Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (11 page)

The state-controlled media allowed little room for debate and covered Sadat’s visit as a great and brave step forward for all Egyptians. Patriotic songs that chanted death to the Zionists instantly disappeared from the airwaves and were replaced by hastily composed paeans to the bravery of Sadat and the eternal appeal of peace. Such simple framing of the issue did not sit well with diehard Islamists and old Nasserites, who felt that the country’s place as the centre of religious scholarship and its pan-Arab national pride were eroded by this visit, and by the Camp David peace treaties that followed it.

The socialist republic of South Yemen joined a small group of Arab countries (Libya and Syria, among others) to cut off diplomatic relations with Egypt for its newly negotiated peace with Israel. As natives of Aden, South Yemen’s capital, living in Cairo, we felt the brunt of our home country’s stance. For the first time ever in Cairo, we felt different, slightly ostracized by Egyptian society. If we could help it, my father told us, we should try not to reveal where we came from. As permanent residents we couldn’t be expelled from Egypt—and technically, we held North Yemeni passports, so on the level of paperwork we were safe. But many families we knew from Aden who were visiting or studying in Egypt’s various universities were on the receiving end of what my father often called the Arab world’s destiny of chaos and instability. Many of these families got kicked out of Egypt with just a few days’ notice. Stories of students being rounded up and held in detention centres before being put on planes spread in the Yemeni community in Cairo. Our upper-floor balcony, which overlooked a side street, became a dumping ground for friends from Aden who had no choice but to leave their heavier baggage behind and travel as light as possible. Who knew where they’d end up? Almost all were deported directly to Aden, while others chose Syria to complete their education. None of them reclaimed their bags, which sat on the balcony as mementos of the cruelty of Arab regimes towards one another. Before too long, my mother asked us to open the bags, take what we wanted and throw away the rest. It felt like a violation of privacy—I remember seeing a condom packet for the first time, not knowing what it was before it was snatched from my hands.

At school, the political differences were starting to make morning assemblies and recess very difficult. The brainwashing of Egyptian youth didn’t take long, and anyone who disagreed with the president’s choices—or came from a country that did—represented a danger. In an attempt to make my life easier, I asked to read a piece—in English—at assembly that praised Sadat for “seizing the opportunity of peace.” I remember that phrase very well, because Farida rewrote most of the text for me and helped me with the pronunciation of bigger words. It was, admittedly, a sycophantic piece of writing, but it bought me some reprieve from the bullies and favour with the teachers.

THERE WAS ONE BRIGHT SIDE
to the normalization of relations between Egypt and Israel: I discovered Barbra Streisand, who remains my favourite artist of all time. I vaguely remember my sisters going to see
Funny Girl
in Beirut in 1969 and then playing the song “People” on vinyl. As a singer who was so identifiably Jewish and perceived as pro-Israeli, she was banned from Egyptian airwaves for much of the 1960s and ‘70s. Omar Sharif, her co-star in
Funny Girl
, also came under special watch, although his pre-Hollywood Arabic films aired on Egyptian TV all the time. By early 1978 the ban was lifted and local distributors released Streisand’s movies to Egyptian cinemas for the first time. My introduction to her was
A Star Is Born
, which Ferial took me to see in the winter of that year.

I still don’t understand what happened to me that afternoon in Cinema Kasr el Nil in downtown Cairo. I’ve never been so hypnotized by a singer before. I was beginning to discover Western music—a bit of ABBA, a little Tina Charles and a lot of Olivia Newton-John—but Streisand represented a different world of sexual and social freedom. I was probably more attracted to her co-star, Kris Kristofferson, but his music, in the film at least, sounded dreadful to me. The theme song from
A Star Is Born
, “Evergreen,” was like a siren song for a gay Muslim boy in Cairo at the time. I quickly caught up with
Funny Girl
and
Funny Lady
in other cinemas later that year. Because of their period settings, I was somewhat underwhelmed by them. But when I saw
What’s Up, Doc?
shortly thereafter, I was hooked again. I was thrilled when a TV show of Western music,
The World Sings
, put cuts from
A Star Is Born
on rotation. I didn’t always understand the lyrics and had to rely on the subtitles, but it didn’t matter. We had one of those seventeen-inch black-and-white TV sets with a built-in cassette recorder in my sisters’ room, so I made decent copies of the songs and played them before going to school and as soon as I got back.

