I just posted the video, below, which was published on YouTube on 3rd September 2014, and shows the Syrian government's bombardment of Jobar in Syria.  It must be watched and then we must ask: with all eyes and analysis on ISIS why is this wanton destruction excluded in the commentary, analysis and (in the lack of) coverage of Syria?  Something is very very wrong about how we are (not) seeing the world and Syria.   

مميز وهام - القصف بصواريخ المظلات على جوبر 3 9 2014

A Relapsing Orientalist in Dubai

writings from September 2010 to January 2011

Souqs

Is it attainable? That sense of being free of any kind of value, cultural judgement.  I can’t help it.  I see the world through a lens that has been fitted over the years.  When you say Arab culture I envisage the old souqs of Damascus and Yemen.  When I stand in the souqs of Muscat, I ask where is the souq?  It doesn’t smell or look like I have imagined an Arab souq so I don’t realise I have arrived. 

Neo-orientalism

So here I am in Dubai, for sure I will shake off this interminable blinkeredness now . . .or will it just confuse me more?

Bonded labour

The souqs are in the shopping malls, built by labourers paid around 25 dirhams a day.  Emirati, Arab culture is in a museum – you can learn about the ‘traditional life’ of the Bedu, mocked up with wax models  of Emiratis around a fire reciting poems at a desert camp – you don’t have to venture into the interior where a part of Emirati culture is alive, but on life support.  Venture though, we do, and the picture is not a pretty one.  Grim theme parks dot the barren landscape and four wheel drives have taken over the camels.  But then, it hits you.  As if you are transferred to another world within half an hour from down town Dubai. . .Work camps all the way and mega-cricket games in the dust as I drive with my Pakistani house mover in his tiny truck with his younger bro, listening to the latest vibes and saving myself huge amounts of money by not taking my own taxi.  They were amused to have me along with them to pick up some furniture from Sharjah.  I in turn was sickened by the sights that greeted me along the route as we travelled at dusk in a low truck that did not allow one to avert one’s gaze as the four wheel drives on high seem to be able to do.  Rows and rows of labour camps, dusty large pieces of land, the smog, smoke, whatever it was, choking me.  It was Friday and the only day off that the labourers get.  They were all out in force playing cricket.  Another world, harsh, dirty, basic. 

Race

Racism here seems rife at every level, I hear often how the Emirates or Arabs are lazy, how the Pakistani workers will rob you.  An Asian office worker trying to organise visas accompanied her boss to the offices of an Arab embassy here in Dubai and was shooed out of the office.  Ghost-like figures follow some Emirati families around the shopping mall carrying all the bags and the babies, pushing heavy prams laden with shopping, looking like they are not fed properly and are exhausted from the work.  It is truly a hideous and disturbing sight.  

Modernity

For those Emiratis who finally gave up and left the countryside for the cities, they can return to the fold during summer, a few even by helicopter, in the hot months to their old village homes to cool in the old- style architecture that provided some relief from the sun before the advent of air-conditioning.  Concrete dust from decades of zealous and greedy investment in real estate has taken its toll on health for the rural community with asthma and other ailments rife.  Goat herds are dying and fishing is a dying art these days, due to pollution (sea beds are destroyed during seaside construction and dredging) and dwindling fish supplies.  I am totally confused by this – how can such a proud nation be treating the very people that it professes to revere so badly?  Money talks.  No-one seems to really do anything else here.  It is all built on a mountain of money and construction has fuelled profits, which means concrete mountains and choking dust over the city.       

I am not a luddite but whose twisted idea of modernity is this anyway?  Someone has been royally screwed.  And I am not sure it is Royalty necessarily doing all the screwing.  Post-Dubai World the greedy criminals who benefited from an unsustainable and grotesque real estate splurge have well and truly left the building.  The senior executives of Dubai’s financial centre are embroiled in a corruption scandal – seems they paid themselves rather over generous bonuses, to say the least.  The slow unravelling and knock effects of the sovereign and very grey area of state-corporate debt must surely have more secrets up its sleeve.  No-one checked – everyone assumed in their greed that they would be nannied by the state.  More announcements of company losses from the construction industry and more to come.  A welcome effect of cheap rents for expats – those who can are now busily upgrading to larger and new apartments in the marina and other des res areas.  At the bottom and middle of the heap we now have ill-maintained, low occupancy tower blocks housing expats locked into rental contracts.  No-one cared about the long term, which soon arrives, to think about how maintenance would be handled.  Now a new law has sought to reinforce the legal duty of home owners to pay and some are refusing – and being named and shamed in their buildings.  Stories in the National, newspaper of choice here, abound about cockroaches and failing air conditioning in the height of summer.  Of course if there is no fund to upkeep the properties then services deteriorate.  But what were people thinking – how carefully do we peruse the legal details at home before we buy a property?  It’s the ‘don’t care it’s not my home ‘ kind of mentality that prevails.  Recyling and cutting down on energy use will face the same problems here – most people, there are some notable exceptions of community efforts to introduce recycling etc , don’t care; this is toy town.

