Culture | No country for you

The Gulf’s “temporary people”

The United Arab Emirates’ millions of non-citizen workers inspire an experimental and troubling novel

Don’t get too comfortable

Temporary People. By Deepak Unnikrishnan. Restless Books; 251 pages; $17.99 and £12.99.

A NATION is not just a place; it is a people who belong together, bound by history, ethnicity or language. But the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has borrowed its people. In a frenzied half-century, its population has grown from barely 100,000 to over 9m. Of these, a staggering 88.4% are citizens of another country. They built its impossible cities, but live under the shadow of one day being told to leave.

Among these perpetual foreigners are roughly 3m Indian migrants, mostly Malayalam-speakers—“Malayalees”. They include the family of Deepak Unnikrishnan, who was born in Kerala and raised in Abu Dhabi, went to America to study, and decided to stay. His debut novel, “Temporary People”, has won the inaugural Restless Books prize for writing by a first-generation immigrant to America. Its patchwork of chapters elicits the vertigo of Joseph Heller and the disoriented human hopelessness of Milan Kundera. In three sections—“Limbs”, “Tongue. Flesh.” and “Veed” (“home” in Malayalam)—it describes a hierarchy of unmet needs: to be safe, to be understood and, deepest felt, to belong.

“Temporary” lives come cheap. Up on sky-scraping building sites, “men don’t burn...they decay.” Each night, the bodies of those who have fallen from their perches are stuck back together “with duct tape or some good glue”. The economy’s insatiable hunger for labour is such that a brilliant scientist develops the “Canned Malayalee Project”. In industrial greenhouses, seeds grow into “oak-dark heat-resistant five-foot-seven Malayalees” in 23 days. Their inevitable rebellion, when it comes, is bloody.

Mr Unnikrishnan’s world could be written off as dystopian, were it not rooted so firmly in current reality. In the past decade, Human Rights Watch has issued multiple searing indictments of working conditions in the UAE, denouncing the kafala system of indentured labour, high rates of heat stress and on-site accidents. In 2009, footage emerged of an Emirati sheikh torturing an Afghan grain merchant, pouring sand into his mouth and eyes and setting him alight before repeatedly running him over. After short-lived expressions of horror from Western policymakers, the sheikh was neatly absolved in court, and the affair was forgotten. In “Temporary People”, these events become an annual ritual compulsory for all local men.

This is not crime, but theatre. Among Mr Unnikrishnan’s many games with form is to lay this gruesome scene out as a play. Each chapter is different. One is the transcript of an interview. Another, reworking tales from the Ramayana, an ancient Hindu epic poem, lays down the founding myth of a new people. Not all are so effective: “Pravasis?” (“migrants”) tries too hard and makes too bald a point. It lists hundreds of jobs, through “Bank Teller” and “Chicken Decapitator”, before trailing off sentimentally with “Country Maker. Place Builder. Labourer. Cog.” But taken together this discordant polyphony of stories is the full-throated roar of an entire people.

Mr Unnikrishnan thanks his high-school teachers for allowing him “to take [his] time with English in order to tame it”. His language is now solid, alive and dangerous. Tongues tear themselves from mouths, spewing “mangled”, “unrecognisable” words “like shrapnel”. Blacked-out and untranslated words deny even the reader the right to complete understanding. This is not an easy book; in fact it is eviscerating. But in “Temporary People” the Restless Books prize has rewarded an urgent voice worth attending to, even if it is hard to hear.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "This land is not your land"

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