A Diamond in the Desert: Behind the Scenes in Abu Dhabi, the World's Richest City
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A Diamond in the Desert: Behind the Scenes in Abu Dhabi, the World's Richest City
304eBook
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Overview
Jo Tatchell first arrived in the city of Abu Dhabi as a child in 1974, when the discovery of oil was quickly turning a small fishing town into a growing international community. Decades later, this Middle Eastern capital is a dizzying metropolis of ten-lane highways and overlapping languages, and its riches and emphasis on cultural development have thrust it into the international spotlight.
Here, Tatchell returns to Abu Dhabi and explores the city and its contradictions: It is a tolerant melting-pot of cultures and faiths, but only a tiny percentage of its native residents are deemed eligible to vote by the ruling class, and the nation’s president holds absolute veto power over his advisory boards and councils. The Emirates boast one of the world’s highest GDP per capita, but the wealth inequality in its cities is staggering. Abu Dhabi’s royal family, worth an estimated $500 billion, lives off the sweat of the city’s migrant workers, who subject themselves to danger and poverty under barely observed labor laws. But now, the city is making an international splash with a showy investment in tourism, arts, and culture—perhaps signaling a change to a more open, tolerant state.
As this sparkling city surges into the future, it devotes just as much energy to concealing its past. Tatchell looks not only at history and social issues—the ancient system of tribal organization, the condition of the city’s million foreign workers, the emergence of women in Emirati society, but also her own experiences as both a child and adult in this fascinating city that has radically changed—and in other ways, stayed the same.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802196170 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/24/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 18 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Final Disillusionment
You can't see the whole city from the air, but as the plane sails in over the sea I squint through the window and catch glimpses of a million golden lights shimmering in the night haze. In the distance, red beacons flit on and off atop the great glass super-towers, marking the boundaries of a new skyline on the flat desert terrain. It is sixty years since Edward Henderson first set foot on Abu Dhabi's soil, and thirty-five since my own parents arrived. I wonder what they would have made of this ocean of lights. Would any of the three recognise the old Abu Dhabi in the sprawling metropolis below me? The small fishing community they knew has grown into a city.
As I step down onto the Tarmac, people rush past me onto the shuttle bus. I walk slowly, feeling the first puff of desert warmth on my face and bare arms. Then it's a step up, and we're off to the climate-controlled cool in which people live here.
Inside the spherical terminal building there are people everywhere. My heels tap across the sparkling marble floors as I head for the immigration hall. Frankincense wafts behind two women in flowing black abayas, the scent of old Arabia. A robed woman in a wheelchair sits in the doorway of the female-only prayer room and Filipino attendants, with buckets and huge grey mops, wash the floors. Men in immaculate white robes and headdresses, the kandura and ghutra, slide past. The women are as mysterious as night, floating past in black capes and decorated shaylah headscarves. They look untouchable, like idealised human forms, not quite real. Haven't they always said here, 'Say what you like, but dress as others do'? I feel grimy and under-attired as I slink into the 'Other Passports' line and wait my turn.
We are a motley lot. Three exhausted Filipinas, a weary French couple, a Lebanese family with a hyperactive child, and a couple of lone businessmen in short-sleeved shirts stretched over thickening middles. An officer patrols the line. He has round eyes and a neatly trimmed beard – like a plump version of George Michael. His green uniform is pristine, stiff with epaulettes and buttons. For a moment, as he waits to send people to the desk, he looks as though he is about to cry. He calls me over with a flick of his finger. 'Where you coming from?'
'London,' I say, with a quiver in my voice.
'Why you come here?'
'I used to live here. I want to see how much has changed.'
He arches his eyebrows. 'When you were living here?' He makes it sound like an accusation.
'The seventies. I came when I was a small child and I've not been here since the millennium.'
He howls like a dog. 'Whoo-hoo.' The sound echoes off the marble and people in other queues turn to look. 'Many long time. Long time.'
