Rajaa Alsanea - Girls of Riyadh

Okay. I accept your anger. And I also don’t. As you can see, and as you will see, I am an ordinary girl (Okay maybe a little nutty, just a little!). I don’t analyze every move I make, and I don’t worry about every act possibly being taboo and against social or religious laws. All I can say is that I do not claim to be perfect (as some people do).

My friends are standard examples, and they are pretty good ones, of who we all are. Some might purposely ignore what their stories show us about ourselves, while others are just blind to it. I am forever hearing people say to me: “You will not reform the world and you will not change people.” They have a point, a very good point, but what I WON’T do is to give up the attempt, like everyone else does. There is the difference between me and other people. As the hadith,* the words of Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, says, “Deeds are measured by the intentions behind them.” May God consider my writings as good deeds, as I only have good intentions. Let me say it again in case someone didn’t get it the first time around: “I do not claim perfection!” I confess to my ignorance and flaws, but “Every child of Adam commits errors, and the best of those who commit errors are those who repent.” I work hard to correct my errors and to cultivate myself. If only those who find fault with me would turn around and straighten themselves out before they start agitating to straighten me out.

May all repent for their sins after reading about them on the Internet. May all discover some hidden tumors and extract them after having been shown some ugly examples under a microscope. I see nothing wrong in setting down my friends’ problems in my e-mails so that others will benefit—others who have not had the opportunity to learn in the school of life, the school that my friends entered from the widest of gates—the gate of Love . The true and shameful wrong, the way I see things, would be for any of us to stand in each other’s way, disparaging each other, even though we all admit the unity of our goal, which is reforming our society and making every one of us a better person.

On Valentine’s Day, Michelle put on a red shirt and carried a matching handbag. A large number of the other female students did the same, enough of them so that the whole campus looked bright red, by means of clothes and flowers and stuffed animals. In those days, the holiday was still a really new fad and the guys liked it; they cruised the streets stopping every girl they saw to give her a red rose with their phone numbers wrapped around the stem. The girls liked it, too, since now they had finally found someone to give them red roses the way they always saw it done in films. That was before the Religious Police banned anything that might remotely suggest a celebration of the holiday of love, Saint Valentine’s Day, as in Islam there are only two holidays, or Eids: one is Eid Al-Fitr, the day following the month of Ramadan, and the other one is Eid Al-Adha, after the days of pilgrimage to Mecca. Saudis started celebrating Valentine’s Day in the late nineties after they heard about it through satellite TV channels broadcast from Lebanon and Egypt. It was before punishments and fines were instituted for owners of flower shops who gave out red roses to their VIP customers by the most intricate and convoluted ways as if they were smuggled goods. Although celebrating this holiday in Saudi Arabia was prohibited, the celebration of Mother’s or Father’s Day was not, even though the principle behind both ideas is one and the same. Love was treated like an unwelcome visitor in our region.

Faisal’s chauffeur was waiting for Michelle at the university entrance to give her Faisal’s Valentine’s Day gift. It was an enormous basket filled with dried red roses and red heart-shaped candles. Nestled in the middle sat a little black bear holding a crimson velvet heart. When you pressed on the heart, the tune of Barry Manilow’s song “Can’t Smile Without You” came floating out.

Michelle sauntered toward the lecture hall, feeling really special. She looked benevolently down at her girlfriends, whose hearts were slowly disintegrating from total jealousy as she read to them the poem Faisal had written on the card accompanying the gift. They were so jealous, in fact, that quite a few of them brought in dolls or stuffed bears and flowers the next day, just to prove that they had been surprised with gifts like hers after returning home from school.

On that day, many girls cried for a lost love or mourned for an old crush. Many gifts were confiscated and the girls who had worn red clothes or accessories had to make pledges that they not repeat their behavior next year. In the years that followed, clothes were subject to inspection even before the girls were inside the campus gates where they could take off their wraps. That way, the inspectresses could return the culprit to her chauffeur, who still would be waiting there, to be taken immediately home if there was the slightest sign of the Crime of Red on her person, even if it was a mere hair tie.

But Faisal’s gift to Michelle did not end with his romantic poem. On her way home, as she was tossing the soft black bear from hand to hand and breathing in Faisal’s elegant Bulgari scent, which he had sprinkled over the bear, she suddenly caught sight of a pair of heart-shaped diamond earrings that Faisal had hung in the bear’s cute little ears for his cute little Michelle to hang in hers.

10.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: April 16, 2004

Subject: When Grief Becomes Pleasure

He said to her one day, All a man wants from a woman is that she understand him. And so the woman snapped loudly into his ear, And all a woman wants from a man is that he love her. —Socrates

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.

After 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.