Oil, the Tree of Life, and The Kingdom

Volume 31

Jul 15

Jamal Khashoggi starts out as a journalist, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. He admires Osama Bin Laden and interviews him in his headquarters in Afghanistan. As a movement, Al Qaeda has its good points: it isn't venal the way the royal Saudi family is; it emphasizes bravery and self-sacrifice; it wants to restore a sense of obedience and mystical closeness to Allah in which spiritual wayfaring in the service of the soul is also in perfect harmony with the Koran and the hadiths, the sayings of the Prophet that guide you in the practical things of life: You must wear your trousers rolled so that the cuffs don't sully you by touching profane earth. You must brush your teeth with an araak twig so that when you pray your mouth is clean. On and on the hadiths unfurl, giving shape and beauty to the randomness of everyday life. But what of Bin Laden's insistence on global jihad? Khashoggi feels repulsed by this so-called holy war in which its warriors become addicted to savagery. Beheading people or cutting off hands begins to take root in the darker part of the soul and becomes its own reason for meting out such punishments.

And so slowly, over the years, Khashoggi finds other ways of believing: free speech as a way to glorify Allah, democratic reform for the sake of Allah. He becomes the editor of a Saudi newspaper, Al Watan, but then he's fired because he's too outspoken. He flees Saudi Arabia, afraid he'll be imprisoned or worse. Khashoggi makes his way to the United States where he writes columns for a major American newspaper with headlines like: Saudi Arabia wasn't always this repressive. Now it's unbearable.

The shop owner in Al-Balad, the old part of the city in Jeddah, takes me by the arm and pulls me into his little storefront in the soukh. He wants to dress me in a thobe, a long white gown that many Saudi men wear. Garbed in old blue jeans and a polyester button-down dress shirt, the owner covers my head with a checkered head scarf, a keffiyeh, and with an agal, a doubled black cord, he secures it in place.

I feel a little ridiculous, very much aware of being an American writer traveling with other American writers on a cultural exchange program funded by a university and the US State Department. I'm an old hand by now, having traveled to many different countries over the past 18 years, including Lebanon, Syria, Libya, Jordan, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria—all places in which war or civil unrest has been the rule and huge numbers of the population spend much of their lives as refugees. Along with two or three other writers, and always led by Chris Merrill, the director of the University of Iowa's International Writers Program, we meet with literally hundreds of people, professors, local authors, editors, publishers, students— some are refugees, some are exiles, some have been imprisoned and/or are under surveillance. Many lead normal lives with jobs and families and a place to call home. The unlucky ones spend much of their lives just trying to survive. We meet them and tell them about our lives as writers, we give short talks about literature, sometimes we read our work, we conduct writing workshops in which the participants write either in their own tongue or in English. Between meetings, I spend most of my time listening, getting to know the place, the people, and the often fraught, at times desperate cultural and political situation.

But today I'm the one full of trepidation: as I look at myself in the shop's full-length mirror, I feel queasy, almost a touch of vertigo. Since I left my Brooklyn apartment a few days ago, Donald Trump's inauguration has come and gone. If I was dressed like this on the flight home, would Homeland Security let me back into the country? Meanwhile, the shop owner steps up his sales pitch, patting my shoulder and repeating with ever increasing gusto, "Beautiful! beautiful! beautiful!"

The more I hear about NEOM (Neo+Mustaqbal, "new future"), the curiouser and curiouser it becomes. Now nothing but a $50 billion series of gigantic potholes gouged in the desert, the projected price tag, according to the Wall Street Journal, has ballooned from $500 billion to $8.8 trillion, "25 times the Kingdom's annual budget." The project includes The Line, a "linear smart city" 110 miles long, but only 660 feet wide: the exterior will be entirely made of mirrored glass, and there will be no streets, no cars, and no carbon emissions. It will stretch from Tabuk (near the Jordanian-Saudi border) all the way to a Red Sea eco-resort, complete with post-carbon solar energy and a plethora of robots, including robot maids and servants that may well outnumber the human inhabitants; an island of Jurassic Park-like robot dinosaurs; robot martial arts experts for NEOMers' entertainment and fitness needs; even a giant fake moon that NASA will help build and will have gigantic images projected onto it; in short, a techno-paradise with glow-in-the-dark sand. But the most controversial proposal is decidedly low-tech: NEOMers will be allowed to drink alcohol.

