When my mother visited Abu Dhabi two years ago, the Rolling Stones were also in town. Mum babysat for us while we indulged in some rock-and-roll nostalgia – and heard Mick Jagger try to wrangle the names of all the Emirates. Now, every time I cross the border to Ras Al Khaimah, I hear Mick say: “Hello, ROSS awl KYEmawh.”
But Mick’s not here this time and even if he were, my children no longer need babysitters. They have hit the age where the fact of us leaving for an evening fills them with thinly disguised delight: no forced-vegetable eating, unlimited screen time and huge bowls of ice cream. What’s that saying about the mice playing while the cats are out to dinner?
It’s very relaxing, in a way, to have a guest who is a repeat visitor. It relieves all the pressure of “hosting”: you got lost en route to the Falcon Hospital on the previous visit; you’ve already spent untold dirhams on high tea at the Emirates Palace. True, you could go back to those places, but a repeat visitor means you don’t have to. You can put the guidebooks away because your visitor already knows a little bit about Abu Dhabi.
Whether it’s the first visit or the fifth, however, having visitors forces you out of your daily routine, even if only to the point where you see that routine through new eyes. On our way to a morning “power walk” on the Corniche, for example, mum stopped to exclaim over the mosaics in the pedestrian tunnels, which I usually hurry right past. She reminded me to put things in perspective: my whinging about the cold snap we had, when temperatures dipped to a “chilly” 17C, didn’t garner much sympathy. For her, a refugee from Chicago’s blizzard-bearing winds, the breeze felt like a gentle gift.
The not-really-that-cold weather shows Abu Dhabi at its best, I think. It makes it easy to walk around the city poking into the nooks and crannies that don’t make the guidebooks or TripAdvisor lists. We spent a happy morning wandering the labyrinth near Madinat Zayed, where we dropped mending off at the tailor, bought two varieties of Yemeni honey from Food Queen Honey, and watched some children playing cricket, even though neither of us knows anything about cricket.
Just as my mum’s appreciation for Abu Dhabi’s grace notes reminded me to appreciate them as well, spending time here reminded her that “the Middle East” is not just the melange of veiled ladies, religious zealots and oil rigs that gets served up in western media. Our stroll around Madinat Zayed served as a counterpoint to the steady drip of negative images on television, in the movies and – perhaps most disturbingly – in the current US presidential campaign.
This steady diet of negativity was in evidence when we went to the Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding (SMCCU), in Dubai, and joined a group for a lunch of traditional Emirati food and a conversation with a young Emirati woman.
The audience – almost all Europeans and Americans – asked questions that our hostess answered with aplomb but that I found mortifying: why do Arabs stone people for punishment, what’s under your abaya, how come you can go to college, do all Arabs hate the West?
The questions were well-intentioned but most seemed to come from a perspective that the “Arab world” had little or no overlap with the world of the questioners. Our hostess patiently tackled everything, from fashion in abayas to her college courses to the important reminder that no extremist should be seen as representative of an entire faith.
Towards the end of her presentation, the hostess invoked the motto of the SMCCU, which is “open doors, open minds” – and certainly the guests at this lunch filed out into the sunlight with a slightly less polarised view of the world.
My mum flew back to freezing Chicago last night. I like to think that she’s bringing the stories from our cultural lunch back with her, along with a tiny jar of Yemeni honey.
Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi
