Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes Read Online Free Page B

liked that her equally fair son had married a woman with such a dark complexion. She was determined that Wife Number Two would be bayda (white). But just as Mohamed was considering his mother’s suggestion of taking on a second wife, who might give him the male heir he wanted so much, Safia finally gave birth to a boy. Mohamed was so overwhelmed he broke the F monopoly and called him Helmi, Arabic for “my dream.”
    But any dreams of adding a second male child to secure an heir and a spare to his little kingdom were shattered with the next three births, all girls. After Helmi in 1953, there was Hoda in 1955, Hanna in 1957 and Raja’a in 1959. It looked like Helmi, already a spoiled brat by all accounts, was destined to be the only male child. By early 1960, Safia was twenty-eight and Mohamed thirty-four. They had eight children. It’s staggering to think of a couple so young caring for so many children, even with the extended families of both nearby to lend a hand. I often marvel at my parents’ patience and determination when I, at forty-seven, struggle with the responsibilities of looking after one dog—a docile cocker spaniel.
    Eight was not enough. Not in the Aden of the 1960s, where my father more or less dominated in business. In less than four years my mother had three more children, and to the infinite delight of my father all were boys: Wahbi in 1960, Khairy in 1962 and me, the youngest, in 1964, making my family the Yemeni equivalent of the original baby-boomer generation, born between 1946 and 1964. My name, Kamal, makes more sense in this context. I was the one to complete the collection of progeny, to bring this child-factory story to its conclusion.
    It just so happens that I was born on the afternoon of the Fourth of July. My father claims to have skipped a reception at the American consulate to make it in time for my birth at a small hospital in the Tawahi district of Aden. He repeated the same story every year on my birthday. And every year my mother would repeat—though not to his face—that he was not ever really invited but bothered everyone for an invitation so much they let him attend. By the eleventh child, it was too dangerous for my weakened mother to give birth at home with the help of a midwife, as she had with her first eight or nine children. She had so many deliveries that accounts of our births got fuzzy in her head. My sister Faiza knew for sure that I was born in a hospital. She said she carried me home while my parents and older siblings walked behind her. Faiza would have been just two months shy of her seventeenth birthday and barely out of the convent school in the Badri district of Aden in which she and the three other F s were enrolled. I was to be her child, so to speak, partly so she could train for her future and inevitable role as a mother, just as my oldest sister, Fathia, looked after Wahbi when he was born and my sister Farida tended Khairy.

    My family’s first picture of me, taken in our Aden home in July 1964.
    To the harried parents of today, in Yemen or in the West, this arrangement may sound like the best of both worlds, but it often created tensions between my mother and her older children. Faiza and my mother often competed for my affection as a child and teenager, in part because Faiza was never able to conceive during her two marriages. But to me, there was never any real competition. I was Mama’s boy. In fact the Arabic phrase dalo’o omo (his mother’s spoiled child) became my nickname. In public. My own father called me that in front of friends and neighbours—not to tease me so much as to divert any blame that might have come his way for raising an identifiably weak and sports-averse boy who loved watching his mother in the kitchen. Later, even my mother would discourage my too-regular kitchen visits, as if she feared that keeping her company would turn me gay. “The kitchen is no place for real men,” she said repeatedly, but she ultimately caved in