Red Sea International School* was the last place I attended in Saudi Arabia. At times, I thought I’d never sit in a classroom again. Even if I did go back to an educational institution, I knew I wouldn’t let myself fully be there because I could be spat out again at any moment.
Meanwhile, Dad managed to find several teachers who would either teach us at home or let us come over to their house to take lessons. He often spent all evening around the Aziziyah neighborhood so he could be ready to pick us up from one teacher’s place and drop us off at the next. Those teachers were terrific, but I always felt like I was missing something.
Eventually, I managed to finish my secondary education this way. But to register for the IGCSE exams I studied for, I needed an I.D. or passport. The middleman my dad was paying to do our paperwork wasn’t moving fast enough, so at some point, my uncle in Ethiopia had to get involved. My dad and his big brother worked with the embassy to get me an Ethiopian passport to verify my identity. That’s how I managed to finally register as a private student—and I’d gotten good grades as well.
But it was like I hit an ‘educational glass ceiling’ right then: there was no going to school for me after that. The ‘Saudiziation’ process was initiated to get more Saudi employees into the private sector. But it wasn’t just what it appeared to be on the surface: the king had announced new rules that would make foreigners’ stay in the kingdom even more difficult. One of those rules was students need to show proof that they’ve been in school for the past three years upon applying to a new school.
Because of this, even the children who had to stay out of school for some time while their fathers fixed their legal status couldn’t finally apply to a school again once their status was fixed.
Disillusioned with school, I dived into art.
I started exploring forms of self-expression I’d been enthralled with for a while. Mom was supportive of my endeavors; she’d often walk with me to a nearby stationary where I’d buy new materials I could experiment with. I think all the employees there were from Bangladesh, and they were wonderful to us. Sometimes, they’d let us take an art supply even when we were short on money (I never stopped sucking at math).
I opened a Facebook page to post my artwork, auditioned for Arabs Got Talent and connected with artists worldwide online. But I never had as much hope in my drawing skills as I did in Shadda Gallery. I thought: my art may take me places my grades never could’ve. The lacking paperwork that prevented me from going to school also stopped me from getting a credit card account that would help me sell my art online.
But at least there were more loopholes in the creative world.
When I walked into Shadda Gallery with my mother one day, we found the owner, Ghada, almost immediately and she was excited about my ability to draw with sand (and Arabs Got Talent audition credentials).
Later, she introduced me to a Philipino artist who made sublime drawings with pastel sticks. I also met young Saudi artists who experimented with various media and a Sudanese man who worked with Arabic calligraphy and joked about our countries’ issues over the new dam. I was warmly embraced by those people and everyone else who visited us.
Ghada invited me to perform short sand drawing shows to open the art exhibitions she hosted, and I was thrilled to do so.
Sometimes, my opening show diverted too much attention from the main event. By then, most of the people I encountered had only watched sand-animation performances on Arabs Got Talent, so mine was a novelty act.
Some people even mistook me for the Omani talent show performer herself. I guess we did share a few characteristics: we had the same caramel skin tone, demure disposition and were around the same age. When I cleared up their misunderstanding, a question that usually followed was where I was from.
‘Dad’s from Ethiopia; Mom’s from Eritrea’
‘Oh, I thought you were a Saudi’, I would often get.
‘No. I was born and raised here. But I’m not from here.’
Sometimes, the strangers would argue that since I was born there, I was technically a Saudi. I chuckled at that suggestion, trying not to be swept away by their friendliness.
I’d been trying to avoid forming any roots there for so long. I knew it was only a matter of time before I had to pull it all out, and I didn’t want that to hurt too much. I knew that outside that mall’s walls was a whole different reality.
People were trying to stay home for fear of being stopped and searched for the paperwork they didn’t have at the moment. Many foreigners’ children had stopped going to school, many had been waiting in long lines under the sun to get their paperwork fixed outside their embassies, and companies were scrambling to hire Saudis to reach the new Saudi-to-foreigner employment ratio set by the government.
This was the winter-era of the Arab Spring—so many things had been changing in governments all over the Arab world. We foreigners and their offspring happened to be caught up in the repercussions of that. There were foreigners who engaged in harmful practices and had to be caught and others who made no effort to legalize their status. But many of us were just trying to lead honest lives in a country we weren’t needed in anymore.
