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FICTION

Reality show

It’s hard to empathise with the young women of Saudi Arabia’s ‘velvet’ class in search for that elusive thing called love, when they get to travel first class, wear Roberto Cavalli and fly off to London to nurse heartbreak. Mu st we empathise? Yes, because they can lead change. Ms. Alsanea thinks so too, or else, she wouldn’t have yanked off the veil of secrecy for an unflinching look into the double standards of Saudi society, and a scathing critique of it in her debut novel.

An unnamed narrative voice sends off a series of e-mails every week to subscribers of an Internet group. These mails unravel the lives of four twenty-something women traversing the minefield of love strewn with longing, loss, anger and disappointment. It’s a reality show of social pursuits and romantic encounters, the kind you find in ‘chick lit’. But the book does go beyond that genre.

With the e-mail format, the style is chatty, irreverent and provocative but don’t expect riveting prose. In fact, there are clumsy similes or some things lost in translation in sloppy lines such as these, “The chemistry between them became so thick that it hovered and swooped around their heads like cartoon sparrows.” There are ‘girlie’ obsessions with zodiac signs and sweeping generalisations about men which amount to male bashing — serious preoccupations of this gang of girls!

Though her scope is limited, Alsanea handles the ups and downs of Gamrah, Lamees, Michelle and Sadeem, against the backdrop of conflicting values —of Islamic tradition and the west — with an unerring grip.

She, like many writers from the Middle East, who have the luxury of speaking from distant shores, possesses a western sensibility that informs her notion of love and challenges tribal ways that trample on the freedoms of educated Saudi women, who aren’t allowed to sign their names in the marriage registry.

But her protagonists don’t evoke compassion the way 17-year-old Marina Nemat in Prisoner of Tehran: A Memoir, or Mariam and Laila, in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns do, as they endure harro wing ordeals in violently repressive Iran and Afghanistan. Though the elitist canvas of Girls of Riyadh is nowhere as heart-wrenching, its concerns are real and urgent. What redeems these affluent girls is the stand they take. Sadeem a nd Michelle are jilted but emerge stronger. Gamrah endures the challenge of being a single parent, refusing marriage to an obnoxious chauvinist who wants her minus her child.

However, they never rise above the personal — pre and post-marital woes caused by effete men, stifled dreams and compromise solutions. Well, these aren’t the book lovers of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, w ho realise that apart from discussing the literary merits of books banned in Iran, they have found their means of protest.

“There, in that living room, we rediscovered…we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita, we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom.”

The “Small space on the world wide web…” is where Ms. Alsanea is free to be subversive. She quotes Kazantzakis, “I expect nothing. I fear no one. I am free.” Brave words, but in the face of controversy this book has stirred up, will she return to Riyadh as planned, after her degree? My guess is she has made alternate plans, which I think will include doing more of the same — being the change she wants to see.

It’s a measure of a society’s insecurity that it can’t deal with dissent and there are many dissenting voices emerging from the Middle East. “Well, don’t shoot the messenger!” is right, especially at a time when most conservative Islamic societies are seriously introspecting.

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