Abu Dhabi odyssey brings mixed blessings
Sask. nurse featured in three short stories
Speaking from her home in Hamilton, Ont., Denise Roig sounds every inch the homesick former Montrealer.
“If you’ve lived for 20 years in Montreal, southern Ontario is as foreign a country as Abu Dhabi is,” said the New York-born writer, a Montreal resident from the late 1980s until 2008.
It’s not a random parallel Roig is drawing. From 2008 to 2011, Roig, with her husband, Postmedia news editor Raymond Beauchemin, and their teenage daughter, Georgia, lived in — yes — Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. (Another daughter, Ariel Tarr, stayed in Canada but did come to visit.)
They were there as the result of a whirlwind process in which Beauchemin was offered and accepted a charter position as deputy foreign editor for a new newspaper, the brainchild of the local ruling sheiks, called The National.
They’re back in Canada now because, as Roig says, “The story of the paper is the story of the country.
“A lot of what happens is that there is this lovely idea and then no one to attend to it. The attention span (is) so short, the tolerance for any frustration so low.”
The newspaper, she says, “began with so much hope — the managing editor at the time greeted the staff on the very first day with ‘Welcome to the last great newspaper adventure.’ Money was being funnelled in. The dream was that it was going to be the New York Times of the Middle East. But it became apparent right away that they were able to do very little. Within six months, the clampdown began.”
Constrictions of censorship and gradually shrinking budget notwithstanding, Roig did manage to freelance for The National on a near full-time basis, writing various local-interest stories, as well as a short-lived food column, the last gig a perfect one given that she had trained as a pastry chef and written about food for the Montreal Gazette.
“Having all those story assignments certainly opened up that world to me in a way that wouldn’t have happened if I had been a housewife,” Roig says of her steep learning curve.
With her dawning local knowledge, though, came an unavoidable reckoning with the country’s dark side, most starkly in the form of the appalling conditions suffered by legions of foreign labourers, domestics and service-industry workers — exploitation meted out not only by the Emiratis, but routinely by the expat white-collar community.
“Volunteering in a shelter run by the Indonesian embassy for nannies and housemaids who had fled their employers — that’s where I really saw what was happening beyond the lovely speeches about grand economic projects,” she said. “And remember, I wasn’t a nanny, I wasn’t an Indian labourer. I was a white western woman, someone to impress with how progressive, how humane, how hospitable (the country) was.”
All of those seemingly irreconcilable impressions have now borne fruit in the form of the collection Brilliant (Signature Editions), 15 standalone stories that, as a group, add up to a dazzling and frequently sobering top-tobottom portrait of a society. For all its roots in the author’s firsthand observations, though, Brilliant shouldn’t be mistaken for a lightly fictionalized travel journal. As good writers do, Roig has transmuted what she saw and felt into art.
“The hard thing in fiction, always, is subtlety,” Roig said. “It’s what one aims at.”
In this case, happily, it is also what has been achieved.
While stories like Fridays by the Pool in Khalidiyah nail the social rituals of expat professionals with near-reportorial immediacy, Roig’s gift is especially apparent in stories whose protagonists are farthest from the author’s life experience — empathetic leaps like The Knowledge, about a Pakistani cab driver ferrying a local rich kid, and the brilliant National Day, about the teenage daughter of Indian doctors. A representative of “third culture” kids, young people alienated both from the place they were born and from their parents’ culture, National Day’s narrator heroine is a salutary reminder of how the young, often the quickest to adapt, can also be the first to fall.
“I had a lot of contact with kids because of my daughter and her friends, who were 13, 14, 15 years old while we were living there,” Roig said. “Many of them had been born there, and there’s an attempt, that one can perhaps never really pull off, to be of that place, to be fully accepted.”
Three connected stories, titled Oasis, are meditative pieces based on the real-life adventures of Gertrude Dyck, a nurse from Dunelm, Sask., who in the early 1960s helped establish the Oasis Hospital in Al Ain.
Where Roig comes perhaps closest to a self-portrait is in Please Drive to Highlighted Route. The longest story in the book and the only one set in Canada, it’s a totally convincing depiction of a very particular kind of anomie, one that Roig herself ran into headlong when she came back from the U.A.E.
“You’ve gone someplace and been changed by it and there’s no opportunity to talk about it,” Roig says. “It’s been a long, long adjustment.”
So, do they have any regrets about having gone in the first place?
“We do have occasional moments of wondering whether we made the right decision,” Roig says. “But if we hadn’t gone we would have missed … this mountain of an experience, this peak thing in our lives. What did it lead to? Well, what does anything like this lead to? It leads to an interesting life.”