Abstract
A central theme in Benyamin’s twin novels Jasmine Days (2014) and Al Arabian Novel Factory (2014) is the role of migrants in Bahrain’s 2011 uprising and their attitudes towards the ruling regime’s repression of dissent amongst native citizens. This article argues that Benyamin’s novels advocate recognition of the political impact of migration from Kerala and elsewhere by questioning the supposedly depoliticized economic space to which migrants belong in Bahrain and the other Gulf States, and by asserting Keralan migrants’ long-standing connection to the region and not merely their contributions to its economy as transitory outsiders. Writing in a regional Indian language and for a Malayalam readership about the political and social dilemmas of an Arab city, Benyamin constructs a transnational multilingual space where writing and translation enable dissent and where individuals from different national and linguistic backgrounds have a stake in political change and its repercussions.
Introduction
I have been here for fifteen years. I was here for the golden age of the City. I enjoyed every bit of it. And now that the City has fallen on bad times, I just have to stick with it. Of course, I came here to make money. But I also made this City my home. I have friends here. I have obligations here. I feel committed to seeing the City through. (Benyamin, 2019: 19)
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The complex relationship that connects migrants to the Arab Gulf States is at the centre of Jasmine Days (2014; translated in 2018) and Al Arabian Novel Factory (2014; translated in 2019), two novels recently translated into English from Malayalam by award-winning Malayalam writer Benyamin. While his best-selling novel Goat Days (2008; translated to English in 2012) portrayed the exploitation of a migrant worker from Kerala in Saudi Arabia, these two novels depict long-term migrant communities whose presence is intertwined with prospects of political change in the unnamed Arab city they adopt as their second home, a city which closely resembles Bahrain where Benyamin lived from 1992 and worked as an engineer until he returned to Kerala in 2013. In the above extract from Al Arabian Novel Factory, Reji, a Malayali who works in a rental car agency, expresses his loyalty to the City, but also his concern about the economic repercussions of the protests which were quickly repressed by the ruling regime. His words echo the feelings of many other South Asians whom Pratap, the Malayali-Canadian narrator of Al Arabian Novel Factory, interviews during his visit as a journalist to the City in the months immediately following the failed revolution. At the same time, Benyamin’s documentation of the integral presence of migrants in the City, or in the Gulf States more broadly, does not merely assert the claims which non-citizens feel entitled to stake, but also questions the political implications of this presence. A central theme in both Jasmine Days and Al Arabian Novel Factory are the attitudes that migrants adopt towards anti-regime protests and their role in supporting the government’s repression of dissent amongst native citizens. Benyamin’s depiction of pro-regime sentiments amongst migrants and of apolitical self-interest amongst Malayali characters forms part of his message to a Malayalam readership, questioning the supposedly depoliticized economic space to which migrants belong in Bahrain and the other Gulf States and thus signalling the necessity of addressing the relationship between migration and political change in the region.
While recent scholarship, especially in anthropology, has addressed the social implications of Indian and Keralite migration to the Gulf (Vora, 2013; Gardner, 2010; Osella and Osella, 2008; Mathew, 2016), less attention has been paid to this phenomenon in the sphere of literature and culture. Notable exceptions include a number of studies on films from Kerala, such as Ratheesh Radhakrishnan’s article on the relationship between Gulf migration and the imagining of a cultural identity in Malayalam cinema (2009), and recent analyses of how issues of identity and religion are represented in home films circulating between the Gulf and Kerala (Menon and Sreekumar, 2016; Nadukkandiyil, 2020). The experiences of migrants in the Gulf have also been tackled in Malayalam writing, but the international success of Benyamin’s Goat Days following its translation into English as well as other recent fiction in English on Indian migrants in the Gulf, such as Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (2017) and Tanaz Bhathena’s A Girl Like That (2018), signals the vital, albeit slow, emergence of a transnational space that registers Gulf migration experiences for a wider readership and negotiates the relationship between home and diaspora beyond the typical focus on Western immigrant destinations (Vora, 2013; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2020). Jasmine Days and Al Arabian Novel Factory take this task a step further by engaging with the City’s internal politics, an almost taboo sphere from which non-citizens are often excluded in the Gulf. Both novels extensively utilize facts and real incidents from the social and political reality of Bahrain before and after the 2011 uprising in order to depict a fictional Arab city’s struggle for freedom during the 2011 Arab uprisings, or what came to be called the Arab Spring. As twin novels, their events are interconnected, with the latter’s protagonist, Pratap, being primarily invested in investigating and documenting the dangerous consequences of writing about the uprising, which is what Sameera, the protagonist of Jasmine Days, initially does in the form of personal emails sent to a friend before being published as a book.