I never let go of that information, or the thought that being interrogated by the wrong people in that gallery might have gotten me arrested. So, I counted on people’s assumptions: an illegal foreigner couldn’t possibly have the guts to perform in the presence of media personnel and all these Saudis, right?
And in that gallery, I was surrounded by people who commended my art and encouraged me to keep going. I received a prize for my participation there, a gift card from the CEO of Red Sea Mall, and some media coverage. So, I couldn’t help but imagine an alternate timeline: what if I married one of the Saudis there and lived in the kingdom—forever? I craved their acceptance more than I was willing to admit and I kept thinking that it wasn’t those Saudi citizens’ fault their government was making it so hard for people like me to exist.
Still, I knew that summers like that one don’t last.
By the end of the season, the young Saudis would go back to school and wherever else they were before the summer, and the number of people in that part of the mall quickly dwindled. I don’t know what I had expected from an experience like that, but I didn’t want to go back to where I was: collecting newspaper clippings of the latest ‘Saudizization’ updates in a collage book, watching busses arrive to take students to school and experimenting with new media.
One day, Dad suggested that I go to Al-Madi International School* and try to apply with just my IGCSE exam results. As per usual, I hadn’t slept that night. I wore my abaya and scarf and went with mom to talk to whoever was in charge.
There were already girls crowding the corridors and the kind of constant background noise that seems to be a feature of schools everywhere.
Mom and I were led to a beautiful, olive-skinned woman on the ground floor—she was the highest-ranking non-Saudi in the school.
I told her my story: I couldn’t bring transcripts for my last three years in school because I couldn’t go to school because I didn’t have legal papers then: But I had done the exam I was studying towards privately and was qualified to move to the next grade.
She listened intently and seemed empathetic. But she gave us an apologetic no.
I argued that I could never meet the current requirements because I can’t get back the three school years I lost waiting for my papers.
But before I knew it, my face felt warm and our back-and-forth had caught the attention of the whole office.
She didn’t budge, and soon enough, Mom and I had to go.
I didn’t want to leave that woman upset. It wasn’t her job to fight my case or make any exceptions. But something I eventually learned is that we will never improve the circumstances of the people around us if we’re only doing the bare minimum and just doing what our job entails on paper. Whenever we can, we have to reach out to the people who slip through the cracks, the people whose stories aren’t clearly laid out on paper.
But very few people do this—most of us are overwhelmed with what’s already on our plate and doing such things rarely serves our interests. It would take several more years for me to be emboldened by Someone to go beyond myself, and begin to love others as I love myself.
At the time though, I felt so resentful. I wanted to bring up Malala, the teenager from her country who was shot for going to school against all odds. I wondered whether she saw any parallels between my battle and hers. I would’ve never risked my life to go to school, but with the new rules they were making, I may have never gone back to school again.
So one night, I sent an opinion piece in reply to an article about Malala. It was published in two of the leading English-language newspapers in Saudi Arabia. I argued that some of the laws in place made it impossible for foreigners’ children trying to return to school and that something should be done about this.
In the online version of the newspaper, there were others who had different opinions or experienced something similar as well.
But that was all it came to. That opinion piece neither brought trouble nor relief. My words had jumped on a scene and fizzled away.
So, I began to think of an escape. If I couldn’t go to school, pursue a proper career in the arts or anything else that matters, I needed to start from scratch elsewhere. I started imagining going to a detention center by myself and requesting deportation to my dad’s homeland. I had a passport that proved where my father was from and I think the lack of my paperwork warranted deportation. But what neighborhood did my uncle say he lived in? I wondered. Where in Addis Ababa would I go first? I don’t even know the language.
One day, I asked Dad if my sister and I could leave. To my surprise, he seemed to have considered this as well—but he seemed relieved I was the one who brought up the idea (he couldn’t leave yet). By late 2014, he had gone to Ethiopia to arrange everything we needed to go back to school, and my uncle agreed to receive us. By then, there was a new kind of document that Saudi-born foreigners could use to travel without being held in a detention center first. It was a one-way pass to a parent’s birthplace.
So, we took it and flew away. I couldn’t wait to start over.