A short piece on surveying public opinion in Saudi Arabia, “Saudi Arabia by the Numbers,” by David Pollock highlights the difficulties in measuring Saudi attitudes, and also provided a reminder on the difficulties of learning about the Middle East. A few years ago I managed to make my way through Robert Fisk’s “The Great War for Civilisation,” detailing his war reportage on the region and acting as a concise history of some of the major events unfolding in the Middle East in the past few decades (I thought it was an excellent book, a doctoral student in Middle East studies, however, off handedly remarked with a tsk tsk that it was only a good starting point). Although Mr. Fisk lives in the region, finding Middle Eastern voices, particularly Saudi voices reflecting on their experience is a challenge for people wanting to learn and discern about the issues and lives that constitute the region.

“Wolves of the Crescent Moon,” by Yousef Al – Mohaimeed provides insights into Saudi Arabian society that haven’t been filtered through a Western lens. A slim novel, it’s prose is distinctive and the story is fairly engaging. Banned in Saudi Arabia, it presents a critical view of Saudi society as it follows the lives of three disaffected citizens of Riyadh. Focusing on three characters, all physically disfigured, the story explores their attitudes and experiences of traveling through life in Saudi Arabia. Their physical disfigurements brand them as societal outcasts, and hints at the broken quality of life among the country’s masses. The story opens in a Riyadh bus station, where Turad, a bedouin and former highwayman is looking to escape the oppression of his current life as a servant. He recalls the story of a friend, Tawfiq, who was enslaved in the Sudan, brought to Saudi Arabian, castrated, and sold as a eunuch to a wealthy family. Finding a document detailing the life of an abandoned orphan, Nasir, left behind by a rushing passenger, Turad also conceives a story for the child, continually abused and abandoned.

Turad reminisces about his life in the desert, where he was a successful, and proud highway robber, before being captured and left to die. Attacked and disfigured, he manages to live, but abandons his home in shame to live in the city, where he feels constrained and humiliated by the small service jobs he undertakes. The theme of globalization weaves into the narrative as he must compete with Bengalis and Filipinos for jobs, and while the tensions between internal and external migrants to the city are not explored fully, the rural – urban tensions that exist are addressed briefly. Tawfiq’s story, featuring child abuse including rape, is graphic and explores the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy. Both characters face everyday humiliations and abuse, and deprived of their humanity, a virulent anger seethes throughout the novel. Turad imagines Nasir’s life beginning with a love story. A young, seemingly upper class woman falls in love with a taxi driver. The young lovers enjoy a clandestine relationship until tribal identities prove an obstacle and the baby is abandoned. Turad’s wild, vivid imagination sees Nasir abused in institutional care and adopted as a plaything by a rich family only to be thrown away. As the narratives unfold, and the characters are scarred, the toll of everyday living in Saudi Arabia is explored, and while at times brutal, Yousef Al – Mohaimeed work retains a raw, emotional quality.

“Wolves of the Crescent Moon” is reminiscent (though not quite the quality) of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man as society’s abandoned and forgotten chronicle their injustices and indignation. The repressed fury and powerlessness of the trio provides a sense of some of the tensions that may exist in Saudi Arabia. While many impressions of Saudi Arabia continue to be made through questions about Wahhabism, the royal family, oil, OBL, CNN’s sports center-esque coverage of the Hajj, OPEC, etc, looking at the contentions that exist among the people and their daily struggles points to the similarities that we may have with Saudi citizens as we struggle with life’s challenges and humiliations while seeking to transcend the confines of our lives. It also reminds us of how much we don’t know about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is a good reason to grab a book.

This guest contribution comes from Lauren S., a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins SAIS, where she focused on Middle East issues, spent time in the area, and picked up a love for the region’s literature while she was at it.

I first became aware of Mahmoud Darwish years ago through the music of the Lebanese-born artist Marcel Khalife, who drew on Darwish’s lyrical poetry for his songs.  Rita and the Rifle, or Rita w’al-Bundaqiya, as it is sung in Arabic, tells the story of Darwish, who is a Palestinian, and his first lover, a Jewish Israeli woman to whom he gave the pseudonym of Rita.  Darwish evokes a moving nostalgia in the poem on which the song is based, longing for his love and lamenting the politics that separated them.  Rita is a symbol and character who appears periodically throughout Darwish’s poetry.  And the poems’s style – original, tender, and devoid of cliché – is an apt introduction to Darwish’s works.

