Girls of Riyadh (17 page)
Authors: Rajaa Alsanea
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: September 10, 2004
Subject: Gossiping About MEN!
This story has become my life. Friday has become more sacred than ever. The PC room is now my home, the only place I feel safe. Now I just laugh whenever I feel annoyed by some stupid thing a professor or some girl in class says. These people make my blood boil but who cares! None of it means a thing compared to what I am doing. After all, those bossy teachers and arrogant classmates are glued to their computer screens every Friday just so they won’t miss a syllable of what I write. So what if they annoy me every now and then? I’m plenty satisfied by the joy and pride I feel inside!
T
he four friends met at Gamrah’s house on the last day of summer vacation. Each brought Saleh a toy or a piece of candy, dangling them in front of him as bait, trying to get him to walk toward them with his little stumbling steps and his cute plump legs.
Gamrah didn’t waste any time, scolding Lamees for the bronzed skin she had acquired in the chalets of Jeddah.
“I swear by God, you are insane! These days, when everyone is going with whitening lotions, you have to go and burn yourself under the sun?”
“Oh, c’mon, guys! You don’t appreciate a good tan! I find it so attractive!”
“Girls! Say something to her—this nut!” said Gamrah.
Michelle, home from San Francisco for the summer, had become accustomed to the healthy look of all the tan, sporty California girls.” Actually, I think it looks great,” she said.
Gamrah erupted. She tried to get Sadeem to back her up. “Sadeem! Just look at these insane girls and what they are saying. Have you ever heard of any mother who wanted to find her son a black bride?”
“Oh, whatever! Everyone to their own tastes. How long are we going to keep doing whatever pleases these old ladies and their darling little boys? I say keep that up, Lamees—just do whatever you want to. And if you ever want to pour kerosene on your hair and set it on fire, go right ahead!”
Gamrah was left spluttering. “Thanks for the help, girl!”
“I mean, seriously,” continued Sadeem, “I’m sick of how we let everyone else control us and lead us through this life. We can never do anything without the fear of being judged holding us back. Everyone steers us along according to what they want. What kind of life is that? We don’t have a say about our own lives!”
“Saddoomah!” her friends all turned toward her and exclaimed. “What’s the matter? Who has been bothering you?”
“Obviously, she’s had a fight with Firas. It can’t be anything else.”
“What did that monkey do to you?”
“Did you see him in Paris?”
Sadeem tried to keep her voice calm, since her outburst had shocked her friends. Slowly, she began telling them what was bothering her. “I saw him once. I mean, he came to Paris for one day just to see me, and of course I couldn’t say no. Okay. I’m not going to lie to you. Frankly, I was dying to see him, too! This whole entire year, I hadn’t laid eyes on him because of my studies and his work, and because the two of us had an agreement not to meet in Riyadh. It’s just too difficult, dangerous and awkward. It wouldn’t be relaxing like it would be if we were abroad. Outside the country, you can loosen up, you can breathe without worrying who’s watching you. Abroad I could meet him anywhere, in any public place, but here, no. In Paris, I met him at a cozy restaurant and we just sat there talking. It was nice.”
“So far, so good,” said Gamrah. “So where’s the problem?”
“Of course,” Michelle broke in, “right after it,
right
away, he asked you, ‘How come you feel so comfortable and relaxed about going out with me?’ Or he doesn’t even ask; he just starts doubting you immediately, and by the next day he’s already treating you differently. Different from when you had never agreed to meet him. After you meet a Saudi guy behind your family’s back, behind the society’s back, he loses his respect for you instead of appreciating your move! I know this stupid business
really
well; these hang-ups are built automatically into the messed-up heads of our guys. They are mentally twisted! Why do you think I left this country to live somewhere else?”
“No, not at all,” replied Sadeem. “He’s never treated me like that. Sure, I’ve noticed sometimes that he seems to have a little bit of this suspicion thing when he talks about girls in general. But he has never doubted me. Firas knows me really well and he trusts me very much.”
“A guy’s nature doesn’t change,” asserted Gamrah. “If he has that suspicion thing in him, then you will suffer from that one day, even if he tries to hide it in the beginning of your relationship.”
“No, believe me, there wasn’t any problem like this. The problem is that for a while now I’ve been noticing that he gives me these really strange hints about our relationship. One day he says to me that his family has found him a good bride, and another day he says, ‘If a well-matched groom shows up for you, don’t send him away!’
“How can his heart allow him to say things like that when he knows I love him so much? At first I figured he was joking, just to torment me a bit. When I saw him in Paris, though, I told him that a friend of Papa’s wants to marry me to his son. Really and truly, I wasn’t lying about that. I figured that he would get upset and worried and would knock on my father’s door the very same day. But what happened instead was that he gave me a smile as cold as the nighttime desert and asked me if the man was a good fellow. He said, ‘Make sure your father asks around about him, and if he turns out to be okay, then put your trust in God and go ahead!’”
“He really said that?” asked Gamrah, her tone disbelieving.
