I Was Here Yesterday is set between Saudi Arabia and the Florida coast and entangles grief and memory, centering on how the narrator grapples with her mother’s death and the truths about her mother’s life—and her own—that she uncovers.
From ‘I Was Here Yesterday’
By Zainab Hifni
Translated by Ibtihal Rida Mahmood
I was nine years old in 1979, when the Juhayman uprising erupted. It was an extremist movement that, as my father never tired of saying, set us back years. The movement ushered in a new era the clerics called the Sahwa, or the Awakening.
What I remember most from that time is the upheaval that swept through Jeddah, the city where I lived. Women singers disappeared from Saudi television. School celebrations were canceled. Music was forbidden. Mixing between men and women in public places was criminalized, and those who defied the rules were flogged. Shops closed at the five daily prayer times.
Our generation witnessed the rising pitch of religious extremism, with all its consequences and shadows. At my school, we were required to cover our faces upon entering and leaving the building. Any girl caught with a book by an author accused of promoting moral decay or vice—writers such as Ihsan Abdel Quddous or Naguib Mahfouz—faced punishment and had her books confiscated. Philosophy was struck from the curriculum, philosophical texts were branded heresy, and anyone who so much as mentioned a philosophical school, in public or private, risked severe consequences. The list of forbidden thinkers was long: it included the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, known for his writings on good and evil and the death of faith in modern societies; and the French philosopher René Descartes, the so-called father of modern philosophy, with his famous declaration, “I think, therefore I am.” Many others who enriched humanity were likewise erased. School libraries were purged of literature and history; they were left with religious texts alone.
My parents had been luckier than we were. They had grown up in an era of moderate Islam and breathed the air of openness that once prevailed, before it was smothered by Juhayman’s ideas and those of his followers. The face veil, once rare in Jeddah, became widespread. My mother often mourned that luminous time she had known, voicing her dismay at the scale of change that had overtaken Saudi society—Hijaz in particular.
Like everyone else, I am exhausted by the scent of memory, sweet and bitter. Life inside our home was calm. Beautiful images from my childhood still rise before me. We all long for the food our mothers cooked when we were little. We yearn for the embrace of those we love, for the scent of their skin after time has parted us from them, by choice or by force.
I remember how, to my father, Fridays were sacred. He would wake up at dawn to join the congregational prayer at our neighborhood mosque. Afterward, he would drive downtown, where the traditional markets spread out in a tangle of stalls. From the famous Al-Ghamdi shop, he would buy ful, tameez bread, mutabbaq, and ma’soub.
At eight in the morning, my mother would wake us up, after laying out the breakfast table. We grumbled at rising early on our day off. She would remind us that our father insisted we share breakfast with him. The aroma of the ful would reach my nose—my mother would drop a glowing ember into its center to lend it a smoky flavor, then drown it in olive oil and lemon. There was also the fragrance of the plate of maqliyah.
I remember my father bringing us sweets from the famous Montana pastry shop in Al-Baghdadiyah. My sister Yusra and I would race to him, snatch the éclairs and macarons from his hands, and run off, while he laughed along with us, wide-mouthed and delighted. I remember how, on weekends and Eid holidays, he would take us to Luna Park on Palestine Street, letting us try every ride. How we would plead with him to take us to the Kilo 10 gardens to play. During Eid al-Fitr, we would coax him into renting us a chalet by the sea at Atallah’s cabins, where we spent the three days of Eid. Then we would go to the toyshop and use our holiday money—the Eidi we collected from our father, uncles, and relatives—to buy the toys we had dreamed of.
When adolescence came, Yusra and I no longer squandered our Eidi money on toys. We had other desires: gold trinkets, light cosmetics. My mother would look the other way and allow it, but within limits and what’s suitable for our age.
I was most like my mother. My sister and brother looked alike; I think they inherited their features from our grandparents. From my mother, I inherited balance, quick intelligence, sharp wit, and a playful spirit—but not her forbearance or her patience. My father was kind and generous, yet quick-tempered and prone to anger. My mother had a gift for dissolving his temper, narrowing any rift that flared between them with skill and patience. Despite his temper, my father believed that a marriage rested on affection and mercy. He was not alone in this; most Hijazi families of that time were close-knit, and each father devoted himself to the happiness of his household.
I was fourteen when I bled for the first time—later than most of my friends, who had entered womanhood a year or two before me. I waited for it impatiently. Strangely, Yusra saw her first blood on the very same night. We stayed up whispering and laughing. In the morning, we told our mother about the visitor every mother awaits, reassurance of her daughters’ future. Relief lit her face. She kissed each of us and handed us one of her own cotton sanitary pads until she could buy more for us. She began explaining how to use them, but we told her we needed no instructions. She walked away shaking her head. “A new generation,” she muttered. We had already heard every detail at school. Some girls’ periods lasted a week; others’ ended after four days. They described the changes that had followed their entry into womanhood: the rounding of breasts, the swell of hips. They spoke with excitement about the stirrings of desire toward boys, about the longing that churned within them and grew more insistent as their period approached.
