Rachel Deyis reflects about her curation ‘In/Visible Lives: On the South Asian Residents of the Gulf’ project, which is now available on the See Yourself on the Shelf webpage. Its accompanying exhibition is located in the University of York’s JB Morrel library, to the right of the entry-way help desk.
It’s both a mildly terrifying and thrilling feeling to look back at the curation I’ve worked on over the last summer and think about it existing physically in the library and also somewhere on the web, accessible to anyone. As a project I am rather attached to, I find it hard to let go of the curation—a part of me wants to do just a little more research, add just another item to the reading list, in case there’s more to include. Of course, there is inevitably more I could have included: more research, more writing, more art. It would be incredibly reductive to suggest that a single curation could somehow encompass the expansive histories, lives and perspectives of South Asians in the Gulf. However, I do hope the curation works as an important starting point, as an introduction to the largest resident demographic in the Gulf, and a way of making space, both physically and metaphorically, for our experiences.
I have stated in my introductory blog post that the curation’s aims have been to foreground, celebrate, question and facilitate engagement with the often neglected and misrepresented experiences of South Asians in the Gulf, embracing the complexity and diversity of our experiences. The process has been accompanied by its own set of challenges and rewards. When it came to the curation’s title, I found myself struggling to find something that fit. As Mohammed Karinkurayil notes, the Gulf is often narrated through the “poetics of secrecy” and the “idiom of revelation”, so it was important to me that the curation didn’t present the Gulf or the South Asian presence in it as a secret to be revealed. Positioning the curation as something that unveiled the Gulf or certain facts of Gulf life as a South Asian, felt dishonest. Consequently, the question of who I was curating for is one that persisted in the back of my head; I wanted the curation to be a resource for students, researchers and anyone else who was curious about the place and its people, but also for others like like me, who had grown up in the Gulf and for whom the South Asian presence in the Gulf was a fact of daily life, but also rarely encountered in academic, literary or artistic narratives. It is in light of this that I settled on the title, In/Visible Lives. The title’s hyphenation attends to the simultaneous underrepresentation and exclusion of South Asians from spaces, stories and discourses in and about the Gulf, and at the same time our paradoxical visibility, and also hypervisibility in humanitarian narratives.
I found the work of compiling a reading list for the curation incredibly enjoyable, allowing me to immerse myself in both academic and artistic work around the Gulf. Although scholarship in the fields of economics and development have studied the Indian-Gulf migration complex quite extensively, new and innovative anthropological, sociological and historical studies fill in gaps and offer alternative perspectives to mainstream narratives that have viewed South Asian-Gulf migration from a largely economic lens. Neha Vora’s Impossible Citizens, for example attends to the alternative forms of citizenship enacted by middle-class Indians in the Gulf while Mohamed Karinkurayil’s The Gulf Migrant Archives in Kerala, published only earlier this year, draws on a range of visual and textual media to illustrate out how the Gulf has been understood and represented in Kerala. Texts in the history section, presenting the long Indian Ocean histories of the Gulf that predate oil, evince the transcultural dynamics that are and have always been present in the Gulf.
It was important to me that the curation also address the often unspoken gendered and sexual contexts of migration to the Gulf, including underrepresented queer and female perspectives. Pardis Mahdavi’s Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives provides insight into the intimate lives of migrant workers, challenging the human trafficking frameworks that reduce these workers, often women, to their labour. The ‘Queer’ section of the curation features fictional texts like Deepak Unnirkishnan’s genre defying collection of short stories, Temporary People and some academic work like Ryan Centner’s Peril and Privilege, which, although it focuses on Western, gay men in Dubai, reveals how classed, racial and gendered hierarchies of access to queer spaces in the city exclude South Asians, especially low-wage workers. Other works, like Gayatri Gopinath’s Unruly Visions suggest the vibrant queer socialities formed even under conditions of duress, asking for example, “what forms of homosocial/homerotic desire and relationality emerge in the all-male labour camps themselves”.
Having written my dissertation on South Asian migrant workers in the Gulf, I was somewhat aware of academic work around the topic but more doubtful about finding much creative work. However, I have been both humbled and thrilled to discover a rich, if emerging variety of artistic and literary works, from memoirs to film to music videos, finding creative work in unconventional forms and unexpected places. One of my favourite discoveries were the community-built Instagram archives like @gulfsouthasia and @humans.abudhabi that have emerged in the absence of ‘formal’ archives documenting the South Asian presence in the Gulf. Publications like ALA and Postscript magazine, and art foundations like Art Jameel also reveal a vibrant, emerging art scene, featuring the work of South Asian creatives like Vamika Sinha, Aathma Nirmala Dious, Vikram Divecha and Bhoomika Ghaghada.
Importantly, there is no single narrative the texts in this curation follow; some celebrate the South Asian presence in the Gulf, others draw attention to important humanitarian issues around labour rights, still others analyse the impact of the South Asian presence on the economies, societies and cultures of the Gulf and South Asian home countries they return to after retirement. I have had to make challenging decisions about which works I wanted to include, afraid that some would prop up exactly those narratives which reduced South Asian workers to their experiences of labour and hardship. However, it was important that those experiences weren’t erased either. The texts featured in the curation aren’t intended to stand in isolation—viewed collectively, they reflect the varied experiences and outputs of South Asians in the Gulf and the evolving narratives through which the South Asian presence in the Gulf has been perceived, understood and written about. Ultimately it has been my intention that the range of mediums and voices featured in this curation resist simplistic binaries or singular narratives and refuse to homogenise a multiplicitous and unendingly diverse group of people.
As I state on my curation page, this curation, as much as it has been my own project, is also the result of many people. I am very grateful to Dr Nadeen Dakkak and Professor Neha Vora for their help and recommendations. Beyond this, I am indebted to the assistance I received from the Library team who have been incredibly warm and supportive throughout the entire process. I have Antonio, Ilka, Dave and Kirsty, to thank for their wonderful advice in our meetings (and also for answering my many, many questions about copyright), to Kenny and the rest of the purchasing team for helping the curation take physical form, to Ned for help with social media promotion and to Steph for patiently guiding my not-very-tech-savvy self through the process of setting up the curation’s libguides page (and for rescuing it from being eaten up when I forgot to close my code).
The ‘See Yourself on the Shelf’ initiative has been a wonderful way to allow students to create spaces within the library collections that reflect our experiences and I am very grateful for this opportunity. Looking to the future I’m excited about the impact of the curation. Aside from a few articles like Jadaliyya’s, Losing Oneself in Gulf-Migrant fiction, I have yet to encounter any collections about South Asians in the Gulf, so I hope the curation plays an important role in dismantling stereotypes and promoting understanding about the Gulf and the South Asian residents it has long been home to—while also making it a little easier for others from the Gulf to find works that reflect on and celebrate their own lives and experiences. In the face of increasingly hostile immigration policies across the globe, this curation hopes to promote greater empathy and understanding of the complex and varied experiences of migration, celebrate the transcultural societies it creates and encourage readers to engage deeply, caringly and continually with migration narratives.