For all the Jetson-like cartoonishness of what is being touted "as the most attractive living environment on the planet," I keep wondering how this futuristic Saudi city—which will maintain security through the use of drones and round-the-clock facial-recognition tracking of all NEOMers—will retain its preternatural luster? The Khashoggi murder, in which the journalist was chopped to pieces, has thrown a glaring light on how the Saudi government is fast becoming one of the most brutal surveillance police states in the world. The crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS for short) is something of an enigma. He's known as the visionary behind NEOM and as a champion of limited women's rights; but he's also seen as a megalomaniacal tyrant who kidnaps and imprisons anyone who stands against him.

But MBS doesn't stop there: he's also responsible for carrying out secret mass executions. 2024 was a banner year: 330 people were put to death, many of them by having their heads cut off. According to the BBC, most of the victims' relatives hadn't been notified that imprisoned family members' status had changed from serving time to waiting on death row. It was only after the executions took place that the families learned anything of their loved ones' fates—and that was restricted to a bare-bones list of names and death dates released by the Saudi Press Agency. According to Yasser al-Khayat, who fled to Germany for asylum, his family was never provided any evidence to justify his younger brother's execution. "We don't know whether they [the victims] were given a decent burial or thrown in the desert or in the sea. We've no idea."

4

We've been invited by the cultural attaché to speak at a Riyadhi book club, a large monthly gathering of some 200 people. Most are Saudi, some come from India, a few are British or South African. The crowd seems equally mixed between men and women, the men dressed any old way, the women wearing jeans and blouses, though one or two wear an abaya, a full-length shawl, but more for the fashion sense than any nod toward traditional Saudi gender roles. One reason MBS has a reputation as a reformer is that he disbanded the Monty Pythonish-named "Committees for the Prevention of Vice and Preservation of Virtue"—conservative Islamic gangs of men whose main mission was to chase women down the street, shouting threats and even detaining them if they showed even the slightest deviation from traditional dress codes. But for MBS, getting rid of the Committees was also part of a larger power play to defang the clerics from wielding any form of political influence in the Kingdom.

Nevertheless, given the more cosmopolitan way in which women dress, you can sense a new self-assertive freedom, especially among younger female college students. This loosening up of styles of dress underlines other freedoms that women have lately been offered—or seized, depending on your point of view: after all, women have been agitating for the right to drive for over thirty years. And in addition to driving, they've been allowed to move into professions beyond nursing and teaching; now they work in tech and government, as well as starting their own businesses or holding jobs in multinational corporations. What's odd is that the women who led the initial protests were arrested a month before MBS's decree giving women the right to drive. One of them, Loujain al-Hathloul, was tortured long after the decree. The logic must go something like: if you agitate for a right before the government grants the exact same right, then you deserve to be tortured, not for campaigning for the right that the government has now granted, but for your prior defiance. Also, the government wants the PR to focus on its humane, forward-looking vision, not on some paltry private citizen's incendiary desire to take the wheel.

