David Gee spent six years in the Gulf and has never met an intelligent woman
September 15th, 2009David Gee is an English author and a wannabe satirist. He lived in the Gulf for six years trying to be funny and failing miserably in the process. In order to evidence his failure at humor he felt the urge to publish his poorly designed “novel” that recycles tedious stereotypes about the Gulf and specifically women in this region who apparently live like cave dwellers amongst sex-crazed Shaikhs. Oh, how funny. Of course, he dismisses all of this with the disclaimer: it’s comedy.
Except no one’s laughing.
In fact, reading the extract confirms that this “novel” is more boring than assembly instruction manuals for particle board furniture.
David claims in an equally boring interview with himself (warning: reading it may cause you to throttle yourself)-
I know that there are Arab women who are intellectual and ‘free-thinking’, but I was never lucky enough to meet one.
Six years in the Gulf and not a single “intellectual” woman. Such “harmless” humor, indeed. Raises a lot of great points and contains:
He claims that he will try to get this thing he calls a “novel” translated into Arabic, but that he will have to find a person with a “broad mind.” Unfortunately in the Arab world he believes this to be an impossible mission. He could, however, find a woman with a broad ass though.
David, congratulations on being you. Not many people could carry the burden of being Britain’s social and intellectual elite with such aplomb and grace, let alone find the time to be so utterly condescending and arrogant. That is a feat beyond compare and I, for one, applaud you. You are so funny, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
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The extract seems to have more in common with soft-core porn than literature. It also reads like a teen movie in which the goal of each guy is screw chicks and party. Not exactly profound, eye-opening, or original.
Another example of why print media is dying.
Is it actually easy to meet any women in the Gulf?
I am completely ignorant about this issue, because I have never been there.
Yet, according to stories told to me by people who visited the Middle East, it is actually hard to meet any women in the Gulf countries, since they prefer to stay at home (or maybe it is not their preference, but preference of their fathers and husbands). They also all noticed the difference when they crossed the border to Iran.
Feel free to correct my current “knowledge”.
Yes, believe it or not we’re not animals in cages. To us, that question is like someone asking an American “is it actually easy to meet any women in New York?”
The people who made this claim probably never left the hotel room and made this statement to make up for their lack of curiosity. Too bad they made no effort and proceeded to further stereotype women in this shallow way. Women in the Gulf are extremely outgoing with the sole exception of Saudi Arabia where women STILL manage to have a visible life. Whoever said we “prefer to stay at home” is utterly clueless and perhaps only had the opportunity to meet our grandmothers. Next time someone makes this kind of statement, please ask “did you actually leave the airport or the hotel?”
Walk in the streets. Go to the cinema. Go to any mall, restaurant, office, building (we have those too, by the way!) and you will find, shock and awe, LOTS OF WOMEN. Loooots. Many in skirts, even. Yes we even know what skirts are too!
That said, the majority of women in the Gulf are employed or are university students, so we are kind of forced to be everywhere BUT the house. You’ll find just as many active and busy women here as you’d witness in downtown Paris – they’d probably be found wearing the same things too, WOW! WOMEN! Where did we come from? There are so many of us and the hilarious David for 6 years never met an acceptable ONE.
Thank you, Esra’a, for the local accurate information. I appreciate it.
Esra’a, this mini-debate about presence or absence of women in public space reminded me of the following piece by Michael Totten.
It is about Libya and, somewhere in the middle of the piece, is says Less than one percent of the people I saw were women. All those who did go outside wore a hijab over their hair. So much for Qaddafi being a “feminist,” as he claims. Tripoli had as many women out and about as a dust-blown village in the boondocks of Afghanistan.
Of course, Libya is a world apart from the Gulf. Except for speaking Arabic and some common Islamic background, the two regions probably have nothing in common.
Do you read Totten’s work, Esra’a? Do you find him credible?
Marian says:
No dear, all the Arab countries have a lot in common, there is more than culture, religion, traditions, language, social structure etc… the Arab societies are very similar though not identical as the Western Orientalists try to imagine in their day dreaming writing of the Arabs stereotyping their own thoughts before coming to our world and not really serving Social Science much when studying our society with their Middle Ages mentality… and this leads us to the next point,
What is true for the Gulf 5 years ago might not be true today. The Arab world, specially the Gulf, is the most developing point in the world in all aspects specially the social inner movement regarding habits, traditions and way of living.
