What Saudi writer Ahmad Abu Dahman narrated in ‘The Belt’

The great Arabian novelist, who has died at the age of 76, carried the mountains of southern Arabia to the heart of France in his famous work, published in 2000.

AFP/Al Majalla

Ahmad Abu Dahman, the Saudi author of the internationally acclaimed novel 'The Belt', has died at the age of 76.

What Saudi writer Ahmad Abu Dahman narrated in ‘The Belt’

Jaber Muhammad Madkhali

last update on 21 Dec 2025

Saudi writer and novelist Ahmad Abu Dahman, who passed away earlier this month, did not merely pass through geography or interpret place in simplistic terms. He lived as a memory in motion, bearing entire villages upon his shoulders—villages composed of dialects, legends, and ancestral echoes, carrying them into the wider world.

He was the boy who left his southern home, suspended between mountains and clouds, to write of childhood, humanity, and identity in the language of the Other. Yet he never relinquished the cadence of his native tongue nor the clay of the village that clung to his soul. In his writing, the line between autobiography and imagination blurred. Exile itself became a vessel for knowledge, turning the villages of southern Saudi Arabia into texts that could speak across cultural boundaries.

Abu Dahman was born in 1949 in the village of Al Khalaf, nestled in the Asir region. His childhood unfolded among soaring peaks and fertile valleys, within a tightly knit web of tradition and community. Among ancient palaces and heritage towers, beside the wells of Banu Hilal that taught him the art of listening, he absorbed the rhythms of folk life and its enduring wisdom—gifts that would later shape the very nucleus of his literary vision.

Transformation and identity

It is life’s transformations that compel us to read the world anew and narrate it in our own voice. For Ahmad Abu Dahman, such a transformation came in 1979, when he enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris. This moment marked a decisive turning point, confronting him with a new civilisation, an unfamiliar language, and a cultural reality that demanded answers to the deepest questions: Who am I? Where do I belong? How can someone born in a southern village remake themselves within a global cultural axis?

Here, the transition ceased to be geographical. It became existential—a shift in vision, a reckoning of identity, and the birth of a novelist who would transform exile and displacement into the raw material of art. In Paris, that great confluence of histories and civilisations, Abu Dahman married a French woman and began a second life.

Charles Platiau/Reuters — Sorbonne University in Paris, where Dahman came to study in 1979.

Here, culture moved from a notion of rootedness to one of fluid identity. Marriage bridged two worlds. Languages and customs intertwined, not in conflict, but in dialogue. This fusion revealed a profound truth: that family is not only a location, but also a bond, a chosen space of affection and belonging.

Abu Dahman did not approach this duality with strategies of cultural negotiation. Rather, he lived both identities fully, authentically, not denying one in favour of the other. As he wrote in The Belt: “I wrote it for my wife and my daughter.” The novel is both a literary narrative and an intimate gesture of love, a story told by a father to his child, a husband to his wife, a testament to an identity expansive enough to carry everything, from the mountains of southern Arabia to the heart of France.

Document for the Other

What The Belt narrated was not merely a literary text; it was a message about personal and geographical transformations, about the place the writer inhabited, and the language he turned into a bridge between himself and the selves that emerged from it. It became necessary for him to offer a document through which the Other might be understood—a point of encounter between ‘his self’ and ‘their selves’.

The transition ceased to be geographical. It became existential—a shift in vision, a reckoning of identity, and the birth of a novelist who would transform exile and displacement into the raw material of art

The beauty of this document lies in the fact that, since its publication 25 years ago, The Belt has become a Saudi narrative imprint of global standards. Issued first in French, it allowed Abu Dahman to reach an international audience in the language of the Other without losing its authenticity. He did not present The Belt as a memoir confined to his personal world, but as a collective narrative in which individual experiences intertwined with the memory of the village.

Faisal Al Nasser/Reuters — Traditional old buildings stand in Rijal Almaa, a stone village tucked into a fold of Saudi Arabia's southern mountains, June 20, 2016.

Place itself became a protagonist, standing alongside the characters. Every stone on a path, every shadow on a mountain, every voice in a village, every note from a flute formed a coherent melody in the music of the event. It is a novel rich in emotion and symbolism, revealing to distant readers the depths of southern society as though they had never seen or heard it before.

Place and people

What Abu Dahman narrated expressed the memory of mountain chains bound to the ties between people and place, surrounded by a persistent struggle between tradition and modernity, while also recording the transformations and anticipations of a man striving to preserve his roots amid the widening horizons of the world.

When Abu Dahman first told his masterpiece The Belt in French, rather than in the Arabic to which he belongs, it triggered debate. Yet this was a deliberate and strategic choice, not a renunciation of his mother tongue nor a retreat from his linguistic roots. He simply wrote in 'the language of the Other' to say to the Western reader: "This is my village; this is my world."

Without affectation or exoticism, it was as if he were sending a direct message from the heart of southern Saudi Arabia to the heart of Europe. Later, to affirm his commitment to returning the text to its original tongue, he undertook its translation himself—a clear expression of his linguistic consciousness and his desire that his cultural experience should reach readers whole and sincere.

A different image

What Abu Dahman narrated undoubtedly contributed to reshaping the image of Arabia in the Western imagination. He conveyed that it was not a barren desert of oil, nor a monotonous political discourse, but a village like any other in the world, alive with heritage, civilisation, folk songs, and daily rituals, touched by the social transformations familiar to anyone living through the age of modernity.

Rania Sanjar/AFP — The Jabal Marir (Mount Marir) park in al-Namas in Saudi Arabia's Asir province on August 16, 2022.

For this reason, his novel played a profoundly cultural and human role. It opened a window onto Saudi society from within, presenting it as part of humanity's shared memory, linking the local with the global, the personal with the universal, in a single narrative translated into many languages.

Abu Dahman settled in France in the early 1980s, carrying his Saudi identity into the heart of a different European civilisation. He lived a long exile, mingled with longing, study, and cultural confrontation, yet he never severed his connection with the Saudi cultural scene, and continued to write about his homeland from abroad. For him, France became a place of living, experience, and new culture, but it never replaced his first youth, his village with its earliest songs, or the nature and mountains where he learned how legends are told.

It took Ahmad Abu Dahman 76 years to prove that villages, however small or simple they may appear before the transformations of the world, can become a universal language provided they are written with creative honesty. In this, he stands alongside those creators who devoted their lives to reaching foundational truths.

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