Jillian Schedneck – ‘Abu Dhabi Days, Dubai Nights’

Reviewed by Heather Taylor Johnson

When Geraldine Brooks’ Nine Parts of Desire came out in 2004 a wave of Western women began considering the implications of veiled Muslim women in Arab countries. Some were on the side of ‘oppression’ while others championed ‘choice’, both being of an equally valued feminist persuasion. The largely female consideration stuck, and women today are as interested in the issue as ever. Jillian Schedneck’s debut memoire, Abu Dhabi Days, Dubai Nights, speaks to this audience.

Jillian is young and vibrant, scratching relentlessly at a travel bug; luckily she’s got a plan. Even after she meets an impossibly well-groomed man (in the cultural sense) and enjoys a perfectly thrilling affair with him (which easily manifests into love), she is determined to stick to her plan: teach English in Abu Dhabi; see how the Other half live.

Life without Andres is complex, as Jillian navigates a long-distance relationship and an emergent self-growth spawned from her classroom of female Muslims. Education, for these girls, is secondary to their lives of ‘courting’ without actually physically ‘courting’, because once they leave school, they will become wives. What does this say about Muslim women? What does this say about all women, and Jillian in particular? The story then moves to Dubai, where Jillian continues teaching, though now the classroom is co-ed. Her questions get bigger while her assumptions become double-sworded in this Westernised desert oasis of a city, so different from an hour’s drive in any direction. It is a struggle to remain optimistic, but it is a worthy and life-changing struggle.

Part memoire, part travelogue, Schedneck sees travel as something that will save her. Flip-flopping from disappointment to awe in a matter of two pages, we see that neither Abu Dhabi nor Dubai will save her. It is not until she becomes involved in the City of Hope – a women’s shelter – that we see it is womenwho will save her. Unfortunately this transformation feels rushed. What began so intensely whittles itself down to one paragraph:

As I walked down the quiet street out to the main road, I thought about how I’d like to write about Marnie and her sons leaving the shelter for a new home, Asma finding a sponsor and Evona regaining custody of her daughter. I’d like to write that Fatima and Warkamesh found jobs in households that appreciated their work and that Victoria got her house and yard. But I wouldn’t find out what happened to the women who shared their stories with me; the only thing I knew for certain was that there would be more like them. And I know what they had taught me: that stories are important, that listening matters and that there are people like Sharla Musabih who would never tire of fighting for women’s rights. I had learned, too, that I was no Sharla Musabih – but I would do what I could. (334)

These women’s stories seem to be the crux of Jillian’s story and I’m left wondering why they are jammed into the end of the book. I am oddly left wondering if Abu Dhabi Days, Dubai Nights should have been a different book.

With a topic as exotic as is dealt with here, one would expect aspects of memoire and travel literature to play a role, but it is preferable that only one genre dominate. I am not so sure this is the case in the book. Schedneck’s writing feels most comfortable in the first section of the book, when there is a richness and texture to the language, when there is a sense of fascination and discovery in the narrative, and characters are three dimensional, and memoire is strong. When we get to section two, travel writing takes over. There is a sense of urgency to teach her readers what she’d learned about the country, rather than let the story show us. It is during these slightly didactic moments where she introduces us to her friends. But there are too many friends, and their interactions with Schedneck are so brief that it becomes obvious they are props used only as a way to tell us something more about Dubai. The fact that these friends have no life outside of the dialogue with Schedneck proves that the memoire-aspect of the book has been put in the corner, awaiting a chance to clear its throat.

Cross-genre issues aside, the book is still a page-turner. Schedneck manages to transport her readers into a classroom of drab colour and bright giggles, or a ‘City of Gold’ which truly sparkles, however hollow its soul. Any confusion the reader might feel about Schedneck’s judgment and sense of Truth is due to the author’s constant contradictions within herself, which, rather than work against the flow of the character, work to create a sense of naïve optimism being shattered by that dreaded pull of the ‘coming of age’. Memoire, travelogue: in the end it is a detailed story of one woman finding her grip on the woman she is destined to become.

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Heather Taylor Johnson reviews poetry madly for literary journals around Australia and in America. She was a poetry editor for the now defunct Wet Ink magazine. Her second poetry collection, Letters to My Lover from a Small Mountain Town, was published earlier this year. Her third will be out early 2013. HarperCollins will be publishing her first novel, Pursuing Love and Death, in July 2013.