Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes Read Online Free PDF Page A

to my requests to stay put—usually on the condition that I didn’t prepare, or get involved in, any food. Her fear of my turning out gay came true, but she needn’t have worried about my kitchen skills. I remain a lousy cook with an intense dislike of doing anything in the kitchen other than making tea or toast. My brothers all feel the same way.
    It’s hard to believe, but in between bringing children into the world and building new apartment blocks, Safia and Mohamed liked to go on holidays with the whole family. In the 1960s, when air travel became more widespread and relatively affordable, my parents would take the whole family (and assorted aunts to help with the younger children) for month-long trips to Cairo, then and now the centre of the Arab world. While I was too young to remember these trips, an extended visual record of them hangs on the walls of my Toronto home. These photographs were my father’s way of documenting his success for any doubters. The snapshots serve a different purpose for me, as they’re my way to prove to the world (or at least visitors) that there was once a great cosmopolitan and curious Yemeni society that is very different from the images we see in the media of khat-chewing, gun-carrying tribesmen and burkawearing women.
    The three big trips (in 1963, 1965 and 1966) have become the stuff of legend in my family, partly because of logistics. Imagine booking airline tickets for around fifteen family members, renting one or two large apartments in downtown Cairo and making plans to keep children who ranged from young women to toddlers happy and busy for a whole month. And calling that a vacation.

    The entire family and two cab drivers (far right) in an Egyptian nightclub before a concert by the singer Abdel Halim Hafez in 1965 or 1966. I’m seated on my mother’s lap, of course (second from the left).
    My mother was still expected to cook at least one meal a day during these so-called holidays. Whether in Cairo or back in Aden, she never liked servants to help with food preparation for her family and limited their role in the kitchen to cleaning dishes or scouring pots and pans. When not visiting parks, the zoo or going to the movies, my sisters would spend most of the day shopping for clothes. Most Arabs considered Cairo the Paris of the Middle East when it came to fashion, and nowhere was more fashionable than its downtown core, especially a little market named after its red marble floors: the Red Corridor (Mamar el Ahmar). A couple of stores there just sold fabrics, which my sisters (and mother) bought by the yard and had turned into dresses by seamstresses in nearby apartments. You dropped off the fabric on a Monday, selected the design from a pile of Egyptian fashion magazines, went back on Wednesday for a fitting (in Arabic, you use the same word for rehearsal, prova ) and picked up the dress by Thursday afternoon—just in time for one of the big concerts by such Egyptian singers as Abdel Halim Hafez. By the time we moved to Cairo in 1971, that market had lost much of its glamour but remained our first stop for the annual back-to-school shopping trips.
    The choice of Cairo as a summer destination for a Yemeni family was an obvious but emotionally complicated one for Mohamed. By the early 1960s, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s nationalist president and leader of the Free Officers Movement, which in 1952 had ousted the royal family and ended British rule in Egypt, was busy importing revolutions to other parts of the Arab world. The nationalist, anticolonial movements sweeping the Arab world—a clear predecessor of the revolutions of 2011—posed a real threat to my father. His real-estate empire was built on Aden’s stability as a gateway port city open to business and trade, with the British keeping order. He was invested in empire as a commercial enterprise and as a way of life. Nasser’s agenda came to fruition in the northern parts of Yemen in 1962, when his troops toppled