He sings, 'Abu Dhabi very big now. Very cool. You will not know anything from then. All is change.' He directs me to the booth on his right and mutters in Arabic to the immigration officer.
Sitting in his glass booth, in a freshly laundered kandura, the man tilts back in his chair and chuckles quietly. Then he begins to list the many improvements that have been made to the city, as if I had come to him for advice. 'So many islands. Lulu Island, you can go there. Emirates Palace, very nice. Corniche, very nice hotels.'
He thumps the stamp on my passport and secures the immigration card inside. 'Insha' Allah. Go. Enjoy our new city.' He beams.
* * *
It was my brother Bill who first got me thinking about Abu Dhabi again. I was sitting on a commuter train going into London when he called from a small town in the Australian outback with an unlikely piece of news. 'Get this,' he crowed. 'They're building a bloody Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. Someone's got his wallet out and been shopping.'
An offshoot of New York's great temple of art? Surely not. When I last saw it, Abu Dhabi was a small town with a few medium-sized mosques, corner groceries, chaotically stocked shopping centres overrun with takeaways, like Maroush, Shakey's Pizza, Snoopy's, Hardee's and Tata, fast-food franchises that never quite delivered the fast-food experience as you expected it. It certainly didn't do high culture.
'Believe!' Bill laughed. 'They're going for it. They've done a deal with the French for the Louvre, too, and they're about to get a Sorbonne. It's like a franchise business. They might even be trying for a Tate. They're going to build on Saadiyat.'
My heart twinged. Saadiyat was a place of coral sand and tufty beach grasses where we had camped regularly. The coast off Abu Dhabi was flecked with islets – Saadiyat, Reem, Bahrani and endless uncharted little drifts that had risen from the ultramarine seas. We used to go out on the boat most Fridays, following the fishermen, my father in shorts at the helm, my mother's hair and scarves flying behind her in the coastal winds. The intense light bleached the skyline and the sea glinted silver. The fishermen, in wooden dhows, sanbuks and small jalboots, with outboards strapped to the back, would wave as they passed, as if we were friends. We waved back, part of the same salty fraternity. Idyllic.
Bill was rattling through the plans. Two giant ten-lane bridges were to link Saadiyat to the mainland, fast-tracking people to and from the airport and the city. There were to be culture domes and arts centres, even a museum created in honour of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, the founding father of the United Arab Emirates. 'You've got to hand it to them.' Bill sighed. 'The leaders have a vision and they're making it reality.'
'You know how conservative they are. What are they going to put on the walls? There won't be any nudes. It'll be all landscapes, fruit bowls and abstracts.'
'They'll make it work. They'll do whatever it takes so long as they screw Dubai and the rest of them into the ground. Actually, I've read they're already planning a huge Picasso retrospective.'
'Umm. His nudes are almost abstracts – but, still, they can't just buy in art.'
'Twenty-seven billion dollars says they can,' he says.
'A reasonably compelling sum.'
This was a change of direction for Abu Dhabi. Even with the possibility of heavily censored content, the arrival of institutions like the Guggenheim signified a huge shift in intention. Until now, culture had never been a priority; there was the odd high-grade BBC TV import, The Bold and the Beautiful daytime soap from the US, Alan Ayckbourn plays at the Intercontinental Hotel, and occasional shows by bands that had fallen on hard times at home but whose members needed to pay their children's school fees. I had seen them all – Aswad, Duran Duran, the Gary Glitter Gang Show. Glitter's arrival, pre-scandal, had set the town buzzing with anticipation. As part of the team who organised the concert, at the Marina Club, a members' beach resort, I remember a grumpy, overweight curmudgeon slouched in his dressing room, complaining about the heat and lack of VIP facilities, then demanding oxygen and a breathing mask.
Now, it seemed, there was to be a huge and expensive attempt to corral high culture and draw it into the mainstream. The question, of course, was whether Abu Dhabi's Culture District could ever become a new Left Bank.
'Funny to think it's all going to be on Saadiyat,' Bill said, almost in a whisper.
