Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (21 page)

Day-to-day life in Yemen continued to reflect some of these larger geopolitical movements. Many members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who operated out of Yemen were said to be graduates from the resistance to the Soviets in Afghanistan (as, of course, was the membership of the main organization). In 2000, members of al Qaeda in Yemen struck the navy destroyer USS
Cole
in the port of Aden, killing seventeen Americans. Ever since, Yemen struggled to achieve political stability within its own borders, which in turn drove away potential investors, who saw the country as too dangerous. Oil companies would do work with the devil, so they stayed in Yemen. Otherwise, its economic outlook was growing dim, and the social tensions increased. As did the dependence on religion. As Ferial once told me, she could escape it all whenever she read the Quran. It calmed her soul and gave her the strength to go on.

I, on the other hand, experienced something completely different. The longer I lived in Toronto, the more convinced I became that I’d made the right choice. And that’s what it came down to. I had choices. I don’t think my sisters, in particular, had any. Our lives diverged in so many ways, but the biggest difference was that I could make choices about every aspect of my life: where to live, how to live, what to spend my money on and who to sleep with.

Winters aside, everything about Toronto felt right, and I felt safe—just one among the millions of immigrants who over the decades have called this wonderful country home. “You are what this country is all about,” an editor friend would remind me. I never lost faith in Canada, but I had to ask myself, why was I still underemployed? Did my very ethnic name and Middle Eastern background scare off employers? How much longer could I survive on minimum wage?

THE SUMMER OF
1997 was a turning point in my Canadian life. I found out about a very cheap one-bedroom apartment in Chinatown where the rent was even lower than what I paid for the house share. For $475 a month I had my own space in Toronto. It wasn’t grand by any means. It sat in a cul-de-sac that you got to from an alleyway and backed on to the storeroom of a Chinese restaurant. But, again, the College streetcar took me to the edge of the gay village in ten minutes. My downstairs neighbour was a filmmaker and illustrator who also lived on very little. I became a regular contributor to
Xtra!
and applied for jobs at gay video stores and sex lines in order to make the most of my freedom. I didn’t get any such jobs, but to place my byline in a gay paper fulfilled my dream of living openly. The odd Arab gay man I met at the time thought it was inappropriate and I should adopt a pen name. That defeated the purpose of coming to Canada, I felt.

Then I landed a three-month contract at an online agency that was about to put the content of a movie-listings magazine on a website. It was the heyday of the internet boom—a world of crazy ideas and no revenue models. The eccentric South African CEO who interviewed me for the job responded well to my immigrant story and hired me on the spot. Finally I had a job that would pay me about two thousand dollars a month, which to me was a fortune. I remember what I did with my first paycheque in late September: I went to the Bay and bought a TV and video recorder. I didn’t have either in my first three months of living in my Chinatown apartment. I always tell my friends that I might be the only person in the world who missed out on the media frenzy surrounding the death and funeral of Princess Diana, as I followed it on the radio and in print only.

The three-month gig was extended to a regular contract with decent salary and health benefits. I needed the latter for the usual reasons: dental and drug plans. I also started writing for the urban magazine
Eye Weekly
(now the
Grid
) as a freelance arts and theatre reviewer. As much as I loved the gay ghetto, I wanted to get out of it as a journalist. It took almost two years, but the pieces of my new life in Canada had started to fall into place. I moved into a world of arts writing, gallery hopping and jazz and cabaret music, which became my forte in the gay press. I was now writing in the kind of magazines that I drooled over as a young man in Cairo and fought to bring into Yemen. It was a charmed life.

And it got more charming when I met my partner, Motaz, a York University dance student who was already performing in local festivals. He came from the same family as a famous Syrian poet that I’d read in school, and spoke English, French and Arabic. Beautiful. Crazy. Passionate. And six years younger. And while we may have shared an Arabic background, we looked like a mixed-race couple. He had light skin, light brown hair and green eyes. I didn’t always like his work as a choreographer, but he became part of my new life as an arts writer in Toronto, and I a part of his dance world, especially once he moved back to Montreal after graduation.

