Girls of Riyadh Narrating the “Velvet Class” in Saudi Arabia

الملخص

Banat al-Riyadh, translated as Girls of Riyadh, is a Saudi controversial novel which was initially published in 2005 and appeared as an English version in 2007. The narrative gives a detailed and an inside view to the domestic and ‘private’ part of the Saudi society. It gives an access to that ‘velvet class’ as the narrator describes the women that occupy the narrative space of Girls of Riyadh. The novel addresses in a revolutionary manner issues pertaining to women’s rights, dreams, hopes and aspirations The novel addresses in a revolutionary manner issues pertaining to women’s rights, dreams, hopes, and aspirations amid shifting social and cultural norms in Saudi Arabia. Raja AlSanea, a female dentist, discusses the traumatic experience of her feminine counterparts at home and abroad appropriating a variety of conflicting discourses: the religious, the cultural, the socio-political, the tribal and the postmodernist. Not only does the novel describe and define the Saudi female identity and its rights; but also, it asserts that such identity is lawful as dictated by Islam and Sharia. Structurally speaking, the narrative is built on a series of emails, from the beginning and throughout, that are addressed to anonymous Yahoo groups by a writer using a pseudonym (“seerehwenfadha7et”. Building on the Bakhtinian theory of the double-voicedness, this paper attempts to unravel many dubious issues including gender, arranged marriage, love, divorce, education and the female identity in the Saudi society. In fact, the article aspires to go beyond Girls of Riyadh to shed some light on the significant social and cultural transformations shaping Saudi society.

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