Girls of Riyadh (6 page)

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: April 16, 2004

Subject: When Grief Becomes Pleasure

Among the many criticisms that have begun flooding into my inbox are a large number slamming me for quoting lines by the late poet Nizar Qabbani and—way back in my first e-mail—asking God’s mercy on him. I quote Qabbani for a simple reason: There isn’t anything out there today that could compare. I’ve never read any modern poetry that has the simplicity and the clear eloquence of his. I have never felt even slightly moved or influenced by those modernist poets who compose a
qasida
of thirty lines in which they talk about nothing! I do not get any pleasure from reading about
the festering pus on the forehead issuing from behind the haunch of eternal grief.
I am in sync only with Nizar’s essential lines, lines that not a single one of those new poets (with all due respect to them) has been able to compose, despite their simplicity.

A
fter Sadeem flunked out of school, which came as a huge surprise to everyone since she was known for her academic excellence, her father proposed that the two of them travel to London for some fun. Sadeem asked him, though, to let her go alone and stay in their flat in South Kensington. She wanted to spend a stretch of time by herself, she said. After some hesitation, her dad agreed, and he furnished her with some telephone numbers and addresses of friends of his who, accompanied by their families, were spending the summer in England. She could contact them if she wanted a little break from herself. He urged her to occupy her free time by signing up for a computer or economics course of some kind so that she could benefit from her time away once she returned to her college in Riyadh.

Sadeem packed away her wound along with her clothes and carried it all from the Dust Capital of the World to the Fog Capital of the World. London was not new to her. In fact, spending the last month of summer there had become a familiar yearly ritual. London this time around was different, though. This time, London was a huge sanatorium where Sadeem had decided to take refuge to overcome the mental maladies overwhelming her after her experience with Waleed.

Before they began the descent at Heathrow airport, Sadeem headed for the airplane bathroom. She took off her
abaya
and head covering to reveal a well-proportioned body encased in tight jeans and a T-shirt, and a smooth face adorned with light pink blush, a little mascara and a swipe of lip gloss.

Coming from Riyadh’s heat, Sadeem had always enjoyed walking beneath London’s summer rains, but on this trip, all that poured over her was misery. London was nothing but gloom, she decided; the city was as dark and cloudy as her mood. The silent apartment and her empty pillow added to her unhappiness, leading her to shed more tears than she had known it was possible to produce.

Sadeem spent a lot of time crying. She wept tears that burned her eyes, for the wrong, the darkness that had enveloped her, that had shrouded her defamed femininity. She cried and cried, mourning her first love, buried alive in its infancy before she could even find pleasure in it. She cried and she prayed, she prayed and prayed, in hopes that God would set guidance before her in her plight, for she had no mother to comfort and reassure her, no sister to stand by her side in this trial. She still did not know whether to tell her father what had happened between her and Waleed on the last night they had been together. Or whether she should carry the secret to her grave.

All that she had the power to do was seek God’s forgiveness and send one prayer after another into the air, imploring that the despicable Waleed would not scandalize her by revealing why he had divorced her; that, having dumped her, he would not say anything that would drag her name through the mud. “Allah, shield me! Keep his evil from me! Allah, I have no one but You to come to, and You are the most knowledgeable of my condition.”

It was during this difficult time that Sadeem became addicted to songs of grief, pain and parting. During those weeks in London, she listened to more sad songs than she had ever listened to in her entire life before. She would feel transported, even elated, whenever she listened to one of the classic love songs by famous Arabic singers that were full of romance and melancholia.

These songs would drench her in sadness and envelop her like a warm, clean bed. As the days passed, she no longer listened to such songs to give herself comfort, but rather to keep herself immersed in the intoxication of grief that she had discovered after the failure of her first love. This was an experience she had in common with most lovers who have suffered loss or betrayal; a masochistic ordeal where pain becomes pleasurable. The trauma leads us to create a tent of wise thoughts in which we sit to philosophize about our life that is passing by outside. We are transformed into tender, hypersensitive beings and the teeniest thought can make us weep. Our damaged hearts dread the next emotional break, so they stay inside their lonely tents of wisdom, avoiding ever falling in love again. One day another Bedouin comes along. He shows up to mend the tent’s tendons…When this other man passes by, we invite him in for a thimbleful of coffee and keep him there, only for a little while to warm up our sad solitude, but unfortunately, this other man always ends up staying—for too long, and before we know it our tent of wisdom falls down around us both! And then we are no smarter than we were before.

After two weeks of solitary confinement in the apartment, Sadeem decided to eat her main meal of the day out, as long as she could find a restaurant not inhabited by streams of tourists from the Gulf. The last thing she wanted, when she was in this state, was to meet a young Saudi man who would try to chat her up.

