Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes

by Kamal Al-Solaylee

  Egypt has gone through the same population shift and expansion in higher education. The same younger generation by and large orchestrated the protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo and inspired similar demonstrations in Sana’a and Taiz.

  I must admit I was hoping that the wave of uprisings wouldn’t reach Yemen, to a large extent because I didn’t want to think about what weeks—and I thought it would be a matter of weeks—of civil unrest would do to the already low standard of living and the fragile economy. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t trying to avoid having to think of the gap between my world and that of my siblings. I didn’t want to revisit the guilt, discomfort and sadness I experienced whenever my family came into my Canadian life. The quieter things seemed, the more distant the problems became. I envied my Canadian friends whose family stories involved normal events like visiting the parents at the cottage, attending cousins’ weddings or planning a Thanksgiving meal. My family life always seemed complicated and on the edge of chaos. Indeed, the protests in Sana’a reached a boiling point in late spring of 2011 before the country descended into a full-fledged civil war between Saleh’s loyalists and the main army of the opposition movement in June.

  By then my concerns for the family outweighed my selfishness (and there’s no other word for it; I toyed with saying self-protection) and their safety became my number-one concern. Our new family home happened to be just a mile or two away from our old Hasaba district, where the most intense fighting took place. During the worst phase of the war, my sisters Faiza and Hoda sought shelter in my niece’s house in a relatively remote part of town. Raja’a and Hanna and their children hid in my brother Khairy’s place in the suburbs. Wahbi was too proud to impose his three young boys on anyone and held out at the family home, where he lived on the third floor, for as long as he could. I just couldn’t make sense of the contrast. Here I was, walking my dog in peaceful midtown Toronto on beautiful spring days, when my own brother had no option but to stay put at home even as gunfights could be heard and the occasional rocket launched a few blocks away. The fact that they had experienced it all before in 1994 made little difference. The new war lasted for about three weeks, during which the nature of our phone conversations—and my entire relationship with the family—changed.

  I had always been able to hear them but not really feel what they went through. Until now. They felt abandoned, betrayed, both by Yemen and the Arab world. Hanna, with whom I rarely ever talked, wept uncontrollably when recounting how her son, age twelve, lost the ability to sleep after several nights of bombings and gunshots. “No one will save us,” she lamented. Faiza told me how they had to make the most of their three to four hours of electricity every day. No matter what time it was, when the electricity came on they would cook lunch or dinner, since there was no natural light in the kitchen. They avoided buying any food that would spoil too quickly, like fish. Sometimes, when they didn’t time it properly, they’d have to grind spices or prepare other ingredients by hand, taking them hours instead of minutes in the blender. “We’ve gone back to the time of our grandparents,” Faiza complained. Whenever I suggested they sit out the war in Cairo, both Raja’a and Hoda responded as if I’d asked them to relocate to the moon. “Where would we stay? Who’s going to pay for it?” I offered to help, but they declined. Part of this was a martyrdom I’d got used to, and part just anger and stubbornness, which was new to me.

  One of their top concerns was leaving the family home unattended. When the fighting got even closer to our part of Sana’a, Wahbi relented and booked his family into a hotel room for a few nights. First, he had to find a trusted night guard to keep an eye on the house. It wasn’t that uncommon for military or tribal chiefs in Sana’a to simply occupy an empty house and take ownership of it. I remembered my father’s mantra about the lack of stability in the Middle East, which was the main reason he never bought any properties after his were seized in 1967. He knew that to live in the Middle East was to accept a life on the run. It was easier to run when you rented someone else’s house, he said. In fact, we’d only bought this house for the family in 2004, long after he and my sister Ferial died.

  When a ceasefire of sorts came into effect in late June, my siblings returned to the family home, but day-to-day living became even more intolerable. Protests and isolated armed clashes would erupt at any minute. A simple shopping trip became an elaborate operation that involved plotting escape routes and bringing extra money in case they had to abandon the car and find a cab driver willing to take them as close as possible to home. Food prices had shot up, and drivers lined up, sometimes for a full day, just to fill up gas tanks. After a few days of normal service, electricity was again reduced to the now-normal handful of hours. With the exception of Raja’a, who worked at the university—the Tahrir Square of Sana’a—they all returned to work. “Good days and bad days” was how Hoda described the situation to me on the phone. What happened in any given day depended on the night before. A quiet night with no machine guns meant a peaceful morning when they could go to work or get groceries. Hoda was lucky in that the one job she was able to find the previous year was within a short walking distance from home. Even after they bought a generator, finding enough gas to run it was difficult. When they did, it extended their access to electricity by a handful of hours every day.

  My niece Yousra, by then twenty-three, would go behind her mother’s back to the protests outside Sana’a University and demand political and economic change. In an email message to me she explained why she insisted on speaking her mind in this way: “I’m a Yemeni and I have a right.” I couldn’t imagine taking part in a revolution or even a demand for change when I was her age. All I’d wanted was to get out. That email highlighted the differences between her generation and her mother’s and mine. It’s not just that technology has connected the youth of a country like Yemen, there comes a point when a population has just had enough of oppression and despair and decides to say or do something about it.

