Who Gets to Narrate Love?

Voice, Silence and Unreliable Intimacy in Four Saudi Novels

by Max Scott, Nomad Publishing

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We tend to approach love stories with a fairly good idea of what we are looking for: who falls in love, what gets in the way and whether the relationship survives. But while editing the English editions of four novels by Saudi women, I became increasingly interested in a slightly different question. Whose account of the relationship are we actually hearing, and how much should we trust it?

The four books are Jumanah Al Saihati’s Dear X; Abeer Al Ali’s Deception; and Atheer Al Nashmi’s I Loved You More Than I Should Have and In December All Dreams Come to an End. I should declare my connection: I worked as an editor on their English editions. That inevitably affects the way I read them. It also meant spending a great deal of time with their narrators — their repetitions, contradictions, changes of tone and, sometimes, their determined refusal to see what seems obvious to the reader.

Love and the Isolation of Covid-19

In Dear X, Sara isolates herself during the COVID-19 pandemic and begins writing to a distant man. She deliberately chooses paper rather than digital messages because she feels that the latter cannot carry what she wants to say. She also admits that she finds it easier to write than to speak. The important detail is that she does not send the letters.

This gives Al Saihati an interesting problem to play with. X is the person Sara loves, but he is also almost entirely a product of her account of him. His silence leaves a space which she fills herself, interpreting brief messages, remembering earlier assurances and wondering what he meant at particular moments. Even the name X is suggestive: he is the unknown quantity around which she constructs her calculations.

There is a recognisable literary tradition here, from the absent beloved of the Arabic nasib to the unanswered and unsent letters of European fiction. The pandemic gives Al Saihati a particularly suitable setting for it. Sara is physically isolated, but the emotional distance she is trying to understand clearly began earlier. Lockdown simply gives her the time — perhaps too much time — to examine it.

An Imbalance of Love

Atheer Al Nashmi takes a very different approach in I Loved You More Than I Should Have. Jumana’s narration is an extended retrospective address to Aziz, the man she loves despite having ample evidence that loving him is doing her considerable harm. The imbalance between them is there from the beginning: she loves him more than she should and believes that he loves her less than she deserves.

Jumana repeats herself a great deal. During the editorial process there were moments when the natural instinct was to compress: do we need this accusation again, or another return to an argument that has already been rehearsed? Gradually it becomes clear that the repetition is doing important work. Jumana knows what Aziz is like. She leaves him, returns to him, forgives him and then finds herself making many of the same accusations again.

Her narration behaves in much the same way. For all her fluency, she cannot talk about herself for long without finding her way back to Aziz. Much of the novel is addressed directly to “you”, and that persistent second person tells us something about the relationship that a tidier version of the prose might lose. Jumana is telling the story, but Aziz continues to occupy an extraordinary amount of space within it.

Love and a Changing Saudi Arabia

It would be easy, on the basis of these two books, to see a pattern in which women speak while men remain elusive. Deception complicates matters because Abeer Al Ali puts the story in the hands of a man.

Salem is a Bedouin looking back over a life shaped by his relationship with Khuloud, his family and the considerable social changes taking place around him. The world he remembers moves from camels and ploughs to cars and digital communications, and his narration moves around in time almost as freely. He remembers his life in the order in which memories occur to him rather than according to a particularly obedient chronology.

What matters is that this is Salem’s version of events. He is eloquent about his love for Khuloud and the hurt he has suffered, although the reader gradually has reason to question the way he distributes responsibility. Khuloud makes choices; Salem tends to experience those choices principally as things done to him. When circumstances become difficult, he has a habit of escaping them.

Al Ali leaves us to notice the gaps in his account. Salem can be sympathetic and exasperating within a few pages, sometimes within the same scene. His memories are also bound up with a changing Saudi Arabia, although I think it would sell the novel short to reduce this to an allegory about tradition giving way to modernity. Salem himself contains plenty of both. His more immediate difficulty is the familiar human ability to explain one’s own conduct far more generously than everybody else’s.

The Fascination of a Rebellious Woman

Al Nashmi makes another interesting choice in In December All Dreams Come to an End. Having written I Loved You from Jumana’s point of view, she places us here inside the mind of a self-exiled Saudi journalist living in London. He becomes fascinated by a rebellious woman who initially withholds even basic information about herself, including her name.

He regards himself as someone who admires her independence. At the same time, he spends a great deal of energy interpreting her and imagining what lies behind what she refuses to tell him. The less information she supplies, the more material he has for speculation.

There is something here of Browning’s “My Last Duchess”, whose speaker tells us far more about himself than he intends while ostensibly describing a woman. Al Nashmi’s narrator is cultivated, politically disappointed and capable of talking persuasively about love and freedom. None of that makes him an objective observer. The woman he wants to understand remains partly beyond his reach, and as readers we have to keep asking how much of the person presented to us is hers and how much has been supplied by him.

Working on these novels in English raised another issue which I had not fully anticipated: what to do with emotional excess. English-language literary prose often places a high value on restraint. Repetition, direct address and highly emotional declarations can therefore tempt an editor towards pruning and understatement. In these books that can be dangerous.

The repetitions in I Loved You, for example, are part of Jumana’s character and of the exhausting relationship she is describing. Make her too concise and you change her. Similar decisions arise throughout the four novels. Every repeated accusation, endearment and shift of pronoun has already passed through the judgement of a translator before it reaches an English-language editor. Ola Ali Hassan, Ayat Basma and Susan Burrell, our translators who applied themselves conscientiously on this, inevitably make choices about how insistence, anger, affection and silence will sound in English.

This does not mean that every repetition must be preserved or every roughness defended. These are novels and they require editing like any others. But there is a point at which making the English more conventionally elegant can begin to make the characters themselves more reasonable than they are. And these lovers are very often unreasonable. They obsess, contradict themselves, misremember, forgive people they should probably leave and attribute motives to people who are not present to answer back.

That may also be why I am wary of treating these four books principally as explanations of Saudi women or contemporary Saudi society. There is cultural and social material in all of them, sometimes a great deal of it, and their settings obviously matter. Yet fiction loses something when we ask it to serve primarily as testimony.

What interested me after working closely on all four was how little certainty their narrators finally provide. Men misunderstand women, women misunderstand men, and almost everybody finds ways of misunderstanding themselves. Love does not necessarily make any of them more perceptive. Quite often it has the opposite effect.

Translation brings their accounts into another language. It does not make them any more reliable.

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