Habibi Magazine - Archives on-line

My first published writing was a series of essays that appeared in a Habibi, a newspaper/magazine from California. The series was called "Arabian Journal". In it, I wrote about my adventures living as a young wife and college grad with my American husband in Jeddah in the late 1970's. I wrote about exploring the folk dance scene and some of the interesting characters I met in the process of trying to learn about the traditions there.

Habibi served the burgeoning belly dance scene in the 1970's, and was originally published by Bob Zalot. Later, in the 1990's, Shareen El Safy revived it, and during that time I wrote a stand-alone article for the magazine, a kind of summary of what I'd learned about the folk dances of the women of Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Gulf. Just recently, Shareen digitized the articles from the years 1992-2002 and put them up on a website. I highly recommend this as a research tool if you're interested in the Middle Eastern performance arts. You can search by author or keyword. Some of the best writing about Middle Eastern dance was published in Habibi, and it's worth a serious browse. The link is here.


Here is the link to my story from the Fall, 1997 edition, Loosening their tresses: women's dances of the Arabian Gulf and Saudi Arabia