Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes by Kamal Al-Solaylee

Author:Kamal Al-Solaylee [Al-Solaylee, Kamal]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781443401845
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada
Published: 2012-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

SANA’A

Ancestral

It couldn’t have begun on a worse note. At the Customs counter of Sana’a International Airport in the fall of 1986, a severe-looking officer with a military overcoat on top of traditional Yemeni clothing insisted on examining a box marked in Cairo as “Heavy.” It contained two years’ worth of the British pop music magazine Record Mirror, which my sister had been sending to me from Liverpool. They were my window into British and American pop music, especially as each issue carried the UK and US album and singles charts. Back in Cairo, my friends would take turns reading old issues and making note of upcoming album releases. The magazine always featured flamboyant indie acts on the cover, men with makeup or women dressed in skimpy clothing: the Cure, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, Madonna.

“This goes against our traditions as a Muslim country,” the Customs officer said, and told me he’d confiscate all copies. “Shame on you for bringing this to our land,” he added as he flipped through them, himself transfixed. Wahbi insisted that they were for private use, but the officer countered that it made no difference. A few supplicating “ma’lesh,” never minds, and “yallahs,” come ons, later and I made it out with my magazines. It never even occurred to me that a general-interest music magazine would be considered pornographic in Yemen, but the experience coloured my perception of our so-called ancestral homeland before I even left the airport. “You’ll get used to it,” my mother told me later the same day. It wasn’t long before I discovered that the full sentence should have gone something like, You’ll get used to it, but you’ll not necessarily like it.

Culture shocks are meant to happen when you take an individual from his native environment and drop him onto completely unfamiliar ground. By all rights, Yemen shouldn’t have been so culturally alien. Unlike Aden, however, which was a port city and colonial melting pot, Sana’a had isolated itself from the world for much of the twentieth century. It was literally a gated community, with the historic Bab al Yemen, the Gate of Yemen, closing off the city at night to visitors in the old days. Nearly twenty-five years since the troops of Gamal Abdel Nasser helped local republicans liberate the country from the pseudo-monarchist rule of the Sayyids, or the Masters, the city, like the country as a whole, was divided along the lines of those who wanted to modernize it in the style of the Gulf states and those who fought to keep it in a time capsule—somewhere between the late Victorian and early modern eras. Judging from the increasing number of businesses, cars and electronics stores, the modernizing faction was winning. Just about.

Getting used to Yemen while resenting it captured the mood at our reunited family home. It had been just three to four years since my older siblings left Cairo, but within days of arriving in Sana’a I noticed a disturbing family dynamic. Our new residence

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