“Nobody smiled at anybody. Everybody looked glum” (16). From Saudi Arabian author Laila Aljohani's novel Days of Ignorance (originally published in Arabic in 2007 and translated into English by Nancy Roberts in 2014), this one line perfectly sums up the sentiment permeating the narrative and outlining every character. The novel begins with one of its central characters, Malek, lying unconscious and bleeding on the pavement in the city of Medina. He has been brutally attacked by his lover Leen's brother and an accomplice. The subsequent chapters offer fragmented snippets of events leading up to and following that scene from the perspective of several unhappy characters. These characters include Leen, a thirty-year-old single woman with a career in social welfare; her younger brother Hashem; her loving father who allows her a number of “freedoms” that many other Saudi women cannot dream of; Leen's mother; and finally, Malek himself—a black man, who, despite being born in the Kingdom, has no rights and is unable to obtain Saudi citizenship, ironically called “absolution” throughout the narrative. There is little dialogue in the novel and even less action, with the focus placed on the emotional state of individual characters and on the collective psychology of contemporary Saudi society.

Some characters may seem one-dimensional and capable of falling into a predictable framework of familial relationships. Hashem is a stereotypical “son of the family”— a repulsive spoiled loser, who sees women as sexual objects and hates his smart and successful sister. His mother, portrayed predictably as a traditional woman who worships and enables her son and completely neglects her daughter, serves to reinforce Hashem's position and outlook. There is also an overly neat “good vs. evil” binary between Leen and Hashem. However, the strength of the novel lies in the journey into the psyche of each of its characters. Aljohani's skill truly shines in the inner dialogue and in the many beautiful poetic observations of their emotional states. Unhappiness unites all of these characters, from Malek, who is a victim of a hate crime and who suffered all his life from racial injustice, to his tormentor Hashem, who represents a particular social circle of empty aimless young men. Hashem, unlike many of his peers, exhibits a certain self-consciousness—“deep down he knew. . . that it shouldn't be that way” (30). Death, grief, silence, melancholy, bitterness, fear, emptiness—these words saturate Aljohani's text and serve to articulate each of the characters’ individual sense of hopelessness, and their collective spiritual illness from Saudi society.

Their feeling of helplessness is underscored by fragments of news reports on the eve of the American invasion of Iraq, interspersed throughout the narrative. The subtle yet persistent link between the personal and the political elevates Days of Ignorance from a predictable love story to an important exploration of contemporary Arab and Saudi identity. Both Leen and her father credibly interweave regional political events (such as the Six-Day War, the Carter Doctrine, Desert Storm) and locally significant events (the demolition of the Bab al-Majidi neighborhood in 1984) with vividly personal memories. The tapestry of the social and political events in the narratives of Leen and her father demonstrate how larger political discourses can burrow in internal dialogue. The chapters are composed in a diary style with precise and creative timelines wherein days and months are named according to the pre-Islamic lunar calendar with the new “Jahiliyyah” era starting with Desert Storm. Thus, the first chapter begins as follows: “Munis, the 15^th of Wail, the twelfth year after Desert Storm, 3 a.m.” (3). This timeline points to the First Iraq War as the beginning of the current identity crisis in the Arab world and to the role that American interventions play in it. The absence of the definite article al in the Arabic title—Jahiliyyah, as opposed to al-Jahiliyyah, which is the conventional term referring to pre-Islamic times—hints to the possibility of recurring and potentially endless “Days/Eras of Ignorance.” Indeed, the last chapter of the novel restarts the Days of Ignorance timeline when the Americans invade Iraq referring to the events of 2003: “Shiyar, the 19^th of al-Muʾtamar, in the year of the Shock and Awe Campaign, 3 a.m.” (155).

Perhaps the most important contribution of the novel is a frank and nuanced discussion of racism and racial discourses in Saudi Arabia where complex social, ethnic, and tribal hierarchies largely define all areas of life. Not only does Aljohani meticulously interrogate the relationship between blackness and whiteness, but the novel also shows lesser known aspects of racism in the Saudi society, such as attitudes toward Hijazi residents, sometimes called tarsh bahr (refuse from the sea) by the tribal Saudis, and the Hijazi response of “Serbian Bedouins,” in reference to the Serbian atrocities in Bosnia in the 1990s.

Days of Ignorance is a timely and important contribution to the growing body of modern Saudi literature. It will be a compelling and useful text not only for students of Arabic literature, but also for anyone interested in global racial discourses. Nancy Roberts’ skillful translation conveys the linguistic undertones of the original text written in the formal register fusha, organically connected with frequent excerpts from classical Arabic literary works, including Kitab al-Aghani, and pre-Islamic muʿallaqat (hanging poems), as well as the Qurʾanic surahs. Roberts’ translation also includes a glossary that conveys important linguistic and cultural contexts. One may hope that this publication will encourage further English translations of Laila Aljohani's award-winning writing that exposes the psychology of the contemporary Saudi Arabia.