Shortly after that I settled in on two Western divas who represented different images and aspirations for me: Newton-John for her pre
-Grease
sweetness, and Streisand for representing a sexual energy I couldn’t understand. I had no idea about her gay following at the time and wouldn’t have understood the word “camp” even if you charted its history and made me memorize it. Naturally, this new obsession with Western singers didn’t sit well with Helmi, who often criticized the music as lacking the depth and artistry of Arabic compositions. I ignored him. It was harder, however, to ignore my father, who seemed genuinely concerned about my fascination with Streisand in particular. To this day I still don’t understand his aversion to her. It couldn’t be her Jewishness, because I strongly believe that had no bearing on him, as he grew up in an Aden that was racially and ethnically mixed. He was also quite Westernized in his thinking and valued the English language and culture, whether in its British or American guises. My guess is that he sensed my nascent homosexuality and was both disapproving as a parent and worried about the trouble that awaited me because of it in the Arab world. He’d constantly remark on the beauty of Newton-John to see if he got a reaction from me. He could never remember her full name—just Olivia. By that time he was working in Saudi Arabia more and was losing contact with his children. As I was the youngest, and in his opinion most vulnerable, my discovery of Western music and Streisand in particular spelled trouble.

Early in 1979, and much to my delight,
A Star Is Born
was shown on Egyptian state TV as the feature film in a Saturday-night program called
Cinema Club.
It was a late show that started after 10 p.m. on a school night. Almost all my brothers and sisters were in bed. Only Ferial, my father and I stayed up to watch it. It was an uncomfortable experience, especially given some of the sex scenes in the movie that were not cut by the censor, and my father, a fan of 1940s Hollywood musicals, hated the rock soundtrack. I kept falling asleep and tried my best to stay awake by rushing to the bathroom and throwing cold water on my face every fifteen to twenty minutes. I’m not sure which Mohamed watched more, me or the screen. Either way, we both stayed up until the end credits. He almost got up to turn off the TV during the finale, a gorgeous song called “Watch Closely Now,” in which the camera zoomed in on Barbra, with her big afro hair and man’s suit. But he knew that would break my heart and went back to his seat. When he switched off the TV, he looked at me and said,
“Allah yerdi alek”
(May God keep you content). I don’t think my fourteen-year-old brain could process what that meant. What had God got to do with anything? We’d just watched a great modern musical with a fantastic leading lady. Ferial told me to forget about it and go to bed.

IN RETROSPECT, THAT EVENING
marked the beginning of a drift between my father and me that would last until just before his death in 1995. Even if he didn’t detect the sexuality, he probably sensed the impending rebellion. The Middle East was not the safest place to be different. As he spent more and more time in Saudi Arabia, the old liberal womanizer was fading and the fifty-something conservative parent taking over.

With my father and brother both leaning towards conservative values, I sought family refuge in my mother, whose lack of sophistication about bigger life directions became comforting to me. But even she was probably concerned that as a growing boy of fourteen I was spending so much time in the kitchen, a decidedly female space in the Arab household. Still, Safia was a devoted mother who lived to make her children happy. My greatest happiness was to get extra allowance money and buy more Western music and posters and bring home more magazines that featured lyrics to hit songs so I could sing along. My sisters certainly encouraged me. Perhaps they saw my new passions as a counterbalance to the hardened lines of the men in the family. My weekly treat was to go shopping with any of my sisters in downtown Cairo’s high-end Shawarbi Street. This was where imported fashions went on sale and where my favourite record shop sold bootleg cassettes of hit American and British music. Window-shopping alone was an education, as I’d make note of artists and album titles—some of which I’d look up in an English-Arabic dictionary—and check with like-minded friends in school to see if they had copies first. At three to five Egyptian pounds a tape, I could only afford one a month, and there was so much I wanted to get hold of. There were of course other Streisand studio albums and soundtracks, earlier Newton-John compilations and, a family favourite since Beirut days, Cliff Richard. (No, I was never an edgy teen.) When Newton-John’s album
Totally Hot
hit the stores in Cairo in the spring of 1979, it was all that my friends and I could talk about.