5

Although the season is technically winter, the bright long days and cool nights are absolute perfection—in particular, the crispness of the air that I've experienced in other desert climes: the Sahara in Libya, say, when I was traveling with a militia just a few months before the country plunged back into civil war. This very same militia dragged Gadaffi, the self-styled Brother Leader, out from where he was hiding: a drainage pipe full of garbage and filth. They threw him over the hood of a Toyota battlewagon and slapped and punched him until his nose was broken, and his face bruised and bloodied to a pulp—in effect, beating him to death. As the militia leader and I drove across desert hardpan in the clear arid noon, it turned out that, before the revolution, this man was an electrical engineer—just like my dad. Naturally, we talked about technical matters, how to build electrical capacity, the problems of load shedding. Then, without explanation, he handed me his cellphone. On the screen was a video of Gadaffi being beaten, something I'd only read about, but was now witnessing in agonizing detail, fist after fist connecting with Gaddafi's battered flesh. The engineer turned revolutionary again turned engineer was so quiet, so gentle in his manner, and so considerate of his guest's safety and well-being. But was he also one of the men whose fists, against the fallen dictator's face, sounded so hollow, so muted, so flatly digital, lacking in any kind of vibratory overtone? Neither one of us said a word about the video. When I'd seen enough, I handed back his cellphone while he kept up a steady monologue about the tragic consequences of lack of infrastructure.

6

At the book club in Riyadh, we've reached that part of the evening where the two moderators ask us questions submitted by the audience in advance. Since I often write about refugees, it means that I'm almost always writing about a place where there is a war, has been a war, will be a war. So most of the questions revolve around how I try to write about such things. And I tell the story about Gaddafi, how, as I watched the video, I felt a horrified sympathy for the dictator, even as I was well aware that Gaddafi was a monster and needed to go. When I say this, I sense a shift in the emotional temperature of the room: well, the story is pretty gruesome, and to have someone tell it to you in a friendly gathering like this must come as something of a shock. But I keep on talking, elaborating how on the one hand my political convictions told me that Gaddafi’s overthrow was a good thing, but my emotional side, the fellow feeling all of us have for any kind of creature being hurt, revealed to me just how inadequate my political convictions were to what you might call my political emotions. The distance between the two—the contradictory nature of what you know you ought to feel and what you really do feel—is the place I try to write from. You don't try to neaten things up. You stay true to the messiness of all that you feel, you keep faith with the contradictions, you do your best to give clear expression to mixed emotion.

Which is when I shut up, sit down, and think, OK, that went OK—and I start taking a little victory lap for resisting the temptation to oversimplify or morally grandstand. Only, now I'm being passed a note from the cultural attaché: it reads Please don't talk about sex, alcohol, drugs, or politics. And then it dawns on me that maybe I've been something of an idiot for "speaking my truth." After all, who's to say that the jolly-looking fellow in the third row who seemed to be particularly attentive isn't a member of the Mabahith, the Saudi secret police? Even worse, because I'm an American, the security men probably won't do anything to me: but what about the organizers and the members of the audience?

7

We've left the Kingdom and flown to another Kingdom, the Kingdom of Bahrain, where we've spent all afternoon in a Bahrain Petroleum (Bapco) company town called Awali. One of our group of four was born in Awali back in the 1950s when her father, a young American geologist, had been recruited to work in the burgeoning oil fields. Sixty-some years later, she was leading us on a tour of her former hometown—a place she left when she was five years old and hadn't returned to since. Nonetheless, she pointed out to us the local hospital where she'd been born, and just a few blocks away, the community center, swimming pool, and bowling alley that Bapco built specially for expat families like hers. The few scrawny trees and bushes the company had planted to "landscape" the scruffy, newly built boomtown had now grown up lush and green. In the center of the town square an enshrined oilwell, surrounded by shrubs and with a commemorative plaque, now celebrates Bapco's corporate benevolence.

At her childhood home surrounded by a tall wooden fence, the four of us crane our necks to see over the palings: like all the other houses, it's a bungalow with a large picture window in the living room. We stand on tiptoe now, our phone cameras held above the fence to record whatever we can of her childhood. Thinking that the new residents might be home and willing to talk to us, I try the latch on the fence door—locked.

