The Consequences of Love

Sulaiman Addonia's novel, The Consequences of Love, is set in the Saudi Arabia of the 80s and ticks all the boxes - Middle East setting, veiled woman on the cover, blurb on forbidden love in the desert kingdom - which makes it au courant. It is not the kind of book I usually pick up, however pick up I did and found that Addonia's writing style, pace and plotting is so brisk and fluid that the novel is hard to put down.

Briefly, it is the coming of age tale of an immigrant lad (part Eritrean, part Ethiopian) in Jeddah. Being Jeddah, the tale includes homosexuality, religious police, beheadings, lashings and also a near religious, passionate love affair at its centre. And it is very free of the hip irony and cynicism that is so essential to modern literature. As a result there are a fair few sections of florid sentiment and prose so that the novel at times seems on the verge of being an overblown romance. Parts of it are also simplistic, it is in some ways an immigrant view of the country (you wonder for example if the country has an educated class, how people negotiate the rigid rules of the society and the like). But it is so imbued with a certain passion and feeling, an honesty as it were, of what it is to be an immigrant seeking love in Saudi Arabia that this overcomes any defects that the novel may possess.

Addonia’s hero (let’s use an old fashioned word here), Naser, flees the war torn region of Eritrea as a child – he is in fact sent by his mother – and ends up in Saudi Arabia with his uncle and brother. He is eventually abandoned by both and goes to work in a café where young waiters serve as temporary sexual partners before the patrons get married. A love letter gets dropped near his feet, it is from a young girl who Naser nicknames Fiore and she is also a non-Saudi. She wears pink shoes as an identifier in the “black and white movie that is Jeddah” - the book in fact uses the colour motif very well with the pink shoes standing for the vibrancy of life itself amidst its denial. The novel then traces the fervent evolution of this romance through love letters and secret meetings marked of course with the tension and subterfuge required to sustain the romance in a country where open contact between men and women is minimal. In doing so, it also provides a vivid portrait of Jeddah itself.

Though the central romance is embedded in a number of incidents that deal with the indoctrination of young men by the muttawas, the men who volunteer for the mujahideen in Afghanistan, the homosexuality amongst men who are denied access to women until marriage, the shabby treatment of immigrants in Saudi Arabia and the repression of women in Saudi society, Addonia never loses sight of the love affair. The book is as a consequence intensely romantic and erotic. And the more so because it requires extreme ingenuity on the part of the lovers to bring about their moments together. It is also very idealistic, purity lies not in the denial of love but its consummation. Fiore herself is an intelligent woman and one who feels and cannot deny the siren call of life, her virtual enslavement by the culture she lives in is meant to be affecting and it is. The other female character in the book, Naser’s mother, is equally strongly drawn, if anything Addonia rather heavily underlines the limited options for women in many societies.

I was a little surprised that I was moved by the novel. I think this has largely to do with the fact that it is heartfelt and sincere and all the tired tropes take on new meaning.