January–February 2014
59
in Cairo, when they would go shopping and splurge on color-
ful clothing and records by Western pop artists. At this time,
when Al-Solaylee was in his early teens, his sisters had actual
choices in their lives: they were outspoken and enjoyed dress-
ing well and wearing a bit of make-up.
But any independence by the female members of the fam-
ily was short-lived. He recalls Egyptian President Anwar
Sadat’s historic 1977 visit to Israel, as the family huddled
around the television to watch it live, suggesting “the only
comparable history-making event in North America would be
the moon landing in 1969.” But while some in the West saw
the Egypt-Israel peace accord as hopeful, many Egyptians
viewed Sadat as a sellout who strengthened the Muslim Broth-
erhood, the group that would ultimately assassinate him.
As the entire Egyptian middle class began to get squeezed,
the Al-Solaylee patriarch made the painful decision to return
to yemen. His eldest brother had become increasingly swept
up in Muslim extremism, often berating his sisters for wearing
make-up and refusing to wear veils, telling them they looked
like whores. Things would only get worse in yemen.
If all of these conflicting questions of identity weren’t
enough, Kamal Al-Solaylee also had to contend with the fact
that he’s gay. In one scene, his father looks at his son anxiously
as they watch a Barbra Streisand movie together, with the
young Kamal looking at the American Jewish singer in com-
plete adoration. The gay thing, on top of everything else,
meant that Kamal understandably felt that he had no other op-
tion for survival but to flee to Britain to pursue a university
education. Expecting histrionics from his mother upon telling
her his plan, this self-described mama’s boy recalls her say-
ing one word to him: “
ihrab
,” which means escape.
Al-Solaylee ultimately manages to make a good life for
himself in Toronto—a city he loves so much that he dedicates
the entire book to it—but he is bogged down by staggering
guilt and depression about the family he left behind, in partic-
ular his sisters. They bluntly describe their existence in yemen
as hell, stuck in a civil war and encumbered by religious re-
pression that results in what Al-Solaylee refers to as “gender
apartheid.”
intolerable
features a number of family photos through-
out, as his father insisted on documenting as much of their
childhood as possible. In his last visit to yemen, Al-Solaylee
describes his horrifying realization that his siblings no longer
took photos, as it became clear there was nothing about their
lives they wanted to record. Worse, they never looked at old
photos, as remembering a happier past was too painful.
intolerable
crosses so many lines of identity as to make a
reader’s head spin: class, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation,
nationality, religion, and degrees of religious observance. This
beautiful book about a family’s tortured relationship to his-
tory—and a region’s fraught relationship to modernity—is
everything a great memoir should be: poignant, complex and
haunting. It resonates all the more powerfully right now, given
that the entire region is in such a dire state of turmoil. But be-
yond the current events, this is a timeless book, one of the best
I’ve read in the past decade.
________________________________________________________
Matthew Hays is the author of
The View from Here: Conversations
with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers
.
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