Love Stories, Cinema, and Social Change

Badriah Al-Bishr’s Love Stories on al-‘Asha Street won a PEN Translates grant earlier this year. It is being translated by Sawad Hussain and will be published by Héloïse Press.

Love Stories, Cinema, and Social Change

Reading Badriah Al-Bishr’s Love Stories on Al-Asha Street

By Fatma El-zahraa Badawy

 

When I read Badriah Al-Bishr’s Love Stories on Al-Asha Street (2013), I was drawn to more than its stories of women falling in love in Riyadh during the 1970s. What stayed with me was the world surrounding these relationships: a neighborhood where everyone seems to know everyone else’s business, where a telephone call can create an opportunity for intimacy, and where Egyptian films offer young women glimpses of lives they might never experience. The novel captures a society changing in ways its inhabitants do not always understand, and women trying to find a place for themselves amidst those changes.

At first, the story seems to revolve around familiar subjects: love, marriage, family, friendship, and the everyday lives of women in Al-Manfuhah, Riyadh. But these relationships gradually reveal a thorny question What happens when a woman begins to imagine a life that her family and society aren’t t prepared to accept?

Al-Bishr makes Al-Asha Street central to the novel. This street is not simply where the characters live; it shapes how they behave and relate to one another. Neighbors watch, gossip, exchange information, and interfere in each other’s lives, privacy is difficult to maintain, but the close-knit community also gives women ways to help one another. The same neighborhood that restricts their choices can provide the connections through which they find work, exchange news, and pursue relationships.

In-between spaces

Rooftops are among the most interesting spaces in the novel. While they belong to the home, they are also open to the outside world; here, women can look beyond their immediate surroundings, see others, and sometimes encounter people they would not meet inside the house. The rooftops offer a limited kind of freedom, one that does not require leaving home or openly challenging family authority. The women in Love Stories make use of a space that already exists, but give it a different purpose.

The relationship between one of the central characters- Aziza – and the cinema offers another way to understand how women’s imaginations begin to move beyond their immediate surroundings. Egyptian films are another inside-outside space, important to her because they show lives and relationships that look different from the ones she knows, offering images of romance, beauty, independence, and choice. Cinema gives Aziza a language for desires she might otherwise struggle to articulate.

This interest in Egyptian films also points to the cultural connections between Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Popular cinema travelled across borders and entered homes and imaginations, bringing with it different ideas about love, femininity, and social life. For Aziza, the screen becomes a place where she can encounter possibilities that remain difficult to pursue in her own environment.

Al-Bishr, however, does not suggest that watching films can free Aziza from social expectations; after all, imagination has its limits, especially when it meets family decisions and the realities of marriage. Love doesn’t remove social restrictions; it makes them more visible. Aziza’s attraction to cinema matters because it allows her to imagine alternative lives, even when she cannot easily turn those alternatives into reality.

Different forms of independence

The other women in the novel respond to their circumstances differently. Wadha, a Bedouin woman, looks for a measure of independence through work in the women’s market. Atwa leaves her village, changes her name, and tries to build a different future in Riyadh. In the novel, women’s experiences are not interchangeable. Each woman faces different constraints and has access to different opportunities.

This variety is important, because the novel does not treat women’s freedom as a single experience. Independence can mean earning money, leaving a familiar place, pursuing a relationship, or keeping a private desire alive. Some women speak directly, while others rely on silence and more indirect forms of communication. Their choices may seem modest, but they matter in a world where even ordinary decisions are subject to family and community expectations.

The novel’s treatment of silence is particularly interesting. Its women don’t simply move from silence to speech, as if finding a voice were enough to overcome the restrictions around them. Speaking can expose them to trouble; thus, remaining silent can sometimes be a way of protecting themselves or of gathering information. Listening, too, becomes a form of knowledge. Al-Bishr shows how women navigate a world in which what is said, and who hears it, can have consequences.

Technology and change

The telephone changes some of these conditions. It allows people to speak without being physically present in the same room, creating a form of intimacy that does not depend on being seen.Via the telephone, a conversation can take place beyond the immediate gaze of neighbors and family members. But the telephone also brings suspicion and anxiety; it offers privacy without guaranteeing it.

The arrival of color television, telephones, air conditioning, and other modern conveniences changes domestic life in similar ways. Television brings images of the outside world into the home, while new communication technologies alter how people maintain relationships. These objects are not just signs of material progress. They affect how people understand privacy, intimacy, and the boundaries between home and the wider world.

