Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (18 page)

Then I met Raymond, my first romance. A previously married older gentleman—he’d be my age now, late forties—whose smile and gentle embrace confirmed that I’d made the right choice in life. But I had no reference for an emotional life with another man. All I knew was sex. I didn’t know what was required of me to be, and keep, a boyfriend. No doubt that was the cumulative effect of more than two decades of homophobia in the Arab world and the complete absence of any discussion of emotions when you’re a man. Raymond couldn’t understand why I felt uncomfortable holding hands even in a dark movie theatre. I could enjoy the sex and the gay identity but not the emotional life and responsibility that came with it. It would be six years of life in England before I connected all these strands.

A string of flings and one-night stands later, I felt right at home as a sexually active gay man. The thought of losing that and being forced back to Yemen once I completed my M.A. terrified me. I’d be going back to a place where what I’d been doing in the last two years was punishable by public lashings. I’d be back in the company of Helmi, who would ask why I refused to pray five times a day. I would no longer feel uncomfortable being who I was. My emotional home was in the West, even if my ancestral one was elsewhere on the map.

A RETURN TO YEMEN
was out of the question for more than just personal reasons. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990, he may have changed the course of history in the region, but he also plunged Yemen into a social and economic crisis from which it never recovered. Indeed, I trace the political and financial downfall of Yemen to that summer. While the rest of the world condemned the invasion, Yemen and Cuba endorsed it. Yemen’s President Saleh was largely regarded as Saddam’s sidekick. Whatever Saddam wanted, Saleh got for him. But this latest gesture of support would prove too costly, because soon thereafter most of the Gulf Arab states, which sided with Kuwait, punished the expatriate Yemeni communities in their lands by terminating work contracts for the more professional class of immigrants and immediately expelling hundreds of thousands of low-paid and temporary Yemeni workers.

Alongside Egyptians, Filipinos and other people from South Asia, Yemenis had worked as cheap labour in such countries as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar. Now, without warning, Sana’a was flooded with returning workers from the Gulf states. Some went straight to their native villages or small towns, but the majority settled in Sana’a since it was the capital and economic centre of the country. A sparsely populated city that could barely accommodate its own citizens in terms of social and medical services before August 1990 cracked under the pressure of this new wave of reverse migration. Economically, Yemen lost the revenue it earned when these workers—especially the single male emigrants—remitted their earnings to their families. Inflation began to undercut the purchasing power of the local population. The US dollar, worth about twenty riyals at the start of the summer, stood at forty or sixty, and then kept jumping by ten riyals every few months. The higher it got, the lower the standard of living became for the average Yemeni, and salaries were frozen to help pay for the influx of returning citizens.

The returning Yemenis came in with different sets of social and religious norms. Those who moved back from the more tolerant (relatively speaking) nations of Qatar or UAE largely followed the same moderate form of Islam they were exposed to over there. But the much larger group of migrants from Saudi Arabia brought back the harsher traditions of Wahhabism, which made Yemeni society suddenly even more intolerant towards women and possibly a little bit dangerous as well. Not that Yemen would ever be considered a role model for women’s rights, but compared to Saudi Arabia it probably should be. In their phone calls and letters to me, my sisters mentioned harassment in the souks and shopping centres from groups of men who frowned on women driving cars or going out without male companions. I felt terrible for my sisters, who were getting increasingly trapped in a Yemen that no longer even offered them the same financial rewards as before.

I had to plot an exit into North America or Australia or find a way to stay in Britain a little while longer. I guessed a Ph.D. in English would at least give me five more years of borrowed time. I dreaded telling my mother what I was planning, but when I called her to break the news later that summer, her response captured the sudden change in Yemen. “What’s your hurry. There’s nothing to come back to.” I sat in my Stoke-on-Trent living room shortly after that call and mulled over her reaction. By then I’d thought that Safia would want me back so badly she’d more or less order my return. She was the one who told me to run away, and now her advice was to keep running. Saddam may have invaded Kuwait, but he’d destroyed what little hope Yemenis had for their future.

Like my father before me, but without the family weight he carried on his shoulders, I needed to find new shelter.

