But I discovered that Barbie was in Egypt. That summer of the Gulf War, my mother bought me my beautiful, blond doll. She was dressed as a skater, wearing tiny white skates and a gauzy, pale, pink-and-blue skating dress, the outlines of her legs showing through her translucent skirt. I could dress her. I could style her hair. She was the loveliest creation I had ever seen. I smuggled Barbie and my Five Adventurers storybooks into the kingdom, wrapped up and buried deep inside my suitcase.
When I returned home, I did not return to school. War over Kuwait was imminent; for six months, until the Iraqi troops were forced out, our school was closed. My grandmother—“Sitti Alwa” we called her—was ill, and Aunt Zein and my uncle Sa’ad’s wife, Aziza, took turns caring for her. I asked my parents if I could stay with my grandmother and help Aunt Zein, and they agreed.
Tarfa’a is an Arabic name for the tamarisk tree that grows in desert regions, but to me, it means a small, quiet village nestled between the peaks of the lofty Sarawat Mountains in an area called Wadi Fatima. The Tarfa’a of my memories is a place largely forgotten by time. Small redbrick houses with wooden ceilings lie scattered along its sandy roads. Everyone in the village knows everyone else, because everyone is from the same family. Kinship lines entwine and wrap around like a vast network of desert tree roots. At that time, there was no electricity, no water, no sewage system, no telephone, and no grocery store at which to buy your supplies. The sole source of electricity in the village was a noisy diesel motor; it grumbled to life after dark and was shut down before dawn. Although the village was only about twenty miles from Mecca, it was difficult for me to understand the accent of the people who lived there, even my grandmother, but I tried to imitate the dialect and to fit in.
My grandmother had a house at the entrance to Tarfa’a. A green iron door in a brick wall led to a wide courtyard covered with pebbles. On the right of the door was a water tank, which was filled once a month by a delivery truck. On the left was a small, barren sidr tree (a species mentioned in the Koran) and an assortment of cactus plants. A small room along the eastern wall of the house was used as a bathroom. The toilet was a large hole in the ground, covered over by a narrow opening. Each occupant had to pull a concrete slab over the top after using “the facilities.”
The main house at the far end of the courtyard consisted of three rooms: my grandmother’s room, which was equipped with a desert air conditioner running on water; the kitchen; and an extra room, used for storage, where she kept several mattresses and an assortment of heavy, handmade wool rugs known in Arabic as hanābil. Behind these rooms were a goat pen and a chicken coop. My aunt would milk the goat in the morning and boil the milk to make delicious goat’s milk tea. We, the children, collected eggs every morning to make omelets, and then gathered around my grandmother to listen to the news on the radio.
Life in the village was completely different from the world I knew in Mecca. All the village girls knew how to milk the goats, bake slightly sour, brown khabeez bread, and prepare Arabic coffee and tea. No one wore abayas; instead both women and girls wore the kurta, a long and brightly colored dress with long sleeves and a fitted waist. On their heads they wore a sharshaf, a type of scarf, either pink or white, tied to reveal their faces and the initial strands of their parted hair. I liked to copy the village girls by wearing a sharshaf. So great was my desire to fit in that I even came close to piercing my nose; I wanted to wear a stud in my nostril like my aunt and the rest of the village women and girls.
My cousin Amal joined us, and Aunt Zein’s daughter, Hanan, came from time to time as well. Every day after Asr prayer in the afternoon, the women of the village met at my grandmother’s house. After brushing out the rugs in the courtyard, they set down mattresses along the walls and an assortment of mirāki—big, hard pillows—to lean on while they sat. While they set up, my aunt busied herself preparing refreshments: coffee with ginger, tea flavored with herbs, and a dish of salted biscuits and dates.
We as girls were not allowed to sit with the women; instead, we would go off with the children who had accompanied their mothers to play. On these days, we always played in the same place, an area behind my grandmother’s house called Shi’ab, a local term meaning a place between the mountains. It lay on the path of a dry creekbed that would swell with water gushing down from the mountains during the rainy season, which transformed the landscape from a muted brown to a vibrant green. We raced through the flat beds, climbed parts of the mountains, and picked the flowers off the desert plant harmal. We gathered up locusts and beetles, competed to see who could throw pebbles the farthest distance, and collected bunches of masāweek twigs from the arāk tree, which we used for brushing our teeth.
Other times we would go off to play in the farmers’ open fields. The villagers of Tarfa’a cultivated large farms known as al-bilād, which were irrigated naturally by running water from nearby springs. An abundance of delicious things were grown there: mallow, alfalfa, and banana trees thrived alongside mangoes, sycamore, limes, and abāna fruit, which is similar to kiwi. We played hide and seek in the alfalfa fields, climbed the high sycamore trees, and drank from the springs.
It was beautiful to live in a place without walls or ceilings or restrictions, and particularly without my mother’s screaming and my father’s cane. Many nights, I fell asleep wishing that I could live in Tarfa’a forever. Mecca for me meant narrow streets crowded with cars; it meant broken and dirty sidewalks; it meant the vulgar slang of the slums and the conflict, outside on the pavement and inside our apartment. My aunt was quiet and patient, always smiling. I wished she were my mother.
The Wadi Fatima of my memory will always be a magical green landscape of springs and farms, but there are no such scenes in Tarfa’a today. The springs of Wadi Fatima dried up in the late 1990s after a dam diverted their water to supply the increasingly populous city of Jeddah. The plants withered and the trees dried up. The land became desolate and sad.
On February 28, 1991, the Gulf War ended. Saudi Arabia and much of the world celebrated, but I did not. With sadness in my heart, I went back to Mecca, back to our dark apartment and my angry family.