Abstract
The novel form has been traced as contemporaneous with the nation-state form and is associated with a homogenous speaking community. This article concerns itself with the role of affect in sustaining a community in a condition in which the distinction between the agent of capital and that of community is not unconditionally or ahistorically available. Drawing its theoretical apparatus from the conceptualisation of post colony by Achille Mbembe, and on studies of rumour, and contextualising itself in the contractual labour practice known as kafala and the exclusionary practices of citizenship in the countries of the Arab Gulf, this article argues that the reproduction of the exploitative capital/state along the axes of community produces both the capital/state and the community along affective lines, and away from the bureaucratic coldness or democratic openness that is supposed to characterise them. Taking Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People, as an instance of a novel produced from such a milieu, the article pays attention to the figure of the reader because traditionally scholarship has put the onus of the effects of the novel such as nationalism as the affordance of the figure of the reader. The article illustrates reconfigurations in the form of the novel and suggests that it is through fallibility rather than efficiency that power operates both as oppressive and resistant.
Introduction
This article looks at the novel/short story collection Temporary People by Deepak Unnikrishnan (2017a) and is about the reconfiguration of the ideal reader under contemporary conditions of migrant labour, with this novel as the pretext. In the process, it extends the postcolonial lens to study migration’s implication on literature, especially the novel form. The article attempts to locate the genre of the novel when it is confronted with the loss of nation-state as its terra cognita. The local/nation has remained the horizon of intelligibility of the novel even though the novels themselves might traverse ex-national spaces in their diegesis (as in Menon 2006). There have been recent attempts to read the formation of the novel form in terms of cosmopolitanism (Boes 2012), or in the context of migration, attempts to read literature differently (Adelson 2005). My article gestures in this direction. With reference to Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People, this article argues that novel as a form undergoes drastic changes as it moves away from its supposition of the nation as a linguistic community towards nation-in-borderland, that is, as a collection of the intimate public held through affective contract. This is a move from the intelligible language of the public sphere towards language in the mode of rumour, where rumour includes, as Nadia Seremetakis (2019, 221) notes, among its forms, silence. Towards this end, the article will look at the specific conditions of neoliberal capitalism as it is obtained in the countries of the Arab Gulf and then establish the novel as staging the task of community-building under such conditions. Further, specifying rumour as this form of affective contract of community-building, the article will further elaborate on how such communities are not necessarily in a relation of resistance to capital but are in itself a means through which the neoliberal state is reproduced in a personalised form in the migrant lives.
Discussing the mutation that the novel The Guide by R. K. Narayan undergoes as it is made into a Hindi film, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2012) makes the observation that while the film ‘speaks to and from the “people”’ (p. 92), the novel keeps itself as a distant observer of the nation. The statist-developmental streak in colonial production of the novel has been identified by Meenakshi Mukherjee (1985) as the ‘novel of purpose’. The postcolonial era saw the men of letters, especially those writing ‘Indian writing in English’ burdened with the task of representing the nation without getting entrenched in its linguistic particularities (Shingavi 2010). The realisation that the rights-bearing citizen is a limited sphere of Indian public life has become starker with the coming of Subaltern Studies, in the eighties and the nineties, and English as a language which more often than being a functional language serves to shore up the prestige of a class, has been often identified as the perpetrator of this republic of inequality (Prasad 2011). Against the backdrop of these arguments, and in the light of the Subaltern Studies collective’s signal that the idea of capital–community divide in India is now untenable (Chatterjee 2012), this article is also an attempt to read the reader of the statist fiction which is the novel in terms of imbrication between community and capital. In this, it follows the lead of Achille Mbembe (2001). Mbembe offers an insightful commentary on the exercise of power in the postcolonial through his notion of postcolony, one which does not assume a disjuncture in the episteme of the governing and the governed—a position which is at a marked distance from the civil/political divide theorised by Partha Chatterjee (2004) and dominant in critical thought in the Indian context. According to Mbembe, the infrastructural lack of the postcolonial state to extend its gaze across its territory is compensated at the level of doubling of the governing class in the governed. The Thing of the postcolonial state that is its dictator, that object of desire as well as revulsion, is doubled in its function at each node of the postcolonial state. The community, therefore, does not offer itself as a zone of resistance as the governing schema is reproduced within the community. Mbembe’s conception of postcolony, which stresses the personalised workings of the state, offers a useful framework to study the relations in neoliberal capitalism where the terms of work and leisure have been reconceptualised along personalised notions of affect (Hong 2022). Further, such personalisation of neoliberalism as well as the state, and the general paradigm of magic and haunting that characterise this space as delineated by Temporary People (see Menon 2020), make Veena Das’s conceptualisation of the magic of the state (as opposed to its rationalised bureaucracy) an effective framework to understand the making of the migrant community in the face of neoliberal capital and in complicated relations with it.