8

A few miles outside of Awali on our way to see one of Bahrain's most famous "natural wonders," we pass billboards announcing Style Camping, VIP Camping: teeming campsites crowded with pavilion-like majlis tents furnished with sofas, chairs, video screens, even chandeliers, and separate wings for rec- and bedrooms. It's the season, after all, when thousands of Bahrainis get in touch with their Bedu roots by pitching elaborate tent settlements, complete with electricity and TV, showers and bathrooms and well-stocked kitchens, and none of the asperities that Americans think of as "camping." We park in an impromptu parking lot crammed with trailers, ice cream trucks, SUVs, crew cab pick-ups, panel vans, and even a knobby-kneed old horse that kids can ride for a buck. The vastness of the site catches us by surprise as does the terrain: next to the entrance gate to VIP is an oil well pumping away, and not ten feet from that are miles and miles of gas and oil pipelines hovering two feet off the ground and crisscrossing the plain in every direction. There's nothing remotely "wildernessy" about any of this, except for the sight we've come to see: The Tree of Life.

Well, so much for the pastoral! We get out of our car and walk to the edge of the fenced-in area protecting this vastly sprawling tree, a variety of mesquite that has flourished in the desert all on its lonesome for over 400 years. Barren in the extreme, the sandy hardpan doesn't support another tree for miles around. Its branches soar upward and outward in long arabesques, the feathery leaves motionless in the hot sun, the late-afternoon shadows cooling the desert air. Apparently, the tree's tap root plunges over a hundred feet down to an ancient aquifer that used to support a settlement that goes back to the 1300s. But the quasi-Biblical/Koranic/Gilgamesh-like vibe that the name conjures extends only so far. Fifty yards away and racing round and round the tree, as if they were on a speedway or in an outtake from a Mad Max movie, wheelie-popping teens on four-wheeled motorbikes rev their engines as they turn their sound systems up to 11 and blast Beyoncé and Amr Diab.

9

In the Riyadhi grade school we visited that morning, I asked the kids staring up at me from their communal tables, girls sitting with girls, boys with boys, to shut their eyes and think of home. I told them to imagine their own bedrooms, the colors, smells, textures, and sounds. Is it night, is it day? Does the sun shine through a window? Can they hear their parents' voices in another room? Are they alone or with a brother or sister, happy or scared or mad or just quietly sitting there, maybe watching TV or doing schoolwork or playing with a favorite toy? And what would that toy be? What color is it, does it have a name?

And then I asked them to describe what they've remembered, writing it all down, not worrying about spelling, just following the voice in their head wherever it leads.

Later that afternoon, among female college students, I'll conduct the same exercise, and again, the room will go quiet, the students will go deep inside themselves, their faces contemplative and distant, just like the children's faces.

And I'll do the same exercise with a group of professors, both male and female, the male professors wearing long white thobes and checkerboard keffiyehs, most of them with neat beards and glasses and a studious air, the women wearing abayas and head scarves but no veils, all of them, male and female, surprisingly willing to go back to childhood so that you can see the child surface in the softness of their faces as they write, many of them smiling, though some seem uncomfortable to be asked to abandon their adult dignity, to go back to when they were seated on the other side of the desk.

And yet all of them, smiling or frowning or fidgeting anxiously, seem touched by a common spirit, a muse you might say, a reflex of memory, an intimidating and strange inhabiting of silence that brings them face to face with what? Pain, maybe, a sense of loss in time passing? Yes, certainly that. But pleasure too, even a hovering sense of enchantment...or so I like to imagine. Of course, I'll never know what any of them are thinking in that part of themselves that is doing the writing even as I watch them in the quiet of the room.

