Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes

by Kamal Al-Solaylee

  EVEN THOUGH FERIAL worked in the USAID, I didn’t stand a chance of continuing my studies in the United States. Most of the scholarships offered by the US government were in effect bribes for the children of rich and powerful business people and the ruling class in exchange for favourable contracts for American businesses or for gaining political ground in the region. Besides, most of the scholarships focused on science and technology, making my proposed English major an even longer shot. Britain, therefore, seemed a more manageable destination. The local British Council offered a range of scholarships that had no specific area of study attached to them. But those, too, were competitive and usually came with a long waiting list. I needed to find a shortcut. If I waited too long in Yemen, perhaps I’d follow in my siblings’ defeatist footsteps.

  Luckily, a teaching-assistant position in an English language program at Sana’a University opened up. I knew at the interview that I’d got the job since the interview committee, made up of English and American professors, commented on my English proficiency. Step one accomplished. I could network with the British and American staff and seek advice or, more importantly, reference letters. I didn’t have much to do during the day, as most classes were in the evening, so I started to make a list of all the great works of English literature that I hadn’t read and went through them one by one at the British Council library. It all sounds very colonial, even to my ears now: reading Jane Austen or Charles Dickens in Yemen during the monsoon season, in the library of the British Council. This took place at a time before terrorism and attacks on Western targets were to define Yemen in the eyes of the world. The British Council was in an old house on a side street in Sana’a’s downtown. The only security was an old befuddled Yemeni guard whom I got to know well that year. All you needed was to show your membership card. He often left his post to attend prayers, so you could walk in without a card if you timed your visit right. His son, then about nine or ten, filled in for him when he got sick.

  It was, in retrospect, a charmed life. The only reminders that I was in Yemen while inside the British Council were the calls to prayers. The Council also gave away old copies of the Times and Daily Telegraph, my introduction to serious journalism in English and my window into social, especially gay, life in the UK. I read whatever I could lay my hands on: magazines, newspapers, books. As long as it was written in English, I’d read it. English was, and would continue to be, my escape route from Yemen, my path to an openly gay life. I was certain of it. After all, English had already served me well in that regard in Egypt.

  I called that one right. It wasn’t long before I impressed the head of the school, an older English gentleman who’d taught in several Third World countries. He told me about a private scholarship that the Council offered a Yemeni applicant who was deemed worthy of support and a chance at a British education. He’d talk to the right people about it and get back to me. In a way, I thought it was too good to be true, too easy to happen that quickly. A few weeks later, I had a firm offer of financial support if I landed a place at a British institution where I could quickly get a B.A. equivalency and study for a master’s in English. It was at most a two-year grant, after which I had to return to Sana’a. Since I had no other offers and stood no realistic chance of getting anything near as generous, I accepted, without telling anyone in my family. Two years in Britain would give me enough time to plan ahead. From there I could go to the States. Imagine: living in New York. One thing I had no intention of doing was going back to Yemen. After applying to several universities, I accepted the first offer I got, from Keele University in Staffordshire, not even knowing where it was on the map. Without a place, I had no scholarship, or I’d have to wait another full year. I had been in Yemen for about sixteen months and I just couldn’t stand being there (and being celibate) for another year.

  Now came the hard part. Telling my mother that I’d be away for at least two years. I knew how upset she’d be. She’d already hinted that the only thing that kept her going in Sana’a was having her children close by. Her husband provided no comfort. Two decades of trying and failing to restart his business had turned Mohamed into a bitter and argumentative man. In the past he could claim that Lebanese and Egyptian business ethics didn’t suit his. Now, in his home country, what was his excuse? I don’t think Mohamed or Safia had said a word to each other in over a year. After more than forty years of marriage, it was as if they had separated. They’d survived his womanizing, her inability to give him a son until the fifth pregnancy, expulsion from Aden and exodus from Beirut and Cairo, but not Sana’a. Mohamed had his own quarters in the house, and we rarely saw him, anyway. To leave my mother now, when she probably needed me the most, would be extremely selfish. I tested out the idea by telling her that I might be going for some training in the UK for a few weeks. She seemed pleased for me and added that I could visit Faiza and my aunt in Liverpool. Then I dropped the bomb. “Well, I may also go for a full year or two.” To my surprise, she didn’t seem to mind. She knew how unhappy I was in Sana’a. She said one word that captured it all: ihrab, escape. I was stunned. I expected tears and strong opposition. I expected her to beg me to forget about the scholarship and stay close to the family. But after a short silence she repeated that word: escape.

  Run for your life, she might have added. Later she told me that the news devastated her, but she’d learned to give priority to her children’s happiness. As I needed a bit more cash to get me through the transition, she sold her favourite gold bracelet, a family heirloom, to help me buy some sterling in the old market in Sana’a. We had to keep it a secret, as even my sisters would have thought it a major sacrifice and talked her out of it. I never got around to buying her a replacement bracelet. I still regret it.

  Leaving my sisters was more difficult. Plotting my escape had been easy; it had all seemed so remote and far-fetched. It was real now. As a moderate male voice in the family, I knew that my sisters would lose an important ally. Yemen was the end of the line for them. I tried to rationalize it. Well, if they, too, studied hard they might have received scholarships and left the country. Or if they married rich, they could travel out of Yemen more often. It didn’t matter much in the end. I managed to break away because I wanted it so badly and because I was a man. While they were all happy for me, they knew that baby brother Kamal would be leaving the nest for good, abandoning them to look after two parents who lived in a state of indifference to each other.

  My sisters’ capacity for sacrifice was (and still is) something I accepted as fact but could never understand. I don’t do sacrifice, unless it’s a temporary measure to achieve a higher goal down the road. Certainly, part of their ability to suffer and sacrifice came from gender expectations in that society, but I think a bigger part simply had to do with life in Yemen. In a world that cut choices short for women, sacrifice gave you something to do—it was an achievement of a sort, a choice, so to speak.

  I spent my last few weeks in Sana’a both counting the days and wishing time would go slowly. I couldn’t wait to get out, but wanted to stay longer with my mother and sisters. I knew I had no intention of ever going back. Somehow I was less attached to my brothers and father. Being gay made me side with the women in the family and stop acting like a man around the house. That said, there was little evidence of machismo around the family home on my last night in Sana’a. Tears, hugs, advice. Helmi gave me a copy of the Quran to keep with me at all times for protection. I left it at home. My father repeated one of his stories from his time in London after the Second World War. My mother sobbed quietly in the kitchen as my sisters took turns calming her down.

  I had to be strong. Sentimentality would hold me back. I was finally going to be doing what I’d dreamed of for years: living in England and possibly openly as a gay man.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ENGLAND

  Escape

  I kept looking at the UK visa stamped on my passport. My letter from the British Council was tucked into the inside pocket of the oversize
d black jacket I’d bought from a street vendor in Sana’a a few days earlier. I wanted to make sure that neither my passport nor that letter could slip out, so I looked for a jacket with a button on the inside pocket until I found one. It didn’t matter that it was two sizes too big for what was then my very thin body. I couldn’t risk losing the documents and delaying my journey to England or being prevented from entering the country.

  I didn’t think through what the next few weeks or months would be like. I convinced myself that I could cope with anything England threw at me. It started as soon as I stood at the Customs and Immigration line at Heathrow Airport. After looking at my passport and proof of scholarship, a very blunt officer asked if I carried any health certificate. I stared at her in amazement. I had no idea what she was talking about. She explained that students from certain Third World countries with a documented history of infectious diseases were usually asked to present a certificate of good health. I had none, and as far as I could remember no one in the British Council or embassy in Yemen had suggested such a thing. That document, I later realized, could be vitally important for an international student in England. Because full-time students were eligible for National Health Service coverage, the idea was not to overload the system with sick students from poor countries. But back then, in the first few minutes of a new life in England, that encounter opened my eyes to the fact that, while I might be living in England, I would always be a Third World citizen suspected of having any number of infectious diseases.