The problem is that the Westerns come to the Arab world with stereotype mentality (of the Middle Ages) that doesn’t want to see the Arabs other than what they studied in their universities or taught by their Intelligence officials who are roaming the Arab world… We welcome them and they spat on us when leaving back to their societies to reinforce the backward stereotyped image, and Mr. Gee is not an except here but a proof.
So, there is no intelligent Woman in our “backward” society for Mr. Gee !!! but I tell him that my little sister is far more intelligent than that Dull-minded British who was taught in the brothels of London. We don’t have whores to please the phallus-centric mentality of Mr. Gee, let him go to his his brothel of London !!!
Sami, the bedouin.
Marian says:
No dear, all the Arab countries have a lot in common, there is more than culture, religion, traditions, language, social structure etc… the Arab societies are very similar though not identical as the Western Orientalists try to imagine in their day dreaming writing of the Arabs stereotyping their own thoughts before coming to our world and not really serving Social Science much when studying our society with their Middle Ages mentality… and this leads us to the next point,
What is true for the Gulf 5 years ago might not be true today. The Arab world, specially the Gulf, is the most developing point in the world in all aspects specially the social inner movement regarding habits, traditions and way of living.
The problem is that the Westerns come to the Arab world with stereotype mentality (of the Middle Ages) that doesn’t want to see the Arabs other than what they studied in their universities or taught by their Intelligence officials who are roaming the Arab world… We welcome them and they spat on us when leaving back to their societies to reinforce the backward stereotyped image, and Mr. Gee is not an except here but a proof.
So, there is no intelligent Woman in our “backward” society for Mr. Gee !!! but I tell him that my little sister is far more intelligent than that Dull-minded British who was taught in the brothels of London. We don’t have whores to please the phallus-centric mentality of Mr. Gee, let him go to his brothel of London !!!
Sami, the bedouin.
Sami I disagree that we are all “very similar.” We are not.
Marian,
Never had time for it and never found myself interested enough to start reading it in the first place but you’re right, Libya is more 3 worlds apart from the Gulf region – and in fact some countries within the Gulf are socially a world apart from each other, like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Visiting Saudi Arabia only and claiming that Bahrain, UAE, Kuwait, etc are typically the “same as it” is a major misunderstanding that most people have. It’s like visiting the rural parts of some isolated southern city in the USA and saying “Boston is exactly like this, I’m sure.” Except that we are entirely different countries as opposed to different parts of a single country so the difference is much more significant, including the interpretation and practice of religion, as well as many of the political and social aspects of our societies.
I was in awe when I traveled to Morocco at some point to witness certain students there under the impression that women were barred from participating in society and all must wear Burqas in Bahrain. Where do people get this idea and why?
Considering that David also lived in Bahrain apparently for quite some time, I wonder what he thinks when he realizes the fact that we have a female ambassador who also happens to be Jewish. A woman in such a position and a religious minority? Shocking.
Michael Totten’s blog is exactly what people here in Israel read, but I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone actually interested in understanding Arab countries.
Elizabeth, I would be comfortable with some basic understanding of some Arab countries. No one can be expert on everything. My field is mathematics and programming…
That said, I got an impression that MJT at least understands Lebanon to some degree.
Marian, it’s not a matter of being an expert. You can have a basic understanding that is better than a profound one that is wrong. I don’t think anyone can really understand Lebanon, it’s such a complicated country with fickle politicians. But yes, his writing about Lebanon are rather decent for an outsider, I think. Definitely better than other stuff he writes.
Is the author (and failed comedian) allowed a word or two in reply?
Thanks, Esra’a, for your Rave Review of SHAIKH-DOWN. I’m sure my Amazon sales have rocketed these last two days.
