GULF

A harrowing account of women’s lives in the Arabian Gulf.

Ogrodnik—a filmmaker and former dean at NYU Abu Dhabi—traces the lives of five woman negotiating violence, misogyny, factionalism, and terror. Dounia, a pregnant Saudi newlywed, faces stultifying days of isolation when her husband moves them to a sterile luxury compound in Ras al-Khair, a new “dream” city, far from the life of relative freedom and comfort she had enjoyed in Riyadh. Flora, a Filipina reeling from the loss of a beloved infant in the destruction of a violent storm, attempts to support her remaining child by joining the legion of women who emigrate to Saudi Arabia to become domestic workers. There, she becomes intimately entwined in Dounia’s domestic unhappiness. Zeinah, a Syrian native from Raqqa, weds an ISIS militant in a marriage arranged by her father in an attempt to secure a measure of protection for his family. Justine, a white American, takes up residence in the United Arab Emirates to curate a falconry exhibit for the new Sheik Zayed National Museum. Eskedare, a teenage Ethiopian, abandons her girlhood dreams to find herself working as a bathroom attendant in the central bus station in Abu Dhabi, where her life collides (literally) with Justine’s. In a cyclical narrative that delivers the women’s stories in a series of cinematic episodes, Ogrodnik’s debut novel offers a chronicle of women’s lives constrained by forces including patriarchal control, cultural misunderstanding, economic disparity, political fervor, and garden-variety jealousy and bigotry. The plight of emigrant domestic workers is sharply portrayed, as are the myriad compromises and adjustments made by women facing life in an environment more repressive than the ones they’re accustomed to. The animating force in their common unending struggle is captured in Flora’s musing that “hope is a rebel.”

An unflinching recitation of everyday horrors.