Outtakes from BOMB 103, Spring 2008…

Read two of one thousand and one possible outtakes from a conversation that appears in BOMB’s Spring 2008 print edition, between Raja Alem, Saudi Arabia’s Nabokov, and Tom McDonough, her translator and collaborator.

 

Shadia Alem, I used to dream my painting, but now my painting dreams me, 1997. Courtesy of Tom McDonough.

 

“Aunt Zubayda died with a needle in her vein.”

Raja Alem Zubayda and my mother ran a substantial business making keffiyehs, the headdresses worn by pilgrims. She told us that one time she stepped on one of her sewing needles and it traveled from her foot up to her body, found its way into her knees and her hip, and gradually damaged her organs. The older she got, the more abbreviated the Epic of the Needle became, until all she would say was, “Oh, that needle I stepped on….” Toward the end it was just “The needle….” She’d flutter her eyelashes and sigh, as if suggesting that her story had become too world-famous to be recounted in detail. But she never abbreviated the moral, she ended the story with: “You work yourself to death. Your love of life—that’s what drains the oil in your lamp.”

When Mama got the phone call with the news of her sister’s death, she fell back into the time of My Thousand and One Nights and started thinking again in her mother tongue, Khazar, which everyone assumed she’d forgotten years ago. The amazing thing is that for my mother and her sister death is merely an excursion. If you happen to be dead, like Zubayda or my father, Mama will still talk to you and do all sorts of things to please you. Mama talks to Papa all the time, addressing him formally, teasing him with his formal title—Mohammed Alem (Mister Alem)—which is what she called him when they made love or were fighting. We still talk about him every day when we sit down to eat.

Mama brings out an elegantly presented juicy melon. Shadia and I ask, as if surprised, “Oh, where did we get that?”

“Mohammed Alem,” Mama says matter-of-factly. “He bought it this morning, plus two big cartons of fruit. He wanted to see you, Shadia. But I told him you wouldn’t come downstairs.”

Mama puts special emphasis on Shadia not wanting to “see” her dead father because whenever Mama is cranky or not feeling well she threatens us with, “I’m going to speak with Mohammed Alem about this! Call the driver! I’m ‘going to Mecca’!”

There’s no mistaking the quotation marks in her voice. “Going to Mecca” is our family code for “going to die.” I deflect Mama’s threat by saying, “Wait, Mama; never go without me. If anybody ‘goes to Mecca,’ we go together.”

A while ago Mama bought herself a Mercedes SUV. She was cruising north by the shore of the Red Sea at two in the morning (she kept checking to make sure Sony, her driver, wasn’t nodding off), fiddling with the shiny stereo controls and singing along with Abdulmjeed Abdullah, her favorite folk singer, when she turned to Shadia and announced, “Raja and I are ‘going to Mecca’ to show Mohammed Alem our new car. Are you coming with us, Shadia darling?”

It came as a bit of a shock, intoxicated as I was by the aroma of the new leather seats and thinking about how sweet life is, to hear my mother inviting us to die with her so she could show our dead father her new car.

“Oh no, not me,” Shadia said. “You two go ahead and enjoy yourselves, please. I’ll stay right here.”

You shocked me when you said you’re a kaffir. You are no such thing. Because kaffir means someone who believes in nothing, and here you are, trout fishing and reading about astrophysics, which is precisely what I was talking about when I told you about feeling a power behind things while I was circumambulating the Kaaba. There are many ways of reaching the Beyond.

As for our translation project, I think it’s more about eagerness to communicate than translating books. It’s about being open to one another. There were times when we were working on the books when I felt like I was wringing my heart out looking for a way to explain things, trying to find parallel words and worlds. I never imagined that I’d wind up working with someone who is not the least bit familiar with the ideas and beliefs in my books. But strangely, or luckily, the more I tried to explain things to you the less I felt there was any barrier at all.

It was hard at first. There came a point when I’d told you more than I ever dared tell anyone about my own people. That’s why I see you as my people now. But I still have a big question: what picture of our world do you carry in your mind? How do you and I sound in our translated books? Not to each other, but to others. Do we sound folkloric? What we are working on is not fantasy, it is the way real people lived their lives.

