Migrant Dreams

Egyptian Workers in the Gulf States

Samuli Schielke

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781617979736
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

An intimate portrait of Egyptian migrants' lives and hopes, and their return home A vivid ethnography of Egyptian migrants to the Arab Gulf states, Migrant Dreams is about the imagination which migration thrives on, and the hopes and ambitions generated by the repeated experience of leaving and returning home. What kind of dreams for a good or better life drives labor migrants? What does being a migrant worker do to one's hopes and ambitions? How does the experience of migration to the Gulf, with its attendant economic and legal precarities, shape migrants' particular dreams of a better life? What do those dreams—be they realistic and productive, or fantastic and unlikely—do to the social worlds of the people who pursue them, and to their families and communities back home upon their return?Based on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork and conversations with Egyptian men from mostly low-income rural backgrounds who migrated as workers to the Gulf, returned home, and migrated again over a period of about a decade, this fine-grained study explores and engages with these questions and more, as the men reflect on their strivings and the dreams they hope to fulfill. Throughout the book, Samuli Schielke highlights the story of one man, Tawfiq, who is particularly gifted at analyzing his own situation and struggles, resulting in a richly nuanced account that will appeal not only to Middle East scholars, but to anyone interested in the lived lives of labor migrants and what their experiences ultimately mean to them.

1

THE TRUMAN SHOW

During a short research fieldwork in 2009 with mainly Egyptian migrant workers employed at a security company in Doha, I had the following dream:

I was in the village of Nazlat al-Rayyis in northern Egypt, taking a walk in the fields with my old friend M. Suddenly we arrived at a huge, new, high-tech office complex. The buildings, seven to ten stories high and built of dark glass and steel, formed a block in the middle of the Egyptian countryside, and at the center stood the station of an elevated high-speed train line, also brand new, which could take one to Cairo in thirty minutes instead of three hours. I said: “This is great, now I can come from Cairo to here on the high-speed line and walk to the village.” M. told me that this was “the Smart Village No. 2,” built as a copy of the original Smart Village on the outskirts of Cairo.²

Arriving at a place like Doha unsettles one’s sense of reality. The way this nighttime dream brought together a spectacle of ostentatious hypermodernity and the rural setting from where two of my friends and interlocutors in Doha hail probably reflected my own confusion about the reality encountered by the migrant workers with whom I was staying.

The previous evening, I had gone with Tawfiq, who worked as a security guard at a bank in downtown Doha, to visit our mutual friend Amr, who, like Tawfiq, comes from Nazlat al-Rayyis. Amr was posted as a security guard at the Eurasian Sports Association (not its real name), where he manned the reception desk at the entrance. His work site was near the National Stadium and the Aspire Sports Academy, which are among the most conspicuously hypermodern spaces of Doha. Nearby stands Villaggio, one of the city’s fanciest shopping malls. Villaggio is a simulation of Venice, its shops constructed as Disneyfied imitations of Italian houses. There is an ice-skating rink and a canal where one can take a gondola ride, and the ceiling is painted to look like the sky—blue, with white clouds and diffuse light. It was Thursday evening (the beginning of the weekend in Qatar) and the mall was full. Tawfiq and I entered to buy some food to share with Amr at his workplace.

At first, Tawfiq was intrigued, pleased to see the many attractively dressed young women strolling around, but he quickly became disturbed and, finally, appalled. He said:

Now I realize what a good, decent place Egypt is (addi eh Masr bint nas, literally: how much Egypt is the daughter of good people). This is the purest falsification. This is The Truman Show. I have never missed Egypt as badly as I do now.

Two things upset Tawfiq. For one thing, Villaggio is an extreme display of conspicuous consumption, an insult flung in the face of the conditions of exploitation Tawfiq and his fellow migrant workers faced in Qatar. Tawfiq had to count every penny of his meager salary. Like other migrant workers I met, he was extremely price conscious, becoming angry at the thought of anyone, rich and poor alike, spending more money than was necessary. Conspicuous consumption was an offense against both his position in the system and his main goal in being there: saving money for his future.

Second, Tawfiq hated the mall because it was such a comprehensive simulation. Comparing the mall with the Hollywood film The Truman Show (1998), in which the hero Truman is the unknowing star of a reality television show, Tawfiq described it as a fake, artificial world that made it impossible to find any footing in the real world (which he explicitly located in Egypt). His observation echoes a concept that has gained currency in the study of the Arab Gulf: hyperreality.