“So what did you say when he said that?” asked Lamees impatiently.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
All the girls spoke at once.
“My brain seized up! I couldn’t get what he was saying! I just sat there staring at him. I couldn’t say a word and I must have looked like a complete idiot. My eyes teared up and then I said, ‘Sorry, I have to go.’”
“So what did he say?”
“He said, ‘Don’t be angry,’ and he made me swear that I wouldn’t leave! He said, ‘Look, if you go now, I am not going to speak to you ever again.’”
“So you stayed?”
“Ya, I sat there until he finished eating and then we both got up and left the restaurant together. He then fetched me a taxi to the hotel.”
“So are you guys still together?”
“Together, but nothing has improved since then. He is playing with my nerves and I don’t know what to do to change him back to what he was before. Why is it always like this with me? Why do guys always change totally after they’ve been with me for a little while? There must be something about me! What seems clear is that the minute I start feeling comfortable with them they start getting really uncomfortable with me.”
Men’s insistence on calling the shots, Lamees believed, didn’t just come about in a vacuum. It happened after a guy stumbled on a woman who really liked that kind of domineering behavior and encouraged it.
“I believe that men aren’t scheming to tell lies or to deceive us,” she said. “It’s, like, they don’t intentionally do that. It comes from their nature. They’re just kind of wicked. A guy will begin backing off from a girl and even trying to escape as soon as she seems available. Because then he feels,
Okay, I don’t have to do anything to get her. She is no longer a challenge.
He doesn’t say this to her face. He doesn’t let her figure out that he is in the wrong, no way! He makes her believe that she is the one who has problems, not him. Some of them give the girl hints, hoping she will end the relationship herself, but we stupid girls never pick up on them. We go on working on the relationship until it kills us, even if we’re pretty sure from the start that it’s a total disaster. That’s why in the end we make fools of ourselves. We’re the ones who don’t hold on to our pride from the start to get out with our honor intact.”
Next, Michelle gave Sadeem her own logical analysis of the situation. “Sweetie, this is the escape strategy of an immature little boy. You find that he has given it some thought and then tells himself,
So why should I take someone who is divorced when I haven’t ever been married? Even divorced men are looking for girls who haven’t been married, so why would I end up with a woman who has been previously married?
You’ll find him weighing her in his mind and saying,
If I want to become a government minister or some other high official later on, I need to find a woman who will give me some standing, a woman to help me with her family name and her looks and her genealogy and her social position and wealth! I’m not going to take one who’s flawed from the start cause she’s been divorced, and then watch people devour me with their waspish tongues.
This is the way our men think, unfortunately. No matter how
impressive
he is or how refined his thinking is or how much in love he is, he still considers love something that can only happen in novels and films. He doesn’t get it, he doesn’t conceive of love as a foundation that builds a family. Maybe he’s even a really cultured and highly educated guy who’s been around. Maybe he knows deep down that love is a basic human need, that it isn’t shameful for a man to choose his partner in life himself, as long as he’s completely sure she’s the right one. But he is still afraid. It worries him to even think about following a path different from the path his father followed, and his uncle, and his grandfather before them. And anyway, he’ll think,
Those old men are still living with those shut-up women of theirs. So something must have gone right. What they did was successful. It’s got to work because everyone else has done it.
So he follows their steps and doesn’t go against their way of doing things. That way, no one can come along someday and rub it in that he failed because he strayed from the path of his ancestors. Our men are just too scared to pay for their own decisions in life. They want others to follow, others to blame.”
Not one of the three other women had any idea where Michelle obtained her theories of how guys think. But they felt that her words evoked strong echoes in all of them. They didn’t know how she had reached her conclusions, but they knew, in their hearts, that she was right.
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: September 17, 2004
Subject: The Migrating Bird
To those who have totally annoyed me by declaring that I do not represent the girls of Saudi Arabia, I say: How many times do I have to repeat myself? I am not writing anything incredible or bizarre or so weird that you people absolutely do not relate to it or can say it’s not true! Everything I say, the girls in my society know very well. Every week, every single one of them reads my e-mail and exclaims, “This is me!” And since I am writing to give a voice to those girls, I ask those who have nothing to do with what I say to quit sticking their snouts into what’s not their business. And then, if they are so eager to offer a perspective other than mine, they’re welcome to write their own e-mails. But don’t ask ME to write only what YOU approve of!
M
ichelle discovered that the epidemic of contradictions in her country had gotten so out of control that it had even infected her parents. Her father, whom she had regarded as a rare symbol of the freedom in Saudi Arabia, had (himself!) now smashed the pedestal she had put him on, thereby proving the truth of the proverb: Anyone who lives with a people becomes one of them!
Her father exploded in a way she never would have anticipated, when he heard her suggest how much she liked her cousin Matti. Even her mother, who had only the one brother, Matti’s father, and loved him devotedly, and considered his children as precious as her own limbs—even this woman was totally, shockingly upset by her daughter’s unmistakable words.
