Contesting Narratives of Victimization in Migration to the Arab Gulf States: A Reading of Mia Alvar’s In the Country

Abstract

The experiences of migrant workers in the Arab Gulf States tend to be understood through narratives of victimization. This article aims to problematize such narratives through an analysis of three short stories set in the Gulf by Filipina-American writer Mia Alvar from her debut collection In the Country (2015). Mapping out ways in which these stories depart from narratives that revolve around themes of exploitation and exclusion, the article demonstrates that fiction can critically engage with the tension between the need to represent and make visible the reality of migrant experiences in the Gulf, and the need to question the essentialism and inflexibility through which they tend to be framed. Using the insights of recent anthropological and ethnographic research on the Gulf’s non-citizen population, I argue that Alvar’s stories both expose the structural inequality that facilitates victimization and pave the way for a more nuanced understanding of migrant experiences in the Gulf.

Keywords:

• Gulf
• migration
• exclusion
• victimization
• literature

Notes

1 Anam, “Anwar Gets Everything”, in Freeman (ed.), Granta 123: Best of Young British Novelists 4 (2013), p. 64.

2 Ibid., p. 65.

3 See, for example, Chonghaile, “Beaten, Trapped, Abused and Underpaid – Migrant Domestic Workers in the UAE”, The Guardian, 23 October 2014; and Al-Qadi, “Gulf Migrant Workers Are Being Abused in Complete Silence”, The New Arab, 5 December 2017.

4 Examples of this kind of representation in works of fiction include: Benyamin, Goat Days, trans. Koyippally (2012); Puri, Dubai Dreams: The Rough Road to Riches (2010); Alrefai, Ẓill al-shams (1998); Ismail, Baʿīdan ʾilā hunā (1997); El-Bisatie, Drumbeat, trans. Daniel (2010). One exception is Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (2017) which notably addresses different experiences of exclusion as well as place-making without resorting to the usual representation of migrants as without agency.

5 See, for example, Amnesty International, “Reality Check: The State of Migrant Workers’ Rights with Four Years to Go Until the Qatar 2022 World Cup”, 5 February 2019; and Chen, “The Labor Abuse that Went into NYU’s Abu Dhabi Campus”, The Nation, 26 November 2018.

6 Single male migrant workers are commonly referred to as “bachelors” regardless of whether they are married or not because their residency permit does not allow them to be accompanied by their families in the Gulf. Policies restrict “bachelors” from living in family-only residential buildings and, sometimes, in family-only neighborhoods.

7 Ahmad, “Beyond Labor: Foreign Residents in the Persian Gulf States”, in Kamrava and Babar (eds), Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf (2012), p. 40.

8 Vora, Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (2013), p. 10.

9 Babar, “Introduction”, in Babar (ed.), Arab Migrant Communities in the GCC (2017), p. 10.

10 Ibid., pp. 9–10; Vora, Impossible Citizens, p. 10; Vora and Koch, “Everyday Inclusions: Rethinking Ethnocracy, Kafala, and Belonging in the Arabian Peninsula”, Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 15.3 (2015), p. 546.

11 As Miriam Cooke puts it, the Gulf is often perceived with disapproval as “either backward tribal with a thin, modern veneer or failed modern because of tribal residue” [Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (2014), p. 10]. On the contrast between places of exploitation and places of luxury, see Elsheshtawy who challenges the tendency to perceive the Gulf through these images by examining the “everyday, ordinary, urbanity” through which many migrants articulate their experiences [Temporary Cities: Resisting Transience in Arabia (2019), p. 69].

12 Elsheshtawy, Temporary Cities, p. 252.

13 Gardner and Nagy, “Introduction: New Ethnographic Fieldwork among Migrants, Residents and Citizens in the Arab States of the Gulf”, City and Society 20.1 (2008), pp. 1–4; Nagy, “The Search for Miss Philippines Bahrain – Possibilities for Representation in Expatriate Communities”, City and Society 20.1 (2008), pp. 79–104; Ahmad, “Beyond Labor”; Gardner, City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain (2010).

