Gargash, a voice for the arts

What would you do when faced with choosing between love and duty?

Noora, the heroine of Dubai-based author Maha Gargash's first novel, The Sand Fish, finds herself faced with this choice.

The man she loves — the man who is asking her to run away with him, away from her husband and her duty — is holding out his palm full of glistening pearls.

The problem is, the pearls have been stolen from Noora's husband and Noora is heavily pregnant with her lover's child.

For Noora, a choice has to be made and her choice is duty.

"You have a choice," Gargash said, "if you're stuck in the wrong place, you have to resist and destroy yourself or go along to make your life work."

A species of desert skink, the sand fish (Scincus scincus) appears twice in the novel — at first it becomes stuck between rocks near Noora's home, bashing its head to try and get away from her and her brother Sagar. It eventually escapes but not without injuring itself first.

Wild at heart

The sand fish, Gargash said, is a metaphor for what Noora is — a young woman growing up, preparing for marriage, with a choice of staying with her duty and surviving, or fighting and becoming injured.

Set in the 1950s mountainous landscape of the Arabian peninsula, The Sand Fish follows Noora from her home as a wildly independent girl, to her first forbidden intimacy with a man (Rashid) and finally to her arranged marriage to a wealthy pearl merchant.

Women in the past, Gargash said, were very independent, literally sharing the life of the men. Women took care of the household, the children, took water from the wells and carried wood in the same way as their male counterparts.

Noora's family didn't restrict her in any way — she ran wild in the mountains if she pleased.

It was only when she was married and moved to the town that the restrictions started, "because the more structured the society, the more restrictions", Gargash said.

The Sand Fish touches on the intimacy between Noora and Rashid but this is a universal theme, Gargash said. "It's her story and it happened to her and it's not the first time it's happened to a young lady, neither here nor anywhere else."

If you are going to write a novel, she said, you can't hold back on details: You need to get into the person, into their life and express what their feelings are.

"If I were to take away feelings, the whole novel would be very dry, it would be brittle, it would not appeal," she said.

Gargash was born in Dubai to a prominent local family and studied in London and the United States, earning a degree in television and radio. Throughout writing The Sand Fish, Gargash continued to work in her present role as CEO of creative company Polkadot.

"It was a question of balancing the two," she said.

Every weekend, Gargash would sit and write, even during her holidays.

For novelists it may be easier, she explained. "But having said that, maybe it's not. You get lazy and delayed during the day. While if you work you have a more structured daily plan."

Two years later the novel was published. For Gargash, writing is like exercise because once you are doing it, it is fine. But before that you have to push yourself to start.

Change of plot

However, it wasn't all smooth sailing — 20 chapters into her first draft and she decided to change the focus of the book altogether. A lot was torn up.

Originally, the hero was a male and the story was based on a fishing family but it was too difficult to get detailed information about it.

"All the divers are either dead or blind or much, much older, whoever's alive. And the ones who are alive don't want to remember — they'd much rather live the life that's more relaxed, like they have now," Gargash said.

However, it is not true that the first draft was thrown into the bin, she says. Rather the good parts were kept and a lot of the original script was adapted into the new draft.

Gargash hopes her debut novel will inspire others to write, particularly in the region. Her advice is for people to just pick up the pen and write because it starts like a little seed, "then it grows and it grows and it grows. We've shown tremendous advances in all aspects of modernity — from the way we live to our surroundings — and I think it would be great to put more energy, more effort into literature and the arts."