The Arab growing in me

Sometimes people ask me why in the world I am so interested in Saudi Arabia.

There are multiple factors but I know that one of them relates to my own childhood.
 

See, I am French, but I am not a Parisian. I grew up in a small village near the German border. Only later in my life, I moved to Paris. I dressed like a Parisian, acted like a Parisian, but deep down, I remained the girl from the small village. Now after a decade in Dubai, four days in Paris are really all I can take before the negativity and the judgmental idealism crawls under my skin. 

Deep down, I am a girl from that small village and something in that quite conservative childhood clicks with Saudi Arabia.
 

Let me start by saying I didn’t like my childhood very much. Boredom was a huge part of it. As a child, I wasn’t interested in nature very much and it seems that’s pretty much all there was.
 

When I was a child, we would go to church a lot. There was a mass for children on wednesdays when we were off school, that was fun. And then on weekends I would go with my father. In those days women would sit on one side, men on the other side. As a child, I would sit with my father on the men’s side. Don’t know why but I always preferred it there.

As a child, I also watched television a whole lot, it was like an open window on a world I could only imagine. But the reality was that there wasn’t much in terms of choice. Three French channels, plus the one from Luxembourg, plus the ones from Germany I never watched (except for Melrose Place). That’s all there was. Sometimes I discuss this with friends and I wonder how the hell we survived 52 week ends a year like that. 

Boredom really was a big part of my childhood. I liked going to church not because I felt strongly about God but only because I felt joy listening to the singing. And joy in those days came in short supply.

We certainly had nothing like a religious police but there was my grandma. My grandma inspected us before I left the house to see if I looked okay, and well, that judgment wasn’t always kind. It fascinated me in those days how much my grandma worried about what the neighbors would think, while it was obvious to me the neighbors had much better things to do than judging us.

Sometimes, when French people judge Saudi Arabia, I have a feeling they are judging my own childhood. My mother worked but not all moms did. My mother drove but not all moms did. None of my grandmas drove. My grandpa on my father’s side encouraged his wife to get the driving license but she’s the one who refused probably because she couldn’t be bothered with the classes. When my grandpa died, my grandma started taking those bus trips with her friends. She’s been to more countries in Europe than I have. My grandma on my father's side, I have to say, was quite fearless.

Except for those wednesdays I spent with my grandma, and the sunday night dinner, I didn’t like my childhood very much, boredom was just too thick. And I suppose some people don’t like their life in Saudi Arabia right now for the same reasons.
 

But in recent years, since I became a mother, that childhood has made a come back on me. First my son who is a Dubai kid by all standards loves going back there, because there are forests and ladybugs and lakes and mud, whatever a 7-old might be interested in.

Last year, I found out there was a going to be capoeira summer camp for children over the summer. I was blown away to realize someone has managed to convince a Brazilian capoeira master to come to the village to teach that class for the kids. I couldn’t help thinking how different my childhood would have been if this kind of stuff had been around when I was a kid. Those are the little things that make a difference, I thought, the little things that give you the feeling you have the same opportunities as anybody else.

Overall the village has become more friendly, there a food truck selling pizzas on weekends now. That alone is huge. 

Also for years now we’ve always had this thing in the old factory that closed in the early 70s. It's a center that keeps the art of glass-making alive. You can go there and understand how glass is made, why it was made in this particular region for a few centuries (that’s how the village started in the 17th century) and you can watch how they blow glass. One of my high school friends runs it and I admire how he was able to grow this over the years, attracting international artists and designers.

It’s been there for years but now it’s becoming something major because they got money from the government and from different foundations to make it a proper thing. Some people are worried about the tourists who will flock in. I think it’s exciting.
 

Now that I am an adult, especially someone living in Dubai, I quite obviously see what a true gem the nature surrounding the village actually is. People there don’t see it because they live in it, it fascinates me.
 

But what I like most there is that people know me. The village has one cafe, I go there in the morning when I am there. Mostly I am the only woman, you might catch a glimpse of a tourist on a blue moon. The lady who runs the place refuses to set up the WiFi, she cracks me up, quite a character.

Last year at the cafe, I started talking with this man, I didn’t know who I was, but he was obviously someone from the village. I didn’t know him but he knew me. He told me, you are Bernard’s daughter. I said I was. My father passed away 5 years ago and it still moves me to tears when I meet people who will not only remember him but talk fondly of him.

That’s also one thing that connects the village to Saudi Arabia. There, I am my father’s daughter, my grandfather’s granddaughter. My family is known because I comes from a certain place. My father grew up in a village but recently someone argued with me that my father was not from this village because his family actually came from another neighboring village. All those villages we are talking about are within 15 kilometers. It takes me longer to go and pick up my son from school in Dubai than to go from my parents house to the village where my father’s family is originally from.

This shit used to drive me nuts. I couldn’t understand why these things were so important to people. 

To this day, any conversation with my 94-year old grandma starts by a 5-minute intro on who everyone is. Only after she’s understood who a person is, who her parents are, who he or she is related to, and precisely where they are from, only then you can start telling your story. And regularly there would be mention of people who married strangers, meaning people who come from 100 kilometers away.
 

It used to drive me nuts.
 

For years, I was Nadine Laubacher, and I thought that was enough to qualify me. But the older I get and the more I realise that those things are actually important. Since my father passed away, I’ve had this crazy idea that I am now the heiress to my family, I have had this idea that I needed to be up to my family’s reputation and as crazy as it sounds, I can totally relate to the pressure the Royals must have to be up to their family’s reputation.
 

The older I get and the more I realize that actually I am my father’s daughter and my grandfather’s granddaughter. Ana Nadine bint Bernard bin Marcel. Ana min Meisenthal.
 

I am telling you, there’s an Arab growing in me.