I shared so little of my new life in Toronto with my family. They wouldn’t have understood any part of it. And I wasn’t sure which would be worse to them: that my partner was a man or that he was a choreographer-dancer. It was just another example of how the family I once knew was lost to me. In the Beirut or Cairo that we lived in, it was quite common to be surrounded by members of the creative community—writers, actors, journalists. We didn’t just consume art but lived in a world that supported and encouraged it. But whenever I talked now to my sisters or brothers about my making a living writing about the arts, they’d encourage me to find something more respectable and stable. After a while I just started to tell them that I was working in a corporate job and that I made enough money to stop borrowing from my sister, whose own life changed radically in the fall of 1998.

Faiza’s workaholic husband, Hamza, died at home from a heart attack while watching TV. It wasn’t uncommon for him to fall asleep on the couch in their living room, but he’d always get up after midnight and go to bed. After all, he worked about twelve to fifteen hours a day, every day of the year, including Christmas. He loved Yemeni food that came drenched in fat, and never exercised. Whenever my sister, at the doctor’s suggestion, tried to cook with olive oil or use less fat, Hamza would throw a temper tantrum. Food was his emotional release, in part because he didn’t have a child to dote on. When Faiza woke up around 3 a.m. and noticed he wasn’t there, she decided to check the living room. He was pronounced dead as soon as the paramedics arrived. I don’t think Faiza was devastated on an emotional level. It was a loveless marriage, but she’d stayed in it because she got used to the routine of working in the shop and cooking a big meal that kept her husband from raising the issue of children. Now her main and immediate concern was to figure out what to do with the business, the house and her new life as a widow in England. A few days after Hamza’s death, she called me for advice on banking and tax issues. I didn’t have much to offer her.

If I had any lingering faith in family values or, for that matter, Arab integration into British society, I lost them there and then. Faiza had lived the previous seventeen years in Liverpool utterly dependent on her husband for all financial and practical concerns. I helped as much as I could when I lived in England. Now, with husband gone and brother away, came the time for Faiza to show some independence and decide what to do with the business. And because she really lived in England in name only, she had no choice but to sell everything and move back to Yemen. Running a business when you hadn’t learned enough about it, or about the language in which it was conducted, was not an option. Not even offers from other Yemeni expatriates to help manage the store—which by that stage included a liquor licence that she found objectionable for religious reasons—could take the burden of such a task off her. She had to join her sisters in a culture that she understood best. What a waste of a British passport, I often thought.

BY THE END OF
1999 I qualified for Canadian citizenship. I wanted it so badly for one reason: Canada, or at least Toronto, was
home.
It was the fifth country I had lived in but the one that welcomed me the most. I loved its liberal society and what was then its neutral stance in the Middle East. I consider myself very lucky to have landed in Canada during the tenure of a Liberal government. I would have got a completely different impression of the country and its culture had I arrived here on Stephen Harper’s watch. I certainly wouldn’t have felt as welcome as an immigrant of Arab origin. On a more practical note, travelling on a Yemeni passport, especially to the US, took the fun out of any holiday plans. I’d go early to the airport, but I’d still miss my flight to New York or Los Angeles because I’d be pulled aside for questioning. I could see no benefit in continuing to hold that passport if I didn’t have to. Technically, it was the only official connection between my homeland and me, and I’d checked out of that country many years ago. In fact, I checked out of the Arab world as soon as I first arrived in England in the late 1980s. I couldn’t wait to get my Canadian citizenship, and in the summer of 2000 I did, at a swearing-in ceremony at St. Clair Avenue and Yonge Street in midtown Toronto. I was in the middle of covering the Toronto Fringe Festival for
Eye Weekly
but wouldn’t have missed that ceremony for the world. I invited my dear friend Shane, himself an immigrant from Australia and now a naturalized Canadian. We were the poster boys for immigration, we joked.

