Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes (20 page)

Early in December 1995, a brown envelope arrived in the communal mailbox of the graduate apartment building where I had been living for more than four years. It was nondescript and came with the regular delivery. It could easily have got lost in the Christmas rush. It contained that piece of paper I’d been dreaming of and chasing for many years: my right to claim residency in a Western democracy, as far away from Yemen and my family as possible. I rushed upstairs to my third-floor apartment, waited until the cleaning lady had left and sat alone in the kitchen, reading and re-reading the document and a one-page sheet of instructions about what to do when you first landed at a Canadian port of entry. I was still at least a couple of weeks away from wrapping up my thesis, but I could hardly concentrate on the copyediting and revisions that I was expected to complete before handing it to my internal and external examiners. Somehow it didn’t even matter if I passed or not. The whole point of doing the thesis was to get that piece of paper. I calmed down after a few days and knew I’d do better in Canada with a completed Ph.D. under my belt—which I had by April 1996, after revisions to my thesis that included adding a new chapter. My mind was on Canada, but until I finished that last chapter, part of it had to stay in Victorian England. I received the final approval for my thesis on April 13 or 14, booked a one-way ticket to Toronto around the same week, and was aboard a British Airways flight on April 20. A Saturday, since two friends insisted on driving me to Heathrow on their day off work. I had bought a travel guide in a bookstore in London, which I never really looked at until I was on that flight.

I didn’t tell my family, who were expecting me back in Yemen that spring, until the last minute. They had no frame of reference for Canada aside from another of my father’s many failed projects, which involved a Canadian company that sold wheat silos. I remember my sister Hoda telling me, somewhat sternly, that I had to break the news to my mother. Safia had been counting the days until she’d see me again. I just couldn’t tell her the whole truth at once, so I said I was going to live there for a few years to get more work experience. She probably saw through the lie but said nothing. Faiza took it badly, as my presence in England had given her some kind of family anchor outside a (beyond doubt now) childless marriage.

Worst of all, I had to break up a loving relationship with Jochem. It had taken almost ten years before I found someone to love me and to love. And now I had no choice but to leave him behind. My desire to move to the West legally and not just on a student visa outweighed all these disappointments and heartbreaks. By now I was also used to leading with my mind. I couldn’t afford to let my heart decide for me.

CHAPTER TEN

TORONTO

Home

A
s I settled into my seat on the flight from London to Toronto, I was terrified but arrogantly optimistic. I was now putting two continents and an ocean between me and my family and heritage. That should be enough physical and emotional distance. If Toronto lived up to the guidebook copy, I’d create a new family and traditions for myself. It was a lot to ask of a city (and a country) I’d never set foot in. My friend Liz from Nottingham University—the one who suggested I check out the
Globe and Mail
and
Maclean’s—
had moved there a few months before my arrival and was my only contact.

I fell in love with Toronto instantly. Once I cleared Immigration, the nice officer actually said, “Welcome to Canada.” I felt that I was indeed welcomed to this city. No one asked me if I had a history of infectious diseases. That was taken care of in the medical tests I’d done in Nottingham as part of my visa application. The first ride on the Toronto subway on my second day was a revelation. I was accustomed to being the only person of colour on the buses in Nottingham or in certain parts of Liverpool. Now, to be surrounded by so many people who spoke different languages and came from almost every part of the globe instantly laid to rest any self-consciousness I might have had about being the FOB—fresh-off-the-boat—immigrant. Even after eight years of absorbing local life in England, I still felt like an outsider.

In less than ten days in Toronto I was sharing an apartment with a gay man and a straight woman in the Little Italy neighbourhood of the city, which looked both refined and bohemian, just like one of those exterior shots in the American sitcoms I’d watched for years in Cairo and in England. The clincher for me was the stop a mere five-minute walk from my new home on Markham Street for the Wellesley bus, Number 94, which took me directly to Toronto’s gay village at Church and Wellesley. None of this would strike readers who have lived in Toronto or other Western democracies as anything special. But after Cairo and Sana’a, where I lived a furtive and then closeted life, and despite the time in England, that bus ride had all the significance of a moon landing. A transportive experience, literally.

