Rajaa Alsanea - Girls of Riyadh

The minute Um Faisal heard the English name Michelle , one hundred devils swarmed into her head. Faisal hastily tried to correct his mistake. People called her Michelle but her real name was purely Saudi, Mashael, he assured his mother.

“She is Mashael Al-Abdulrahman.”

A searing look from his mother’s eyes scared him and halted his tongue. He worried suddenly that some ancient quarrel existed between the two families. But it quickly became clear to him that the problem was that his mother had never before heard the name of this family.

“Who do you mean, Al-Abdulrahman ? Abdul is the servant and Rahman is the Merciful, one of Allah’s several names. So she comes from the family of the servant of God, just like any Abdullah or Abdullatif or Abdulaziz. All are names of God. But do you know how many servants of God there are? We all are! So what makes this Abdul Rahman special?”

Michelle’s family name—“Servant of the Merciful”—was as common as the epithet suggested it could be. Apparently, the name had never ascended to the ranks of families who formed alliances with—or even mixed with—the family of Al-Batran. Faisal tried to explain to his mother that Michelle’s father had only been settled in the country for a few years, and maybe that was why his name was not yet known to many in Riyadh society.

His mother didn’t get it. “Who are his brothers?” she demanded to know. Faisal answered energetically that Michelle’s father was the most successful of the Al-Abdulrahmans. It was just that, since returning from America, where he had lived for many years, this Al-Abdulrahman had customarily mixed only with people who had the same cultural outlook and ideas.

That just made his mother angrier.

The family of that girl was not of their sort. They must ask Faisal’s father, since he knew infinitely more about genealogies and families. But from the start, his mother suggested, this line of conversation did not augur well. The girl had tricked him! Aah, the girls of this generation! How awful they were! And aah, for her young, green son—she never would have expected him to fall into the trap of a girl such as this! She asked him who the girl’s maternal uncles were and as soon as she heard that the girl’s mother was American, she decided to bang the door shut for good on this fruitless dialogue around this utterly ridiculous topic. So, like countless mothers before her, she resorted to the oldest trick in the book:

“Quick, son! Get up, hurry, get me my blood pressure medicine! My heart, oh, my heart! I think I’m dying…”

Faisal tried hard. It must be said that he really tried hard to convince her, to get her to see Michelle’s many exceptional qualities, or, in the horse-trading language of mothers looking to make a match, her “fine attributes.” He went on and on about things that meant nothing to her. Mashael was a cultured, educated girl; she was a university student whose potpourri of Eastern and Western thinking he really liked and admired. The girl understood him; the girl was sophisticated and not straight out of the village like all of the other girls he had met or those his mother had hinted strongly about marrying him off to. The simple truth of it was the one thing that he could not say plainly to his mother: the girl loved him and he loved her. He loved her even more than she loved him, he was sure.

Faisal’s mother gulped down her pills. (If they didn’t help, at least they didn’t hurt.) She wept hot tears and she stroked his hair gently as she talked about her great hopes to marry her youngest son to the best of girls, to give him the best home there ever was, and the best automobile, plus all-expense-paid tickets to spend the best honeymoon ever.

Poor miserable Faisal! He cried, too, poor Little Faisal under the feet of his cherished mother. He loved no one in the universe more than his mother, and he had never opposed her, never ever, never in his life. He wept also for the sophisticated girl, his beloved who understood him and whom he understood, more than any two people in this world could ever understand each other, Michelle with her Najdi beauty and American personality, who would not be his.

16.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: May 28, 2004

Subject: Is This Emotional Stability?

Lots of you folks out there simply did not believe what Faisal did. Or, to put it more accurately, what he did not do. Let me assure you, though, that this is exactly what happened. He told Michelle the sordid details of the back-and-forth with his mother—which I in turn conveyed to you—but only after several weeks of confused mental meandering, several weeks of self-punishment, several weeks of war between a passionate heart and a head that knew exactly what the limitations—set down long ago by his family—were in the choices he would have in life.

I can’t understand why all of you are so surprised! Such tales happen among us every day, and yet no one has an inkling of it except the two people who get scorched at the scene of the fire. Where do you think all of these sad poems and wailing, melancholic songs of our heritage came from? And today, poetry pages in newspapers, radio and TV programs, and literary chat rooms on the Internet all draw their nourishment from such tales, such heartbreaks.

I will tell you the things that happen inside our homes and the feelings that grip us—we, the girls of Riyadh—when such things happen to us. I will not attempt to access the contents of the manly crocodile chests out there because to put it simply, I don’t know enough about the nature of crocodiles. Frankly, crocodiles are not among my spheres of expertise or interest. I speak only of my female friends; the rest is up to someone who is feeling crocodilish enough to want to say something about his friends. That crocodile should definitely write to me and inform me of what goes on in the swamps they inhabit, because we—the lizards—are in truly desperate need! We really do long to know their thoughts and understand their motives, which always seem to be so deeply hidden away from us.

All hell broke loose for some after my last e-mail about Faisal and Michelle. Unfortunately, some people can always be heard over everybody else because they are proud practitioners of the questionable philosophy that the loudest voice beats all. If they are so eager to stir things up, wouldn’t it be a better use of their time for these vengeful types to wag their tongues against repugnant ideas and outdated traditions like tribal prejudice,* rather than against people who merely try to get some discussion going about how offensive these practices are?

Everyone is condemning my bold writing, and perhaps my boldness in writing at all. Everyone is blaming me for the fury I have stirred up around “taboo” topics that in this society we have never been accustomed to discussing so frankly and especially when the opening salvos come from a young woman like me. But isn’t there a starting point for every drastic social change?

And this I believe: I might find a few stray people who believe in my cause right now, or I might not, but I doubt that I would find many people opposed to it if I were to look half a century into the future.

Gamrah’s permanent return to her family’s home was billed as a routine visit. Her mother, who knew everything that had happened, thought it wisest to hide the truth from everyone. “A summer cloud”—that was how she described her daughter’s quarrel with Rashid and his threat to divorce her. Her mother decided not to tell even Gamrah’s father, who was in North Africa on holiday. After all, the man had never taken any interest in the personal lives of anyone in the household and he never would. Gamrah’s mother had always been the organizing mastermind, the mover and shaker of the household, and she always would remain so.