No one was intoxicated either, because alcohol was never served in Zubaidah's house, in keeping with the strong Islamic faith she shared with her family. Though illegal and punishable, black market alcohol was readily available in the Kingdom, but these ladies needed no alcohol to have a riotous time.
Among the sober Saudis, no one danced with one another; rather they danced for one another, the dancing woman surrounded by an enclave of clapping, laughing, shrieking joviality. The dancer was a performer for all to enjoy. I clapped to the music and collected my disordered thoughts.
In a few short hours, Saudi Arabia and its women were slowly demystified. These women were becoming three-dimensional, less like hooded holograms as I learned more about them. They were real women, coming into sharp focus through my very privileged lens of fellow womanhood. Underneath the swathes of veils and abbayahs, dancing feet and gyrating, curvaceous hips were scurrying by all over Riyadh. The daylong sedated, veiled torpor, the mask of Puritanism was just that: a bland façade to the uninitiated, lifting privately to unveil carefully guarded energy, made all the more delicious and potent in its illicitness. These were buoyant, spirited women, made stronger by the layers of oppression in the public world. These were women of appetites, complexity, and deep convictions. Through Zubaidah I was inducted into a multilayered, complex, cloistered world. Under an impassive, forbidding surface, Saudi Arabia was very far from monolithic.
As Christine and I tapped our feet to this scene, unable to join in the day-lit disco of dervishes, trapped in very Western inhibitions, I asked her about her relationships with her fellow Saudi nutritionists. She had worked with them for some years. I wondered how she felt toward them.
“How do you get along with these Saudi women?” I asked, mentioning that I hadn't any female colleagues in my section.
“Saudi women are incredibly manipulative,” she answered flatly, in a low determined voice. She watched the scene with an unflinching, aqua-colored eye. I looked at her, stunned at her criticism, especially as she partook of their hospitality. What did she know of these women? What had she learned in her years here?
“They have to be manipulative,” she went on. “Their goals and dreams and their places in the workplace are achieved only through the manipulation and influence of husbands or fathers or brothers or sons. Without their influence, they can never express themselves.” She sounded bored. Evidently she had theorized on this before.
I listened, taken aback by the venom in her conviction. Christine explained how she believed Saudi women cannot realize their needs by assertion, in the way women in the West traditionally do. The ambitious Saudi woman, therefore, becomes skillful in influencing men within the family, a subversive manipulation, calculating, persuasive, and highly intelligent. I knew already that the women at this party, the Saudi women who worked at my hospital, were unique and rare within the Kingdom. These were some of the first women in the workplace in Saudi Arabia. My hospital was exceptional in encouraging Saudi women to work, with the support of the liberal and woman-promoting CEO, Dr. Fahad Abdul Jabbar. I had not yet met him, but among the Saudi women at the National Guard Hospital, he was revered.
These women must have overcome tremendous traditions that would normally encourage them to remain at their father's home until it was time to relocate to a husband's home. In this stratum of Saudi society, the families were wealthy and the women would have no material need, no economic compulsion to earn. The goal to live in one's own apartment was one which I never encountered amongst these women. Though they longed for the freedoms I had enjoyed—driving cars; wandering the world with short hair and no scarf; traveling alone; pursuing a career as avidly as a man; simply being free—there was no driving force urging them on to leave their families and be independent in any real sense. The hunger these women did have was for education and autonomy in the workplace; a need for purpose, one greater than that of their mothers.
Whatever their methods, of argument or debate or attrition only in the way a beloved daughter can exact upon any indulgent father, these women were indeed very strong. I was not sure that “manipulative” was the most encompassing description for such determined women, and I wondered how much of that observation was a reflection of Christine's frustrations. I could see that matters I had taken for granted—education, freedom, travel, independence—were hard-won prizes, even for these privileged, wealthy creatures. And yet, when allowed in the workplace, they had to be tough, just like I did, competing not only against men, but against legislated male supremacy—men who believed women belonged in the home and at the hearth, not in the hospital or headquarters, not in offices or operating rooms. Facing that everyday was a feat. As I spent more time in Saudi Arabia, I would see how much strength would be asked of a woman at work. I would learn from them and observe them in action. Saudi women indeed were a force to be reckoned with.
It was after one a.m. I had work in the morning, and we faced a long drive back to the compound, far from the pulse of downtown Olleyah. Christine signaled that it was time to take our leave, and we began our thanks and farewells. Already a good neighbor to me, Ghadah volunteered to run us back home. As the steely gates closed on an exceptional evening, we clambered into Ghadah's green minivan, which was waiting for us, engine running, outside the house.
A sinewy Bengali sat hunched over the wheel. The streetscape shimmered by in the velvet night. The city was still busy even though it was late. Traffic packed the highway and the side streets were congested. Everyone had been out tonight, on the eve of Ramadan. We all wore our veils properly, covering our hair, even though the windows were heavily tinted. Ghadah's veil was the most beautiful, with deep borders of purple and silver embroidered flowers; she drew the veil into a perfect frame around her face, showing off her chiseled jaw. There could be no hiding this kind of beauty. Ghadah's beauty was radiant, unquashable. No abbayah could vanquish this resilient, gleaming woman.
As I sat enfolded in my own clumsy veil, I smiled: I really had enjoyed myself. It was extraordinary to gain entry to the matrix that is Saudi. Without the abbayah, in the privacy of a home, these women laughed and danced and joked and smoked like anywhere else. In unveiling ourselves, we had revealed our womanhood in common. Saudi women were no longer alien. During the day, or in public, these women not only veiled their beauty and their clothes in those black abbayahs, they veiled their spirits, their souls, their joie de vivre.
With a jolt, I noticed this was the first time I had heard out-loud laughter in the Kingdom. Within weeks of my arrival, the public Saudi Arabia had already become pervasively oppressive; like a vapor, nothing escaped its suffocating touch. Invisible tentacles of control had smothered me into submission. But underneath this miasma-mask, in the far marble pavilions of Saudi homes, in the recesses of the private Saudi, it was already alluring, intoxicating, and profoundly conflicted. I wanted to know more.
My joyful reverie was aborted minutes later. Caught in a snag of unruly traffic, we came to a juddering halt on the highway. An impasse of SUVs (“James's”) and loitering Land Cruisers barred our way. Music blaring, pulsating windows reverberating to the subwoofer bass beats within them, surrounded the diminutive minivan. Our entrapment was sudden. The bass beats were more Cross-Bronx Parkway than Khuraij Road; once more a crass cultural shard of America in the heart of Arabia.