14 Vora, Impossible Citizens; Vora and Koch “Everyday Inclusions”; Koch, “Is Nationalism Just for Nationals? Civic Nationalism for Noncitizens and Celebrating National Day in Qatar and the UAE”, Political Geography 54 (2016), pp. 43–53.

15 Few studies address such literary works, including Schlote, “Writing Dubai: Indian Labour Migrants and Taxi Topographies”, South Asian Diaspora 6.1 (2014), pp. 33–46; Sabry, Al-ʿAmāla al-wāfida wa atharuhā fī al-ʾadab al-ʾImārātī: alqiṣṣa namūdhajan (2008); and Elayyan, “Three Arabic Novels of Expatriation in the Arabian Gulf Region: Ibrāhīm Naṣrallāh’s Prairies of Fever, Ibrāhīm ʿAbdal-Magīd’s The Other Place, and Saʿūd al-Sanʿūsī’s Bamboo Stalk”, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 16 (2016), pp. 85–98.

16 There have been recent attempts and promises across the Gulf States to reform the kafala or to abolish it. See Migrants-Rights.org Organisation, “Campaign: Reform the Kafala System”.

17 Gardner, “Why Do They Keep Coming? Labor Migrants in the Persian Gulf States”, in Kamrava and Babar (eds), Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf (2012), p. 44.

18 See Dakkak, “Migrant Labour, Immobility and Invisibility in Literature on the Arab Gulf States”, in Aguiar, Mathieson, and Pearce (eds), Mobilities, Literature, Culture (2019), pp. 189–210.

19 Gardner and Nagy, “Introduction”, pp. 1–2.

20 Longva, Walls Built on Sand: Migration, Exclusion and Society in Kuwait (1997), Chapter 3 and Chapter 5.

21 Longva, “Neither Autocracy nor Democracy but Ethnocracy: Citizens, Expatriates and the Socio-Political System in Kuwait”, in Dresch and Piscatori (eds), Monarchies and Nations: Globalisation and Identity in the Arab States of the Gulf (2005), pp. 126–129.

22 Longva, Walls Built on Sand, p. 45.

23 Gardner, City of Strangers, p. 6.

24 Ibid., pp. 79–80.

25 Dresch, “Foreign Matter: The Place of Strangers in Gulf Society”, in Fox, Mourtada-Sabbah, and Al-Mutawa (eds), Globalization and the Gulf (2006), pp. 200–222; Bristol-Rhys, “Socio-Spatial Boundaries in Abu Dhabi”, in Kamrava and Babar (eds), Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf (2012), pp. 59–84; Kathiravelu, Migrant Dubai: Low Wage Workers and the Construction of a Global City (2016).

26 Longva, “Neither Autocracy”; Babar, “The Cost of Belonging: Citizenship Construction in the State of Qatar”, The Middle East Journal 68.3 (2014), pp. 403–420; Sater, “Citizenship and Migration in Arab Gulf Monarchies”, in Seeberg and Eyadat (eds), Migration, Security, and Citizenship in the Middle East: New Perspectives (2013), pp. 27–42.

27 Sabry, Al-ʿAmāla al-wāfida; Al-Mutawa, “Al-ʿAmāla al-wāfida: dirāsa sosiolojiyya lil-qiṣṣa al-qaṣīra fī al-ʾImārāt”, in Al-Sharouni et al. (eds), Abḥāth al-multaqā al-thānī lil kitābāt al-qiṣaṣiyya wal riwaʾiyya fi dawlat al-ʾImārāt al-ʿArabiyya al-Muttaḥida: al-juzʾ al-ʾawwal (1992), pp. 61–82.

