It’s been twenty-five years since I worked there, but I still am not to be trusted on the subject of Saudi Arabia. The mere mention of the name of the place brings out the worst elements in my character and I become vengeful, spiteful, and violent. During the First Gulf War I found myself saying that I wished the navigators on the U.S. bombers would get their flight path wrong by a few miserable degrees and end up laying a line of big ones straight up the main highway, right into the living room of the Royal Palace in Riyadh. Whenever I hear about violence in Saudi Arabia, whether it’s cops shooting bad guys or bad guys shooting cops, it’s a win-win situation for me. And those scenes of mass panic, crowding, and crushing that take place during the yearly hajj in Mecca, well, you really don’t want to hear what I have to say about those.
It took less than nine months in what I cannot endure to hear be called “the Kingdom” to do this: to turn a generally well-disposed and easygoing woman into a vengeful harpy. Because so much time has passed since I was there, I can no longer distinguish between what is exaggerated talk and what is real, lingering rancor, though I do know that the time I spent in Saudi Arabia, teaching at King Saud University, in Riyadh, was the worst time in my life. I went for greed, lured by the promise of lots of money. I went because I’d just spent a year in China, where my conviction that a Westerner had no right to take money from the country forced me to spend my every paycheck on dinners for my friends, endless meters of silk sent to friends in Italy, not so much because I wanted these things but rather to leave all of my money there. Broke, I left China and realized I needed a job.
When I saw the ad for a teaching job at the University in Riyadh, I knew I shouldn’t even apply. Some of my friends had worked there, or had friends who did, so I had heard enough stories about the place to warn me off. But in need of work and allowing myself to be lulled by my memories of four pleasant years in Iran, I applied for the job, did a quick interview, and was hired to teach English and English literature. How different, my willed ignorance asked me, could one Muslim country be from another?
I flew, if memory serves, from Paris, where I got on the plane along with a large number of jean-clad women, most of whom seemed to be wearing stage makeup and to have bought their sweaters and blouses one size too small. Perhaps they were confused by the European numbering system?
In Riyadh, when we landed, all of those women had disappeared, replaced by vertical black clouds above little feet. This was a Muslim country, so it was not the rapture—it’s the Christians that happens to, isn’t it? They’d merely been transformed, turned into thin black-draped and veiled shapes. Gone were the flowing red hair, the bright RED lipstick, the too-tight jeans and sweaters, replaced by interchangeable black forms.
Customs, passport inspection—which included the confiscation of my passport—and then a car ride to the housing area of the university, where I was let into a four-room apartment, my home for the academic year.
Nothing is to be gained by recounting the first week of introduction to the routine of the university, the apportioning of work and the assignment of teaching schedules, which was all pretty standard. But my passport? It was being held for “processing.”
It was during that first week that I had my first exposure to the Saudi male, and this happened when I went with a colleague (we had been warned never to go anywhere in the city alone) to buy food in the local market. At first I thought these were very clumsy chaps. Surely they must have seen us, but then why did they keep bumping into us? I wore, as my contract stipulated, a floor-length skirt and sleeves that came down to my wrists, and so I was slow to view my much-muffled appearance as erotically stimulating, though the continued clumsiness of passing males soon began to suggest that it was.
As the weeks passed, there was an escalation in their aggression: if you can see it on my body, it’s been touched, or spat on, or run at with a motor scooter, or struck with an open palm . . . am I forgetting anything? Ah, yes, masturbation.
Now, why is it that nothing I’ve ever read about Saudi Arabia discusses this? I doubt that it has stopped, for every Western woman I worked with at the university had it done to her, so frequently that we ended up greeting news that it had happened to someone else with tired sighs. The most common place was the public buses. The back section, built over the motor (this in a country where the summer temperatures are well above 100 degrees), is reserved for the women and has its own entrance. There are two rows of seats, facing forward, but to keep the sexes from the contamination of seeing each other, a plasterboard partition separated us from the rest of the bus. Because one needs, if one is going to get off the bus at the right place, to be able to see where the bus is going, a small vertical crack, about half a centimeter wide, was left between the two pieces of plasterboard. We were expected to push our faces close enough to the crack to enable us to see where the bus was, which would allow us to pull the cord before our station and have the bus stop.
