Stories That (Probably) Need Telling

Stories That (Probably) Need Telling

by Nessreen

I’m not gonna lie. I was reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck, a collection of short stories about the experiences and thoughts of Nigerian women from different backgrounds, when I decided to finally, actually in-real-life-and-not-just-imagining-it, write the book I had been putting off for years now. There’s nothing more inspiring than reading a brilliant storyteller, but now I know that inspiration is one thing, and actually putting in the work is another (why do I know this only now?).

Obvi it wasn’t going to be easy, and I knew that off the bat. I have mediocre writing skills (I generally speak better than I write, I promise you), horrible writing habits, a glaring lack of writing accomplishments, and an inflated sense of grandeur, which all meant that tackling this mountain that is writing a book is exactly the kind of thing I would go for. And so here we are.

In 2013, I left Saudi Arabia. That was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do in my life, made even worse because although living in Jeddah was extremely stunting, it was the only life I had ever known, and I also love that place for all the opportunities and friends it has given me. When I left, I said goodbye to all of that as much as I prepared to embrace freedom.

That confusing state, where you would hate to leave but would love to go? Living in Jeddah is made up of 10,000 states exactly like that, none of them resolved, all of them conditioning your brain into thinking that it all is ‘normal’. In short form, it was very toxic.

Before I left, I had long conversations with my family and friends, prolonged farewell discussions about all the reasons I had to leave, and just as many reasons to go back when I do. These people – Saudis who have lived there their whole lives, non-Saudis born and raised there, expatriates, children of expatriates, Saudis who had lived outside but came back, foreigners who lived there and left and came back – were all like me, we all had the same stories. Our stay in Jeddah shaped us, for better and worse, and we are bound to it.

It was this collective story that I decided was the best one to tell, in the form of a book.

Writing it (or at least what I’ve written of it so far) has been, as you can imagine, very, very not easy, and I can explain it only in this way: There’s this thing about Jeddawis – they don’t like to talk about Jeddah to people who are not from Jeddah. It comes from a strong desire to not be misunderstood, or to not commit to any form of ‘public’ statement, or to not be judged wrongly (yes, as opposed to being ‘rightly judged’), or to not cause harm to other Jeddawis. We'd all just rather make up ridiculous stories that were not exactly the truth, just to throw 'outsiders' off. Make a joke or two about it. 

In the beginning, I was noncommittal, too. I’d write stories that I felt didn’t ‘betray’ us, or didn't paint the wrong picture. These stories had no ‘meat’. I stayed away from controversial topics (sex, racism, oppression) and also the ‘expected’ ones (religion, politics, capital punishment), but that didn’t last long, because it felt like I was making things up again. The truth is, being from Jeddah meant that all those topics made up my true, real story, but also, so much opportunity, goodness, and a sense of community with incredible people I probably would not have met if I hadn’t come from this place.

My biggest fear is that in telling my story, I inadvertently make myself a target for criticism and attack, or worse, that I make people think that I am an expert of Saudi Arabia and its culture.

Duh, of course I’m not, fools.

I am an expert only of my own experiences. I’m not whistleblowing on the government (don’t have enough journalist blood in me for that), nor am I asking for sympathy (okay, maybe a little) when I talk about what it was like for me growing up and then living most of my adult life in Saudi. 

Having said that, though, I’ve (almost) come to terms with the fact that people will read my story the way they like, and just by writing about it, I’m opening myself up for a lot of crap.

Have at it, motherfuckers.

Here’s Chapter One, which I’m sharing to you as proof that I sorta kinda wrote 1,700 words per day for the whole month of November, and it wasn’t just Mindy Kaling shit that I did.

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CHAPTER ONE: The Monkey

Prayer rugs are being thrown hastily next to each other on the carpeted floor of our living room. Othman, our youngest brother at (maybe) 7 years old at the time and already exhibiting mild signs of compulsive obsession, uses his big toe to align each rug so that they don’t overlap. Soon, six boys – two of them already teenagers – are standing in line behind the best of the prayer rugs – clean, smelling like bukhoor, as if it came straight from the mosque, dark green with gold trimmings outlining the menarah on its face.

They are waiting for my father to come in and lead them for the Asr prayer. But today, they are all restless and distracted by the monkey in the living room balcony, peering at them through the glass door. The monkey is making screeching sounds and breathing fast and heavily, moving its head frantically from side to side, and the boys giggle at it. 

“Look, look!” Waleed yelped, pointing at the bottom of the glass door. The monkey had bent down and started pushing its fingers through the space there, wiggling them. The boys laugh out loud in amusement. 

Me, I’m sitting way in the back, where my mom’s large, Arabic-style sofas are pushed against the living room walls, spanning all three. I keep my distance, but I join in the laughter and the yelping. I’m just waiting for them all to begin their prayers so I can quietly observe the monkey, have my alone time with it. 

