Kim Barnes IN THE KINGDOM OF MEN



AUTHOR QUESTIONNAIRE: IN THE KINGDOM OF MENKim BarnesQ: Can you tell us a bit about the title you chose, "In the Kingdom of Men"?My husband jokes that I like my book titles to be big: A Country Called Home; Hungry for the World; In the Wilderness. And I guess I do want to impart the sense that, even though these books are about individual characters, they are really stories about everyone’s hopes and fears, desires and betrayals, loves and losses. What is particular to this title is the setting. There is something grand and compelling about Saudi Arabia being referred to as “the Kingdom,” and I was interested in the ways that my main character, Gin McPhee becomes entangled in various aspects of its meaning. She was raised in a fundamentalist faith, and the Kingdom of God was made very real to her. As a girl, she read fairy tales and The Arabian Nights, so her sense of Arabia was highly romanticized. Once in Arabia, she becomes increasingly aware of how every moment of her day is defined and controlled by men, from her husband to his supervisor to the company’s Arab taxi cab driver to the Bedouin guard at the gate of her compound, which she cannot leave without an approved male guardian.Another layer of meaning is the contemporary awareness that we have of Saudi Arabia being “America’s Kingdom” because of the wealth of oil and our connection to its production and consumption. (Robert Vitalis has written an important critical text with this very title.) One of the most intriguing aspects of this story to me is how oil workers from the US could hire on with the Arabian American Oil Company and quickly move from lower class wages to middle class prosperity. As my Oklahoma uncle, who worked in Arabia in the sixties, once told me, “We all had more money than we knew what to do with.” Ironically, there were very few places to spend that money. Still, it was a kind of fairy tale. Inside the American compounds, the Aramcons, as they called themselves, had the best of everything that money could buy: schools, medical care, fancy clothes that they had nowhere to wear. “I never thought I’d belong to a yacht club,” my aunt told me. “But, in Arabia, I did.”The title, In the Kingdom of Men, incorporates all of these meanings, and the book itself revolves around the ways in which Gin McPhee’s life is defined—and endangered—by the powerful men of the company, the culture, and the country. It’s not a victim story, however. It is Gin’s spirit of curiosity and defiance that determines her fate. Q: Gin and Mason McPhee meet in Oklahoma and then move to Saudi Arabia. On the surface these locations seem quite different. What difference and similarities did you discover as you wrote about them?Oh, many more similarities than differences! It really hit me as I was doing my research that the roughnecks from the oil patches of Oklahoma and Texas were perfectly suited for work in the harsh desert. They had survived the Dust Bowl: what was so different about blowing sand? For every Arabian shamal (sand storm), they had survived a tornado. My husband always says of my tough Okie kin that you “couldn’t kill them with a meat cleaver.” When Aramco first put the Bedouins to work, they had so little nutrition in them that the American doctors said they shouldn’t even be alive. I often heard the term “dirt poor,” which meant you couldn’t grow a stalk of corn in the hard-packed clay without watering it with your sweat—not so different from trying to live off a patch of sand. My Oklahoma family was made up of marginal farmers and itinerant sharecroppers, some of whom lived in dirt-floor shacks. The roughnecks in Arabia didn’t require much more than a tent and water to work their way across the desert. Wind? They had seen it. Heat? They were used to working under a blazing-hot sun.My parents left Oklahoma and came to north Idaho so that my father could take work as a gyppo (from the word “gypsy”) logger. We lived in small, one-room wooden trailers built on wheels that could be moved from one work site to another. No running water, no electricity. The nomadic nature of the Bedouin lifestyle is very familiar to me.Another similarity between Oklahoma and Arabia is how the places and people have been defined by the discovery of oil and resulting upheaval. Just as the American workers in Arabia were realizing a dizzying rise in their economic status, so were the Saudis. People poured in from all over the world to pursue their fortune. In the book, I write that “the American dream became the dream of the world,” and although, this time, that dream was taking place in Arabia, Oklahoma had its influx of Boomers and Sooners with the same resulting displacement of indigenous peoples.Finally, I think the similarities in the people themselves are really striking. Like my Oklahoma family, the Arabs value hospitality above all else. Even if my grandmother were down to her last boiled potato, she would have given her portion to feed a weary traveler. Likewise, the Bedouins would rather starve than see a guest, even