Hyperreality (Baudrillard 1993; Steiner 2014; Wippel et al. 2014) is a form of simulation so convincing that the original appears less real. Regarding the ambitious construction projects in Gulf cities, the air-conditioned worlds of luxury and material pleasure, the skyscrapers rising along the coastline in past years, and the combined sense of awe and disorientation these structures often generate, there is certainly something to be said for applying the notion of hyperreality when trying to understand them. Had Tawfiq known about the concept, he well might have used it. Had he been familiar with the work of the geographer Yasser Elsheshtawy, he would also have likely agreed that prestige projects in the Gulf cities are indeed “spectacles” (in the sense of Debord 1977), where ultimately “falseness becomes a virtue, a model” (Elshesh-tawy 2013, 112).

Tawfiq’s anger at the sight of Villagio mall reminds us that there is another, darker side to the hyperrealities of the Arab Gulf (see also Elsheshtawy 2010). They are built, maintained, and serviced by a labor force that lives in a very different sort of reality from the glass and steel palaces along the coast. Tawfiq described the contrast through another popular cultural reference, the science fiction novel Utopia by Egyptian writer Ahmad Khaled Towfiq (2008; 2011). His book is a nightmare vision of extreme class polarization, where the rich live in the isolated city of “Utopia,” protected by high walls separating it from the extreme misery on the outside. Tawfiq explained: “Doha is also such a utopia. As for the other side of the utopia, that is the dystopia where we live.”

If the sports park and the Villagio mall were prime examples of utopian hyperreality, the daily life of Tawfiq and his colleagues might be described as a kind of hyporeality, a dystopian existence that is somehow less than real: a dim state of routine, focused on something other than the immediate material spot in which they are present—a life of enduring for the sake of something other than this.

However, concepts like hyperreality or “hyporeality” only take us so far. They may help us to understand the powerful effect of the Gulf as a dream world where everything seems possible. But unlike Baudrillard’s hyperbolic “desert of the real,” fantasies often do not take one away from reality; rather, they change reality. Falseness may be a virtue in shopping malls, yet they structure the material ways in which people actually move, eat, shop, and work. They make some people rich while providing others a meager income. The aspirations of migrant workers ordinarily involve more mundane projects: home, marriage, family. The workers’ less-than-real sense of existence in Doha was intrinsically connected to an immensely productive process of realizing things at home; they were building lives somewhere else.

This is what I try to trace in the following chapters: the dialectics of the pressing dream of movement and advancement; the experience of the life of the migrant, which is felt to not really be a life yet is entirely concerned with building a life; the troubled temporality of a constantly deferred future, as produced by this dialectic under the conditions of an oppressive labor regime; the tangible material effects that migrants’ strivings have; and, last but not least, the way those material effects in turn shape new dreams. This process is especially pronounced among low-income migrant laborers relocating to the Gulf states on temporary contracts, and it is this group my book discusses. The concrete questions I try to answer are as follows. What does being a migrant worker do to one’s dreams? And what impact do those dreams have on the world in which one lives?

2

TRAVELING TO DOHA

International and rural–urban migration is close to a total social fact in Egypt, second only to marriage, the military state, and the worship of God. According to the 2017 national census, one out of eleven Egyptians currently resides abroad. Two-thirds of the Egyptians abroad live in other Arab countries, mainly in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. Other large Egyptian diasporas can be found in the United States, Canada, and Italy (Mada Masr, 2017). In Tawfiq’s home village, most migrants go to Saudi Arabia or other Arab Gulf states. In the neighboring town, Italy is the main destination. In Tawfiq’s extended family, ³ nine of the ten men born between 1960 and 1990 have been international migrants at some stage in their lives. By summer 2019, five of them were currently living abroad. (In a remarkable gender contrast, Tawfiq’s sister is the only woman in the extended family—not counting spouses—who has thus far lived or worked abroad.)

Egypt is a migrant nation, but it does not convey a sense of free-floating movement. For the vast majority of Egyptians, moving across borders is difficult, costly, and full of risks. This difficulty of movement makes it even more loaded with promises and expectations. This is in no way unique to Egypt, of course. While increasing migration across borders is met by increasing visa restrictions and border controls, the dream of migration to the North has become only more compelling throughout the Global South (see, for example, Alpes 2012; Elliot 2015; Swarowsky 2014).

However, there are different ways to be held back by borders and to cross them, and there are different experiences of living abroad. Class makes an enormous difference. Less class privilege generally means more limited possibilities of movement and more exploitative and alienating conditions of living abroad—be it as an undocumented migrant or asylum seeker in Europe or as a low-income contract worker in the Gulf. Visa and labor regimes are equally of consequence. The Gulf states offer temporary work visas on all income levels and do not criminalize low-income workers as illegal or irregular residents as systematically as European and North American states often do (Menin 2017; de Genova 2002). However, attaining legal residence is governed by highly exploitative laws, most importantly the sponsorship (kafala) system (more about this in the next chapter). Significantly, Gulf states usually do not allow migrant workers to stay after retirement. Low-income “migrant” laborers and top-salary “expat” functionaries alike are subject to a circular logic of temporary work contracts and ultimate return to their home countries.⁴

