Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (23 page)

I resolved to snap out of this Yemen-induced funk by refocusing on my life as a Canadian. Not an Arab-Canadian but just a Canadian. I would read more Canadian history and literature. I’d even watch made-in-Canada movies and TV dramas—most of which I found utterly cold and soulless, but at least they were Canadian.

It was a short-lived resolution. Just six weeks later, September 11 changed everything.

I
WAS WORKING OUT
at a gym near the
Globe and Mail
offices on Front and Spadina when the first plane hit the World Trade Center that Tuesday morning. My trainer, Mike, thought it was just a little private jet that had flown lower than it should. When the second plane crashed into the other tower and the news anchor—it was CNN, I believe—declared it was no accident but a deliberate terrorist attack, I blurted, “Oh, God, please don’t let it be Muslims or Arabs.” I knew immediately that an event like this would change everything for all parties, including, of course, North Americans of Arab origin like me. Bizarrely enough, I continued with the workout until 10 a.m. Mike wouldn’t let me use a terrorist attack as an excuse to mess up our appointment schedule. By the time I got to work half an hour later, the second tower had already collapsed.

So much has been written from the perspective of Americans who either had friends or families in the towers (and elsewhere) that day, or who were among the millions who simply watched the attack unfold on TV. But to be an Arab in North America at the time meant that the horror of those events was coupled with fear of repercussions, retaliations, discrimination or a combination of all three—just because we shared the same heritage as the hijackers. If my heart beat a little faster every time I crossed borders before 9/11, it now raced with fear. Once again, Toronto came through for me. All my fears about being verbally or physically assaulted—very real possibilities had I been living in parts of the UK or the US, and possibly other parts of Canada—came to nothing. Apart from the odd stare every now and then on the subway or on an elevator in a high-rise, my day-to-day life was not affected.

But on a more profound level I
was
affected, in ways that only a few weeks before I would have found unimaginable. I’d spent almost two decades trying to distance myself from my Arab and Muslim identities and cultivating a Western one. Now the world seemed divided along those very lines. I felt compelled to show somehow that there was more to where I came from than terrorism and strict readings of Islam. I didn’t really want to be an ambassador for Arab culture, but no longer could I sit out that debate.

At the
Globe and Mail
, I was sent to report on what was going on in mosques around the Greater Toronto Area, since I could blend in with the crowd of worshippers. I hadn’t stepped inside a mosque since I was probably sixteen or seventeen, and here I was, twenty years later, spying on Canadian Muslims. On the eve of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the paper sent me to Chicago and Detroit to cover the responses of the largest Arab communities in North America. I loitered outside a mosque in suburban Chicago before I stepped in. I think the imam there was more concerned about the parking situation than terrorism. Many in the Arab American community there shared with me their fears of reprisals or attacks against their businesses or families, which made me even more grateful to be living in Toronto. I then went to Detroit to write about the life of a Yemeni American soldier who was training to join the US-led coalition forces in Iraq. In Dearborn, Michigan, I found myself sitting in a Yemeni restaurant ordering the same old food that my family was probably serving for lunch. So much for killing off that part of my life.

The first anniversary of 9/11, however, came with devastating news. I woke up at 6 a.m. to the phone ringing. I assumed it was a wrong number, ignored it and went back to sleep. I’d trained my family to bear in mind the time difference and not call that early. When the phone rang again a few minutes later, I picked it up and immediately recognized Wahbi’s voice on the other end. “Kamal, be strong. I have bad news.” I assumed it was my mother. To my shock, he told me it was Ferial. She had died from a brain aneurism two days earlier. They’d waited until after the funeral to let me know.

I knew how unhappy she had been since losing her USAID job. She had struggled for years between unemployment and another job that she accepted out of desperation. She hated not having her own income and, like our father, was running through her rainy-day savings much faster than she thought she would be because of the inflation in Yemen. When I had last seen her, the year before, I could immediately sense her profound sadness. But I shied away from asking her to confide in me or urging her to consider anti-depressants. I just didn’t have the courage or the will to enter into any such discussion.

Ferial’s mental problems coincided with some physical ones. She’d inherited the same arthritic condition that my mother suffered from, and only a few months before had travelled to Cairo for a pair of routine medical procedures. That’s what people in Yemen who can afford it do—seek medical advice in the nearest, relatively more developed, Arab country. As far as we knew, both procedures went well, and the fact that she could walk more comfortably made her happier. Ferial had felt more positive about herself, said my sister Farida, who accompanied her to various medical appointments in Cairo. No one knew what one factor, if any, triggered the aneurism that caused her death. It didn’t matter. Six years after my father’s death, Yemen had claimed one of my sisters. My resentment towards that country for what it had done to the family intensified from that moment on.

I
HAD NO INTENTION
of going back to Yemen after that stressful 2001 visit. The flights from Toronto were physically exhausting, and once I reached my destination I knew there would be emotional strain. But it didn’t sound like my mother’s body could handle its various pains and aches, and her mind was deeply affected by the death of her favourite daughter. She never fully recovered from that loss. For almost seven years she’d dream about her “white child” (Ferial was very light skinned) and wake up crying. At the insistence of my brothers and sisters, I made another trip to the Middle East in 2006. This time, in an attempt to create an emotional buffer, I bookended the visit to Sana’a with a short visit to Beirut and an overnight in Cairo. In effect, I embarked on a trip along the course of my early life. But the main purpose was to see my mother. Even though I talked to her on the phone almost every other week, I knew she was not quite there by then, as she’d occasionally end our talks with “Say hello to the kids.” Previous trips to the Middle East had left me shattered, but I rebounded. Not this time. That trip in 2006 triggered a depression that took me almost four years and a lot of willpower to recover from. I experienced in person what I only knew in theory five years earlier when I detected it in my sister.