a complete stranger, go hungry. The Aramcons who lived in the compounds during the fifties and sixties (and even now) speak of their years among their Arab friends as the happiest times of their lives. They speak of their generosity, their humor, their loyalty. Maybe it’s a tenacity of spirit, the stubborn will to survive, that they recognize in each other.Q: The move to Saudi Arabia was prompted by Mason's job with the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco). The Aramco compound that you depict in Saudi Arabia is something else! What sort of research into Aramco and American/Saudi Arabian relations did you do to paint such a seemingly accurate picture?I swear that of the five years it took me to write this book, four of them were spent doing research. Sometimes, I felt like I was studying for a dissertation defense!It wasn’t just the history of Aramco—it was the history of oil and of the House of Saud and its relationship to the United States, which, of course, includes Israel and every other country in the world. The politics alone are enough to keep a writer researching for a lifetime. Really, it’s astounding how the oil industry is tied to just about every other aspect of international politics and power. I would come across some fascinating Wikipedia tidbit about George H.W. Bush’s oil drilling company, Zapata Off-Shore (Mason McPhee works for Zapata while in Texas), and its ties to the Bay of Pigs invasion (code name Operation Zapata), and off I’d go down the Google rabbit hole. It was overwhelming to try and imagine how I might reduce such a complicated story with such epic dimensions (think Lawrence of Arabia, the partition of Israel, the discovery of the world’s largest oil fields) into a single novel.With the help of my editor, what I came to realize was that, if I weren’t careful, the research could actually get in the way, which is why I worked to tighten my focus on the compounds. I knew I couldn’t get everything in, no matter how fascinating and informative. My job was not to be a historian or scholar or commentator; my job was to tell the story of Virginia and Mason McPhee.It was a relief to narrow my research down to what life in the compounds must have been like in 1967. Luckily, I had my aunt and uncle, who had lived in Abqaiq in the sixties, close by, and I was constantly asking them questions: How long did it take to get from the boat launch site to the offshore drilling rig? What did the airport look like? What did the housewives do with all those empty hours? Did you ever meet a Saudi woman? What did your houseboy cook you for dinner? My cousin, Terry, helped me with the details he remembered from his childhood spent inside the compound: the smell of the movie theater (rice and gravy concessions); what it was like to ride the bus into al Khobar to snag a new rock-and-roll record. I relied a great deal on the online journals of Aramcons like Colleen Wilson, who spent several years with her husband in Arabia. Her memories provided invaluable details of daily life in the compounds. I also had the great privilege of meeting with William Tracy, who lived in the compounds and was a writer and editor for the company magazine, Aramco World (now Saudi Aramco World). People often ask if I traveled to Arabia for my research. Even if I could have found an approved organization to sponsor such a trip (US citizens can’t travel to Saudi Arabia without one). I talked to author Selden Edwards about this (his fabulous novel, The Little Book, is set in 1897 Venice), and he encouraged me to rely on my research, interviews, and narratives from the past to inform my story. “I made the decision not to travel to Venice,” he told me, “because that time and place are gone. Images and impressions from the present can overtake the past. Better to rely upon your research and the narratives from the time about which you are writing.”I read stacks of novels by Arabian writers and more stacks of scholarly texts on Arabian history, culture, and religion. I read memoirs by the (former) wives of sheiks who had immigrated west and the wives of social anthropologists who had followed their husbands east to the desert. I very much wanted both sides of the experience—the Arabian and the American. Many of the memoirs I read by contemporary Arab women speak out against the oppressive laws governing women. The wives of Aramco, on the other hand, most often wrote the kind of whitewashed diaries we have seen from other pioneering wives, including those from the Oregon Trail: generalized facts about daily activities—who came by for coffee, what was prepared for dinner--but very little emotional response or opinion.From what I’ve observed, the women of Aramco were divided into two camps: those, who, like my aunt, embraced their time in Arabia as a great adventure; and those who, like my character Maddy Cain, resent the isolation and grow bitter. Everything they read, ever letter they wrote, was censored by the Saudis. The stories of the Arabian women, of course, especially the Bedouin women, were