Joseph O’Neill - The Dog

WELCOME TO DUBAI

I’m no expert, but I detect a difference between this ad and the others. I’m thinking of the little films brought to us by the ‘Reaffirm Your Uniqueness’ and ‘The Prestige of Excellence’ and ‘Dubai: The Exception’ campaigns. These obviously laughable and tawdry productions push without irony the idea that Dubai is where an elite of beautiful cosmopolitan tastemakers convenes in order to lead lives of extraordinary luxe and cachet and to buy and use and disport themselves in and with famous handbags, clothes, bathroom fittings, etc. We see men tossing car keys to smiling parking valets, and women emerging long-leggedly from sports cars, and childless couples in their late thirties getting together to drink champagne on yachts. The cheesier, the better, I say. There is a transparency of falsity in this absurd idea of a good-looking socio-economic Weltklasse that almost confers a kind of blamelessness on the falsifiers, whose misrepresentations are (no offence) not far removed from those offered by very young children caught red-handed, and may be regarded, even enjoyed, as good old-fashioned hogwash. Wilson’s effort, by comparison, was sly. I’m not one to pick on a man or knock down the efforts of someone who’s just doing his/her job, and in any case whatever I might think about any of this is subject to the universal rule that dooms to futility a private effort of vigilance and so won’t make a difference to anything. Still, I’ll allow myself a small say. ‘Hospitality of the Desert’ proposed to do battle with the (of course calamitous and disgusting) prejudices directed against Arab/Muslim peoples (the terrorist-towelhead travesty) by offering an alternative mischaracterization, namely the whole wisdom of the desert-slash-ancient custodian of hospitality-slash-ethics thing. The latter is hardly on the same scale of wrongdoing as the cartoons it opposes, but it trawls the same swamp of plausibility; it calls forth fresh species of toads and snakes and slime. There is no high ground here, admittedly. There never is. Maybe the best that can be done, in terms of not making a bad situation worse, is to stick with the vivid fantasia of opulence, or, even better, to go back to the straightforward before-and-after photographic montage that was once very popular here but now seems to be falling out of fashion, i.e., the juxtaposition of a ‘before’ photograph of the acreage of sand that Dubai until very recently was, and an ‘after’ photograph of the extraordinary city we now see. This captures something honourable and true, if you ask me.

No one will ask me, I can safely say; the question is deeply moot. So, too, is the more personal question of my own reception by others, since it hasn’t happened since I got here. That’s right — for reasons that have, I hope, more to do with local custom than with what I’m (perceived to be) like, I have barely crossed the threshold of a private residence in Dubai. I haven’t even been to Ollie’s house, in Arabian Ranches. For that matter I have only once met Ollie’s (English) wife Lynn, and that was the time I ran into the whole family in Dubai Mall. The term ‘family’ in this instance includes the live-in Filipina nanny (Winda? Wanda? Wilda?), who, on the occasion I’m thinking of, took complete care of the little boy, Charlie, so that Ollie and Lynn were at liberty to stroll around in a carefree manner and permit themselves a measure of public parental insouciance that would be unavailable to them back home in Australia/England or, if available, would not be totally free of stigma, there being in those places people who frown on the conspicuous assignment to an employee of responsibilities deemed to be proper to a mother and/or father, and there being for the time being in those countries a degree of social uneasiness about noticeable master — servant relations. Here in Dubai, there’s nothing particularly unseemly or unusual about one’s children and one’s child-minders trailing behind one at the mall, especially since Emirati women amble at some distance behind their menfolk, often with the little ones. Nor is it suspect or de mauvais goût to have a residential domestic workforce: on the contrary, integral to the appeal of the expat experience is that the labour of mopping and dusting and washing and cooking that typically forms part of the in patria experience may, ex patria , be transferred at a low cost to others — the so-called help. What about their experience — the labour transferees? This question, inherently valid, arises especially in the minds of the self-appointed inspectorate located overseas and to our northwest, where news agencies periodically run stories of women who have escaped from domestic service as if from slavery and reportedly are found desperately wandering the malls of Dubai without a penny to, I was going to say, their names, except that these escapees evidently are usually deprived by their employers of their passports and suffer from an official namelessness, not to mention denationalization. I completely accept the factual soundness of these stories. The imbalance of power that inevitably characterizes the employment by the relatively rich of persons radically relocated from poor parts of the world must perforce give rise to cases of mistreatment of the powerless. However, no consideration of this problem would be satisfactory without the paying of some attention to the trope by which it is publicized, namely the trope of the scandal. I am not such a theology ignoramus as to be unaware of the time-honoured sense of this word: a stumbling block on the true path of religious virtue or, in a different context, Christian faith. This is hardly applicable to the present case: the mistreatment of help in Dubai is hardly a shocking reverse in the sacred project of human goodness to which the scandalized bystander is committed. I say this not out of cynicism but out of a recognition that real-life scandalization is a delight, conferring as it does a wonderfully unpaid-for feeling of righteousness. So let’s get it straight: most of the tut-tutting we hear is the sound of nothing other than opportunistic moral hedonism. And let’s acknowledge that it would be wrongheaded to disregard the fact that a large number of low-net-worth workers in Dubai enjoy relatively satisfactory outcomes, the pertinent point of comparison being the outcomes they would have enjoyed but for their employment in Dubai. Ollie and Lynn retain an Ethiopian live-in housemaid whom I’ve never met or seen but who is most unlikely, knowing her employers as I do, to be a detainee. I think it may fairly be assumed that she’s better off cleaning the nice house of nice people in Arabian Ranches than doing whatever she’d be doing in Addis Ababa, fine city though it may be.

Anyhow, we all walked over to Morelli’s Gelato for ice cream. Lynn Christakos is very pretty, in the sporty, clean-cut way of a star golfer’s girlfriend, and I found her good-natured and reasonable. She and I were in line at the counter, chatting away, when into the salon there stormed, I say without exaggeration, a group of black-robed and black-gloved and black-masked women. They came like a black wave through the tables, and for a second I thought they were coming to get me. I jumped to one side to let them pass. After they’d bought ice creams and surged away (having skipped the queue, pursuant to the relevant unwritten local rule), I said to Lynn, ‘Jesus, they gave me a fright.’

Lynn laughed. ‘They’re only mums,’ she said. ‘Just imagine them with no clothes on.’

I forced out a culpable little laugh. More than once I’ve had pipedreams involving women precisely like these women (i.e., dressed in attire designed as a powerful antidote to nudity but counterproductively causing in me precisely the effect of mentally undressing them), and I had the crazy thought that Lynn had X-ray powers that had opened a window onto my revolting inner life. ‘Yeah, good idea, I might try that,’ I said. Mildly risqué banter is not what I’m best at, which is a handicap in Dubai, where the nudge and the wink are vital social tools. According to Ollie, Lynn loves it here. In common with many expat mothers, however, she runs away from the summer heat and humidity and goes with the little boy (and, on a tourist visa, the Filipina nanny) to her parents’ house in Lancashire, England, for a couple of months of rain. In her absence, Ollie gets bored. This is when he becomes a prankster.