I’m thrilled to hear that so many career doors are now open to women in the Gulf and that my President Nayla will soon be History rather than Science Fiction. I was in Bahrain (and Qatar) in the 1980s, and back in those dark days women were not encouraged to have (and certainly not to express) political ambitions or opinions. And it really was not easy for a Westerner to engage in meaningful dialogue with Arab women. The women (from all over the Middle East) who worked in the two call-centres I helped to manage were among the loveliest and liveliest I ever met, but they were not open to discussing politics or religion with one of their managers – maybe not surprisingly considering that one of their male colleagues was ‘disappeared’ by State Security.
Even in the ’80s there were women with prominent roles in Education and the Arts (but never Politics). I always thought this was ‘tokenism’, throwing women a few crumbs from the master’s table. The Suffragettes in Britain showed us that progress in female liberation will always be in small slow steps, but it sounds like you are optimistic.
In fact I did have a stimulating conversation with a liberal-minded Bahraini lady (just the one) at a function, and out of that brief encounter I built my fictional Nayla. Because the setting for my novel is an emirate where the local merchants and bigwigs are chasing after bellydancers and air-hostesses (sorry, Esra’a, but there were some who did that sort of thing in those dark days), I decided that my wannabe revolutionaries must beat them at their own game, so I made Nayla a bisexual ‘adventuress’ who ends up heading a ‘democratic’ regime.
Here in the West we change our governments via the ballot box (and often end up with a lot less than we thought we were voting for). Iran and Iraq provide examples of two other ways of achieving regime change. You and I can probably agree that the main achievement of invasion in one land and revolution in the other has been death and destruction. My aim in SHAIKH-DOWN was to show another way, taking advantage of certain highly-placed people’s weakness for extra-marital ‘nookie’. Turning Sex into a weapon achieves an almost bloodless change of regime on the island of Belaj.
And of course it was meant to be a ‘Carry-On’ kind of comedy. T.S.Eliot said that “humour is the antidote to everything.” It’s too bad that my attempt at a spicy satire didn’t push your buttons.
Despite your justification of this shallow and painfully insignificant content, I am glad that you are at least able to maintain your sarcasm:
No one’s buying this book. People are much more mature than you give them credit for and their sense of humor is a lot more sophisticated to swift through a sorry excuse for a “funny novel.” Everything from the name to the stereotypical stories does no more than create another wave in a sea of nerves to anyone with a brain. In other words, it’s not merely annoying, but it’s also offensive. We know how to laugh at ourselves. Most of the humor and jokes targeted at this region are hilarious and timely. This book isn’t within that sphere of “funny.”
When it concerns this region, satire is typically meaningful. It is supposed to provoke thought and relevant debates in an entertaining and clever way. Your novel doesn’t achieve this. It is irrelevant and feeds the stereotypical insults that we are doing our best fighting against.
I know you’re doing your best to be clever here, patting yourself on the back for something which you believe to be “groundbreaking,” but you were doing nothing more than reintroducing tired stereotypes, and trying hard unsuccessfully to actually make people laugh while doing so. Arab men (typically fat and in robes) are obsessed with “Western totty,” women aren’t intellectual, the entire society’s sex-crazed, anyone “free-minded” is unique and impossible to find, forcing you to make them up. Do you realize, also, that there is a special section in Hell reserved for people who use words like “nookie” and “totty”? Does your audience consist of 5 year olds?
It’s a failed attempt, and claiming that this is “satire” is actually an insult to the genre.
I see that the comment from Eve or Yvette that was here yesterday in support of my book has been removed. You don’t encourage comments from people who take an opposite view to you? Censorship is alive and well on the Mideast Youth blog?
No one by the name of Eva or Yvette left a comment on this thread at any point in time.
What’s wrong David? Can’t come up with a refutation so you resort to lying instead?
Mr. Gee, as a moderator of this site, I have tabs and I can assure you that no comment from this thread was removed. Censorship is against everything that we stand and fight for.
From the way he wrote it, I assume that he asked someone by the name of “Eve” OR “Yvette” (same person who goes by either name, the keyword being “OR”) to leave a comment desperately requesting support but that person failed to comment in a timely manner and David is under the impression that she did. Coming back, he argues with himself that his friend couldn’t possibly have betrayed him by not leaving a comment, and that the only reason it isn’t here is because it was “deleted.”
