Nine Parts of Desire

by Geraldine Brooks

  I splashed my face with the hot water that gushed from gold faucets and attacked my wind-knotted, dust-crusted hair with a gold-backed brush set out on the gleaming marble bureau. When I emerged, the queen was drifting down the stairs in a long, Palestinian-style dress with panels of silk in plum and dull gold. Her hair, a brighter gold, fell in loose tresses down her back. She was a striking woman, slender and very tall—at least five inches taller than her husband. In official portraits she was always posed to look shorter than he. I wondered whether he perched on a box or she stood in a hole.

  She smiled and held out her hand for a firm, American-style shake. “I asked His Majesty how you were, and he said, ‘Well, she’s a bit dusty.ߣ ” she said. “But you don’t look dusty to me. Let’s talk in the garden. It’s the best room in the house. In 1970 they had to put bulletproof glass in all the upstairs windows. I think it makes the inside claustrophobic.”

  She swished through french doors onto a terrace giving way to lawns and flower beds. The afternoon light fell in solid golden shafts. We wandered over to a group of chairs near a tangle of fragrant jasmine. I perched my notebook on my knee. “You need a table,” she said. Spying a piece of cast-iron garden furniture across the lawn, she strode over and hefted it herself, waving away the dismayed-looking servant who rushed to help her. She had always been athletic: a cheerleader and a member of the hockey team in the first coed class at Princeton in 1969 and an avid skier during a semester spent waitressing at Aspen. Now, she rode, played tennis and did aerobics two or three times a week.

  A waiter brought me fresh orange juice in a gold-rimmed glass. The queen took a sip of an astringent-smelling herbal tea, trained her green eyes straight on me and, simply and frankly, unfolded her thoughts on the riots, their meaning and their aftermath. “We flew straight home from Washington when it happened,” she said. “And, as soon as I got home, one of my friends sat me down and told me what had been going on—the absolute rubbish in the air about me.” The friend was Leila Sharaf, Jordan’s only woman senator and one of the queen’s confidantes. “Some of it was so preposterous that you have to meet it with a sense of humor, otherwise it crushes you. I mean, someone in my position will always be talked about, whatever I do.”

  It was no secret that wealthy Amman wished the king had married one of its own daughters instead of an outsider. His first wife had been Dina Abdul Hamid, a university-educated intellectual with Egyptian roots, seven years his senior. After eighteen months and the birth of a daughter, there had been a sudden divorce. Dina, holidaying in Egypt when she received news of the split, later said that she had been allowed to see her daughter only once during the next six years. The king’s next choice was Toni Gardiner, nineteen years old and the daughter of a British military officer. The king met her at a dance and ignored all warnings about the possible pitfalls of the match. He renamed her Muna al-Hussein—Arabic for “Hussein’s wish.” They had two sons and twin daughters, but when his wishes changed, in 1972, he divorced her to marry a Jordanian of Palestinian roots named Alia Toucan.

  Alia was the first of his wives on whom he bestowed the title queen. She was the perfect choice to heal the scars of Black September and unite the kingdom in the time-honored tribal way. Her son, Prince Ali, born in 1975, vaulted over Hussein’s older sons by Princess Muna to take second place in the succession after Hussein’s brother, the crown prince Hassan. Alia also had a daughter and fostered a baby whose mother was killed in an airline crash. Alia suffered her share of malicious gossip while she lived, but her sudden death in a helicopter crash in February 1977 made her certain to be remembered as the king’s great love and the country’s perfect queen.

  So twenty-six-year-old Lisa Halaby had a hard act to follow when the king married her just sixteen months later. There was little in her background to prepare her. She had grown up in a wealthy and influential Washington family. Her mother, the daughter of an immigrant from Sweden, married and later divorced Najeeb Halaby, the son of a Syrian immigrant. Najeeb was a success story of the American melting pot who grew up speaking only English and rose to the top in both business and government service. He became chief executive of Pan Am and directed the Federal Aviation Authority under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. His interest was domestic politics, not foreign policy, and his daughter could barely remember a discussion of Middle East issues at home. Still, she claimed a stubborn attachment to her Arabic heritage. “The fifties were all about conformity, and I suppose I rebelled against that,” she said. “When everybody wanted to be the same, I clung to the things that made me different.” For a while she even tried to persuade her bemused fellow pupils at the Washington’s Cathedral School to call her Lisa Man-of-Halab, since that was the literal translation of her Arabic surname.