Jasmine Days is written from the perspective of Sameera, a young Pakistani woman who moves to the City in order to join her father and extended family, and becomes a successful radio jockey in the few years preceding the uprising. The book consists of her reflections on the protests and her relationship with a native Shia colleague from the opposition. At the centre of Al Arabian Novel Factory is the book that Sameera publishes — which gets translated to Malayalam by the fictional character of Benyamin and published as Jasmine Days — before it immediately becomes banned in the City, as well as Pratap’s investigation of its disappearance during his visit. Benyamin “merge[s] together many histories, characters, incidents and places to create a city that has no name”, as he notes in the preface to Al Arabian Novel Factory in order to assure the reader that everything in the story is “real and fictional” (vii). It is clear, however, that both novels offer a documentation of Bahrain’s 2011 uprising and an explicit attempt to tackle contentious themes, like sectarian tensions in a country where the Sunni ruling family has long repressed the majority Shia population.
It is significant that Benyamin, a migrant in Bahrain himself for more than two decades and working there as an engineer before emerging as a writer, engages in the political and social dilemmas of this “fictional” Arab City by writing in a regional Indian language and for a Malayalam readership. His novels push for an alternative reality where the political impact of migration from Kerala and elsewhere is recognized, thus asserting Keralan migrants’ long-standing connection to the region and not merely their contributions to its economy as transitory outsiders (Ilias, 2015). Sameera in Jasmine Days contributes to the making of this alternative reality when she writes about the uprising. The fate of her book anticipates the fate of Benyamin’s own writing in real life, raising important questions about language, translation, and censorship. Indeed, central to both Jasmine Days and Al Arabian Novel Factory is the role of translation in general as a means towards social and political change, and more particularly as a literary tool that Benyamin uses to insert his fictional character into the narratives. Not only is translation an important aspect of Benyamin’s actual career by enabling his Malayalam fiction to reach wider audiences in the transnational contexts in which it is set, but it is also through translation that his fictional character liberates Jasmine Days and makes it accessible to Malayalam readership after its original version was banned in the City.
My reading of Benyamin’s novels in this article addresses two points. First is the connection established in both narratives between the large migrant population and local anti-regime protests in response to marginalization and social inequality. Second is the role of interlingual exchange and translation in the multicultural space of the City, as well as in Benyamin’s utilization of what he calls “fictional realism” in order to keep his readers “hooked to the subject” (2018a). I argue that the novels construct a transnational multilingual space where writing and translation enable dissent and demonstrate the diversity of this city where individuals from different national and linguistic backgrounds have a stake in political change and its repercussions. I suggest here that in this imagined space, words of dissent slip from the grasp of authority through translation into Malayalam, the language with which Benyamin documents the reality of the City’s revolutionary struggle and which his fictional character also uses to translate Jasmine Days and to write Al Arabian Novel Factory on behalf of Pratap. Malayalam becomes a language of dissent even outside the borders of Kerala. We can read this as a manifestation of how Malayali diasporic communities in the Gulf States create “translocal” political spaces that can interact with politics in both home and host state, thus offering an “avenue of subtle expression” in the face of being excluded from the political sphere in the Gulf (Ilias, 2015: 309). Not only does Malayalam possess transnational significance because of the history of migration between Kerala and the Gulf, but writing in and translation to and from Malayalam, including Benyamin’s own work in reality and not only in the fictional spaces he constructs, connect the two regions more substantively by emphasizing the mutual interests of native citizens and migrants in the face of political repression.
Nuancing the Gulf and its migrants
The revolutionary 2011 protests that toppled a number of ruling regimes across the Arab world found resonance in the Gulf States, despite being typically perceived as politically stable and tightly controlled by powerful monarchical regimes. Oil wealth has painted an erroneous image of the Gulf as a place where access to welfare rights makes citizens apolitical and deprives them of agency vis-à-vis ruling regimes (Le Renard, Vora and Kanna, 2020: 5–6). The rights and privileges that come with citizenship in the Gulf even allow protests to appear unjustified and irrational in the eyes of migrants who see Gulf citizens as a homogeneous mass, as evident in the stereotypical attitudes that Benyamin critiques in the novels. The naivety of Sameera, the protagonist of Jasmine Days, initially leads her to question the motives of protestors because she does not understand the reasons for their opposition when they have a “good education, a secure job and a decent income” (2018b: 61). 2 Echoing the words of other middle- and upper-class migrants, Sameera genuinely asks her colleague and friend Ali, “Shouldn’t you be grateful to your rulers? Why would you want to bring down such peaceful, generous rulers?” (61). Later, when Ali, whose family has long suffered repression because of their second-class status as Shia citizens, joins a group that organizes the 14 February protests (also the date of Bahrain’s uprising), Sameera finds the idea of a revolution unconvincing. However, as Ali introduces her to the history of social inequality and sectarian discrimination in the City, and as she witnesses the violent suppression of protestors, she develops a more nuanced understanding of the place she lives in. Sameera even secretly supports the protestors and appreciates the demands of the revolution, despite not being able to publicly express her views. Her character development arguably reflects Benyamin’s attempt to advocate for a nuanced understanding of political upheaval in Arab cities by countering the misapprehension of the general reader. Considering the tendency to marginalize the Gulf States in discussions on Arab uprisings and to reduce the region to oil, the significance of Benyamin’s novels lies in the way they centralize political activism and opposition movements in the Gulf.
