Inspirations

Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Photographer: Tobias Fischer.

That first night in Abu Dhabi …

When Jillian Schedneck takes up a position teaching English to a classroom of students in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE), she is young, idealistic, in love, and ready to take on the world. But it is not exactly what she anticipated: her mostly female students are only attending university as a token distraction from what will become a life spent attending to domestic duties, and Jillian struggles with the limitations to their futures that they seem to so readily accept.

Facing the contradicting culture of extreme wealth and luxury, but little real opportunity, Jillian finds herself deeply intrigued by the women of the UAE. As she negotiates her way around classrooms of unlikely students, they start to come alive as Jillian introduces them to writers such as Virginia Woolf and poses questions about feminism. But she is not only opening up a new world to them. She also finds her own cultural assumptions being challenged and begins to realise how much her time in these desert cities have shaped the woman she will become.

Chapter One

That first night in Abu Dhabi, I dreamed of a woman wearing a dazzling black headscarf hurrying through a maze of clay-coloured alleyways. She disappeared among the shadows cast by the domes of a nearby mosque and then suddenly appeared behind me, the ends of her scarf fluttering in the wind. Before she could speak, a warbling voice rippled in the distance, bellowing from on high. The noise washed over us, filling the alleyways with its strange, impassioned plea. I watched the woman turn to face the shrouded sun and sink to her knees. As she prostrated in prayer, whispering words like an incantation, I felt myself being lifted far above her until I hovered under the waning moon. That voice, raw and beautiful, echoed through my whole body.

I woke, but that ethereal sound didn’t end. The sunrise call to prayer had slipped into my dream and awakened me to the reality of Abu Dhabi, my new life and the one I’d left behind. I opened my eyes to the drab hotel room, with its rattling air conditioner and dark curtains, and wished this new reality would dissolve before my eyes like drawings in the sand. I shouldn’t be here, I thought. This was a huge mistake.

I got up, pushed the curtains aside, and studied the city at sunrise, with its glass-panelled buildings and dusty yellow cranes. Months ago, I had read about this country in outdated guidebooks. I’d marked pictures of oases and craggy mountains, roadside stalls selling carpets and camel blankets, goats and donkeys crossing one-lane roads and the distant palaces of sheikhs. I had been so sure of my decision to move to this tiny country in the Middle East, so ready to leave home, yet ever since I’d stepped on the plane in Boston not even twenty-four hours before I had been desperately trying to remind myself why I once found those images so appealing. Would I spend a whole year longing for my return?

Before settling on Abu Dhabi, I would concoct a new plan to live abroad almost weekly: a Fulbright fellowship to Bosnia; reporting on women’s issues in Zimbabwe; working for a language school in Krakow; teaching at a university in Istanbul. This desire to travel took hold during my last year of graduate school, when I noticed that it was taking me longer and longer to get out of bed each morning and awaken from the haze of half-sleep. I longed to be pulled and pushed, to journey to places that seemed unknown and less travelled, whose names held some kind of mystery and magic to my ears.

When international teaching websites began listing job postings from universities in the United Arab Emirates, I sent my CV to every one, in cities like Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. I had heard of Dubai before, while working as a research assistant in London in 2002. From that office in dark and foggy Hammersmith, I pulled up pictures of paradise on my computer screen: pristine beaches, lustrous palm trees, shimmering bodies lying on golden sand. Dubai. The rising metropolis bordering Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf was a luxury travel destination with all the trappings of Arabian life – Bedouins on camels, tents erected in the vast desert, palm fronds sagging with clusters of ripe dates – alongside gleaming residential towers, themed shopping malls and international conglomerates.

Yet no one else seemed to see the romance of the place. When I spoke of my plan to teach in the UAE, classmates and friends responded negatively. “Aren’t you worried you might teach a future terrorist?”, I was asked more than once. I was treated to lectures on the oppression of women in Arab cultures and told I would be forced to veil. Classmates brought up the stereotype of the dominant, possessive Arab male and joked about rich sultans demanding I become the third or fourth woman in their collection of wives. But in our divergent views I found another reason to pursue teaching in the Middle East. My friends’ prejudice and media-inspired fear was the opposite of my exotic imaginings; I wanted to find out what lay within that middle ground.

A few weeks after sending my job applications, a private university in Abu Dhabi asked for an interview. While I was disappointed I hadn’t heard from any Dubai universities, I couldn’t deny that Abu Dhabi, the wealthier, oil-rich capital emirate, held similar appeal. Abu Dhabi. Here was another enigmatic name, a place where I could witness the great divides of Islam and the secular west, timeless desert and futuristic cities, local people and foreign expatriates. When the HR manager emailed me a contract the day after our interview, I signed immediately.

About the author

Jillian Schedneck is the author of the memoir Abu Dhabi Days, Dubai Nights, and the writing craft book, Write Your Travel Memoir: A Step-by-Step Guide. Her stories and essays have been published in a variety of journals, including Tahoma Literary Review, Brevity, Redivider and elsewhere. Her work has been chosen as a notable essay in the Best American Essays series and won multiple Solas Awards for Best Travel Writing. She lives in Canberra, Australia, with her partner and two children. You can connect with Jillian via her website here.