Another new reality. As sad as I was to see my beloved sisters relegated to far-from-equal status, I had my own struggles to deal with. Where was I? Who were these people who ate green leaves called khat, storing it in their mouths before spitting it all out in a bowl? The khat-chewing sessions in the afternoons, especially on Thursdays, emerged as the major social activity of men and women in Sana’a. If you wanted to get ahead and network, you had to spend hundreds of riyals every week buying and sharing the stuff. I took an instant aversion to it, which, my brother Khairy always reminded me, was my biggest mistake and the main reason I didn’t feel at home in Yemen. Given that it’s a mild form of narcotic, I see both the point and the irony of his comment. You needed to be on a high to come to terms with the country’s many lows. Not even the homoeroticism of an all-male gathering could tempt me.
For the first few days Wahbi and I walked around like two tourists on an exotic vacation. My father encouraged us to familiarize ourselves with our ancestral land. “This is where you’ll make a career without having to beg for a work permit from the Egyptians,” Mohamed would tell us. I still felt out of place and longed to return to Cairo, at least to my new gay life. Not all the differences were emotional, though. I genuinely had trouble deciphering the dialect of people from Sana’a, and almost always felt like bringing one of my cousins or siblings who had been there for a while as an interpreter. Even when I walked alone and caught another man’s eyes, I’d look away in fear.
I figured there’d be no Nile Hilton Tavern there, and even if there was one, I wouldn’t dare go inside. I’d only been sexually active for two years, and now I had to be celibate again. It didn’t help that my cousins and even my own siblings made my difficulty at adjusting a running gag during social gatherings. At a traditional Yemeni restaurant, I asked to see a menu, which had my cousin Taha in tears laughing. There was no menu. The waiter just told you what the kitchen could do today and you ordered one of the items he mentioned. Suddenly, I was the odd one out even within the family. I was spoiled, I was told. Toughen up, Helmi advised, or I’d find it impossible to make my way in Sana’a. But I wanted to make my way out of this society, not into it. Adapting was my only choice, however, and despite the profound sadness of those early days, some bright spots followed.
Part of me enjoyed the quaintness of Sana’a. Whole districts felt like a movie set for a period piece, circa the seventeenth century, perhaps one of those racist Hollywood movies from the 1940s, Road to Morocco, or something with “Ali Baba” in the title. The feeling of being a tourist in my own land offered temporary relief from the pain of losing Cairo. At night, Sana’a became quiet and strangely serene. The din of buses, speeding cars and carousing youth that defined nightlife in Cairo was replaced by silence. You would see very little traffic after 9 p.m., apart from the usual central security Jeeps with armed soldiers roaming the streets. I wasn’t sure what they were trying to detect or deter. Random violence and break-ins were unheard of. As locals explained to us, the patrols were just the president’s way of imprinting his security apparatus on the brains of the citizens—just in case they got any ideas. By that point President Saleh had been in power for nearly eight years, the latest Yemeni president after assassinations had finished off his two predecessors. Political violence was to be expected in a country that was largely tribal (as Yemen is to this day). That explained the extra measures of security in an otherwise peaceful country.
Despite my father’s promises and my brother’s assurances, as Yemenis from Aden we were treated as second-class citizens. To get the coveted Yemeni identity card we had to go through a long and humiliating application process. Because Wahbi and I were the last in the family to seek work in Sana’a, we went through this Orwellian experience together. In an old building that was cut off from the street by a large metal gate, through which one applicant at a time was let in, we filled in one form after another. The questions ranged from the basic data—birthdate, education, passport number—to what could only be described as the stuff of dystopian fiction. What, if any, political or social organizations had we joined in the last ten years? Who had we mixed with socially in the last few years? (This was a question I had no intention of answering truthfully. “Lots of gay Egyptians and Westerners” was not the sort of response you wrote.) Almost each application included a request for a brief synopsis of about ten or fifteen lines of our lives so far. It was humiliating. “We all had to go through it,” Helmi would tell me, as if that made it more comforting. It was just as well I had such low expectations going into that country.
When I finally had an “interview” with a security agent, I was horrified by how much he knew about my brothers and sisters. He had a family file where he had collected our “bios” and proceeded to quiz me as if to see if I or any of my siblings had lied to him. These interviews always took place in offices that were brightly lit or had big windows. The contrast between the bright setting and the dark nature of the interview was deliberate, I think. It signalled that everything was being conducted in the open. There were no secrets, and you couldn’t complain to anyone, even if you wanted. This was Yemeni government business. Like it or leave it.