  The rest of the summer passed relatively quietly. I planned a trip to check in on the family and to see first-hand the effects of the revolution on daily life in Yemen. I was going to visit during the month of Ramadan, which coincided with August 2011. They seemed optimistic enough that the worst was over and in early phone conversations were surprised but welcoming. As the visit got closer, their tone changed. Usually, they are the ones who insist I visit, but they seemed hesitant and nervous about it. “Put it off until later in the year,” Wahbi suggested, adding that next summer would be even better. I told him that I had enough experience of travelling the world and could look after myself. “But you haven’t been to Yemen lately,” he said. When he handed me over to Faiza, she asked that I call Helmi before I get on a plane.

  My conversations with Helmi had been strained for many years, but when we eventually talked later the same week, the full picture of what had been happening in Sana’a became clear. It wasn’t just my safety that the family was worried about but the thought of me seeing them living in such primitive conditions. They couldn’t shower as often as they used to and couldn’t always spare enough water to wash vegetables as thoroughly. My brother was worried I might get sick. “You’re not used to this, Kamal,” he said. It took me back to my last visit, when my mother insisted that I drink bottled water and ordered my sisters to wash the food with it to make sure I didn’t get any stomach bugs. Ever since that conversation with Helmi I haven’t been able to turn on the tap or the lights in my Toronto home without realizing that these simple everyday acts are luxuries to my own family. I wish I had a more satisfactory explanation, but much of the distance I put between us and the alienation I cultivated towards them suddenly disappeared. Like a man obsessed, I looked online for news about Yemen every few hours. I considered it a good day when there was none. Whenever I saw the word “Yemen” on the home page of a website, my heart would sink. There hadn’t been, and there may not be, any good news coming out of Yemen for a while.

  In September, shortly
after Ramadan, intense fighting between the revolutionaries and the Saleh loyalists resumed in Sana’a. Once again the family had to flee our home and seek temporary shelter with my brother. Even Wahbi swallowed his pride and took his kids to his brother-in-law’s house. The schools, government buildings and business offices were closed, with only the food markets and some adventurous retailers staying open. Because I couldn’t get through to any of them from Canada, I used my sister Farida in Cairo as a go-between, especially when I read about the sudden return of President Saleh to Sana’a after four months in Saudi Arabia. His comeback could either bring the civil war to a halt, at least a truce, or keep it raging indefinitely.

  My Lebanese friends who have escaped the civil war in that country but left family members behind tell me that I’ll get used to this feeling of helplessness and guilt. I don’t know what to make of it. Does anyone ever accept that his family is suffering and living in the middle of a war zone? It was one thing to accept their conservatism and economically deprived condition. But a war? And even if the political and economic situation stabilizes, I have a feeling it will be too late for my brothers and sisters. Their generation has missed out. They enjoyed the first few years of the liberal and tolerant society of Aden, Beirut and Cairo, but the latter chapters of their lives have coincided with decades of political repression and religious dogma. I believe that my siblings have written off this life, hoping that they’ll be rewarded in the afterlife, since they’ve been good and devout Muslims.

  Just a few years ago I would have found that way of thinking not just defeatist but repellent. I can see it now as the natural conclusion of the intolerable journey they have been on. What started as the sectarian violence in Lebanon and continued with the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt culminated with a civil war that grew out of Yemen’s politically and religiously brutal society. I escaped, at least physically, but they had been paying for this trajectory for many years now. There might be hope for the new generation in Yemen and elsewhere in the Arab world, the generation of my younger nephews and nieces, but I think a lot more has to happen before there’s any real change. It will take decades to reboot the economies of countries as different as Egypt and Yemen. It looks unlikely that foreign investment will flow back easily to Egypt, and it may not flow at all to Yemen, which had very little of it to begin with. Millions of unemployed and struggling youth could turn to hardline readings of Islam, leaving them vulnerable to extremists. I worry about the lives of women in a place like Yemen if that happens. How much more marginalized will they be? Despite the odd story in the Western media about how a handful of Yemeni women have taken part in, even spearheaded, the revolution, if the chaos continues the society that will emerge will be tribal, violent and hostile to women.

  It has dawned on me that, despite the passage of time and the different specifics, what my family has been experiencing lately is but a replay of the troubles that started with our expulsion from Aden in 1967. History is repeating itself, but this time without my father to take the family out of harm’s way and find temporary shelter. With my more comfortable income in Canada, I am in fact the best situated of all my siblings to play my father’s role and airlift them to Cairo, which, despite its own post-revolution growing pains, remains the only relatively safe option. I can’t believe that I’m even considering that possibility. Another relocation? And to Cairo?

  Even Farida, who lives there, thinks that an exodus to Cairo is not a realistic option, given that there’s no chance any of our siblings or their children will find work. The ongoing clashes between the army and the protestors, and the new outbreaks of sectarian violence between Muslims and Christians, mean that certain parts of Cairo are as dangerous as Sana’a.

  Still, I feel they’d be safer in Cairo, assuming they’d be willing to budge on their resolution not to move. With twelve nephews and nieces and four spouses in addition to my eight siblings, moving the family would be much more difficult than it ever was for my father. And to move some of them and leave others to face their uncertain future would be unacceptable. “Either we all leave together or we stay together,” Raja’a told me on the phone.