Like Sameera who plays the role of an observer in Jasmine Days, the character of Pratap in Al Arabian Novel Factory is also that of an observer who seeks to understand and document the reality of the City with the challenge of reconciling the conflicting views he encounters. Pratap arrives from Canada to the City with pre-held assumptions that reflect his position not only as an outsider who does not appreciate the complexity of the protests and their repercussions, but also as an Indian immigrant whose long-term residence in a “Western democracy” has shaped his clichéd perspective on the political situation of an undemocratic Middle Eastern country. A journalist in a Canadian newspaper, Pratap’s job along with three other international journalists is to collect information and stories from the City at the request of a famous anonymous novelist who wishes to use this research in order to write about the Middle East. Pratap’s main interest is in the repressed voices of protestors whose demands for justice became portrayed by the government and its supporters as subversive and sectarian attempts to destabilize the City. He finds it bewildering how migrants, particularly those who lead affluent lifestyles in the City, including Malayali friends from his college days in Kerala, can be oblivious to the protests and even express their support for the regime’s violent crackdown on the uprising. Pratap’s clear condemnation of the pro-regime attitudes he encounters amongst this group of migrants reflects both the emphasis that Benyamin places on their complicity in affirming authoritarianism and his critique of the Malayali community.
In Jasmine Days, during the protests, Sameera’s Malayali colleagues at the radio station, known as the “Malayalam Mafia” for being a well-knit group that often speaks exclusively in Malayalam so that others would not understand (19), come up with and repeat jokes to make fun of protestors: “‘Part-time Revolutionaries’ were ones like Ali who went to work during the day and went to the camps in the evenings. Then there were ‘Sandwich Revolutionaries’ who signed in to work in the morning and went straight to the camp for breakfast. ‘Biryani Revolutionaries’ were those who turned up in the camps at lunchtime” (136). The demands of the protestors are unappreciated and demonized for their negative repercussions on the City’s economy and, accordingly, on the economic and social security of migrants. In Al Arabian Novel Factory, Pratap’s Malayali friends and the other privileged Malayali migrants he meets seem to perceive and experience the City primarily through the opportunities and advantages it grants to their community, without an objective understanding of the social and political reality from which the uprising emerged. Raju, who was an active member of the communist party of Kerala before coming to work in the City, tells Pratap: “You have no idea, Mr Pratap, how peacefully and happily us foreigners lived here under His Majesty’s rule [. . .] We had every freedom we could possibly want. We had churches and temples and gurdwaras and schools and bars and our own Malayali Samajam where we elected our own administration. In fact, Mr Pratap, the communist party of Kerala has a branch committee here” (35–36). For Raju, the protestors “destroyed” the country for no justified reason (35). The obliviousness of affluent middle- and upper-class Malayalis for whom the status quo ensures their continued prosperity is also evident in the character of Daisy, Pratap’s friend, whose annoyance at the chaos caused by protestors leads her to simply ask, “what are the damn police and the military doing? Why don’t they just shoot all these rioters?” (102). Considering the fact that the government exploits migrant policemen and uses anti-migrant attacks in order to legitimize its authority, the support that well-off expatriates show for the government also signifies their disregard for the marginalization to which migrants from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are vulnerable in the City. At the heart of Benyamin’s novels is a multi-layered conflict not only between citizens and non-citizens, but also amongst the latter group that is mainly divided along lines of nationality, ethnicity, class, and religion. Class, in particular, determines a migrant’s place in the City and their level of agency, hence Benyamin’s delineation of the different circumstances that shape a migrant’s involvement in the protests.
On the one hand, Benyamin’s depiction of oblivious and apolitical Malayali characters falls within his specific critique of the Malayali community to which he belonged during his residence in Bahrain and for whom his novels arguably function as a mirror, reflecting the self-interested attitudes that many of them adopt in the Gulf. In Jasmine Days, as Sameera reads through Facebook comments posted by Malayalis regarding the protests and rumoured attacks against Sunni migrants, one commentator writes, “That’s not the only reason they are targeting Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. We Malayalis will hide in our holes the moment we hear of a problem. We know how to look out for our own safety” (175). In Al Arabian Novel Factory, Pratap makes a similar observation when he reads a pro-regime statement issued by a Malayalam magazine supporting revolutionary movements against dictatorship in Arab countries, but not in the City where the protestors are described as reactionaries and His Majesty as a compassionate ruler. “I couldn’t help but laugh,” Pratap says. “We Malayalis. Like sure-footed cats, wherever we go, we know how to land on our feet” (249). It is only Perumal, Daisy’s husband, who criticizes these double standards: “Most of the expats here would like to see history rewritten, as long as it does not affect their cushy lives in any way” (249). On the other hand, then, is a more specific critique of self-interested attitudes amongst middle- and upper-class migrants who lead comfortable lives in the City and who justify authoritarianism and suppression without seeking an objective understanding of the protests.
