Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes

by Kamal Al-Solaylee

  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.

  Day-to-day life in Yemen continued to reflect some of these larger geopolitical movements. Many members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula who operated out of Yemen were said to be graduates from the resistance to the Soviets in Afghanistan (as, of course, was the membership of the main organization). In 2000, members of al Qaeda in Yemen struck the navy destroyer USS Cole in the port of Aden, killing seventeen Americans. Ever since, Yemen struggled to achieve political stability within its own borders, which in turn drove away potential investors, who saw the country as too dangerous. Oil companies would do work with the devil, so they stayed in Yemen. Otherwise, its economic outlook was growing dim, and the social tensions increased. As did the dependence on religion. As Ferial once told me, she could escape it all whenever she read the Quran. It calmed her soul and gave her the strength to go on.

  I, on the other hand, experienced something completely different. The longer I lived in Toronto, the more convinced I became that I’d made the right choice. And that’s what it came down to. I had choices. I don’t think my sisters, in particular, had any. Our lives diverged in so many ways, but the biggest difference was that I could make choices about every aspect of my life: where to live, how to live, what to spend my money on and who to sleep with.

  Winters aside, everything about Toronto felt right, and I felt safe—just one among the millions of immigrants who over the decades have called this wonderful country home. “You are what this country is all about,” an editor friend would remind me. I never lost faith in Canada, but I had to ask myself, why was I still underemployed? Did my very ethnic name and Middle Eastern background scare off employers? How much longer could I survive on minimum wage?

  THE SUMMER OF 1997 was a turning point in my Canadian life. I found out about a very cheap one-bedroom apartment in Chinatown where the rent was even lower than what I paid for the house share. For $475 a month I had my own space in Toronto. It wasn’t grand by any means. It sat in a cul-de-sac that you got to from an alleyway and backed on to the storeroom of a Chinese restaurant. But, again, the College streetcar took me to the edge of the gay village in ten minutes. My downstairs neighbour was a filmmaker and illustrator who also lived on very little. I became a regular contributor to Xtra! and applied for jobs at gay video stores and sex lines in order to make the most of my freedom. I didn’t get any such jobs, but to place my byline in a gay paper fulfilled my dream of living openly. The odd Arab gay man I met at the time thought it was inappropriate and I should adopt a pen name. That defeated the purpose of coming to Canada, I felt.

  Then I landed a three-month contract at an online agency that was about to put the content of a movie-listings magazine on a website. It was the heyday of the internet boom—a world of crazy ideas and no revenue models. The eccentric South African CEO who interviewed me for the job responded well to my immigrant story and hired me on the spot. Finally I had a job that would pay me about two thousand dollars a month, which to me was a fortune. I remember what I did with my first paycheque in late September: I went to the Bay and bought a TV and video recorder. I didn’t have either in my first three months of living in my Chinatown apartment. I always tell my friends that I might be the only person in the world who missed out on the media frenzy surrounding the death and funeral of Princess Diana, as I followed it on the radio and in print only.

  The three-month gig was extended to a regular contract with decent salary and health benefits. I needed the latter for the usual reasons: dental and drug plans. I also started writing for the urban magazine Eye Weekly (now the Grid) as a freelance arts and theatre reviewer. As much as I loved the gay ghetto, I wanted to get out of it as a journalist. It took almost two years, but the pieces of my new life in Canada had started to fall into place. I moved into a world of arts writing, gallery hopping and jazz and cabaret music, which became my forte in the gay press. I was now writing in the kind of magazines that I drooled over as a young man in Cairo and fought to bring into Yemen. It was a charmed life.

  And it got more charming when I met my partner, Motaz, a York University dance student who was already performing in local festivals. He came from the same family as a famous Syrian poet that I’d read in school, and spoke English, French and Arabic. Beautiful. Crazy. Passionate. And six years younger. And while we may have shared an Arabic background, we looked like a mixed-race couple. He had light skin, light brown hair and green eyes. I didn’t always like his work as a choreographer, but he became part of my new life as an arts writer in Toronto, and I a part of his dance world, especially once he moved back to Montreal after graduation.

  I shared so little of my new life in Toronto with my family. They wouldn’t have understood any part of it. And I wasn’t sure which would be worse to them: that my partner was a man or that he was a choreographer-dancer. It was just another example of how the family I once knew was lost to me. In the Beirut or Cairo that we lived in, it was quite common to be surrounded by members of the creative community—writers, actors, journalists. We didn’t just consume art but lived in a world that supported and encouraged it. But whenever I talked now to my sisters or brothers about my making a living writing about the arts, they’d encourag
e me to find something more respectable and stable. After a while I just started to tell them that I was working in a corporate job and that I made enough money to stop borrowing from my sister, whose own life changed radically in the fall of 1998.

  Faiza’s workaholic husband, Hamza, died at home from a heart attack while watching TV. It wasn’t uncommon for him to fall asleep on the couch in their living room, but he’d always get up after midnight and go to bed. After all, he worked about twelve to fifteen hours a day, every day of the year, including Christmas. He loved Yemeni food that came drenched in fat, and never exercised. Whenever my sister, at the doctor’s suggestion, tried to cook with olive oil or use less fat, Hamza would throw a temper tantrum. Food was his emotional release, in part because he didn’t have a child to dote on. When Faiza woke up around 3 a.m. and noticed he wasn’t there, she decided to check the living room. He was pronounced dead as soon as the paramedics arrived. I don’t think Faiza was devastated on an emotional level. It was a loveless marriage, but she’d stayed in it because she got used to the routine of working in the shop and cooking a big meal that kept her husband from raising the issue of children. Now her main and immediate concern was to figure out what to do with the business, the house and her new life as a widow in England. A few days after Hamza’s death, she called me for advice on banking and tax issues. I didn’t have much to offer her.

  If I had any lingering faith in family values or, for that matter, Arab integration into British society, I lost them there and then. Faiza had lived the previous seventeen years in Liverpool utterly dependent on her husband for all financial and practical concerns. I helped as much as I could when I lived in England. Now, with husband gone and brother away, came the time for Faiza to show some independence and decide what to do with the business. And because she really lived in England in name only, she had no choice but to sell everything and move back to Yemen. Running a business when you hadn’t learned enough about it, or about the language in which it was conducted, was not an option. Not even offers from other Yemeni expatriates to help manage the store—which by that stage included a liquor licence that she found objectionable for religious reasons—could take the burden of such a task off her. She had to join her sisters in a culture that she understood best. What a waste of a British passport, I often thought.