Riyadh March 8-10

In Riyadh on Sunday March 8 I hung out at the hotel, chatting with other book fair guests and getting caught up on email and internet browsing. In the afternoon I went to the book fair, and attended the two evening cultural panels on women in literature and on intellectual property. The book fair had hundreds of booths for publishers from all around the Arab world, but none from anywhere else, except for a small booth for Brazil, which was being highlighted this year. The exhibition hall was a large, fully servicable, but strictly utilitarian building, a contrast to all of the other ornate public buildings I have seen in Riyadh.

The book fair

Back at the hotel, I had dinner and extended conversation with other book fair guests, assorted Ministry of Culture people and members of the Saudi consultative assembly; we had a very interesting discussion about intellectual property, including what was the best Arabic translation for “creative commons”.

The next day Monday March 9 in the morning I went with some of the book fair guests to the National Museum and then the National Archives building, two more fancy public buildings. In the afternoon I went to al-Dar‘iyah, the first Saudi capital a short distance out of Riyadh. The long-abandoned mud brick town is undergoing large scale development as a tourist heritage site. We saw an exhibit and then a small portion of the site under reconstruction. I went to al-Dar‘iyah with some Saudi women from the Ministry of Culture as the only man in the group.

The Saudi women’s group at al-Dar‘iyah

I have not been in Saudi Arabia long enough yet to understand the rules for mixing or segregating the sexes. Mostly, the sexes are completely segregated, as for example at the book fair, where there are times for men only. For the cultural panel discussions, the women were seated at the back of the tent-like hall, behind a partition. The panel discussions were broadcast via closed-circuit television into the women’s section; the woman speakers were in the back women’s section and only their voices were broadcast into the men’s section.

My session on Jerusalem was that evening, after an earlier session about Tayyib Saleh, the recently deceased Sudanese author. I spoke in Arabic for 15 minutes about what has not yet been studied about Jerusalem. Adnan al-Bakhit, from Jordan, Muhammad Ghosheh, my Palestinian colleague, and another woman, were the other guest speakers in my session. I had dinner back at the hotel, before leaving for the airport for my flight to India, the next segment of my travels.

Given all of the elaborate and ornate public buildings in Riyadh, the airport is oddly utilitarian and cramped for space. At roughly the same time in the early hours of the morning there are flights to Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Calcutta and Columbo, so the much too narrow space between the security x-ray machines and the check-in counters was filled to overflowing with hoards of people and luggage, in the worst case of airport congestion I have experienced. I was virtually the only non-South Asian to be seen and I was the only non-Indian on the flight to Hyderabad.