Author of the Month: Anis Shivani

Continuing our Author of the Month interview series, assistant fiction editor Sauleha Kamal talks to Anis Shivani about literature in the age of neoliberalism, alarming similarities between the US and ‘renegade states’, and the authoritarianism of the corporate marketplace.

Click here to read Anis Shivani’s ‘Dubai’, our Story of the Month and here for his essay on world literature.

Recently, Dubai’s ‘dark side’ has started to receive more media coverage, with some focus on the terrible treatment of foreign workers. What drew you to write about the city?

When I wrote this story in early 2006, Dubai was just beginning to become a leading story in Western media. This was about the time coverage of the miserable conditions of migrant workers began to appear. I was interested in depicting a dystopian city — at least I think of it that way — with an invisible laboring class hidden away in shantytowns far from the gleaming skyscrapers, and dual or multiple notions of rights for different classes of citizens, Emiratis versus Western expatriates versus Asian workers. Dubai has since been the subject of a great deal of journalistic exploration, as the abuses underlying the frenzied prosperity have come to light. I don’t know to what extent any of the injustices — such as seizing workers’ passports upon arrival, wages being withheld and workers being denied basic rights — have been addressed. My guess is not much has changed, since that is the nature of the illusion that is Dubai. If anything, the megalomania — the biggest, the highest, the tallest — only seems to have magnified manifold, the global recession probably just a momentary speed bump along the pell-mell rush to madness. The construction of Dubai as a neoliberal capitalist paradise, far from enlightenment notions of equality and freedom, seems to me just another way that Arabs have misused their wealth in short-sighted ways, rather than building societies that have a chance of outlasting the moment.

When I wrote the story, immigration politics in the U.S. were also very much at the forefront (as they are again today), as historic marches for immigrants’ rights were taking place all over the country. In 2005, Congressman James Sensenbrenner had presented a bill making undocumented presence a felony. Subsequent legislation, while it hasn’t gone that far, consistently moves in the direction of criminalizing immigrants. This was also the time when the concept of the “guest worker” emerged in the consecutive immigration bills that were debated in congress in 2006 and 2007. The category of the “guest worker” was revolting to me, because I believe in equal citizenship rather than creating different classes of people. What Bush was proposing then seems incredibly tame, however, positively New Deal in its benign intentions, compared to the legislation currently under consideration, which is determined to set up permanently different classes of people vulnerable to exploitation.

So this is how neoliberalism has corrupted late-twentieth-century notions of immigration, to the point where there is now a convergence between the U.S. and renegade states like Dubai built on guest workers, with the U.S. often explicitly pointing to such countries’ regressive immigration practices as the model to follow. The one thing we’d got right was immigration, but we’re hell-bent on destroying our successful model. When I wrote the story I was wondering how far the U.S. would proceed along the lines of inequality and immobility, and in the wake of the financial crisis I think we have our answer now.

My character Ram, who has been illegally present in Dubai for decades, is actually very fortunate in having acquired the protection of an Emirati sheikh early on in his stay, so that he’s immune to the vicissitudes confronting ordinary migrant workers. He floats above the concerns of the laborers as well as the petty bourgeois among the Indian immigrants, the shopkeepers and traders, convinced of his own invulnerability. Of course this is a mirage — as it always is in police states — because what someone like Ram thinks of as his right is actually only a privilege, subject to revocation at any time. Dubai — and the U.S. immigration system has become very similar in its corruption of humanist ideals — can only be pushed so far. In many ways Ram’s situation is highly unrealistic, almost utopian given the actual economic and political context. In Dubai, they supposedly tell you, If you don’t like it, just quit, just leave the country. Well, Ram wants to leave voluntarily. Is that even possible? For Ram, for the migrants who have set up lives in the U.S.? Voluntary departure is a fantasy, there as here.

In ‘Dubai’ you write, “Law and justice are abstract constructions, generalities which concrete facts usually make a mockery of.” Do you share this perspective with your protagonist, Ram, and can it be universally applied?

Yes, I do agree with this idea. To the extent that any law is formalized and given abstract shape, it will of necessity violate the uniqueness of individual circumstances. But this is how we govern, fooling ourselves that we are in the business of dispensing justice. The only law that would be completely just would be completely attuned to individual circumstances, that is to say, it would be completely anarchic. So anarchy and law are always in insufferable competition. To stay with immigration, the many millions of undocumented people in the U.S. are supposed to be covered by overarching legislation that will define who gets to stay and with what rights. This ignores the individual circumstances of real people with real histories and families, most of whom will be bypassed by the harsh disciplinarianism of the law, with regard to work requirements, for instance. What happens to the disabled woman who can’t work but has happened to build a life here for thirty years? Of course you could do the sensible thing and pass a law based on simple presence in the country, and that would be much closer to justice, but even that would have to be subject to consideration of individual circumstances in order not to deviate from fairness.

