that my father’s royal pretentions—manifested in naming four of his daughters in the style of the Egyptian monarchy—may have rubbed off on them. They had every right to think of themselves as princesses. Didn’t their father reign over Aden? They had their dresses made in Cairo and bought fine jewellery from the Indian and Jewish traders in Aden. Whether it was Arabic or Western music they listened to, they had the latest records on vinyl. Men competed for their affection and they turned down many suitors. (Well, my father turned them down, as they usually didn’t have the money or social standing he expected for his daughters.) All that was to change, and from then on we would be middle class, without that “upper” prefix that my father, in his best English accent, always added.

Safia was by far the more stoic of the two. She’d gone from being a shepherdess to being the wife of a business tycoon to being a broken man’s companion. Perhaps she handled it better than my father or her children for no other reason than her lack of worldly sophistication. Or perhaps she never had the luxury of time for reflection. Her attitude was always simply about surviving another day—another day of cooking for a large family, of hearing stories about my father’s philandering, of relatives coming and going and borrowing money. She took part in the mythologizing of Aden just like her husband and older children did, but her participation was often reluctant and punctuated with silences. When she was taken out of Aden, she lost her only safety net, her own three sisters and mother and a society that, despite its colonial moorings, was still tribal and village-like. Her illiteracy didn’t stand out in the context of Yemen. With hindsight, I can now understand that Safia’s attachment to her mother and sisters was a way of reclaiming her interrupted childhood. She loved to defer to them, to let them make decisions. As soon as they left her house, it was her turn to do the same for her children. She never felt qualified, old or wise enough to call the shots, but she did anyway.

I know that, as much as my siblings and I loved our mother, the difference between our educational levels and her lack of sophistication would become more of an issue as the years went by—years spent in Beirut and Cairo and away from Aden, our paradise lost.

CHAPTER TWO

BEIRUT

Temporary

W
ith his home, business, property and members of his own family—his two brothers, his parents and his oldest daughter, Fathia, who got married in 1966—left behind in Aden, Mohamed had little time for nostalgia or heartbreak. Not right away. It was already late November 1967 and starting a new life in Beirut with nine school-age children would not be easy—especially more than two months into the academic year. As he’d tell us several times, the only thing that kept him from falling to pieces was the impossible list of tasks that needed to be done in a few days. With the family temporarily sheltered in a number of hotel rooms in Raouché, the seaside neighbourhood of Beirut, Mohamed had to find a home big enough for everyone and schools to take in his brood.