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Abstract
Deepak Unnikrishnan’s debut text, Temporary People, attempts to explore certain vulnerabilities and anxieties of transience that accompany emigrants to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, where citizenship is not an option. By representing one of the largest Gulf diaspora in contemporary history—the Keralan emigrants or pravasis—as spectral figures and as absence-presences that signal a non-present presence in the Gulf, Unnikrishnan’s book attempts to retrieve and register their occulted histories on the Gulf landscape. In particular, this article explores how, by creating a Keralan Gulf-pravasi spectre, Unnikrishnan critically engages with a more varied version of Gulf diasporic experience and, therefore, a more complex definition of emigration itself.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Fulbright Scholar Program under the Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellowship 2018 during which I was affiliated with the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India. It also benefitted from valuable comments the anonymous reviewers for South Asia generously provided.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Deepak Unnikrishnan, Temporary People (New York: Restless Books, 2017) p. 3.
2. Generally referred to as the Gulf, the GCC states consist of all the Arabian Gulf countries except Yemen (i.e. Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates).
3. Benyamin, Goat Days, Joseph Koyippally (trans.) (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008).
4. Joy C. Raphael, Slaves of Saudis: Terrorisation of Foreign Workers (Mumbai: Zen, 2013).
5. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 186.
6. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, Peggy Kamuf (trans.) (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 100.
7. Attiya Ahmad, ‘Beyond Labor: Foreign Residents in the Gulf States’, in Mehran Kamrava and Zahra Babar (eds), Migrant Labor in the Gulf (Doha: Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown School of Foreign Service Qatar, 2011), pp. 21–40.
8. A. Didar Singh and S. Irudaya Rajan, ‘The Political Economy of Migration in Indian States’, in Politics of Migration (New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 133.
9. See, for instance, ‘Qatar Migrant Workers Are Still Being Exploited, Says Amnesty Report’, The Guardian (26 Sept. 2018) [https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/sep/26/qatar-world-cup-workers-still-exploited-says-amnesty-report, accessed 25 Jan. 2019].
10. Scholars in the social sciences such as S. Irudaya Rajan, K.C. Zachariah and Neha Vora have contributed immensely to this field. For film studies, see D.S. Mini, ‘Public Interest Television and Social Responsibility: The Search for the Missing Person in Indian Television’, in International Journal of Digital Television, Vol. 7, no. 2 (2016), pp. 173–91.
11. Examples of movies are Arabikadha, Gaddhama and Pathemari.
12. Unnikrishnan, email communication, 27 Dec. 2018.
13. Whitney Curry Wimbish, ‘Deepak Unnikrishnan: We Didn’t Talk About Pain’, in Guernica (30 Oct. 2017) [https://www.guernicamag.com, accessed 3 Jan. 2018], para. 23.
14. Veronica Scott Esposito, ‘Four Questions for Deepak Unnikrishnan on Temporary People’, in Conversational Reading (4 April 2017), para. 5.
15. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 51.
16. Ibid., p. 83.
17. Filippo and Caroline Osella, ‘Migration, Money, and Masculinity in Kerala’, in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 6, no. 1 (2000), p. 118.
18. Neha Vora, Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 17.
19. Ibid., p. 16.
20. Andrew Gardner, City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and the Indian Community in Bahrain (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).
21. Ibid.; and Andrew Gardner, ‘Why Do They Keep Coming? Labor Migrants in the Persian Gulf States’, in Mehran Kamrava and Zahra Babar (eds), Migrant Labor in the Persian Gulf (Doha: Center for International and Regional Studies, Georgetown School of Foreign Service Qatar, 2011), p. 45.
22. Gardner, ‘Why Do They Keep Coming?’, p. 48.
23. Gardner, City of Strangers, p. 7.
24. Praveena Kodoth, ‘Structural Violence against Emigrant Domestic Workers and Survival in the Middle East: The Effects of Indian Emigration Policy’, in Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, Vol. 28, no. 1 (2015), pp. 1–24.