Rumour has been studied as an instrument of mobilisation against the state, for example, in events of peasant rebellion (Guha 1983). In the context of the strife immediately before and after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the anti-Sikh riots that followed, Veena Das (2007) has shown the work of rumour as central to producing not only the Other in terms of other communities and the state but also a version of the state which is almost mythical in its personalisation. However, rumours can also be a specific form of doubling of the state in the community—‘[a] narrative form by which the state forges and reintroduces normalcy in times of crisis’ (Seremetakis 2019, 221). This article will look at the role of rumour in the formation of an affective community, while also pointing out how such a community is nevertheless in the service of the capital in the neoliberal times.
What this article does is to substitute the postcolonial space with the space of the neoliberal city, and that of the postcolonial subject caught between the state and the community with the precarious migrant labourer that populate the fragmented labour zones of neoliberal cities. The article reads in this neo-liberal space the postcolonial condition of reading, interpreting and making sense of the world. ‘Reading in postcolonial locations is an especially fraught activity that continually challenges how public history is told (within dominant or subaltern frames) and which collectives are recognized publically’ (Mukherjee 2017, 3). It is only apt that the ‘novel’ under discussion is by an Indian who grew up in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was a resident of the United States and currently teaches in the UAE, and the book is published from the United States. The article is, thus, on extending the postcolonial method to the new conditions of reading in general and beyond postcolonial spaces and nations themselves. Living at a time where increased migration of labour unsettles any closely bound spaces, the paper sees the postcolony as now extending to the metropolis. At the same time, the paper does away with the idea of separate dominant and subaltern spheres, and views instead the two domains as interpretive performances. It is rather the unobtainability of the public today in conditions of migrant labour-propelled capital that this article puts forward as the occasion to think beyond the classical account of reading as taking place in homogenous speech and empty time. Rather, as this article shows, reading becomes an act of affective affirmation, a zone of intimate contract that stages the shutting down of the public for a zone of pleasurable belonging. The public, then, is the portal to a zone of subterraneous enjoyment.
Temporariness of the Novel
Deepak Unnikrishnan, the author of Temporary People, is born to migrant labourers in the Gulf and currently works in Abu Dhabi, UAE. He describes Abu Dhabi, the city he grew up in, as the ‘city where citizenship is not an option’:
My father came in 1972 on a three-year work visa, which allowed you to sponsor spouses or children to join you. After 18, sons were on their own. To stay in Abu Dhabi as a young man, you had to find a job or enrol in university. Only unmarried daughters could stay on their parents’ visas. But unlike in the US, where the H-1B work visas offer the possibility of a pathway towards permanent residency, no long-term option exists in the UAE for non-citizens. If a foreign loser loses his or her job or reaches retirement age (60 in most companies), they need to leave, irrespective of how long they have lived in the country – or even if they were born there. (Unnikrishnan 2017b)
The temporariness of the only place one could call home bears heavy on the space and time. To be temporary is to be devoid of that space which can record one’s growth, that permanence against which the vagaries of time can be indexed as such. In the age of double revolution, when Europe plunged into modernity, nation was that space in which the ever-growing promise of the youth that is modernity could be delimited, such that novels could be brought to an end. It was in the consummation of a nation as the endpoint of individual development that these novels could finally resolve itself (Boes 2012, also see Moretti 2000). To then be deprived of that space, the nation, is to be at the mercy of time when time doubles itself as space, and, therefore, crosses boundaries.