The background hiss on the line bloomed to fill the space between us. I knew that something had happened to him out there – he had once started to tell me but had stopped himself, saying it wasn't the right time. I'd almost forgotten about it. Now it seemed wrong to press him, but I wondered if he was about to confess.
* * *
I had come to the capital of the UAE with my parents in 1974. I was three, the same age as the country. My father had taken a posting to manage Spinneys, a British-owned catering company. Set up in 1948 in Beirut, it had branched into fulfilling the growing needs of oil prospectors in the Gulf. As soon as reserves were confirmed and revenues began to flow, Spinneys had opened a large, air-conditioned supermarket in Abu Dhabi. Reassuringly expensive, seemingly modelled on Fortnum & Mason, it guaranteed the swelling population of expatriates a regular supply of Frank Cooper's marmalade, Gentleman's Relish, Bath Olivers and Worcestershire sauce.
By 1975 change was well under way. The seaside village of a thousand, living in the old barasti huts, made from palm fronds, was gone. Between the tyre tracks that crisscrossed the sand, asphalt roads were knitting together to form a well-planned seaside town. With them came new mosques, springing up to serve the tens of thousands settling there, all bound together by a common interest in oil.
The desert still had the upper hand. Everything was shrouded in the fine dust that blew invisibly on the breeze and sand piled up in every doorway. But Abu Dhabi finally had its own currency, the UAE dirham, having ditched the rupee and the Bahraini dinar. It also had an infant bureaucracy, housed in disorderly new ministries, managed by men learning how to administrate a nation state while building businesses on the side. An almost palpable sense of chaos and opportunity hung about the place. It was like California's Sierra Nevada in the days of the gold rush.
My mother was stunned at the disarray that greeted her. A Surrey girl, she had married my father at the age of twenty-two and left England for Kerala, in India, then Kenya. Already used to living with unpredictability, she found herself dumbfounded by the chaos of such an unformed society. She reeled at the inhospitable terrain: her letters home tell of a town barely begun, of endless miles of fawn and white sand stretching in all directions to the horizon. The buildings were the same colour, there was not a green leaf to be seen and the roads, such as they were, trailed into dust at every turn. She dared not think about the people or where she would find friends. At first the locals had seemed remote and mysterious. My father, who had come out months before her, had warned her that the Arab was 'an unknown quantity and the place an enigma'. When she arrived with Bill and me, he was there to meet her from the small terminal building at Abu Dhabi's fledgling airport. As we drove down the single-lane road from the airport to the tip of the island, my father had reminded her not to expect too much. He had turned onto the sandy flat that led to the sea, and pulled up in front of a Portakabin on the beach. 'It's all there was, darling,' he explained apologetically. She concluded that it would be best to take life day by day and make the most of whatever kindnesses came her way. At least the sea offered relief from the sand. Writing home that first morning, as my brother and I slept, she told her parents she had come to nothing at 'Sand-on-Sea'.
My father had taken the job in Abu Dhabi in preference to one in wartorn Sri Lanka. Alive though it was with potential, it was still considered a hardship posting. After several months of cultural immersion in London, during which the most important thing he learned was that understanding Arab taste and habit would be best achieved by watchful patience when he got there, he had set to work pulling into shape the ragbag team of British, Indians, Pakistanis, Palestinians, Syrians and Arabs. Several enthusiastic staff showed their affection for their new boss by flinging their arms around him every time he appeared at the office door. The British were the most troublesome – he hadn't worked with any before, other than his old boss in Cochin – but he felt comfortable enough with everyone else to make it work. London expected nothing less than a bonded brotherhood of locals and foreigners, following the efficient, well-ordered creed of profit and loss.
My earliest memories are of a dishevelled, dusty place as enchanting and mutable as the dunes surrounding it. Despite heat so blinding I would occasionally faint, I became captivated by the commotion of the souks, enjoying the attention of shopholders offering sweets, fruit and, sometimes, small pieces of silver. I loved hearing the shuffling squeak of sandals across sand, seeing the vast panoramas of my new world, and the absence of colour: everything was bright and white. Too young to know it then, I understand now that I was drawn to the thoughtfulness of Arab ways. They yearned to make those around them happy – to squeeze my cheeks until they ached – with a passion that was more than just the desire to please. Once they had taken to you, it was for ever.