  At Princeton she completed a BA in architecture and urban planning and, in the four years following her graduation, worked her way around the world as a draftswoman on town planning schemes in Tehran and architectural projects in Sydney. In Jordan, she’d taken a job as a designer with the national airline. It was at a reception celebrating the delivery of the Jordanian airline’s first jumbo jet that Najeeb Halaby introduced his daughter to King Hussein. The king invited her to lunch at the palace and entertained her for five hours, showing her the palace and introducing her to his children. For the next six weeks they ate dinner together almost every night. Afterward, they’d roar around the hills of Amman on the king’s motorbike, with bodyguards trailing at a discreet distance.

  Lisa, working at the airline and living at the Intercontinental Hotel, kept the romance secret. Rebecca Salti, an American married to a Jordanian, had come to know her quite well. She remembers running into her outside the hotel that summer. “It was very hot, and the two of us just sat down on the pavement there and chatted about this and that. Looking back on it, I guess she seemed a little distracted.” Later that day the royal palace officially announced the engagement of King Hussein to the woman who from then on would be known as Noor al-Hussein, the Light of Hussein. The official announcement stated that Noor had adopted the Islamic religion.

  “When he proposed, I thought long and hard about accepting,” said Noor. “Not because I was unsure of my feelings for him. My feelings were so strong for him that I was thinking of him, perhaps, more than myself. I was well aware that I wasn’t a typical, traditional wife. I didn’t want to be a source of controversy for him.”

  And now she was. It wasn’t difficult to pinpoint what had gone wrong. At first the people of Jordan had been warm. “I hadn’t expected the outpouring of affection,” she said, thinking back to the early days of her marriage. Others in Jordan remembered it too. “She tried to give a speech in Arabic, and halfway through she got a bit flustered and looked as though she was about to cry,” recalled Metri Twall, a young Amman businessman. “The whole audience was behind her. People were calling out, ‘Don’t worry, we love you, you’re doing great.’ “ The births of four children in six years also had pleased a population obsessed with family.

  Those were the oil-boom years, when bright Jordanians could make a fortune working in the Gulf. Coming home, they built bou-gainvillea -splashed villas where thick-pile carpets muffled the footfalls of Filipino servants and the only sound was the tinkling of decorative fountains.

  In that era of conspicuous consumption, Noor at first stood out as being rather less ostentatious than the elite among her new subjects. Her wedding, in June 1978, was low-key by royal standards, held in the gardens of the king’s mother’s palace. Engagement and wedding photos show an unregal-looking bride, with a scrubbed face and lank hair. But that unstudied coed style soon vanished. With the media’s need for a new Grace Kelly, international photographers such as Norman Parkinson made their way to Jordan, trailing famous makeup artists. Anthony Clavet, who specialized in creating distinctive “looks” for celebrities such as David Bowie and Sophia Loren, gave Noor a look of sleek, queenly glamor, accented by fine jewelry and French couturier clothes. The king and his be
autiful wife became fixtures on the royalty and head-of-state circuit. It was possible to find them at their London address, opposite Kensington Palace, or in their hilltop retreat near Vienna as well.

  But times had become harder in Jordan since then. The oil boom busted, and the bright young Jordanians who formerly would have been able to make their fortunes in the Gulf were staying at home, underemployed. Hardship bred frustration, and frustration fundamentalism. America’s support for Israel, even during the violence of the intifada, had inflamed ever present anti-American sentiments.

  In Amman, after the riots, everyone seemed ready to attack the queen as an extravagant clothes horse. “She has become our Imelda Marcos,” sneered a young businessman. Even government officials joined in. “People remember the young girl who came here wearing blue jeans. They expect someone down to earth, not dripping with jewelry and jetting off to Europe,” said one prominent politician.