  I signed some kind of form and gave Faiza’s address in Liverpool as a contact. Sure enough, within a week or two I had a visit from a health officer, who asked me to undergo some chest X-rays to eliminate any possibility of tuberculosis. “Don’t take it personally,” a very sensitive Faiza told me. I didn’t, not because I was thick-skinned, but because I had too many distractions. I had newspapers and magazines to read, TV shows to watch, movies that were shown in their entirety, not edited by the censors like the ones we used to watch in Sana’a. This was the reason I wanted to study in England. I wanted to immerse myself in a culture that I perceived to be the exact opposite of my life in the Middle East.

  But what I forgot to factor in was that although I’d arrived in England I hadn’t exactly left Yemen behind. For economic and practical reasons, my sister’s and aunt’s homes in Liverpool initially served as shelter. By 1988 Faiza had been living there for seven years and my aunt for nearly fifteen. You wouldn’t know it. Neither felt at home in her North England surroundings and did very little—nothing, in fact—to adapt to them.

  My aunt Fatima, two years older than my mother, was barely educated and had lived much of her years in Liverpool a prisoner in her own home. She only went out with her husband, Ahmed Sultan—my favourite family member at the time—or her one son, Nabil, who’d spent most of his adult life in Liverpool but longed to return to Aden. He arranged his own marriage to a woman from Aden he didn’t know. I remember thinking that perhaps we could trade places. He could go back to Yemen and I’d take his British passport and settle in England.

  The multicultural and predominantly Arabic and African Granby community, off Liverpool’s crime- and riot-prone Princess Road, represented a kind of immigrant experience that I’d spend the rest of my life avoiding: closed-off households that showed no interest in British culture or civic society. My aunt, who passed away in November 2011, turned her house into a shrine to all things Yemeni. Ethnic food markets provided her with almost any ingredient she needed to prepare the same meals she made back in Aden, as well as khat. The living room was turned into a diwan for chewing khat and smoking hookah. It was difficult to tell if they adopted this way of life to preserve Yemeni roots or as a retreat from British society, which, while by no means welcoming of all immigrants, had served them well financially. The only sign they were living in England in that household in the 1980s was the TV, which was usually on, set on mute. By the time Arab satellite TV began carrying channels from all over the Middle East the following decade, the British programs were effectively obsolete.

  Faiza fared a bit better in that department, but only a bit. She and her husband ran a popular corner store in Walton, a working-class but mainly white neighbourhood. The store was sandwiched between the football grounds of the city’s two main teams, Liverpool and Everton, so it did well on game days. Faiza had to learn the art of chit-chatting with customers while bringing them their cigarettes, cat food or the morning paper. It must have been hard for her to go from being the daughter of a business tycoon in a British colony to a shopkeeper’s wife in Britain, but she coped well. She was obsessed with Princess Diana and would go through all the tabloids looking for her pictures. The odd brat or yob would occasionally give her and her husband, Hamza, a hard time, but by and large the two enjoyed a good income and a quiet if not always happy married life. Faiza had not been able to conceive. That part of their lives only got more problematic later in their marriage, but in those early years the issue of children didn’t define their world.

  Once the store was closed, she and her husband would go upstairs to their flat and spend the evening watching videos of Egyptian films and the odd British program. Faiza rarely went out at night, and visits to the shopping centre and back during the day became her only leisure activity. As soon as I arrived, I did some research for her to find the closest schools offering courses in English as second language so she could improve her spoken and written English. At the very least she could watch TV without asking me to translate anything more complicated than chat-show banter. She declined. Too old for school, she said. Our mother responded the same way when Mohamed and her older daughters suggested she learn how to read and write when we lived in Beirut. In retrospect, perhaps Faiza didn’t want to come across as better educated than her husband, himself a high-school dropout who worked as a sailor for many years before settling in Liverpool. I understood about half of what he said. He spoke a strange mix of Arabic and English that suggested both were his second language.

