Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (12 page)

Many Egyptians assumed that we, a Yemeni family, had more money than they did. As a result of this misconception we started to experience discrimination from a society that only a few years before had felt like home to us. Cab drivers charged us more if they recognized us as non-Egyptians. For my sisters, renewing work permits became an annual hassle, as the unemployment rates kept rising and the Sadat government limited the number of foreigners who could work legally in the country. The infrastructure of the country slowly crumbled, and nowhere was this more evident than in the ordeal of getting a phone line in Cairo in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. We lucked out in that our rented apartment came with a phone, but not many of our friends had that privilege. Well, we were lucky until the summer of 1979, when our landlord (who lived in a nearby apartment building) simply switched the phone line from our place to his. It’s unfathomable to any of us now—and by that I mean my Canadian friends and my cell phone–addicted family in Yemen—to think of living for two years without a phone. But we endured just that. Public pay phones were a rarity in Cairo, so if you wanted to make a call, you had to ask in a convenience store or coffee shop whether you could use theirs in exchange for twenty or forty pence or a full Egyptian pound for long calls. Not long after he appropriated the phone line, our landlord visited my mother to let her know that the rent would be increasing by 300 percent. “Your husband works in Saudi Arabia now, so he can afford it,” he told her. I can still remember my sisters pleading with him to be reasonable and to at least consider putting off any talk of an increase until Mohamed’s return to Cairo. Even with my father away, none of my siblings had the authority to deal with any big financial decision. Mohamed still controlled how and where money was spent.

BY THE END OF
1979, we had further confirmation of the end of the secular era when Ayatollah Khomeini rose as Iran’s spiritual leader.

I was always a sickly child. I missed weeks and weeks of school every year with one form of childhood illness or another. But that year I seemed to have caught a worse-than-usual cold, and my father was so worried about my health that he joined my mother and me on what to us was a routine visit to the doctor, a pediatrician. I was convinced that my father’s reason for coming along was to find a cure for my fascination with a certain Jewish American singer.

The doctor’s office was in downtown Cairo, in a historic mixed-income area known as Bab el-Louq, where its shabby artdeco buildings stand as reminders of Egypt’s colonial history. The doctor himself was part of that fading Old Cairo set of rich Egyptians educated in private schools and in the United Kingdom who often lamented the socialist tendencies of post-colonial Egypt for allowing peasants (
fellaheen
) into positions of power. The medical checkup took less than ten minutes. Dr. Rashad El-Sakkar was all too familiar with my body. It was the usual: I was not eating enough vegetables and proteins. His conversation with my dad afterwards must have lasted about an hour, much to the chagrin of my mother, who wanted to go home to prepare supper.

The two old-timers got into a discussion of politics and religion. I remember the doctor being nervous about the revolutionary talk coming out of Iran. My father expressed his concern at the increasing influence of Islamic groups on municipal life in Cairo. Mosques seemed to be starting up everywhere, a backlash against the Egyptian entertainment industry for its corrupting influence, etcetera. Both men agreed that more troubles were to come. The doctor advocated the imprisonment of political Islamists, as they fostered unrest and plotted an overthrow of the state. My father, who had more experience with anti-state rebels from his Aden days, sounded a less militant tone and offered a scenario that in hindsight would be considered appeasement. “Give them 10 percent of seats in Parliament to shut them up for now,” he offered.

That conversation was the first of many I’d hear my father having in the following months. Each conversation—with other doctors, neighbours, bookstore owners—confirmed that the life my siblings and I had taken for granted was coming to an end. God was suddenly in the picture. My father’s fears were realized less than two years later, when members of the Muslim Brotherhood assassinated President Sadat on October 6, 1981. As another major Arabic capital started to lose its attraction as a safe haven, my father once again began to think about relocating his family. This time, economy as well as politics had to be taken into account. As his savings were being depleted by the double blow of 1970s inflation and the early 1980s recession, and since my older siblings had all graduated from university and the younger ones would be joining them in a few years, the emphasis was on choosing a place where they could find employment. For the first time, talk of going back to Yemen became more than an idle threat. It wouldn’t happen for a few more years, but it looked like the family had run out of options.

CHAPTER SIX

CAIRO

Gay

M
y Canadian and British friends of my age associate the 1980s high-school experience with new-wave music, shoulder pads, big hair and general flamboyance. My high school, Amoun—in Zamalek, an elite neighbourhood populated by expatriates and well-heeled Egyptians—wouldn’t have registered on the cool scale, but it did not lack in local glamour. In the Zamalek enclave we could all pretend that the tide of radical Islam wasn’t rising. My brothers Wahbi and Khairy were in their final years of high school when I joined them there. Amoun—named after an ancient Egyptian god—was another co-ed private school, but it seemed to attract a who’s who of Cairo’s acting community. I was in the same class as Sherihan—the Miley Cyrus of my generation—and, in senior years, with Salah Sarhan, now a well-known Egyptian actor whose father was one of local cinema’s matinee idols from the 1950s and ‘60s. My friend Adham was the son of Mohamed Rushdi, a famous folk-singer. I carpooled with him on the way back from school for two years. His mother would drive us home on one condition: No music by her husband in the car. “It’s enough having your father at home. Give me a break in the car,” she told Adham sternly whenever he tried to play a cassette of Rushdi’s music.

By sixteen, I had more or less come out as being gay—at least to myself. And if I had any lingering doubts, the movie
Xanadu
put them to rest. Music from the movie had been circulating among my group of friends for months, and when in May 1981 it opened on a Monday morning, as movies did in Egypt, I stood in a long line of kids to get a ticket at the Metro Cinema in downtown Cairo. I don’t remember much about that first viewing, but the second, a mere three days later at a busy Thursday-evening show, left a lasting impression.

