CHURCHILL said that “success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm””, and that, perhaps, is what comes to mind when the anthropologist and specialist in oral history and Nabati poetry in the Arabian Peninsula, Dr. Sa'ad Al-Suwaiyan, speaks of a certain period of his life. “Me and failure are like a pair of twins, born the same day, from the same womb,” he says. “How could one be born an Arab and not expect to fail at a time when such a thing finds popularity with no one?” Al-Suwaiyan's upbringing was not easy – “my incubator was poverty and need, my wet nurse backwardness and cultural and intellectual sterility” – and the early loss of both his mother and father left him longing to study abroad. Hard work at school and a grade that earned him the scholarship of which he dreamed resulted in him staying in America for 17 years. He confesses to spending most of that time at play and little at study, but the experience, he says, “turned my life and my way of thinking upside down”.“I learnt more from living the life and immersing myself in it than I did from the school classroom. I learned the meaning of individual freedom and independence of thought. I realized there was something called the mind that can be honed and made use of. But I also realized that I was illiterate and that I hadn't learned anything from primary and secondary school, and that I had to begin a lot of subjects from their very ABC's to get a mental grip on them.” He says he failed completely in assuming the American character, despite genuine attempts over the long period of time he spent there. “The more profound my efforts to understand American culture, the more I found myself, involuntarily and indirectly, deepening my understanding of myself and my own cultural and social background, since the comparison between the two is something that happens spontaneously and unintentionally. Later it became a deliberate comparison to try and understand both cultures on their different home territories and according to their prominent features.” That comparison in which he lived is what drove him to study anthropology and popular cultures, particularly primitive ones, but when he returned to Saudi Arabia, the failures began. “I came back and found that failure had me in its sights, tracking me at every turn. I failed in bringing attention to the importance of traditional culture studies, as my efforts were interpreted as promoting vernacular language, regionalism, and tribal fanaticism. I failed as head of the department of social studies when I tried to introduce anthropology, since my colleagues saw it as a threat to their livelihoods and as an attempt to negate sociology. The faculty deanship at the time saw me as trying to instruct students that the monkey was the origin of man. It's unquestionable that arriving at the peak of the fundamentalist tide contributed greatly to these failures, and in the intent to destroy the person, besmirch my reputation and turn the world against me. Also some people saw in me – due to my peasant background which lacks diplomacy and has a degree of what I picked up from the values of American culture in asserting one's sincerity – a certain insubordination and disdain.” Al-Suwaiyan moved on from university to the Da'ira Publishing and Documentation house where he stayed for ten years, heading the editing staff and supervising what he calls “two of the most important documentation projects in the whole of the Arab World in terms of accuracy and detail, elegance of presentation, and size”. The two projects were the 12-volume “Traditional Culture in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” and the 20-volume “King Abdul Aziz Aal Saud: His Life and Reign in Foreign Documents”, both in Arabic. He describes the second work as having a “value unmatched by any other”, but its fate was for it to be “confiscated and not put into circulation”. Al-Suwaiyan also tried to set up an “audio-visual archive to document local culture and traditional arts in the Arabian Peninsula” to be an academic center documenting “the truth about the peninsula's culture following proper academic methodology, without the dictates of fundamentalists, politicians and state bureaucrats, and the dictates of the censor”. His approaches to bodies in the Kingdom and the Gulf to set up the center, he said, were “like talking to a brick wall”. “What saddens me is that I have a wealth of rare reference texts, manuscripts and recordings which will be lost after I'm gone. Despite that, I have been able, since the end of my connection with the Da'ira publishing house, to publish a number of important reference works, the most recent being ‘The Arabian Desert: Its Poetry and Culture across the Ages, an Anthropological Approach', and the book ‘Legends and Oral Narratives from Northern Arabia'.” Prior to that, he had published several works in Arabic and English on Nabati poetry, as well as numerous articles in both languages in specialist academic journals. Of his failures, however, Al-Suwaiyan also takes an introspective view, saying he failed to “Saudize” himself properly after his return from abroad. “Emigration for too long a time becomes exile,” he says. “And I've also failed to live the present, as I'm caught between looking to a better future that I know is within the limits of the possible, and between the return to the past and viewing it with a degree of empathy in trying to summon it and understand how it really was, and not how other people or authoritative bodies want me to see it. I've also failed to live with the intellectuals and academics, the people of culture, because many of them are there by just following others and are one-dimensional in their culture.” The same goes, he says, for the modernists and the traditionalists. “I've failed to live with the modernists, as their modernism is a modernism of vocabulary and terms, not a modernism of understanding, concepts and behavior. I've failed to live with the traditionalists because they want me to live the past like they do.” Dr. Sa'ad Al-Suwaiyan says, in fact, that he has “failed by all standards of time and place”. “But I've succeeded in living with myself, and am at one with myself, and that's more than enough for me to live a happy life.” – A
