The Riyadh world

LOST IN TRANSLATION America has missed the point of Rajaa Alsanea’s novel.

Rajaa Alsanea may be the most internationally famous Chicago author you’ve never heard of. The Saudi-born writer became the center of controversy when her novel, Girls of Riyadh, was published in Arabic in 2005. The novel, told via a volley of e-mails, depicts several Saudi women dealing with societal and familial oppression, drinking underage and violating various other Muslim taboos.

Now published in English for the first time, Girls is experiencing controversy again. The reaction here has been to label the book as Middle Eastern chick lit. As we spoke to Alsanea on the phone—she moved here last summer to attend the University of Illinois at Chicago—we got the impression that the English translation has become more of a curse than a blessing.

Your book stirred up a storm in Saudi Arabia when it was released. How has the reaction been in America?
I was hoping for something different. People are concentrating on comparing it to Sex and the City and the taboo breaking and the fact that I wrote about Muslim girls who are dating or falling in love, or trying to have sex before they’re married, or trying to drink alcohol. These are just simple things within the whole story, which is mainly about girls trying to live their lives within Saudi traditions, within Islamic rules, and at the same time trying to have a different kind of life from what their mothers had.

You think there’s been confusion about that here?
The rights I’m talking about are not the rights to drink or have premarital sex. I’m talking about girls who get married to men they don’t love, or girls who have their choices made for them by their families. I’m talking about a culture that makes the individual not be able to own their own lives.

Chick lit is almost a dismissive term here. But in Saudi Arabia, where a book like this hadn’t been published before, it could be empowering.
People did not call it “chick lit” in Saudi Arabia. The things that were addressed in the book were very sensitive matters in Saudi Arabia. People took it very seriously.

Do you think it was the drinking, sex, etc., or the larger issues that were upsetting to Saudi citizens?
The conservatives were against the idea of sharing these sensitive matters with other countries. Now we see that the Americans are trying to hold anything against us. They say it’s bad timing, now that everyone thinks Saudi Arabia is the land of terrorism. That’s why when I do interviews, and read them and see things that I’m saying written in a different way, I feel like I’m being used against my own country.

So are you thinking of not doing any more interviews?
Kind of. There are many who know what they’re going to write before they talk to you. They have their own headlines in their mind. I just feel like I was trying to do something good for Saudi Arabia, and now I feel like people are using me against Saudi Arabia.