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Something about this rings a bell with me...  I think it's the stealing baked beans from someone else's plate, one by one, with your fingers.  Classic terrordrunk behaviour. 

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The kind of nightmare you have when you got a really high fever... but like a sexxxy version.  Everything about this is ADHD hottness. 

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Shebab playing on the highways.  Between this and the drifting it's surprising that there are any young Saudi men left.  It's not uncommon to see young guys walking with canes here, or for whole car loads of men to be wiped out. Obviously, skating and drifting are extremely dangerous; Saudi has one of the highest RTA death rates in the world.  Yet there is a pretty fatalistic attitude to the whole thing: if you die, well.... that must have been your time.  Not that you were hanging upside down out of your car doing 120kph on a highway while your 14 year old cousin does the steering.  

Most of the time I hate the fact that Saudi is dry.  It makes me sad that I don't have the Friday night ritual of pickling away my problems in the pub.  Ordinarily, I am a straight-up lush; the nannying prohibition of alcohol is just another controlling restriction here that makes me fume.  But sometimes I can see the positive side to it.  There is almost no violent street crime, no barking and fighting and bottling on a Saturday night.  People don't cry and scream and piss in the streets.  Before coming here I lived in the centre of Brighton, and this was my lullaby every night. Hardly a morning went past when I didn't complain of having woken up in the middle of a sweet dream to the sound of people shrieking and baying incoherently. Here, if my sleep is ever interrupted it's by the call to prayer emanating from the 2000 mosques in Riyadh.

However, looking at shebab and their driving acrobatics, you have to ask how helpful all these restrictions are.  Having never been a teenage boy I can only imagine the power of all those new hormones rushing around... and having nothing to channel it into.  Being that age is about pushing back against the limits you have been set and expanding into adult activities.  The way we did that, on the whole, is by drinking cider in graveyards or raiding our parents' cupboards for forgotten bottles of ouzo. We expanded into adulthood by testing our skills with the opposite sex, flirting and snogging and cheating.  

Shebab, frustratingly, have no contact with women outside of their close family. Until the day they are married, the only faces of women they see are either related to them, or appearing on the TV.  They have no chance to flirt, to flex their impressing-girls muscles, to form adolescent crushes.  So I guess they look for ways to push back against their limitations with what is available: their cars.  Car culture is incredibly strong and petrol cheaper than water- oil is after all what this country was built on- that the car is almost a right for shebab.  Whether or not drifting is a saner, safer way to channel energy than knocking back 8 pints of Stella and trying to sleep with a stranger, I don't know.  I suspect it is in a lot of ways (at least it's creative, right?)  But it strikes me that neither of us have quite got it right yet.

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OK, let me school you a little...

It occurred to me that a glossary of Saudi terms might be helpful, and fun to write.

So, first and foremost, Muttawa.  He of the long beard and the stern face and the one sentence in English he likes to bark in public places: "Woman!! Cover your hair!".  I hear that muttawa literally means 'volunteer'.  In fact they are the infamous and often dreaded religious police.  Riyadh, unlike many other cities in the Kingdom, is blessed with a lot of them. Officially they belong to the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, whose central offices overlook 'ChopChop' Square.  Really. They are identifiable by their short thawb (the white 'dress' Saudi men wear), brown bisht (long open jacket worn by men over the thawb) and the lack of cord holding their gutra in place on top of their head. They also tend to have a fierce look in their eye. Could be frustration.

Few things are more confusing at first than women's wear. 'Abaya' is the long black dress that is legally compulsory wear for women in public.  I like to refer to it as my 'cloak' or, on particularly bad days, my 'shroud'.  The hijab is a more tricky issue: it is not strictly a legal requirement for women to cover their hair, but try telling a muttawa who loves his work that.  Besides, I think the hijab can be pretty, and fun to wear.  The niqab ties around the head to cover the whole face, leaving a slit open for the eyes. Finally the famous burqa.  You know the deal.  There are almost infinite variations and styles of these arrangements, depending on where you are from, how strict you are, where you are going... Intriguing, baffling, sometimes even unsettling.

Shabab.  Shabab means 'boys' or 'youths'.  In particular it means the kind of teenage boys whose only available avenue of entertainment is to be found in their car. They have usually watched way too many Vin Diesel movies. They love 'drifting' on highways, and pulling donuts and handbrake turns at 2am in residential neighbourhoods. They aren't allowed into malls, which means this is pretty much their only weekend distraction. They are little princes, usually with huge hair and a permanent fag on the go.