What is the American mind? The world, especially the Third World, always thought of the American mind as unique, as an example of generosity and openness to invention. The Wizard of Oz is a perfect analogy for the American mind, an infinite source of stunning new ideas. We never thought that America would change from welcoming the world to conquering it. Once America had new ideas, a spontaneity so attractive to so many people. Now it has only armies inciting resistance.

It occurs to me that these emails sound just like those we wrote each other right after 9/11. 9/11 makes us say the same things over and over.

 

Self-Portrait with Mirror, 2007. Photo: Raja Alem. Courtesy of Tom McDonough.

Tom McDonough I’m sorry to hear of the passing of your aunt. It sounds like she’ll always be with you, as your father is always with your mother. What we call “wakes” here have become much less elaborate than they used to be. When I was a kid in Brooklyn, the Italian wakes were distinguished by the overpowering smell of lilies and roses and the wailing of black-dressed women. The Irish wakes were drinking parties at which one of the attendees (the “stiff”) was beyond the need to drink anymore.

When my father died at the age of 81, it fell to me to “make the arrangements.” I’d left the old neighborhood for the wicked life of Manhattan, and I’d forgotten some important neighborhood rules. My father was laid out in an open coffin. Slowly, unsteadily, his cronies tottered into the funeral parlor to pay their respects, wrinkled old Irishmen in wrinkled suits. It took me a while to understand the baffled look on their faces. It wasn’t until one of the old gents whispered to me—“For the love of God, Tommy, where’s the bar?”—that I grasped the enormity of my mistake. I rushed out to a liquor store and bought an armful of whiskey and gin and set the bottles on a table at a discreet distance from the coffin. In a few minutes, everyone was telling jokes and singing and reminiscing about my father’s baseball-playing days.

 

Raja holding The Book of Dreams, 1997. Photo: Raja Alem and Wendy Ewald. Courtesy of Tom McDonough.

 

“The end of the world as we know it.”

RA I’ve got goose bumps all over. Rana, who works as a psychiatrist at Efran Hospital in Jeddah, just phoned: the Department of Employee Relations sent out a memo saying that any female doctor who wants a driver’s license should bring in her identity papers along with permission from her mahrem [male guardian] so the hospital can expedite her driver’s license.

For a while I’ve said that driving is not a big priority for Saudi women. I was so wrong. This is a turning point in our history. Finally I won’t feel threatened when my driver announces he wants a vacation. The first wave of woman drivers is going to face serious opposition. They will be physically attacked. The terrorists will try to frighten us. I don’t care. I’m getting my documents together and soon I’ll be on the road. Expect a period of silence on my part while I deal with this. It’s the end of the world as we know it.

TM As much as I like the image of you behind the wheel of a Porsche, may I suggest you consider buying a pickup truck—something black, high off the road, with a big snarly engine? Whatever you do, please don’t let the Dark One get behind the wheel. The world is dangerous enough as it is.

RA Actually, the Dark One is thinking about getting a Hummer, big and black, with glaring lights, four or five of them mounted on the roof. They use them for hypnotizing falcons and hunting for predators in the desert at night.

Don’t you think we’re entitled to a little silliness, after centuries of restraint? Well, let’s not exaggerate—it’s been more like a half-century, since the formation of the Saudi kingdom. Before that, our grandmothers rode on camels, donkeys, and horses, of course. They were a sort of knights in shining armor.

Mama is about to ask my brother Osama for written permission to drive. She wouldn’t miss it for the world. She thanks God it’s happening in her lifetime, and she thanks God it was Aminah, not her, who died during Ramadan, so she won’t miss out on all the fun. She told her best friend Salima, “Get ready, girl; we’re going to driving school. We’re getting rid of that fat old Mercedes SUV and getting a Mini Cooper. We’ll crash it? So let’s crash it.”

 

Raja Alem and Tom McDonough in Toronto, 2005. Photo: Shadia Alem. Courtesy of Tom McDonough.

 

 

Read the print edition interview of Raja Alem by Tom McDonough in BOMB 103, Spring 2008, now available on newsstands everywhere. Subscribe today and receive your FREE copy!