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    A Land Without Jasmine
    A Land Without Jasmine
    A Land Without Jasmine
    Ebook99 pages1 hour

    A Land Without Jasmine

    By Wajdi Al-Ahdal and William Hutchins

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the 2013 Said Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation.

    A Land without Jasmine is a sexy, satirical detective story about the sudden disappearance of a young female student from Yemen's Sanaa University. Each chapter is narrated by a different character, beginning with Jasmine herself. The mystery surrounding her disappearance comes into clearer focus with each self-serving and idiosyncratic account provided by an acquaintance, family member, or detective. The hallucinatory ending, although appropriately foreshadowed, may come as a Sufi surprise for the reader. Less mystically inclined readers may want to reread this tale to construct an alternative ending. This short novel has echoes of both the Sherlock Holmes stories and The Catcher in the Rye as, in addition to the mystery and a murder, the novel contains candid discussions of coming of age in a land of sexual repression. Wajdi al-Ahdal is a satirical author with a fresh and provocative voice and an excellent eye for the telling details of his world.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGarnet Publishing
    Release dateJul 1, 2022
    ISBN9781859643129
    A Land Without Jasmine

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      Book preview

      A Land Without Jasmine - Wajdi Al-Ahdal

      1

      THE QUEEN

      When I enter the bathroom first thing in the morning I feel uncertain and anxious. I start to examine myself in the mirror while my fingers probe my feet, belly, chest and head. Then I shudder involuntarily. Once I’m sure that I haven’t lost any of my body I praise God and sigh with relief. Returning to my senses I realize I’ve merely had a beautiful, harmless, enjoyable dream, one of those delightful dreams when a girl sees herself as a bride on her wedding night.

      After drying my face with my rose-coloured towel, I head towards the curtains, which I draw back. I enjoy looking out of the window, gazing at the joyous colours of the sky shortly before sunrise.

      My name is Jasmine Nashir al-Ni‘am. I’m a first year student in the Faculty of Science and my hobbies are reading, and writing in my diary.

      My room, which is on the second floor, overlooks a quiet back street. Opposite, down below, is Hajj Sultan’s grocery store. This man, even though he’s made the pilgrimage to Mecca, when he sees me peek out of the window, stands there smiling idiotically and makes an obscene gesture. He puts his large store key in his ear, moving it in and out while his eyes flash fiendishly. Then I can’t resist running to the bathroom to fetch a slipper to brandish at him.

      He’s fifty, as old as my father, and short and stout with a grey beard and a prayer callus on his forehead. Instead of growing angry and indignant he winks at me and I see him nod his head cheerfully as if confident he’ll get me some day!

      I slip into a black coat and veil my face before heading out. Behind his door’s peep-hole, Ali, the adolescent son of our neighbours, whose apartment faces ours, has been lying in wait for me. The moment he sees me descend the stairs he pursues me like my shadow, clutching his books, which are wrapped in a prayer rug, under his arm.

      His secondary school is in the same direction as my faculty but further. It takes him twenty minutes walking at a fast clip to reach it before the bell rings and the gate closes. Ali is sixteen, four years my junior. He is tall and good-looking, and his skin is fair, smooth and sleek. His body ripples with flesh and fat, and his protruding butt gives him a feminine allure that troubles me and makes him a target for lewd sexual advances from men.

      During the ten minutes that he shadows me he doesn’t say a word and doesn’t even hum a tune. All I hear is the rapid shuffle of his feet behind me. But I sense that his ardent glances are devouring my buttocks. I feel as if fiery rays are striking them, almost melting them.

      The way this taciturn boy looks at me upsets me. Occasionally he focuses on me so intently I grow hot and tremble. Then I panic and perspire. I feel so upset my steps become clumsy and one leg brushes against the other.

      People’s curious stares dog celebrities, who avoid appearing in public places for this reason. In Yemen, all young women are considered celebrities! When a girl leaves her home and ventures onto the street she’ll notice that everyone is staring at her. Perhaps some girls feel good when men look lustfully at them but this continuous gaze from dozens of passers-by upsets me, gets on my nerves and makes me feel unbearably tense.

      I consider this mass gaze, which comes from all directions, to be a noxious type of male violence. It’s true their stare isn’t tangible and that it’s not like being touched by a hand but it exerts psychological pressure, tightens my chest and makes it hard to breathe. This gaze by repressed males assaults my skin, makes my blood boil and scrambles my thinking.

      As an experiment, I once stared straight into a cat’s eyes. He fled in alarm, his tail between his legs! Whenever I want to vent my rage at the male gaze I stare into the eyes of cats. This disconcerts them and they invariably flee. All cats are uneasy when someone gazes into their eyes; they assume he intends to harm them.

      My grandfather told me that when he was young he left his mountain village one night and passed through a dense forest where he encountered a leopard blocking the narrow rocky trail. He shone his torch at the animal and fixed his gaze on its eyes, which glowed like embers. He stood there resolutely looking at it. Do you know what happened next? My grandfather said the leopard was visibly troubled; felt perplexed and sensed danger. It turned tail and disappeared back to its lair in the forest.

      My late grandfather repeatedly told me about this incident because he wanted me to know how to react when confronting a leopard. But his story hasn’t ever helped me since leopards are extinct in Yemen. Besides, I live in a city where it’s inconceivable that leopards would appear on the street. What I gained from my grandfather’s story was that even leopards, those prime predators, lose courage and turn tail when a person stares resolutely into their eyes. If a leopard can’t think straight when only one person stares at him, what about my state of mind when dozens of men are staring at me simultaneously?

      On the street most men look at me lecherously and all of them want to screw me. If they weren’t also watching each other I’d be raped on the pavement at least twenty times a day. Is it because I’m unmarried and have never had any sexual adventures that I seem so extraordinarily committed to virtue? Occasionally I reflect that if I were to experiment by closeting myself with a member of the rougher sex I might then feel differently about the male gaze.

      I’ve nothing against sex. In fact, I await with bated breath my bridegroom’s arrival. But this overly intense, ocular male provocation enrages me, almost driving me crazy at times. Then I must exert a superhuman effort to keep myself from screaming and cursing.

      Who knows? Perhaps I’ll change once I’ve married and be like my faculty classmate Nasama, who is delighted when men ogle her!

      Men in our country are secular in their own special way, making a clear distinction between mosque and daily life! In the mosque our men pray devoutly and piously, embodying such praiseworthy characteristics that they seem to be Merciful God’s angels. But the moment they’re back on the street they forget God, morph into evil demons, practise duplicity, deceit and perfidy, and chase after forbidden pleasures. I’ve seen a white-haired man in his seventies emerge from the mosque, his shoes still in his hand, and ogle me while licking his chops as if he wanted to nip me with his decaying teeth.

      I would strongly advise any girl in my country against carrying a white handbag because this colour attracts men’s attention in a weird way. Some men succumb to a special type of hysteria known as ‘White Handbag Hysteria’ in which the victim loses control of his senses and of himself. I witnessed an instance of this syndrome myself the only time I carried a white bag. That was the most miserable day of my life!

      It happened as I walked past a construction site where labourers were carrying bags of cement on their backs into a new building. A worker with rippling muscles caught sight of me, heaved the bag of cement off his back and began to yell right in my face: ‘Have mercy on me, Lord of the White Bag … have mercy!’ I froze in alarm and nearly wet my knickers I was

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