Space Invader

A self-proclaimed 'Gulf futurist', Sophia Al Maria's hotly anticipated literary debut is not your usual Arab-American memoir   It's Sophia's first day at her new school and, like most teenage girls, she's feeling self-conscious about what she's wearing. The public school uniform under her ill-fitting abaya suddenly seems out of place as a glossy clique of girls strut past, as does her Bedouin uncle's beat-up truck she's riding in. Fresh off the plane from the States, the private international school in Doha is a far cry from the middle America state school she's left behind. 'It was like 90210 if it were acted entirely with international exchange students cast by Benetton,' she writes, referring to the 'offspring of ambassadors and oil barons' that are now her classmates. 'But the weirdly utopian assortment of cultures had boiled down into a patty-melt pastiche of an America I knew from experience didn't exist offscreen.'   This is just one house-of-mirrors moment from The Girl Who Fell to Earth, the literary debut of artist, filmmaker and writer Sophia Al Maria, a sharply told memoir of her upbringing between Qatar and America. Embracing autobiography, science fiction and 1990s pop culture in equal gulps, it's a frank and funny tale of the pangs of girlhood. Suburban America, the urban boom of Doha and lonely student years in Cairo are seen through the eyes of a library-dwelling misfit: from first loves and fashion faux pas to an obsession with David Bowie (The Girl Who Fell to Earth's title is poached from Bowie's flame-haired alien alterego in 1976 science fiction film The Man Who Fell to Earth). Floating between cultures and social classes, she tapes the Ziggy Stardust album over her father's Surat Al-Baqara cassettes, fights boys to play Nintendo in her Bedouin family's majlis and rebels with her own signature 'glitter-grunge-via-Gulf' wardrobe. It's painfully personal. Does it freak her out that her innermost thoughts are now out there on the bookshelves of the public domain?   'I'll tell you this – it's more like having your baby exposed to the elements. The umbilical chord is cut so I can't really feel it anymore. It's not kicking in my belly, but I know when it is hurt and hear when something good is happening,' Al Maria explains. 'It had been such a harrowing process to write the thing – I'm 29, which is perhaps not the best age to attempt memoir. And so in a way, to jettison it out into the world was the only way to purge myself of a lot of the issues discussed in the book and move on to other ideas and projects of more interest to me.'   The Girl Who Fell to Earth is a more mainstream departure from her artistic output to date. A 'sci-fi Wahabi', her artworks (featured in last year's Gwangju Biennale), videos (her blog shows MIA's Bad Girls music clip imitating her style) and essays (most prominently published in cult magazine Bidoun) can all be bracketed under the title of 'Gulf Futurism', a mindboggling aesthetic link between the simulacrum structures and hyperreal lifestyle of the Gulf and the world's inevitable future dystopia. The ideology, which Al Maria shares with fellow futurist, visual artist and composer Fatima Al Qadiri, also borrows heavily and lovingly from sci-fi pop culture. 'The Gulf is a projection of a global future – one where extremes are rendered at their most,' Al Maria explains. 'The way class is so extremely and racially divided, the way interiors are so cold and exteriors are so hot and inhospitable the physics shatter glass in buildings, the make-believe fantasy elements of urban planning, and so on.'   After signing with an agent in 2008, Al Maria's original book proposal was therefore not autobiographical at all, but a 'baroque young adult post-apocalyptic "The Hunger Games in the Gulf" type series, called Qasida. My agent took one look at my planned masterpiece of SF/fantasy and said "um, that's a hard genre to break into." '   Instead, the agent suggested a proposal for a memoir, based on Al Maria's essays, and 'freakishly' publishing giant Harper Collins picked it up. 'And then my stomach dropped. Because I actually had to write this thing.'   The daughter of a tough farm girl from Puyallup, Washington and a Bedouin boy from Al Dafira, whose cultural differences are so vast they jokingly refer to themselves as the alien and girl next door in TV show Mork & Mindy, Al Maria bares all about both sides of her home life in the book – the good, the bad and the ugly. How did her family react to the memoir?   'My family are honest and straight people. And I occupy a bit of an autonomous zone where rules are confused. So in a way it was my attempt to explain myself to them as much as the readers,' she says, who also used the book as a way to challenge misconceptions of the Gulf as a sterile, artificial society. 'Another thought I had during the writing was this – life in the Gulf is highly sanitised for outside consumption, right? Decorum. Social graces. Whatever "honour" is,' she explains. 'But in my experience life in Qatar and the UAE is one of deep, almost primal experience. Whether it's having scarlet fever as a kid or cramps as a teenager, feelings of being trapped or feelings of total rapturous freedom, I felt it all there. More than in the States. So in a way the book was trying to blow up that conception of cold steel and glass.'   It's testimony to Al Maria that The Girl Who Fell From Earth toys with its own genre – she describes it as a 'memoir' in air quotes. 'I pitched it as not Not Without My Daughter,' she says. 'It was intentionally punching a hole in the Arab/Muslim woman memoir of woe.'   The portrait of the close tribal bond and tough love of her Bedouin side of the family, who are struggling to deal with the rapid urbanisation of Doha as they are relocated from horsehair tents in the desert to stocky apartments behind twelve-foot walls of concrete (to protect the women's privacy), is filled with warmth and delicious humour.   'This is going to sound strange but I was reading a lot of a writer called Pat McManus. He's a Pacific northwest outdoorsy writer, whose books I think right wing libertarians read.' More likely references for The Girl Who Fell to Earth include 'soothing' popular memoirist David Sedaris, Vladimir Nabokov and Joan Didion ('for her clarity of prose and sharp observation') as well as old diaries, home videos, movies from her childhood and, of course, memory 'as a sort of poetic guide'. A Clockwork Orange – both Anthony Burgess' original novella and Stanley Kubrick's wickedly subversive film adaptation – remains a constant influence. Al Maria praised Burgess' use of language as she took Brownbook to Thamesmead in London, where Kubrick shot some of the film's scenes.   Currently based between cities, with no 'walls' to call her own, Al Maria was in London to gather the crew for her first feature film, a thriller set in Cairo about 'a girl who goes on a vigilante killing spree targeting men.' Are there plans to adapt The Girl Who Fell to Earth for the big screen too? 'I think it would be better if someone else who loved it as a sort of fictional tale wanted to breath life into it,' she says. 'All that navel-gazing can make you go a little cross-eyed. I want to do as much non-me-focused, non-identity-politics, non-confessional stuff as possible.'   Photography: Celia Topping