Home at last. I was Canadian now and proud of it. I’d reached my final destination after three decades of travelling and relocating, with my family and alone. Not only that, but I was settling into a city that had given me so much in such a short time—a home, a social life, a partner and above all a place to be who I was, without fear, shame or risk of life.

The only snag was that I got laid off the same summer from the online agency and faced more months of unemployment. I hated that job, but at least it provided a regular paycheque. I was better prepared this time. I had some contacts for freelance writing; I had put away some money in a savings account; and I had a partner to look after me if I needed it. But I knew one thing about myself: I liked the security of a paycheque, no matter how small, and I wasn’t one for hustling as a freelancer. When my editor at
Eye Weekly
mentioned that the
Globe and Mail
’s
Report on Business
magazine was looking for a production editor, I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I made the call to the contact there. In twenty-four hours I had a job interview and an offer to start immediately. I think the editors there were desperate to find someone to take the job, and I was desperate for one. Perfect match. Desperation worked to my advantage again. Because of my copyediting experience, I picked up the intricacies of production editing very quickly. Working at the
Globe and Mail—
the paper I was told to check out at Canada House in London if I wanted to learn more about Canada—was the chance of a lifetime for someone whose career was now focused on journalism.

My charmed life in Toronto continued. The
Globe
job qualified as a crash course in professional journalism, and I shared it with a great team. The hours were long, but I lived just a few streetcar stops away, so no commuting to add to my day like some of my colleagues. I was freelancing more for
Eye Weekly
and establishing my name as a theatre critic. I liked the low-key and accessible nature of local Toronto theatre. Soon thereafter I started writing for
Globe Television
, the newspaper’s TV magazine, and an editor at the soon-to-be-launched
Elle Canada
approached me to become their regular theatre contributor. That dream I had when I boarded the plane for Toronto had come true: I’d carved out an alternative family and tradition for myself. I never understood, and will never be able to, all the Toronto bashing from those who live outside it. I don’t know if there’s a special trick or magic formula to living here. The way the city opened its doors to me makes me think it’s their loss.

It was perhaps too good to be true. And I may have jinxed it all by succumbing to family pressure to visit them in Yemen—for the first time in nearly eight years. Having been away for so long, there was no need for me to worry any longer about the unspoken issue of my sexuality. The less they knew about my life, the happier they and I were. My friends would often ask me to explain how I came out to my family, given their religious and social views. The truth is that I never did. The whole coming out scene—the “Mom, Dad, I have something to tell you” scenario—is part of the Western narrative of being gay. My sisters in particular figured it out soon enough without me having to come out. They dealt with it by either ignoring it or by telling extended family members to leave me alone whenever any of them suggested a suitable bride.

In the summer of 2001 I made the trip back home. I don’t think any phone conversation or letter could have prepared me for what I experienced there.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CANADA

Reality

N
o wonder there are very few direct flights from Toronto to virtually anywhere in the Arab world now, and none back in 2001. You need a connection in that middle ground of Europe to link the two. That’s what I was thinking when I reached Sana’a, after a long stopover in Frankfurt. It’s difficult to explain the feeling I, as an Arab person, get whenever I visit the Middle East, and especially Yemen. There’s a sickness in the belly, a nervousness all over. Every trip back could turn into a long-term prison sentence. The prison could be emotional, as I confront a family that has changed and is visibly suffering, trapping me in guilt and uncertainty. Or physical, should the temperamental government declare me an abomination for writing in gay magazines or curating a program of short films for a gay and lesbian film festival. I realize it’s my paranoia, and I’ve probably inherited it from my own father, but this is not what going home should feel like. And who’s to say that this is home, except in a blood memory sort of way? My roots are in Yemen, but everything else remains firmly fixed in Canada, my real home.