But we also knew what it was like to feel temporary, to keep your eye on the clock, to normalise the inevitability of departure so completely that you didn’t think about it, even though you always thought about it. (Unnikrishnan 2017b)
It is from the vantage point of this transience that Deepak Unnikrishnan approaches the question of migrant labour in the Gulf. Temporariness becomes the state of being which casts life in a double image, as if in a split-screen, like in the simultaneity of thinking and not thinking, being and not being, which lends the labouring life in the Gulf a ghostly nature:
Once the last brick is laid, the glass spotless, the elevators functional, the plumbing operational, the laborers, every single one of them, begin to fade, before disappearing completely. Some believe the men become ghosts, haunting the facades they helped build. (Unnikrishnan 2017a, 3)
At the outset, note that there is a want of consensus in the public sphere as to what the ontological status of this work is. Of all the different testaments provided by the publishers, some of them refer to this book as a novel, and some others as a collection of stories. The cover of the book presents the book as ‘A Novel’, a qualification which has gone missing when the title gets reproduced in the title page inside. What is afoot here is a crisis in naming, not in that the commentators cannot agree upon a word, but that what the confusion points out is the inadequacy of both the terms—the novel and a short story—to relay what it is in the differential structure of nomenclature that they are referring to. It is, therefore, a crisis in the structure itself, in that it is now imbued with a feeling which has not yet found a name. Between the short story and the novel is the distance between the traveller and God, the former defined by his particularity, and the other by His objectivity, the former by his locatedness, and the other by His transcendence. Indeed, to write a novel is to arrogate to oneself the ‘transcendental condition of objectivity of form-giving’ (Lukács 1989, 88; quoted in Mufti 2007, 178). Novels have been credited with the arrival of a new subjectivity which can place itself in the world along a horizontal organisation and also have a totalising vision of the world. In that respect, it has been studied as the discursive infrastructure for the birth of the bourgeoisie (Armstrong 2006). If the novel is that realm which is made intelligible only by the reader’s occupying the homogenous empty world (Anderson 1983) and is, there- fore, characterised by an overarching unity which might be consum- mated only in the figure of the reading subject (through ‘the process of anticipation and retrospection, the consequent unfolding of the text as a living event, and the resultant impression of lifelikeness’ [Iser 1972, 296]), then to be caught between a short story and a novel is to wink and blink in the light of historical call of duty as the interpreting subject, aka citizen, to make sense of the world.
The novel/loosely connected short-story collection recounts experiences of migrant labourers in the Gulf in a non-realist manner, experimenting with techniques of story-telling. In this book you find bodies of labourers falling off under-construction skyscrapers stitched back to functionality, a rogue scientist who farms labourers to mount an insurgency, a cockroach who walks, dresses and speaks like humans, and other magical realist circumstances, prodding one to ask if magical realism was not written off as obsolete a bit too early. As Raya Alraddadi points out, ‘[a]lthough Temporary People seems to strive against a realist form through blending surrealist, irreal, and absurd elements, this does not abstract from struggle and oppression but instead emphasizes it and makes it tangible for readers’ (Alraddadi 2023, 72). She further notes that the combination of different narrative styles in Temporary People ‘creates a migrant aesthetic practice that can redefine the experience of those who are often underrepresented and depersonalized in literature’ (p. 76). While Alraddadi points out the many different mutations that realism can take in exploring the human condition, this article would like to ask if the realism at hand in Temporary People, expressed as non-realism, corresponds to the zoning of national spaces into smaller parts, and thereby with an implication for the bourgeois idea of citizen who, in the classical accounts of the liberal public sphere, is a rational subject equipped to think and make decisions for himself.
With sections of varying lengths, some of them as short as a paragraph of a few lines (e.g., Book 2 Chabter 6, 8; Book 3 Chabter 1), and with varying themes, some bizarre and some quotidian, with varying genres at play, and some chapters just a collection of words (Book 1 Chabter 3, Book 2 Chabter 4), with the naming of sections as Books and ‘Chabter’ (to refer to how Arabic does not have the p sound), but with sections which are within books but not within a Chabter, with Arabic numerals for the Books, the book strives against a realist form which would make the labourer lives transparently and inertly available. I read one chabter of this book, Book 2 Chabter 1, in order to dwell on the nature of the state and reader at the margins/zones—as in precarious labour—and the subjectivity that is produced by virtue of finding oneself at this border.