THE LAST THING I WANTED
to do was study for five more years. Although I did well in my master’s dissertation and enjoyed working on the fantasias of local Staffordshire author Arnold Bennett, a career as an academic would take me away from having fun. I hated sitting in a classroom and didn’t enjoy discussions with my professors, mainly because I barely had time to finish the novels we were supposed to read. I felt better when I realized that the English doctoral system was a leftover from the old Oxbridge days. A Ph.D. candidate got a supervisor and a library card and was left alone. The system was developed to make a scholar out of a doctoral student—unlike the North American model, which encourages general knowledge and teaching skills. In that case, I could choose a pre-modern period to focus on and develop a thesis that worked within my area of strength: literary history. When additional funding came through from the British Council, I tried to get into any college in the University of London so I could be at the centre of its gay life. I know how disappointing this must be to my colleagues and students who hold my academic achievements in high regard. In my case, academia was an acquired taste. To be on the safe side, I also applied to Nottingham University, since an old English friend from the days of the Nile Hilton Tavern relocated there and I had visited him in the past. Its English department is still one of the best in the country, and its then-chair, Norman Page, was a renowned Victorian specialist. I had made up my mind to focus on the novels of Wilkie Collins for what started out as sentimental reasons.

While living in Sana’a, I’d stumbled upon a second-hand copy of
The Moonstone
that someone donated to the British Council. The back-cover blurb suggested a narrative that was both English with hints of colonial intrigue—Indian jewels, curses and so on.
The Woman in White
, an earlier novel by Collins, had became one of my all-time favourite books when I read it a few months before. It’s hard to explain the appeal of Victorian mystery novels for a Yemeni man in Sana’a, but I was hooked. If I had to do a Ph.D. in English, then I’d better focus on something I knew I enjoyed. The more English it was, the better. Part of my wilful suppression of my Arabic identity meant avoiding obvious choices for an Arab scholar: travel literature set in the Middle East or translations by Sir Richard Burton (
The
Arabian Nights
). I didn’t want a Ph.D. that relied on my Arabic knowledge. I wished that part of my life negated, made irrelevant. I botched my interview at Birkbeck College in the University of London by showing up underprepared. I had spent the night before watching a drag show at the Vauxhall Tavern in South London. When I received a firm offer from Nottingham University—and the expected rejection from Birkbeck—I made the move in the fall of 1990.

Any hope of staying away emotionally and politically from the Arab world was dashed a few months later when the first Gulf War erupted in January 1991, five months after Saddam invaded Kuwait. Yemen’s condemnation of the American-led bombing of Iraq further isolated it from the world and identified it as an unfriendly state. (Its status as a terror-supporting country was yet to come, but the seeds were planted then.) I’d gone from being the child of a British colony to a person of interest based on my passport, no more than a piece of paper as far as I was concerned. Day-to-day living in Nottingham was unaffected by the war, but when later that summer I wanted to visit the United States for a vacation—it’d been my dream for more than a decade to set foot in New York and San Francisco—I knew that holding a Yemeni passport would forever mean being interrogated at visa offices and airports around the world. Even with a Canadian passport now, I still have an irrational fear of crossing international borders. Someone will come and drag me away, transport me back to Yemen and I’ll lose everything I have. It happened to Maher Arar, didn’t it? I don’t think that fear ever goes away if you’re a man of Arab origin.

Still, I managed to get an American visa after submitting a letter of support from the British Council and, to my surprise and relief, made it through US Customs in Boston in the summer of 1991 with nothing more than the standard questions about my last visit to the Middle East and the purpose of my visit to the US. I had a thirty-day ticket for unlimited standby travel anywhere Delta Airlines flew within the continental USA and that convinced the immigration officer that I was a legitimate tourist. Five years earlier I had sat in my room in Sana’a fantasizing about what it would be like to fly from New York to LA. Now I was about to experience it. I wanted to visit every city I’d read about in magazines or seen in movies growing up in Cairo. I visited my Egyptian friend Nancy in her new home in Chicago because it was a city I’d heard mentioned so many times. I stopped in New Orleans, since I’d read some literature of the Deep South as a student in Cairo. And in Dallas, because I knew that was where JFK was assassinated. And as far as I was concerned, a trip to San Francisco and a walk through the Castro—a street I first read about in 1983 in an article about AIDS—was the most important item on my itinerary, followed closely by a stop in New York City.