In the ordinary course of events, all of the seats in the male part of the bus (bigger, air-conditioned, not on top of the motor) would face forward, right? Nope. The penultimate row faced the back of the bus, allowing those who chose to sit there a vision of the half centimeter of open space between them and the women. I would like to say that it happened every time I rode the bus that a man would take his place in that row of seats, shove his hands into the pockets of his djellaba, and have at himself, but this is an exaggeration. What I will say, in truth, is that it happened so often that first I stopped counting and then I stopped taking the bus. Every woman I worked with, well, every Western woman, said that the same thing had happened to her and happened repeatedly. Lovely beaches, and the local people are so friendly.
It’s not that the taxis were much safer, though only one of my colleagues had any trouble, when she was driven out of the town and left at the side of the road. There was apparently no attempt to hurt her, merely to inconvenience her and show her her proper place. I never had trouble, but then I never rode in a taxi alone, did I?
None of my colleagues ever suffered physical aggression in the form of attack or rape; that was left to third world women to suffer. I was told—and I want to emphasize that this was only rumor, though constant rumor—that rape was very common among servants, especially Filipina women. The police? Darlings, surely you’re joking. We Western women were shielded by our passports, and just where had mine gotten to? Still being processed?
While I was there, a colleague had a former student return to visit. The girl, about twenty-two, was then in her second year of medical school. She came to the school, asked if she could speak to her former teacher alone, and closed the door of her office.
When they were seated, the girl asked Evelyn how it was that Westerners got pregnant. Since the girl was in her second year of medical school, the question raised some doubt as to the quality of instruction at that institution.
“The same way people here do,” my friend explained. “You have been told about that, haven’t you?” One never knows the limits of censorship, after all.
“Of course, I know about that. The penis and the vagina,” the girl said dismissively. “But what do Westerners do that makes them pregnant?”
“The same thing Saudis do,” my friend explained.
The girl took some time being persuaded of this fact, and the reason for her reluctance, my friend unearthed by dint of careful questioning, was her brother’s extensive pornographic video collection, to which she seemed to have free access. In those films, none of the sex acts performed were progenerative, and so, in the best tradition of the scientific method, the girl sought information from an informed source: if you want to know about Westerners’ sexual customs, who better to ask than a Westerner?
My friend William had an unusual sexual experience in Saudi Arabia, this some years after I had been there. He lived and taught in Jeddah and had a sweet Yemeni houseboy, Ahmed, who was happy to cook and clean and help William with his Arabic. Once, when William was about to leave for vacation in Europe, Ahmed asked Mister William if he would bring him a present from foreign. William agreed, Ahmed made him swear that he would, William swore, and then Ahmed revealed that he wanted Mister William to bring him a woman.
“But Ahmed,” he said, “I can’t bring you a woman.”
“But you said you would.” Crestfallen, pained looks.
“But I can’t do it.”
“Yes you can, Mister William. One of these women,” Ahmed explained, bringing his fist to his mouth and blowing air into it as though he were blowing up a rubber balloon. Or a rubber woman.
William envisioned himself skulking into a sex shop, smuggling her back to Jeddah; he blushed. He agreed.
He told me about this when he stopped to visit me in Venice on the way from London back to Jeddah. When I asked if he had found her, he confessed that he had seen one in the window of a sex shop in Soho and had bought her. I insisted on seeing her and, not a little embarrassed, he pulled her out of his suitcase.
Flat, about the size of the New York Review of Books, she lay on the floor, looking back at us with cornflower-blue eyes, her red lips smiling, her blonde hair streaming down what we could see of her shoulders.
“We’ve got to open her up,” I insisted. Without waiting, I pulled her from her plastic covering and snapped her open, unfurling her as one would a tablecloth.
“Well?” I asked.
William blew her up. She had—hmm—she had orifices.
To put her back in her plastic envelope we had to flatten her out, but this we managed to do only by spreading her flat, letting the air out of her, and then placing books on her and walking on the books to squeeze all of the air from her.
Then, after spending about fifteen minutes folding her into her original shape, we had to, as it were, bury the body, which we did inside one of his new shirts. Carefully, we removed the pins at collar and cuffs, unfolded the shirt and inserted her, then folded the shirt and replaced the pins. The shirt was a bit thicker, perhaps; aside from that, it looked like his other new shirts. At the airport, he later told me, the customs officers opened the bag, looked at the shirts with practiced eyes, pulled out the plump one, unpinned it, pulled her out, and snapped her open, this in front of not only William but three other men who worked for the same company.