Maybe this Eve or Yvette is taking a long time to respond because there is nothing to defend here, David. Or maybe some Arab found her “Western totty” and she found herself getting a bit busy.
If we believed in censorship, your own comments wouldn’t be here. Moreover, what reason would we have to delete a comment in support of this book? Who would put themselves in a position to actually support your failed work?
Poor Eve “OR” Yvette. You should contact her again and see why she refrained from commenting thus far.
I have been following this post from the beginning and am sure no Eve or Yvette has commented or even left a note…. Eve could be one of your “intelligent” and “intellectual” friends that deceived you and told you that she commented on you “brilliant” post, but she knew she just wanted to please you. Whores do this, I assure you !!!
Anyway,
This farce of Mr Gee reminded me of “Satanic Verses” of Rushdi which I did an analytic paper of some 50 pages about it. Writers, specially those of prose, are deceptive, and they know how to play with the words to detach themselves from the text, as Dr. Said says in his book “The world, the Text and the Critic” … At the time the writer ( the deceptive one) tries to pretend being promoting some cause of “freedom” and “democracy” (like that American one in Iraq), he is deliberately intending to demoralize the others pretending to be enlightened and helping the others to get out of their old ages.
Rushi, was profoundly aware of his blasphemous book, as the same Mr Gee is fully aware of his intention of degradating the Arabs, at the time he pretends to be innocent and his aim is just to please by using sarcastic language !!!
Rushdi has put the mask of prose very will at the time he (as a Muslim) used his profound knowledge of Islam to shoot blasphemous images and scenes of the early Islam… However Gee, is just a naive student compared to Rushdi in style, imagination and language !!
Sami, the bedouin.
A member of my UK writers group told me there was a comment “supporting” my book (she thought it was from an Eve or Yvette), but since it wasn’t there when I looked a day later and since you don’t censor the site, she must have imagined it.
Two things prompted me to write Shaikh-Down. The most important was the disappearance of the young man who worked with me. The other was the ‘commerce’ between a handful of air-hostesses and a number of local shaikhs and merchants. My imagination provided a link between them: a group of dissidents would avenge a boy’s disappearance with a ‘bedroom coup’. I started it as a thriller but ending up turning it into a comedy. One that doesn’t amuse you, Esra’a.
It seemed to me (and, honestly, it still does) that women were treated as second-class citizens in most of Arabia, so I set out to create an “Amazonian” female character who would cast off the shackles of enforced marriage and join the dissidents. Her reward is to be President of the new republic. Nayla and her uncle the Amir, because they required me to stretch my imagination beyond the confines of the expat community which was easy to send up, are my favourite characters in the book. But not yours, Esra’a. That’s a shame.
Using stereotypes is far from constructive “imagination”. It’s also not funny to anyone with even a slightly developed sense of humor. Accusing us of censorship is just another example of how you stereotype the people of “Arabia”. We’re not all close-minded and unwilling to listen to other opinions as long as they are made in a respectful way (which your book clearly doesn’t do).
I’m sure members of your UK group find your book simply amazing, they just don’t want to go through the trouble of actually commenting here.
Yes, all five of them.
You have to remember, David, that there is an unhappy background context to conversations between westerners and arabs, an uneven power relationship. Westerners have been organising regime change and even nation change in the arab and muslim worlds for a long time, with disastrous results. The representations that western writers have made of arabs and muslims has helped this process, and continues to. Plus, people quite rightly dont want interfering foreigners telling them what their culture should be. This is why you are sailing in choppy waters, even if your intentions are good. Read Edward Said’s Orientalism or Covering Islam to see what I mean.
Saudi Arabia is one thing. In Oman, Qatar and the Emirates (and of course further north and west) my experience was very different to yours. In the places I taught the rule was to talk no politics or religion in class, and many foreign teachers obeyed. I didn’t (it was certainly easier for me because the students were not suspicious of me, because I knew their cultural references and because I am an Arab), and I found women as much as men had strong, well-argued opinions. And socially, of course, I met many opinionated women. Perhaps Gulf people are more reticent with foreigners until they know them very well. Not so surprising – how many English people befriend those immigrants who speak almost no English. How relaxed would you be with a bearded Mullah? Would you immediately tell him all your political, religious and sexual revelations, or would you stick to small talk, scared of being taken wrong or causing offence. You look as foreign to many Gulf Arabs as the bearded Mullah might to you. Arabs do feel defensive sometimes, and I think this is entirely understandable. A white expat has more prestige in the Gulf than a mullah here.