WITHIN WEEKS I FOUND MYSELF involved in that world of internal security in a more direct way. As a Yemeni I had to spend one year in a government agency as part of my military service. After a few days of mock training and bribing my way out of spending the night in a dormitory, and given that I spoke good English, I was assigned the role of translator and interpreter for the main commanders in the central security unit. I wasn’t quite sure why they needed a translator there, but I figured it’d be a better way of performing my service than patrolling the streets or guarding foreign embassies, something that Helmi and Khairy had to do. I look with amazement at a picture of me in green military uniform that Khairy took during my first week of service. Somehow, I think, the family wanted visual proof of my masculinity and place in Yemeni society as a man. I thought of it more or less as male drag in the style of the Village People or Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
“Time will pass so quickly,” my mother would tell me. And before I knew it, I fell into a routine. I got up at five thirty in the morning, reported for duty by seven and returned home at two in the afternoon in time for lunch. As soon as I could, I took off the uniform and started listening to Streisand and watching old videos of 1980s pop that I’d taped off Egyptian TV. Like my own father, who’d mastered the art of denial over many years after we were kicked out of Aden, I thought it wouldn’t be long before I went back to Cairo—or at the very least got out of Yemen. Even as Cairo was becoming more conservative and the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood threatened its secular society, it still worked as largely a liberal society. I had female friends there with whom I socialized, and of course a network of gay friends—two avenues of connection that were impossible for me in Sana’a.
My brother Khairy took this picture of me wearing my military uniform in 1988 with his new Polaroid camera. To me, the uniform was drag; to him, a symbol of masculinity.
I found it extremely difficult to make friends in Sana’a, so I spent more time with my sisters at home and experienced the country through their eyes as much as mine. On days when the chief commanding officer I reported to was out of the country, I skipped work and instead accompanied either Hoda or Ferial to work. Hoda worked in a very Yemeni office environment, while Ferial’s job was predominantly with Americans in the USAID office. I’d help Hoda with translation or paperwork, and in the offices of USAID I mainly read American magazines and USA Today. The difference in how the two women were treated opened my eyes to the discrimination in that society. Hoda was talked down to by her male co-workers, who often told her how to do her job, while Ferial was given a great deal of freedom and relied on as a local woman who knew Yemeni society. Hoda took the discrimination in stride and made the most of the job. She couldn’t afford not to work.
FIVE YEARS INTO HIS NEW LIFE in Yemen, my father had yet to mak
e any major business deals or bring in an income. As was his habit in Cairo, he spent hours every day typing up letters and making calls that usually led to nothing. I was struck by his lack of compassion for his own daughters. When we lived in Beirut and Cairo, Mohamed championed his beautiful daughters and took pride in their education and freedom. He often reminded us of the freedoms he gave his daughters and expected them to respect his trust. In Yemen, he turned a blind eye to their experiences as second-class citizens. Every now and then he’d admit that this was a backward society, but that admission almost always came with resigned acceptance of it as a fact.
What made Yemen even harder as a new home was the strict adherence to Islam across the different classes and communities. It became impossible not to organize the day according to the five calls to prayer—at dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset and night—since everybody else worked around them. And it wasn’t just any kind of Islam but a strict Zaidi version that applied sharia law. (As late as 1987, public hanging or flogging in a designated area of the city centre passed for entertainment for some watchers.) When word got out that two men who were found “sodomizing” were scheduled to be flogged after Friday prayers, I felt physically ill. The feeling only intensified when I heard Helmi’s reaction. They deserved it, he said nonchalantly. Yemen hardened the attitudes of an already observant brother and worked hard on wearing down my sisters’ defences. By then, we had a strict rule in the house: No man, not even a male cousin or other close relative, could come into the living room unless my sisters were all covered up or at least wearing long-sleeved dresses. The gender apartheid operated outside and inside with equal rigour. The architecture of Yemeni homes accommodated this separation. Almost all residences had two entry doors: one that led to the family living room and another directly to the diwan, or salon, which stayed mostly empty and in which men were invited to sit until the coast was clear, so to speak. Repairmen or labourers had to wait outside, and if they needed to go through the living quarters, they had to avoid any eye contact with the women.
Only ten years before, the same women were splashing in their bikinis in Alexandria.
I internalized all of these customs rather quickly, but never felt at home with them. I acted my way through life as if I were a different person. Or as if I were two people: one who would show up for work and deal with gruff military men whose strong Sana’ani dialect I still had difficulty understanding; the other who would spend the evening writing to his Cairo and international friends—my school friend Nancy had moved to Chicago a year before to join her sister, and a buddy from the Nile Hilton Tavern had moved back to Bournemouth, England—and dreaming of a getaway.
EVEN IF I COULD LEAVE Yemen, it wouldn’t be for a few more months, as there was no cutting short my military service. It wasn’t long before I understood the central security unit’s need for an in-house translator. Most of my work was to translate business letters and proposals as well as catalogues from international arms manufacturers and dealers. The office’s main resource was an English-Arabic technical dictionary, which I consulted regularly, since not all my language training could have prepared me for translating the specifications for grenades or “city-friendly” military tanks (tanks that could be rolled out on streets without leaving fractures or craters in the asphalt). While I reported directly to a captain, most meetings were run by the head of the security apparatus, Mohammed Abdullah Saleh, the president’s older brother. Some of what I and another colleague had to translate were personal medical reports, and when needed I’d act as English teacher to any of Mohammed Saleh’s extended family. As long as I said yes and never argued, I was fine. Although there were incidents where I left early without permission or made translation errors and was punished the next morning by being forced to do push-ups in the courtyard to the captain’s taunts.