10

In November of 2017, Mohammed bin Salman "invited" over 400 members of the Saudi royal family to the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton where they were imprisoned then charged with corruption and stealing state funds. Most of them eventually bought their way out of their gilded prison where the sheets' thread count and the luxury bath products made the detainment of these elite grotesquely comic: apparently, room service also included beatings and torture. But if you ask Saudis about what has come to be known as "the night of the beatings," most seem glad that the extended royals got their comeuppance. MBS asserts that the treasury reclaimed 107 billion dollars. Other initiatives have made MBS popular, especially in his own thirty-something generation: before MBS, the only fun you could have in the Kingdom was to go out to dinner, men sitting with men, women with women, and families together. Now, there are movie theaters playing Hollywood blockbusters, cultural centers and bookstores, art galleries and music festivals. All of this cultural activity, imposed from the top down, has been set in motion by MBS's creation of the seriously unfun, somewhat sinisterly named General Entertainment Authority. Despite the Kafkaesque overtones of the nomenclature, as long as Entertainment doesn't involve alcohol, premarital sex, or drugs (selling drugs can still get you beheaded), then the Kingdom is only too happy to show its citizenry a good time. This sudden deluge of culture, art, and party-hearty fun reflects MBS's conviction that Saudi Arabia needs to become "a global tourism hotspot" if it's to attract the foreign investment it needs to diversify away from oil. To that end, the MDLBEAST entertainment company produces Soundstorm, the biggest rock festival in the Arab world, where men and women mingle and dance until they drop. And Saudi Arabia has been named the site of the World Cup in 2034, committing billions of dollars to building eleven new stadiums, something that has drawn fierce criticism from human rights groups around the world, charging that migrant workers are being exploited, overworked, and dying of preventable workplace accidents because of almost non-existent workers' rights. Some call it sports-and-culture washing, others the face of the new Saudi Arabia.

But how new is it, anyway? Two years before the massive shakedown started in 2017, didn't bin Salman buy a $550 million superyacht? And then a few days after the shakedown began, a $450 million painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, the Salvator Mundi? This means that the painting of the savior of the world is also the most expensive in the world. When Norah O'Donnell on Sixty Minutes pushed MBS on the timing of his purchase, suggesting that the "new sheriff in town" should perhaps look to his own financial wheeling and dealing, he answered, "The idea is not to get money, but to punish the corrupt." And lest there be any lingering doubts about his motives, financial or moral, he shrugged, "I'm a rich person and not a poor person. I'm not Gandhi or Mandela."

It was rumored that MBS wanted to hang the savior of the world in his yacht, bringing the total for painting and yacht to a nice round billion dollars.

11

Throughout Saudi Arabia—and at the opposite end of the Ritz-Carlton crowd—are the people who serve them: they do the Kingdom's cleaning and housekeeping, cooking and nannying, construction work, clerking, or low-skill pick and shovel labor. These migrants come from places Trump dubbed "shithole countries." The majority migrate from south Asian nations like the Philippines; but in recent years, they've also started coming from Africa, mainly Kenya and Uganda. According to government statistics, they make up three quarters of all the Kingdom's workers and are often paid as little as $200-250 a month. Ordinary Saudi citizens make around $3,000 per month—over ten times the amount that migrants are paid. And according to Human Rights Watch, employers routinely try to cheat them out of even that paltry sum. The government gives ample lip service to fair labor practices, but it rarely reports what amounts to wide-spread wage abuse. While migrants are supposedly housed and fed by the companies that sponsor them, it's routine practice for employers to pay substantially less than the contracts the migrants have signed. At the same time, they're often required to work 14 and 15 hour days, regardless of the eight hour day promised them. Worst of all—and almost never reported by the government—migrants' wages are often withheld altogether. As one Nepalese contract worker reported to Human Rights Watch, "I was paid on time for the first two months but was never paid on time thereafter. When I asked my manager for my payment, he would answer, 'Die first, and I'll pay you later.'

And yet they keep coming. Despite the many stories I'd read about rape and beatings, starvation and overwork, workers being cheated out of their pay and even imprisoned in a workplace where being punched and kicked to death is often ruled by government authorities as due to "natural causes," still they come. These are the ambitious ones, the intrepid, and the truly desperate: they want so badly to improve life for themselves and their families back home, where conditions are even worse, that they're willing to gamble, literally, with their lives.

