Women of Sand and Myrrh by Hanan al-Shaykh

He sat up in bed, and to my surprise he announced that he'd been afraid of me the previous day and felt disgusted by me. My thoughts strayed back and I couldn't think of any reason. Was it because I'd bought another piece of jewellery, or told him that I preferred life in the desert to here? 'Why? Why?' I asked him, irritable in my curiosity to find out what sin I'd committed. He answered that I'd done things for my own pleasure like a man. When again I sifted through what had happened the day before and still couldn't guess what he meant, I shook my head questioningly, and he said calmly and gravely, "God created you to bear children, and to give pleasure to a man, and that's all.' I didn't understand. Perhaps I hadn't understood his English? Naturally I'd had children, and naturally a man enjoyed me just as I enjoyed him. Wide awake by this time, Maaz repeated seriously, 'God created woman to make children, like a factory. That's the exact word, Suzanne. She's a factory, she produces enjoyment for the man, not for herself.'

Suha is a Lebanese woman living in an unnamed Arab country where she must hide in a cardboard box from the religious police, always on the lookout for women who have committed the sin of having jobs. Nur is a local woman who longs for the brief freedom she experienced abroad, and who meets Suha at her lowest moment of profound need; Suha is shocked and troubled when their relationship becomes physically romantic, though Nur is not. Tamr is a woman who has been divorced many times, and who dreams of opening her own tailor's shop and hair salon, though she must rely on the legal permission of men to do so. Suzanne is a white woman who has fallen in love with an Arab man; her obsession with him is so strong she is willing to undergo any indignity, even longing to become his second wife.

Hanan al-Shaykh's Women of Sand and Myrrh allows each of these four women to tell their own story in a country where their lives are hidden and their voices muzzled. The country is not named, but it's certainly one of those Gulf petrostates like Qatar, Kuwait, or Bahrain--or, more likely, Saudi Arabia--flooded with money and luxuries that promise to soothe the sting of repression, but which can do very little. Each of the four women struggles in her own way with the stifling culture that keeps them little more than vassals to the men in their lives--husbands, brothers, fathers. Suha and Nur dream of returning to the places where they felt truly at home, Lebanon and London, though the possibility of leaving together seems to be one that is left totally unexplored; Suha cannot accept about herself what Nur can. Tamr, by contrast, tries her best to work within the system, carving out a space for herself and her business with a little deception, a little bribery, and a great deal of resolve.

The most interesting of these stories, I thought, was Suzanne's, who has arrived in this country as the wife of an (English?) petroleum engineer. Her narrative is the strangest, the wildest, and the least easy to understand; al-Shaykh manages to capture the mania, close to true madness, of a woman who would sacrifice her freedom so readily. Even Suzanne, willing to adapt and conform in ways the novel's Arab women struggle with, runs afoul of the contempt of men in her life; in the passage above, Maaz is disgusted by her compliance: it's not enough for her to submit to him; she shouldn't even be enjoying it. Maaz, of course, like the other men of the novel, is a child, reduced to an infantile understanding of women and relationships by the same repressive ideals that keep their thumb upon women's lives.

Now, I'm no expert in the Middle East, but it seems to me that in this novel, published in 1992, al-Shakyh captured something vital about the tension between the modernizing and fundamentalist impulses of the Gulf. There are echoes here of someone like Mohammad bin-Salman, a stunted child with too many toys, and of modern Saudi Arabia, a place where economic and technological explosions have done little to stem the effects of Wahhabism. And yet, al-Shaykh's characters feel not like allegories or parables, but real women.

With the addition of Lebanon, my "Countries Read" list is up to 90!