simply never told.And then there are the stories of the houseboys like Yash, who came from all over to work in the homes of the Americans. To understand Yash and his relationship to Gin and Mason, I had to know how it was he came to Arabia from India, which required that I research the history of his country and culture and especially the food, because Yash does all the cooking for the McPhee household. I have a friend from New Delhi who teasingly scolded me for not understanding the difference between north and south Indian cuisine. “Yash would never serve such a sweet desert with that particular curry,” she said. I was (am!) sure that I would never be able to get the details right, but I was very pleased that she had begun to think of Yash not as a character but as a real person. That is how I knew my research was paying off.Q: Saudi Arabia can be very a restrictive place for a woman and it's interesting that you set the book in 1967, before the sexual revolution. Why choose this time and place?I love writing stories that take place on the cusp of enormous change. Everything is going on in 1967 America: the sexual revolution; women’s liberation; desegregation; the conflict in Vietnam. Even though Gin and the other Aramcons are removed from much of the political and social upheaval in the US, they see it mirrored in the cultural shift in Arabia. What had once been a closed culture inside a closed country had opened its doors to western influence in the name of oil (and military protection). The company and the kingdom partnered together to send promising young Saudi men to universities in the United States, and those men came back changed. We see this in the character of Abdullah, who has taken his degree in petroleum engineering, but, because he asked too many questions about the company’s drilling practices, he was demoted from engineer to Mason’s driver and interpreter. Abdullah represents the brewing discontent over Aramco’s (then) inequitable hiring practices that had led to Arabs striking in the past—at least until the king outlawed unions. Abdullah also resents Aramco’s ties to Israel, which eventually fuel the violent Arab protests against the American presence in Arabia during the Six Day War. The Saudi society was then, as it is now, torn between those citizens who wanted modernization and those who viewed outside influence as evil. What I began to understand as I researched and wrote the story is how clear the line is leading from Aramco’s “corporate colonization” of Saudi Arabia to much of the violent repercussions we see today.On a more individual level, Gin, who has been raised by her grandfather, a fundamentalist preacher, finds herself strangely and unexpectedly liberated in Arabia. Not outside of the compound, of course, where the American women had to be careful about their dress and behavior, but inside the compounds, where the women were allowed to drive, dance, and wear their bikinis to the community pool. Under the direction of her best friend Ruthie, Gin goes through a true coming-of-age, 1960s style: she gets a new, sexy hairstyle, finds a job, learns how to smoke and drink (every kitchen had its own still for making hooch), and follows Ruthie’s instructions on how to hone her sexual skills in order to better manipulate Mason. Gin’s sexual revolution echoes that of her back-home sisters, but it comes naturally to a young woman who has always resisted dominance and control.Q: You say in your acknowledgements, "If, as Yash says, the events in these pages add up to the "education of Mrs. Gin," they also represent the education of this author." What do you mean by that? All that reading and research opened up doors for me—doors that I didn’t even know were there. I have always been hungry for knowledge, and I love how much I learned, not only about Saudi Arabia and India but about Louisiana, where Ruthie’s Cajun husband, Lucky Doucet, is from (my youngest son helped me find his name by sending me online links to Louisiana football rosters). I traced the chaotic history of Beirut, where Ruthie, who is Jewish, went to university. I ferreted out every informing document I could, from old copies of National Geographic to declassified CIA reports. I felt like I was going back to grade school and working my way forward again but with a wider lens to see the world through. I felt like a detective, discovering clues to my story. It was so exciting!I’m the first-generation in my family to attend college, and it hasn’t always been easy. Growing up in the physical and cultural isolation of the “wilderness” was both idyllic and disabling. We had no TV or radio and very little contact with those outside our small community. (I’ll never forget how our little logging town became alarmed when a rumor filtered in that “hippies” were headed our way to drop LSD in our communal water tank.) I remember the first time I saw a person of color and was amazed and curious, but I wasn’t yet old enough to be aware of the bigotry that I would later encounter. When I set about writing this book and learned