The Ruins of Us (43 page)
She puts her finger on Texas, moving it from west to east until she arrives at Sugar Land. For her, it is a heavy place, the blinds always drawn, her mother cranky without her supply of Yemeni khat, the swampy Gulf air rich with decay. She has never been nostalgic for Sugar Land, and she will not start now. A new place is what she is after. She feels the Urals rise up under her open palm, the unfurling of the South China Sea at her fingertips. She knows there is an island where she can catch slick, muscled fish that glitter more brightly than all the jewels of Gold City. She knows there is a place where she can sit too long in the sun and shed the layer of skin that clings to her now. She will find the place, lose herself, lose memory. The children will visit her there, in this place beyond language, beyond nation; they will laugh and laugh and laugh, a sound like bells echoing into the sky.
You will search everywhere for her,
you will ask the waves of the sea about her, the
turquoise of
the shore . . .
Your heart’s love has no land, no homeland, no
address.
Life does not permit even the greatest love poets to write only love poetry.
At night, she and her children will fall asleep like foundlings, glad of each other, only as far apart as the salt skin that keeps them separate seas of blood and bone.
P.S.
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About the author
Meet Keija Parssinen
About the book
A Country Not Your Own
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Journey to the Middle East: Author Recommendations
Meet Keija Parssinen
K
EIJA
P
ARSSINEN
was born in Saudi Arabia and lived there for twelve years as a third-generation expatriate. She earned a degree in English literature from Princeton University and received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she held a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching and Writing Fellowship. For
The Ruins of Us
, her first novel, she received a Michener-Copernicus award. She lives with her husband on the edge of a quarry in Columbia, Missouri, where she directs the Quarry Heights Writers’ Workshop.
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A Country Not Your Own
W
HEN
I
WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL
in Texas, I was deeply troubled by the question “Where are you from?” I was born and raised in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, where my mother had also lived since she was four years old. I had lived more than half my life in that country, and it was listed on my birth certificate as my birthplace. My mother and maternal grandparents had lived there before me. And yet when I answered that question about my origin by saying “Saudi Arabia,” I got incredulous looks. I was blond, the child of two Californians, and American by citizenship. But I still claimed Saudi Arabia as my homeland even though I might never go back, thanks to the strict laws governing visitor visas. Unless you have an immediate family member living there, or you’re a journalist working for a major newspaper, it’s impossible to secure a visitor visa. And for a while, I felt comfortable with my answer to the question. After all, what other criteria aside from being born in a place must be met in order for you to belong?
But then I got to college. At my mother’s urging, I went to international student gatherings. Missing Arabia while she was at college in Southern California, she’d sought out Saudi students and became a part of their raucous social circle, and I think she hoped I would find a similarly satisfying experience waiting for me at school. To the first meeting, I wore my mother’s Arabic name necklace—it spelled out
Catherine
—which I had come to cherish as a symbol of my Middle Eastern past. A student read it back to me before I could introduce myself. “Catherine,” he said. “Hi.” He was from Syria. In that moment, I felt incredibly foolish—I wasn’t
from
Saudi Arabia; I couldn’t even read the name necklace that I had so loved.
I didn’t go back to the international student gatherings, and from that point forward, I told people I was from Texas, even though I’d only lived there for seven years, not nearly as long as I’d been in Saudi. But I started to understand that much more comprised national identity than mere presence upon a country’s soil. But where did that leave me? Texans seemed to require at least a decade of residence before allowing you to claim their state as home. I kept up a quiet nostalgia for the Kingdom, a place that bloomed with all the mystery of memory in my imagination.
Several events precipitated the writing of
The Ruins of Us
. First, I learned that a Saudi friend of my parents had taken a second wife—it shocked my parents deeply and, as a result, shocked me. It was not something they had expected of their friend, and their other Saudi and Arab friends looked on plural marriages with mild disdain. My young mind pondered the details of such an arrangement: Why did he do it? Emotionally, how did everyone in the family survive the fallout? Logistically, how did he manage it?
“
I kept up a quiet nostalgia for the Kingdom, a place that bloomed with all the mystery of memory in my imagination.
”
And then, September 11, 2001, came and went. Fifteen Saudis (my countrymen, a part of me still thought) flew themselves into the Twin Towers just a few miles north of where I lived in my college dorm room, and I wondered, did I know the country of my birth at all?
“
I wondered, did I know the country of my birth at all?
”
Finally, in the summer of 2003, my father, now divorced from my mother, moved back to Saudi Arabia, even though the country was wracked by terrorist violence and had experienced its bloodiest months since the 1979 takeover of the Great Mosque in Mecca, when hundreds of soldiers and rebels were killed. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had formally and gruesomely announced itself, and my father, a six-foot-three blue-eyed half-Finn, was thrusting himself into the middle of it. Was it suicide, or was it willful ignorance? My parents had always had many Saudi friends, so growing up we often left the compound to socialize with their families. Perhaps my father felt he was safe because he knew the lay of the land, knew and trusted his neighbors. After all, he had lived in the Kingdom for decades; he had written his doctoral dissertation on the Palestinian Diaspora; his best friends were Saudi—perhaps he felt that this gave him a pass. That he was somehow protected from the violence because he had always been sympathetic to Arab struggle and had built a life and community in the Middle East.