Most seventeen-year-old-boys watching that movie were likely turned on by the beauty of Olivia Newton-John. I, on the other hand, was deeply aroused by the long hair and short shorts of her co-star, Michael Beck, an actor whose career fizzled out faster than the musical itself. When the camera zoomed in on his face during a song called “The Fall,” it all became clear to me. I still get the shivers whenever I watch that scene from that loveable, goofy musical. That’s it, then, I thought: I’m a homosexual. Newton-John looked gorgeous but did nothing for me sexually. Even Gene Kelly looked sexy in that movie. A few days later I went to see it for the third time.

On my way in, I stopped at the convenience store attached to the Metro Cinema and overheard a conversation between the owner and one of his friends. The friend was asking why the theatre was so busy, to which the storeowner replied that it was an audience of fools who were headed to hell for watching
haram
(forbidden) material. He was incensed that the promotional stills next to his store featured a picture of Newton-John as a 1940s glamour girl in shorts that showed off her long bare legs. “God curse them all,” he said as he handed me my change and gave me a defiant look. I knew that a movie musical wouldn’t be to the taste of a devout Muslim like him, but such intolerance was frightening, and this time I couldn’t enjoy the movie. What was I going to do with my life if I stayed in Egypt? How would I survive the inevitable humiliation and scandal of being gay? I couldn’t be the only one who felt this way, but how could I connect with others, and if I did, how could I be sure that word wouldn’t get back to my family?

There was no way I’d seek guidance from my brothers, and despite my close ties to my sisters, I couldn’t confide in any of them. Just because they were more sensitive to issues of gender and discrimination didn’t mean they espoused liberal views about homosexuality. Any thoughts of talking it through with my male high-school friends were laid to rest whenever we went out and they talked about nothing but women’s breasts and sex with girls. I’m still not sure how I got away without being called a faggot by my friends, since I never participated in any sex-related conversations. The idea of homosexuality probably never occurred to most of them. Either that or some were protesting too much, but I didn’t understand it as such at the time. I now teach seventeen- and eighteen-year-old university students, and I’m stunned at their sophisticated understanding of sexuality. I envy them. My isolation at a comparable age could have led me to a different life altogether—perhaps one of suppressing my desires and seeking refuge in strict Islam as a form of self-flagellation or cleansing.

Luckily, I had other options. My English was improving and I was able to read about homosexuality in the reference library of the British Council, where I began to make the association between being gay and the need to get out of the Middle East. But I was still a high-school student and had no means of making that happen. What I wouldn’t have done to be in London or New York at the time.

THE ROAD TO LONDON
at least got shorter by the end of 1981. My sister Faiza married for the second time and eventually settled in Liverpool, where her new husband, Hamza, a British national from Aden, ran a corner store. My mother’s sister Fatima and her family had already relocated to Liverpool in the early 1970s. My dad and two of my older siblings (Helmi and Farida) had visited them in the past and brought back stories about their life in England. To my father, England had deteriorated since he’d lived there in the late 1940s; to Farida, and even for the pre-religious Helmi, it was a great place. When Hamza proposed, my father had to swallow his pride and allow his daughter to marry a shopkeeper of dubious social background. Mohamed figured it’d make his next few decisions easier with one less child to take care of.

Decisions about where to relocate—from Aden to Beirut, from Beirut to Cairo—were becoming more and more difficult as the children got older. By 1982, two more of my sisters had finished university and Helmi finally received his law degree. There was no change on the work-permit front for non-Egyptians. Mohamed’s trips to Saudi Arabia were cut short as he got older and found it harder to accept condescending attitudes from local businessmen. In fact, the breaking point came in 1982, when it became clear that one of his business associates more or less expected my father to procure for him during a visit to Cairo. The businessman assumed that since our family had been living in Cairo, we’d know our way around its prostitution rings. My dad was so defeated by that point he couldn’t, as the English used to say, organize a fuck in a brothel. When he politely refused and declined even to suggest where this man could go, he put some of his business contacts in jeopardy. We found out about this incident several years later, but it must have been another deciding factor for a move that would send my family down a path so different from the one we’d been on: a move back to our ancestral homeland of North Yemen and its capital, Sana’a.

In the summer of 1981, the increased rent for our Tahrir Street apartment became unmanageable for my father, who decided to find a more affordable place, even if it meant going a bit outside our usual neighbourhood. Helmi found a quiet four-bedroom apartment on a side street about fifteen minutes’ walk from our old place. The downside was that it overlooked a busy boys’ public school, so we had to cope with the noise of assemblies and the nuisance of a new generation of aggressive Egyptian kids. This was the kind of school where lower-middle-class families sent their children—a far cry from the private schools we attended. By then, and it had only been a matter of three or four years, we could see many veiled schoolteachers go in and out of the school. We could also hear some of the speeches at morning assemblies, which almost always followed a strict Islamic script about the benefit of prayers or the foolishness of those secular folks who were trying to undermine the rise of the Islamic voice.

Faiza’s wedding, in September of the same year, served as a distraction from the economic stresses and political tensions. At least for her siblings. For my father, the ten-year gap between her first wedding and this one captured his deteriorating financial situation. As was the custom in Arab society, the father of the bride almost always covered the wedding costs. But Mohamed was in no position to go it alone, so he agreed with the groom to split the expenses. The groom and his family would also make all decisions about venue, food and entertainment.