I had never set foot in New York before, but I knew it so well. One of my favourite films as a teen was
An Unmarried Woman
, starring Jill Clayburgh and Alan Bates, who I thought back then was the sexiest man alive, as her bearded British artist boyfriend. To me, the film’s message of freedom—which my then newly divorced sister Fathia also appreciated—and the New York landscape were inseparable.

As terrified as I was to be alone in NYC (and in a youth hostel), experiencing the thrill of being in a Broadway theatre (Neil Simon’s
Lost in Yonkers
, starring a relatively unknown Kevin Spacey, was my first show) and actually walking up and down Christopher Street became my pilgrimage. Although I thought the gay bars on Christopher Street were seedy and the people ugly, I felt that I had to find a way to move to the West. I just didn’t know how it could be done, and with the Gulf War and Yemen’s troublemaking reputation, my chances were getting slimmer.

Back in England, I continued to live as much of an Arabic-free life as I could. Even when talking to another Ph.D. student from Bahrain, I’d use English. The only Arabic I spoke was on my increasingly rare visits to Liverpool and rarer calls home. But I knew this couldn’t continue, as I was long overdue for a family visit to Yemen, my first in over four years. It’d be my first encounter with the post-Kuwait Sana’a and a test of my relationship with my family, from whom I had drifted emotionally in the intervening years. The trip also meant going back into the closet and avoiding any questions about my personal life, including the obvious one: When are you getting married? I didn’t really want to spend time with my father and be reminded of the fact that since he’d moved us to Yemen, he had made no money whatsoever. But in the spring of 1992, I forced myself to go home, mainly to see my mother.

CHAPTER NINE

SANA’A

Return

S
o much had changed in four years in Sana’a. Cars with Saudi licence plates clogged its once-deserted side streets. New buildings erupted in places where green patches once provided some relief from the concrete, leaving the local architecture little breathing room. If there was an inch of land for sale, some developer with money from his Gulf years bought it to build a low-rise or a family home.

At Sana’a International Airport, Wahbi and Khairy greeted me. Both looked much older than their thirty-two and thirty years, respectively. But that was to be expected. The heat and chewing khat can do damage to the skin, since both are dehydrating. As we drove from the airport to our new family home in the Zubieri district of Sana’a, I looked at the streets and passersby with disbelief. Nine months earlier I was knocking back beers in New York City’s gay bars. That felt more natural and at home to me than being in a car in Sana’a with my own brothers. Even after living there and recognizing its quaintness, I still felt like a stranger in Sana’a. And now, on top of it all, I had no choice but to speak in Arabic for three weeks.

At home I rushed to kiss my mother, whose arthritis had got so severe she was now completely housebound, except for visits to the doctors. My sisters greeted me with warmth and affection, but I saw the haggard look on their faces. Since the return of approximately one million migrants to Yemen, everything in Sana’a had turned into a struggle, from finding a new job to commuting to work if you had one. So far, my three sisters who lived at home—Ferial, Hoda and Raja’a—were still employed, but the higher cost of living and stagnant salaries left them with little disposable income. Holidays in Cairo, which were once as easy as stopping at the travel agent and packing a bag, became huge investments. They felt not just psychologically trapped in Yemen, but physically, too.

And there was my father. Almost a decade after relocating the family to its ancestral home he was still without meaningful income or any chance of resuming that thriving career as a real-estate developer. His world consisted of watching the news on TV and whiling away the time playing with his grandchildren. At sixty-seven he, too, looked much older. Thinner as well. We didn’t know it then, but the cancer that killed him three years later had probably begun to invade his body. For the first time in my adult life, he replied in Arabic every time I started a conversation in English. I knew that in the past he took any opportunity to practise his English, so I often volunteered to keep him talking. Not now. His English was fading, and while I associated the language with my liberation, he linked it with his long-gone glory days. From here on, it had to be Arabic for this former anglophile.