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Issue 103 Spring 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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Raja Alem in Saudi Arabia, 1997. Photo: Wendy Ewald. Courtesy of Tom McDonough and the photographer.
Tom McDonough first met Raja Alem in 1997, in the Saudi Arabian port city of Jeddah. She had already published seven novels in Arabic, and her reputation in contemporary Arabic literature was similar to Nabokov’s in ours: masterful, erudite, witty, and somewhat dangerous.
I flew home with the manuscript of a novel Raja had written—this time in her classroom English. Though the prose was not entirely comprehensible, it was clear that she was the genuine article—a serious writer with a compelling vision. I rewrote a few pages and faxed them to her. Raja faxed right back, delighted. Parenthetically, she mentioned that she’d started embroidering my initials in Arabic on a bolt of black velvet, and asked me to supply her with my mother’s unmarried name, an ingredient necessary for the completion of the Bedouin spell she was casting to ensure the success of our project. We’ve kept up our collaboration for more than ten years.
Saudi Arabia, like Ireland, is mostly a country in a movie. The Mecca that Raja grew up in during the 1970s was a medieval city. She was raised in her grandfather’s house near the Holy Mosque. Her grandfather was the Sheik of the Zamzam Water Carriers. Zamzam is the well in Mecca’s sacred mosque, and also the name of the healing waters that flow from it. During the oil boom of the 1980s, the holy city was entirely rebuilt, extinguishing an intricate culture whose problems were sorted out according to neighborhood codes rather than merciless geopolitical forces. Our most recent book, My Thousand and One Nights, is a pilgrimage to a Mecca that no longer exists.
Raja has also written plays, poems, children’s books, and quite a bit of journalism. Her stories are braided strands. Her storytelling strategies may be at variance with ours, but her concerns are much the same as those of our canonical romans: How dangerous is love? How lethal are women? Can spiritual labor keep up with the ever-increasing demand for immortality?
Read two of one thousand and one possible outtakes from the Spring 2008 issue’s conversation between Raja Alem, Saudi Arabia’s Nabokov, and Tom McDonough, her translator and collaborator.
