The reason is that the royal family, traditionally under intense pressure from the kingdom's conservative Sunni clergy, is most concerned about appearing to give its imprimatur to potentially controversial fiction by allowing its publication. But it is not necessarily averse to some of its more liberal content, academics say, as long as the books arrive from abroad. At the same time, customs agents mostly turn a blind eye to even those books banned from sale in the kingdom when they are brought in by the handful in suitcases, as many are.
Through the compromise, the Saud royal family is making a concession to a smaller but also influential segment of society: A highly educated, Westernized elite now demanding more freedoms. The contradiction is most apparent in the case of Qusaybi, a longtime Saudi ambassador to Great Britain who now serves as the minister of labor. His novels, including the celebrated "An Apartment Called Freedom," which relates an Arab student's coming-of-age in the West, are banned in the kingdom.
When Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1988, it helped give hundreds of other Arab writers international exposure.
(T. Cambra Pierce -- AP)
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"The sensitivity of society has now been changed," said Abdulaziz Alsebail, a professor of modern literature at King Saud University who mentors many of the young writers. "A book that would not have been published 10 years ago is now being sold here without any problem."
Moving the Mountain
There was a tribe that lived on a mountain of ice, a place its leaders called the warmest in the world. Each evening tribal elders warned the people that those who left the mountain froze to death on the plains below. Yet each night some slipped away. Times changed. The ice began to melt, and soon a flood engulfed those afraid to leave. Years later a group of explorers discovered the remains of the civilization. Among the archaeologists were some of those who had managed to escape the mountain long ago.
"This is what's happening right now in this country," said Abdullah Saad Wesali, 36, a writer in the eastern city of Dammam, who wrote the short story summarized above."We are constantly told we are better than others, that we are special, and not only by our government," he says, drawing the comparison to the the tribe on the ice. "This will not last forever."
Wesali's father was an illiterate mechanic who learned how to fix American cars at the state oil company headquarters near Dammam. He died when Wesali was a boy, leaving him to choose which of the many strict rules governing Saudi society he would follow. In picking a wife, for example, he ignored conventions that require young Saudis to marry within tribes in conservative regions such as his. Instead, he chose his wife for the simple reason that he fell in love with her.
"I've never regretted a moment," said Wesali, a slight man with a thin mustache, careful and formal in his speech.
Wesali grew up reading Tolstoy, Turgenev and Hugo from his uncle's library. Although he began writing in high school, he works as an administrator in a public hospital, a typical job for authors in a society where writing rarely pays a living wage.
He frequently travels across a causeway that joins the Saudi mainland to the kingdom of Bahrain, where he sees Western movies and buys Qusaybi's novels, the closest place he can do so.
His 2003 collection of short stories titled "Sparks in the Time of Mud" survived Saudi censors and was published here. A second collection, called "Conception," is pending publication, but one story he is most proud of was rejected by state censors, most likely because it alludes to the travails of an authoritarian system. The story focuses on a tribe that makes a statue out of dates, which it plans to eat in times of need. But the more they worship the statue, the more alms the statue demands. One day, as the tribe begins to starve, the statue begins eating them.
Wesali continues to read the story at gatherings of the Dammam Literary Club, a state-funded association where writers read and review each other's work. In evening workshops, older writers tutor younger ones such as Wesali on ways to convey their often angry messages and still receive the approval of Saudi censors or permission for sale in the kingdom if published abroad.
"We are always told not to be direct," Wesali says, but at the same time not to be superficial. "Don't think people are stupid. They will understand."
Literary culture here revolves around the clubs in each city, originally created as a way for the state to monitor and potentially guide the writing being produced. But the clubs have emerged as more freewheeling forums than that, and the government pays little attention to most of the seminars and workshops that take place in them. The clubs are also beginning to admit women, who, Altoma said, are among the "more assertive" writers now emerging in the kingdom.
Female Voices
The woman is waiting for her husband. She is alone, restless with worry, and "the cold marble floor sends chills through her" as she distracts herself with a thousand tasks. It is Wednesday night, the start of the Saudi weekend. She knows how the evening will end: Her husband drunk in a country where it is a flogging offense. She confronts him as he stumbles through the door. A slap cracks across her face. He is gone.
