Incendiary Circumstances (21 page)

 

Left to himself to talk about Wadi al-Uyoun, Miteb al-Hathal would go on in a way no one could believe, for he could not confine himself to the good air and the sweetness of the water ... or to the magnificent nights; he would tell stories which in some cases dated back to the days of Noah, or so said the old men.

 

But unsettling portents begin to intrude upon this earthly paradise. One evening at sunset, one of Miteb's sons returns from watering the family's livestock and tells his father of the arrival of "three foreigners with two marsh Arabs, and they speak Arabic"—"People say they came to look for water." But when Miteb goes to find out for himself, he sees them going to "places no one dreamed of going," collecting "unthinkable things," and writing "things no
one understood," and he comes to the conclusion that "they certainly didn't come for water—they want something else. But what could they possibly want? What is there in this dry desert besides dust, sand and starvation?"

The people of the wadi hear the foreigners asking questions "about dialects, about tribes and their disputes, about religion and sects, about the rocks, the winds and the rainy season"; they listen to them quoting from the Koran and repeating the Muslim profession of faith; and they begin to "wonder among themselves if these were jinn, because people like these who knew all those things and spoke Arabic yet never prayed were not Muslims and could not be normal humans." Reading the portents, Miteb the Troublemaker senses that something terrible is about to befall the wadi and its people, but he knows neither what it is nor how to prevent it. Then suddenly, to everyone's relief, the foreigners leave, and the wadi settles back, just a trifle uneasily, to its old ways.

But soon enough the strangers come back. They are no longer unspecified "foreigners" but Americans, and they are everywhere, digging, collecting, and handing out "coins of English and Arab gold." Their liberality soon wins them friends in the wadi, but even the closest of their accomplices is utterly bewildered by their doings; "nothing was stranger than their morning prayers: they began by kicking their legs and raising their arms in the air, moving their bodies to the left and right, and then touching their toes until they were panting and drenched with sweat." Then a number of "yellow iron hulks" arrive, adding to the bewilderment of the wadi's inhabitants: "Could a man approach them without injury? What were they for and how did they behave—did they eat like animals or not?" Fearing the worst, the people of the wadi go to their emir to protest, only to be told that the Americans have "come from the ends of the earth to help us"—because "'there are oceans of blessings under this soil.'"

The protests are quickly suppressed, Miteb and other troublemakers are threatened with death, and before long the wadi's orchards and dwellings are demolished by the "yellow iron hulks."
After the flattening of his beloved wadi, Miteb mounts his white Omani she-camel and vanishes into the hills, becoming a prophetic spectral figure who emerges only occasionally from the desert to cry doom and to strike terror into those who collaborate with the oil men. As for Miteb's family and the rest of the wadi's inhabitants, they are quickly carried away by passing camel caravans. A number of them set out for a coastal settlement called Harran ("the Overheated"), where the new oil installations are to be built, a "cluster of low mud houses"—a place evidently very much as Doha and Kuwait were only a few decades ago.

 

The rest of Munif's narrative centers upon the early stages of Harran's transformation: the construction of the first roads, the gradual influx of people, the building of the oil installations, the port, and the emir's palace. Working in shifts, the newly arrived Arab workers and their American overseers slowly conjure two new townships into being, Arab Harran and American Harran. Every evening, after the day's work is done, the men drift home

 

to the two sectorlike streams coursing down a slope, one broad and one small, the Americans to their camp and the Arabs to theirs, the Americans to their swimming pool, where their racket could be heard in the nearby barracks behind the barbed wire. When silence fell the workers guessed the Americans had gone into their air-conditioned rooms whose thick curtains shut everything out: sunlight, dust, flies, and Arabs.