One of my most vivid early memories is of a drive through the interior during a trip round the Arabian peninsula in the mid-1970s. Our convoy stopped in the palm groves leading to one of the outlying villages of the Buraimi oasis, the fertile area in the east of the Emirate close to Al Ain. Through a light mist I saw men in grey and white robes with thick curved knives in their hands, ringed by mounds of wool and thick white fat. Rivulets of bright red blood ran down the slope away from the village.
My father raised his arms in greeting. The men ran towards us. 'Alhamdulillah, salaam alaikum, Eid Mubarak. Thanks be to Allah. Peace be upon you. May you enjoy this blessed occasion.' Soon every last villager had trailed over to where the Land Rovers were parked. Slowly they came forward, whispering to each other, ushering us towards the village. It was Eid al Fitr – the end of Ramadan – and we, my father told me, were an auspicious arrival. We ate with them. A few had jackets over their kandura. Some were barefoot, while others wore sandals. Their headdresses were tightly wound round their skulls and they looked like the desert brigands I had seen in books. They sat us on thick, woven rugs and gave us tea poured from a Thermos flask. My mother offered them 7 Up from one of the coolers in the car. The slaughtered sheep were roasted on stone-packed fires and a few hours later we ate. The meat was tender. It came with rice and soft dates.
These are earthy memories, impressions of a place where nothing ever happened quite as you imagined it would. The crumbled coral, coppery dust and the kind, yet secretive people merged into an unshakeable feeling. There remains in me a physical sense of having been in that desert place. Though the town was growing up around us, the wilderness was at the edge, never more than a moment away. Outside the town of Abu Dhabi the land was timeless, constantly shifting, covering civilisations, bringing peace and small trials. We left no trace. A sense of our smallness left its mark on us.
For several years I attended a small English-speaking school, the Al Khubairat, not far from where we lived. At ten I was sent back to England, to boarding-school, and my parents were posted to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Indonesia. After this hiatus they returned to Abu Dhabi, as many expatriates did, for another decade in the sun. By the time I was at university, I was visiting two or three times a year. After graduation I avoided the recession-bound UK, with its negative equity and grunge-rock obsession, for clear skies, fun and the promise of my first job. I became the subscriptions officer at the Marina Club; I was supposed to recruit new members and run promotions, part of a mixed-nationality team – British, Palestinian, Dutch, Swedish, Filipino and Indian. I saw my role as an opportunity to stage events and shows. Getting publicity wasn't easy and it was difficult to find potential new recruits. But when you're young persistence comes easily, and although the job was frothy and my achievements few, my boss told me my prospects were good: I could rise up the ranks of the parent company. Yet I knew I wouldn't stay. Issues of injustices within this tight-knit, business-minded society attracted indifference. The enormous underclass of migrant labour cushioned life for the wealthy. The labour laws, if they were observed, were draconian, leaving workers without much in the way of rights, and dependent upon the good character of employers. 'I'll tell you what's so great about Abu Dhabi,' a workmate had once said to me. 'I had a set of lined curtains made and hung inside forty-eight hours. I could have had my carpet laid the same day too.' Chilled by such disregard for others, I knew I had to leave. The easy life in the Gulf's shiny capital overwhelmed me.
I chose instead the damp, sunless uncertainty of London and a typing course. Friends told me I was a fool, but in 1993 Abu Dhabi was wrapped up in its own comfort. It had no time to turn a critical eye on itself. Besides, I had seen people with good intentions sink into easy routine, losing their drive, passion and values. One old-timer, who had done extremely well out of Abu Dhabi, referred to it as the Velvet Rut. 'And that,' she warned me, 'is the hardest rut to escape.'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Diamond in the Desert"
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Copyright © 2009 Jo Tatchell.
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