Yusra and I had a mutual friend named Awatif; she was our age and in our grade. I passed into first secondary, then second. Awatif failed the third intermediate grade twice. Yusra joined her there, and they became classmates. I was astonished by Awatif’s repeated failures. She was not stupid—on the contrary, she was sharp and perceptive. She was nice-looking, distinguished above all by a captivating smile that revealed perfectly aligned white teeth, though we seldom saw them.
Their friendship deepened, and Awatif began to visit us often. She and Yusra studied together in the living room, and sometimes my mother kept her for dinner or for the whole of Friday. She told us that the turmoil at home was behind her academic failures. She was the youngest of her siblings, ten years younger than her eldest brother, and had once been at the top of her class. Three years earlier, her father had taken a second wife, a girl no older than fifteen. Her mother could not accept it. The shock shattered her. Jealousy flared into an unquenchable fire, and their home became unbearable. Her father reduced his visits to avoid conflict, spending most of his time in the second house and sending only their monthly allowance.
“Since my father married again,” she told us bitterly, “my mother pours her anger out on me and my brothers. She’s no longer the woman I knew. Her smile has vanished. She’s developed diabetes and high blood pressure. She’s miserable, and most of the time she’s shut up in her room. She can’t bear the sight of us. No longer cares about anything. He destroyed her as a woman. I’m so angry at my father. My mother was cheerful, tender—and she was still young and beautiful. Why do men betray their wives? Is something wrong with them, or with their wives? Why doesn’t a love for their children stop them when they think of marrying again? Or is sacrifice demanded only of women? Men are the cause of women’s misery. I’m never going to marry. I won’t be a copy of my mother. I refuse her fate.”
We could only soothe her and urge her to study. But the psychological strain was more than she could bear. One day, she came to us in tears: her mother had fallen into a diabetic coma after neglecting her medications—as if she had chosen to die. Awatif missed a week of school. When Yusra called to check on her, she sobbed that her mother had died a few days after being hospitalized.
After her mother’s death, she visited us once more. Her face was yellowed, her eyes sunken, her hair unkempt, her body thinner than ever. She told us her eldest brother couldn’t get over it, so he had abandoned his university studies and moved to Medina after finding work there. Before leaving, he said he could no longer endure the suffocating atmosphere, that he could not look at their father, whom he blamed for their mother’s death. Awatif felt abandoned; his departure deepened her crisis.
She did not finish the school year. She ran away.
Her father never learned what became of her. He reported her missing, but nothing came of it. My mother grieved deeply for her. Rumors multiplied. Some said she was found in Al-Ruwais district, her throat slit after she’d been raped. Others insisted the police arrested her in a suspicious apartment with boys and girls, and that her father refused to claim her, saying she had disgraced the family name, and after that she’d been placed in a juvenile girls’ home. Still others swore she had fled the country with a non-Saudi boy she’d been seeing. Whenever my mother heard these stories, or whenever Awatif’s name surfaced in conversation, she would say, “May God protect my daughters, and may He keep that girl safe and return her to her family unharmed.”
My body began to curve; my features were reshaped. I envied Yusra. She had grown tall, her breasts had blossomed, and her face had become more beautiful and striking. When we went to the markets with our mother, I noticed boys’ eyes always followed her. By the time I was seventeen and in my final year of secondary school, Yusra, in her first year, had won a popularity among teachers and fellow students that I had never known. Mothers began visiting our home, each confiding to mine her wish that Yusra would marry her son. Only one or two asked for my hand. Jealousy flared inside me whenever a young man knocked at our door, looking for Yusra.
My mother noticed. She grew careful in my presence, avoiding talk of the suitors who came for my sister. Curiosity drove me to eavesdrop on her conversations with my father. I learned they had agreed to postpone any talk of marriage until we both finished university. Their decision lifted the weight that had been pressing on my heart.
Zeinab Hifni is a journalist and novelist who was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She first gained notice with her novels Women at the Equator and Mind of Ill Repute and is also well-known for her columns with al-Sharq al-Awsat.
Ibtihal Rida Mahmood is a writer, editor, translator, and poet. She is the translator and co-editor of Snow in Amman: An Anthology of Short Stories from Jordan (2015) and the English translator of Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (2017). Her essays, translations, and criticism have appeared in The Markaz Review, New Internationalist, Qantara, The Seattle Globalist, and Women Writers, Women’s Books. Her poetry and literary translations have been featured in international anthologies, including The Art of Being Human (2013), Premio Mondiale di Poesia Nosside (2014), and Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets (2025). She is a contributing editor at ArabLit. She also publishes the Substack newsletter Naked Shadows on a Black Wall. Find more from her at https://substack.com/@ibtihalridamahmood.