The following interview with Saudi author Raja Alem and a review of her latest book first appeared in 2008 in an alternative tabloid publication of limited circulation in Hamilton, Ontario. Ergo, both are reprinted here for a larger audience.
AN INTERVIEW WITH RAJA ALEM
By James Strecker
The Saudi Arabian author Raja Alem was born in Mecca and now lives in both Jedda and Paris. Her works include ten novels, two plays, biography, short stories, essays, literary journalism, writing for children, and collaborations with artists and photographers. She appears often on the international cultural and literary scene, especially to discuss and give workshops in women’s issues, children’s creativity, and links between east and west. She has received many awards in the Arab world and in Europe and one from UNESCO for creative achievement. With her sister, the artist Shadia Alem, she established and sponsored a Cultural Club & Recreation Center for the girls of Mecca, which was a pioneer step in enriching women’s knowledge and giving them space to exist creatively.
James Strecker: Raja, you have travelled a great deal internationally, so I’d like to know what there is about the Arabic mind, as revealed in your novel My Thousand & One Nights, that you feel we, in the West, might not readily understand.
Raja Alem: First of all, I don’t think of mind as Arabic or American or European, but instead as one universal mind in various stages of awareness. However, I do think the main difference in our approach to life is that some of us in the East are always addressing the afterlife which is deep in our unconsciousness. The West, on the other hand, is mostly dedicated to involvement in this one life. Maybe this makes us regard suffering as a road, while others see it as an end, and this affects our way of creation or our goal in creation. In any case, some in both East and West value a breaking through to Godly levels on earth, a moving to no limitation in artistic experiments, while others tend to move timidly, considering an outer power which is in control. It depends on personal experience: some work as God on earth and some work as allies with God in heaven.
In some of the Western experiments I have come to know, they are mostly in control of the plots and solutions more than some of us here; we seek power in the invisible while they leave nothing invisible.
JS: I’ve read that you are highly regarded as a writer in the Arabic world. Why do you think this is so?
RA: Because I am possessed. I mean I am true to a message, reaching beyond the impossible, the seen, the known, even beyond death. Through writing about Mecca, the forbidden zone, of which I consider myself the only inheritor of its pagan legends and history, I free my characters from moving behind tabooed borders and bring this new vision to the world. Growing up as a child in Mecca, the center of this universal energy, where pilgrims of every culture and race annually gather with their wishes and dreams, I learnt to see myself as a particle within. I am part of a whole power and I write about a way of being which is greater in being open to transformation, moving between identities and cultures, eternally changing with every minute to reach a better understanding and a oneness with the world. I see the universe as one body and we are its parts -and through art we are discovering our endless body.
JS: Do you feel any restriction or limitation as a creative female in a culture that we understand to be male-dominated?
RA: From where I see our society, I look at both males and females as dominated. But writing was the one domain I moved in freely because, when I write, I am attached to some energy above physical forms and thus I am no more a female nor a male. In fact, when I sent my first manuscript to a publisher, his response came back with “Dear Mr. Alem….” I started publishing my literary articles in the Riyadh newspaper’s cultural pages, and I’ve been respected as an intellectual ever since. As to my books, I published them outside Saudi Arabia, in Lebanon, the real arena for culture. Up until two years ago, my books were not allowed in Saudi Arabia, but they were widely read. But I think one creates one’s own limitations. I mean, it’s your decision to allow or not allow any authority to exist in the moment of creation. The moment of creation is supposed to be free of any restriction.
JS: What do you find most difficult about writing in English?
RA: Not knowing how I sound. And the fact that I can’t give the equal flavor to Arabic jargon words, tastes, beliefs. In writing about some dances and songs –which are sometimes sources of healing- I can’t find their equal even now in our own culture, since they tend to disappear. But, since I work with an English-speaking collaborator, the language of my English books is not really mine. If it was my own language, a word or a sentence would tell the reader who I am, because in Arabic there is real magic. But in English, I can’t tell if we succeeded in conveying the mixture of ancient and ultra modern tongues and visions and I am afraid that in English I might sound medieval in style. But English did somehow liberate me as a writer. I discovered that it’s easier to spell the taboos in another tongue because you don’t feel the files, the archives, attached to every word, although I am not at all inhibited writing in Arabic and I do tackle the taboos. English, in the end, has made my writing less magical, more human and earthy, but, no matter what the limitations English puts in my way, it helps me strip to my bones as a living body.
JS: I enjoyed your novel very much and wonder what you, as its creator, like about it.
RA: I am more like a hunter than a creator here, with My Thousand & One Nights, since it involves the capturing of a real life, a biography of my family in Mecca. I try to capture the smells of childhood, of peace, and pigeons flying in circles around God’s home. Do you know how it feels to grow up in a place where they tell you it is God’s home? We were playing in His courtyard, drinking His magical zamzam water, and my grandfather was the Sheikh of its carriers, the distributor of this magical water. I grew up with that. I write about that.
My Thousand & One Nights
A Novel of Mecca
By Raja Alem & Tom McDonough
Syracuse University Press
$24.95
Reviewed by James Strecker
Raja Alem’s second novel in English, My Thousand & One nights, claims many authors. The first are an Arabic tradition and culture that inspire Alem’s muse to create a slew of dramatis personae who are ripe with complex idiosyncrasies. They are usually Arabic women, a subject I, like many, know mostly through media simplifications and Hollywood clichés. The next author is the Saudi novelist herself, instinctively adept at negotiating the simultaneous truths of mundane human life and other dimensions inhabited by genies, “Underworldlings” and supposedly inanimate objects that assume living personalities.
