Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (17 page)

I didn’t think through what the next few weeks or months would be like. I convinced myself that I could cope with anything England threw at me. It started as soon as I stood at the Customs and Immigration line at Heathrow Airport. After looking at my passport and proof of scholarship, a very blunt officer asked if I carried any health certificate. I stared at her in amazement. I had no idea what she was talking about. She explained that students from certain Third World countries with a documented history of infectious diseases were usually asked to present a certificate of good health. I had none, and as far as I could remember no one in the British Council or embassy in Yemen had suggested such a thing. That document, I later realized, could be vitally important for an international student in England. Because full-time students were eligible for National Health Service coverage, the idea was not to overload the system with sick students from poor countries. But back then, in the first few minutes of a new life in England, that encounter opened my eyes to the fact that, while I might be living in England, I would always be a Third World citizen suspected of having any number of infectious diseases.

I signed some kind of form and gave Faiza’s address in Liverpool as a contact. Sure enough, within a week or two I had a visit from a health officer, who asked me to undergo some chest X-rays to eliminate any possibility of tuberculosis. “Don’t take it personally,” a very sensitive Faiza told me. I didn’t, not because I was thick-skinned, but because I had too many distractions. I had newspapers and magazines to read, TV shows to watch, movies that were shown in their entirety, not edited by the censors like the ones we used to watch in Sana’a. This was the reason I wanted to study in England. I wanted to immerse myself in a culture that I perceived to be the exact opposite of my life in the Middle East.

But what I forgot to factor in was that although I’d arrived in England I hadn’t exactly left Yemen behind. For economic and practical reasons, my sister’s and aunt’s homes in Liverpool initially served as shelter. By 1988 Faiza had been living there for seven years and my aunt for nearly fifteen. You wouldn’t know it. Neither felt at home in her North England surroundings and did very little—nothing, in fact—to adapt to them.

My aunt Fatima, two years older than my mother, was barely educated and had lived much of her years in Liverpool a prisoner in her own home. She only went out with her husband, Ahmed Sultan—my favourite family member at the time—or her one son, Nabil, who’d spent most of his adult life in Liverpool but longed to return to Aden. He arranged his own marriage to a woman from Aden he didn’t know. I remember thinking that perhaps we could trade places. He could go back to Yemen and I’d take his British passport and settle in England.

The multicultural and predominantly Arabic and African Granby community, off Liverpool’s crime- and riot-prone Princess Road, represented a kind of immigrant experience that I’d spend the rest of my life avoiding: closed-off households that showed no interest in British culture or civic society. My aunt, who passed away in November 2011, turned her house into a shrine to all things Yemeni. Ethnic food markets provided her with almost any ingredient she needed to prepare the same meals she made back in Aden, as well as khat. The living room was turned into a
diwan
for chewing khat and smoking hookah. It was difficult to tell if they adopted this way of life to preserve Yemeni roots or as a retreat from British society, which, while by no means welcoming of all immigrants, had served them well financially. The only sign they were living in England in that household in the 1980s was the TV, which was usually on, set on mute. By the time Arab satellite TV began carrying channels from all over the Middle East the following decade, the British programs were effectively obsolete.

Faiza fared a bit better in that department, but only a bit. She and her husband ran a popular corner store in Walton, a working-class but mainly white neighbourhood. The store was sandwiched between the football grounds of the city’s two main teams, Liverpool and Everton, so it did well on game days. Faiza had to learn the art of chit-chatting with customers while bringing them their cigarettes, cat food or the morning paper. It must have been hard for her to go from being the daughter of a business tycoon in a British colony to a shopkeeper’s wife in Britain, but she coped well. She was obsessed with Princess Diana and would go through all the tabloids looking for her pictures. The odd brat or yob would occasionally give her and her husband, Hamza, a hard time, but by and large the two enjoyed a good income and a quiet if not always happy married life. Faiza had not been able to conceive. That part of their lives only got more problematic later in their marriage, but in those early years the issue of children didn’t define their world.

