I have finished reading Al-Aakharoon (The Others) by Saba Al-Herz (a pseudonym) a while ago. As the title does suggest, this is a book written in Arabic. It has been a long, long while since I have read a book written in Arabic. This is mainly because: 1) there isn’t anything worth reading 2) even if there is something worthwhile, the print quality is really, really bad. In any case, at first I made the mistake of ordering the book online but of course it didn’t arrive (we’ll get to that later). My friend, who recommended it to me has apparently forgotten to warn me about that. Oh well, $14 went to the waste. Nevertheless, a while ago I managed to buy it from Bookplus in Bahrain.
So why did it not pass the customs? Easy, the main character engages in some homosexual relationships and she recounts her experiences in 1st person POV throughout the book. Now, this is quite interesting but so taboo and supposedly out of place here. It even took me a while to grasp that fact. I totally didn’t see it coming; not in a million years. The book, however, feels more autobiographical than fictional. Of course, there is no way I can know which is true and which is fiction but it seems to me that lots of the contents is real. Well, it does not matter much.
And she speaks about facts, lots of these things happen here. It is not that many young people here are gays and lesbians by choice. They are mostly just like that until they get married since doing *it* before marriage is a big no-no. For guys, marriages are often costly. As a friend puts it “you buy a wife here”. For girls, they mostly have to wait for their knight-in-shining-armor (not always a knight, though, just anyone) to come and marry them. But since marriages are costly for the guys, not many marry until later in their youths. Hence, the number of girls who are considered spinsters (above 30) is nearly 2 million; nearly 1/3 of all the woman in Saudi Arabia. This number is set to skyrocket to 4 million within the next 5 years or so if the situation remained unchanged. In any case, that is a really complicated topic that touches upon many other fields like unemployment, ‘marriage equivalence’ and the whole man-woman relationship here. This is beyond the scope of this simple impression.
Anyhow, I kind of liked the book at the beginning, not only because of its bold choice of topic but because I can identify with lots of the things mentioned in it. One prime example is the American-sponsored Channel 3, which came way before the age of Satellite TV. It enabled me to watch the NBA, NASCAR, American Football and many other TV shows in my early adolescence. And then there were the talks on the Gulf Wars, the year 1400 AH (1980 AD), the Internet revolution and the whole ubiquitous Sunna versus Shia thing (and all the stupid action stirred by it). Additionally, the writer is from Qatif (in the eastern part of the country) where I live.
However, towards the end, the writer seemed to have lost her focus, which made the novel suffer a bit and she kept dragging on aimlessly for a while before coming to an abrupt end.
In all, this is a pretty decent novel. I guess it is part of the new “scandalous” novels written by female writers; a genre (if we can call it that) popularized by Riyadh Girls, which sucked (now available in English). It is recommended if you can read Arabic, are not wholly sensitive when it comes to issues about sexuality (although there isn’t anything I would call graphic here) and want to discover some of the secrets of the woman world here. There are many allusions, though, which may puzzle people outside the region.