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Yes, it's a dam.  Yes, it's in the middle of the desert.  No, I have no idea why. Suggested explanations include, 'because we can' and 'we want to say we have a dam in Riyadh'.  The function of the dam doesn't seem to matter to anyone; again it seems like merely the appearance of the thing is enough.  Weirdly it's a really popular picnicking spot for couples and families.  Also happens to be one of the most thoroughly muttawa-patrolled places I've been.

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I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

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Almost as bad as boobies: Buddha.

The approach to censorship here seems a little bit slapdash.  For every album cover where bare arms have been blacked out, there's one adjacent which contradicts the message.  So, we have a Mariah who's been given a T-shirt instead of a booby vest, but we still have the Nelly with bulging biceps, shiny six pack and hand shoved firmly down his pants.  (In a country where homosexual activity is both illegal and apparently a rite of passage for boys, this one struck me as particularly ironic).

I don't especially want to talk much about religion here, but the censoring of the picture of a Buddha statue on this CD also made me think. It felt like it was the appearance, rather than the actuality, of the thing that was important.  So often here it seems people believe that how something looks is the same as the way it is.  If it looks good, it is good.  If we can see the Buddha, it's seditious.  If not... well, the content of the thing doesn't really matter.  Looking at Snoop and his censored cartoon hottie, I absolutely wonder- do they know what the content is? Do they care? If a Saudi listens to Snoop in the woods and a muttawa isn't around to hear it, is it subversive? 

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Boobs? What boobs?

Nice work Mr Red-Pen-Censor dude. 

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Saudi Mariah looks good. Hella 90's, but still good.

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I doubt Snoop would approve.

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He's back! Now Valentine's Day is over the giant red teddy downstairs has been returned to his rightful happy place.

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Be humble for you are made of earth.  Be noble for you are made of stars.

-Serbian proverb

This is why I love Kanye. He is like the Marmite of hiphop- no one else seems to inspire such passionate polarity. For me, I pitched my fangirl tent well inside the 'love him' camp the minute I heard 'Through the Wire'.  He sort of settled on the periphery of 'dudes I like' for the first couple of years, but recently I've found I love him even more, not just for the baller diamond teeth or the crazy fur-pillow tweets, but for his vulnerability.  Yep, that's right, his vulnerability.  Granted it's not a word that would score highly in a Family Fortunes' 'nouns associated with Yeezy' round, but it's there.  

Now, maybe I'm projecting so hard I could be a weapon, but for me no one else encapsulates so well that contradiction between believing you are extraordinary, and believing you are just straight up BAD NEWS at the same time.  

That dissonance runs through everything.  The people I love the most (in real life and in the Hello! magazine life I live in my head) are the ones who mirror this contradiction. It's feeling special, feeling that what you have to say is important and worth hearing, feeling that your rampant egotism is justified because you really are that good.  And of course all that is countered by the conviction that you are always chased by mediocrity, bone-deep insecurity and fear. You can't help but treat others horribly because really your first love is yourself, and you treat yourself the worst of all.  Yes, we might be assholes, but we are damn good at being assholes. That's definitely worth drinking to.

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Inertia

There’s nothing like inactivity to really focus your mind.  Despite the never ending distractions of the internet, the endless trips to get coffee, the interminable and exhausting attempts to read even a paragraph of some fusty old dude’s theory of language teaching, this week has finally broken my illusion that I might be on my way to acheiving anything. My employer (who necessarily shall remain nameless, I don’t particularly want to get fired, deported.. or worse) in their wisdom have decided to keep us 120 odd teachers coming into work for the next 3 weeks, students or no.  It’s a strange suspension, a feeling that we are all floating in treacle, wandering the campus aimlessly like we are the doped-up cast of a particularly dull reality TV show.  We have all this time locked away (literally) together, when for once even the compulsion to pretend to be working has disappeared.  For 8 hours a day we’re like grossly coddled refugees, wrapped up in blankets, slurping hot chocolate and watching youtube videos.  For me the novelty of this wore off today- about 4 days in.   I got a sudden glimpse of how much time I was wasting, which evolved into a mini-crisis of how much opportunity, youth and brain power I had already wasted.  Hence, the first post of a blog I created 5 months ago… and then in true typical avoidant fashion, neglected.