I hope Ahmed believed him.
My students, dear little things, were usually driven to school by brother, father, uncle, paid driver, husband. They arrived, swaddled from head to foot in the enveloping black abaya, which they removed as soon as they passed through the portal that separated the girls’ section from that of the boys. The staff was female: videotaped lessons could be followed only if the teachers were also female. Now that so much teaching is done online I wonder if cyber promiscuity is allowed.
I had fourteen girls in one class, and I grew quite fond of them, once we settled the issue of religion, that is, that neither of us was interested in the religion of the other; I failed to confess that I also wasn’t interested in the one that was listed on my job application. They were really quite sweet, those kids, even though one of them was married and one had a grandmother who was younger than I was—thirty-nine—at the time.
The clearest memory I have of the class is the day I had to teach them about the subjunctive, or is it the conditional? Anyway, the one you use for talking about imagined situations and wishes. To avoid the accusation of teaching them to lie, and bearing in mind the fate of the woman who mentioned Paradise Lost to her literature class only to be fired the next day, I stressed the fact that this was how we talked about what we would like to do, as in, “If I had a million dollars, I would go to Paris on vacation.” Mind you, the truth of the matter was that if I had had a million dollars I would have gotten the hell out of their fucking country, but I settled for Paris as a compromise.
First came Hariba, who said, “If having million dollars, going Paris vacation,” whereupon I turned to the class and told them, “Now, girls, Hariba has told us that, if she had a million dollars, she would go to Paris on vacation.” General smiles. “Now let us ask Nahir what she would do if she had a million dollars. Nahir, what would you do if you had a million dollars?”
Well, I’ll be damned. Nahir wanted Paris going vacation too. Nice city, Paris.
As I moved down the line, I grew ever closer to Farida, generally acknowledged as the nicest and most religious girl in the class as well as the best student. Unfortunately, as I got nearer, she grew more agitated until, when her turn came, she could barely speak but sat with her face lowered into her palms.
“What’s the matter, Farida?” I asked, and to hell with Paris.
“Oh, Miss Donna,” she said, raising a tear-washed face, “I cannot tell a lie. I have a million dollars.”
Indeed.
My passport? My passport? Who’s got my passport? Women who had been there longer than one year—and we won’t go into that particular form of insanity, shall we?—finally told me that all passports were confiscated upon arrival and not returned until the teacher left. This way, should any of us quit, the administration of the university was free to “process” our exit visa, though our quitting made us ineligible for university housing, and since women could not rent hotel rooms we would remain in our apartments but at the cost of a hundred dollars per night. It was generally believed that they would keep us there until they’d earned back all salary paid until then, at which point the exit visa would be issued, or maybe they’d keep us there a while longer, just to encourage the others. Lovely beaches, and the local people are so friendly.
One Saturday, we were allowed to take the female students to the newly constructed sports center of the university, where they were to, well, I don’t know what they were meant to do, since our girls were not much given to any physical activity more strenuous than walking, and that slowly. But we took them, about fifty of them, and we entered the immense sports complex: professors in long skirts and girls enveloped in their black clouds. And there our wondering eyes beheld the pool, squash courts, handball courts, basketball courts, all state of the art and all of the courts covered with fresh parquet, just varnished and not yet used by the boys. One of our students took a basketball and tried to dribble it on the floor of the court. It rolled away and some others went out onto the court to get it. They knew enough to toss it from one to another, and then they got the idea of tossing it to one another while they were running. More and more of them flung aside their abayas and ran out onto the court. Up and down, up and down they ran. Occasionally one of them would stand under the hoop and try to make a basket, and when the ball came down one would grab it and run up the court holding the ball, the others following.
The Western professors, all women, sat on the sidelines and watched. I don’t remember who was the first of us to notice that the girls were wearing high heels and that each of their footsteps was leaving a tiny hole—round or square or rectangular—in the parquet floor. No one said anything. The girls ran their happy way, up and down, hair streaming down their backs, squealing with delight. And in her wake each of them left a trail of little holes. There were perhaps thirty girls on the court, all of them running back and forth, back and forth. The recalled image of those hundreds, thousands of tiny holes is one of the few happy memories I have of Saudi Arabia.
Okay, now it’s quiz time. A woman stands on the checkout line in the Riyadh Safeway supermarket. In her shopping basket are eighteen bottles of grape juice, a box of yeast, five kilos of sugar, and a twenty-liter plastic demijohn. What is the woman going to make?
