The youngest of Uncle Sa’ad’s daughters, Amal, was the same age as me. Though she always wore a new dress on the second day of Eid, she never said anything about my “repeated” dress and remained my friend throughout my childhood. Usually on the holiday, the younger children would go up to play on the roof, where the girls would show off their new dresses: Amal’s was always a touch more lavish than everyone else’s. Together, the girls and boys would also play a tag game known in Arabic as Shar’at, where one child chases the others, and those who are tagged before reaching the “safe wall” are forced out to wait until the next round. Other times, Amal and I would sit quietly and draw and paint and read comic books.
In the final part of the celebration at my uncle’s house, eidiyyāt, money given as gifts to celebrate Eid, would be handed out. At Aunt Zein’s house, the eidiyyāt was given out first, tucked into small bags that my aunt would press into my palm and my brother’s when we walked through the door. (Eidiyyāt varies in amount, from anywhere from five riyals to more than one hundred. Favored children receive more eidiyyāt from their relatives. Aunt Zein was always very generous with me.)
I remember early on at my uncle’s, I got my small purse and hung it over my shoulder in preparation for the gift giving. Then my uncle’s older daughters called the children to gather around in a circle, where one by one my cousins would push the eidiyyāt into their outstretched palms. They called every name, except for mine and my brother’s and sister’s. At first, I assumed that they simply forgot us. But each year it was the same, until I stopped taking my purse at all. Then there came the year when I thought I understood the reason. My sister had inherited the same milky, fair complexion as my mother, a feature not usually found within my father’s family; among his tribe tanned skin prevails. As we entered my uncle’s house that year, I had heard other women asking in curious voices, “Who are these girls?”
If someone asks about a child—boy or girl—it is customary in Saudi culture to refer to them in relation to their father. You only mention their mother’s family if you want to belittle them. To the question, “Who are these girls?” I was expecting my cousins to answer, “The daughters of Uncle Massoud.” But instead my female cousins replied, “The daughters of the Egyptian.” They of course knew my mother’s name and that she was Libyan, not Egyptian. But they had learned to say that my sister and I were “the daughters of the Egyptian.”
Saudi families, almost universally, reflect a contradictory combination of extreme intimacy and extreme segregation and impenetrable privacy. We sleep in common rooms and travel in and out of each other’s apartments, but we keep our windows covered, and indeed often have no windows that face the outside world. In many houses, men and women live on different sides, and enter and exit via different doors. We are a culture of peeking, where women peek from behind windows or on the other side of doors to see who might have come to visit. We do have apartments with balconies, but those apartments were designed by Egyptian civil engineers and others from cultures that ring the Mediterranean Sea. In those countries, people gather on balconies, sip their dark, aromatic coffee, and call down to passersby on the streets, whether friends or the vegetable seller. They do not live in the dusty, blazing, dry, desert heat of the Saudi kingdom. In Mecca, we did not sit on our balconies. Women might use them to spy on the surrounding streets, watching cars or other vehicles, but we did not socialize on our balconies. We called down to no one, drank nothing. Our own balcony stored an extra water tank. I would sometimes flatten myself against it to watch kids playing below, but even as a child, I considered balconies a useless waste of space.
More often than not, we were not taught the rules of our lives, we simply absorbed them. Just as our first day of Eid was always spent at Aunt Zein’s house, just as my father always brought the same sweet fried dough balls (halwa al-zalabya) and the same sesame sweets called halwa tahiniyya from a shop named Abu Nar, the most famous halawa store in the whole of Mecca, and just as my aunt always prepared sweet vermicelli with sugar and cardamom, and set out plates of white cheese, olives, and Indian-style mango pickle and the same Meccan dishes of debyāza, fūl mabakher, and khobz al-shreek bread, we always sat in the same arrangements.
Aunt Zein lived with her husband, Uncle Hamed, and six of their children on the first floor of a two-story house. Their eldest child was a professor of Islamic studies at a university and lived on the second floor with his own wife and family. They had two sons, Hammam and Hossam, who were close in age to my brother and me, as well as to Zein’s youngest daughter, Hanan, and to Amal, uncle Sa’ad’s youngest daughter. When we were small, we would all crowd in together around one sofra, a plastic sheet that we spread on the floor, picnic-style, to eat our way through the Iftar spread. My older female cousins, the other daughters of my uncle Sa’ad, never joined us. They didn’t want to share our sofra with us. They sat in a separate area and ate at a separate sofra to avoid mixing with Aunt Zein’s older sons, their male cousins, teenagers and men whom they could presumably marry. As a small girl I was annoyed with this and wondered why all the cousins didn’t just sit together. I made a promise to myself that I would never sit separately from my favorite cousins, nor would we stop playing soccer and riding bikes together when I came to visit.
But when I was twelve, Hammam and Hossam were banned from my life with no warning and no explanation. We could not say so much as hello to each other; I never got to say goodbye. Today, if I passed them on the street, I would not even recognize the men they have become.
Unwritten Saudi rules determined far more than my holiday celebrations, they cast a shadow over nearly my entire childhood.
In our apartment in Al-Utaibiyyah, we had a neighbor with a twelve-year-old son. He would often come to visit us along with his mother and his sisters. But once he came alone, and while the mothers were elsewhere, he asked me to take off my underwear. I was about six years old, and I feared him from that moment on. I knew better than to mention it to Mama, but after that day, I stayed with her whenever he visited us, refusing to leave her side until he was gone. Then this boy had made the mistake of asking my sister to remove her underwear. Unlike me, Muna would not keep quiet. She told Mama right away.
Mama questioned my sister and me about the details of what had happened, but I was too shocked to speak and afraid that she would hit me because of what this boy had asked me to do. I denied that he had asked me to remove my underwear.