Once the store was closed, she and her husband would go upstairs to their flat and spend the evening watching videos of Egyptian films and the odd British program. Faiza rarely went out at night, and visits to the shopping centre and back during the day became her only leisure activity. As soon as I arrived, I did some research for her to find the closest schools offering courses in English as second language so she could improve her spoken and written English. At the very least she could watch TV without asking me to translate anything more complicated than chat-show banter. She declined. Too old for school, she said. Our mother responded the same way when Mohamed and her older daughters suggested she learn how to read and write when we lived in Beirut. In retrospect, perhaps Faiza didn’t want to come across as better educated than her husband, himself a high-school dropout who worked as a sailor for many years before settling in Liverpool. I understood about half of what he said. He spoke a strange mix of Arabic and English that suggested both were his second language.

My Liverpool family’s England would not be mine. I didn’t see the point of living somewhere that could be sliced off and transported back to Yemen without any noticeable difference. I completely understand the current European (and even North American) hostility to multiculturalism and the several declarations of its failure by the likes of Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor. The Arab community was still a relatively new one in Britain despite the long colonial history that bound people from the Middle East and Arabian Gulf with the monarchy. Still, the way it isolated itself from the general British experience and the hostile tone with which, for example, my aunt and sister talked about the decadent English folks with whom they did daily business struck me as inexplicable. They often cited the evidence of knocked-up teenagers as proof of a lack of morals in British society. Why, I wondered, couldn’t they appreciate the freedoms of that society instead? How could they still long for a life in Yemen and talk fondly of family and friends back home who had no right to express themselves?

To me, it all came down to the issue of gender and sexual freedom. I was finally free to walk into a gay bar without looking over my shoulder or fear of getting arrested. Even when I became familiar with the notion of gay bashing—particularly in the more violent north of England—I still figured it was better to experience homophobia from some drunken yobs than from an organized state or as part of religious crackdown. I knew immediately that what I’d gained by moving to England outweighed what I’d lost by moving away from the Arab world.

Still, it took me a year to break away from the influence of family in Liverpool. As I settled into the Keele University campus, I made fewer trips back to Liverpool. Slowly, I began to feel uncomfortable speaking Arabic. I was convinced that the more I spoke it, the less my chance of reaching native-level English proficiency. From here on, Arabic would be on an as-needed basis. I had stopped listening to Arabic music many years before, so I now graduated to the next level of cultural abandonment. I would not cook with the spices that Faiza loaded into my luggage when she and Hamza drove me to the Keele campus. For one thing, the communal kitchen in our student residence was too small, and I felt self-conscious about the aroma in such tight quarters. Instead, I bought a lot of ready-made meals at a supermarket—the kind that was an adventure for me in Cairo only a few years before.

One of the first things I noticed about this change of diet, however, was a constant stomach cramp and gas. For over twenty years I’d seldom eaten anything that hadn’t been prepared in the family kitchen from scratch, and suddenly eating all this pre-packaged food wreaked havoc on my system. The general practitioner I went to see on campus suggested I learn to cook more fresh food. I blurted out that I came from a culture where men didn’t cook. “Well, you’re not there anymore,” he quietly responded. Partly out of laziness and partly because of a longing to immerse myself in British culture, I associated Arabic food with the kind of life that my sister and aunt were leading in Liverpool.

I guess all of that would suggest I was self-loathing. I think I was. I wanted to be as English as possible. I listened carefully to classmates and professors and made notes of expressions and rhythms of speech that sounded distinctly British. I remember a police officer—as a foreign student I had to register with the Home Office—telling me to get in touch if I was ever “in a spot of bother.” What a great expression, and in it went into my mental database. I had a very solid English education in Cairo, but nothing compared to this opportunity to live the language—a language that I associated not just with survival but with my right to live in dignity as a gay man.