You got it. Wine. Most of the people who worked for the university, both men and women, made alcohol at home. I did, and it was horrible, so horrible that I ended up pouring most of it down the sink, but not before my apartment stank of alcohol for days as the disgusting liquid went through the process of fermentation. Some of my colleagues who had been there longer possessed quite sophisticated recipes for both wine and beer. Those people with connections to diplomatic services of any sort had access to wine, beer, and whiskey, and it was said that most of the major compounds, where the employees of the major contracting companies lived their apartheid lives, had not only professional stills but, in one case, a store where bacon and pork could be found. I did not enter many Saudi households while I was in the country, but every one I entered had ample supplies of whiskey.
For a time, I played tennis with the manager of one of the major foreign banks, often went back to his compound for a beer after we finished playing. The tennis ended the day he offered me cocaine, of which he had an ample supply, mailed to him through the diplomatic post and kept in the freezer in the kitchen, along with hashish and marijuana. At the worst, the beer might have gotten him flogged and me tossed out of the country, but they chop your head off for drugs, and I was not willing to risk that, certainly not for a habit I did not share and that has never interested me.
One might as well dismiss the university as a joke, well, a joke with a library. All students were to be promoted, and all students were to do well. This probably won’t do much damage in the English literature department, but when the same rules apply to the classes in surgery at the medical school, the consequences might be graver.
I ran afoul of the administration only once, when I was called in to speak to the male (of course) dean, the man who had hired me. He was a slick one, was the good doctor: slicked-back raven wing hair, utterly, devastatingly cool sunglasses, and even an English accent. He told me, as he went on to tell all of the women professors, that the university had decided to request of us, out of respect for local customs, to veil our hair, perhaps even our faces (no doubt in respect for local customs, in which case I’d be in my underwear), even though our contract made it clear that this would not be necessary.
I listened, admiring his shoes and suit, until he had finished. The slick doctor, I knew, married to a lovely Saudi woman and the lover of a colleague of mine (nought odder than folks, is there?), had taken a degree in American studies.
“Doctor,” I began with a smile almost as oily as his own, “I know your degree is in American studies.” I paused to allow him time to smile modestly. “That being the case, I’m sure you’re familiar with the e. e. cummings poem ‘i sing of Olaf glad and big.’” He smiled to suggest not familiarity, but intimacy, with that poem, though I rather suspect the slick doctor seldom read much American literature more demanding than Playboy and Hustler.
Taking his next smile as permission to continue, I said, “And so I fear I have no choice but to recall to you the final line in stanza four.” He looked up brightly and I went on, “Where he writes, ‘There is some shit I will not eat.’” I paused, but he did not indicate, neither in gesture nor in word, any familiarity with the text. “Good day, Doctor,” I said and left.
When I left the country, the original deposit I’d given on my apartment was not returned and was done so only when I wrote to ask for it from the States, adding that I was sure this was an administrative oversight, for surely the people entrusted with the protection of the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina could not so much as contemplate even the thought of dishonesty, and whatever would a person think of Islam if this sort of thing went on, boys?
Americans aren’t supposed to use the word “nigger,” are we? Well, for the time I was in Saudi Arabia, I was a nigger. That is, because of some accident of birth—in my case, the fact that I was a woman—most of the people around me assumed my inferiority. Further, they saw no reason why I should be afforded basic human or legal rights or civil treatment. I was the object of their sexual fantasies as well as the object of their violence, at the same time they profited from my labor. After nine months there I could, given the means, easily have become violent. And bear in mind that my niggerhood was temporary. I always knew it had a temporal limit, and had I been willing to pay enough I could have ended it whenever I pleased. The longer I stayed, the more intoxicating grew the fantasy of violence, and the memory of it, even now, after twenty-five years, lingers.
As an aside, I would like to make clear that my dislike, my profound loathing, has nothing whatsoever to do with Arabs or Islam, for I admire much of Arab culture and have always understood Islam as a source of comfort and peace in my Muslim friends. I lived peacefully and happily in Iran for four years and took with me when I left great affection for the people and admiration for the culture. My rancor has to do only with Saudi Arabia and only with its male citizens. I was a guest in their country and they spat on me and cheated me. After more than a quarter of a century, I still wish them any bad thing that history can bring them. But, darlings, it’s got lovely beaches, and the local people are so friendly.