The Precarious Labour Zone
Precariousness (in relation to work) refers to all forms of insecure, contingent, flexible work—from illegalized, casualized and temporary employment, to homeworking, piecework and freelancing. In turn, precarity signifies both the multiplication of precarious, unstable, insecure forms of living and, simultaneously, new forms of political struggle and solidarity that reach beyond the traditional models of the political party or trade union. (Gill and Pratt 2008, 3)
The precarity of labour in the Gulf primarily comes from the kafala system, which is the legal system of recruiting migrant labourers in the Gulf countries. The kafala system is a system in which a migrant labourer has to be sponsored by a kafeel, or the sponsor, who is usually a citizen or in some cases an elite non-citizen. Through various legal measures, such as not allowing labourers to change jobs, preventing their re-entry for a time period if they cancel their earlier job visas, as well as through other practices such as the sponsor keeping the labourer’s passport in his custody, the kafala system becomes, as Andrew M. Gardner (2010) notes, a structural violence which bounds the labourer to the whims of the sponsor, ‘[allowing] the state and the citizenry to host (and profit from) the global economy without submitting to its logic’ (p. 22). Gardner identifies the system as the cornerstone of the unequal relations between the nationals and the foreigners (p. 54).
When a poor Indian family mortgages its productive assets, pulls children from school, and pawns the mother’s jewelry to come up with the thousands of dollars it takes to send a son to the Gulf, only to have him face month after month of no pay and, finally, to be relegated to scrounging for illegal work, it may seem tragic for that family. (p. 68)
However, Gardner notes, what is tragic for the family is in fact a profitable venture under the system of kafala, for the number of middlemen involved who gains when a sponsor does not pay the sponsored. Taking this as another instance of ‘deportation industry’ as specified by William Waters (2002, 266), Gardner lists those profited by this industry as ‘including the multitude of citizen-sponsors all of whom work under the tragic system of kafala’ (Gardner 2010, 68).
More than a transfer of wealth from South Asian families to the labour brokers, sponsors and state, as noted by Gardner (2010, 69), the debilitating conditions of the kafala system are at the heart of the consolidation of the state form in the Gulf, as noted by J. Sater:
migration and the lack of migrants’ citizenship status substantially contributes to positive rights that official citizenship holders enjoy. This means that in spite of the consolidation of immigration in the Arab Gulf countries, and arguably the absence of meaningful nation-building concerns, it is the absence of liberal–democratic practices and corresponding negative and political rights that is the primary factor that explains why migrants will continue to be denied citizenship rights. (Sater 2013, 293)
Similarly, Philippe Fargues (2011) has noted that of the three policies that were pursued by the Gulf states to preserve their identity in the face of the far more numerous migrant populations in their countries—‘non-naturalization of foreign nationals to maintain the national/non-national separation and the privileges of the former; pro-natalism applied to nationals in order to maximize their demographic potential; and the indigenization of the workforce in order to reduce the number of non-nationals’ (Fargues 2011, 287), it was only the first policy which worked. What stood in the way of the third becoming successful was precisely the need ‘to minimize the cost of labor and maximize efficiency, and the interest of nationals who profit from the kafala or sponsorship system’ (p. 289).
The structural logic of the kafala system, together with, ironically, what Thomas Chambers (2018) identifies as continuities between home and away in transnational migration, has led to fragmentation in the migrant population of the Gulf countries. ‘Dubai’s landscapes are designed to separate the population into zones, and the lives of construction workers often remain hidden and their mobility is restricted within the built environment’ (Kendall 2012, 47), and ‘it is not unusual for adults in their social lives to only associate with those of the same nationality, religion or ethnicity’ (Willoughby 2006, 37).
