Μια Αμερικανίδα συγγραφέας μιλά για την Σαουδική Αραβία όπου μεγάλωσε, τον Τραμπ και άλλα

Keija Parssinen on her Saudi childhood, angry poems, and a wannabe despot

On the NYR Daily this week

On Friday we published Keija Parssinen’s memoir about her upbringing in Saudi Arabia, where her father worked for Aramco, the oil giant that has, in effect, defined the US–Saudi relationship ever since the end of World War II. Her essay tackles the profound difficulty of reconciling the many ambiguities of that experience: idyllic childhood vs. colonial privilege, love of country and its people vs. transactional geopolitical alliance, democracy vs. autocracy, human rights vs. theocratic repression, and so on. All through the filter of family and home.

Photo by Kris Brunelli

This is material that Parssinen, an Iowa Writers’ Workshop alumna who today teaches writing at Kenyon College, drew upon for her first novel, The Ruins of Us (2012). And it is the subject to which she has returned in the novel she’s currently working on (her third; a second, The Unraveling of Mercy Louis, set in the US, appeared in 2015). Parssinen’s family moved back to America permanently in 1992, when she was twelve, and she was raised in Texas. Then she studied at Princeton and has spent time in Brooklyn, Tulsa, Iowa City, and Baton Rouge. She and her family now live in Ohio.

“Home is where you spent your formative years,” Keija told me via email. For her, it’s an improbable-seeming combination of Saudi Arabia and Texas hill country: “I will always feel an ache in the chest when I see photos of those places.” The legacy of compound life in Dhahran is especially powerful and poignant.

“The essence of that experience, for me, is of closeness and community,” she said. “It’s why Aramco brats are so protective—almost delusional—about our childhoods. Because we loved growing up ‘Aramco.’ It’s painful for me to excavate the politics of the experience, because I had such a wonderful childhood, surrounded by people who are still some of my dearest friends in the world.”

That phenomenon might be familiar not just to other “Aramco brats,” but to any child of a foreign-posted family, whether with the military, a multinational, the diplomatic service, or an NGO group. As Keija describes in her essay, her political education came later, forcing her reckoning with the US–Saudi relationship’s complicated nexus of exploitation, co-dependence, transactional cynicism, mutual misrecognition, and suppressed hostility, as it has evolved through decades.

The latest iteration of that alliance—the close ties between the de facto Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or “MBS,” and US President Donald Trump—has taken us to a particularly dark place, she noted: “Bin Salman is more dangerous than any previous Saudi leader because he knows how to sing the West’s siren songs of progress and business, while employing the same old medieval tactics against his people.”

A paradox of this moment is that America’s greater independence in gas and oil might have created more opportunity for detachment, even pressure for reform and a better human rights record in the Kingdom. But that is not the current direction of US–Saudi relations.

“We have a wannabe despot in the White House,” said Keija, “who would probably love to take a lesson from MBS’s playbook on how to silence criticism in the press and on social media. So we’re stuck with this sick, hypocritical show.”

Parssinen in fact embraces anger, frustration, and fear as engines of her fiction. Writing is necessary to her, she said, precisely for the way “it forces us to both confront ourselves and the world we live in.” Given recent controversies about cultural appropriation, I wanted to know how she navigates her way through these questions of who gets to tell which stories.

“The conversation about appropriation, which has been going on for years, is absolutely necessary and productive,” Keija said. “I think readers and writers are right to demand that if you do venture beyond your identity, you not only do so with care, respect, and research, but also with great technical skill. That’s why I’m writing slowly, methodically, trying to get the story right.

“I write about Saudi because I feel compelled to—it is an indelible part of my family history,” she went on. “But I also do so with trepidation, knowing that whatever I write will be heavily scrutinized for authenticity.”

Her first experiments in writing, “as a depressed college student,” involved short poems—“because they helped me work through knotty things, like my parents’ divorce and my mom’s alcoholism,” she said. “I learned how capacious art was, and that thrilled me.”

Today, Parssinen witnesses that same sense of excitement and discovery in her creative writing students. Being on the other side of the fence, as an editor at The Kenyon Review, has also been salutary.

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“I’ve realized that a rejection doesn’t mean the work isn’t good. It’s all about taste and timing, really,” she said. “Every writer needs a healthy dose of good luck—the right reader at the right time.”