Visual Podcast-Finally moving to the Netherlands
Tobias: We decided that we liked the Netherlands and started to explore options of settling here.
Mustafa: Yes. You decided that you were too old for yet another posting in a country where gay is still taboo. You tried to apply for a job in London, but the organization instead wanted you to go to Kuwait, which was a lot more conservative that Oman in terms of its politics. It represented all negative aspects of our attempt to live as a couple in Oman with a free lifestyle, only amplified.
We wanted to live somewhere where gay was just ok, even if not a gay paradise, which I don’t think really exists anywhere. Even if I am disillusioned with what Holland was painted out to be in terms of pluralism, at least we are able to lead a bohemian, free lifestyle.
Tobias: Going to Kuwait also meant that I had to repeat the same thing I had been doing for 15 years, and it just wasn’t as much a challenge anymore.
Mustafa: We had visited Kuwait once before to see a friend who lived there. Even alcohol was completely banned there, except for the Americans in their military base.
At any rate, you got lucky to find an alternative job in Oman which was well-paid in running a museum and cultural foundation. This time, your job focused more on the arts and culture sector than education per se.
Tobias: I did not divorce education. The project which I consider to be the highlight of my time running that foundation was when I brought in a major exhibition from the Cobra Museum just outside of Amsterdam into the Museum space in Muscat. We had around 3000 primary school children come in and undergo arts training and workshops around the history of the Cobra movement, the style and technique. We had kids from international schools, but also government schools in collaboration with the ministry of education.
Mustafa: You were promoting creativity with school children then. Comment, if you will, on the experience of leaving your home organization for whom you had worked for decades: virtually the entirety of your career. Everywhere you went around the world, they had your back in terms of logistics of life. You had described them as your home. Now you were venturing out on your own in an unknown land. I remember the challenges you faced in finding your own place, taking care of your own rent and utility bills.
Tobias: It did become overwhelming. Gratefully I had no other responsibility such as kids and their schooling or insurance. I felt secure enough financially to take on the challenge.
However, around 2015, there was a crash in the oil price and the country took a big hit as a result. Because of that, the exchange rate became favourable to me in terms of paying off my debts for the properties I had bought in the UK, but a few months later, my boss said that the organization was tightening its belt and could not justify paying me as much as they were. I was informed that my contract wasn’t getting renewed, and that constituted a lack of job insecurity which I was experiencing for the first time.
Mustafa: As soon as that happened, you had to leave the country as you had no work visa anymore. It was also just prior to that time that you and I experienced a fall-out in our romantic affair, albeit we kept in touch on a daily basis.
I got involved in a short-lived relationship with a guy who vengefully outed me online to my family when the relationship ended. On a visit to Oman, my family arranged for me to get kidnapped and forcefully placed into mentally and physically torturous gay conversion therapy. They also found out about my relationship with you. They frightened you by threatening to utilize Oman’s anti-gay laws to persecute you. Perhaps they fell short of pursuing you personally in order to avoid further scandal, and you managed to leave the country before things further escalated on your side.
I disappeared off the face of the Earth just as you had to leave Oman, and for the next 13 months I was missing to all whom had cared for me in my life. You, my college professors, my therapist in Holland, and all my friends all did not know if I was alive or dead. After a saga of my own, and with the help and support of extraordinarily kind people, I did manage to escape and secure another student visa to come to back to Holland. That was our grand reunification!
Tobias: Yes. You went on to finish your studies. Meanwhile, we researched and found out that you were eligible to apply for asylum in the Netherlands, and we decided that I come live here together with you. Having left Oman in 2016, I stayed in the Dorset in the UK where my family is now based and managed to find part-time consultancy work with an organization based in Scotland. I still work for them and I travel out of Holland to do that on a part-time basis, only there has been a halt on many projects that entail international travel as a result of the global coronavirus pandemic.
Even as I remained in the UK for 18 months, I had itchy feet about the prospect of staying there. Everything seems too normal and I found myself aware of all that went around me in a way that bored me. I enjoy living somewhere and not quite knowing all what goes on around me. I savour the need to explore and not understand the language. Therefore, the Netherlands offers me with the excitement which I crave.
Mustafa: Please elaborate on the kind of work that you do now.
Tobias: We work with representatives of legal systems in Middle Eastern countries on projects and reforms related to human trafficking and modern slavery. We also work in the field of female-empowerment for women out of conflict zones. That is to say that post-war state-building is not reserved to the men who held the weapons.
Because I relied mostly on my previous job-experience, I decided to pursue formal qualification and have just this year completed a master program in comparative criminal justice systems.
Mustafa: We live with our cat whom we had gotten together in 2014 in Oman, and our mischievous, adorable dog. I am finding my way in the professional arena and considering pursuing a Master program. We shall see what life throws as us.
We often visit your family in Dorset, and that provides us an escapism from the hectic awareness of global events, the corona-crises, and of the recent uptake in the reckoning among racial groups, spewing out of the American context into the rest of the Western and wider world.
Tobias: Dorset does provide us with an escapism, doesn’t it? It is a pleasant place located far from the frenzy of international politics or the sensitivities of racial inequalities, or even Brexit-related frustrations.
We look out the window, and there is 18th century Georgian architecture. The setting is just so English! Thomas Hardy, the famous Victorian writer of works such as Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd was actually based here.
Mustafa: You grew up in Cornwall, which does have a distinct Cornish identity in a history of being conquered by the English, even though Cornwall now lies in England. Dorset, however, really is quintessentially English.
I have to say that the stigma of being a refugee and the anxieties associated with being a person of colour are just as present to me in Dorset as they are in Holland. Nevertheless, I have been more scared of being gay in the Middle East than being brown in Western Europe. Being LGBT in a predominantly religious society felt like being a snail whose fragile shell is crushed under the feet of an inattentive giant human creature who’s totally oblivious to the sanctity of my life and freedom, or a butterfly whose delicate wings are forcefully plucked by an innocent yet deadly human child who is simply having fun without an iota of awareness as to my pain.
At least here I am able to choose to exercise my legally codified and socially revered freedom of speech to claim my rights and bring attention to my plight. It’s quite tragic the existence of a narrative in many societies globally that LGBT rights are a form of imported Western cultural imperialism, rather than human rights to ensure dignity, safety, and quality of life for members of sexual minorities.
Our life between Holland and Dorset, where we celebrate warm Christmases with your family, sure is very cosy. I wonder what the future holds for us. I sure am very grateful for all the opportunities which hard-work and luck have thrown our way.
Thank you so much for sharing your story. I had heard bits and pieces over the years, but this conversation as a whole makes me feel that much closer to you and confirms my admiration to your history as a person and as a professional.
Tobias: Thanks a lot!