12

Now that Saudi Arabia has entered more enlightened times—or at least more social media conscious times—public beheadings, which used to be carried out without warning any day of the week at 9 a.m. sharp in Justice Square, popularly known as Chop-Chop Square, are kept secret. As to the nature of the official head choppers, I came across an article in the Arab News (Jeddah, June 5, 2003) about what the paper calls "Saudi Arabia's Leading Executioner," Muhammad Saad Al-Beshi. In a confiding mood, he tells his interviewer, "It doesn't matter to me: Two, four, ten—as long as I'm doing God's will, it doesn't matter how many people I execute.... No one is afraid of me. I have a lot of relatives, and many friends at the mosque, and I live a normal life like everyone else. There are no drawbacks for my social life." And when he gets home after a long day: "I deal with my family with kindness and love. They aren't afraid when I come back from an execution. Sometimes they help me clean my sword."

13

Before I arrived, a friend warned me not to bring a paper copy of Ben Hubbard's book, MBS, as the book is currently banned. So I've been perusing it on my Kindle—I wish I could unsee the gruesome images of Jamal Khashoggi's body.

While working for the Washington Post, Khashoggi had been lured into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in order to secure a document that would allow him to marry his Turkish fiancée. The Saudi consul general had given his employees the day off and disabled the consulate CCTV. But Turkey had bugged the consulate and, according to their secret audio recordings, Khashoggi hadn't been inside the consulate building more than a few minutes when the hit squad, referring to him as "the sacrificial victim," took hold of him, administered a sedative, probably put a plastic bag over his head, and strangled him.

Then a bonesaw-wielding forensic pathologist set to work. On the secret Turkish recordings you can hear him laughing just minutes before the murder, saying to the rest of the hit squad, as if he were something of a bon vivant, "I often play music when I'm cutting cadavers. And sometimes I have a coffee and a cigar at hand...It's the first time in my life, I will have cut (up) pieces on the ground. Even if you are a butcher you hang the animal up to do so." Well, it could have been worse—at least the hit team had covered the killing floor with plastic sheeting where Khashoggi would have his arms and legs, and even his head, cut off. As one of the hitmen says, "Take it off. Take it off. Put this on his head. Wrap it." One of the sounds that the investigating UN rapporteur found most disturbing was a "low-level humming sound" that Turkish officials believe "was the sound of the saw."

The pieces of Khashoggi's body were then placed in plastic bags and suitcases, driven to the Saudi consul's home two blocks away, and incinerated in a recently constructed tandoor barbecue oven. Large quantities of meat "were grilled in the oven after the killing," no doubt to cover up the smell of burning human flesh. Another version of his disposal alleges that his cut-up body was dissolved in an acid bath. Burned or dissolved or both, his body would seem to have vanished.

14

Is it any wonder that Trump has chosen Riyadh as the foreign kingdom to meet with Putin and Zelensky? When Khashoggi was murdered, of all the worlds' leaders Trump alone refused to acknowledge that MBS had been behind the journalist's killing, even after the CIA confirmed the Crown Prince's involvement. Instead, Trump kept insisting, "We may never know all of the facts surrounding the murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi..." And then once MBS went on 60 Minutes and took responsibility for the murder, using the old dodge that any atrocity that happened on his watch was ultimately his responsibility, but denying any personal responsibility for Khashoggi's death, Trump followed up, saying, "The United States intends to remain a steadfast partner of Saudi Arabia to ensure the interests of our country...Very simply it is called America First!" Which means that when the Senate voted to halt an estimated $450 billion worth of US arms shipments to Saudi Arabia, Trump vetoed the Senate resolution. As he later said to Chuck Todd who interviewed him on Meet the Press, "Take their money. Take their money, Chuck." And to Bob Woodward about MBS, he boasted, "I saved his ass."