Of course, that dream of living the language, and my impulse to idealize English language and literature, would be interrupted every time I encountered some form of racism or discrimination. I rationalized it to myself by remembering the harassment and humiliation I experienced at the hands of the Yemeni internal security men when I first moved to Sana’a. If people from my own country did that to me, I could at least survive this occasional outburst of verbal violence. I got called Paki several times, even on campus. Sometimes the encounters scared me so much I’d walk as fast as I could and hail the first cab I found. My trusty British Council guidebook told me to ignore these jeers, as it was best not to engage the people who made such comments in a conversation or a fight. Luckily, I developed a thicker skin, but for the rest of my time in England, my comfort level in that country would be undercut by its racial violence. I learned to avoid being out late at night or on weekends. I avoided pubs, as I soon realized that most of these incidents happened at closing time and involved people who’d had one-too-many pints. I never told my mother or any of my siblings about these early experiences. It was in my best interest to cultivate a blemish-free image of life in England in order not to give them any excuse to ask me to return to Yemen.

Faiza called several times a week to check in on me. When it became evident that she wouldn’t be able to have children of her own, she continued instead in her old role as my second mother. I felt awkward standing in a corridor in the hall of residence, talking on a pay phone in Arabic as students came and went. Other international students would talk freely to friends and family in Greek, Cantonese or Spanish, but I resented those few minutes every other day that took me away from English and transported me back to conversations about gossip and feuds in the Yemeni community in Liverpool—or just news about Yemen itself. After a year of living in Keele, I thought less and less of my parents and siblings. They became symbols of repression, even as I understood that the women were more victims than oppressors. What struck me about that first year in England was how my life constantly changed while theirs remained static. It was a given that mine would change. But theirs seemed to be particularly resistant to new developments. Changing jobs was about as radical as it got, and even that happened too rarely. My mother and father continued to ignore each other, while my sisters kept giving up their freedoms by integrating more into Sana’a society. I began to sense the widening gap between us just by talking on the phone. Their language and way of life were that of the Quran, a world of religious observance and intolerance, in my opinion. “What have we done to you?” my brother-in-law Hamza would often ask me on the phone when I turned down an invitation to go to Liverpool for the weekend or to celebrate eids, the Muslim feasts. I used work as an excuse—although it was a genuine one.

STUDYING ENGLISH LITERATURE
in England was harder than I thought. In Cairo I was a star student, even though I spent most of my college time fooling around in the underground gay scene and used classes and “library time” as excuses to get out of the house, particularly when one of my parents was visiting from Sana’a. At Keele, however, and specially once I passed to the master’s level, I found the critical theory of studying literature to be challenging. All I wanted was to learn English so I could escape my Arabic roots. All that stuff about deconstruction and psychoanalysis didn’t interest me. I preferred history and historiography to illuminate the literary texts. While that was still possible to do at an undergraduate level, the M.A. course I chose didn’t always accommodate that approach. Thinking that I just needed to avoid any program with poetry courses, I’d picked one in twentieth-century British fiction. But I hadn’t really thought about how modernism changed the way fiction was written and analyzed. As long as I was reading the realists (H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy), I was doing just fine. Bring in James Joyce or Virginia Woolf and I’d be lost. I couldn’t concentrate on narratives without strong plot lines and with too much interior monologue.

I couldn’t concentrate in general, as I began to be distracted by the possibilities of the gay scene in Stoke-on-Trent, where I later moved and rented a room in a house with a gay landlord, Tony. I just couldn’t get enough of talking to Tony about all things gay and filling in the gaps in my sexual education. Tony, a sweet and ambitious young solicitor, obliged. His stories of dancing in clubs, meeting other men and having a string of one-night stands kept me awake until the early hours of the morning. Who needed to study boring old literature when Staffordshire could be such a seedy little fantasy. I’d count the days until Saturday—and when I couldn’t wait, Friday—to go with Tony to the local club in Henley, one of the “five towns” that made up Stoke-on-Trent. I’d been to gay bars in London but never until then to a dance club. The idea of men dancing together was so life-affirming, so utterly different from anything I’d experienced before. Even if, with my nerdy glasses and conservative clothing, I didn’t get to dance or meet that many people on the first few visits, I was thrilled to be in that environment. Occasionally, I’d stop and ask myself, What would my family say if they saw me now? And what would that army captain in Sana’a who’d tell me to toughen up and act like a man make of all this? But the loud music and the crowded bar distracted me from any serious comparative cultural analysis.