Al-Shaykh: Breaking with Tradition

In her work, "The Swimming Pool," Hanan Al-Shaykh uses settings as well as natural images to compare the tension between custom and contemporary life, as seen through the adolescent narrator's eyes. Images of her home village are claustrophobic, such as the first scene of her "in the tent for threading the tobacco, amidst the mounds of tobacco plants and the skewers. Cross-legged, [...she] breathe[s] in the green odor, threading one leaf after another" (Al-Shaykh 1728). The physical confinement of a tent is both narrow and bland, given the impression of a tent as tan fabric without adornment. Coupled with the amount of tobacco products and the odor, the senses close in without reprieve or variation. Even the speaker's physical position of sitting cross-legged seems compressed and tight. The reader cannot blame her for leaving the tent to get a drink of water, but even as she excuses herself and claims to be thirsty, there is also the sense of desiring to escape. She admits "I am exasperated at being in the tent" (Al-Shaykh 1728). However, the relief of the water is short-lived, for she is called back to the tent. Throughout the story, it is the idea of going to the sea and swimming that drives the action. Due to tradition, the speaker is not allowed to swim in a co-ed place, and so hearing about a women's-only swimming pool provides opportunity to escape her village and experience more of the world, as well as enjoy the refreshment of swimming in hot weather. The sea is elusive and remote from the speaker,  In a reproduction of the sea she contemplates its beauty, explaining "the more I gazed at it, the cooler I felt its waters to be, and the more they invited me to bathe in them; they knew I had been born amidst dust and mud and the stench of tobacco" (Al-Shaykh 1729). Given the depiction of living with mud and dust, the speaker is tied to the earth. Water, however, possesses opportunity for travel and transformation. The sea, especially, is active with its tides and represents the potential to travel and escape. Ironically, however, the speaker realizes that as much as she wants to distance herself from her roots, they are a part of her. Similar to the water, it is difficult to separate the waves from their source. Rather than escaping, the speaker's journey to find the sea is more an experience of illumination. Seeing her lifestyle from the perspective of others provides the proof that alternate ways of thinking and living are equally possible.