My father comes in and everyone turns down, rushing towards their prayer posts. They stand in a straight line next to each other, six boys, and my father, water still dripping from his elbows from his ablution, whistles his trademark stand-to-attention-and-STFU sound. 

“Bilal,” he calls out to my brother Zeineldin. “Call the iqama.” He liked to do this, my father, to call whoever was assigned to do the call-to-prayer (that signals the start of somberness), Bilal, after the Prophet Muhammad’s companion Bilal who was assigned to do the same task during the early days of Islam. Each one of the boys get to be Bilal alternately, but Zen was appointed the default when my father couldn’t be bothered to pick.

Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Zen chants softly, facing forward. My father walks towards the balcony glass door and sits on his haunches, levelling with the monkey. He puts his hand against the glass and the monkey watches him, quieting down. My father smiles at it, like one would a baby. It runs to the far end of the balcony, out of sight. Qad qaamat as-salaah, Allahu akbar, says Zen, and then they all begin to pray.

I’m still in the back of the room. I’m almost invisible – no one takes notice of me. I don’t pray with the boys. I have my own prayer rug and my own sharshaf – prayer cover, different from my abaya – that is in my bedroom, the one I share with my sister and my maternal cousin Norma. Sometimes, my father would tell me to join them in prayer so I had to rush and get my prayer things and then stand all the way behind everyone else. But most days, my father left me alone. If I were a distraction to the boys, I would be told to leave the room.

But I was sitting quietly. Now, as they are praying, I walk towards the balcony. The monkey comes running back and presses its face against the glass, looking at me, showing me all of its teeth in a wild grin. I’m scared of it. I was terrified of all animals, and this one especially. I quickly put my face close to the glass and let out a quick breath to fog it up, and the monkey is startled, scuttling backwards. For the first time, I notice the chain around its neck. It trailed behind it, down its back, and the monkey dragged it around.

That was the first and last time I saw the monkey. But I have so many memories of it! I now realize that all those memories were from the stories my brothers told me. I was never actually there. But I absorbed all of them, and made them mine, too.

They were so real I can almost remember every detail. When the Filipino family driver of our neighbors across the street brought the monkey to us for the first time, holding it like a small child, its arms wrapped around his neck – I remember it like I was standing there at the front door with the boys to greet them. The driver’s name was Fred, and my father had instructed us not to call him by his first name as it was disrespectful. Call him Manong, said my father to us. What’s Manong, we asked, and he said it means 'older man' in Tagalog.

Even that conversation didn’t happen with me in the picture. They had that conversation while they were standing on the street in front of our house, where I was never allowed.

The boys, led by my father, had taken the monkey up to the rooftop of our building where it was to be kept. They led the monkey by its chain leash. It wasn’t a wild monkey, and it didn’t resist, but it was panicking, so they were talking to it as if it were human, because it looked and acted human, with its human arms and hands and feet. It didn’t look like an actual animal, like the stray cats we would feed and who all took to us and lived under the stairways of our apartment building. Those were animals. This monkey walked like a human being.

That year, we lived in a typical middle-class Jeddawi apartment – a square building that had on average four floors, with two apartments on each floor. Each apartment would have four bedrooms and a living room, a dining area, two balconies (one in the master bedroom and one in the living room), two bathrooms and a kitchen. There would be about eight families living in one apartment building, and there would be a caretaker – a haris, typically Bengali or Yemeni, who maintained the entire building, acting as a security guard and washing the tenants’ cars or throwing out the trash. 

The rooftop was a common area, meaning it didn’t belong to anyone, but the entire building is usually owned by a private individual, sometimes living in the same building with his family (in the biggest or best flat), or sometimes never seen altogether except when he comes to collect the rent twice a year. Pets are not common except for cats – there are virtually no dogs in Jeddah, unless you lived in a foreign compound or a big villa that you don’t share with other families. We had snuck the monkey into our building.

Up on the rooftop, we found a shaded area next to the water tanks. My father declared it the monkey’s home because, he said, the sun doesn’t touch it anytime during the day. We don’t want the monkey to die from the heat, he said.

The boys ran back down into our house, which was on the second floor, to get water and food for the monkey. BANANAS!! We fed the monkey one banana, which it took greedily, peeled quickly, and stuffed into its mouth to our great amusement. Then it took another banana and did the same. And then a third.

“It’s not eating properly,” one of the boys said.

“It’s eating like a monkey,” my father explained. “They don’t swallow it – they store it in their cheeks for later when they’re hungry, and then they swallow it. It’s an animal survival instinct.”

We were all in awe.

Except I wasn’t there. I was in my brothers’ room the entire time, and this was all relayed to me by six boys shouting everything to me in excitement, and me jumping up and down, and then what happened? And then what did you say? And then what did Papa say?

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Thank you kindly for reading!

Pretending to write a book in Malaysia.

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Nessreen doesn't shut up about Jeddah, but when asked, she won't say a thing. Read more Jeddah-related posts HERE.