Wasafiri at Large: Countering Narrative Fault Lines in The Gulf

Wasafiri works with Editors at Large across South East Asia and Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Middle East. During their tenure, each Editor at Large writes a piece reflecting on an aspect of their literary locality. Here, Teresa Cherukara reflects on the misconceptions and outsider perceptions surrounding the Gulf, emphasising the complex and multifaceted experiences of the South-Asian diaspora who live there, and how cultural and creative initiatives that arise in the area resist reductionist narratives, and better represent the diverse migrant experiences in the Gulf.

I can’t remember the first time I learnt the UAE existed on a fault line, only what it did to me after. I recall scanning the rooms of our rented flat trying to identify safe corners. We lived on the second floor — modest as far as height standards in Dubai go, but still, not really feasibly safe from shaky ground. Later, when I escaped risk to go study English in London, I learnt something equally unsettling: the place that I was raised also existed on a narrative fault-line. When I told people I grew up in Dubai, I would be met by one of two responses: the assumption that I was a morally corrupt millionaire in hiding (untrue, at least on the count of wealth), or, being interrogated about where exactly in India Dubai was.

A small collection of Middle-Eastern countries – the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia – host the busiest migration corridor of the Indian diaspora in the world, according to Reuters. South-Asian existence in the Gulf is deeply specific and multifarious; in Dubai, the Indian diaspora occupies both the richest and the most precarious strata of society. As an Indian writer and reader who continues to live in Dubai, I am deeply interested in the city’s PR problem, or success, depending on who you ask. You don’t have to venture far to see the discourse in action. Here’s A.A Gill, writing about the city in 2011 in his article ‘Dubai On Empty’, published in Vanity Fair: ‘Its skyline erupting from the desert in just two decades, Dubai is a cautionary tale about what money can’t buy: a culture of its own’. He proceeds to outline the various categories of expats you might be able to find in the city: 

‘Then there is a third category of people: the drones. The workers. The Asians: Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, and Filipinos. Early in the morning, before the white mercenaries have negotiated their hangovers, long before the Emiratis have shouted at the maid, buses full of hard-hatted Asians pull into building sites. They have the tough, downtrodden look of Communist posters from the 30s—they are both the slaves of capital and the heroes of labor’.

It seems unlikely that one could make a statement like this today, but the spirit of the interpretation still persists — you only have to venture online to know that the Gulf is home to highly polarised opinions. Depending on where you look, Dubai is either the future – highly safe, super efficient – or a moral wasteland: exploitative and vapid. Reality resists binaries. Criticism like this sheds light on the flattening of place, and provides fertile ground for us to begin interrogating why and how these narratives thrive. In her study of Indian migration to the Gulf, in Between Dreams and Ghosts (2021), Andrea Wright explains: ‘the Gulf is not an exceptional, unmodern space; rather, it is a place deeply imbricated with and shaped by colonialism and contemporary neoliberalism’. Academic literature about the Gulf has risen in the last few years, and scholarly work lays an important foundation in challenging the tired conceptions of these places. Rana AlMutawa’s recent study, Everyday Life in the Spectacular City (2024), does especially counteractive work when examining the lives of Dubai’s expats: 

‘[Dubai’s residents] are adaptive agents who inhabit and make meanings in a spectacular and illiberal city that shapes but can also be shaped by, their desire to live a meaningful life and the practices they enact to achieve this goal.’

How do we begin to dispense this knowledge into mainstream discourse about Dubai? In this essay, I refer specifically to the South-Asian migrant experience, primarily because it is the region most typically brought to the fore when criticising migrant experiences within the Gulf. The obvious answer is cultural production. The writers and artists who work to narrativise migrant existence in the Gulf do important work: they build an archive upon which to call upon, a record that the ‘Gulf Dream’ is as potent and compelling as it’s imperial counterpart, that lives have been lost over it as equally as dynasties have been found. 

Multiple spaces in the city are dedicated to highlighting the works of local artists. These spaces have an established practice of legitimising hybridity — a radical trend in a place where the delineation of ‘local’ and ‘expat’ was once carefully maintained. Khalid Jauffer, whose shows have been on display at galleries such as The Third Line and 421 in the UAE, is one such example. Past examples of his work include hand-drawn receipts (‘Receipts - DHL’) and sketches of palm trees in states of decay (‘Flaccid series’). His bio places Jauffer as ‘an artist who stumbles upon his work whilst grocery shopping, illegally parking, people watching, dune bashing, sunset chasing and commuting’ — that is to say, the routines that escape mainstream narratives about Dubai, where he was born and raised.

