Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (8 page)

Zaglol—an odd name even in Arabic—was a smart young man from Aden on his way to study in France. His father, an old friend of Mohamed from the heyday of colonial Aden, had made enquiries for an eligible bride with several Yemeni families who had fled for Cairo. Mohamed recommended his second daughter, Faiza, over a cup of tea on the balcony of our Dokki apartment. The groom himself still lived in Aden, taking some intensive French-language training. The idea of being whisked off to France was too romantic for Faiza to pass up, even if marrying someone she didn’t know—just as our own mother and father had done twenty-six years before—was considered backward and ran against the modern vibe of 1970s Cairo.

To make her a more attractive choice, my father insisted that Faiza take French lessons at a downtown institute not far from his favourite hangout, the Groppi coffee shop and patio near Opera Square. It was a treat to get invited by our father for ice cream and a soda in the summer or for hot
kunafa
and baklava with custard cream in the winter. My sister told me recently that she and one of her classmates in the French course would drop by for an afternoon tea if my dad was there since he’d pay the bill. I sat on its patio in the spring of 2010 for the first time in almost thirty-five years and imagined what Mohamed’s afternoons looked like: coffee, a newspaper, the conversations he’d strike up with English or American tourists who stumbled on his haunt. He needed to practise his English, which he felt was rusting without talking to his British associates in Aden.

By late summer of 1971, when it became official that Zaglol had chosen Faiza for his bride, family attention turned to the wedding. All weddings are symbolic ceremonies, but this one had an added symbolism and significance for my father. The wedding of his first-born, Fathia, in Aden in 1966, had been a lavish affair—the kind that a business tycoon would throw, both to please his daughter and to assert his place in Aden’s turbulent society. This new wedding came after the fall, as it were. It had to restore some of the old glory, even if it meant spending thousands of pounds, which at the time in Egypt would have been an obscene amount of money. As I watch the surprisingly large number of shows on TV now about wedding planners and rich and poor brides, I laugh at some of the impossible tasks my father and older siblings had to undertake in just a few weeks. Booking a banquet hall in a fancy hotel and sending invitations (by hand) was not that different from any wedding in the West today. Of course the boys had to have new suits and the girls new dresses. All of that was to be expected. But Egyptian weddings probably stand out in the entertainment department. The wedding procession—or
zaffa
—is a showcase of wealth and pomp. Nothing but Egypt’s top belly dancer, Soheir Zaki, would do for my father. He booked her to lead the couple and guests into the banquet hall and start off the official ceremony with a little hip-swinging. Even at the age of seven, I found watching belly dancing to be hypnotic. I knew it was not a sexual thing, but I admired the art and wildness of it. Years later, as I embraced my gay identity, I would discover that belly dancers were essential parts of Arab camp—Egyptian drag queens impersonate their favourite dancers the way their Western counterparts lip-synch to divas like Barbra Streisand or Madonna.

After the opening belly dance, Soheir posed for pictures with the bride, groom and their families. There’s an embarrassing shot of me in the family album looking all flummoxed (in my new three-piece suit) at finding myself in her company. Two Egyptian pop singers whose careers had peaked in the 1960s and were doing the wedding circuit followed. Even Mohamed knew he couldn’t afford the top-tier singers. Still, the evening was a success. The marriage less so. Zaglol and Faiza were divorced six years later for irreconcilable differences. My father rarely brought up the fact that they hardly knew each other before they got married, or that he rushed his daughter into the marriage.

I know that my mother found being away from her eldest two daughters—one back in Aden, the other now in France—difficult emotionally. We had to turn down the radio or change the channel whenever we heard songs about absent loved ones, which became a recurrent theme in Egyptian popular music as generations of political dissidents and intellectuals were fleeing Nasser’s and then Anwar Sadat’s iron-grip rule.

But for us, the younger siblings, having a sister living in France earned us new status in Cairo’s Western-obsessed society. Pictures of the couple in the snowbound French countryside were too glamorous not to make the rounds whenever visitors stopped by. Our favourite gifts from France were vinyl albums of British music. My sister Raja’a loved Tom Jones, while Hanna drooled over Engelbert Humperdinck. Two songs from the Tom Jones collection stand out, and to this day bring powerful memories of that lost Cairo: “Love Me Tonight” and “She’s a Lady.” Of course, the shockingly sexist lyrics of the latter are hard to swallow, but back then I didn’t even know what the words meant. I repeated parts of them phonetically. I’d started learning English at the age of five, but it would be another ten years at least before I could sing along to a full Tom Jones record. And to be perfectly honest, I was more interested in the albums because of Jones’s sexy poses on the covers. Glittery tight pantsuits and a sexy swagger. Humperdinck always looked like a dork by comparison.

To me those early years in Cairo were simple and innocent. While I wouldn’t say I had a frame of reference for those feelings I had for men like Tom Jones, I could at least enjoy fantasizing about singers and movie stars without worrying too much. I was still too young to be expected to act manly or to participate in the machismo of men’s lives. I even remember dressing up in women’s clothes and putting on a show for my sisters and a visiting aunt with the help of my older brother Khairy, who wore a similar outfit. I added red lipstick to get the look just right. If my sisters’ giggles were any indication, our double act was a hit. I, of course, wanted to go back to the wardrobe and create a new outfit. That was in the fall of 1972, to the best of my recollection, and it might as well be the curtain closer on a whole life.