The State of the Gaze
The chabter under discussion is titled ‘Mushtibushi’ and refers to the garbled rendering of the Japanese company Mitsubishi which is the manufacturer of, along with other things, the elevators in the apartment building of the characters in this story. The plot, to summarise it however inadequately, is that there have been instances of a series of sexual assaults targeting children in the Hamdan area of Abu Dhabi. The latest victim is a child of six. Debashish Panicker, a resident of the building in which the victim stays and was assaulted, ‘a long-serving responsible adult; a twenty-year veteran in the Ministry’s employment’ (Unnikrishnan 2017a, 91) is tasked with interviewing the person who happened to see the victim and the stranger who accompanied the victim into the elevator around the time that could be presumed to be just before the attack. This witness is Maya, a girl of ‘twelve, not ten. Soon, thirteen’ (p. 95). The chabter has three parts—the first is Debashish’s summary for the sake of the reader the background to the interview, the method of his interview (‘I normally ask a question, wait for an answer, write it down. I may also write how the child is behaving’ [94]) as well as his findings in the interview. After noting that the witness confided to a deal with one of three elevators in the building for supplying him regularly with children for satisfying his kinks in return for leaving Maya and her brother alone so that the latter two can concentrate on how to mug their father’s debtors, Debashish concludes:
It is my recommendation that the building decommission one of its Mitsubishi elevators, more specifically, the middle one, because the machine stands accused of sexual impropriety. In fact, after hearing her statement, it is my recommendation that all three Mitsubishi elevators be decommissioned in case the infection the accused machine has is contagious – but how does one word that without feeling stupid? In this city, where tall tales are birthed by all sorts—all kinds, every minute, seconds— her claim may be the mightiest of all. But I believe her. (p. 94)
The second part is the transcript of the interview between Debashish and Maya. Maya comes across in the interview as a feisty individual of her own right who hates to the guts the world of the adults and is determined to resist it even as she rues the inevitability of having to transmutate into ‘Manufacturists’, that is, the adults. The interview lays explicit the non-verbal dimension of any interview, that after all any interview is not conducted by speech alone, but also through gaze. ‘Maya was…’ says Debashish, ‘blessed with intellect, and a big bosom’ (p. 93). ‘Oh, how you stare’ (p. 95), admonishes Maya, ‘Your eyes. Avert’ (p. 98), ‘TOUCH me, I jump on your back, bit you like a tick, burrow, scream’ (p. 109) but also ‘These quests. Needs. Finger up bum hole. Untouched wee-wees. Brother and I would like everyone to get on with it’ (p. 101).
What comes across is the unreliability of Maya as a witness, not only because she is obviously an interested party in the whole episode but also because she calls attention to her agency over her narrative—‘Look, luv, whose story is this? I tell it my way’ (p. 98), ‘Look, whose story is this?’ (p. 104). The unreliability in her narrative precisely because she denies it objectivity and claims it as hers, her interests in the whole deal with the elevator, which is on the wrong side of the law at different levels (mugging, supplying children for sexual satisfaction), as well her sassiness, exuberance, viscerality (‘Maya jumps on the table. She lifts her knees, up-down, up-down. She marches’ [97, italics in the original]), complicated with her status as a minor (‘Twelve, not ten. Soon, thirteen’) produces her as a visible body, the live zones of sexual infraction which then becomes, as Lauren Berlant (1997) notes for post-Raeganite America, the zone for citizen action which would remove this hyper- visibility, normalise the minor subject and produce ‘dead’ citizenship. Maya becomes that subject on whom the citizen—Debashish Panicker—should exert himself, that subject where citizenship comes alive because here the citizenship status has to be actively administered, making itself vulnerable to resistance.
This translation of a potent situation to the dead letters of legality is achieved in the final section of the chapter, which is Debashish’s report to the Police (shurtha) on his findings. This report produces Maya (M, as she is referred to) as ‘another little girl’ which not only erases the interest that the little girl could have in this whole episode but also produces her as less than a citizen, someone whose words need to be taken with caution and judgement.
The Place of the Reader
How does this chabter place its reader? The first section posits the reader as someone who is privy to the thoughts of the protagonist of that section, Debashish. Here the reader is the citizen-confidante whose ethical configuration is guaranteed by the state, or essentially what is behind it—the bourgeois subjecthood. The second part lays open the question of the unreliability of not just Maya as the witness but also of Debashish as the untainted holder of rational values. Even while his tongue sticks to the purported nature of his visit, his wayward gaze is called out by Maya, which should then consolidate the position of the citizen-reader as the horizon against which Debashish can be judged. In the third part, the reader, on the other hand, is assigned the position of a mute witness. The conversation there, which is in the form of the report, is between the state and its local agent. However, this section brings to the fore what was hidden throughout, that even though the reader may always judge, his judgements were never from the position of a transcendental knowledge which bourgeois worldview promises to the apprehender of the world. Rather, there are notable gaps for the reader about how the scene transpired in its fullness. One can observe the incompleteness of the reader’s vision in the curious trajectory of the word ‘pidgin’ in the conversation between Debashish and Maya (99). Before beginning the transcript, explaining the method, Debashish notes, ‘When you spot an emboldened
The question is: How did a word—‘pidgin’—which was ‘jotted down’ or ‘came to mind as the transcript was reread’ make an appearance in Maya’s conversation? Could it be that Debashish inserted the word later on because Maya used the word? If that is so, why would Maya use that word that is so disconnected from the rest of the conversation? Again, could it be because it was in Maya’s mind the thought first occurred that ‘fews’ is a pidgin for cash, and that Debashish just made it explicit? If it was indeed this rewriting, it serves to add to the fact that the transcript is in no way a reliable one, but one that has been reinterpreted from the standpoint of an interested party. In this, it showcases an excess. Or could it be that Maya saw Debashish writing it down, and then deliberately asked a question about the way it is spelled, thereby investing the word with a desire to reveal, on the one hand, that she is privy to what he is writing, and on the other, that she still holds him incapable of correctly noting down what is happening—another way in which Maya draws attention to herself as a visible body that threatens the composure of the state.
