Saudi novelist Laila Aljohani is the author of the acclaimed Days of Ignorance, which is out of print in Nancy Robert’s translation, as well as the compelling memoir Forty, a story of living as a Saudi woman who has chosen to grow older “without having given birth to a child.” She writes: “my name will not be erased, as many women around me think, and my life will not lead to emptiness.”
Forty: And the Meaning of Growing Older
Diary of a Woman
By Laila Aljohani
Translated by Ghazal M. Alharbi
(1)
I am growing older. But I’m not writing this to tell you how old I am today or to count how many years I have lived.
I realized early on that the value of my time lay in my increased knowledge of myself and the world around me. If I were to busy myself with counting my age, it would stop me from learning new things. Instead, I dedicate all my time to knowledge. I want only to learn more and more, so that I can discover how ignorant I had been, and so this fact will make me sad and regretful.
A person who possesses knowledge is far removed from the meaningless hustle and bustle of daily life, but they are lonely; they may panic; they may be uncouth; they may suffer (no, they are suffering). Yet they will never ever harm anyone. Yes, whoever knows more does not harm others, because of the energy and time lost when doing harm. Harm is weakness, and harm eventually leads to defeat.
A person who possesses knowledge does not like to lose, nor to be defeated.
A person who possesses knowledge is also able to build their own joy atop life’s sandy time, but they are terrified when those sands erode and life ends.
A person who possesses knowledge is able to forgive, to move forward. If they look back, they will do so because memories grow with time. And then, this remembering does not signify anything more than the friendly “hello” from a passerby.
Most of life, when we contemplate it, is as fleeting as the greetings exchanged between two people passing on the street, and I do not want to leave this brief time on earth without knowing all that I can know.
(2)
I’m older today. What I wrote twenty years ago is very different than what I’m writing today. What I understand now from the 1975 novel Sharq al-Mutawassit (The Eastern Mediterranean), by Saudi writer Abdul Rahman Munif, has altered considerably from what I understood when I read it for the first time many years ago. My reaction to this novel has changed.
What I want today from others is no longer easily acceptable or attainable; it’s rather more difficult than to be just tolerated or forgiven. For the most part, I want to be left alone. My dreams have become deep, strange, detailed, colorful, and texted with the heated clashes of war. Some of these images look like huge paintings. Also, my eyes are sunken from the tremendous amount of time I’ve spent reading, and from what I learn of the world’s conflicts, which break my heart. My breath has become slower and colder, like that of a wild animal in its winter hibernation; an animal that saves energy for the harsh days, for survival.
I have become more at peace and less anxious and sad. Maybe because I have survived the deceptions of hope! My face appears more beautiful than it did years ago. I see a mysterious halo around my face which rises above, as other things do when they approach completion or reach maturity. With the wisdom that comes with age, I have been able to break free from many things that I thought I would never escape. The first of these is waiting. I am no longer waiting. I have won back myself, my time, and the energy that I had previously spent, years ago, on issues and people who are not worth it.
(3)
I’m growing older, and I’m approaching forty without having given birth to a child. However, my name will not be erased, as many women around me think, and my life will not lead to emptiness.
What I gave birth to is resistant to death, and everything I know about life has made me realize that immortality is the ornament of those who are conscious, not those who multiply. And, on top of this, my life is full.
Yes, my life is full, even though some women think or console themselves with the thought that a childless life is empty. In the past, I had been preoccupied with justifying, to those women and others, the reason for my reluctance to have children. Then I realized that I was like someone swimming in the icy water of pointlessness. I make a great effort to explain to these women, and those who think in this way, that they define themselves differently than I define myself. They don’t see the world from my viewpoint, so I decided to just smile at them.
I try to understand how women realize that having a child is a weighty commitment, and then how they treat this fact lightly.
I try to comprehend the point of this motherhood trouble. I try to understand how a woman thinks that all children born are a good deed and will save her in her final days, so she keeps saying to me with great certainty: “Bear a son who will support you when you grow old.”