People do talk about the people who disappear, of course they do. Your complaint reminds me slightly of Rushdie (I’m not comparing you otherwise) saying The Satanic Verses was intended to start a debate with the Muslims about women’s rights. But if he’d wanted to start a debate he could have written a very straightforward essay rather than a fiction casting the prophet’s wives as whores.
Why not write a realist scenario on what might have happened to your friend, and why. Do you speak good Arabic? Perhaps a course in that, followed by a fresh visit to Bahrain, would help. Have you read contemporary Arab fiction which deals with sexuality/ women/ oppression? Perhaps Alaa al Aswany, Randa Jarrar, Raja sanea
I’ll post this on the page you sent.
Best wishes
Robin
[...] a Revolution that will sweep the tyrant Rulers of Arabia into the dustbin of history!” It is just one more Orientalist novel – a really bad and poorly written [...]
It was Yvonne not Yvette who posted a comment, and it’s on the FREEDOM’S ZONE blog which has picked up Esra’a’s original “review” of SHAIKH-DOWN. Here’s what Yvonne wrote:
“As someone who lived & worked in the Gulf during the 7o’s and 80’s, I can relate to David Gee’s comments. I could never engage any of the Bahraini women I worked with in any type of political discussion, the Eygptian women..yes…. I was a young women new to the Gulf and curious to find out more about their life and country. We could discuss many subjects apart from these and on the occassions when I was invited to their homes ,where they were very hospitable, the main topic of conversation amongst the Bahraini women was…sex…..nothing wrong with that…I was pleasantly surprised at how open they were on that particular subject.All this took place a long time ago and I know that things have moved on…..this book is meant to be read tongue in cheek but maybe this doesn’t translate……. ”
Back to me (David):
Thanks, Robin of QUNFUZ, for your thoughtful contribution to this debate. I can see that as an outsider my attempt to “script” a revolution for an imaginary emirate may not be welcome, perhaps not even among those who yearn to see regime change. Maybe it was a mistake to write it as comedy, but golddigging cabin crew relieving shaikhs and merchants of their dirhams and dinars always seemed to be the stuff of farce, and when my young colleague was “disappeared” I concocted the notion that sex could be used as an alternative way of bringing about a coup.
My book needed a strong Arab female character, and I came up with Nayla al-Khazi – half Barbarella, half Joan of Ark! It’s too bad that she doesn’t “resonate” with Esra’a. I hope some Arab ladies will take her to their hearts.
Yes, Robin, I’ve read Aswany (Yakoubian), and some Mahfouz. But they are writing about the real Arab world. Yakoubian was a gloriously upmarket “soap opera” with characters from different classes interacting in a building that becomes a metaphor for all Cairo. Rushdie, I guess, was fabricating a kind of fantasy in Satanic Verses but even to an outsider like me I thought naming whores after the wives of the Prophet was a vile outrage. In Shaikh-Down I mock the weakness of some Arab gents for Western nookie (sorry, Esra’a!) but the book’s British hero is beguiled, as I was, by seeing and hearing the daily obervances of Islam. There is no humour in blasphemy.
Shaikh-Down sets out to be somewhere between soap opera and fantasy, a ‘Carry-On’-style comedy about the naughty sexual commerce between the citizens of Belaj and their guest workers, but it has the “sting” of Revolution (and then Armageddon) in its tail.
Sorry, Besra’a, but there are a lot more than five writers in my group, including two bestselling authors. That crack was unworthy of you and of your fellow bloggers.
In spite of which: respectful greetings from David.
David, you have yet to apologize for stupidly accusing us of “censorship” when it was your little friend’s inability to tell the difference between an actual blog post and an aggregator.
