English Uncensored

In all of Saudi society, and in my students in particular, I am constantly struck by the clashing combination of their strict, conservative, unquestioned Islamic beliefs with their simultaneous fascination with Western entertainment.

Pixabay.com

The university, as I have mentioned, has a long list of forbidden topics that the teachers must steer clear of. These topics include dating and relationships, alcohol, music, politics, anything to do with holidays or religious celebrations that are not Islamic, women driving, and even birthdays. 

The texts we use are meant for teaching English to a general audience; they are not tailored for Saudi Arabia. Therefore, we have to do our own censoring and pay attention to the barrage of “skip this page!” emails that come to us as our supervisors discover a page with something inappropriate. In other words, if an article about a festival in Spain mentions the Virgin Mary, that page in the book must be skipped. If a reading passage suggests a wife with a drinking problem, skip it. A series of articles chronicling the life of Maria Montessori is fine, as long as you deftly jump over the passage where it mentions her illicit child. An exercise on antecedents that mentions nudist colonies in Estonia? Better not go there. If there is ever any extra material teachers want to use, the university wants to review it first. A fairy tale about a prince who rescues a princess with a kiss? Sorry, denied. 

As often happens when the rules are so binding, teachers and students relax a bit as they get to know each other and stop worrying about all the nit-picky details. The funny thing is that while the university is concerned that I as a foreign teacher might broach these topics, it is the students themselves who often bring them up. An activity I did at the end of first semester most clearly presented their familiarity with and interest in Western decadence. 

Towards the end of the semester, students usually start losing their steam, evidenced one day by the first words I heard from a student at the start of class: “Teacher, today we don't want a lesson.” In an attempt to build their enthusiasm and let them have some fun, I had them work in groups to act out a scene from a movie of their choice for the rest of the class. 

They ate it up. They immediately started plotting their scenes, assigning roles, and even planning costumes. As I put no restrictions on their task, I suspected they would inevitably touch on a few questionable subjects, but I wasn't going to worry about it. When they performed their skits, I was completely shocked. My little classroom must have broken nearly every rule in the university! And the students loved every second of it – from performing their own skits to watching the others do the same.

The first skit was no doubt the most shocking. I don't think anything could top that. The girls had chosen Titanic, a movie that enjoys intense popularity here, perhaps because Rose feels doomed to accept her arranged marriage for money. Two girls, one as Rose and one as her fiance, sat at the “table” and began the scene. “I don't want to see you with Jack again. You don't respect me!” roared the girl who played the fiance, violently knocking the water bottle off the table, just as in the movie itself. In the next scene, another girl played the comforting mother, telling Rose, “You have to marry him. We need money!” The scene changed; a girl playing Jack placed a necklace around Rose's neck. The girl playing Rose had her abaya on, but at this point, she let it slip from her shoulders. She then climbed atop the teacher's desk and posed seductively, as 'Jack' sat in a chair and pretended to sketch her. The girls in the audience at this point were going crazy. For their final scene, Jack and Rose stood up on the teacher's desk in the classic Titanic pose, as if they were on the front of the boat rushing through the Atlantic. Another girl had gone to the e-podium computer to play “My Heart Will Go On” in the background. The girls clapped wildly and I was laughing too hard to speak.

The next skit was much more culturally appropriate and extremely creative. The girls slipped out of the room to prepare, and when they re-entered, they were wearing their abayas and niqabs and brandishing mops and paper rolls as swords. They chased each other around the class in a beautiful mock sword fight. It ended dramatically when one girl, who had secretly hidden a marker in the top of her paper roll, approached the board victoriously and, in sweeping movements, scrawled a huge “Z.”

In the skits that followed, we were entertained with zombies roaming around from Resident Evil, a gory scene from The Saw complete with a spooky voice coming from an iPod, Cinderella who lost and found her slipper, the heroic vampire of Twilight saving a girl from a speeding car, and a recreation of the TV show Moment of Truth. Though I had never heard of this show before, the girls all highly recommended it to me. The player, hooked up to a lie detector, wins money if he answers all the questions truthfully. The questions are the embarrassing sort, like “Have you ever cheated on your wife?” or things of that nature. “You have to watch it! People get divorced after this show!” the girls told me in excitement.

Pixabay.com

The final skit was, to my amusement, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The girls had backpacks and sunglasses on and wore their abayas and colorful scarves to look like the lovable fighting reptiles. Their ending pose provoked all the girls to take photos with their phones, so I joined in. The women in Saudi do take pictures of each other, even uncovered, but they are very wary of anyone outside their group of close friends and family having a photo of them. The Ninja Turtle photo was very safe – you couldn't see anyone's hair or face. Even so, after class, the Ninja group came to me shyly, asking me not to put the picture on Facebook. I told them of course not, I would keep the photo for me only. Much relieved, they smiled and went on their way. The great irony was that the very girls who were so concerned about a photo – a photo in which they could hardly be identified – were the same girls who had performed the earlier Titanic skit.