If things were not considerably worse than they had been five years before, it was because suffering has a tendency to plateau. Even in Yemen. My family had found ways to adapt to Yemen in the past, but they were mainly psychological ways. Now life required some practical skills that they had to acquire. Water was now in such short supply that its main source became private sellers who roamed up and down the streets and filled up residents’ private tanks at a premium. Hoda became a pro at flagging them down in the main street and guiding them to our home. She’d then connect the water line to their tank. I had no idea how she knew how much water was enough, but she figured it out. Similarly, Khairy had given up on the government supplying his electricity and invested in a generator. So much food was spoiled and so many football games were missed as he—and everybody else—sat in the dark during the now-regular power outages.

My sister Raja’a played a trick on me one weekday afternoon. She spotted me walking back from the university where she worked and, to see how long it would be before I recognizd her, decided to follow me without revealing herself. She waited outside when I went into a store and continued to walk behind me once I came out. She was wearing a niqab that covered everything but her eyes. Only when I made a turn that led to our street did I cotton on. It was meant as a joke, but as I later tried to explain the encounter to my Toronto friends, I (and they) didn’t see a funny side to it. Neither did I see a logical reason for my brothers’ objection to a few family pictures of my sisters with their hair showing. “What if the man developing the film at the camera shop saw your sisters’ uncovered heads?” they asked me. The pictures from that trip are locked in a filing cabinet in my Toronto apartment. Not even my dearest friends have seen them and I rarely look at them. They represent a descent into a world that, to me, is intolerable.

I took this photo of my nieces Nagala (left) and Yousra during a day trip just outside Sana’a in 2006. My nephews Motaz and Mohamed stand in the middle. Even as teenagers, the women were expected to cover up. It was a far cry from what their aunts and mothers had worn at the same age.

During that visit, I detected the impact of Yemen on my nephews and nieces, who were too young in 2001 for me to register their attitude to life. My niece Nagala, who was now nineteen, reminded me of my younger self. She loved American TV and spoke fluent, accent-free English. She asked me if I had friends and if so what was that like? She didn’t have any, as she spent most of her evenings looking after her younger brother while her mother, Hanna, worked at a night school. She realized that going to university would be difficult with this schedule but was determined to study for a degree in English. I hope it provides her with the escape route it’s given me, but the odds are against her. Her father was usually chewing khat or asleep all day. His life had not changed in any way in the last two decades. Another niece, Yousra, was trying to rebel against her mother’s autocratic and Islamic upbringing, but that was causing serious confrontations between them. Every time I weighed in, I got a strong “None of your business” from her mother, Raja’a. I couldn’t counter that. I have made it my business not to get involved or be a part of their lives. Like many teenagers, Yousra loved going to the mall and eating fast food. My fondest memory of that visit was going for frozen fruit drinks with her mother. The sight of Raja’a lifting up the niqab to sip on her cup was part comedy, part a socioeconomic snapshot of life in Yemen. As for my nephew Motaz, his father has ignored him because he likes crazy things like the internet, loud music and colourful shirts. He was my main guide to the new Sana’a, where malls and mullahs shared the same space. The president’s way of pacifying his public was to distract them with more commercial enterprises. More malls than hospitals had been built in the previous ten years, I was informed.

I told each one of my nephews and nieces individually that if they wanted to follow my example, they’d have to finish their education and get out of Yemen as fast as they could. But their emotional bonds with their parents and their brothers and sisters were much stronger than mine ever had been twenty-five years ago. They wanted change, but they were not willing to abandon everything they knew and loved (and even hated) for it. I didn’t know it then, but what I was witnessing in Nagala, Yousra and Motaz were the seeds of the revolution that swept through Yemen and elsewhere in the Arab world in 2011.

CHAPTER TWELVE

ARAB WORLD

Revolution

I
n the last months leading up to her death in October 2009, Safia struggled to complete a single phone conversation. When I called, one of my sisters would put the phone to her ear so she could at least hear my voice. I’d say a few hellos and how are yous? She said nothing in return. I spent much of 2008 and 2009 expecting that early-morning call to tell me that she had passed away. To me, she was already dead and lived in my memories and photographs only. When that call actually came, I was prepared emotionally for the news and for the realization that with Safia gone I had lost the strongest and final bond with my siblings.

I felt sad but relieved.

By then it had become clear to them and to me that our relationship was broken beyond repair. Without my mother’s health to discuss, the phone calls lasted for a few awkward moments before time ran out on their phone card—they didn’t have international dialling from the home phone—or I made an excuse to end the call. Because they made most of their calls on a Sunday, I began to dread the weekend. When I remembered, I would turn off the ringer before I went to bed on Saturday. I’d go months without making calls myself. I found that dialling the country code for Yemen was the first step towards a world I wanted more than anything to pretend did not exist. I just wanted to resume the life I had before the last two visits and before 9/11. And for the most part, I did. I sold my downtown condo shortly after Safia’s death and moved to a different one, just to make my plans for new beginnings more formal and concrete. My initial concept for this book was as an elegy not for my dead parents but my living siblings. I mourned their lost lives but wanted to keep mine moving foward.