It's no surprise, then, that during Trump's visit this May to the Middle East, he promised his hosts that the US will "no longer be giving you lectures on how to live." Meaning human rights are out, business is in. Accordingly, Trump revelled in the pomp and circumstance. One or another Emir, Sultan, Sheik, King and Crown Prince rolled out royal red and purple carpets accompanied by trumpet fanfares and 21-gun salutes. Red Tesla Cybertrucks escorted Trump's motorcade, traditional dances performed by male "warriors" and hair-flipping young women provoked a Trumpian fist pump, 17 miles of red, white and blue LED lights installed on the facade of the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest needle skyscraper, turned it into an uber-MAGA, star-filled hypodermic. Gifted a single drop of Murban, a light sweet crude, Trump joked, "The highest quality of oil there is on the planet, and they only gave me a drop of it...so I'm not thrilled." Accompanied by a raft of billionaires, including the now banished Elon Musk, Trump signed MOUs purportedly worth $600 billion, though The New York Times reported less than half that number in actual deals announced by the White House.

And of all the deals announced, which was the one that most excited Trump? Not AI or energy or construction projects. No, it was the Saudi promise to donate two endangered Arabian leopard cubs to the Washington National Zoo. No doubt seeing themselves as fellow apex predators, both Trump and MBS, in conversation with Brandie Smith, the head of the Zoo, seemed fascinated by the cats, how big they are, what and how much they eat, how dangerous they might be, but especially about their "personalities." According to The Times, when Joe Maldonado-Passage—the infamous Tiger King now serving 21 years for a botched murder-for-hire attempt against an animal-rights activist—heard the news about the cubs, he started to troll for a pardon, promising Trump, whom he passionately supports, that he would love to be their caretaker. "I think it would be absolutely amazing if he would put some endangered cats like that around the White House grounds,” said Maldonado-Passage. “Putin," he added, "loves tigers. You always see him with pictures of young tigers. So why shouldn't Trump have them?"

15

A month after our return to the United States, the State Department cuts off all funding for cross-cultural exchange, deeming that such programs "'no longer effectuate agency priorities," nor align with "agency priorities and national interest." This brings to an abrupt end 58 years of writers and artists from countries all over the world meeting face to face. It's a slippery business, cultural exchange—but when you're talking one on one, really talking, the way one does in poems, or at least the ones I want to read, there's something more enigmatic going on than a surreptitious attempt to push "soft power." To meet one person, either in friendliness or wariness or both, is to risk seeing yourself in the other's eyes, and not in the usual self-flattering light. As a young female Iraqi university student once said to me, Mr. Sleigh, do you really think you can escape your ideological formation as an American? I fumbled, stumbled and finally said, "Well, no, not completely. But I trust the language to carry me places that my political convictions won't reach. All I can say for sure is that if the language tells me to go there, I go there."

16

From Jeddah on the coast we've driven two hours up to Taif, a small summer resort city a mile high in the Sarawat Mountains. All around me and my fellow writers wafts the smell of roses and rose water. Petals of roses flutter down around us as the man singing to welcome us to the rose factory reaches into a woven basket and showers us with more and more petals until the floor is covered, our shoes are covered, the petals piling up and up, a little blizzard of petals that finally come to an end when the man stops singing. Now, we're laughing at how the singer points to a photo of himself on the cultural center wall. In the picture he's a young man with movie-star good looks—but now he's a stoutish old man with horn-rimmed glasses who nonetheless adopts the same pose he struck in the photo, heightening the contrast between youth and age with a good-humored, self-deprecating shrug. And I wonder if the song sounds even more beautiful now because of the subtler registers of feeling that the old singer's voice, a little gravelly, not quite as supple anymore, could never have reached when he was young.

When the man is done singing, we all pile into a van and drive to a cultural center's recording studio to hear a master oud player, the strings percussive with a metallic timbre, the notes slowly accelerating until the man's fingers blur on the fretboard, overtones mounting in the room where we listen, dumbfounded and absorbed, grateful to be here to witness such skill, courting a caffeine high as we sip our second or third small delicate cup of rose-water flavored coffee. The musician shuts his eyes and bends his head down toward his instrument, he and the oud in communion made all the deeper by the overtones going out of synch as they rise in the stillness until it becomes impossible to tell which is more expressive, the dissonance, the harmonies, or the two together.

Oil, the Tree of Life, and The Kingdom

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