Political and personal survival was all I could think of. With my military service out of the way, I’d be able to do whatever I wanted. And what I wanted was to get out of that country as fast as humanly possible. I knew that would mean leaving my family behind, including my mother and sisters, with whom I was closer now that I shared their sense of entrapment. Safia was in her mid-fifties by then, and four years in Yemen had taken a toll on her health and looks. Her rheumatism got more severe and developed into arthritis. She found it hard to stand up for long or take steps up or down in the family home. In effect, at just fifty-six, she was housebound. There were not that many places anyway for her to visit; my sisters did the grocery shopping, and since women had few public spaces to mingle, if Safia went out at all she just visited other relatives or family friends—from one living room to another. Even Victorian women got to go to balls, I thought. Her life, like that of her daughters, had changed dramatically. The Safia who’d walked up and down Cairo’s markets, bargaining down fruit and vegetable sellers and chatting with clerks in the haberdashery shop, was gone. To me it was like watching the life drain out of one woman after another in the family.
In 1988, I was invited to a social gathering with a group of men from Sana’a who were, like me, fulfilling their military service. I have no recollection of their names. As I look at the picture, I barely recognize myself—I’m sitting down, far left—let alone the others.
As a man, I knew at least that I had the gender advantage in Sana’a. I could go out wherever I wished, and if I chose to travel, I didn’t need a male companion’s approval. When my sisters would visit us in Cairo, my brother accompanied them to the Sana’a airport to sign off on documents to indicate his approval of their travel plans.
“You’re lucky to be a man,” my sister Raja’a—who, like me, loved American movies and grew up adoring Tom Jones—would tell me. She was married for one year to a Yemeni man who lived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and had a daughter in 1987 before her husband more or less abandoned her and married another woman. Her life was effectively ruined—a single, divorced mother at twenty-eight had few prospects in Sana’a’s ultraconservative society. It took her almost three years to get a divorce in absentia. She never saw her husband again.
My sister Hanna was also unhappy with her domestic situation, having been forced into marriage with a man she didn’t know well. Both sisters grew up watching romantic Egyptian and Hollywood movies and felt betrayed by what the move to Yemen had done to their dreams of independent and free lives. Watching those same movies or listening to the same music in their company at times became unbearable as they quietly wept, doing their best to hide their tears.
Slowly, both sisters started to turn to religion as a way of licking their wounds. They insisted that they found praying or reading the Quran to be comforting, that it didn’t mean they were becoming hardline or intolerant like many other people around them. It seemed to be a coping mechanism. Naturally, Helmi was supportive of their discovery of Islam and praised them for following their rightful path in life. Any attempt on my part to get them to return to our secular roots would have been seen as interference. My two other sisters, Hoda and Ferial, were unmarried and seemed to have resisted the tide of sudden religiosity for now. They talked of trying and failing to get out of Yemen. Hoda was engaged briefly to an Egyptian and was secretly hoping he’d relocate to Cairo so she could follow him. Ferial would go on any business trip or to any conference the USAID would send her. But despite all these escape attempts, they eventually accepted Sana’a as their home. “We’ll be buried here,” Hoda would say, part in jest, part in desperation.
I was determined not to fall into the same trap. I felt guilty for turning my back on them and plotting my exit strategy without them. But it was easier that way. My fate couldn’t be the same as theirs. My father sensed what was happening and tried to dissuade me from any plans to immigrate or study abroad. It’ll break your mother’s heart, he cautioned. I knew that, but it was either her heart or mine. I didn’t have the luxury of saving both.
But just as things were getting serious, along came some moments of comic relief. Because the number of women
outnumbered men in Yemeni society, it wasn’t that uncommon for matchmakers to visit family homes with details of brides who might make suitable matches for the men in well-to-do households—sometimes even married males, as Muslim men have the right to marry up to four, although that remains a rare arrangement. Word must have got out that Wahbi and I were single and in our twenties, even though he was still in university and I had no job. I’d get a kick out of hearing out various descriptions of women—they were always beautiful and dutiful—who might one day make me a happy and contented man. Now that I’ve lived in the West for nearly a quarter of a century, I look back at that phase of life as if I’m watching a Bollywood movie in my head where my family and I played the leads.
Traditionally, the matchmakers visited on Friday evening, which clashed with my favourite radio show on Voice of America, featuring the countdown of the Billboard Top 20 singles chart. I realize it must sound strange to be listening to which song climbed to Number 1 in the United States with one ear and marriage plans involving complete strangers with the other. But I was used to living a double life by then. My brother and I sat through the descriptions of the women just to please the matchmakers. Even my sisters and my mother—bless them—didn’t approve of being married that way and merely humoured the matchmakers.
I often wondered if any of my sisters had by then guessed that I wasn’t interested in women at all. Perhaps they were just trying to protect me or play the game by going through the motions with the matchmakers. It would throw my brother and father off my gay scent for a little while at least.
Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes Page 11