28 Al-Mutawa, “Al-ʿAmāla al-wāfida”, pp. 64–65.

29 Nagy, “The Search for Miss Philippines Bahrain”, p. 83.

30 Alvar, “The Miracle Worker”, The Missouri Review 34.4 (2011), p. 35.

31 Ibid.

32 Vora and Koch, “Everyday Inclusions”, pp. 541–542.

33 Ahmad, “Beyond Labor”, p. 28.

34 Vora and Koch, “Everyday Inclusions”, p. 544.

35 Ibid., p. 541–542.

36 Ibid., p. 543.

37 Ibid., p. 547.

38 Vora, Impossible Citizens, p. 11.

39 Nagy, “The Search for Miss Philippines Bahrain”; Hosoda, “Middle Class Filipinos and the Formation of Diasporic National Communities in the United Arab Emirates”, in Lian, Rahman, and Bin Alas (eds), International Migration in Southeast Asia: Continuities and Discontinuities (2016), pp. 39–56.

40 Wang, “‘Global Citizenship’ and the Dislocated Generation in the United Arab Emirates”, Challenges to Citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa Region, LSE Middle East Centre, Vol. 2 (April 2015), pp. 70–85; Ali, “Going and Coming and Going Again: Second-Generation Migrants in Dubai”, Mobilities 6.4 (2011), pp. 553–568; Shah, “Kuwait Is Home: Perceptions of Happiness and Belonging among Second Plus Generation Non-Citizens in Kuwait”, Asian Population Studies 13.2 (2017), pp. 140–160; Akinci, “Culture in the ‘Politics of Identity’: Conceptions of National Identity and Citizenship among Second-Generation Non-Gulf Arab Migrants in Dubai”, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46.11 (2020), pp. 2309–2325.

41 Alvar, “A Contract Overseas”, In the Country (2015), p. 232.

42 Ibid., p. 242.

43 Ibid., p. 249.

44 Ibid., p. 253.

45 Ibid.

46 Ibid.

47 Ibid., p. 254.

48 Qtd. in Osella and Osella, “Nuancing the ‘Migrant Experience’: Perspectives from Kerala, South India”, in Koshy and Radhakrishnan (eds), Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo-Diaspora (2008), p. 149.

49 Ibid.

50 Lori, Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf (2019), p. 143.

51 Ibid., p. 141.

52 Ibid., p. 144.

53 Ibid., p. 155.

54 Alvar, “A Contract Overseas”, p. 259.

55 Alvar, “Shadow Families”, In the Country (2015), p. 93.

56 Ibid., p. 94.

57 Ibid., p. 95.

58 Ibid., p. 52.

59 Ibid., p. 94.

60 Ibid., p. 95.

61 Ibid., p. 106–107.

62 Ibid., p. 107.

63 Ibid., p. 109.

64 Ibid., p. 116.

65 Lori, Offshore Citizens, p. 137.

66 Vora, Impossible Citizens, p. 111.

67 Nor is Alvar’s “Shadow Families” the first narrative that depicts the complicity of migrants themselves in the victimization of fellow migrants in the Gulf. As I mention earlier, Alrefai’s Ẓill al-shams exposes the networks that operate in Kuwait and Egypt and enable the deception of Egyptian migrants prior to their arrival. There is also Egyptian author Mohamed Mansi Qandil’s Bayʿ nafs bashariyya (1987), a novella which depicts the Gulf as a place where structural inequality pushes migrants to become opportunistic and materialistic at the expense of other migrants, even from the same national or class group.

68 Vora and Koch, “Everyday Inclusions”, p. 546.

69 Lori, Offshore Citizens, p. 137.

70 Alvar, “The Miracle Worker”, In the Country (2015), p. 29.

71 Ibid., p. 28, 33.

72 Ibid., p. 33.

73 Ibid., pp. 38–39.

74 Ibid., p. 31.

75 Ibid., p. 43.

76 Ibid., p. 44.

77 Ibid., p. 45.

78 Ibid.

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid., p. 46, 61.

81 Ibid., p. 59.

82 Ibid., p. 33.

83 Ibid., p. 55.

84 Ibid., p. 56.

85 Ibid., p. 59.

86 Ibid., p. 58–59.

87 Ibid., p. 59.

88 Ibid.

89 Ibid., p. 62.

90 Ahmad, “Beyond Labor”, p. 29.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nadeen Dakkak

Nadeen Dakkak is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK, [email protected].