25. Gardner, City of Strangers, p. 7.
26. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 10.
27. Ilana Masad, ‘Unnikrishnan’s “Temporary People” Captures the Plight of Workers in the UAE’, The Washington Post (13 Mar. 2017) [https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/unnikrishnans-temporary-people-captures-the-plight-of-workers-in-the-uae/2017/03/13/55c931d2-ff8b-11e6-8ebe-6e0dbe4f2bca_story.html, accessed 17 Mar. 2017], para. 1.
28. Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (San Diego: University of California Press, 1999), p. 9.
29. Deepak Unnikrishnan, ‘Abu Dhabi: The City Where Citizenship Is Not an Option’, The Guardian (13 Dec. 2017) [https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/dec/13/abu-dhabi-citizenship-uae-foreigner-visa-india, accessed 4 Jan. 2018], para. 8.
30. DC books online, ‘New Immigrant Writing Literature and Exile’, Kerala Literature Festival 2018 online video (24 Mar. 2018) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A50Zv7kJATU, accessed 26 Mar. 2018].
31. Terry Hong, ‘Temporary People Depicts the Lives of Guest Workers in the UAE’, The Christian Science Monitor (14 Mar. 2017) [https://www.csmonitor.com/Books/Book-Reviews/2017/0314/Temporary-People-depicts-the-lives-of-guest-workers-in-the-UAE, accessed 21 Mar. 2017], para. 7.
32. Esposito, ‘Four Questions for Deepak Unnikrishnan’, para. 4.
33. Unnikrishnan, ‘Abu Dhabi’, para. 15.
34. Ibid., para. 11.
35. Wimbish, ‘Deepak Unnikrishnan’, para. 5.
36. Unnikrishnan, ‘Abu Dhabi’, para. 13.
37. Emphasis mine.
38. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 6.
39. Deepak Unnikrishnan, ‘Places: A Rumination on Cities: From Abu Dhabi to the East Coast’, Open City Asian American Writers Workshop, 14 Jan. 2013 [https://aaww.org/places/, accessed 2 Feb. 2018], para. 2.
40. Esposito, ‘Four Questions for Deepak Unnikrishnan’, para. 5.
41. Unnikrishnan, ‘Abu Dhabi’, para. 6.
42. Homi Bhabha, ‘Unpacking My Library Again’, in Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 28, no. 1 (Spring 1995), p. 14.
43. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 249.
44. Ibid., p. 222.
45. Esposito, ‘Four Questions for Deepak Unnikrishnan’, para. 7.
46. André Naffis-Sahely, ‘A Child of the Place: An Interview with Deepak Unnikrishnan’, Los Angeles Review of Books (3 June 2017) [https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-child-of-the-place-an-interview-with-deepak-unnikrishnan/, accessed 3 Mar. 2018], para. 7.
47. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 70.
48. Esposito, ‘Four Questions for Deepak Unnikrishnan’, para. 12.
49. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 25.
50. Ibid., p. 23.
51. Ibid., p. 139.
52. Hong, ‘Temporary People Depicts the Lives of Guest Workers in the UAE’, para. 7.
53. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 251.
54. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 63.
55. Matthew Schulz, ‘“Arise, Sir Ghostus!”: Textual Spectrality and Finnegans Wake’, in James Joyce Quarterly, Vol. 49, no. 2 (Winter 2012), p. 283.
56. Hong, ‘Temporary People Depicts the Lives of Guest Workers in the UAE’, para. 1.
57. Ibid.
58. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 120.
59. Ibid., p. 119.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid., p. 238.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., p. 235.
64. Schulz, ‘“Arise, Sir Ghostus!”’, p. 285.
65. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 197.
66. Ibid., p. 199.
67. Ibid., p. 19.
68. Unnikrishnan, Temporary People, p. 198.