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And I hope you will see, too, that little by little some of these women are beginning to carve out their own way—not the Western way, but one that keeps what is good about the values of their religion and culture, while allowing for reform.

“Verily, Allah does not change a people’s condition until they change what is in themselves.”QUR’AN, SURAT ALRA’D

(The Chapter of Thunder), Verse 11

GIRLS of RIYADH

 

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1.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: February 13, 2004

Subject: I Shall Write of My Friends

Ladies and Gentlemen: You are invited to join me in one of the most explosive scandals and noisiest, wildest all-night parties around. Your personal tour guide—and that’s moi—will reveal to you a new world, a world closer to you than you might imagine. We all live in this world but do not really experience it, seeing only what we can tolerate and ignoring the rest.

To all of you out there

Who are over the age of eighteen, and in some countries that’ll mean twenty-one, though among us Saudis it means over six (and no, I don’t mean sixteen) for guys and after menarche for girls.

To everyone out there

Who has got enough inner courage to read the naked truth laid out on the World Wide Web and the resolve to accept that truth, with of course the essential patience to stay with me through this insane adventure.

To all who have

Grown weary of the “Me Tarzan You Jane” brand of romance novels and have gotten beyond a black and white, good and evil view of the world.

To anyone who believes

That 1 + 1 may not necessarily be equal to two, as well as all of you out there who have lost hope that Captain Majed* will score those two goals to reach a draw in the last second of the episode. To the enraged and the outraged, the heated and the hostile, the rebellious and the bilious, and to all of you who just know that every weekend for the rest of your lives will be a total loss—not to mention the rest of the week. It’s for you; it’s to you that I write my e-mails. May they be the matches that set your thoughts on fire, the lighter that fuels a blaze of change.

Tonight’s the night. The heroes of my story are people among you, from you and within you, for from the desert we all come and to the desert we shall all return. Just as it is with our desert plants, you’ll find the sweet and the thorny here, the virtuous and the wicked. Some of my heroes are sweet and others are thorny, while a few are a bit of both at the same time. So keep the secrets you will be told, or as we say, “Shield what you may encounter!” And since I have quite boldly started writing this e-mail without consulting my girlfriends, and because every one of them lives huddled in the shadow of a man, or a wall, or a man who is a wall,** or simply stays put in the darkness, I’ve decided to change all the names of the people I will write about and make a few alterations to the facts, but in a way that will not compromise the honesty of the tale nor take the sting out of the truth. To be frank, I don’t give a damn about the repercussions of this project of mine. As Kazantzakis put it, “I expect nothing. I fear no one. I am free.” Yet a way of life has stood its ground in the face of all you’ll read here; and I have to admit that I don’t consider it an achievement to destroy it by means of a bunch of e-mails.

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 the 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 traditions.

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.—Nizar Qabbani

Right you are, Nizar, baby! Your tongue be praised, God bless you and may you rest in peace. Truth be told, though you are a man, you are indeed “the woman’s poet” and if anyone doesn’t like my saying so they can go drink from the sea.

My hair is now fluffed and teased, and I’ve painted my lips a shameless crimson red. Beside me rests a bowl of chips splashed with chili and lime. Readers: prepare yourselves. I’m ready to disclose the first scandal!

The wedding planner called out to Sadeem, who was hiding behind the curtain with her friend Gamrah. In her singsong Lebanese Arabic, Madame Sawsan informed Sadeem that the wedding music tape was still stuck in the machine and that efforts were being made to fix it.

“Please, tell Gamrah to calm down! It’s nothing to worry about, no one is going to leave. It’s only one A.M.! And anyway, all the cool brides these days start things on the late side to add a bit of suspense. Some never walk down the aisle before two or three A.M.!”

Gamrah, though, was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She could hear the voices of her mother and her sister Hessah shrieking at the events manager from the other end of the ballroom, and the whole evening was threatening to turn out to be a sensational humiliation. Sadeem stayed at the bride’s side, wiping beads of sweat from her friend’s forehead before they could collide with the tears that were held back only by the quantity of kohl weighing down her eyelids.

The voice of the famous Saudi singer Muhammad Abdu finally blasted from the amplifiers, filling the enormous hall and prompting Madame Sawsan to give Sadeem the nod. Sadeem poked Gamrah.

Yalla,* let’s go.”

With a swift movement Gamrah wiped her hands along her body after reciting some verses of the Holy Qur’an to protect her from envious eyes, and raised the neckline of her dress to keep it from drooping over her small breasts. She began her descent of the marble staircase, going even more slowly than at the rehearsal with her girlfriends, adding a sixth second to the five she was supposed to count between each stair. She murmured the name of God before every step, praying that Sadeem wouldn’t stumble on her train causing it to tear, or that she wouldn’t trip over the floor-length hem of her dress and fall flat on her face like in a comedy show. It was so unlike the rehearsal, where she didn’t have a thousand women watching her every move and assessing every smile; where there was no annoying photographer blinding her every few seconds. With the blazing lights and all those dreadful peering eyes fixed on her, the small family wedding she’d always disdained suddenly began to seem like a heavenly dream.