In Nottingham, the gay scene was mainly a couple of bars and one nightclub, all of which got busy on weekends only. I was now living in a city that had a definable gay neighbourhood with bookshops, coffee houses and bars that were open during the day. I don’t think I had been to a gay bar in daylight except for maybe once in London with my then-partner. Every time I visited London, however, I felt like a tourist with time limits. But in Toronto I could finally slow down and enjoy this new world, which, from here on, I would have every right to call mine.

Toronto would be my playground, but I also needed to find some kind of long-term employment to afford living here. I qualified as a book editor under the occupation-demand list that determined my eligibility as an immigrant to Canada. There was almost nothing advertised anywhere that called for an editor with a English graduate degree, or at least nothing that I was qualified for. The Catch-22 of the new immigrant’s life: to get work in Canada, you must have experience in Canada. And you can’t get that experience if no one hires you in the first place. I had enough money to live for, at most, two months without a job. If I was still unemployed by the end of June, I’d have to re-examine my plans and possibly move to a place in Canada where there might be more work opportunities. I was told that Alberta’s or British Columbia’s stronger economy might be more suitable for me, since both had labour shortages. I could work there until I got the Canadian experience that all employers expected. But the idea of leaving a city that I loved so much and so quickly gave me the incentive to try harder.

I lucked out when a friend of a friend passed the name of a contact at a temping agency in downtown Toronto, Kelly Services, which usually supplied offices and telemarketing agencies with temporary workers. My first paycheque came from a two-day stint as a telemarketer for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. I don’t think I sold a single subscription. When it became clear that I wasn’t cut out for phone sales, and since I didn’t have any secretarial or computer experience, I qualified for low-skill filing and mail-sorting jobs. I couldn’t afford not to take on such work. Nightshirts at the Royal Bank on Front Street? Sure. Stuffing flyers at the
Toronto Sun
plant? Why not? It didn’t really matter to me that none of these jobs remotely called on my education or skills. All I wanted was to cover the rent and have enough to pay my grocery bills. It wasn’t every month that I could afford both. My sister would send me more cash, all the while suggesting that I should just leave Canada and go home to Yemen, where my education would be valued and food and shelter taken care of. Our conversations had the exact opposite effect. To go home was to admit defeat and to let the family make decisions for me. Freedom with poverty meant more to me than money without personal choice. I saw things like “position” and “home comforts” as Middle Eastern values that could get in the way of this new life in Toronto if I let them. I asked Faiza to be patient and promised to pay back the money when I could.

Ironically, it took the Middle East to make my life in Toronto tolerable. In late August I spotted an ad in an alternative weekly for an exhibition coordinator job at an artist-run gallery cooperative, YYZ Artists’ Outlet. A Canadian-Arab curator was organizing a festival of contemporary video and visual art from the Arab world and diaspora. Knowledge of Arabic language and culture would be an advantage, the ad copy went. The very things I’d turned my back on might help me land a six-month contract, which would provide some peace of mind. Coming up with $513 for rent plus about $100 for phone and hydro bills every month was proving a struggle. I’d lost weight, as I couldn’t afford to eat well and the stress of unemployment was wearing me down. I was a mama’s boy turned scholarship kid who’d never had to fend for himself before.

I had to get that gallery job. So what if I had to speak or read Arabic while in Canada? I still think I got that job because the two kind women who interviewed me sensed my desperation. I had no art administration experience, although I had just successfully completed an adult-education course in copyediting at Ryerson University and one of the gallery job’s requirements was to compile and edit the exhibition catalogue. No immigrant or general success story would be complete without that one lucky break, and mine was that exhibition, titled …
east of here … (re)imagining the “orient.”
It was heavy on post-colonialism and avant-garde video installations that I thought were too precious. (I much preferred the drag shows on Church Street for entertainment.) None of that mattered. The connections I made from that work experience opened up whole new worlds for me, from art administration to art writing, to alternative politics and independent culture. I soon discovered that while it was a struggle, you could live on very little in Toronto. Although that meant I couldn’t even go out to the gay bars I craved so much on many weekends, I knew I could still go to the Second Cup at the corner of Church and Wellesley and stretch my five dollars over two cups of coffee.