This is one of the novel’s most trenchant observations: modernization does not necessarily mean greater personal freedom. New technologies can open up possibilities while creating new reasons for surveillance and control. A telephone can help two people communicate privately, but it can also become an object of suspicion or a way of checking up on someone. Television can introduce different ways of life while provoking anxiety about their influence, the changes are real, but their consequences are not always liberating.

These details take on a wider significance when placed against the backdrop of Saudi life in the 1970s. The oil boom that  followed the 1973 crisis accelerated economic development, urban expansion, and the introduction of new consumer goods and technologies.

These changes reached households as well as public institutions, yet economic and material modernization did not automatically bring an equivalent change in women’s social positions. The novel’s domestic world reflects this uneven process: new objects and experiences enter people’s lives while older expectations continue to shape their choices.

History writ large and small

This period also preceded a major historical rupture: the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in November 1979 by Juhayman al-Otaybi and his followers. This event lend the novel’s portrayal of the 1970s an unsettling dimension, as Al-Bishr looks back at a society experiencing new forms of entertainment, communication, and social interaction before the more rigid climate that followed—before the mosque’s  seizure and the subsequent tightening of religious and social controls.

The story of one of the book’s male characters, Saad, brings this historical development into the novel’s personal world. He begins as a character involved in the neighborhood’s relationships and everyday concerns, but eventually becomes associated with Juhayman’s group. His trajectory reshapes the reader’s understanding, because it connects the intimate world of love and youthful desire with the ideological conflicts taking shape around it.

Indeed, the novel doesn’t present history as something that happens only to political figures or institutions; it reaches into ordinary relationships and changes the lives of people who may initially seem far removed from public events.

Why Saudi in the ‘70s

Al-Bishr’s decision to look back at this period makes memory central to the novel. And yet her portrayal of Saudi in the 1970s is not simply nostalgic. She doesn’t present it as a lost golden age in which women enjoyed freedoms that disappeared later. In this time, family authority was strong, women’s choices were restricted, and social observation shaped everyday life. At the same time, the novel shows that women experienced friendship, pleasure, work, attraction, and moments of independence. Their lives were constrained, but they were not solely defined by oppression.

The novel thus avoids an easy contrast between a restrictive past and a liberated present. Saudi society has changed considerably since the 1970s, and women’s opportunities have expanded in important ways. But it would be misleading to treat the novel as a valorization of women’s lives today, or to assume that the questions it raises have disappeared, even if the circumstances have changed, as have the ways in which women negotiate family expectations, personal choices, and social pressure.

Many loves, many stories

As a work of fiction, Love Stories on Al-Asha Street is at its most convincing when it allows society’s larger changes to emerge through ordinary details. Throughout the novel, Al-Bishr weaves together several characters and storylines rather than relying on a central protagonist. This gives the novel a broad social perspective, although the number of stories sometimes makes the narrative feel episodic.

Some characters leave a stronger impression than others, and the different strands do not always carry equal weight. Still, the structure suits the world Al-Beshr is trying to portray: a neighborhood made up of intersecting lives, where no single person’s experience can explain the whole community.

The street itself gradually becomes an archive of social change, Its houses, rooftops, conversations, romances, and new technologies preserve traces of a particular moment in Saudi history, the women become part of that archive, too. Through their experiences, the novel records the personal costs of family authority, the influence of popular culture, and the small opportunities women create for themselves.

I found it difficult to separate the love stories from the historical setting in which they unfold, and every relationship reveals something about the limits placed on personal choice. Every attempt at independence brings the surrounding social structures into view, and even the characters’ seemingly private decisions are shaped by questions of class, gender, family authority, and reputation.

What makes Love Stories on Al-Asha Street worth reading today, thirteen years after its publication, is not simply that it offers a picture of an earlier Riyadh. It shows how historical change enters people’s lives through things that might otherwise seem ordinary: a film watched at home, a telephone call, a job, a conversation between neighbors, or a decision about whom to let oneself love. Al-Bishr gives these details the space they deserve, allowing readers to see a period of social transformation through the experiences of women whose stories rarely occupy the center of official history.

The novel doesn’t offer a single answer to the question of how women can claim freedom within restrictive societies. Instead, its characters find different ways to negotiate their circumstances, and none of these paths is complete or uncomplicated. That, perhaps, is what makes their stories so convincing. Freedom appears in small decisions and private hopes, but it remains tied to the social world in which women have to live. Through these lives, Al-Beshr makes the history of a changing society visible without losing sight of the people who experienced it.

Fatma El-zahraa Badawy is an Egyptian journalist and independent writer based in Cairo, specialising in gender, social issues, literature, and cultural criticism.