She didn’t feel any better in the restaurant than she had inside the four walls of the apartment. The atmosphere inside the Hush Restaurant was, as its name might suggest, quiet and romantic. Sadeem thought she came across as the victim of some contagious disease whose family had abandoned her. There she was, eating her meal in solitude, while couples all around her were talking and whispering in the glow of the candlelight. Sadeem couldn’t help but recall her poetic dinners with Waleed and the way they had planned for their honeymoon. He had promised to take her to the island of Bali. She had asked that they spend several days in London before returning to Riyadh after the honeymoon was over. For so long she had dreamed of someday going with her husband, whoever he might be, to the places she had been going to alone for years.

She had had it all planned. She would take him to visit the Victoria and Albert, the Tate, and Madame Tussaud’s. Even though art did not appeal to Waleed the way it did to her, she had figured she would change all of that after their marriage, just as she would force him to stop smoking, a habit that annoyed her greatly. They would drink shoga apple and eat sushi at Itsu on Draycott Avenue. They would slowly drown themselves in Belgian chocolate crepes at the shop near her flat. She would take him to shows at Ishbilia, the Lebanese restaurant, and—of course!—she would not forget to take him on a sea cruise to Brighton. At the end of their time in London she would take him shopping in Sloane Street. She would get him to buy her the latest fashions in clothes and accessories, just as Gamrah’s mother had advised her to do, instead of buying them in Riyadh in advance of the wedding with her dowry.

How very painful these memories were now! Her fancy wedding dress and gorgeous wedding veil (which had been shipped custom-made from Paris) were still lurking in her wardrobe in Riyadh, sticking out their tongues at her in derision every time she opened the closet door. She could not get rid of them. It was as if something inside of her were still waiting for Waleed’s return. But he would not return. And her wedding dress and veil were ugly and ever-present witnesses to her beloved’s low-minded and despicable nature.

Her destination the next morning was an Arabic bookshop. She bought two novels by Turki Al-Hamad,
Al-Adama
and
Al-Shemaisi,
after seeing a man from the Gulf who looked to be in his forties requesting them from the clerk. She also bought
Sheqat Al Horreya,
or
Freedom’s Nest,
by Ghazi Al-Qusaibi, which she had seen as a TV series on some satellite channel a few years before and liked very much. She took a bus back home to find a voice message from her father. He told her that he had arranged things so that she would have a summer internship in one of the London banks that he dealt with regularly. It would begin in a week’s time.

She liked the idea. Summer work, added independence, and some self-improvement. Beyond the books she had just bought and—now—working at the bank, she had no other plans for the summer. Well, she did have one: to study psychology under the guiding hand of Sigmund Freud, aided by the books she had brought with her, so that she could better analyze Waleed’s personality and arrive at a clear understanding of those factors that had pushed him to no-fault divorce. Meaning, no fault of hers.

Reading the books she had just bought was a pleasure, but it depressed her that she had no idea what she ought to read next. She wished she had a list of must-reads for the cultured and intelligent person.

In the novels of Al-Qusaibi and Al-Hamad, she found a lot of political allusions that reminded her of the novels of the Egyptian writers she had been addicted to as a teenager. She recalled suddenly the demonstration she and her classmates had been prohibited from participating in, in those days, when all of the Arab nations were protesting to show support for the Palestinian Intifada and the Al-Aqsa Mosque uprising. She remembered how a lot of countries started boycotting American and English products a while back, but only a few of her friends in Saudi participated and even the ones who did didn’t stick with it for more than a few weeks. Had politics been within reach of everyone once upon a time, but were now accessible only to generals and rulers?

Why had none of her relatives, male or female, gotten involved in a political cause, supporting it with their very souls as had been the case when Ghazi and Turki were young? Why was it that young people these days had no interest in foreign politics unless it was the scandalous behavior of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky? Or, in domestic politics, only the flagrant corruption at the Saudi Telecom Company? It wasn’t just her, Sadeem—all of her classmates and everyone at their age were on the margins when it came to political life. They had no role, no importance. If only she understood politics! If only she had a particular cause to defend or one to oppose! Then she would have something to keep her occupied and to turn her away from thinking about Waleed the bast…!

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: April 23, 2004

Subject: Um Nuwayyir’s Classification of Human Populations

Over the past two weeks, I have read what has been said about me in some of the famous Saudi Internet forums. Some of the talk was as soft as the granules in my daily facial soap but some of it was as rough as the black stone I use on my perennially problem knees. As I followed these discussions swirling like a sandstorm around
me
, I felt as though I were watching a bullfight—that is, two bulls fighting. Can any of you out there believe that someone would call for my blood? Well, fine, that’s enough to deal with, but then there is the one who claims to be my sister, which is a whole other deal! She claims to have observed that, every Friday, starting early in the morning, her sister secludes herself in her room, in front of her computer screen. One time when this sister of hers was out of the way, the “sister” who is writing says she searched through her sister’s files for evidence that would confirm her suspicions. And, listen to this! She stumbled across all thirty e-mails. And she is ready to sell them to the highest bidder!