The more Sadat modernized the Egyptian economy, the more Western music became readily available—and the louder the response of anti-Western, anti-government Muslim activists became. As the middle classes continued to be squeezed in favour of a merchant and entrepreneurial nouveau riche, the number of bearded men and veiled women on the streets increased. Many of them had reacted to Sadat’s trip to Israel by embracing Islam. In my family it was like playing a game of hunting zombies. Whenever one of us would see an employee at a shop we frequented or a waitress at a cafe who’d “turned”—looked more identifiably Muslim—we’d report it to each other. My sisters held their ground and refused to cover up, still seeing the veil as an extreme (and déclassé) reaction. They tried as hard as they could to cling to their freedoms—and for the most part they succeeded.

Hoda worked for an ad agency that placed commercials on Egyptian television, while Ferial abandoned her master’s degree when she was offered a job in a famous antique shop in a tourist resort near the pyramids. Both made decent money, but more significantly, they were independent women who followed in the footsteps of our older sister Farida, who still worked for the Liberian embassy in Cairo. I watched as they planned their work wardrobe for the whole week, occasionally arguing over a shared blouse or perfume. At the same time, Helmi was still studying law at university and rarely, if ever, made any money. Either out of spite, pride or religious piety, he’d criticize his sisters’ dresses as too tight or too revealing. Their makeup made them look like whores, he’d tell them in the morning as they left for work or when they came home at the end of a long day. My sisters learned to ignore him and overcompensated by buying more clothes and makeup and staying longer at work to avoid confrontations.

But even I could sense some tension among my sisters. Because Farida got her pay in US dollars and received considerably more than Hoda or Ferial, she could afford to buy more expensive clothes. She’d spend a hundred Egyptian pounds on perfume or makeup in a single shopping trip, which was about a third of what the other two sisters made in a month. Her evening dresses for weddings and receptions were extravagant by Egyptian standards, and all my sisters could do was watch—admiringly, but with some jealousy. My mother became quite concerned at the disparity among her daughters and took it out on my father for not providing his children with more money. My father in turn became more concerned about his girls’ taste for expensive fashions and accessories, which he felt would make them stand out in the more middle-class (read struggling) parts of Cairo.

At best Mohamed was overprotective, and at worst paranoid. (He was also an obsessive-compulsive who washed his hands before lunch three or four times and never left home before checking he had his wallet and whatever else he needed at least a dozen times.) Changes in Cairo fed into his paranoia. He would often talk of people following him, possibly to rob him, or would ask my mother not to let our neighbours know any details of the family’s financial situation in case they broke into the apartment. Ever the sensible one, Safia would just tell him to stop obsessing (
“Batel el wiswas,”
she’d say in Arabic). She herself was equally overprotective—I was thirteen before I could go to the corner store unescorted—but, let’s just say, less precious about hygiene. Anyone who shopped in Cairo’s markets learned to turn a blind eye to actual conditions there. As long as she washed a piece of fruit or a vegetable once, she felt safe enough to eat it or feed it to her children.

My father’s paranoia took a turn for the worse in 1978, when he bought a car and hired a driver to take us to and from school or university. He feared that cab drivers—whom we’d used for so long—would kidnap his children for ransom. He firmly believed that shifts towards radical Islam in Cairo’s society had little to do with religion and everything to do with the decline in living standards. He was particularly nervous around Palestinian refugees in Cairo, whom he felt would kill one of his children for money if they could get away with it. His obsessions started to annoy my mother, who did not share them and had no frame of reference for her husband’s concerns. For all we knew, Mohamed was acting crazy, but in reality events at home reflected the bigger picture in the Arab world.