PicoBlog

So there is a four-part series called The Runaway Princesses. It has a full-page ad in The New Yorker magazine, in which I had read, maybe a year and a half ago, an article about “the Fugitive Princesses of Dubai”, chronicling the repeated attempts by Sheikha Latifa and her older sister, Shamsa, to escape the strict control of their family. Their father is Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and reportedly worth about 18 billion dollars. One of the sisters’ escape attempts are real international thriller material.

It struck me forcefully because I had just read the novel Finding Nouf, by American writer Zoe Ferraris, set in Saudi Arabia; she was married to a Berber-Palestinian- Saudi man and lived for some time with his family in Arabia. The novel tells an intriguing story that gradually unfolds its characters while revealing some of the tensions and dynamics of a rigidly gender-segregated, patriarchal autocracy.

Young women such as Shamsa and Latifa live in unimaginable economic privilege – their life is one of private planes, yachts, multiple servants, luxurious dwellings in various choice locations, jewels, fancy sports cars, and swimming pools. Their father can control anything they do -- where they go, whom they see, and certainly whom they will marry. If they should want to leave this bubble and claim their individual freedom – well, their family has vast wealth with which to track them down with private detectives, kidnap them with extraction teams in boats and helicopters, plentiful funds to make sure local governments do not object and to ensure that media covers the whole thing in counter-claims, denials, and ambiguity.

I am curious what others make of this.

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