Michelle would never have believed it of her parents, but there was undoubtedly a religious impulse behind their blowup. Her father had never been among the hard-liners when it came to religion. And her mother, who had become a Muslim after her daughter’s birth, had never been one to strictly follow religious strictures. So why did they treat her so ferociously now, trying to force her to believe that Matti wasn’t right for her? Her parents, it seemed, had absorbed their share from this garden of contradictions where they had put down roots in recent years.
What if Matti really did love her? She knew that was unlikely, but she couldn’t help but think: was she going to give him up for the sake of her family, as Faisal had let her go for the sake of his family? Matti’s problem was much more complex, because according to Islamic law, she couldn’t marry Matti, since he wasn’t a Muslim. Her dad, as a Muslim man, had been able to marry her Christian mother, but Muslim women weren’t permitted to marry non-Muslim men. Could she marry him in a civil ceremony in America? She knew that her parents couldn’t possibly agree to such a thing, no matter how liberated they were.
Anyway, praise be to God that Matti had never broached this subject of love. Perhaps his feelings toward her were no different from the customary affection between friends or between brothers and sisters. Especially since in America it wasn’t generally accepted for first cousins to form romantic relationships. Perhaps her years in Saudi Arabia had so perverted her judgment in these matters that when a man was just being nice and kind to her, she misread it as LOVE.
Her parents decided to take the step they had been postponing until Michelle got her degree from UCSF. As a pretext for making that decision now instead of later, they insisted that with the situation being what it was in post-9/11 America, they were afraid for her to return there for her last two years of college. Michelle had a hunch, though, or more than a hunch, that what she had said about her relationship with Matti, as vague as it had been, was their real motive.
They would all move to Dubai! That was the decision the parents made once they became convinced they could no longer fit comfortably in the prim and prying Saudi society. Michelle had no choice in the matter. If she were to refuse to move with her parents and brother, the suspicions filling her father’s head would only grow more intense. For her part, when she thought about her relationship with her cousin, she didn’t believe he truly loved her. She felt he regarded her as a pampered younger sister whom he tried to make happy—the way he tried to make everyone happy, especially those nearest to him.
Their decision, coming after she completed only two years of her studies at the University of San Francisco, bewildered her. It was clear, though, that her parents had arranged everything in advance. She was to finish her studies in the Department of Visual Communications at the American University in Dubai so that the two years wouldn’t go to waste, as had her first year of university when she moved from Riyadh to San Francisco. Little Meshaal, meanwhile, would enter a private school. Her father intended to make investments in Dubai as many of his friends were doing. Her mother would have more freedom and respect, which had mostly been denied to her in Saudi Arabia.
Even though Dubai was a lot closer than San Francisco, this move was much harder than the last one. This time she would have to say good-bye to her friends without the promise that she would see them again at the New Year’s break. Their home in Riyadh would still nominally remain their home, yet Michelle was certain that she would return to it only if everyone in the family agreed. There would remain no ties to Riyadh except for the relatives who lived there, and her father and mother would not be interested in visiting them, anyway.
Lamees organized a big farewell party at her house. The girls gave Michelle an elegant diamond-studded watch. They cried remembering the days of their adolescence and young adulthood, which seemed to be vanishing with Michelle’s departure from the
shillah.
Um Nuwayyir reminded her girls repeatedly that phone lines and Internet did exist! She pointed out that they could even converse daily, with picture and sound using a webcam and a microphone. That soothed them a little. Still, they worried that their relationship with Michelle would change once she moved to Dubai, just as it had when she went to America. This would be an even bigger change, for now the separation would be permanent, and so the ember of friendship that had remained constantly warm for years would be snuffed out, no matter how hard they all tried to preserve it.
Lamees was the most grief-stricken of all. Michelle’s departure came at a trying time for her. She was suffering from an accumulation of things: difficulties at the university with some overbearing faculty members, plus her usual problems with Tamadur, who never tired of criticizing her and didn’t conceal her envy whenever Lamees scored some success or other. There were also problems with Ahmad, who, Lamees had discovered, was repeating everything they discussed on the phone to his friends at the university—all those conversations that had nothing to do with their studies! He was passing on everything she told him for their amusement, including stories about her classmates, who then heard about it and got furious and stopped having anything to do with her.
In the last few years, Lamees had grown distant from Michelle. She had gone through a long period of uncertainty and conflicting feelings that came when she compared Michelle to her new, somewhat more sophisticated girlfriends at the College of Medicine. But on the day of the departure, Lamees had the sudden painful realization that Michelle alone understood her, really understood her. Michelle resembled her in so many ways and she had divined her true personality in a way that the others had not. Only she had unlocked her deepest secrets and could keep them safe. Yes, there had been problems. Michelle had put up with a lot; she had every right to feel hurt when Lamees neglected her at the university. But what was the point of dredging any of that up now? Michelle was about to leave and might never return, and so Lamees would lose forever the friend closest to her heart, whose worth she recognized only now.