Oh yeah, I forgot to include you in that. So that’s a total of six then. It’s great to know that there’s a support group who can relate to your failures as an author and insignificance as a human being.
Esra’a, I apologize for thinking your site was censoring the debate raised by SHAIKH-DOWN.
I can’t help wondering why the size of my writing group has become such an issue. FYI, it’s 40-plus.
I thought I had found a blog that was keen to discuss some of the issues that formed the background to my shaikhs-and-stewardesses comedy. Issues like the role of women; intolerance of homosexuality; the use of torture; the path to democracy for those who aspire to it. I guess I must look elsewhere for that debate.
I’m logging off now. Time to get my head down over a new book – not set, you will be relieved to hear, anywhere east of the English Channel.
Mr Gee,
Maybe you should read this and you might just get it (though it seems unlikely):
http://www.racialicious.com/2009/09/29/your-joke-is-not-my-joke-racism-and-sexism-in-jokes-and-satire/#more-3306
The extract I read of you book is not funny, it is not satire, it is not even sexy. It is tired, unoriginal, clearly offensive to the people of the Gulf (see comments above and in the article link I have posted), sexist and painful to read for anyone with an intelligent mind. I’d rather read Dan Brown or Katie Price.
Frankly it reads like some tawdry novel from the 70s purchased by a dirty old man who doesn’t dare buy real pornography.
I’m sorry to hear you’re writing another book.
Sincerely,
TeakLipstickFiend (a white, Western woman)
Careful not to go anywhere near an Arab land, since according to David, all Arabs would obsess about your “Western totty” and the overwhelming stupidity of Arab women might actually be contagious. Please, in the interest of your own safety, avoid any and all Arabs, specifically those in the Gulf. We’re nasty over here.
LOL. Thanks for the warning Esra’a!
)
It’s interesting how when white western people criticize the Arab world, they are usually utterly unaware of their position of privilege and how it plays out and influences their views. It’s also interesting to me how Mr. Gee can’t even perceive how the cover of his book immediately showcases it as racist claptrap – I don’t even need to read the content to realize that every sickening stereotype we’ve heard a thousand times before is going to be rehashed and trotted out like a tired old plowhorse, bony and sick from years of abuse.
I know Mr. Gee didn’t personally choose the cover – although he would have had to approve it – and that actually disappoints me further. That several people met to decide that this was the perfect cover for the book, never once feeling appalled at its clearly racist overtones.
Let’s see:
A-rab riding a camel? Check.
A-rab looking menacing and sex crazed and literally about to pounce on unsuspecting white woman (read: rape)? Check
An implicit comparison of A-rab to animal (drooling, ravenous dog)? Check
Congratulations. You’ve just played into the oldest stereotypes of nonwhite peoples, and ones that were already hackneyed when your esteemed countryman Sir Richard Burton made his Orientalist journeys to the “Arabian lands”. And I see all this without even opening the book and suffering through the drivel within.
Oh but you also skewer the British in your book, so that’s all right then. You were having a spot o’ fun. Just a laugh. Don’t take it personally!
Well, let me tell you this: a joke isn’t funny when you’ve heard it a thousand times before. And we’ve been hearing this joke for centuries now. So thanks for that, really.
Personally, the size of your writing group means nothing to me. Forty plus people find you insightful and intelligent. It’s been my experience that even some of the most educated white folks I’ve met abroad will happily repeat tired, ethnocentric garbage about that monolithic entity known as “the Arab world” without ever coming to a glimmer of understanding about why what they might be saying could be considered offensive.
Better writers than you have fallen into this trap, so at least you’re in good company. Hilary Mantel, on this year’s Booker prize shortlist I might add, wrote a book called Eight Months on Ghazzah Street about her time in Saudi Arabia in those “dark days” of the 1980s. This book was recommended to me by an English friend and colleague whom I respect greatly, and who has visited me here in Lebanon several times now and shown great sensitivity with regards to any “culture gaps” she perceived. Anyhow, I had to point out to her why I found the book so hard to stomach – how the local characters all had inherent moral failings revealed in a certain ugliness of their bodies, how one woman’s little daughter was repeatedly called hairy and compared to rodents of all sort, how the main white female character is finally saved from the sexist enclave of Saudi Arabia by her white husband, who admits that the sexism has gotten to him as well at the end. All this rendered in exquisite prose, which judging by the excerpts from your book Mr. Gee, you do not come even close to crafting.