While this critique is valid, the risk is to overlook the fact that even privileged non-citizens are often powerless in a city that does not grant them rights beyond the economic sphere within which their roles and their identities as foreign residents are defined. Migrants occupy a complex status in the City. They are integral for the survival of the government which depends on their support and the work they perform in different sectors, including the police and military. At the same time, they are not granted full inclusion or freedom of expression, which makes them incapable of opposing the government without jeopardizing their security. Even though Benyamin mostly depicts such apolitical attitudes amongst privileged non-citizens, his critique risks reproducing the typical image of migrants in the Gulf, particularly low-paid workers, as docile and without agency (Babar, 2020: 765). Docility is a social construct that makes migrants from certain nationalities convenient to the state and employers because they are seen as less likely to pose a threat or cause political and social unrest. In reality, migrant workers in the Gulf have along the years engaged in numerous protest movements and strikes to call for fairer treatment and better pay. Since such movements call for rights rather than political representation, they have not gained much media visibility or public recognition because they are not viewed as “‘political’ forms of public expression” but as “acts taking place within the sphere of private employer-employee relations” (Babar, 2020: 766). Such acts of resistance are seen by the state as part of a depoliticized economic space to which migration issues belong, despite the fact that their political implications make them integral for understanding state legitimacy (Kanna, 2012; Ilias, 2020).
The lack of visibility granted to migrant protests and the repercussions of such movements, including imprisonment and deportation, have given rise to the figure of the apolitical and self-interested migrant in the Gulf. However, Pratap, whose democratic views and interest in documenting repression make him initially judgemental of pro-regime sentiments amongst migrants, gradually appreciates the impact of social divisions on how the protests are perceived and the complex circumstances that make some migrants appear deprived of agency, or lead them to adopt such sentiments, willingly or unwillingly. After all, the Gulf States actively discourage integration and naturalize the detachment of migrants from the social and political realities of citizens, and vice versa. Zainab, a young Shia nurse whom Pratap interviews, articulates this complexity when she acknowledges the dilemma migrants face as insiders/outsiders, even while she expresses her frustration at the attitudes that many adopt towards the protests. She tells Pratap, “It never ceases to amaze me how hard you foreigners will work not to know what is going on in the City” (195). However, she simultaneously acknowledges structural divisions that have for decades separated migrants from natives and made it imperative for the former to avoid interfering in the affairs of the latter to ensure their survival: “I am not blaming you. We are standing on opposite sides of the same wall. We don’t try to understand each other. You are essentially living inside a Third World country within this country” (195). Zainab’s words encapsulate Benyamin’s representation of hostile relations between migrants and natives in the City. As I demonstrate in the following section, both novels engage with Sunni–Shia sectarian tensions not only in order to document the failed revolution that occurred in Bahrain in 2011, but also to question the place of different migrant groups in this revolution by dismantling the wall that divides them from native citizens and highlighting commonalities that put many citizens and non-citizens in the same position vis-à-vis authoritarianism.
Bahrain’s 2011 uprising between reality and fiction
In both Jasmine Days and Al Arabian Novel Factory, Benyamin depicts the fear and hostility with which migrants and Shia protestors view each other in the City, feelings which accurately reflect the reality of the 2011 Bahraini uprising that decried the role of non-citizens in affirming the ruling regime’s legitimacy and that also quickly descended into sectarian Sunni–Shia tensions. Toby Matthiesen attributes these tensions to “an interplay of top-down and bottom-up processes that divided the Bahraini protest movement along sectarian lines”, including “the government-incited sectarian narrative” and “the sectarian inclinations of parts of the protest movement” (2013: 68). This answers one of the main questions that Matthiesen asks on whether the uprising was Shia-driven from the start, or “a gloss of sectarianism [was] imposed later on by the state as part of its crackdown” (2013: 12). This point helps illustrate Benyamin’s representation of hostile relations between migrants and protestors in the City. The fear that migrants of different classes have towards protestors and the native Shia can be attributed to two factors. First is the nativist Shia narrative which affirms the status of Shia Bahrainis as the original inhabitants of the country and targets the invading ruling family and the regional Sunni waves of migration that accompanied or followed it from the late eighteenth century onwards (Matthiesen, 2013: 31). This narrative also targets more recent migrations from other Arab countries and from South Asia, especially because the regime has been known to naturalize many Sunni migrants in order to reverse the numerical Shia majority (31). The outcome is that migrants would be “more inclined to cling to the regime, fearing that the nativist rhetoric would have its logical conclusion in the expulsion” of some recent migrant communities (32).