Then we have Alem’s collaborator Tom McDonough who, with an admittedly impossible task of translating one culture and one sex into another, has reworked the author’s original version, composed in English as a learned language, into a rendering more aesthetically digestible in the West. Next, within the tale itself, is Zohr the narrator, a modern Scheharazade who seduces us with girlish enthusiasm and eager commentary from within the world of women. We remain entranced as each short chapter unfolds; there are 79 chapters in 269 pages and we hunger for each new tale.
Thus seduced, the final author down the line is inevitably the reader. True to the oral tradition which informs Alem’s style, the modern reader interprets the storyteller’s reality according to the workings of his or her piqued imagination and, thus committed, participates in each story. Alem, who writes with an exquisite ink of sensuality, would have it so, since storytelling is an intimate experience of shared creation. Her narrator declares, “Open to me now, infidel friend, kaffir, faithless reader, as I am opening to you.” For Alem, there’s no holding back, especially in the creation of a newer reality.
The book’s subject is the narrator’s aunt, the ever intriguing Jummo. She’s a woman of laughter, raunchy jokes, and jangling bracelets, a woman of “candor and fearlessness in confrontation” whose most intimate relationship is with Sidi Wahdana, a spirit harbinger of death whose various manifestations turn out to be Jummo’s raison d’etre. Sidi comes to Jummo “in every conceivable shape” and before he ultimately leads her to understand that “nothing is so alive (as death),” Sidi guides her with Sufi-friendly utterances like, “I am He –if you like. And if you don’t like, I’m not He.” The richly conceived women in Alem’s novel usually understand such forays into enigma, while a male, even the family patriarch Sheik al-Baikwaly, remains one in whom no one ever finds “any hard evidence of magical literacy.”
Within a style that flows with the fluid logic of a dream, a style that weaves its magic not so much through the continuum of narrative as a gradual accumulation of impressions, My Thousand & One Nights suggests an underpinning of autobiography, one that is affectionately anchored in the physical and psychic lives of women of Mecca where Alem was born. This city, on the verge of modernization, is of the present and still decidedly medieval. Rams are sacrificed and old beliefs -“a girl could get pregnant just by being looked at” or “if a bird pooped on her shadow” -inform everyday life. In need of counsel, people heed “contradictory stars, disorderly entrails, and other auguries.” No doubt, the assertion “The people of Mecca are made of the same stuff as their mountains” confirms a Mecca citizen’s place in timelessness and is mystically taken for fact.
Yet for all its compelling otherworldliness, its flexible realities and cultural revelation, Alem’s novel is happily much more. It is also a serious and poetic meditation on the nature of mortality and the appropriation of death into the consciousness of everyday life. These characters commute regularly to dimensions unconfined by this world and, for Alem, we don’t die but continue in other forms. If Jummo realizes that “Nothing keeps as busy as death. Nothing is so alive.” it is because Sidi has taught her, “There is no living except in the everlasting flood.” In essence, we have no need to transcend death because, in the greater scheme of things, we accommodate it as we live in various forms.
So what is real and what is fancy? For Alem, no riff on what we take for reality is inconceivable and any excursion of imagination creates a new and valid dimension of existence. Thus, she is stating a literal fact when she writes: “A delegation of geniis lay in wait for Hannah in her dreams. They captured her and escorted her to one of their underwater palaces.” It is also fact that Jummo is “betrothed to the Unseen” and that “Jummo has developed “a knack for seeing invisible creatures…wandering around the house.” This is Jummo for whom “angels appear in the wink of an eye.”
In Alem’s world, any incident, any thought, any word is potent with further possibility since imagination is all. If Sheik Baikwaly, for one, believed that “every star had a name, every name had a spirit (and) every letter of every name had a spirit too,” he later finds that “the spirits –the inner energy- oozed out of the names and took the shape of dazzling stars.” In this world, Zamzam, the sacred water drawn from the well of Mecca’s Grand Mosque, “is for whatever you drink it for” and meanings and identities can change at a storyteller’s whim. Alem’s novel, then, is a celebration of the potency of language as the basis of freedom and fulfilled existence.
My Thousand & One Nights also provides a female-favouring and playful assessment of the nuanced contest for power between men and women. In this patriarchal culture, it is women, ironically, who seem to win. For her young love Mayjan, we read that “Jummo was like a hawk; she never missed her prey, and her talent for teasing the mortal limits of Mayjan’s senses was masterful.” In turn, “the more Jummo delves into the secrets of Mayjan’s name, the more he feels imprisoned (and) Jummo’s hold on his name becomes dangerous.” Of Jummo’s husband from whom she is soon divorced, we read a dismissal that al-Neyabi is “of no astrological consequence whatsoever.” Jummo later complains “He can’t even get my fire started. His body is blind and deaf and dumb. He doesn’t feel a thing.” But, in fact, who needs really needs men? After all, Jummo concludes that ““Scheherazade didn’t so much mate with her husband Shabrayar as with her true self, her animal self.”
Both Raja Alem and her novel are highly esteemed in the Arabic world partly because, one suspects, readers there readily savour the resonance of both ambiguity and enigma and accept Sidi’s premise, “Behind every veil, another veil.” Readers in the West will derive great pleasure here in proportion to their ability, like Jummo’s, to “surrender every surrenderable thing” as they consume, with their senses open, the author’s poetic prose. They will find that Alem doesn’t actually write; she dances like a conjurer in front of you and at some point she becomes her words and their letters that you see. Myself, I often recalled, while in Alem’s world, a remark by depth psychologist Ira Progoff when I was working with him in New York years ago: “Sometimes our reality is as real as our dreams.”