Coffee as Motif in Saudi Fiction: Ritual, Hospitality, Heritage, and Memory

This article investigates coffee (al-qahwa) as a recurring literary motif in contemporary Saudi fiction, focusing on Badriah Albeshr’s Hend wa Alaskar (Hend and the Soldiers, 2006) and Mohammed Hasan Alwan’s Al-Qundus (The Beaver, 2011). While coffee is widely recognized as a ritual and heritage emblem in Saudi Arabia, it has received limited scholarly attention as a literary device. This study addresses this gap by examining how coffee, as a recurring motif, shapes narrative meaning and cultural identity in Saudi fiction, thereby contributing a new intersection of motif theory and cultural semiotics to Arabic literary studies. Drawing on motif theory, semiotics of culture, heritage studies, and memory studies, the analysis situates coffee as more than descriptive detail: it is a recurrent sign that encodes cultural values and structures narrative meaning. Close readings of the novels show that coffee functions in four interrelated ways. As ritual code, it organizes hospitality and initiates storytelling. As a spatial marker, it mediates thresholds of belonging between home, workplace, café, and life abroad. As a heritage token, it encodes continuity through Najdi preferences, Khawlani cultivation, and household variations. As a mnemonic anchor, it evokes memory and nostalgia, linking taste and aroma to kinship, inheritance, and life away from home. The study demonstrates that Saudi fiction mobilizes coffee motifs to dramatize hospitality, belonging, continuity, and memory, enriching motif research and cultural criticism. It suggests comparative research on other everyday practices in Gulf and Arabic literature.