But for me, his daughter, who was no longer sure she knew anything about Saudi Arabia, it was frightening. While my father was overseas, Paul Johnson was beheaded on videotape. A group of French tourists were shot while visiting Mada’in Saleh, the historic site in Southern Arabia. Terrorists tried to blow up the Abqaiq refinery. Because I was not living there and could not observe the more mundane details of my father’s life—the kabsa feasts, the late-night carousing with his buddies, the thousands upon thousands of nonviolent Saudis who were equally threatened by the outbreak of violence—I was left only with what was reported to me by the BBC and the
New York Times
. Anxiety limned my dreams.
In 2005, I started writing
The Ruins of Us
to assert some control over my father’s story. I was tired of feeling fearful, and I wanted to better understand exactly what was going on in the country I had called home for so many years. In a note at the end of his novel
To the End of the Land
, David Grossman wrote that he began the novel to protect his son once the young man was called to the frontlines in Lebanon, and so I began to explore through fiction the violence that plagued my mind, and the fear it inspired. If I could control the story, my father would be safe. I read dozens of books about the history of Saudi Arabia, about al-Qaeda and September 11, about Saudi ARAMCO, where my father and grandfather had both worked, and about the al-Saud. I read every newspaper article I could find about the Kingdom. I spoke with journalists and human rights experts. At the University of Iowa library, I pored over scholarly papers. I read blogs written by young Saudis, Saudi women, American women married to Saudis. And I started to feel that, at last, through the writing and research, I was coming to terms with the complicated country where I had spent my childhood. My father survived the violence in a way that Grossman’s son, tragically, did not; fiction, it seemed, was an unreliable bodyguard.
“
I began to explore through fiction the violence that plagued my mind, and the fear it inspired. If I could control the story, my father would be safe.
”
“
My research was an education, and the knowledge it delivered did what knowledge always does—it enlightened, but at a cost.
”
The research was, of course, an exercise in disenchantment. When you realize that you spent your entire childhood in a carefully guarded bubble—where people did not live by the same rules as the citizens of the country, where Arabic was not taught in schools—you get a little sad, you get a little angry. You feel robbed of authentic experience. You feel like a phony. My research was an education, and the knowledge it delivered did what knowledge always does—it enlightened, but at a cost. When I talked about my new feelings with one of my oldest ARAMCO brat friends, she didn’t really want to hear it. “I don’t think that’s all it was,” she said. And she was right: I possessed the cynicism of the newly informed, and I was letting it kill my happy childhood memories. So I tried to let my friend’s nostalgia, her pleasant memories of a tight-knit community of people surviving as best they could in a harsh, strange, and marvelous place, return me to my original, simpler sentiments about the Kingdom.
In 2008, I traveled back to Saudi Arabia. I was able to secure a visa because my father was still working there. I rode a bike around the Dhahran compound, stopping by all my old haunts—the snack bar, the Third Street pool, my school, the white clapboard ranch-style house where my family lived for years. On a drive out to the oasis town of Qatif, Dad and I stopped to gas up the car. I rolled down the window and leaned out to take a photograph of a beautiful pink neon sign flashing brightly against the oncoming dusk. Some young men hanging out in the back of a pickup truck stared at us. “Put it away, roll up the window,” Dad said nervously. He got in, we drove away quickly, and I noticed him checking the rearview mirror a couple times. I could see, then, that my fear and paranoia about my dad’s existence in post–9/11 Saudi had not been misplaced.
“
I possessed the cynicism of the newly informed, and I was letting it kill my happy childhood memories.
”
At Half Moon Bay, I stared out at the darkening Arabian Sea. I had celebrated countless birthday parties on that beach. I’d caught jellyfish, built sandcastles, jumped from the pier that stretched far into the clear, salty water. At that moment, I realized that for all my research, for all my years living there, Saudi Arabia would forever remain a mystery, just beyond my grasp. Yes, it was true: it was not my country, and it could never be my home, at least not one I could return to. But it was more than merely a place I had lived, once. It was the mythic, wondrous land of my childhood.
Journey to the Middle East
Author Recommendations
Literature Related to Saudi Arabia
1. Cities of Salt Trilogy (
Cities of Salt
,
The Trench
,
Variations on Night and Day
), Abdelrahman Munif
In the epic trilogy that got him stripped of his Saudi citizenship, Munif explores a fictitious Gulf country’s evolution after the discovery of oil beneath its sands. Set over several decades, the books scathingly assess Western influence and exploitation, as well as royal pandering and greed, during the subsequent period of rapid change that forever alters the desert kingdom’s landscape, physically, politically, and socially. A gifted storyteller, Munif unfolds the tale with all the heart and bitterness of a man who feels he has lost his home to the inexorable, unforgiving push of modernity—these books are a lament for a way of life forever lost.
2.
Girls of Riyadh
, Rajaa Alsanea
Upon publication, Alsanea’s book caused a scandal in the notoriously private Kingdom, where people would do just about anything to prevent the airing of their families’ dirty laundry. Though it is a work of fiction, this fact did little to protect Alsanea from being condemned for exploring the taboo subjects of romantic love, marriage, and sex in the Kingdom. A fun, frothy peek behind the closed doors shielding the sequestered daughters of Saudi Arabia’s elite, and an interesting examination of the dual lives those daughters are forced to live depending on whether they are at home or abroad.