A
fter reading
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Essentials of Psychoanalysis, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, On Narcissism
and
Totem and Taboo,
Sadeem gradually realized that Freud, with all his totems, tomatoes, cucumbers and green salad vegetables, was not going to be much help in solving her problem! Sigmund was not about to yield an explanation of why Waleed had left her.

Sadeem had stumbled across two of Freud’s works, translated, in the Jarir Bookstore in Riyadh. The rest she had asked a university friend to bring her from Lebanon before her own departure for London.

She did not find Sigmund Freud’s thought nearly as convincing—at least, not in explaining Waleed’s behavior—as she had found Um Nuwayyir’s classification of human groups. In a happier time, with Sadeem as her audience, Um Nuwayyir had explained her own analysis of men and women in the Gulf states. It was a complicated system of groups and subgroups that covered just about every personality type, and Sadeem had taken notes so she could remember it all.

Um Nuwayyir classified people of the Gulf and Arabs in general based on a number of factors, including strength of personality, self-confidence, good looks and so forth. These general categories applied to both men and women and were then further subdivided.

For example, “strength of personality” is subdivided into two groups: the strong and the weak. In general the strong usually show a lot of motivation for economic self-improvement. These people watch the examples of success they see around them and seize their opportunity to benefit. The weak, led-by-the-nose types lack initiative and only get off their butts when their family or their entire environment gets an upward kick. But these groups are also subdivided as follows:

1. The Strong

• A.
  The logical type who respects the views of everyone he (or she) encounters even when he has a different point of view.
  
• B.
  The person who has to have his own way and doesn’t care about the views of others.
  

2. The Weak

• A.
  The person whose family can easily bend him (or her) one way or the other. This person is incapable of acting independently because, as Um Nuwayyir points out, “Without his family he isn’t worth a penny.”
  
• B.
  The person who is easily swayed by his friends and can’t stop swaying. This case is even worse than the first one because this person is convinced that his family is against him and only trusts his friends, who, in general, are likely to be in even worse shape than he is.
  

Um Nuwayyir worked out the same kind of analysis under the heading of “self confidence.” Here also there are two main groups, the secure and the insecure, and, of course, each group is divided by Um Nuwayyir into subgroups as follows:

1. The Secure

• A.
  The sensible type. People belonging to this group are at peace with themselves, displaying a clear degree of confidence that makes everyone respect them and even hold them in awe. But at the same time, they maintain the love and affection of others due to their modesty and genuine accomplishment.
  
• B.
  The Overconfident
  This includes people who really don’t have anything to be proud of. They have an excess of self-confidence, though they lack any reason for it; no great achievements or outstanding personality or even appealing looks. This type is abominable and, unfortunately, more common than the first one. But both A and B together are less common than the second main group:
  

2. The Insecure

• A.
  Those who claim to be secure. They affect a self-confident pose that isn’t matched by any sincere belief on their part. They take every word said to them with extraordinary sensitivity and reply with great aggressiveness, shielding their failures with their loud personalities. They make mountains out of molehills, or, as we say, “a dome out of a seed.”
  
• B.
  Those who are really insecure. People in this group don’t act or claim to be something they’re not. It’s apparent from the first that they are pitiful and they make you feel sorry for them. Sometimes they have an obvious physical problem that lowers their self-esteem, like obesity, short height or even a big nose. Or it could be a social problem like poverty or even a mental one like stupidity. Or sometimes it could be a hidden problem that no one else is aware of, like a broken heart from a lost love that never healed.
  

Sadeem’s favorite classification was that of “religious types before and after marriage,” and this was the only one that strictly separated men and women. There were three categories: The extremely religious type, the rational moderate religious type and the wild type, who mostly ignored the strictures of their religion. The men and women are mirror images of each other. Let’s look at the men first:

1. The Extremely Religious Type

• A.
  He was once wild but he turns religious.
  
• B.
  He fears wildness so he becomes religious.
  Both fear they will degenerate morally after marriage, so they often end up in polygamous marriages, preferring their wives to be at least as zealous as they are.
  

2. The Moderate Type

• A.
  A strictly religious man who differs from the first group in the way he treats women: tenderly and without interference. This type can marry a relatively liberal woman as long as he is confident of her love and certain of her morals.
  