The second factor triggering fear of protestors is the regime’s media representation of the protests as sectarian and violent, which again threatens the security of migrants. After all, they are often the subject of resentment in criticism directed against the government’s disenfranchisement of citizens through reliance on a large migrant workforce and deliberate naturalization of regime supporters. As in Benyamin’s novels, Matthiesen notes how “many South-Asian workers had come to hate the Shia and associated them with danger, and how they praised, at least publicly and in conversations with foreigners, the ruling family” (2013: 35). At the same time, he notes that many South Asian workers were urged by their managers to participate in pro-government demonstrations (35). We see this in Jasmine Days where Sameera’s family and South Asian colleagues join a rally in support of the ruler following a public announcement on the Malayalam and Hindi radio stations urging migrants to prove their loyalty to the City. “We should participate in this rally as if it were our own family matter,” the radio station director emphasizes. “Let’s not see this as a problem happening in someone else’s country. This is after all a question of our survival here” (141). The rally triggers animosity against “foreigners” for interfering in internal affairs, even though it is sponsored by the government. Furthermore, most “foreigners” from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan “were poor labourers who had been trucked in from labour camps” (143). There is a clear difference then between the voluntary participation of middle- and upper-class migrants, including Sameera, her family and colleagues, and the forced participation of low-paid workers. The former’s participation may not necessarily reflect their genuine loyalty for the government, but it derives from their fear of the consequences of political change on their status and the need to secure their continued residence and work in the City. On the contrary, the status of low-paid workers is already insecure, and their social and spatial marginality is even perpetuated by the status quo that the former group is keen on maintaining, hence the centrality of class conflict amongst the non-citizen population for possibilities of political change.
On the one hand, the survival of migrants does indeed depend on the loyalty they express to the ruling regime, individually and as national communities, because the actions of one migrant would tarnish the reputation of an entire community in the eyes of the government. Furthermore, migrant performances of loyalty in the Gulf are not uncommon and often conform to public discourses expecting foreigners to narrate belonging to their host country through expressions of gratitude (Koch, 2016). On the other hand, even though they are subjected to different circumstances, migrants appear complicit in thwarting the protests and legitimizing the regime. Sameera only joins the rally “half-heartedly” because she and everyone else in her house is forced to do so by her uncle, the family patriarch who could not be disobeyed (142). However, Ali blames her for participating in what he called the “ass-lickers’ rally”, especially because she, unlike many others, understands the demands of the uprising (144). Her complicity also comes from the position which her paternal family has long occupied in the police, making them integral for maintaining the authority of the City’s ruler. Many Sunni migrants from Pakistan have indeed worked in the security services in Bahrain and became naturalized, just like many members of Sameera’s extended family (Matthiesen, 2013: 31). When the uprising begins in the City, it is these migrants who have to face the protestors. Their status as foreigners with no internal oppositional loyalties allows them to ensure the survival of the regime, but it also makes them dependent on the regime for their own survival. From the perspective of Ali and other Shia citizens, they are “coolie soldiers” and “dogs eating the leftovers of this government” (91, 129).
As someone who critically listens to other perspectives, Sameera acknowledges the feeling which many protestors have about foreigners being “the reason they were denied equality, justice and employment opportunities” (129). She recalls the image she had as a child in Pakistan of Arabs being wealthy oil owners who did not need to do the work of policemen, hence the migration of her father and uncles. She writes, “It was only after I arrived here that I realized that [… their job] was to protect His Majesty from his own people, in the name of law and order” (81). The nuance that reshapes Sameera’s understanding of the City makes Jasmine Days both a critique of authoritarianism and a didactic attempt to enlighten readers about the reality of a region often misunderstood and reduced to stereotypical images. More importantly, Benyamin questions the tendency to understand migrants in the Gulf merely through their economic role in a separate sphere from internal political affairs. His novels reveal the political implications of migration and the direct or indirect involvement of many migrants in the internal politics of their host society, thus illustrating how a seemingly depoliticized population can contribute to maintaining the status quo.
Migration and political disenfranchisement
Beyond the contemporary post-2011 period, the relationship between migration and the disenfranchisement of citizens has to be understood in relation to the history of imperialism and oil production in the region. The ethnic diversity of Bahrain is not only a result of migration following the oil boom in the 1970s but a legacy of British imperialism from the early nineteenth century onwards. In Bahrain and other Gulf countries where Britain initiated oil production, migrants were brought from British colonies, namely India and Pakistan, to occupy positions in oil companies and in the police, making it important to understand hostility against foreigners as partially directed against this legacy (Matthiesen, 2013: 35–36). In addition to the large number of foreigners in the police and security services in contemporary Bahrain, dividing the population along ethnic and sectarian lines in order to prevent potential protests and achieve regime legitimacy is also a legacy of colonialism. British officials played a significant role in the production of sectarian identities in pre-oil Bahrain through a system of “divided and contested rule” which allowed Britain to have sovereignty over those it designated as “foreigners”, while allowing the ruler to have sovereignty over “locals” (AlShehabi, 2019: 9). Western oil companies also adopted racial segmentation in the early periods of oil production in the region. Separate housing areas and unequal treatment for Western professionals, native workers, and migrant workers were part of a system that created ethnic divisions with the aim of weakening the labour force and suppressing dissent (Vitalis, 2009: 88–120). In addition to the history of imperialism in the region, studying the relationship between energy extraction and the growth of political freedom reveals the impact of oil production on political systems in the Gulf. While it is often said that oil revenues have allowed the Gulf States to offer citizens welfare in exchange for political rights (Sater, 2013; Longva 2000; Babar, 2014), Timothy Mitchell departs from approaches that attribute the “anti-democratic properties of petroleum”, or what is often known as the oil curse, solely to ways in which oil revenues enable governments to disenfranchise citizens and repress political dissent (2011: 8). His analysis emphasizes instead the nature of oil and how it is extracted, distributed, and used in ways that inhibit political movements. The reliance of oil companies on foreign labour prevented unionization and strikes, which allowed oil production to continue undisrupted and to be accompanied by authoritarian rule.