Thinking about my colleagues and our suspended-animation work predicament, I started wondering about the students whose absence fills the campus.  With three weeks off, I can just picture the girls safely tucked up on sofas behind their locked gates and 10ft high privacy walls, mainlining Korean dramas and candies.  Or visiting each other’s houses and playing dress-up weddings. They are mostly about 19 years old and, at most,  a few years away from the real thing. I think this play-acting at getting married is pure entertainment, one of the few avenues of frivolity and release allowed to them.  But they also seem to be a way of diffusing their fear of the biggest event of their lives. Marriage means reliquishing control from father to husband… to a man who may or may not be benevolent.  It’s an incredible gamble which will lockdown the rest of their lives in ways nobody can anticipate.  I have to believe that most fathers are good to their daughters, neglectful but not spitefully so- they are only daughters after all.  Husbands on the other hand are unpredicatable, even when they are your cousin (as is so often the case…but that’s a subject for another post!).  Sheltered as they are, the girls are aware that marriage means the change of everything in their lives, the possible curtailment of their education, nascent careers, their youth.  I guess they have to focus on the wedding itself to avoid thinking of the ramifications of actually being married.  (However, given the amount of time and energy given over to weddings all over the world, it seems like it’s not just Saudi girls who get meringue-dress-fever).

So I suppose that in a lot of ways their bubble world of playtime and cookies is a good reflection of our work-bubble.  The lot of a woman in Saudi is to accept her situation for what it is, without much complaint and taking pleasures where she can.  In the spirit of which, I’ll be spending tomorrow eating mini-Bounty bars, watching cats do miaow-singing on the internet and trying to make the imaginative best of a treacly situation.

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Flying into Riyadh

I just thought I’d add something from a few months ago… something I should have started with, but didn’t.   Before coming here, I don’t think I had any idea how to imagine what I was getting into.  I googled pictures, I talked with friends who’d lived here, but nothing could shake this feeling that I was headed into another universe of heat and dust and metres of black cloth and hostility.  It was just impossible to visualise, and this terrified me.

Day 1

I was so scared on the plane. I tried to switch off, watch my crappy movie romcom. For the most part this was successful, until I started dipping in and out of Sex and the City 2. Terrifyingly clunky, so awkward and ill-conceived  that I felt nausea rising… and I began to understand why Saudi men might want to spit at me or think I was essentially a prostitute (these were my ugly, badly informed preconceptions, I have to admit).  The several scenes where the ladies flash condoms as badges of pride, or flash legs beneath abayas to catch a taxi made me feel like I was entering into a whole culture where irresponsible, ignorant ‘western’ senses of superiority were paving a pretty shoddy path for me.  I noticed the veiled lady sitting next to me also watching it; if only I could have seen the expression on her face.

She’d changed from a pink and white headscarf into a black one about an hour out of London.  I noticed that as we approached Riyadh she started to add more pieces of material to this arrangement.  By the time the captain announced our imminent arrival she’d covered her face completely. And then she started a conversation with me.  I guess I have to admit the fact, as uncomfortable and ashamed of it I am, that I was a little freaked out by this transformation; but also I was struck by the impression that when covered up she obviously felt more at home, more comfortable initiating a conversation with me.  I felt the opposite; I suppose it compounded my feeling that whatever I was about to enter into was going to be strange and alienating.  Whenever I’ve travelled before I guess similar feelings have sprung up, particularly when just about to land: anxiety rises, you look around the plane at all the people obviously excited to be returning home and fervently wish to be them, wish to be met by smiling lovely faces at the airport and whisked off home to a meal cooked by Mum.  But this time it seemed worse.  I couldn’t even picture what I was heading into…

As we flew lower over Riyadh and my neighbour pointed it out to me, I was suddenly excited… I remembered the first time I’d really flown, at 16years old with my best friend, to New York. Flying over the city I could make out blocks of houses, swimming pools glowing blue in the darkness, and I was gripped by possibility.  Now, below me in Riyadh, neon pink hotel signs flashing and highways crisscrossing the city and stretching off into the dark distance, I could feel this thrill rising in my stomach.  I hadn’t experienced this feeling so strongly since I was 16.  I suppose, like any addict, I had got to keep upping the dosage of ‘extreme’ travel experience to get the same buzz.

I have to admit that my thoughts about Riyadh as a place full of exciting possibilities have changed a bit since then. But my feelings about niqab are still equally as complicated.. and I still loathe SATC2.

