A boy meets a girl. They fall in love. They decide they want to be together. These simple ingredients constitute the plot of Addonia's debut. What saves the work from being just another sensitively realised coming-of-age story is that it is set in Saudi Arabia during the 1980s, and what would otherwise be a straightforward rite of passage is fraught with terrible difficulty.
When we meet him, 20- year-old Naser is working as a car-wash attendant in Jeddah. The product of a liberal upbringing in his native Eritrea, from which he and his younger brother fled ten years before, Naser is privately appalled by the intolerance around him, based as it is on Wahhibist ideology, which insists on the absolute segregation of men and women. For the handsome young man, desperate to find a girl he can call his own, such a view is anathema. Nor is he safe from the sexual overtures of other men.
In the street one day, a black-veiled woman drops a piece of paper at Naser's feet that turns out to be a love letter. From this moment on, his life changes for ever, as he and the girl he names Fiore - or “flower” - embark on a dangerous flirtation that could end, if it is discovered, in their deaths. Fiore takes steps to identify herself to her lover in the ranks of women in their black abayas. This she does by wearing pink high-heeled shoes, symbolising the contrast between the restrictive regime under which the young couple are living, and the sexual freedom to which they aspire.
As Naser and his habibati prepare to risk everything for love, he reflects on the absurdity of the system that has placed them under restraint: “It was a gloomy world where everyone feared something, a world where laughter was a sin...(and) where looking at a woman's face...was a serious crime.” The author allows his indignation to express itself through the thoughts of his characters, making us see their predicament as our own.
The Consequences Of Love by Sulaiman Addonia
Chatto & Windus, £12.99 Buy the book here
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