It’s interesting that Ram formulates his concept of abstract law as unjust early on in the story, as he contemplates his part in protecting the Emirati sheikh’s culpability in the incident that took place thirty-five years ago, resulting in the death of a fellow worker at a construction site. He’s not thinking of himself when he formulates this opinion, though soon this will apply to him too, as he’s taken into custody for a past he thought he’d put behind him. He’s lived his life in Dubai allowing a crime to go unpunished, making the law flexible in his own mind to ease his conscience: the sheikh didn’t mean to run over the worker, it was God’s will that it happened. But “the law” apparently already knows quite well what happened. So it’s an endless series of illusions, which ultimately backs up into the idea of justice serving the powerful, and Ram being not godlike but just a pawn in the end. Law becomes flexible when it comes to the rich and powerful, not otherwise.

You write, “There will be no rude wolf-whistles, no overt harassment, as in uncouth India,” and you follow it up with Ram commenting there are no incidences of “reported rape” in Dubai. The distinction “reported” coupled with the culture of secrecy described earlier in the story creates a very chilling effect. How would you compare violence against women in India and Dubai?

Again, note that this laudatory — and illusory — remark about rape in Dubai comes from Ram, even as he is being escorted in a dark Mercedes by an agent of the intelligence services toward their secret headquarters. It’s not the agent who makes this remark but Ram. So he remains in a state of illusion, and why not, he’s had a blessed thirty-five years of relative privilege, compared to where he came from in India. In essence, he’s allowed himself to be morally “co-opted.” His allegiances are all wrong, and he half-knows it. It’s hard for him not to feel superior to those left behind in the race, it’s hard for him not to feel emotionally attached to Dubai’s glossy exterior, since he believes he’s had some infinitesimal role to play in the glorious transformation. He’s aware of the fakeness of Dubai, but he honestly can’t visualize anything better in its place. In many ways, Ram is representative of the attitude of migrants anywhere in the world at that early stage of integration into bourgeois norms, and such attitudes are very common among, for instance, recent Hispanic or Asian migrants to the U.S., once they start putting some distance between those just off the boat and their own middle-class security.

Ram, at the end of the story, is commenting on how women are left apparently unmolested, regardless of their provocative clothing, and that too in a Middle Eastern country. That may be true on the surface, but what women does this formulation leave out? I don’t know enough about violence against women in Dubai versus India, but I would guess that in Dubai, as in India, there are layers of differences, protections versus vulnerabilities, for different classes of women. In India it would likely be more overt, as the recent cases of gang rape illustrate, but I would note the underlying constant, pervasive, low-level violence against women which would be true in both these sexually repressed societies. Dubai may boast surface Western freedoms, it may think of itself as a party town — as perhaps Delhi and Bombay also are to some extent — but what about subterranean patriarchal attitudes which easily veer into violence? In Dubai, how does the Filipina maid fare against the female British executive? Similarly, in India, what about the poor servant versus the high-powered businesswoman? And in the vast middle is the amorphous perpetual low-intensity abuse, which requires an altering of the mindset skyscrapers and highways can hardly begin to achieve. It requires a transition to true democracy.

At the same time, real progress for women, which has come about by the simple fact of economic development, as problematic and unequal as that may be, cannot be denied in any of these societies, so I think it’s important to keep that in mind and not have a predominantly negative or static view. The transformation underway is fundamental and irreversible. Making things visible is half the fight. In The Fifth Lash and Other Stories, my new collection, there’ s a story called “Dowry,” which is about a young female Muslim physician in an Indian provincial setting, fighting the invisibility of victims of domestic abuse at her own progressive hospital. Here again, confused loyalties due to professionalization and specialization come into play, and make it difficult to roll over ingrained cultural beliefs.

Since you write both fiction and poetry, have you found that some themes or subjects are better suited to stories and some to poems?

No, I wouldn’t say that at all. The same subjects find expression in both fiction and poetry, only in different ways of course. In both My Tranquil War and Other Poems and The Fifth Lash and Other Stories there are repeated excursions into surveillance, discipline, empire, self-censorship, torture, justification for war, the material conditions of artists, and the uses and abuses of literary endeavour. I have a story called “Tehran” in Anatolia and Other Stories, the book whose opening story is “Dubai,” but I also have a poem called “Observations of an American Woman Upon Donning the Chador in Tehran” in My Tranquil War. I have a dystopian story about mass deportation called “Repatriation” in Anatolia, but the theme of mass exclusion occurs in many different ways in My Tranquil War as well. In fact there’s a story called “Manzanar” in Anatolia, while there’s also a poem called “Remembering Manzanar” in My Tranquil War.

