The relationship between the sexes has dominated Badrya Bisher's writing since high school. The theme of her story "Wednesday Night" is summarized above. She has always found material close at hand. Her mother, Hyaa, was wed to her father at the age of 13 in the southern village of Aflaj, where marriages are arranged and tribal custom rules. Hyaa twice tried to escape before she moved to Riyadh with her husband, who found work as a government driver.
"I never heard a word my whole life from my mother that she loved him or that she was satisfied," said Bisher, whose story is included in an English-language anthology of Saudi female writers called "Voices of Change," generally available outside of Saudi Arabia.
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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Influenced by Virginia Woolf, the Syrian-born Ghadah Samman and Hanan Sheikh of Lebanon, Bisher, 37, has published one slightly censored collection of short stories here and two others abroad. One critic called her Saudi Arabia's George Sand, after the French woman writer who often dressed in men's clothes. She does not veil her large dark eyes and subversive smile but does wear the cloaking black abaya. Her mother won't read her daughter's work.
"I always ask why women of my mother's generation didn't ask why there were these rules," Bisher said. "We're always fighting about this. They think if you think too much the devil is trying to confuse you."
Behind the Fiction
There was a woman who lived in Riyadh, married to a man who wanted a son. The first child she delivered was a daughter. So was the second, the third and the fourth. By then, the man had taken a second wife, then a third, and a fourth. The woman finally gave birth to a boy, whom she named Yousef. The man, however, had already left.
The son is Mohaimeed and the story is a true chapter of his life. His father lives with another woman now in his native village of Qassim, north of Riyadh. His mother lives with him.
Featured last summer in Banipal, the London-based magazine of modern Arab literature, Mohaimeed writes in a lush style that evokes a writer he cites as an influence, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. His fiction is populated with foundlings and eunuchs, slaves and thieves -- the outcasts of Arab society. The endings are rarely happy.
"Maybe outsiders can find magic in these novels because our society is strange to you," Mohaimeed said. "But Saudis do not find them that way. They know this is the truth."
