Book: Girls of Riyadh (بنات الرياض)
Author: Rajaa Alsanea, Marilyn Booth (Translator)
Publication Year: 2005 (2007)
Genre: Fiction
The next couple of country profiles in this series, Saudi Arabia and Eritrea, are thematically linked. Two of the next three books we look at are connected by their depictions of love and life in Saudi Arabia for people from disparate backgrounds.
When we come to look at Eritrea (see Eritrea), we will see how poor immigrants living in the hardline Islamic country survive. First though, we take a rose tinted look at the love lives of women born in Saudi Arabia to prosperous and influential families.
Upon its release in 2005, Girls of Riyadh took flak from both sides of the political and religious divide. Hailed as the Sex and the City of Saudi Arabia, hardliners inevitably found in it the loose morals and corrupting influence of western life.
I haven’t read Candace Bushnell’s original Sex and the City novel, but having seen at least some of the TV adaptation, Girls of Riyadh is hardly so graphic. Indeed, it is entirely sexless. It plays out more like a Jane Austin novel than the tale of debauchery some levelled at it. Even the melodrama of the Bronte sisters’ best novels contain more eroticism (which is still to say almost none).
The Girls of Riyadh is written in the form of an email send out every week to its subscribers, in which the anonymous writer recounts the love lives of her four friends.
These lives are hardly reminiscent of Disney fairytale princesses. One is
betrothed to be married, then the man calls off the wedding, leaving a large stigma
attached to the jilted woman . Another is married and with child when she
discovers her husband has a mistress. She confronts the other woman and is
beaten by her husband when she refuses to apologises to his lover.
And yes, Girls of Riyadh is a sanitised view of Saudi society, entirely free of scenes of public stonings or beheadings, unlike Sulaiman Addonia’s The Consequences of Love (see: Eritrea). Yet this is perhaps the more egregious of the two sorts of criticism levelled at the book.
The criticisms of hardliners were reactionary, but hardly surprising. On the other hand, to criticise the book for opening a window onto the upper echelons of Saudi society is ridiculous. Why shouldn’t we see life as it is lived at every plateau of soceity? How can we assess a culture without seeing it from its multiple levels?
Moreover, it isn’t like Saudi Arabia is terribly different from other countries in the world, especially in the west. To live in the UK, a country with perhaps the most corrupt government in living memory, where the ruling party gives untendered contracts to party donors while vilifying the poor and asylum seekers, is to be reminded that the rot of hypocrisy is in the root and branch of all countries.
Money and power make people crazy. Their infection sickens them and they govern in (un)kind. Those at the bottom of society are expected to stick to the rules and adhere to standards for which those at the top are never to be held. We see this wherever those claiming benefits are demonised by politicians who claim thousands in expenses from the public purse: Where religious scripture is the literal truth and applied rigorously until it requires anything of those imposing it, at which point it becomes open to interpretation: or Where women are put to death for committing adultery, but the men they sleep with are treated leniently, as if the men were the ones without the power refuse, rather than forcing themselves on any woman they desire.
We can also hardly talk about Saudi Arabia from a western perspective without talking about the hypocrisy and double standards of western countries when dealing with hardline, repressive countries. Oil is money and the Arabian peninsula has plenty of it. Therefore, all of the usual standards we apply to other countries (Iran, North Korea, Russia et. al.) are declared null and void. We can, rightly, denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and fly Ukrainian flags at our sporting events. But we must never do the same or even talk about Saudi Arabia’s proxy war in Yemen, which has killed an estimated 377,000 people since 2014, because that is a war armed, financed and supported by the vast majority of western countries, including the UK and USA.
As such, it is hardly surprising that native Saudi Arabian families with money live a different kind of live from those in the lower echelons of Saudi society. But the point of Girls of Riyadh is that even rich young women growing up in the country are still treated as second class citizens, bought and sold by the men who oversee them. That it is regarded as some kind of revolutionary act to suggest that women in Saudi Arabia might have the same kind of romantic dreams as women the world over is damming. That the year is 2024 and yet in many parts of the world, including large sections of the supposed civilised west, it might as well be 1224.
At the end of the day, Girls of Riyadh is what it is. It’s not the greatest novel ever written. If it had been written in most western countries, I’m sure it would have been dismissed as a typical piece of ‘chick lit’ and disappeared beneath the weight and white noise of a thousand similar books published each year.
As it is, Girls of Riyadh is a revelation exactly because of where it is set and by whom it was written. It is disingenuous to devalue any book written by the repressed, because each liberated voice is one more breath blowing in the winds of change.
Girls of Riyadh shouldn’t be treated in isolation, but as part of a matrix mapping the mechanics of love in present day Saudi Arabia. We shall add to that matrix when we turn to Sulaiman Addonia and a very different sort of tale of love in Saudi Arabia and in the refugee camps of Eritrea.
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| Rajaa Alsanea |
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