The Books of Kate, Chapter 3

Yeah, I definitely thought I was going to do this book review thing a lot more often.  Hasn't really happened.  And I've definitely been reading a lot at work.  Oh, well.  Book #3:

On a suggestion from my stepsister, Kelley, I picked up a book called Girls of Riyadh by Rajaa Alsanea a couple of weeks ago.  Middle eastern culture produces some incredible stories and the story-tellers to go with them, and I've been on a kick with this style of book ever since reading The Kite Runner a couple of years ago.

The writing is a little lacking but the story more than makes up for it.  This book is an only slightly fictionalized account of four 20-something women living in Saudi Arabia.  The author wrote the revealing tale from within it and the characters in it are her real-life closest friends.

The book was written in email installments.  Alsanea created a Yahoo Groups account and would send out a chapter ever Friday.  Her following quickly grew and she was both loved and hated by her fellow Saudi Arabians and others across the world.

The women are what make this book so compelling.  They are all a part of Riyadh's upper class, women that are well aware of the Western world.  They spend summers in London.  They wear Badgley Mishka and Elie Saab.  They speak English.  They watch Sex and the City.  They celebrate Valentine's Day.  One of the women lived in America until the age of 13 while her father went to and then worked at Stanford.  They are no different from me in many ways.

And yet they marry men that they've only seen face to face once.  They are not allowed out without a male to accompany them.  They can't drive.  Divorce is the worst shame.  They have entire relationships based on phone calls, texts, and IMs.  They embrace and embody their culture and religion, but yet see so far outside it.  It is a striking juxtaposition to say the least.

What is interesting is their views on change.  In a way, they value and respect their culture, but of course they want something more.  Two of the women end up divorced.  Two fall in love with men who aren't allowed to marry them because of the women's reputations, placed on them solely by the men around them.  And yet one ends up happily married and another happily single.  

All in all it was a good book and brought to light the lives of a whole new group of people different from me.  I like it.

Bonus:  Alsanea started the book with a poem by Nizar Qabbani, a male Saudi poet who writes often of the women in his culture.  His sister committed suicide after being left by her fiance and it greatly influences his work.  Alsanea used his poems several times, but I found this one achingly beautiful:

I shall write of my girlfriends

for in each one's tale

I see my story and self prevail,

a tragedy my own life speaks.

I shall write of my girlfriends,

of inmates' lives sucked dry by jail,

and magazine pages that consume women's time,

and of doors that fail to open.

Of desires slain in their cradles I'll write,

of the vast great cell,

black walls of travail,

of thousands, thousands of martyrs, all female,

buried stripped of their names

in the graveyard of tradition.

My female friends,

dolls swathed in gauze in a museum they lock;

coins in History's mint, never given, never spent;

fish swarming and choking in every basin and tank,

while in crystal vessels, dying butterflies flock.

Without fear

I shall write of my friends,

of the chains twisted bloody around the ankles of beauties,

of delirium and nausea, and the nighttime that entreaty rends,

and desires buried in pillows, in silence.