However, one could also assume a very different position for the reader if one goes by the timeline of the conversation and at least for argument’s sake assumes that Maya was actually repeating what was in Debashish’s mind. If so, what was the connecting link between Debashish’s mind and Maya’s words? I propose that we look at the role of the reader, us, as the very link between Maya and Debashish, the one whose reading sounds loud in the scene of the interview. That is, basically, that Maya got the word from us as we were reading the paragraph. This makes the reader an invisible witness, invisible because he is not present in the scene, but all the same with real effects on the conversation. The reader then becomes the third person in the room whose reading becomes the articulation between the interlocutors. This calls into question our own need to remain invisible as the silent stock-taker of matters, as that index of being thereby non-vulnerable and, therefore, secure in the protected zone (because invisible and without a body that might be violated [Berlant 1997, 71)].
Translation Between Margins
Even if we are to discount such a reading (which I would very much like to retain), the fact remains that the reader is presented a transcript flanked by two summaries—one as in a confidential brief and the other in the form of an official report. What is played out in the chabter is the loss in the translation itself between one summary and the next. Take, for example, Debashish’s conviction that Maya was telling the truth and, therefore, the elevator is actually a sexual predator (p. 94). While Debashish, at the beginning of the chabter, tells us that he would recommend decommissioning the elevators, this part is missing in his final report but leaves a curious trace:
But this report concerns what has been done to a helpless child, and I regret to admit that beyond speculation, my session with the witness has not come to much. The culprit has unfortunately gotten away. I do have one suggestion, which, with funds permitting, I hope can be implemented. Before the machines are decommissioned, I strongly advise the installation of cameras… (pp. 111–2)
The report actually does not make a recommendation to decommission the elevators by providing reasons, which, as Debashish reminds us, ‘how does one word that without feeling stupid?’ (p. 94). The suggestion seems to have fallen through the gap between the two paragraphs cited above, but leaving a trace behind—‘before the machines are decommissioned’. One should not, however, think of this trace as the trace of an imperfect erasure. Rather than read this trace as a leftover which would then forensically tell us what was left out, rather than labour on reading between the lines, the message between the lines is there for us to enjoy. In other words, it is not an accident nor the sloppiness on the part of Debashish that has left the trace of its seemingly pathological and now erased diagnosis. The trace is rather for us, the excess participant who is now a threat, the trace through which we are produced as precarious subjects. The labour of the trace is to display the fallibility of the state in spite of its exceptional technologies, and to create anxiety around its showcased errancy. An error may creep in a document, a salary might not reach on time, or the boss might have a change of heart regarding handing over the passport. The reader is not only privy to the now erased bizarre suggestions, but only too aware of it, too conscious of what the state is able to and is shameless about. The state enjoys and erases, it enjoys as it erases. The state produces itself as a site of pleasure by making a scene of erasing its pleasure.
Citizenship as an act of meaning-making has to now take place in a zone of vulnerability, of precarity even, privy to the traces of enjoyment that suffuses the rationality of the state. Yet, having been refused the position of neutrality, this citizenship is to occupy a position of witness to state’s majesty in magnanimity and obscenity. It is at the margins that the pleasure of the state is in its live display, as that zone in which it lives through the numerous disinterested technologies that include and exclude, and through the whimsicality of deploying these technologies which is what produces this zone as a zone of pleasure for the state. The excess nature of the intimate witness of the scene is produced by this excess of the state in which the state is no longer the stable entity of an already-achieved contract but reserves the potential of capricious use of resources and power.
