Keija Parssinen’s story, “Rock Wednesday,” appears in the spring 2020 issue of The Southern Review. Here, she discusses drawing inspiration from her family’s history, cross-cultural romance, and the most important magic in the alchemy of fiction.
Preety Sidhu: “Rock Wednesday” features a doomed love story that comes to a head against the backdrop of real historical events that took place in Saudi Arabia in 1967. In what order did these elements come together for you, as you were writing the story?
Keija Parssinen: I had heard about the protest that came to be known as “Rock Wednesday,” but only vaguely and anecdotally from my parents, the way you might hear about a problematic relative from the past. But those stories lodged in mind, and I included a scene set on that day in my first novel, The Ruins of Us. It was fascinating to me, I suppose, because it struck at the heart of the myth of the “special relationship”—the notion that the partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia runs deeper than money and oil. Also, on a more personal level, the fact of violent protests against U.S. policy taking place in Dhahran, the sleepy oil compound where I grew up, complicated my conception of my home town, as well as Aramco, the company for which my father and grandfather both worked. In terms of order, the love story between Ghassan and Janet was there first, and then as I layered that story in with the events of the day, it made sense to have their relationship come to an end at this time of strife between their respective countries.
PS: Were there other elements or experiences from your own background that informed the writing of this story?
KP: I have been interested in Saudi-American romantic relationships, I suppose, since learning that my mom’s first true love was a Saudi man she met at the University of Southern California. My mother was also an Aramco “brat” (a child who grows up in the Aramco oil towns), and when she matriculated at USC, she sought out Saudi students because she wanted that connection to home. They loved each other very much, and at one point in their relationship, they discussed marriage. Ultimately my mother decided she would not be able to live as a Saudi wife, and they broke up. She did find her way back to Saudi, though, when my father took a job with Aramco. She and my father eventually divorced, and I know she has often wondered what her life would have been like if she had married Aziz; I think sometimes she regrets not trying; regrets letting the notion of insurmountable cultural difference end their relationship. She discovered this week that he passed away in November, so she is grieving that loss afresh.
PS: Every time I read this story, I am struck by the believability of Ghassan’s voice, and Mohammad’s. As someone with many Indian family members who have worked in western-owned corporations, their efforts to amiably interface with, and quietly best, their white colleagues and bosses while not losing too much of their own national identity seems especially on point, resonating more broadly than even the specific Aramco and Saudi context. What was your process in developing your Saudi characters’ voices? Did you find anything particularly challenging or liberating about writing from their perspectives?
KP: Thank you so much for the kind words! They mean a great deal. I have never wanted to write about Saudi Arabia strictly from an American perspective—that narrowness, I felt, would not produce compelling or honest fiction. This means that I have written Saudi perspectives into my work since 2005, when I began writing my first novel. Even then, before questions of cultural appropriation had entered the literary mainstream, I was keenly aware of the delicate politics of my decision. Politics aside, achieving an authentic character voice requires a special kind of magic—maybe the most important magic in the alchemy of fiction. It requires a belief in the character’s full humanity, first and foremost, so that the character has room to be heroic and flawed, compassionate and unkind, thoughtful and selfish, possessing all those messy, beautiful human traits. Ghassan is the anchor of my novel-in-progress, The Book of Fate, from which “Rock Wednesday” is extracted, and to me, he’s the most interesting of my narrators. He’s a good man who has made bad decisions that have adversely affected people dear to him. His narrative is retrospective, steeped in melancholy and tinged with regret. As I wrote him, I drew inspiration from Stephens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.
PS: Ghassan spends almost ten years loving Janet from afar, aching for the family they might have had together, and in a moment of duress discovers that she returns the feelings and is ready to be with him. Yet he also doesn’t want to give up his promising position in the company or return to America, where people will see him as lesser for being brown. To what extent do you think Janet represents something aspirational for him, acceptance by Americans of the sort Mohammad warns him against investing too much in? Do you think his position, as he matures and rises within the company, grows closer to Mohammad’s, or rather that he discovers something that was always true about himself when faced with a stark choice?
KP: Since Ghassan is a character from my novel, and I now have a second draft of that novel completed, I know the answer to this question! Losing Janet haunts him, to be sure, much like my mother was haunted by Aziz, whom she continued to dream about for decades after they parted ways. In the years that follow Janet’s departure, Ghassan becomes a true “company man,” giving himself over completely to the “Aramco experiment,” as he calls it, and embracing Mohammed’s somewhat cynical, pragmatic, capitalistic outlook. But by embracing the corporate ideas of a “value-free space,” he loses himself, he begins to feel soulless and unmoored. In the end, acting from within that void, he makes a choice that harms people he loves. In the novel he tries at first to excuse that choice, and at last to make sense of it, and seek redemption.
PS: What are you working on next?
KP: I’m finishing revisions of The Book of Fate, and I look forward to writing some stand-alone short stories and essays this summer.
Keija Parssinen is the author of the novels The Ruins of Us, which earned a Michener-Copernicus award, and The Unraveling of Mercy Louis, which won an Alex Award from the American Library Association. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is an assistant professor of English at Kenyon College.
Preety Sidhu is an intern at Electric Literature. She holds an MFA in fiction from Louisiana State University, where she worked as an editorial assistant at The Southern Review. You can find her on Twitter at @_preetysidhu.
Support great writing by subscribing to The Southern Review.