Benyamin’s critique of the disenfranchisement that arises from an autocratic ruler’s dependence on foreign police forces to protect his authority in the City recalls earlier fictional depictions of the connection between foreign migrant workers and authoritarianism in oil-rich states in the region. Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh, himself a diasporic writer who spent a period of time in the Middle East and is now based in the United States, set part of his first novel The Circle of Reason (1986) in al-Ghazira, a fictional Middle Eastern oil country whose features resemble those of the modern Gulf States. Ghosh critiques the social segregation and inequality that ensue from dependence on neocolonial Western technologies of oil production and modernization. In the early days of development in al-Ghazira, the locals were not given work because “the Oilmen knew that a man working on his own land has at least a crop to fight for. Instead they brought their own men” (1986: 309). We see images of migrants reduced to the labour they perform in oil extraction sites. Behind the fence of the Oiltown, “faces stared silently out—Filipino faces, Indian faces, Egyptian faces, Pakistani faces, even a few Ghaziri faces, a whole world of faces” (309). Ghosh writes, “those ghosts behind the fence were not men, they were tools—helpless, picked for their poverty […] they were brought as weapons, to divide the Ghaziris from themselves” (309). We see similar images in Saudi novelist Abdulrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984) which Ghosh reviews in his essay, “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel” (1992). Foreign workers are represented as passive and deprived of agency because of their alienation and detachment from the environments in which they work. This forms part of Munif’s vehement critique of the process of oil production that caused disenfranchisement and political repression in the Arabian Peninsula (Nixon, 2011: 72).
Being more recent works, Benyamin’s Jasmine Days and Al Arabian Novel Factory depict a contemporary period where the citizenry has long acquired the privileged status of oil owners and where migrants are mostly excluded from welfare and citizenship rights. His novels are also more centred on everyday tensions between migrants and citizens as an expression of the marginalization and disenfranchisement to which both groups are subjected, respectively. Nonetheless, the connection that he establishes between these experiences evokes much of the criticism that has been directed by intellectuals against top-down models of oil development and modernization in the Gulf, including Ghosh and Munif. These models, which emerged during periods of direct imperial influence and continued under the rule of monarchical regimes, cannot be understood separately from the waves of migration which not only made development possible, but were also integral for defining the parameters of citizenship and consolidating state power (AlShehabi, 2015; Chalcraft, 2010).
Benyamin’s two novels that are discussed here highlight the connection between the marginalization and exploitation of migrant workers and the disenfranchisement of Shia citizens while simultaneously critiquing the complicity of middle- and upper-class migrants and the exclusionary and fanatic religious discourses of some Shia opposition groups for intensifying social conflict and inhibiting political change. This connection is manifest through the tragic fate of Sameera’s father which is narrated from different perspectives in Jasmine Days and at the end of Al Arabian Novel Factory. Like other policemen, Sameera’s father has to stand in the face of protestors for whom the presence of foreigners in the police force is itself an indication of an illegitimate government incapable of securing the loyalty of its citizens. He is injured when one protestor deliberately runs over him with a car, but even more shocking for Sameera is discovering the identity of this attacker, her friend Ali, who convinces her of the rightful demands of the uprising, but whose fanaticism unknowingly end ups hurting his close friend. However, it is in the last pages of Al Arabian Novel Factory, on the flight that takes Pratap back to Canada, that we find out the truth of how Sameera’s father died. A prestigious Pakistani doctor who spent decades working in the City confesses to Pratap the reason behind his decision to resign from his job and immigrate to Canada. Despite previous knowledge of the government’s repressive and violent practices, the doctor realizes his powerlessness and the extent of the ruling family’s tenacity when a Pakistani policeman is admitted to the hospital with some injuries and the doctors are given orders prohibiting them from saving his life in order to increase the death toll that counts as evidence of the violence of protestors.
