The Others, by Seba Al-Herz. Seven Stories Press, 328 pages, $17.95 paper.
Queer readers are likely to be drawn first to this novel’s Sapphic content, as a young Shi’a woman attending a girl’s college in Saudi Arabia becomes physically and emotionally entangled with other women. The nameless character’s flirtations alternate between exhilarating and ambivalent, explosive and shameful – reactions not at all at odds with the process of same-sex sexual initiation in the Western world. Self-discovery is self-discovery, after all. But in this revolutionary novel, said to be an Arabic-language first, there’s a culturally fascinating contextual twist: Seba Al-Herz (the pseudonym for a 26-year-old Saudi writer) couches her character’s hesitant nascent liberation in the real world of Saudi Arabian religious sectarianism. The narrator is a member of the minority Shi’I, subjected to economic and political marginalization by the dominant Sunni of Saudi Arabia, according to a trenchant historical afterword by the translator, also not identified by name. In that sense, she’s a double outsider – twice “the other,” distanced from her family by her sexual adventures and from her country by her minority status.
by Richard Labonte