What you don’t understand, is those of us who do not possess the inherent privilege of your race and culture are particularly sensitized to seeing inhuman renderings of ourselves through your eyes – through books and movies and television shows. And we see the same things over and over again, rendered in the same smug, self-righteous tones, oblivious to criticism.
(For a real satirical take on notions of privilege, please see: http://www.derailingfordummies.com)
It’s not that there isn’t plenty to criticize in any society. It’s the lack of nuance I find particularly upsetting, the lack of understanding of context and privilege and power dynamics and history. At a time when the whole world views us a monolithic bunch of repressed animals, you’ve only succeeded at adding to that hateful discourse. Congratulations.
Oh sure, there’s a positive message in the book. A busty woman rises up to craft a democratic society. At least you aren’t saying, as a British friend once said to me in utter earnestness, “Well, perhaps the Arabs are simply incapable of democracy.”
We’ve heard and suffered your ideas on how we should be improving our societies through a long history of explicit and implicit colonialism. Perhaps you’d best keep those ideas to yourselves from now on.
Ps. To whomever was asking about Michael Totten, as a Lebanese, I will tell you he is as inherently unaware of and full of arrogant assumptions about Lebanese society and politics as Mr. Gee seems to be about the Gulf.
Thanks, Lens, for your paranoid deconstruction of my SHAIKH-DOWN cover.
I worked with the artist on the design. The gentleman flying off the camel in the direction of the airhostess is meant to be a caricature of the kind of Arab with a weakness for cabin crew ladies (there were quite a few of these in Bahrain in my time, and I believe there still are). There is also an intended IRONY – a blonde stewardess is going to join the plot to eject the Amir off his throne, an Amir whose regime tortures and murders some of its teenage citizens.
Lens sees a racist subtext in the dogs running across the desert. Lens hasn’t read the book. Most of the British characters in the novel have adopted stray dogs. The Brits were doing this when I was in the Gulf and they’re still doing it – all over the world (I’ve just come back from a dog-sitting trip to Spain).
The bulldog is one of the symbols of Britishness (meant to draw attention to our pugnaciousness). And we are very sentimental about our pets. I brought two Bahraini salukis back to England – Sadie and Sophie, who also appear in the novel. (Sadie narrowly excapes being shelled by a tank on the morning of the coup that unseats the Amir of Belaj.)
That’s really all there is to say about the cover. But thanks again, Lens. I realize you have some serious points to make about the British colonial mindset and I am taking them onboard, but your fraught analysis of my artwork brought a smile to me and my cabin crew chums.
David – I don’t feel unkindly towards you because we have corresponded, but I have to jump in again and say that you and your cabin crew chums shouldnt be smiling. The book cover is straight up racist, and cant be reasoned away. It is nasty and offensive. I suspect that had your cover featured drug-dealing, pimping, melon-eating blacks, or mean hook-nosed Jews counting their money, you would have run into trouble in the UK. Because your target was the people who are being targetted and demonised every day in the Western media, the people who are being murdered by Western bombs, you get away with it and smile with your friends and describe as paranoid those Arabs who complain. I must saw that as soon as I saw the cover I was alienated and upset. Please think again.
(your repeated argument that there are in reality Arabs who want to sleep with white air stewardesses is of course true, just as there are in reality mean greedy Jews and black street criminals who are also good at dancing. But to characterise a group of people according to lazy stereotype at best shows a profound lack of imagination and at worse is racist.)
I’m truly flattered to see that David Gee took my recommended reading to heart and spent a while perusing the derailingfordummies.com site I plugged in my comment. Clearly, in his response to my criticism of his cover, he took some suggestions straight out of their sage advice on how to deal with the annoying nit-picking and fault-finding of a Marginalised Person™.
I think he took the creative approach – of course! – and constructed a response out of two suggestions, the first being:
You’re Just Oversensitive
Once again, though very similar to You’re Being Overemotional, this one has a slightly different nuance.