Sameera’s father could have lived, but he is instead killed by the government and its supporters who exploit his loyalty and turn his death into another tool for furthering the legitimacy of an autocratic regime. It is through Pratap’s investigative interviews that we get a clear sense of how foreign policemen are powerless and vulnerable to the government’s exploitation, despite the authority they represent. Pratap meets young Pakistani officers who complain of having to face the anger of protestors without being given proper means of protection and of being ordered to stand guard for days in the villages of Shia citizens where they become the objects of their hate and anger, the “bait” which the government “wanted to throw in front of the hunters” (305). The death of Sameera’s father and Ali’s imprisonment thus represent the exploitation and the social injustice which both marginalized migrants and second-class citizens experience in the City. I suggest that Benyamin’s novels illustrate how these experiences cannot be understood separately. In fact, both the complicity of migrants who express loyalty to the government in order to protect their interests and the fanaticism of protestors who express hostility against all foreigners are driven by a political system that achieves legitimacy through disenfranchisement and repression of any form of dissent. This highlights the shared interests that could bring citizens and migrants together in the face of authoritarianism. In the last section of this article, I argue that Benyamin emphasizes the power of interlingual exchange and translation to propose an alternative reality where these commonalities can be recognized, thus constructing Malayalam language and literature as a space of dissent that transcends geographical and national boundaries between Kerala and the Gulf.
Malayalam as a transnational space of dissent
The City that Benyamin depicts is a multicultural space where ethnicities, nationalities, and languages simultaneously intermingle and assert their difference from each other. Sameera’s friend Ali speaks a “hybrid language that mixe[s] Arabic, Hindi and English” alongside the Malayalam words he learns at work (44). Sameera herself, who grew up in Pakistan, speaks Urdu, Farsi, a bit of Arabic, and enough Hindi to be able to work for the Hindi radio station which competes with the Malayalam station (28). The multilingualism of the City and the interlingual exchanges that connect its inhabitants do not take away from Ali’s strong sense of identity. Nor do they prevent national divisions from being asserted in times of crisis. For example, during the uprising, Sameera’s neighbourhood turns into a “Free Pakistan” where no strangers come in without being inspected, and other neighbourhoods in the City turn into “countries” with “borders”, each asserting their difference, if not their hostility against intruders from other nationalities (151). Nonetheless, a world of linguistic and literary exchange exists beyond these divisions and is primarily made possible through the translation and circulation of texts between home and host countries. In this transnational textual space, Benyamin is a writer and a translator. He inserts himself in the novels as a fictional character whom Pratap meets during his visit to the City. He also writes a “Translator’s Note” at the end of Jasmine Days reflecting on the circumstances that led him to translate Sameera’s book, A Spring without Fragrance, into Malayalam, supposedly from the original in Arabic, and to ghost-write Pratap’s novel in Malayalam as well. In the epilogue that Pratap writes at the end of Al Arabian Novel Factory, we are told that he could not rely on his Malayalam after years of living in Canada and sought the help of Benyamin in order to document his visit to the City and his investigation of Sameera’s banned book.
It is not clear how Arabic comes to play a role in this literary exchange, i.e., how Sameera’s book is translated from Arabic, because the copy which Pratap reads and lends to Benyamin is in English. The journey of Sameera’s book is indeed a complex one, initially taking the form of emails she sends to a friend in Pakistan who, in turn, uses his brother’s publishing house to turn them into a book. It gets banned in the City even before it is officially published, and the few copies which Pratap manages to trace are proof copies that had slipped from the grasp of the security services. Yet, notwithstanding Benyamin’s unconvincing insertion of Arabic in this journey, the novels demonstrate the power of writing and translation in advocating social and political change.
As a Malayalam writer who involves his readers in the internal political struggles of an Arab city, Benyamin’s fiction allows Malayalam, a regional Indian language spoken by one migrant community, to construct a textual space of dissent that transcends geographical and national boundaries. This asserts the stakes which Malayali and other migrant communities have in the cities they adopt as their second home, thus contesting the notion of a depoliticized economic space that justifies the exclusion of migrants from citizenship. Furthermore, Benyamin’s work suggests that any future political change would have to recognize different voices and the commonalities that bring citizens and migrants together as the City’s inhabitants in the face of marginalization and political repression.