 

Soon Harran no longer quite belongs to its people, and the single most important episode in the building of the new city has little to do with them. It is the story of an R-and-R ship that pays the city a brief visit for the benefit of the Americans living in the yet unfinished oil town:

 

The astonished people of Harran approached [the ship] imperceptibly, step by step, like sleepwalkers. They could not believe their eyes and ears. Had there ever been anything like this ship, this huge
and magnificent? Where else in the world were there women like these, who resembled both milk and figs in their tanned whiteness? Was it possible that men could shamelessly walk around with women, with no fear of others? Were these their wives, or sweethearts, or something else?

 

For a whole day and night, the inhabitants of Harran watch the Americans of the oil town disporting themselves with the newly arrived women, and by the time the ship finally leaves "the men's balls are ready to burst." This event eventually comes to mark the beginning of the history of this city of salt:

 

This day gave Harran a birth date, recording when and how it was built, for most people have no memory of Harran before that day. Even its own natives, who had lived there since the arrival of the first frightening group of Americans and watched with terror the realignment of the town's shoreline and hills—the Harranis, born and bred there, saddened by the destruction of their houses, recalling the old sorrows of lost travellers and the dead—remembered the day the ship came better than any other day, with fear, awe, and surprise. It was practically the only date they remembered.

 

The most sustained wrong note in
Cities of Salt
is reserved for its conclusion. The novel ends with a dramatic confrontation between the old Harran and the new: between a world where the emir sat in coffeehouses and gossiped with the Bedouins, where everybody had time for everyone else and no one was ever so ill that they needed remedies that were sold for money, and a universe in which Mr. Middleton of the oil company holds their livelihoods in his hands, where the newly arrived Lebanese doctor Subhi al-Mahmilji ("physician and surgeon, specialist in internal and venereal diseases, Universities of Berlin and Vienna") charges huge fees for the smallest service, where the emir spies on the townspeople with a telescope and needs a cadre of secret police to tell him what they are thinking. "Every day it's gotten worse," says
one longtime resident of Harran, pointing toward the American enclave: "I told you, I told every one of you, the Americans are the disease, they're the root of the problem and what's happened now is nothing compared to what they have in store for us."

The matter comes to a head when a series of events—a killing by the secret police, sightings of the troublemaking Miteb, the laying off of twenty-three workers—prompts the workers of Harran to invent spontaneously the notion of the strike. They stop working and march through the town chanting:

 

...The pipeline was built by beasts of prey,
We will safeguard our rights,
The Americans do not own it,
This land is our land.

 

Then, led by two of Miteb the Troublemaker's sons, they storm the oil installation, sweeping aside the emir's secret police and the oil company's guards, and rescue some of their fellow workers who'd been trapped inside. And the book ends with an unequivocal triumph for the workers: the half-crazed emir flees the city after ordering the oil company to reinstate its sacked employees.

 

It is not hard to see why Munif would succumb to the temptation to end his book on an optimistic note. His is a devastatingly painful story, a slow, roundabout recounting of the almost accidental humiliation of one people by another. There is very little bitterness in Munif's telling of it. Its effectiveness lies rather in the gradual accumulation of detail. Munif's American oil men are neither rapacious nor heartless. On the contrary, they are eager, businesslike, and curious. When invited to an Arab wedding, they ask "about everything, about words, clothing and food, about the names of the bridegroom and his bride and whether they had known each other before, and if they had ever met ... Every small thing excited the Americans' amazement." It is not through direct confrontation that the Harranis met their humiliation. Quite the
opposite. Theirs is the indignity of not being taken seriously at all, of being regarded as an obstacle on the scale of a minor technical snag in the process of drilling for oil.

Better than any other, Munif's method shows us why so many people in the Middle East are moved to clutch at straws to regain some measure of self-respect for themselves—why so many Saudis, for example, felt the humiliation of Iraq's army almost as their own. But in fact the story is even grimmer than Munif's version of it, and the ending he chooses is founded in pure wish-fulfillment. It probably has more to do with its author's own history than with the story of oil in the Gulf.

