‘The Girl Who Fell to Earth,’ by Sophia Al

Advertisement

Supported by

By Dalia Sofer

The neon skyline of the Gulf Arab states encroaching on the Arabian Desert forms the preternatural backdrop to Sophia Al-Maria’s memoir, “The Girl Who Fell to Earth.” Born to an American mother from Puyallup, near Seattle, and to a Bedouin Qatari father, Al-Maria spent her childhood shuttling between the “soggy blades of grass” of the Pacific Northwest and “the pockmarked moonscape of construction pits and cranes” in the Qatari capital of Doha.

This is a tale of strangers in strange lands: of Sophia’s father, Matar, once a Bedouin boy glued to the communal television in the courtyard of the Al-Dafira tribe’s one-room mosque, “fantasizing about space travel,” who, years later, flies west, bypassing Mecca and landing in Seattle, “Home of the Space Needle”; of Sophia’s mother, Gale, who converts to Islam in order to marry Matar, “grudgingly” agreeing “to try to pray if Matar agreed to learn to swim”; and of Sophia herself, who navigates the chasms between cultures and places, tribal allegiances and interior spaces.

Conflict takes many shapes in this memoir, but the most striking is the tension between modernity and tradition in the Gulf states. It is not surprising then that Al-Maria has now made her home in Doha, where she is researching “Gulf futurism” at the Arab Museum of Modern Art.

Citing the early-20th-century Futurist movement that glorified technology, speed, industrial cities, youth and violence, surveyors of Gulf futurism see urban planning in the Gulf as part of a movement too, espousing utopian ideals of modernity and prosperity. “Every week,” she writes, there was “more dust cresting off the construction sites, and higher floors added to the grove of young skyscrapers shooting up around us.” She begins fearing heights and has dreams “first of plummeting to the ground, then of plunging up into the sky.”

The Gulf’s futuristic architecture is accompanied by equally surreal interiors. Of the Doha Sheraton, completed in 1982 and designed by William Pereira, Al-­Maria writes: “The lobby was a seductive Islamic fantasy-future of hexagonal mirrors and disco-lit elevators.” At its center “was the largest standing chandelier in the world: a crystal palm tree.” Later, awaiting the outcome of a quarrel between her parents — which leads to their eventual separation — Sophia walks through the hotel, listening to “the hum of invisible machines running the mother ship of the building,” spies on her parents arguing in a cafe with a “player-less piano,” gets lost among “brassy ­mirrors” and ends up in an empty restaurant with a panoramic view of a “pink and copper” sandstorm.

Through the cracks of this science-fiction landscape, Al-Maria observes a wasteland. Efforts to green the terrain fail: “Grass parched out after a single afternoon,” and “trees died still girdled in their shipping mesh.” Houses, not yet a decade old, crumble. “The wrinkles of the Gulf were premature,” she writes, “and showed in everything I looked at.”

The Gulf is a region still mysterious to the West, whose extent of exposure rarely surpasses glimpses of sheiks attending a summit, or abaya-clad ladies getting into a Rolls-Royce with Hermès shopping bags. Al-Maria is searching for a deeper understanding in her paternal land, where others are digging only for oil. In addition to writing, she is a filmmaker: she won an award at the Doha Tribeca Film Festival in 2009 for her one-minute short, “The Racer.” She has also created “The Gulf Colloquy Compendium” — an evolving online dictionary inspired by Douglas Coupland’s “Dictionary of the Near Future.”

Although her vigor is to be admired, the memoir could have benefited from some restraint: metaphors of extraterrestrial landscapes, while evocative, are too numerous and distracting. Also valuable would have been a more profound discussion of both Bedouin history and identity politics in the Gulf. But then again, as Al-­Maria herself writes, she didn’t care “anymore about what Edward Said said,” with his argument that Western perceptions of Middle Eastern cultures are based on false assumptions. Hers is a more visceral exploration. She offers us an original outlook on ancient ground — what any artist hopes to achieve.

THE GIRL WHO FELL TO EARTH

A Memoir

By Sophia Al-Maria

271 pp. Harper Perennial. Paper, $14.99.

Dalia Sofer is the author of the novel “The Septembers of Shiraz.”

Advertisement