  The city, he said, was abuzz with the latest outrage. While the king had been in Kuwait seeking aid to patch up Jordan’s ravaged economy, the queen had gone shopping. “She bought a piece of jewelry that cost three quarters of a million dollars,” he said. “A Kuwaiti newspaper got ahold of the check and printed it under a headline, ‘While the king begs, the queen spends.’ “ I asked him if I could borrow his copy of the article. “Well,” he said, “I didn’t actually see it myself. My friend saw it.” For the next few days I chased this article across Amman. The friend would refer me to a neighbor who’d refer me to a shopkeeper who’d swear his son would be able to show me a copy. But he couldn’t. I tried combing every Arabic information service and checking with press attaches at foreign embassies. Nothing. Finally I got out the Kuwaiti telephone directory and called each of the emirate’s newspapers, one by one. At every paper the answer was the same: no such article had ever run. But in the minds of Jordanians it was as real as if they’d held the dog-eared clipping in their hands.

  The king had joined us in the garden. Now, he interjected gently, in his soft, deep voice. “It’s natural that someone close to me should become a target.” The ancient bonds between the Bedouins and their leader, especially a leader descended from the prophet, created strong taboos against direct criticism. Women, on the other hand, were easy targets. Any time things started to go wrong in the Middle East, women suffered for it first. A fundamentalist revolution couldn’t instantly fix a national economy, but it could order women into the veil. If Jordanians were unhappy, they couldn’t punish their king. But they could make his wife’s life a misery.

  King Hussein had always been an accessible ruler who understood the Western press and rarely shied away from the chance to put his point of view on Middle Eastern affairs. But in the late 1980s things started to change. By the time I became Middle East correspondent in 1987, he had become harder to reach, walled off by an impenetrable defensive line of palace advisers. They were all men, all middle-aged, all of a type: intelligent and elitist, yet deferential to the point of groveling before the king. The fired prime minister, Zaid Rifai, had been a brave diplomat, astute at analyzing the shifting moods of Jordan’s dangerous neighbors—Syria, Iraq, Israel and Saudi Arabia. But his domestic politics were a disaster. His authoritarian streak led him to distrust the ordinary people of Jordan and disregard popular opinion. Under his direction, control of the press and TV was total, and a whisper of dissent, especially from citizens of Palestinian background, often led to a jail cell. It was ironic to me that in 1987 and 1988, when Israel was engaged in a virtual civil war with its Palestinians, I could go to a refugee camp anywhere on the West Bank or Gaza and talk to whomever I wanted. But across the river in Jordan a trip to a Palestinian camp required a permit and an intimidating escort of secret police whose presence stifled any possibility of a frank discussion. The riots had been a reaction to Rifai’s repression, and the king had already eased the rules on free speech.

  Hussein looked at his wife as if apologizing for what she had borne on his behalf. “It’s sad and difficult for Noor, who has done so much here and in the outside world for Jordan.”

  Noor acknowledged that some of the criticism had to be addressed, and was trying to distinguish between behavior that she was prepared to change and behavior she wouldn’t sacrifice. She had more or less decided that her style would change, but not her substance. After the riots she switched to clothes that were almost all Jordanian-made, from ballgowns to blue jeans. The big jewels vanished into a vault somewhere, to be replaced by down-homey pieces such as a charm bracelet decked with ornaments chosen by her children. Just after our first meeting she invited me to go with her to Jerash to inspect the preparations for that year’s arts festival. She wore a mid-calf khaki skirt; mine came just to my knees. In the newspaper the next day I was amused to find myself in a picture standing just behind the queen. The photograph had been retouched to give me a modest pair of trousers. Sensitivities were obviously so great that even someone in the queen’s entourage had to be covered.

  But the queen was not going to submit to demands that she wear Islamic headscarves. “I don’t play to one group or another, and I don’t plan to start now,” she said. “I think it’s possible to—and I think I do—balance a respect for what’s traditional in this society with what’s practical for the role I have to play.”

  That role—her projects—would all continue, although, she said wistfully, “some of them will take years to be understood.” When she married the king, she had asked him what she should do. “He said, ‘Whatever you decide I’m sure will be right,’ “ she recalled. At the time she had been buoyed by his confidence in her. But her first visits to government officials were less encouraging. One minister strongly advised her to confine her public role to cutting an occasional ceremonial ribbon.

  “Everyone would have understood that,” said Ranya Khadri, a Jordanian law graduate. “If you just sit home and have kids, that’s fine with everyone. The minute you try to do something different as a woman in this society, you open yourself up to gossip and criticism.”

