Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh, Book Review Example

The newly-termed genre of “chick lit” presents a form of female artistic discourse that, although closely related to forms of romance literature, differs from the latter in its emphasis on a consumerist post-modern world as the setting for the unfolding of various archetypical female relationships: relations of love, familial relations, and relations of friendship. Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh seems to represent a prototypical version of this type of literature, fulfilling various genre conventions: (post)modern technology is the means of communication (the text unfolds in the form of emails), many references to consumer goods, such as lipstick are made, and various female relationships drive the narrative. Nevertheless, with her close attentiveness to cultural context in this work, namely, to both the restrictive Islamic society of Saudi Arabia and its patriachical foundations alongside the post-modern, but also restrictive, world of Western culture, Alsanea can be said to utilize chick lit conventions to develop a work of social criticism: she does not want to only portray how females live in the early twenty-first century, but also how various social discourses, both Eastern and Western, create a tension that informs the existence of her characters.

Hence, a constant symbol of the work is that of lipstick. This expresses both sides of the tension that drive the work. Clearly, in the fundamentalist society of Saudi Arabia, lipstick and other female cosmetics are viewed as violations of fundamental religious principles of humility in dress and appearance: accordingly, the reference to lipstick becomes a symbolic form of protest to precisely these restrictions on subjective decisions concerning the appearance of one’s own body. In contrast, however, the constant references to lipstick symbolize the repetitive nature of Western consumerist marketing and advertising, with constant instances of “product placements”: from this perspective, lipstick is not a form of emancipation, but rather a form of its own slavery to a consumer culture. Here, Alsanea brilliantly captures both sides of the Western-Eastern cultural divide, ultimately choosing to side with neither.

In light of these two imperialist and domineering discourses, Um Nuwayyir’s home becomes a symbolic meeting place for the female protagonists. Arguably, this is because Um Nuwayyir is metaphorically dead to both the Eastern and Western forms of life: as a widow, she is no longer attractive for marriage; as an old-woman she does not fall within a desired demographic. Accordingly, Um Nuwayyir’s home, as radically outside of the two dominant ideologies and discourses that structure the girls’ lives, is a place where they can negotiate their subjectivity in a manner that is autonomous to the worlds that attempt to determine their identities.

The form of the novel in its exchanged e-mails, however, seems to emphasize only one side of the Eastern-Western dichotomy: showing the modern transformative effects of technology. This would suggest that, in the end, the Western ideology is more dominant than the Eastern in determining the existence of the subjects. It is this form of life which, as structuring the way in which the girls’ communicate, is the true hegemonic force in the girls’ life. In this sense, we can understand that for the strict Islamic world of Saudi Arabia, the West is not a symbol of freedom, but contains an oppression of its own: the key is to balance the two cultures, as the author makes explicit in her introduction to the text: “Little by little some of these women are beginning to carve out their own way – not the Western way, but one that keeps what is good about the values of their religion and culture, while allowing for reform.” (Alsanea, viii) Post-modern methods of communication, such as the Internet, can also be used to liberate: the decisive point is to learn how to use these tools not to conform to Western culture, but rather, as Alsanea notes, to reform a rich cultural heritage.

Alsanea thus accomplishes a difficult task: she manages to take the apparently shallow genre of chick lit and turn it into a form of art which can examine the various discourses that consciously and unconsciously determine our subjectivities. In this way, it is not simply a pulp text, but earns a place beside texts like Frankenstein and Passing. Alsanea presents, like Shelley and Larsen before her, critical feminine expressions of a surrounding world and its ideological tensions.

Works Cited

Alsanea, Rajaa. Girls of Riyadh. London, UK: Penguin, 2007.