Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh explores the lives of four Saudia Arabian friends through emails written by an anonymous member of the friendship group. Described by Marilyn Booth as a novel about the “self-fashioning of the Saui bourgeoisie”, upon publication the novel achieved status in the West as a shining light on the untold stories of a marginalised demographic: the young Islamic woman, contributing to the discourse surrounding the construction of ‘secondary-culture’ texts in an international, specifically Western literary marketplace.1 Particularly significant aspects of the novel are the novel’s engagement with its international audience, (both internally and externally) and Alsanea’s use of the cyberworld as the backdrop for the narrative.
One of the most revealing aspects of the book lies more in its reception in the West than within the text itself, a facet in itself telling of Western engagement with texts of the Other. In the introduction to the text Alsanea prefaces that “the girls in the novel do not represent all girls in Riyadh”.2 Instead, Girls of Riyadh is merely an imagining of four Saudi girls’ lives and while the geographical location is undoubtedly central to their experiences, reflecting the cultural context in which they are set, it is no more significant to the story than Manhattan is to the Sex and the City series. Rather, our own perception of Western centrality is what constructs the text as an honest representation of the Saudi female reality. Marilyn Booth argues that to Western readers, female-authored Arabic narratives offer the “promise to carry the reader into the hidden domestic heart of society” and as Saudi Arabia is seen as the locus of the “mystery of the Islamic Orient”, Girls of Riyadh is transformed from fiction to a first-hand account of a monolithic ‘truth’, a sentiment reflected in the Western endorsements of the book.3 For example, the Daily Telegraph praises it as “An absorbing expose of life behind the veil” while Financial Times describes it as “a revealing study of one of the world’s most secretive societies”. This hyper-politicisation of international texts, particularly Arabic female narratives, further marginalises them from the aesthetic literary world by perpetuating an imperialist gaze on non-Western texts that views them as only valuable for what they are able to teach us. As in the case of Girls of Riyadh, this undoubtedly results in discourses solely or heavily focussed more on the politics of the book than its literary features.
Another revealing aspect of the novel is Alsanea’s construction of the girls’ identities as the result of the combination of their home culture and other cultures. In her introduction to the novel, Alsanea writes about her perceived “duty to reveal another side of Saudi life to the Western world” which still perceives the Middle East as “land of the Arabian nights” and “the land that gave birth to Bin Laden and other terrorists, and where women are dressed in black from head to toe” (p. vii). But instead of repudiating these respectively romantic or political implications in the novel, she positions the society’s cultural traditions alongside the girls’ transgressive behaviour, meaning while the two are at odds, neither is superior to the other. For example, the culture’s disdain for dating and emphasis on separation by gender culminates in an instance on Valentine’s Day where nicodemously delivered but conspicuously displayed gifts are confiscated from the girls at Michelle’s university for their celebration of the holiday. In a culture hostile to non-familial male-female relationships, where “love was treated like an unwelcome visitor”, the girls’ subscription to the arrival of the consumerism of Valentine’s Day is cause for punishment by the “Religious Police” who send girls home for flaunting the “Crimes of Red” (pp. 62-64). Through this playful criminalisation of public love in Saudi society, Alsanea demonstrates how the influences of the West seamlessly interact with the conservatism of Saudi culture to construct identities that desire passionate love but must be secretive about it.
As the West’s reception of literatures of the Other is is contingent on the construction of the Eastern female Other as oppressed in contrast to the liberated Western woman as outlined by Booth, perhaps also present in Western reading of these texts is a possible subconscious desire for certain narratives in support of this imagining of these secondary cultures. This is evidenced by the fact that much of the novel’s criticism focuses on its perceived failure to reveal something new and unknown about the lives of Arab women or to dismantle the oppressive Islamic regime under which the girls live, easing the novel’s dismissal as vapid or asinine when this self-negotiated ‘promise’ is not delivered. For example, Rachel Aspden of the Guardian writes that ultimately the novel disappoints as “After Alsanea’s promises, the novel’s collapse into the frothiness of its TV blueprint is telling – in the end, Girls of Riyadh is more a love letter to America than a poison pen to the Saudi establishment.”4 This implies a preconception of the book’s performance as a denunciation of the Saudi establishment, despite Alsanea’s own words which oppose this. One of her final aims for the book outlined in the introduction is to highlight that the girls experience life and love in a “way that keeps what is good about the values of our religion and culture, while allowing for reform”, demonstrating no desire to undermine the novel’s cultural backdrop. Thus, Aspden’s assertion that Alsanea as “sets out” to overturn the stereotypes of Saudi Arabian women ““by proving that ‘women here fall deeply in and out of love just like women everywhere else’” is perhaps too reductive a reading of Alsanea’s position, possibly reflective of Apsden’s own desire for the novel’s direction in spite of the book’s textually established stance on its depiction of Arab culture.