Some differences are also due to the specific aims and stages of one’s movement. In this regard, Arabic is endowed with a migration-related lexicon that is helpful in understanding some of the specific qualities of moving to and living in a place far from home.⁵

The Arabic word for migration, hijra, is not identical in use with the English “migration,” except in some academic and policy uses. Hijra usually implies leaving a place behind with the intention of settling permanently in a new place. It also has a religious connotation due to Prophet Muhammad and his followers’ emigration (hijra) from Mecca to Medina that transformed Muslims from a small persecuted group into an expansionist world religion. Egyptians living and working in the Gulf states would not be likely to see themselves as muhajirin (permanent settler–emigrants), because they know that sooner or later they will return home. In legal terms, they are described in the Gulf states as residents (muqimin) or arrivals (wafidin), in opposition to citizens (muwatinin).

They and their families and friends, however, would more likely say that they are mughtaribin (living away from home) or musafirin (traveling).

A mughtarib is somebody who lives in ghurba, which means the sense of being abroad in a strange place among strangers, separated from the familial connections and safety of home. To experience ghurba or “strangerhood” is to live a life that is not full in the relational sense and that lacks the comfort of the familiar. It is a notion that stands in marked contrast to the much more open-ended concept of safar, meaning travel, departure, and migration. Safar is associated with the promise and possibility of movement, while ghurba is the condition of disconnection from a full life that one may have to endure as a consequence of that movement. Safar is something one may pursue, ghurba something one must endure. Notably, the philosophical concept of alienation in Arabic is expressed by the term ightirab, which also means the act of moving away from home to a state of ghurba. Neither ghurba nor safar carry the connotations of rupture and permanence that hijra possesses. One can travel (yisafir) for a week or for the rest of one’s life. One can live in ghurba for decades and never feel that the place one inhabits is home.⁶ A few Egyptians have also told me that they experience ghurba in their homeland in the sense that they feel alienated, unwell, and unrecognized in it.

Tawfiq and others in similar positions thus did not emigrate (yihajir) to the Gulf in the sense of aiming to make it their new home. Some of them might have dreamed (and Tawfiq indeed did) of becoming a muhajir (emigrant) to America or Western Europe. However, the actual path of safar (travel) they undertook brought them to the alienating and exploitative condition of ghurba (strangerhood): workers hired on temporary contracts in the Gulf states, their efforts devoted to saving money in order to build a life at home that had yet to begin. As I speak about migrants in this book, I therefore (unless otherwise specified) mean the mughtaribin who understand their condition as one of a temporary (while possibly longlasting) migrancy away from home.

Tawfiq’s first safar took him to Qatar, where he worked for two years (2008–10) as a security guard for an international company. The site and kind of work were both coincidence: his friend Amr, who is several years older and needed to save money for his marriage, had received a contract as a guard some months earlier, and Tawfiq followed him. Both Tawfiq and Amr come from relatively poor, rural families in Nazlat al-Rayyis. They have some higher education and great expectations, but their resources were only sufficient to get low-pay, public-sector jobs in Egypt. Amr is a schoolteacher, while Tawfiq is a health inspector. Incidentally, they are both literature enthusiasts and writers: Tawfiq writes poetry and Amr writes short stories.

Tawfiq had dreamed of leaving Egypt since he was young. When I first became better acquainted with him in 2006, he was already developing plans for migration, or “escape,” as he often called it. He had originally wanted to go to either the United States or Western Europe, but a path to emigrate to those countries was unavailable to him (and he refused to take the risk of crossing the Mediterranean on a fishing boat). I also could not organize a visa for him. Thus, he settled for a contract in Doha in the hope that it might be a stepping stone on his imagined path to Europe or America. The dreams he invested in safar (travel) comprised the desire and need to fulfill the social expectation that he become a mature adult and responsible family man, along with a pressing need for money, accentuated by the relative poverty of his family. There was also a personal as well as political desire for freedom, new experiences, and knowledge. However, his actual migrations have so far all taken place in the limited and limiting framework of labor contracts in the Arab Gulf states: the first two times as a security guard and the third time as a customer service representative.

Much of Tawfiq’s life trajectory and experience is common, even typical. He belongs to a vast mainstream in Egypt’s population, a group that is for the most part relatively young, possessing some formal education and being poor but hopeful. People like Tawfiq are systematically excluded from the well-paid jobs and mobility that wealthy Egyptians can take for granted. After completing his two-year higher vocational education, he received a badly paid government job as a health inspector—a position that provides a meager yet stable salary but no lucrative side income, as some other public-sector jobs do. He migrated as a worker to the Gulf, returned, got engaged, migrated again, got married, became a father, and migrated once again. He has recently begun building ...