A move to Responsible capitalism?

Abu Dhabi pitches in with jibes about financial transparency whilst it contemplates a Green City and how to make proper functioning communities out of the so far ill-thought out residential and office space that has been developed on an upward trajectory with no thought to the space around it.  Plenty to learn from its failed neighbour but the Abu Dhabi plan for 2035 sounds like the same mistakes are going to be made all over again . . .Dubai has a media city that seems pretty empty to me, Abu Dhabi is going to create another one.  The censorship in the Emirates is grim and the mindless pap that passes for analysis and news in some of the worst state-managed offenders is really numbing.  The odd journalist will pipe up, in an off the record conference, and remind us that business people are being interned without trial in these fair Emirates as they are investigated for what seems to have been common place corruption.   

Cultural ‘production’

I was at my book club dinner in Dubai, doing the expat circuit thingy (not the one where you drink for 12 hours though, as I would die) . . . any way what is culture again? I am lost.  The German lady married to the Yemeni told me her husband said that there is no culture in Dubai.  Hmmm that is kind of what I was thinking . . then, we reminisced about Yemen, the architecture, henna sessions with the local girls in the mafraj of one of Sanaas old houses that seem as if they were built for giants.  I am doing it again, aren’t I/we?  Well, I am from England; I am used to old stuff and I like it.  Anyway, then the eccentric Viennese lady told us about the Pearl Museum, in the national bank of Dubai, I think.  And then the German lady raved at length about the traditional houses in Deira made of Coral, among other things, so that they do not soak up as much heat as concrete and were built by Iranians.  Superb.   Right, culture.  Where is it again?  Everywhere I guess, if you are using a generous definition.  So, why do we need to get out of Dubai everyone few months?  It is a real urge.  I want to breathe but not just the air.  Oh, its the control issue, not socio-religious norms, it changes little for me.  But, the encroachment of state on culture, space, etc.  I feel force-fed.  I can go with it for a while and wish I could go to all the Abu Dhabi federal government sponsored events and lots of good things are being organised.  Can you please let people breathe and then just see what happens.  Why is the cultural space being set up like an architect designs a mall?  Yep, still don’t know what we all mean by culture. . . . cultural expression is organised, systematic and stifling.  It is all a part of the positive reinforcement of the federal and state-level appropriation on everything.  Then it spills over: every artist, painter, writer, fashion designer, seems to have a significant name and/or is backed by his friend in the Royal families.  Ok, get over it.; mental note here to analyse Unfair, my ongoing favourite glossy magazine and obsession.  Orchestration of culture, style , life all very universal in the realm of glossies.  So what is really authentic ?  Is it the level of mediation between the art and its production and who is behind or influencing it?   

  

Emirates - The City of Life – new and old and the mix.  The backlash.  Cultural sensitivities high.  I loved the film and I truly empathise with the challenges being faced. 

Intellectual beggars

Lots of debate recently about how to nurture intellectual life in Dubai . . .the word is banded about like an alien concept that needs to be constructed like a shopping mall and left to grow, slowly . . .How do we measure the intellectuals?  Who are they – I read a piece on the Saudi dissidents in town who are growing the intellectual sphere?  Mainly I am just sad I didn’t get on the invite list for these salons that take place – a chance for meeting and debating.  But I wonder;  the deformed beggar who used to sit, maybe he still does, on a main thorough fare from Tahrir square to the old city of Sana’a recites al-Quran beautifully, so I was told.  Does he count with his aural sophistication?

Postscript

I loved Dubai mall’s cafes, Armani for afternoon tea, the musical fountain and I found beauty in new architecture.  I will endeavour to put up pictures.  I loved the leveling effect of using the metro and I wonder what will become of the Emirates.  I enjoyed a stint of sand dune bashing and savoured the beaches in the cooler months.  Did I miss something when I was searching for the souqs?