It was the last free display of my latent gay tendencies. The older I got, even while still a child, the less tolerant the family became of my perceived femininity. Whenever I played with a doll or my sisters’ nail polish—the smell of which I adored—it would be snatched away from me and I’d be instructed to join my brothers in a game of football. I still don’t think of my sisters’ and mother’s responses as homophobia as we understand it today, but merely their attempt to shield me from bullying in school. In hindsight, their worried looks whenever I indulged in something unusual for a boy of my age were also watchful, and protective.

CHAPTER FOUR

CAIRO

Changes

I
n the years following the 1967 Six Day War, Egypt experienced a massive crisis of faith. The war shattered illusions of military might and nationalist pride that for years Nasser had sold his people. The high tone of nationalist Egyptian culture in the 1950s and first years of the 1960s was replaced by a flippant, defeatist, escapist one. Instead of mining Egyptian folklore to glorify their heritage, many composers and writers turned to local art for lascivious notes. Songs about girls taking baths or refusing to drink tea—”I don’t drink tea; I only drink Coca-Cola” went one lyric of a popular song—became anthems for middle- and working-class Egyptians who felt betrayed by Nasser. At school we were told not to sing or quote lyrics of such
baladi
, or native songs. They represented a decadence that students of our respectable school were to avoid. But I must admit I wish I was older back then so I could have enjoyed such decadence. What I don’t remember, I’m able to glean from Egyptian movies of the period. One of them in particular,
Adrift on the Nile
, summed up the mood in a story about an ethical journalist uncovering an underground network of sex and drugs on a houseboat on the Nile. (To my utter surprise, in 2006 a multicultural theatre company in Vancouver adapted the novel by Naguib Mahfouz on which the film was based.)

We had this picture taken at a photography studio on Tahrir Street in Cairo to celebrate Wahbi’s birthday in 1972. Khairy (left) and I are dressed in vests, the latest fashion, although mine, in shades of brown, is clearly oversized.

My consciousness as a growing boy in Cairo started with another war against Israel, the war beginning on October 6, 1973, known by Israelis as the Yom Kippur War. No matter how secular you were and how many Jewish families you knew, if you lived in the Egypt of the 1970s, Israel was the enemy. At school, Israelis were portrayed as unlawful occupiers of Palestinian land and killers of children. Our school held several fundraisers and charity concerts for Palestinian refugees during which footage of displaced children and women were shown. Most Arabic families publically used the word “Jewish” as a synonym for someone who exploited or threatened innocent victims. It took years of cultural readjustment and conscious effort to disassociate the two in my mind. The early days of the short-lived war, when it looked like Sadat’s army had the upper hand, shocked many Egyptians out of their complacency and revived the fortunes of the country’s military forces, which explains their continued place in the country’s politics.

To me the war at first just meant a few days off school. Even though it was fought in the Sinai desert, Cairo was under watch for possible air raids. For my father, who was still largely unemployed and plotting his “comeback,” the war meant a further delay of his business plans. But it was a worthy sacrifice. “Even the date of October 6 has a ring to it,” he’d tell his brother Hussein, who was visiting from Aden at the time. The new military anthems, hastily released to win the PR war, used the date in what you might call now a branding exercise. “The sixth of October reunited us as a nation—an Arab nation” were the words we were forced to sing for months afterwards during morning assemblies. And as soon as injured soldiers were shipped to Cairo hospitals, the school arranged bus trips for the students to pay tribute to the “heroes.” My mother intensely disliked these new trips to faraway military hospitals, in part because you could never show up empty-handed and she had to buy us boxes of chocolates to give the soldiers.

Money was getting tight just as Safia’s children were growing up and demanding more. The household expenses gobbled up all our income, which now consisted only of the interest—and occasionally part of the principal—of my father’s savings in the UK. When the exchange rate of the English pound went down, so did our disposable income. On weeks with exchange-money surplus, my parents took the youngest four children to the cinema on Thursday nights. Every other month, Mohamed would drag us to the more expensive live theatre to watch popular Egyptian comedies. Performances always started as late as 10 p.m. and would last until 1 or 2 a.m., by which time I would have fallen asleep in my mother’s lap.

The inflation that hit the West after the 1973 war also hit Egypt and our family’s finances. Until then, if you were poor in Egypt you somehow still managed to eat a full meal and have a roof over your head. By 1974 even such basics proved more than many Egyptians could afford. I cringe when I think that the cleaning maids my parents hired at the time got paid ten to twenty Egyptian pounds a month. No wonder they occasionally stole food from the kitchen or small household items—which infuriated my mother, who felt the pinch herself. Our maid for many years, Enayat, came from the working-class district of Shoubra and always showed up for work late because of the crowded buses and traffic congestion. She was only in her forties but had severe back and neck pains and was a widowed mother of, if I remember correctly, two teenage children. She always had bruises on her arms or legs or came in with her traditional Egyptian clothing all covered in dirt, as she kept tripping and falling when running to catch the overcrowded bus. She ate the leftovers from our lunches and dinners and wrapped up what she didn’t get through in a white scarf to give to her children. Even back then, Enayat would recall the better days of the 1960s and complain about this new, harsher way of life in Cairo. By no means am I suggesting that there was a social cohesiveness in Egyptian society before then, but in the years after the 1973 war the country divided along economic lines: the ultra rich, the struggling middle classes and the impoverished poor.

CHANGE. AGAIN. THIS TIME
the pace was slower but the effect just as long-lasting. Stories of break-ins, muggings and violent crimes became part of our lives. They usually took place in more impoverished parts of town or very late at night, but like all middle-class families we had to watch our backs. We could sense the anger of some Egyptians and, as the civil war in Lebanon was starting in 1975, also feel it in the waves of Palestinian and Lebanese refugees. Nasser’s agenda of a secular pan-Arabism had broken apart only four years after his death.