Today it is a commonplace in the Western media that aspirations toward democracy in the Arabian peninsula are a part of the fallout of changes ushered in by oil and the consequent breakdown of "traditional" society. In fact, in several instances exactly the opposite is true: oil and the developments it has brought in its wake have been directly responsible for the suppression of whatever democratic aspirations and tendencies there were within the region.
Certain parts of the Gulf, such as Bahrain, whose commercial importance far predates the discovery of oil, have long possessed sizable groups of businessmen, professionals, and skilled workers — a stratum not unlike a middle class. On the whole, that class shared the ideology of the nationalist movements of various nearby countries such as India, Egypt, and Iran. It was their liberal aspirations that became the victims of oil's most bizarre, most murderous creation: the petro-despot, dressed in a snowy dish-dasha and armed with state-of-the-art weaponry — the creature whose gestation and birth Munif sets out to chronicle in the second volume of the Cities of Salt cycle, The Trench.
Unfortunately, The Trench comes as a great disappointment. The narrative now moves away from Harran to a city in the interior called Mooran ("the Changeable"), which serves as the seat of the country's ruling dynasty. With the move to the capital, the focus of the narrative now shifts to the country's rulers.
The story of The Trench is common enough in the oil sheikdoms of the Arabian peninsula; it begins with the accession to power of a sultan by the name of Khazael, and it ends with his deposition, when he is removed from the throne by rival factions within the royal family. Munif describes the transformations that occur during Sultan Khazael's reign by following the career of one of his chief advisers, a doctor called Subhi al-Mahmilji (who earlier played an important part in the creation of the new Harran). The story has great potential, but Munif's voice does not prove equal to the demands of the narrative. It loses the note of wonder, of detached and reverential curiosity, that lent such magic to parts of Cities of Salt, while gaining neither the volume nor the richness of coloring that its material demands.
Instead Munif shifts to satire, and the change proves disastrous. He makes a valiant attempt — not for nothing are his books banned in various countries on the Arabian peninsula — but satire has no hope of success when directed against figures like Sultan Khazael and his family. No one, certainly no mere writer of fiction, could hope to satirize the royal families of the Arabian peninsula with a greater breadth of imagination than they do themselves. As countless newspaper reports can prove, factual accounts of their doings are well able to beggar the fictional imagination. Indeed, in the eyes of the world at large, Arab and non-Arab, the oil sheik scarcely exists except as a caricature; he is the late twentieth century's most potent symbol of decadence, hypocrisy, and corruption. He preempts the very possibility of satire. Of course, it isn't always so. The compulsions and the absurdities of an earlier generation of oil sheiks had their roots in a genuinely tragic history of predicament. But those very real dilemmas are reduced to caricature in Munif's Sultan Khazael.
Even where it is successful, moreover, Munif's satire is founded ultimately upon a kind of nostalgia, a romantic hearkening back to a pristine, unspoiled past. It is not merely Americans from the oil companies who are the intruders here: every "foreigner" is to some degree an interloper in Harran and Mooran. As a result, Munif is led to ignore those very elements of the history of the oil kingdoms that ought to inspire his curiosity, the extraordinary admixtures of cultures, peoples, and languages that have resulted from the Oil Encounter.
Workers from other parts of Asia hardly figure at all in Munif's story. When they do, it is either as stereotypes (a Pakistani doctor in Cities of Salt bears the name Muhammad Jinnah) or as faceless crowds, a massed symbol of chaos: "Once Harran had been a city of fishermen and travelers coming home, but now it belonged to no one; its people were featureless, of all varieties and yet strangely unvaried. They were all of humanity and yet no one at all, an assemblage of languages, accents, colours and religions." The irony of The Trench is that in the end it leaves its writer a prisoner of his intended victim. Once Munif moves away from the earliest stages of the Oil Encounter, where each side's roles and attributes and identities are clearly assigned, to a more complicated reality — to the crowded, multilingual, culturally polyphonic present of the Arabian peninsula — he is unable to free himself from the prison house of xenophobia, bigotry, and racism that was created by precisely such figures as his Sultan Khazael. In its failure, The Trench provides still one more lesson in the difficulties that the experience of oil presents for the novelistic imagination.
AT LARGE IN BURMA 1996
What Went Wrong?
Like many Indians, I grew up on stories of other countries: places my parents and relatives had lived in or visited before the birth of the Republic of India, in 1947. To me, the most intriguing of these stories were those that my family carried out of Burma. I suspect that this was partly because Burma had become a kind of lost world in the early sixties, when I was old enough to listen to my relatives' stories. It was in 1962 that General Ne Win, the man who would be Burma's longtime dictator, seized power in a coup. Almost immediately he slammed the shutters and switched off the lights: Burma became the dark house of the neighborhood, huddled behind an impenetrable, overgrown fence. It was to remain shuttered for almost three decades.
In retrospect, I am astonished by the degree to which the Ne Win regime succeeded in cutting the country off, even from the attention of its immediate neighbors. Burma is one of the larger countries in Southeast Asia, with a land area considerably greater than that of Thailand and a population of an estimated 46 million. It hangs like a mango between India, China, and Thailand, with the province of Tenasserim trailing like a tendril down into the Andaman Sea. Its border with India is hundreds of miles long. Calcutta, where I was born, is closer to Burma's principal urban centers, Rangoon and Mandalay, than it is to New Delhi. Yet while other neighboring countries — Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka — figured in our newspapers to the point of obsession, Burma was scarcely mentioned. In defiance of the laws of proximity, General Ne Win was able to render his country invisible to both its neighbors and the world at large.
In my family, memories of Burma were kept alive by an old connection, and last December, on traveling to Rangoon, I found a trace of that connection in a small, nondescript temple in the commercial center of the city. The temple stands on a broad, straight road that was once known as Spark Street; it is now called Bo Aung Kyaw Street. This part of Rangoon was planned and built by British engineers in the late nineteenth century, and Spark Street still has a dark, gas-lit Victorian feel to it.
The temple on Spark Street is merely a hall on the ground floor of an old apartment building. It was built in 1887 and has served ever since as a community center for Hindu immigrants from Bengal. I had heard about the temple as a child, from an aunt who had married into a wealthy Bengali family that had settled in Burma. My aunt's husband ran a prosperous timber business. He was nicknamed "the Prince" because of his extravagant tastes. My aunt and the Prince left Burma in 1942, in the last, panic-stricken weeks before the Japanese Army marched into Rangoon. They managed to bribe their way onto a ship that was sailing for Calcutta.