  I became even more worried about them when news of the capture and death of Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi broke in October 2011. Saleh and Gadhafi had a strong bond, and Gadhafi’s death could strengthen both Saleh’s resolve to stay in power by any means possible and the protestors’ determination to oust him. To my family, the final outcome of the revolution isn’t their main concern. All they want is to be able to live in their own home without waking up to gunshots or explosions. A home where running water and electricity are the norm and not the exception. It’s great that a Yemeni revolutionary, Tawakel Karman, won the Nobel Peace Prize and that a handful of women burnt the veil—while fully veiled—in an act of defiance. All that plays well in Western media and helps advance the narrative of the Arab Spring. But none of it is keeping Yemeni families safe in their beds at night.

  As a testament to their endurance and to prove that life must go on, even in the middle of a civil war, my family called with some good news: in late October, my nieces Yousra and Nagala had accepted marriage proposals from two eligible bachelors. In early December, the family enjoyed not one but two engagement parties. I’m relieved that the family can focus for now on new beginnings and happy occasions. In a recent phone call, my sister Hoda said that she’s learned to sleep through late-night explosions. In the past, she’d get up and stay awake. Now she just goes back to bed as if she was woken up by a slamming door or the garbage truck.

  After decades of periodically trying (and failing) to banish them from my thoughts, I think of my family all the time now. But I also think of how lucky and privileged I have been to come to Canada and make a home for myself here. The worse the situation gets in Yemen, the tighter I cling to my life in Toronto. The paranoid side of me still thinks that somehow even my Toronto existence may one day be taken away from me. The Middle East has a way of catching up with you no matter how far you run. I find it surreal that I’m writing about it now when in the past I didn’t even want to speak the language or work on an Arab-themed art exhibit. And after decades of turning my back on Arab culture, I have rediscovered its music as if I’d never listened to it before. I love walking around Toronto streets with old Egyptian music playing on my iPod. It has to be music from the 1950s to the early 1970s, a period that conjures up the glory days, when the family felt optimistic and protected even as the world around us was rapidly changing. I can’t listen to any Egyptian music from the last twenty to twenty-five years, as it makes me think of nothing but cultural and emotional decline.

  To me, the music I tried to escape is now a form of escapism. The ‘60s music of Abdel Halim Hafez, Shadia and Nagat play so well against the backdrop of the vast and safe streets of midtown Toronto, especially as I take my dog, Chester, for his long evening walks in the summer. “Why do you keep listening to that funny music?” a dog owner I often ran into in the park once asked me, as Shadia’s voice filtered out of my headphones and into the warm summer air.

  Long story.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Intolerable is about, for and because of my family. My late parents and sister Ferial will never get to read it, but I know that they’ve shaped my life and this narrative distillation of it. My remaining nine siblings and fourteen nephews and nieces have suffered silently for so long, but civil wars, crushing living conditions and political suppression have failed to change their close bond or love for one another—or for me, the proverbial black sheep, the one who left them behind. To them all, salamati and hobbi. I think of them every day.

  My gratitude and admiration go to my gently tough editor, Jim Gifford, at HarperCollins Canada. In 2010 he was the first to react positively to my book proposal and he maintained that upbeat spirit for two full years. Jim was patient and understanding when I fell behind schedule and thorough and exacting (in a good, even great, way) whenever I handed over sample chapters or
successive drafts. I couldn’t have dreamed of a better editor for my first book. I asked him for some (platonic) handholding during our first in-person meeting, and he delivered. I’m also grateful to the incredibly meticulous Alex Schultz for copyediting—more like rescuing—the manuscript with such intelligence and sensitivity. He even corrected my spelling of Arabic words, a language he doesn’t speak. Awesome. Thanks also to Lisa Rundle for her faith in my story and Noelle Zitzer for making the production stages of this book so easy on a nervous, habitually late and occasionally too-sick-to-work writer.

  My agent, John Pearce, is another patient soul I’ve kept waiting while working and reworking my initial ideas for this book for over two years. He believed in what I wanted to write even when I had my own doubts. He urged me to open up and share my stories, and I’m so glad I took his advice. Our long lunches in Toronto’s Boulevard Café on Harbord Street made me feel like a writer for the first time in my life. (Full disclosure: Moderate amounts of alcohol were consumed, possibly explaining that writerly feeling.)

  The first person I ever discussed this book with was playwright and director Lee MacDougall during a summer afternoon chat in Stratford, Ontario. Thanks, Lee, for listening, encouraging and for suggesting Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family. Pam Shime read an early draft of the proposal and tore most of my content to shreds. I couldn’t be more grateful. My dear friend and role model Laurie Lynd, a gifted film and TV director, also read the proposal and added his visual panache and strong sense of story structure to it. His advice stuck in my head during the writing process. His later comments about the manuscript were equally insightful. I gave the manuscript to my brilliant friend Noreen Flanagan to read. She encouraged me to open up more emotionally, and I’m so glad I did. Her comments made me see parts of the story I, as a man, couldn’t before.