more about the history of Aramco’s presence in Arabia, I became increasingly aware of how complex our relationship with the Saudis is. For instance, in the 1970s, Idaho Senator Frank Church and the Church Committee investigated charges of institutionalized racism against Aramco, which informs key elements of my fictional story and which, in real life, resulted in the company changing its housing, hiring, and promotion policies.One thing that my upbringing did give me was a greater understanding of what it feels like to see the pastoral tranquility of your childhood dashed apart by change. Like the Bedouins who lost their ancestral lands to oil development and politically imposed partitions, the forested wilderness I once knew has since become scarred with clear-cuts. The leased shotgun shack I lived in as a girl was burned to the ground by the lumber company: we owned the house, but it was company land. When I go back to that place that once sheltered me and no longer recognize it, I feel like I’ve lost some part of myself—as though I never really existed there at all. I think this must be what Abdullah feels when he sees his lovely, green wadi destroyed by the drilling machines. It’s what any people feels when they lose their ancestral home because, with that loss of place comes loss of story. I don’t know if that wound ever heals.Q: You’ve written two memoirs about the way you were raised in the Pentecostal faith. Gin was raised by her strict Methodist grandfather. What role does religion play in your writing and in the development of Gin as a character?My religious upbringing is often a defining element in my own story and the stories of my characters. What intrigued me about Gin’s fundamentalist background is how it would inform her life in Islamic Arabia.Like Gin, I grew up in a “holiness” tradition that taught that women, as the daughters of Eve, were easily tempted and incapable of controlling their emotions, which meant that we must remain silent and submissive. We didn’t cut our hair, which was our veil of modesty. No bare arms, no swimsuits or shorts, only simple cotton dresses, skirts below the knees, no makeup, no jewelry—nothing that might draw the desire of men. As I imagined what it might be like for Gin to find herself in Arabia, forced to conform to certain laws governing women, I realized that, like me, she would already know what it meant to “cover.” Her grandfather had whipped her for cutting the sleeves from her blouse and showing her shoulders: so what if the mutaween wanted to switch her for showing her ankles?Coming of age as a young woman in the 60s and 70s, my life was defined by religious dictates as well as my family’s patriarchal structure and my father’s dominance. Like Gin, I was a “willful” girl who “had a mind of her own.” When I was fourteen, I ran away from home, was found, brought back, and punished. The night of my high school graduation, I left home for good. As I wrote Gin’s story, I realized how, because of my own experience, I saw only two possible outcomes to Gin’s course of disobedience: she would submit, or she would pay the price. Writing Gin’s story helped me step outside of my own fatalism and see that the cautionary tale of Eve isn’t the only possible outcome for women who act on their curiosity and desire for adventure, but I knew that, for Gin, at least, the consequences might be dire.Like the era in which her story is set, Gin is defined by change and transformation. Her character is informed by the restrictions that the kingdom of men has always imposed upon its female subjects, but she is also ruled by her own spirit—she has her own agency and must come to awareness of her blindness and live with the mistakes she has made.Q: You're surely asked this all the time, but what is your go-to piece of advice for young writers?Learn the craft. Trust the process.You can learn the craft in a number of ways. You can do what the fabulous Southern writer Harry Crews did and imitate line by line the novels of Graham Greene until you’ve integrated the architecture of a great story into your own. You can do what Christopher Paolini did as a very young man and study Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and write a fantasy book called Eragon and hawk it at county fairs while dressed in a wizard’s cape until someone notices and you hit the bestseller list. You can study creative writing in college, avail yourself of amazing mentors, and be a part of a community that supports and nurtures what you do, but you don’t need an MFA to write. What you need is time and a desire that cannot be shaken. You need to understand that it’s like playing basketball or the cello or any other art that you mean to do well: you’ve got to practice the equivalent of eight hours a day, even if it’s twenty minutes at a time; you’ve got to have the patience that will allow you to move forward over years; you’ve got to learn that you can survive those years. You’ve got to love the process and learn to trust it. Or let’s switch metaphors and say that it’s like building a