Abdelrahman Munif was born in 1933, into a family of Saudi Arabian origin settled in Jordan. (He was later stripped of his Saudi citizenship for political reasons.) He studied in Baghdad and Cairo and went on to earn a Ph.D. in oil economics at the University of Belgrade—back in the days of Titoite socialism, when books written by progressive writers always ended in working-class victories. Since then Munif's working life has been spent mainly in the oil industry in the Middle East, albeit in a rather sequestered corner of it: he has occupied important positions in the Syrian Oil Company, and he has served as editor in chief of an Iraqi journal called
Oil and Development.

No one, in other words, is in a better position than Munif to know that the final episode in his story is nothing more than an escapist fantasy. He must certainly be aware that the workforces of the international oil companies in the Arabian peninsula have never succeeded in becoming politically effective. When they showed signs of restiveness in the 1950s, they were ruthlessly and very effectively suppressed by their rulers, with the help of the oil companies. Over the past couple of decades, the powers that be in the oil sheikdoms (and who knows exactly who they are?) have followed a careful strategy for keeping their workers quiescent: they have held the Arab component of their workforces at a strictly regulated numerical level while importing large numbers of migrants from several of the poorer countries of Asia.

The policy has proved magically effective in the short run. It has created a class of workers who, being separated from the indigenous population (and from each other) by barriers of culture and language, are politically passive in a way that a predominantly Arab workforce could never be within the Arab-speaking world—a class that is all the more amenable to control for living perpetually under the threat of deportation. It is, in fact, a class of helots, with virtually no rights at all, and its members are often subjected to the most hideous kinds of physical abuse. Their experience makes a mockery of human rights rhetoric that accompanied the Gulf War; the fact that the war has effected no changes in the labor policies of the oil sheikdoms is proof in the eyes of millions of people in Asia and Africa that the "new world order" is designed to defend the rights of certain people at the expense of others.

Thus the story of the real consequences of the sort of political restiveness that Munif describes in
Cities of Salt
is not likely to warm the heart quite as cozily as the ending he gives his novel. But if Munif can be accused of naiveté on this score, he must still be given credit for seeing that the workplace, where democracy is said to begin, is the site where the foundations of contemporary authoritarianism in the oil sheikdoms were laid.

Today it is a commonplace in the Western media that aspirations toward democracy in the Arabian peninsula are a part of the fallout of changes ushered in by oil and the consequent breakdown of "traditional" society. In fact, in several instances exactly the opposite is true: oil and the developments it has brought in its wake have been directly responsible for the suppression of whatever democratic aspirations and tendencies there were within the region.

Certain parts of the Gulf, such as Bahrain, whose commercial importance far predates the discovery of oil, have long possessed sizable groups of businessmen, professionals, and skilled workers—a stratum not unlike a middle class. On the whole, that class shared the ideology of the nationalist movements of various nearby countries such as India, Egypt, and Iran. It was their liberal
aspirations that became the victims of oil's most bizarre, most murderous creation: the petro-despot, dressed in a snowy
dish-dasha
and armed with state-of-the-art weaponry—the creature whose gestation and birth Munif sets out to chronicle in the second volume of the
Cities of Salt
cycle,
The Trench.

 

Unfortunately,
The Trench
comes as a great disappointment. The narrative now moves away from Harran to a city in the interior called Mooran ("the Changeable"), which serves as the seat of the country's ruling dynasty. With the move to the capital, the focus of the narrative now shifts to the country's rulers.

The story of
The Trench
is common enough in the oil sheikdoms of the Arabian peninsula; it begins with the accession to power of a sultan by the name of Khazael, and it ends with his deposition, when he is removed from the throne by rival factions within the royal family. Munif describes the transformations that occur during Sultan Khazael's reign by following the career of one of his chief advisers, a doctor called Subhi al-Mahmilji (who earlier played an important part in the creation of the new Harran). The story has great potential, but Munif's voice does not prove equal to the demands of the narrative. It loses the note of wonder, of detached and reverential curiosity, that lent such magic to parts of
Cities of Salt,
while gaining neither the volume nor the richness of coloring that its material demands.