Another means by which Benyamin asserts the presence of migrants in their host country is emphasizing the literary influence which the City has on migrants who only begin to write after their arrival. Pratap is surprised that his friend Bijumon, who was never interested in literature back in Kerala, has become a writer during his twenty years of living in the City where he also organizes Malayalam literary events. Pratap writes, “The place you live in will remake you in its own image. I felt curious about this city that had remoulded Biju so magnificently” (16). In his own life, Benyamin only became a writer after years of living in Bahrain with his first novel, Goat Days, a reflection on the conditions which migrant workers experience in the Gulf. His fictional character in Al Arabian Novel Factory is also that of a writer who becomes famous through a best-selling novel on the tragedies of a Malayali migrant in the City. “This city made me a writer,” he tells Pratap proudly (176). This suggests that the rich experience of migrating to the City, or the Gulf States, pushes migrants to adopt writing as a means for documenting what they encounter and expressing the marginalized voices of individuals often homogenized and reduced to their status as temporary workers. The importance of this social responsibility is emphasized in the novel by reference to Benyamin’s Goat Days when a priest whom Pratap meets confesses to having stopped eating mutton after reading that book, thus confirming literature’s ability to “create miraculous changes in how we see the world, how we behave in it, even what we eat” (214). Pratap’s concern with political repression in the City leads him to think of literature as a form of dissent, especially when it is grounded in the reality it seeks to document and critique. He reflects on how novels are often “simply elaborations on what we read in the newspaper. But when it is written as news, no one cares. When it takes the form of literature, that’s when people react, that’s when it hurts them and provokes them” (214). This describes what Benyamin calls “fictional realism”, a method he employs to comment on the reality he experienced in Bahrain without having to mention the country’s name or be restricted to the actual events that took place in the Bahraini 2011 uprising (2018a). His concern with documenting reality makes the novels too descriptive of the political situation and too preoccupied with covering different opinions and perspectives on the uprising. As a result, characters appear clichéd, mere mouthpieces for what can be otherwise read in newspapers. However, this “fictional realism” allows Benyamin to produce novels that are accessible to the general reader and that are characterized by an easy-flowing language and a suspenseful plot. Accessibility and wide readership are key when the topic has urgent social and political implications and when literature “is all that’s left for ordinary citizens” (2019: 214).
For Malayali migrants in the City, such as those who only become writers after their arrival, literature could indeed be seen as the only way for them to articulate their experiences in a place that does not grant them citizenship rights or freedom of expression. Simple as Pratap’s view of literature may seem, it corresponds to the reality in which writers find themselves responsible for revealing the experiences and voices of marginalized peoples. His almost idealistic understanding of this responsibility also foregrounds the dilemma that writers face when the choices they make could have serious implications beyond the world of the text and its immediate readership. In their first meeting in the City, Pratap does not appreciate Benyamin’s decision to “unsee” the uprising or to not take up the cause of the protestors in his writing despite supporting “their struggle for democracy” (176–177). Fear of the consequences of a book written in Malayalam and that goes against the government on the security of thousands of Malayalis in the City prevents him from expressing his views. What demonstrates the validity of this cautiousness is the story of Sameera’s book which immediately becomes hunted by the security services and which, amongst other reasons, leads to her deportation. When Pratap meets Benyamin again after both of them have left the City, he gives him a photocopy of Sameera’s book and sarcastically tells him, “Remember how you were hesitant to write a book about the City? Read this. Maybe your heart will murmur that this is the book you should have written” (262). Sameera dares to question the complicity of her family and other migrants in the survival of a repressive political regime. She pushes for an alternative reality that brings migrants and citizens together when she learns to perceive the uprising from a different light by appreciating the social injustice that has fuelled the anger of protestors. Therefore, Pratap’s investigation reveals how a book can pose a threat and usher dissent against authoritarianism.
Conclusion
By writing two novels, one of which investigates the impact and fate of the other, Benyamin raises questions about the fate of his own attempt to tackle the relation between migration and social injustice in the Gulf. Although written in Malayalam, will Jasmine Days and Al Arabian Novel Factory encounter censorship in the region in which they are set? Considering the fact that the Arabic translation of Goat Days has received positive reviews despite being reportedly censored in some Gulf countries (Sabr, 2014; ArabLit, 2014), how would an Arabic readership perceive a Malayalam writer’s engagement with the internal political affairs of a place where migrants do not have the right to transgress the economic space that determines their role and identity? I have argued in this article that despite the limitations of “fictional realism” and of reproducing the figure of the apolitical and docile migrant, Benyamin’s novels depart from the tendency to portray migrant communities in the Gulf separately from the experiences of native citizens and instead highlight the political implications of their presence. By tackling the different perspectives and positionalities through which the Bahraini 2011 uprising was experienced, including tensions and hostilities between migrants and natives and amongst each of these groups, Benyamin pushes for a nuanced understanding of the reasons behind such hostilities and the commonalities that can bring different sections of society together in the face of marginalization. The emphasis placed in the novels on the role of writing and translation highlights the connection between the Gulf and the home countries of its migrant communities. I have suggested that translation enables dissent to circulate within and beyond the borders of the Gulf, and Malayalam literature becomes a space for negotiating the relationship of migrants to their host countries beyond the focus on their economic role. Therefore, my analysis of Jasmine Days and Al Arabian Novel Factory understands them as Benyamin’s response to the words of one native character: “We are standing on opposite sides of the same wall. We don’t try to understand each other” (195). They represent a literary attempt to dismantle this wall and to advocate for inclusive political change that recognizes the common ground from which different experiences of marginalization emerge in a diverse yet divided society.