house: at first, you’re not a carpenter at all, just a journeyman, an apprentice—you’re lucky if you can hammer a nail. You watch and you listen and you try and you learn. Pretty soon, you’ve got some studs pounded in. But how long is it going to take you to learn how to build an entire house? What about a really, really beautiful house?I don’t know why we think that writing a book is any different. What I know is that if you learn to pound that nail, hang that joist, put in the wiring and add the siding…well, pretty soon you have a house. It may not be the prettiest house on the block, but it sure as hell is your house that you built, and now you know what it takes to build a house. You go back, and you do it again with more knowledge. You learn the process. You begin to trust that process because you know how to pound a nail and you’ve learned what the tools in your toolbox are made to do. And then you begin to forget the process because it’s become so natural to you that’s it’s no longer work but an art, like a professional dancer moves to music without even thinking, I’m dancing. Q: What are you working on next?I have so many writing projects that I want to pursue that I’m giddy with possibilities. What’s drawing me right now is…well, at this point, it’s really just an image.Last summer, my husband and I were camped on the banks of a remote Idaho river, where we spend as much time as we can in the summer, flyfishing, which is my passion. We were relaxing during the heat of a Sunday afternoon, kicked back with our books, when I looked up to see a young father stepping into the rushing thigh-high water, one adolescent son clinging to his back, the other, maybe six, holding tight to his right hand. In his left hand, the father held a very large chainsaw. He had a pair of heavy caulked leather boots hanging around his neck. I immediately recognized him as a logger.I sat up, curious and mesmerized. I spied their pickup up on the road—a local rig. On the other side of the river, there was a barely visible hiking trail leading up the side of the narrow ravine, but it led deep into the wild flank of the Idaho-Montana border. I watched the father stagger against the current, the older son hanging from his shoulders, the other gripping his hand, fighting to stay upright.No fishing rod, no hunting rifle, only the chainsaw. They might have been going out to gather firewood, except for the river crossing. I could not imagine what their mission was. And what was the man thinking, dragging his sons across the rough water that way? What if they all went down? What if the smallest were taken by the current? Where, I wondered, was the mother? Did she even know?I watched until they reached the other side. The father swung the older son to the ground, pulled the other to dry land, and then they all turned and waved at me before disappearing into the dense forest.I could not shake that image, and I could not shake the worry that beset me. I’m the daughter of a logger, raised in the camps. My father had been seriously injured in the woods; my great uncle, a sawyer, was killed by a falling tree; my step-grandfather was crushed and disabled by a load of logs that rolled off a trailer. I knew the dangers. What would those young boys do if their father was hurt? What would the father do if one of the boys was pinned by a snag? Even as my husband and I geared up to fish the evening hatch, I fretted and stewed. I cast my line with one eye on the trail, and I began to make plans to track them down if I had to.When, just as the last light was leaving the river, they finally appeared at the trail head, I was both relieved and angry. What would possess a man to take that kind of risk? I watched them cross back over, again, the boy hanging from his father’s strong shoulders, again, the younger son held by one hand. My husband helped them out as they made the near bank, and he got their story: just a Sunday outing to clear some trail and give the boys a little fresh air. The older boy was riding piggyback because his boots were new, and they didn’t want them to get wet.The mother in me could hardly believe it. Why would you endanger yourself and your children in such a way? But another part of me was feeling a strange kind of loss, and I realized that the man reminded me of my own father and how strong he had once been, how he might have done this very thing.My storytelling impulse kicked in. What if something had happened? What would that something be, and how would it define the lives of the family from that point forward?What I think I know at this point is that the novel will have this as its triggering moment, and it will also incorporate stories of Hieronymus Bosch, Anais Nin, the Italian tenor Tito Schipa, and the Scottish-American soprano Mary Garden.At least, that’s the plan. Who knows what shape the house will take once the building begins? All I can do is sit down, begin with a word, and trust that the process will teach me what I need to know. ................
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