Shazia Salam is another example of this. Her bio describes her practice as a ‘negotiation with her displaced cultural belonging’. Her debut solo exhibition at Tashkeel, titled ‘Voice-Over-Voice’ presents four auditory environments that record the performance of exercises developed for vocal professionals who populate the city’s soundscape, from automated telephone messages to announcements at metro stations. My personal favourite is ‘Exercise 02: Narrate the script. Increase the intensity of happiness as you go along’, which follows Ana Schofield, voice of mega-airline Emirates. These are but two examples in a rich and ever-growing field of artistic production, one actively creating an archive of creative dialogue with a place that remains ever in flux.

Public programming in Dubai also does much to illuminate the adaptive agents AlMutawa refers to. The Jameel Arts Centre hosts ‘Night School’, a continuing education program run by Todd Reisz, in which ‘UAE residents shape discussions around urbanism, history and their intersection at the port city of Dubai’. Meanwhile, the Quoz Arts Fest, hosted at AlSerkal Avenue, is perhaps the most commercial of these ventures, aiming to highlight local musicians, galleries, and businesses in the region. This year’s edition attracted more than 35,000 people. Much is being done towards building a public facing calendar that exposes the kinds of creativity that is fostered in the city.

There remains so much room for migrant experiences within the Gulf to be documented and archived in creative mediums. Part of the reason for that is time — the UAE was founded in 1971, making it a spritely 53 years of age, and the generation of creative practitioners shaped by it proportionally young. As AlMutawa writes: ‘there is still a need for a large-scale intervention’, one that challenges questions of authenticity, and highlights ‘the consequences its narratives play in our understanding of certain geographies and the people who inhabit them’. Fiction, I believe, remains one of the most powerful agents to bring this intervention forward.

Gulf-migrant literature that deals with the South-Asian experience is relatively nascent. My grandmother gifted me Benyamin’s Goat Days, a novel translated by Joseph Koyippally and published in 2008. It documents the narrative of a Saudi migrant forced into slave labour before he escapes and returns home to Kerala. The book has done much to represent the starker realities of the migrant experience in the Gulf, as Benyamin is reported to have written the novel after hearing a first-hand account of the same experience. Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (2017) has also secured a permanent place as a more contemporary work within this canon; his short stories are infused with magical realism, and glimmer with multi-media stylings that play with the formality of language itself. Stories range from labourers who dissolve into passports, to a teenager whose tongue leaps out of his body and gains sentience. In his article, ‘Losing Oneself in Kerala’s Gulf Migrant Literature’, published in Jadaliyya in 2021, Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil posits: ‘Realism renders a poor service as a literary technique when it becomes the mode of studying migration, because it believes that migrant lives can be made transparent.‘

The difficulty of realism might be another reason to explain why there remains an entire category of migrant experiences that go unrepresented and become illegible outside their specific regional contexts. An argument may be made for legibility being an unnecessary goal. Yet, without it, we have little to counter the reductionist narratives that dominate so much discourse surrounding the Gulf. Perhaps more importantly, we remain unseen, not simply by the world, but ourselves. Authors battle very real material constraints; publishers rule by consensus, and there remains a lack of conviction fuelled by Orientalist binaries of ‘authentic/inauthentic’ places and narratives. Plenty of space remains within the canon of Gulf-migrant literature, for stories of pathos to exist alongside joy, moral dubiousness to exist alongside martyrdom.

George Saunders, upon visiting Dubai, writes it best in his piece, ‘The New Mecca’, for GQ in 2005: ‘In all things, we are the victims of The Misconception From Afar. There is the idea of a city, and the city itself, too great to be held in the mind. And it is in this gap (between the conceptual and the real) that aggression begins.’ A professor of mine once sheepishly admitted that they’d thought Dubai was considered a place where ‘people who couldn’t cut it’ in London, tended to go. I was unsurprised, but flinched anyway. Cultural production in the Gulf, in all its various forms, plays a vital role in countering the reductionist narratives that have dominated external perception for so long. Fostering and creating critical room for this will be an essential part of its growth. Later, when researching this essay, I leant that the UAE has never been on a fault line, just near one; it is located on the edge of the Arabian Tectonic Plate, whose one boundary is located next to the seismically active Zagros mountain belt of Iran. I must have been misinformed, or I might have just made it up.

Photo credit: Photo by David Rodrigo on Unsplash