What you’re implying is that the Marginalised Person™ is looking for offence where none exists.
Once again, you’re disowning your own responsibility, and this is absolutely the crux of any derailment – you just can’t repeat or reinforce it often enough. No matter what, none of this is your fault – nothing you said that was hurtful, offensive, bigoted or discriminatory is really to blame here, because you said it in all innocence! After all, what reason have you ever had to examine your ingrained prejudices? Why should you start now?
So you want the Marginalised Person™ to know this is how you feel and that you really believe the responsibility is all theirs – if they weren’t looking so hard for offence, everything would be a lot more pleasant!
(For you)
and
You Just Enjoy Being Offended
Closely related to the above point, it’s another critical element of a successful deraling. You really need to make sure the Marginalised Person knows you consider their issues to be completely trivial. It’s insensitive in the extreme – it also exemplifies your lack of awareness and empathy.
By demonstrating you have absolutely no concept of what a particular issue or point may mean to them both within their conversation with you and beyond it, you get to show off just how cocooned and protected in Privilege® you really are. Remember how maddening this is for a Marginalised Person™ – it’s a Privilege® they do not share and will probably never know so to witness it being so blithely owned and used to diminish their experience is bound to get their blood pumping.
But absolutely best of all, you are being obnoxious and hurtful enough to tell them outright that they enjoy facing discrimination and prejduice. Enjoy it so much, in fact, that they “look” for reasons to be hurt and offended! Wow. This one is almost breathtakingly perfect as a derailment tactic, it lacks any sort of conceivable class and humility and goes straight to smug viciousness. The very idea that anyone enjoys being hurt and discriminated against as a daily practice is so preposterous it could only be believed by a Privileged Person® who’s never really experienced or known what it’s like.
The fact is, many Marginalised People™ go out of their way to avoid these sorts of debates and confrontations because it’s such a painful and unenjoyable experience. Those you are encountering in this circumstance have likely made a conscious choice to do so, even knowing it will probably go bad. For you to spit in the face of their choice in putting themselves on the line by suggesting it’s all fun and games for them just adds a particularly piquant insult to injury.
*
I’m flattered, truly I am. Gee, thanks for reading.
I know I’m trying to defend a book which my critics on this site find indefensible, but here goes anyway.
The main purpose of SHAIKH-DOWN, as I’ve already said, was to outline a scenario (yes, an unlikely one) for revolution on the fictional island of Belaj. My two British characters (Cass the runaway housewife and Eddy the bisexual banker) are little more than outside observers to this event (Eddy accidentally makes a major contribution), but the principal Arab characters (Nayla the Amir’s niece and Rashid the gay pilot) are deeply involved. The contrast between these two pairs of characters was essential to the book I set out to write.
Nayla is a counterpoint to Cass who has left her cheating husband in England and found ’sanctuary’ with her brother in Belaj. Nayla doesn’t have the option to leave her faithless husband, although she has taken a lover (not something a Muslim woman would find easy to do, I am sure). Even her husband’s murder doesn’t set her free, since her brother quickly
marries her off to a Shaikh from another country. It is this husband who will turn her into a female Che Guevara.
Similarly, Eddy has the freedom to move from a failed (heterosexual) relationship in London to a briefly happy gay one with Rashid, whereas Rashid is under pressure from his family to marry and live a ‘normal’ life.
The revolution, in which Rashid and Nayla play key roles, will not improve their chances of finding the freedoms which Westerners enjoy. This is meant to provide the book with an ironical coda, as is my ‘fantastic’ projection that the revolution in Belaj is the first step on the road to a Middle Eastern apocalypse .
The debate on this site makes it plain that my attempts to be ironical (or funny) are not communicating themselves to Arab readers. Is there any chance of moving the debate beyond the book’s cover (and my lack of contact with female intellectuals in the Gulf) to the different options facing unhappily married Muslim women and gays compared to those in the West?
The extract on my SHAIKH-DOWN website doesn’t include Rashid (who enters the story a few chapters later) but it does offer a first glimpse of the way I’ve tried to depict Nayla and her brother and her uncle the Amir.