A new translation of Darwish’s later poems, entitled If I Were Another, spans Darwish’s final works, written between 1990 and 2005, before his death in 2008. His writings are filled with allusions to literature, religion, history, and myth.  Obscure symbols and even Arabic letters make up the characters in his poetry, which occasionally verges on the grandiose. But the reader is able to forgive him for the occasional wordiness because of the tender and introspective portraits he paints.

Darwish’s poetry points to an artist who sets out to write about human stories but ends up tangled in politics. Rita’s Winter is Darwish’s final poem about his former love, written in 1992, decades after he first wrote about her. The poem’s characters are surrounded by political turmoil but seek to isolate themselves in the small details of their lives:

Rita sips the morning tea

and peels the first apple with ten irises

and says: Don’t read the newspaper now, the drums are the drums

and war isn’t my profession. And I am I. Are you you?

Although he was never formally a politician, Darwish was long associated with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). He was born in 1942 in a small village of Galilee, and the loss of his village, which was destroyed after the 1948 war, seems to haunt his works.  Darwish was finally forced to emigrate from Israel for good in 1971 after a series of arrests by Israeli authorities.  He has been called a poet of the resistance, but his poetry in this volume is more often muted and steeped in long narrative.

The theme of exile occurs throughout Darwish’s works and refers to both a physical and emotional state.  He writes in Eleven Planets at the End of the Andalusian Scene:

I will soon exit

the wrinkles of my time as a stranger to Syria and the Andalus.

The earth is not my sky, yet this sky is my evening

and the keys are mine, the minarets are mine, the lanterns are mine, and I

am also mine. I am the Adam of two Edens, I lost them twice.

In the poem, Darwish recounts the purges of Muslims and Jews from Spain in the 15^th century.  It is as if Darwish is bored with his own troubles and more concerned with exploring the abstract and historical dimensions of exile.  And that is in part what makes him so fresh and engaging and his work so universal.

Darwish takes a similar approach in The “Red Indian’s” Penultimate Speech to the White Man, this time more defiant:

What have you promised our garden, stranger?

Some tin roses prettier than our roses? Do what you please, but do

you know the deer will not chew the grass if our blood touches it?

Darwish asks later in the poem, Will you not memorize a bit of poetry to halt the slaughter?

The role of poetry in Darwish’s works is salutary, but it is often overtaken by events too powerful to control.  The ending of Rita’s Winter seems to indicate a triumph of facts over poetry:

Take me to a faraway land

take me to a the faraway land, Rita sobbed, this winter

is long…

And she broke the ceramic of the day against the iron windowpane

placed her handgun on the poem’s draft

threw her stockings on the chair, and the cooing broke…

then she went barefoot to the unknown, and departure reached me.

Finally, in this somber collection Darwish also grapples with the end of his own life.  In Mural, written shortly after Darwish nearly died of cardiovascular disease in 1999, Darwish writes hauntingly of his own inevitable death as well as the uncertain fate of his countrymen:

Death! wait for me, until I finish

the funeral arrangements in this fragile spring,

when I was born, when I would prevent the sermonizers

from repeating what they said about the sad country

and the resistance of olives and figs in the face

of time and its army. I will tell them: Pour me

in the Nun, where my soul gulps

Surat al-Rahman in the Quran. And walk

silently with me in my father’s footsteps,

and on the flute’s stride in my eternity.

But as the piece progresses, Darwish actually challenges death, calling out to it directly, and affirming life:

Death, all the arts have defeated you, all of them,

all the songs in Mesopotamia have defeated you,

the Egyptians’ obelisk, the Pharaohs’ tombs,

the carvings on temple rock, all have defeated you,

and immortality has escaped your traps…

Fady Joudah, who translated Darwish’s poetry, notes in the introduction that Darwish believed in the centrality of Mural in this collection and in its message of hope for Palestinians, humanity, and Darwish himself.  So too, in some way then, Darwish’s collection has cheated death.