When the contract was over, I had enough leads for parttime art gigs—curating a program on gay life in the Middle East for Inside Out, Toronto’s queer film festival, or writing short art pieces for
Xtra!
, the city’s gay biweekly. But I still needed a regular job that brought home at least a thousand dollars a month to cover food and shelter. I had never experienced winters like Toronto’s, and buying suitable clothing was an expense I hadn’t anticipated. My roommate’s partner, Ben, donated some of his old coats and sweaters just to get me through my first Canadian winter. So back to the temping world I went, where I worked at an office in the Ministry of Education, filing and storing thousands of apprenticeship records. The contract kept getting extended, and I figured out a way to curry favour with the supervisors: don’t act smart, and certainly not smarter than them. And whatever you do, I reminded myself, say nothing of the Ph.D. The building was on Church Street, which meant I could walk up and down through the gay village during my lunch or coffee breaks. It made going back to the cold archives almost bearable.

IN MY INFREQUENT LETTERS
and phone calls to Yemen, I shared none of this with my family. To them, the move to Toronto would be considered a failure if I didn’t have a house and, if I could drive, a car in the first year. People on both sides of the divide often talk of the Middle East as a spiritual destination and put down the West for its materialism, but my experience suggests otherwise. I could live well as a poor immigrant in Toronto because my life was enriched by many other things: from public libraries to public broadcasting to the many parks and free art galleries. And my roommate had a newspaper subscription, which meant free news before the internet made that the norm.

My mother, who initially thought that Canada was close to the United Kingdom, chided me for not flying to see my sister more often. (My aunt in Liverpool thought that Canada was next to Denmark when I first told her I’d be moving here.) Whenever they saw a news item about heavy snowfalls that even mentioned Canada, they’d call to make sure I was safe. At first I thought it was comic; after a while, I resented having to waste time telling them that snowstorms were part of everyday life here. I also started to call Yemen when I knew that my brothers wouldn’t be home, since they’d ask me about the Arab community in Toronto. Where were the mosques? Had I met any good Muslim women I might consider for marriage? If not, they could make arrangements to ship one over for me. Just say the word.

I couldn’t even explain to them that I had no interest in looking for Arab families in Canada to make me feel less homesick. I never got homesick. Sick from home, yes. Helmi and I got into a serious argument when he asked me to look after a friend of a friend who was seeking medical advice in Toronto. I didn’t even know who he was, but the idea of spending days with someone visiting from Yemen seemed like such a waste of my time when I was still enraptured with Toronto’s cultural and gay scene. Each call became an awkward reminder of the fact that the gap between me and them was widening, just as the gap between them and Yemen was tightening. There were few, if any, traces of the family I was born into and grew up with. That family was dead, killed off by a decade in Yemen.

I often wondered what would have happened to them (and me) had we not returned to Yemen. Would Cairo have protected our old family values? And if my father had managed the comeback he always dreamed of, would the financial security that came with it have shielded the family from the conservative influences of life in Sana’a? I don’t have answers, but I do know that the Al-Solaylee family, like many others, got caught in a particular moment of history in the Middle East. They were always reacting to outside forces.

It was a perfect storm of so many political and social factors. The invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union and the war that followed ushered in a new militarized form of Islamic resistance to foreign interference. The intifada in the Palestinian territories reminded many Muslims of the ongoing crisis there. The intifada in particular coincided with the penetration of round-the-clock Arabic-language news channels in the Middle East that trafficked in images of Palestinian rebellion and heroism in one news segment and victimization of the same people in the next. In Egypt, the newly visible Muslim Brotherhood’s war against Anwar Sadat’s peace treaty with Israel—and that country’s widening gap between the rich and poor—created a society that tilted towards extremism. In Yemen, of course, the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait derailed all plans for economic prosperity and brought with it a wave of hardline Islamic followers returning from Saudi Arabia.