Often I take a first, glancing blow at ideas that have been percolating in my head for a while with poetry, before launching into full-scale attack in a story or novel, and then I’ll return to poetic treatment having dealt with it in prose. I find it extremely helpful to switch back and forth between the two modes in dealing with the same subjects, a way to unblock the alternative mode. This is not to say that poetry and fiction work along parallel tracks for me most of the time, but there is a lot of overlap, very helpful from the point of view of the eventual full realization of ideas.

In your ‘What is World Literature?’ essay, you quote Goethe discovering the similarities between Chinese and German people through literature. Later you remark that “the concern [with world literature], as with globalization in general, is uniformity, a monolithic dominance that crushes diversity of local expression.” This suggests that, though acknowledging similarities across the human experience is imperative, becoming entirely the same is highly undesirable. Do you think a balance can be achieved between the two?

Yes, this is an important point to make. I think both trends are simultaneously in progress, and of course I think that becoming the same everywhere is highly undesirable. It means the extinction of the human, in fact, if such a project of uniformity materializes, but unfortunately, with the global transmission of debased consumerist values via social media, satellite television, and other means, this is already happening very rapidly. One can see how the use of language is suffering all over the world, how the same dumbed-down English — I encountered it emerging in real-time in California as the Valley Girl dialect — is becoming the global lingua franca among young people.

I’m a committed one-worldist, globalist, whatever you want to call it, and I think given emerging technology, this world convergence is bound to happen during the course of the twenty-first century — barring some apocalypse. But at the same time, one notices a disturbing flattening of cultural differences. That would be too high a price to pay for universal communication and exchange of ideas. What ideas would be exchanged anyway if everywhere was the same bland cool neoliberal “paradise” — á la Dubai or Singapore or Shanghai? What is being propagated at a rapid pace is the glamorous physical infrastructure of Western development, including buildings, roads, communications technologies, power plants, etc. But what is not being disseminated — in part because the West itself has been rapidly losing its own faith — is the enlightenment value system that led to this blossoming of science and technology in the first place. The West becomes less democratic and universalist by the day, while the East adopts some of the exterior manifestations of progress; both are emerging as soulless societies, without absolute commitment to human freedom. The West feels that it can dispense with the substance of the enlightenment as long as the pretense can be maintained that prosperity and freedom continue on as before, and to some extent this pretense can indeed be kept going a long time. The East is uncomfortable making the transition to full-fledged democracy and equality, hoping that the semblance of spreading prosperity will keep such demands at bay for a long time yet. In both cases, power is narrowing and shifting upward at an almost unprecedented scale in the modern era, while at the rhetorical level power has ceased to call itself by its proper name, especially among the intelligentsia.

Where does world literature, and what I think is its antithetical idea, multiculturalism, fit into this?  Goethe’s hope for world literature — I recently came across an astounding new book called Against World Literature, by Emily Apter, which essentially makes a mockery of the notion because literature is allegedly untranslatable! — was that it would bring out the commonality among different nations, bridging differences and encouraging mutual respect. It was very much in tune with enlightenment philosophy. Real differences wouldn’t be papered over in this bold concept. Multiculturalism, on the other hand — or the literary brand of multiculturalism, as it has become enshrined in New York and London publishing — has little truck with this notion, it is rather a reiteration of ethnic bias or prejudice, setting up races and nations as distinct and apart, though some superficial transactions might indeed take place in the interest of economic lubrication. I’m not saying this is how multiculturalism has to be, but corporate publishing and the arts infrastructure has reduced it to this. Instead of increased global understanding, what we have — like the shimmering glass towers of Dubai — is a glossy parody of literature, dreamed up in the marketing-addled brains of corporate executives, translated into reality by many willing writers happy to traffic on their ethnic essentiality. So today we have the familiar multigenerational family secrets saga written according to a specific formula by many interchangeable Indian writers based in the U.S. or the U.K. There’s often a pair of brothers or sisters, one of them a proper bourgeois, the other a Naxalite or Tamil Tiger affiliate, and eventually, like in a Hindi movie, reconciliation and redemption are achieved. What bullshit! This is the kind of writing that deters thought, is meant to be a consumer product that lends easy status, makes the reader feel like a participant in some global discussion about literature. It’s fake, not the real thing, however, and as with other worthwhile ideas appropriated by the corporate elite, it creates similarity and banality everywhere. The corporate marketplace describes itself as democratic, but it is utterly authoritarian, and writers and artists play along with the game, knowing the bounds of acceptable discourse.

Sauleha Kamal is Assistant Fiction Editor for the magazine.