I did not know how to make women understand that I am terrified of my destiny in this life. I feel my life is a predicament, and I should not bring a new child into it unless it was solely the child’s desire to be born and not my own. Since I cannot ask a fetus before it is created in my womb, and becomes aware of whether he or she would like to be born, then it is not right for me to force life on them just because I can. Neither now, nor tomorrow, nor ever can I enter the fragile paradise of motherhood.
Yes, motherhood is a fragile paradise. A child’s disobedience may cause a woman to regret motherhood. The illness of a child may provoke a motherhood of torment, and the death of a child may turn it into hell. Then there is sleeplessness, anxiety, physical and mental exhaustion, and the fear of overindulgence that leads to neglecting the child.
There are choices that will emerge in the middle of a road and decisions that will have to be made.
There is a thought that makes me sick when it passes through my mind, perhaps because of my selfishness. This thought is that my life with a child would not be my own and would not be the same as it was before I gave birth. I would dedicate my time to caring, protecting, and worrying. I’d lose my courage and strength and become more reserved. I would also become agitated at times, obsessing over the fact that my life was no longer mine.
With that frustration, I’d grow into a terrible mother, and I wouldn’t be able to forgive myself. And, because I always thought that people would not understand these ideas, I stopped justifying my thoughts and my self to anyone a long time ago.
I no longer care if someone understands why I am different or if they accept it, not because I despair, but because I have realized the general opinion of me is unchangeable—at least right now. As long as an awareness of my differing perspective is not achievable, it is not worth wasting my efforts to try to get people to understand matters from my point of view.
Most people can understand only what they already know, and any difference just serves to confuse them.
(4)
I am maturing, and many aspects of my life have matured me. The first of these is pain. The older I get, the worse the pain becomes and the slower it fades.
At times, I thought the pain was my fate in life, and I wondered why I had to grow up in its shadow. But later on, I realized that pain is a human condition, and that no human being is truly free of misery. Everyone experiences some form of pain—from slight discomfort to excruciating misery.
I’ve realized that my fair portion of pain would be huge! Oh! How great is my pain! This is because a conscious person is fated to suffer twice: once for being attentive and once more for being alone.
But the strangest thing I’ve realized in my life is that, despite my pain, I don’t want to exchange my life for another’s. What is the point of going through a torment twice if I didn’t understand it thoroughly the first time? What is the point of attempting to live another life with all its costs?
Every person’s life will include pain, disappointment, sorrow, frailty, and fleeting joy. A simple, easy, or frivolous life does not exist. Every life is complicated in some way. I don’t want to simply switch my life for another. Instead, I want only to live my own particular experiences. Perhaps because there are experiences that will enrich my life, provide it with meaning, and make it more significant. Such experiences, however, will never result in a big changes, for all of the years of life I drag behind me.
(5)
I’m getting older. I’m about to turn 40, and if this book is published, it will be my third.
My first book came out when I was twenty-seven, and it was preceded by years of built-up anger. As for my second, it was published when I was thirty-seven, and it was preceded by summer rains.
Perhaps some war will precede my third, because, as I realized a long time ago, I grow up in the shadow of wars. Every ten years of my life has been marked by destruction in such a way that I cannot close my eyes to it. I have witnessed three wars that changed the world around me, and they all took place nearby, on the shores of the Gulf. The first was between Iraq and Iran, the second after Iraq invaded Kuwait, and the third when America invaded Iraq.
During the first war, I was a child, and I recall the newscaster announcing that Saudi television would no longer broadcast details of the war between the two Muslim countries.
During the Second war, I was a young woman crying on the night of January 17, 1991, not knowing what was going on or why it was happening.
During the third war, I was a woman accustomed to loneliness and sadness, believing that God’s mercy had fled. I was a woman who had no idea how she would spend the rest of her life but hoped to live it with as few losses as possible. Losses mark the soul like drops of salty water that flow for years over a small rock, carving it to reflect what has happened, not what should.
Also read: An excerpt from her Days of Ignorance, tr. Piers Amodia, on Banipal.
Ghazal Alharbi is an assistant professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at King Saud University in Riyadh, and has a PhD from Indiana University Bloomington in Middle Eastern Language and Culture. Previous translations have appeared in the Bengaluru Review and elsewhere.