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Valentine's Day

Now I’m living in a place where it is illegal, away from the mister, I was thinking about past Valentine’s Days. I guess maybe I wasn’t as much of a hater as I’d thought.  When you are a single girl it almost seems obligatory to hate Valentine’s Day, to attend ‘anti-Valentine’s’ parties dressed in black, scoff at cutesy notions of hearts and teddies while knocking back shots and talking loudly about NSA sex. I guess I never really felt genuine in that.  It always seemed overly bitter and cynical to me, that while I might have been pining for a boyfriend, for love, for security and comfort, I never felt excluded from Valentine’s Day. I didn’t get mad that I couldn’t celebrate diwali, or attend girl scout jamborees or the Chelsea Flower Show or set off fireworks on July 4th… those were things that, whilst they may appear fun to varying degrees, just weren’t meant for me to be a part of. I could look at them and feel the warm n fuzzies and feel excluded at the same time. Valentine’s is the same.

Below my apartment in this yellow glitz bomb of a hotel is a flower shop…actually 2 or 3 of these little shops of horror are on this portion of the block. They aren’t quite your simple everyday florist’s, but branch out into shiny foil paper, ribbons, candles, twisted luminous glass canes, and monstrously, abnormally outsize teddy bears. In short, aside from being a lot of pink frosty shimmer, they are a teenage Valentine’s heaven.  I’d been warned that Valentine’s is not tolerated here: in much the same way as around Christmas and New Year, the Muttawa step up their puritanical sex-crazed crusade.  They straighten their gold bishts and hike up their thobes just a little more, setting out to patrol public places for signs of vice, indecency, romance and hair.  Since I moved in to this hotel about three weeks ago, the adjacent shops and their exuberantly gaudy displays have never failed to cheer me up… gaudy and extravagant are my thing.  In a city where everything is black, white and orange, the 3ft high baskets of pink ‘Its a Girl!’ chocolates and the Elton John (CrystalMeth edition) flower displays have provided much needed colour, life and humour. Which is why I felt so sad today to see that the giant, bright red teddies had disappeared from the window, no doubt removed by a zealously beardedman with a real hatred for that which we can’t control, comprehend or explain: sexysexylove.

And that just made me love Valentine’s Day even more.

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More gorgeous, overblown and elaborate dresses. 

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Fulla, the 'Islamic Barbie'.  She comes complete with abaya, hijab... and 'indoor fashion'.  

(*Warning...I am about to use the 'F' word* :P)

Like a lot of women who identify as feminists, my feelings about the blonde, Cali version of Barbie are pretty complicated. When I was little I never had a Barbie. Maybe there was a second-hand Sindy who seemed utterly 1950's in her wholesomeness, but no flashy Barbie with a secret sexy smile.  However, every Wednesday, after ballet class, I used to go to my friend Laura's house and play.  She had a couple of dolls, but what I remember most was the feeling of deliciousness I got from rummaging through her big plastic bags of Barbie clothes.  The shoes, the shiny pink Cinderella dresses, the occasional bit of plastic jewellery you could skewer onto Barbie's hands... I loved it because I sort of hated Barbie.  She was absolutely everything I wasn't: blonde, tanned, slim, grown up, perpetually smiling.  She was talented and sure of herself, and most of all she belonged to other people. Never to me.  I liked to torture her with constant outfit changes, the ugliest, gaudiest ensembles I could find, and most of all by shoving those rings through the holes in her hands, like some odd plastic Jesus.  

Of course when I got older and finally got my own Barbie I continued to torture her in the same way that a million other girls do.  I cut her hair.  First to a bob, then to a crewcut.  I took a black marker pen and slowly thickened her eyeliner until she had that panda thing going on.  I gave her black lipstick, facial piercings, a barbed wire tattoo around her arm.  My Mum seemed vaguely horrified; I was smug. Finally a Barbie who looked like the ugly teenage rebellion I was growing into.

When I first saw Fulla I was kind of surprised.  I smiled at her hijab and abaya, it seemed sweet. And I giggled a bit at the notion of a Barbie with 'indoor fashion'.  Fulla is apparently Syrian, but she seems pretty ubiquitous around these parts too.  I wondered if little girls throughout the Islamic world go through the same pubescent rejection of their Fullas as I did with my Barbie.  I'm not sure- despite her green eyes I wonder if Fulla's abaya and hijab do her a service.  Fulla is apparently a keen reader; she values honesty and her friends.  There is no Disco Fulla or Malibu Fulla, only incarnations as teacher and doctor.  There is no Ken; there is a 'protective older brother'.  Fulla is all mouth AND her trousers...or abaya.  I wonder if it could ever occur to a guardian of such a sweet companion to give her a trashy Baywatch tattoo and throw her down the stairs.  I think not.