• B.
  The seculars. This man believes that Islam is built on five and no more than five basic and compulsory beliefs. He only attends the assigned five prayers and fasts only during Ramadan. After he has gone on the Pilgrimage to Mecca, he feels he has done his part, as long as he has also adhered to the declaration of the faith and given alms to the poor. This kind of man does not marry a woman unless she is on the same level of liberation as he is. He wouldn’t marry someone who wears
  hijab,
  for example, and would insist that his wife be pretty, open-minded and stylish so that he could proudly show her off in front of his friends, who share his point of view.
  

3. The Wild or Escapee Type

• A.
  Gradual escapee. Someone in this group may have grown up in a very strict religious atmosphere and “escaped” in a religious and moral sense. His escape is a gradual one, happening whenever he gets a chance to be away from the authority of his community. This type might pretend to belong to the first group to prevent any social embarrassment.
  
• B.
  Liberal upbringing. This type has been brought up in an extremely liberal home to the point of atheism in his religious beliefs and the absence of any kind of bulwark against “bad behavior.” And as we all say in these parts: “He who grows up doing something, grows old doing it.” The problem you find in this type of man is pathological suspicion. Unfortunately, and due to his experiences with some cheap girls, whom we will be discussing later, he believes that every girl is guilty until proven innocent. This is why a man in the “wild” category always prefers to marry an inexperienced girl; she will always view things from his corrupted point of view. Sometimes a man of this type marries a girl who is a flirt but knows how to play the game. She knows perfectly well what her husband is really like and she knows how to manipulate and pretend so that her actions won’t end up being misinterpreted. This is exactly what happened to Sadeem, who didn’t realize who Waleed really was until it was too late and after he had made up his mind that she was “bad.”
  

Now we come to the matching categories for women.

1. The Extremely Religious (“Bowing to the Faith”) Type

• A.
  The sheltered one. Brought up in a strict religious family, a woman of this type has never been exposed to any conflicting outside forces. If she’s very lucky, she will marry someone equally religious. As long as both are able to accept and be happy with what fate has brought them, they can live “happily ever after” in a peaceful and secure life. But if she ends up marrying a man more liberal than she is, she will be miserable because she will never understand how to please him, since she has no knowledge of his way of life.
  
• B.
  Sheltered, but with fantasies. This woman also has grown up in a sheltered setting, except that fantasies of bursting out into something new, into some kind of liberation, have always pursued her. She is also pure, not because of ignorance of the world “out there,” but because of her own will, her self-discipline or the surveillance of her family.
  

2. The Moderate Type

• A.
  Fashion victim. This woman changes her behavior according to the current fashion. If the trend during a certain time is to act all spiritual, attend religious gatherings and wear the
  hijab
  outside the kingdom, she will do it and “go with the flow.” But if the trend is to dump your
  hijab
  once you get outside the country, and when you are inside to spend a lot of time in the malls wearing a tight-fitted
  abaya
  that shows off the features of a woman’s body, then she will go with that flow, too. These trends are usually under the control of men’s preferences during their search for suitable wives, or mothers who are hunting for future daughters-in-law.
  
• B.
  Not religious, but not liberated, either. This woman is less strict than the extremely religious woman but more observant than the more liberal one. A woman from this group tends to resist sinning because of her morals and principles rather than her actual religious belief. She often has a strong personality, so she might mistakenly be listed as a liberal because she doesn’t submit to all the rules of the more zealous groups.
  

3. The Wild Type (or “Escapee”)

• A.
  Wild before marriage. This woman normally reforms after marriage. She might turn into a very committed woman (or at least one of moderate commitment). That depends on her husband. If she marries someone who isn’t right for her, she remains in the wild category even after her marriage.
  
• B.
  Wild after marriage. This woman is usually a member of one of the sheltered groups, but she goes “bad” after marriage because she can’t acclimatize to the demands of a liberated husband, or because of a rocky marriage or an unfaithful husband.
  

These were some of the complicated sets of categories that Sadeem took down while Um Nuwayyir dictated. Even months after writing it all down, Sadeem was still trying to absorb everything. The soundness of the whole complicated scheme became clearer and clearer with the passing of every day that Sadeem lived in the school of life. After all, that was the school where Um Nuwayyir had gotten her information and formulated her theory.

Sadeem’s thoughts about Um Nuwayyir reminded her of the evening gatherings at home with her three friends. She could almost taste the Kuwaiti desserts—the syrupy sweetness of the
zalabya
and the smooth powdered
darabeel
—that Um Nuwayyir used to ply them with, together with hot tea. Her memories flew her home to Riyadh, all the way to the metallic gate with its gilt-edged bars, where she had so often stood after the evening prayer time waiting for Waleed to arrive. She saw in her mind’s eye the swing by the swimming pool where she had spent evenings with his arm around her; the formal living room where guests were received, and where she had seen him for the first time; the television in the family living room where together they had watched all of those films; and the room that witnessed the birth of their love as well as its death. Had her love for Waleed truly died?