ELTWeekly Vol. 3 Issue#105 | November 21 | ISSN 0975-3036
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Mohammed Sumili is the next who has brought silver particles from the restless desert of the Saudi Arabia. Just one hundred pages have revealed painful wandering, game of pleasure, and eloquent articulation in the desert which is shrinking into clash point of urban boldness and rural traditions prevailed for centuries in the Kingdom. Memories Resurrected. Among rarely talked issues in the Saudi society are women, relationship and of course politics. The novella has talked first two of them which have sufficiently challenged extremism, traditionalism or anything against modern outlook. Raja Al Sanea, Madawi Al Rashid, Salma K Jayyusi, Mansour al-Hazimi and Izzat Khattab have earlier highlighted tensions within the Islamic kingdom.
The painful brief story of heavy sense of guilt, confusions over his own affairs when he was young and role of religious authorities, economic problems which push poor parents to give their younger daughters in wedlock of far older men. Petrol didn’t bring everything to the Saudi citizens which they aspire to have. Women are still denied driving cars, walking alone on roads and talking taboos in public. Everybody seems to live a life which they officially required to denounce. Religious volunteers Mutawwahs control public space, Wasta control administrative space, Kafala manages flowing money from state to the people and desperation controls all of them. Hasan and Ali are the just two victims of this desperation. Ali is from urban Saudi society of Abha where his father has proximity with Wasta and he is not shied of talking flirting women anytime and Hasan a village boy, is a religious and pious young man who could never propose his girlfriend Rawan because of his piousness. Whenever he wishes to do, he remembers Quran and Mutawwa, though the girl asked his opinion, he found himself only a person who “respect” her. But when he was detained by Mutawwa for a crime which he never done and Wasta of Ali’s father rescued him, Hasan couldn’t stop himself. A young lady at his floor successfully allured him to do sex and he found that she is exchange of heavy debt of his father to his business partner rather than a wife and she was in search of happiness and pleasure which her old husband of other three wives couldn’t give.
But when story repeats in Hasan’s own life and her daughter Moona sought to enjoy a pre-marital relationship, Hasan considered it as an insult and spot on his honor. He found it strange that the women, who were overlooked in most aspects of life in Saudi Arabia, stood as their families’ source of honor. Yet that honor belonged to men who were often the first to destroy it when the chance came.” (p.103) Hasan like any Saudi male was offended and tried to protect family honor and the daughter was killed, intentionally or unintentionally. The disturbed Hasan succumb to his life-long conflicts and earlier relations with Rawan and Sarah and chose to disclose everything of his ‘sinful’ life to his hospitalized wife through a letter which would have to reach her with news of Hasan’s suicide.
Tragedies are common to human life but tragedies are becoming desirable in closed societies where honor killing is justified by Mutawwa, Wsata and Kafala. Mohammed’s plain and simple but painful narration questions every stakeholder in this tragedy. He appears skeptic about what liberals and Mutawwas are doing. He failed to understand how merely prayers can rescue Palestine and how can veil be guarantor of women’s dignity. He is confused to differentiate as to whom he is more afraid, Allah or the people. Muhammed beautifully traces linkages among all cultural contradictions with some plain language unusual for Arab and Asian readers. Muhammed Suimili has captured this abstract confusion, tension, and contradictions in Saudi culturalscape with his words embedded in simplicity and plainness, rather than articulation and sophistication.
Arabseque Publishers has published the volume from Cairo and is also available in some Indian book stores.
Ammar Anas is lecturer at King Khalid University, Abha, Saudi Arabia, he can be contacted ammardas@gmail.com.