Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes

by Kamal Al-Solaylee

  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

  In 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 wor
king-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.

  By 1976, my oldest brother, Helmi, was the first to bring some of these hardened attitudes inside the family home. A handsome, secular law student at Cairo University, Helmi fell under the spell of rebellious Egyptian middle-class men his age who discovered that neither socialism nor Sadat’s new free-trade philosophy and nascent pro-capitalism would improve lives. Islam, until then relegated to the sides of the political landscape, emerged as an alternative. For many years Sadat’s mantra went something like this: No politics in religion and no religion in politics. It outraged young Egyptians and the Muslim groups, which until then had been relatively quiet. I wish I could say the ideological shift in Helmi was gradual, or that our parents had time to wean him off it. The truth is that one summer day in 1976, he woke up to tear down the posters of movie stars in his room (including a gorgeous one of Clint Eastwood circa 1973 that I secretly adored), rearranged his bedroom to make space for a prayer mat that faced Mecca, and just like that found Islam.

  Even though Helmi’s notion of a return to Islam would be called moderate by today’s standards of militarized hard-liners, my father—ever the secularist—became deeply concerned about this conversion. For one thing, it meant that Helmi was mixing with young men beneath his social status, and for another, it became a case of a son trying to control family destiny while the father was still alive and well. Islam undercut Mohamed’s authority as a patriarch. He did try to change Helmi’s new direction. He’d often challenge him on his notion of Allah as a furious, punitive force. To my father, Islam was more about ethics, compassion and charity. It had nothing to do with banning belly dancers or censorship of art and culture. And it certainly should not interfere with how money was made or interest rates were determined. “Why would God throw me in hell,” he argued with Helmi, who would reply, “Because you don’t pray five times a day or fast at Ramadan.” Mohamed would counter by saying that he went about his business and raised eleven children, and raised them well. That to him was more important than praying or fasting.

  But if Helmi’s change of direction was fought on a symbolic and ideological level with his father, it was the beginning of an oppressive time for my sisters from which they have not yet recovered—and which long ago eroded their will to resist.

  MY FIVE REMAINING SISTERS in Cairo—Farida, Ferial, Hoda, Hanna, Raja’a—were very much integrated into Egyptian society. That meant coming and going as they pleased, wearing whatever they thought was fashionable and appropriate, including miniskirts, and applying as much or as little makeup as the occasion demanded. I loved that about my sisters and my parents back then. The family pictures of the time stand as testaments to the last great wave of Arab social liberalism and secularism.

  For young women like my sisters in the Cairo of the early 1970s, the idea of wearing a hijab was unthinkable. To young Egyptians, it symbolized poor and uncultured country folks—the kind who were to serve as maids and not as fashion models. (The hijab’s association with oppression of women is a newer, Western phenomenon.) Egypt’s large cities—Cairo and Alexandria—had gone through a great period of modernization starting in the 1920s, during which women adopted Western dress and abandoned traditional garb. That came to an end in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s.

  Nothing symbolized the freedom we had as a family as much as our annual summer vacations in Alexandria and the bikini-shopping ritual beforehand in downtown Cairo, which brought out the fashionista in me, even at the tender age of ten or eleven. I looked forward to it every summer and spent the weeks before going through women’s magazines and cutting out my favourite designs. I have absolutely no recollection of the men in the family raising any objections, although I suspect that my parents were secretly concerned about indulging this feminine side. Egyptian cinema featured several distressing stereotypes of the effete (never explicitly described as gay) fashion designer, florist or dance instructor. By the end of the movie these figures often got humiliated by the macho leading man. I wonder if my mother thought I was headed in that direction—which I certainly was.

  My father dressed in a suit even for a day at the beach with his children. This photo shows our last family trip to Alexandria, Egypt, in 1976. A mere year or two later, the thought of my sisters wearing bikinis was unacceptable.

  “The colour of this brown two-piece makes you look darker,” I’d tell my sister Raja’a as she went through the swimwear selection in a crowded shop near Talat Harb Street in downtown Cairo. She picked a lime-green bikini instead. “I love this one so much I want to wear it myself,” I blurted out to Ferial, clinching her choice of a black-and-white striped swimsuit. When we eventually got to the beach, Mohamed—in his summer suit and tie—and Safia would listen to the radio or talk to other Egyptian families nearby while all the children got into the water. None of us were swimmers as such, but the point was to leave Cairo for two weeks at the hottest time of the year.

  I believe that our last trip was in 1976. By the following year, Helmi’s embrace of Islam was getting stricter, and his constant berating of our sisters for their love of “risqué” clothes or excessive makeup was drowning out my father’s constant praise. His daughters were helween (beautiful), he’d tell them. When Mohamed was really feeling generous and Safia was within earshot, he’d add, “Just like your mother.” The old flirt may have lost his wealth but not his way with women. His women, at least. It must have been hard on him to realize that all the women he prided himself on catching back in Aden were probably into him for the money. In Cairo, while still comfortable, he was just a middle-aged man with eleven children.

  EVEN AS A CHILD I did not escape Helmi’s transformation. I looked up to him, but he’d ignore me until I joined him in prayer, which even at thirteen or so I didn’t feel like doing. I didn’t understand the point of being religious; I associated it with old people. During the holy month of Ramadan, I’d hear no end of it if I didn’t fast or if I spent the day playing instead of reading the Quran. “Leave him alone—he’s still a baby,” my mother told Helmi repeatedly. “He’s as big as a horse,” Helmi would answer back. I was already nostalgic for the days when we were an all-secular household. My immediately older brother, Khairy, was more amenable to this new form of religious observance, and soon enough he was telling me and my other brother, Wahbi, off for not praying or going to the mosque on Fridays with him and Helmi. Wahbi and I cared more about music and film and were in the habit of sneaking out to movie theatres on Fridays (our day off from school) to watch the latest Arabic or foreign releases. Going to a mosque seemed like a waste of a weekend. Who needed to spend his free day listening to an angry imam and watching sco
res of men nodding in agreement?

  My sisters Raja’a (right) and Ferial and I pose with our first-born niece, Rasha, in 1978. Note my afro—I was also wearing bell-bottomed jeans and high heels. I’d started listening to American disco music by then and liked the fashion that accompanied it.

  Similarly, my sisters did their best to ignore Helmi’s criticism (and later Khairy’s) and continue with their regular beauty and fashion routine. But there was only so much you could do before you started self-censoring—self doubting is more like it—and taking safer options. The skirts got longer, the makeup lighter. Dyeing their hair was for special occasions. A new reality set in.

  My sister Farida, Child Number Three in the family and the next in line to get married, had a glamorous career and looks to match. Statuesque, even-tempered, with a good secretarial training from the American University in Cairo’s School of Continuing Education, Farida found a job in 1974 as a secretary at the Liberian embassy in Cairo. Her salary of three hundred US dollars a month would have been considered very high in Cairo back in the 1970s, and probably by many Egyptians today. More importantly, the job opened up the world of the international diplomatic community to her, which came with parties, receptions and a string of gentlemen admirers. I’d sit up in the early evenings during the school year and watch her apply her makeup or get dressed in the room she shared with two of my other sisters. It didn’t take me long to insist that she come to school on parent-teacher nights. My mother must have known I was afraid it would be discovered that she was illiterate, and she often came up with an excuse not to go and asked Farida to fill in for her.