When at the margins, the power of the state is not its mantle of rational order but its very human fallibility which has to resort to guesses and conjectures. Here is how Debashish Panicker describes the possible detractor:
Even though it’s possible an Emirati national may have done this, it would be foolish to assume the culprit at large is an Emirati solely on the basis of this circumstantial evidence. (p. 112)
Debashish vis-à-vis the vulnerability of the intimate witness is caught in the contradictory positions of being an immigrant labour himself but also the representative of the state in whom the state reproduces itself. On the one hand, he too lives in the logic of kafala with its segregations; on the other hand, he is there on behalf of the state and reporting to the state. He is that double of the Thing which reproduces the Thing locally, that Thing which enjoys and whose perverse enjoyment is already a manifestation of its power—the postcolonial condition, as delineated by Mbembe (2001). At the same time, he is also where the Thing is frustrated in its hopes of unhindered pleasure. On the one hand, what could be read fairly easily from the scene is that Debashish would risk his position greatly as the representative of the state if there is an unambiguous allegation against a national (Emirati) in a society in which the population is subjected to racial differentiation. As noted above, the racial—national/foreigner—dichotomy is central to defining the state form in the Gulf states and relies on distances that should not be breached spatially or discursively. After all, the law of untouchability is about formulating who may be touched offensively (Muthukkaruppan 2017, 66). On the other hand, these conjectures and conditional clauses are the very human technologies through which the state produces a different kind of a public as its people—publics, rather than public, which due to the illegibility of the public order and the impossibility of breaching this obfuscation has to resort to knowledges that are shared as if in a private mode, as private and intimate truths— ‘In this city, where tall tales are birthed by all sorts—all kinds, every minute, seconds—her claim may be the mightiest of all. But I believe her’ (Unnikrishnan 2017a, 94).
Conclusion
The state at the margins becomes the object of private pleasures, of rumour and gossip that operate through and build communities of private talk. Public speech becomes translatable into an intimate idiom through its fissures and incapacities (on public speech, see Warner 2002). In other words, the public speech becomes loaded with the enjoyment of gossip, pleasured and dreaded in various intimate publics—‘a voice that [is] unattributed, unassigned, and yet anchored to the images of self and other…’ (Das 2007, 117). As Veena Das has shown, the state becomes almost human in rumours—dependent on individual lives, and fragile enough to be potentially washed away by individual calls to rebellion (pp. 108–34). Rumours become a potent means of communication because of their ‘adequacy to a reality that has become suddenly unrecognizable’ (p. 134). What is particularly interesting is that the central piece of the chabter under discussion is the transcript of the interview rather than the summaries. This is counterintuitive in the sense that one usually assumes that it would be the official transaction of the state, the final report submitted to the police in this case, which would be the statement from which the alternative histories will have to be teased out. Instead, the summaries flank the main narrative. What I have sought to show in the paper is that it is in the excess of the transcript itself—the excess in gaze and gestures that is lost in the official report—combined with the scientific discourse that officially introduces it (the method of the interview, the legend to the interview, etc.) which makes it the realm where the magic of the state (Das 2007, 162–83)—with real consequences, non-transparent, ‘combination of obscurity and power’, and ‘placing oneself in a position of vulnerability’, and all of this grounded in everyday life (p. 163)—is established.
It is the inadequacy of the known in explaining the actual transaction, or, the recognition that the real is missing in its legally/legibly permissible articulations that sustains the borderland subjectivity as a zone of precarious liveliness that congeals between the lines of the official discourse. The subject of the novel of migration is not a novel of being lost to the world, nor is it a novel with the command over the comprehensibility of the world, it is rather the one who can reproduce the novel-state as a site of pleasure in inside knowledges. Rather than obscure the particularity behind the claim to intelligibility of ‘universal’ truths, the world of the migrant novel produces a world as knowable and enjoyable only through the live bonds of intimacy, and construes its reader as an insider, while also reproducing the state far away from the cold rationality with which it is associated, and as the zone of violence, fallibility, errancy and private pleasures and, therefore, to be dreaded all the more.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.