Similarly, also revealing is the subversion of Western significance outside of itself which Alsanea depicts through the novel’s engagement with international cultures. By relying heavily on footnotes to explain foreign concepts which transfers the labour of learning away from the reader, Alsanea ‘brings’ the text to a presumably non Arab and likely white or light complected Western readership, assumed by the marginalisation of dark knees in a footnote (p. 164). Yet despite this domesticisation of the original text, Alsanea decentres and destabilizes the West’s self-conception through the nuances in the girls’ experiences in and outside Saudi Arabia. For example, while Sadeem’s arrival in London brings the freedom to dress as she wishes without judgement, she equally dismisses the Western scholarly claim to knowledge of the human condition, deciding that “Freud, with all his totems, tomatoes, cucumbers and green salad vegetables, was not going to be much help in solving her problems!” (p. 73) For Gamrah, emigration to the West isn’t presented as entirely positive as America becomes the site of domestic violence and her husband’s affair while through her access to cosmetic surgery there, Lebanon becomes a site of empowerment following an abusive marriage (p. 161).
Similarly, in America, part of Michelle and Matti’s romance involves drinking hot chocolate in winter at Ghirardelli, which happens to overlook Alcatraz: “Sipping their hot drinks, they contemplated its tower in the distance, a notorious silhouette that conjured up a grim past of crime and violence in America” (p. 177). By juxtaposing Michelle and Matti’s freedom to drink casually alongside the memory of repression in an infamously brutal prison, Alsanea highlights the hypocrisy of a West that views cultures of the Other as barbaric by overturning the established savage East, civilised West binary. Through these conflicting depictions of the girls’ experiences in Saudi Arabia and outside it, Alsanea demonstrates the universality of ideologies of oppression and liberation to an audience perhaps willingly blind to their own cultural blemishes.
Also interesting is the question of authority within the book which is explored in several ways, one of which being the relationship between reader and author. The anonymous narrator regularly addresses her readers, writing for example, that “A lot of angry emails came my way last week… most of them – were angry at me for talking about the sun signs and the Ouija board and reading coffee cups which not so many believe in” (p. 61). While she acknowledges these critiques and suggestions for less offensive content, she resists them in the summarising sentences: “Okay. I accept your anger. And I also don’t” (p. 61). By interweaving the varied responses to the emails with the girls’ narratives, Alsanea also anticipates her real audience’s responses to the novel by voicing what may be the reader’s feelings, forming a type of dialogue between reader and author that she tactically maintains a stronghold on. For example, when she hits back at a reader for suggesting her depictions of the girls lives are deliberately unfavourable, she also manages our expectations of the novel by asserting the kind of narrative she wishes to promote. By presenting multiple responses to the emails, viewpoints which she welcomes in her acknowledgement of them then dismisses, Alsanea emulates the experience of reading and reviewing a text in the real world by subconsciously toying with the possible responses to her text. Thus through this pre-emptive diminishment of the alternative she projects a narrative which disenfranchises the reader by asserting her omniscience within and without the text, which affirms her power over her narrative.
Alsanea also regularly shifts between first and third person by opening each chapter with her responses, taking us out of the narrative and back into the fictional reality of the whole text. The fact that the intertextual references to the Qur’an, the Hadith and Arab literature feature more heavily in the first person sections of the text, often in the form of an epigraph, further positions the cultural reality in which the novel is grounded at the forefront. This constructs the novel as a celebration of Islam and Arabic culture, regardless of the conflicting sentiments throughout it. By placing the majority of these texts of cultural significance in the sections of the narrative where we are most sober in our reading, Alsanea encourages an international audience’s engagement with these literatures, simultaneously venerating a culture that has been denigrated in the West, and demystifying the artistic productions of a still mystified region.
In its depiction of the ordinariness of the lives of a heavily politicised demographic, Girls of Riyadh is an interesting and revealing text. By manipulating the depiction of the girls’ engagement with international cultures as well as their own, Alsanea creates a text that on the surface portrays the universal themes of love, family and friendship through an ‘unseen’ lens but equally manoeuvres around the reader’s preconceptions to produce a reflexive reading experience. This is facilitated by her use of the ‘anonymous blogger’ formula typical of chick literature which emphasises her authority over the narrative through its recreation of the dialogue between reader and author.
Bibliography
Alsanea, Rajaa, Girls of Riyadh, trans. by Marilyn Booth, (Penguin, 2008)
Aspden, Rachel ‘Sex and the Saudis’, The Guardian, 22 July 2007, Books section
Booth, Marilyn, ‘“The Muslim Woman” as Celebrity Author and the Politics of Translating Arabic: Girls of Riyadh Go on the Road’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Vol. 6 (2010) pp.149-182
- Marilyn Booth, ‘“The Muslim Woman” as Celebrity Author and the Politics of Translating Arabic: Girls of Riydah Go on the Road’, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Vol. 6 (2010) p.176.
↩︎ - Rajaa Alsanea, Girls of Riyadh, trans. by Marilyn Booth (Penguin, 2008), p.viii. Subsequent references to be indicated parenthetically.
↩︎ - Booth, pp. 154, 160.
↩︎ - Rachel Aspden, ‘Sex and the Saudis’, The Guardian, 22 July 2007, Books section
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