  My Liverpool family’s England would not be mine. I didn’t see the point of living somewhere that could be sliced off and transported back to Yemen without any noticeable difference. I completely understand the current European (and even North American) hostility to multiculturalism and the several declarations of its failure by the likes of Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor. The Arab community was still a relatively new one in Britain despite the long colonial history that bound people from the Middle East and Arabian Gulf with the monarchy. Still, the way it isolated itself from the general British experience and the hostile tone with which, for example, my aunt and sister talked about the decadent English folks with whom they did daily business struck me as inexplicable. They often cited the evidence of knocked-up teenagers as proof of a lack of morals in British society. Why, I wondered, couldn’t they appreciate the freedoms of that society instead? How could they still long for a life in Yemen and talk fondly of family and friends back home who had no right to express themselves?

  To me, it all came down to the issue of gender and sexual freedom. I was finally free to walk into a gay bar without looking over my shoulder or fear of getting arrested. Even when I became familiar with the notion of gay bashing—particularly in the more violent north of England—I still figured it was better to experience homophobia from some drunken yobs than from an organized state or as part of religious crackdown. I knew immediately that what I’d gained by moving to England outweighed what I’d lost by moving away from the Arab world.

  Still, it took me a year to break away from the influence of family in Liverpool. As I settled into the Keele University campus, I made fewer trips back to Liverpool. Slowly, I began to feel uncomfortable speaking Arabic. I was convinced that the more I spoke it, the less my chance of reaching native-level English proficiency. From here on, Arabic would be on an as-needed basis. I had stopped listening to Arabic music many years before, so I now graduated to the next level of cultural abandonment. I would not cook
with the spices that Faiza loaded into my luggage when she and Hamza drove me to the Keele campus. For one thing, the communal kitchen in our student residence was too small, and I felt self-conscious about the aroma in such tight quarters. Instead, I bought a lot of ready-made meals at a supermarket—the kind that was an adventure for me in Cairo only a few years before.

  One of the first things I noticed about this change of diet, however, was a constant stomach cramp and gas. For over twenty years I’d seldom eaten anything that hadn’t been prepared in the family kitchen from scratch, and suddenly eating all this pre-packaged food wreaked havoc on my system. The general practitioner I went to see on campus suggested I learn to cook more fresh food. I blurted out that I came from a culture where men didn’t cook. “Well, you’re not there anymore,” he quietly responded. Partly out of laziness and partly because of a longing to immerse myself in British culture, I associated Arabic food with the kind of life that my sister and aunt were leading in Liverpool.

  I guess all of that would suggest I was self-loathing. I think I was. I wanted to be as English as possible. I listened carefully to classmates and professors and made notes of expressions and rhythms of speech that sounded distinctly British. I remember a police officer—as a foreign student I had to register with the Home Office—telling me to get in touch if I was ever “in a spot of bother.” What a great expression, and in it went into my mental database. I had a very solid English education in Cairo, but nothing compared to this opportunity to live the language—a language that I associated not just with survival but with my right to live in dignity as a gay man.

  Of course, that dream of living the language, and my impulse to idealize English language and literature, would be interrupted every time I encountered some form of racism or discrimination. I rationalized it to myself by remembering the harassment and humiliation I experienced at the hands of the Yemeni internal security men when I first moved to Sana’a. If people from my own country did that to me, I could at least survive this occasional outburst of verbal violence. I got called Paki several times, even on campus. Sometimes the encounters scared me so much I’d walk as fast as I could and hail the first cab I found. My trusty British Council guidebook told me to ignore these jeers, as it was best not to engage the people who made such comments in a conversation or a fight. Luckily, I developed a thicker skin, but for the rest of my time in England, my comfort level in that country would be undercut by its racial violence. I learned to avoid being out late at night or on weekends. I avoided pubs, as I soon realized that most of these incidents happened at closing time and involved people who’d had one-too-many pints. I never told my mother or any of my siblings about these early experiences. It was in my best interest to cultivate a blemish-free image of life in England in order not to give them any excuse to ask me to return to Yemen.