This session aims to characterize the Saudi novel as literature at a crossroad: conventional and non-conventional. While many literatures worldwide have the luxury of being described as either within a traditional narrative or beyond it, the Saudi novel has always found itself at a crossroad between the two. This peculiar position is a result of the relatively late formation of the Saudi state and its rapid and persistent development into a modern one that constantly negotiates with centuries of staunchly guarded traditions in the area. This session will showcase this characteristic by examining the presence of subtle social criticism in four contemporary Saudi novels. The papers will: 1. explore how each novel defines and complicates the idea of a “Saudi culture,” 2. examine how each novel presents itself at a crossroad to its readership, and 3. trace how each novel resolves its climax in a direction that almost always reveals dissatisfaction with the social status quo and calls for social change. The four novels are unique because they emphatically display juxtapositions in Saudi culture and society and they relentlessly tackle the nuances of cultural, religious, social, and utopian binaries in Saudi Arabia. These novels also portray the diversity of authorship and readership that are generally viewed as a single entity; the novels are written by two males and two females, two novice and two well-established writers, and two older and two younger writers. Furthermore, two of the novels were written in exile and two were written inside Saudi Arabia.

The session begins with Amani Altamimi’s “Re-membering Mecca: Retracing Raja Alem’s Journey in the Doves' Necklace” that juxtaposes Hijjazi society with that of Najd. In the novel, Alem journeys back to her childhood Mecca of saints, sinners, misfits, artists and writers interacting with one another under the gaze of a policeman representing imposing Najdi puritanism on the Hijjazi region. What is remarkable about the Dove’s Necklace is the juxtaposition between the author’s childhood Mecca and the present Mecca that the author sees only peopled by shadows, memories, and contradictions. In her paper, Altamimi examines the concept of return by analyzing various photographs of Meccan sites mythologized in Alem’s novel and by interviewing the novelist about them. Altamimi’s analysis highlights the differences between the imagined locale and its current state to explore the depth of nostalgia and loss for a Saudi female writer in a self-imposed exile protesting Mecca’s current cosmopolitan condition.

The session then turns to another female voice in a Saudi novel at a crossroad. In her paper “The Feminist Voice in Zainab Al Khudairi’s Novel Hayya,” Nadia Khawandanah explains that Al Khudairi’s debut novel - a nostalgic memoir of old Najd - delineates Saudi feminism by juxtaposing contrasting generational and familial relationships and concepts of friendship, love, and marriage in the region. Furthermore, the novel offers contrasting female voices calling for change. Though contemporary readers would associate feminism with assertive and vocal voices in the novel, Hayya asserts that the softened and subtle voice of the protagonist proves more effective. In addition, Hayya traverses agency in male representation by portraying male characters’ behavior and actions via female characters’ meta commentary and analyses. The portrayal of these oppositional relationships and the experimentation with female agency brand Hayya a novel at a crossroad representing social ambiguities and contradictions that beg for social action.

The session’s exploration into the crossroads of the Saudi novel extends into the contrasting definitions of “a coherent” versus “a flawed” Saudi novel. In his paper “The Isolating City: Riyadh from Within,” Ibrahim Azizi argues that the analyses of Yousef Al-Mohaimeed’s novels have erroneously focused on the novels’ supposed misrepresentation of Saudi society or their lack of coherent plots. These analyses are the result of the presumption that meaning is always created by the author or the text. This presumption undermines the readers’ role in defining and negotiating meaning and literary value in texts. This paper utilizes Stanley Fish’s theory of “interpretative communities” to enhance our appreciation of Al-Mohaimeed’s novels by liberating them from canonically and structurally conventional expectations and by shifting our focus to the dynamics of reception. Azizi examines Munira’s Bottle as an example of a novel wrongfully described as either “misrepresenting society” (by Saudi critics/readers) or “flawed” (by Western critics/readers) because its plot neither submits to Saudi social norms nor follows any acceptable plot structure. Azizi argues that this negative analysis would change if critics focus on the interaction between the literary and cultural presumptions of the novel’s readers and the text itself. Understanding this interaction exposes a layer of satire that is possibly questioning and criticizing unjustified social norms. In other words, Munira’s Bottle is an example of a Saudi novel carefully navigating its way through a crossroad and subtly calling for social change.

The session concludes with Musab Bajaber’s examination of the emergence of Science Fiction in Saudi Arabia. In his paper, “Progression and Outlook of Saudi Science Fiction in Hawjan,” Bajaber argues that even though the national narrative of Saudi Arabia projects a futuristic utopia, Saudi science fiction is wholeheartedly embracing pre-Islam and pre-Saudi myth and folklore that resist the conventional definitions of the genre. This relapse into myth and folklore is not necessarily a display of resistance to the dominant futuristic national narrative; it is rather an attempt to redefine Saudi folklore to better align with that narrative since the existing puritan ideologue seems to be stagnant, unpromising, and outdated. Thus, the study of the function of science fiction in Saudi Arabia presents a peculiar case that illustrates how the Saudi novel is positioned at a crossroad and how backtracking a national narrative can surprisingly function as a tool for social progress.

In conclusion, these papers expand upon and add nuance to contemporary readings of the Saudi novel. In particular, they examine the innovative ways in which Saudi writers deploy the novel to engage with religious and social controversies and navigate through a unique national setting.

Each paper will take 15 minutes, leaving 15 minutes of Q&A at the end.