  But Noor couldn’t imagine a life without something resembling a job. “I’d always worked,” she said. At first she involved herself with projects linked to her former career: urban planning, building codes and environmental issues. As her children were born, she became increasingly involved with issues of mother and child health and education, then women’s training and employment, then sports and culture. By 1985 she was heading a large foundation from an office in a refurbished palace that had belonged to King Abdullah. Her projects tended to focus on women, especially the women of isolated rural areas. Many Bedouin tribes had stopped wandering with the seasons and settled down year round in makeshift settlements that lacked transport, clean water, health care. Lisa Halaby, the town planner, looked at these places and imagined them differently. Noor, the queen of Jordan, goaded the politicians to make them so. The men who ran Jordan weren’t used to taking orders from a young woman.

  And the men whose wives she was helping didn’t always like the effect of her help. A rug-weaving project on a wind-swept hilltop named Jebel Bani Hatnida had been a roaring success because the women could do the work at home on simple, traditional looms made of sticks and stones. The queen had helped with design and organization, then bought the rugs as gifts for Jordan’s official visitors. She also visited the women, squatting beside them in the dust and listening to their problems. The money for the rugs went straight to the women, giving them a measure of independence for the first time in their lives. One of them used the money from her first rug to pay for bus fare to the city to file for a divorce.

  Noor had other interests that didn’t sit well with religious extremists. There had been threats to disrupt the arts festival at Jerash, of which she was the principal patron. The festival had been growing every year, drawing traditional artists such as Arabian poets but also increasingly attracting European performers, such as foreign ballet companies, whose acts the fundamentalists considered lewd. They also opposed the crea
tion of a scholarship boarding school, which the queen had sponsored. The school was to be coeducational—anathema to Islamic hard-liners. The “Christian causes” that had so worried the Bedouin in Maan entailed working with denominations such as Men-nonites, Anglicans and Roman Catholics who had refugee-relief programs running in Jordan.

  Whenever Noor spoke about becoming a Muslim, she always stressed Islam’s compatibility with the values of the Judeo-Christian tradition in which she’d been raised, and of the need to “promote an accurate image” of Islam’s humanism and universal character. She criticized “extremists” for conveying what she said was a distorted picture of the faith.

  Her sudden return from Washington in the midst of the riots had left her staring at a diary of empty, unscheduled days. She had to decide how to fill them: to hide from the criticism or to go out and face it. She went out. “It might be easier to retire slightly or retract slightly,” she said, gazing at a fading beam of sunlight falling gently on a bed of soft pink roses. “I’d have more time with the children”—her own were then aged nine, eight, six and three. “I could exercise more or even read a book. But I feel I have a responsibility to those young people who believe in the same ideals as me but don’t have the power to carry them out. If I pull back, I’m letting them down—especially the women.” Her first public appearances had gone well. “I was so relieved to find that the rubbish in the atmosphere hadn’t had any impact, thank God. I’d worried whether the rumors could affect the way people related to me. It was a mood that came, and seemed to pass… although you never let go of the knowledge that people could feel that way.”

  Later, when I got to know her better, she confided that she’d considered an alternate answer to her critics: having another baby. “I thought, That’s something I can do that would please everyone.’ “ But in the end she decided against it. “I’d love to have another baby, but I also want to be a good family-planning model,” she said. I laughed and said that the king’s eleven children rather militated against that. She pointed out that fertility rates—Jordan has one of the highest in the world—are calculated on offspring per woman, not man. “By Jordanian standards, four children is still considered a large small family. If I had five, it’d be a small large family.” That evening in the garden she hinted that the riots had not been quite the calamity for her that I had assumed. I had asked the king whether he felt the riots were a one-time explosion of emotion, or whether unrest could occur again. “I think it was a one-off,” he said. The queen shook her head. “I don’t think you can assume that, Sidi,” she said. Sidi, meaning leader, was what the king’s closest deputies called him. I wondered if she was the only one of them brave enough to contradict him. She went on to say that much would depend on whether people believed the promised changes to be genuine. She spoke warmly of the king’s decision to call elections and the freeing of comment in the local press. A few days earlier an outspoken Palestinian journalist who had had her passport confiscated and her career ended by Zaid Rifai’s government had been invited to the palace for a meeting of reconciliation. “I was so glad,” said Noor. “These are things that I have been pushing for and that His Majesty has always wanted for Jordan. But some of the people around him have tried very hard to prevent them from happening.”