When people migrate to different countries seeking better employment, education or freedom, they take for granted that they will be protected by the laws of their host country. But rarely do they think of the tangled and intimidating issues that emerge when the host country is engulfed in political turmoil.
The paraphernalia of security breaks the moment the host country spirals into political turmoil, with immigrants being the first to realise their fragile position in their adopted land. They are faced with questions of belonging, identity and what they might have to do to survive in the changing socio-political contexts. Try as they might to remain indifferent to the changes around them, they are still affected and at times forced to make their choices clear.
Benyamin
Jasmine Days
Juggernaut, 2018
In his new novel Jasmine Days, Malayalam author Benyamin deals with the onerous questions that define the immigrant’s dilemma. His characters, South Asian immigrants in the Gulf, are caught between ethnic majoritarianism that makes them outsiders in Arab society and a dictatorship that is harsh on citizens and immigrants alike.
In his earlier novel Adujeevitham – translated as Goat Days by Joseph Koyipally – Benyamin transported us to the deserts of Saudi Arabia, where a young Malayali immigrant, Najeeb, spends almost three years in bonded labourer by his Arab employer. The novel exposed the deeply disturbing but overlooked aspect of a young South Asian workforce being exploited for cheap labour, often in inhuman conditions under the kafala system in the Gulf.
The dark underbelly of the Gulf labour market remains underexposed as South Asian countries, including India, continue to show interest only in remittances and not the human rights violations of their citizens in foreign countries. Najeeb’s is more a personal story than political, focusing on the human capacity to endure hardship and humiliation as long as there is glimmer of hope of returning home and to freedom.
With Jasmine Days, Benyamin takes the reader into the heart of political turmoil in the Arab world. Sameera, a young Pakistani woman, lives with her father and extended family, in an unnamed Middle Eastern city. What could be taken for granted in several other parts of the world – working as a radio jockey, keeping male friends and accessing social media – are for Sameera, coming from a conservative household, instances of rare-found freedom.
It’s at the radio station that Sameera, a Sunni Muslim, meets Ali, a Shia Muslim whose identity as a ‘second class citizen’ in the country makes him rebellious and vengeful. Ali is deeply against the country’s monarch and Sunni Muslims in general. His anger derives from a long history of being denied citizenship and enduring violations of human rights at the hands of the Sunni majority. The allegedly Iranian roots and sectarian affiliations of Shias leave them reeling from systematic discrimination.
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The historical conflict between Sunnis and Shias finds political expression time and again among Muslim populations, sometimes in the form of cold wars between countries and communities, at other times violent confrontations.
The bitterness between Iran and Saudi Arabia is a reflection of such a cold war. It’s not uncommon for Shias in a Sunni-majority country to be subjected to humiliation and denial of equal rights, and in worse conditions, state-sponsored torture and killings.
The Sunni-Shia conflict is deeply entrenched, to the extent that it is easier to be Hindu, Parsi or Christian in a Sunni majority country. The Shias “were not just second-class citizens in the City, they were kafirs to be detested like hell.”
This conflict finds expression in the novel, where ‘the city’, is factionalised into two – those who support His Majesty (the monarch) and those who oppose him. Sameera finds herself caught in a double-bind of familial loyalty – her family supports His Majesty – and her empathy with Ali, who she knows is not a rebel without a cause.
As she confronts the political changes in the tumultuous state – let’s call it the Arab Revolution – Sameera also finds herself negotiating deeply ethical questions such as forgiving her father’s killer and examining her loyalty to the existing government.
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Even as she tries to make sense of her identity, Sameera has personal devils to fight, like confronting her views on questions of truth, justice, ethics and duty. It is this scrutiny of the self vis-à-vis the larger political world that leaves her on the side of those who oppose His Majesty, unlike her fellow immigrants who support him.
Benyamin, who lived in Bahrain for a number of years before moving back to India, presents a gripping account of how crippling life under a dictatorship in the Middle East is, and that surmounting the lack of freedom is not an easy choice, or a choice at all. The resulting revolutions lead to further bloodshed and cost many lives but at the end, power is claimed by the majority, whose version of religious truth is the ‘only’ version of it.
Benny Daniel
Kulanada (Pen name Benyamin). Credit: Wikipedia
He exposes the tyrannical politics of citizenship, nationality and the strategic reduction of a community to a non-entity. The question of belonging for immigrants in the Gulf is particularly complex, Benyamin shows, as these countries hardly ever grant citizenship to immigrants no matter how long they have stayed.
As acute as his understanding of the issue is, Benyamin startles the reader with the poignancy of his prose – which, of course, I read in Shahnaz Habib’s translation. The translator deserves praise for her ability to render the original Malayalam text into English and helping enrich Indian literature through translation.
In his earlier novel, Goat Days, he gave credit where it was due – by introducing Najeeb Muhammad, whose real-life story he had borrowed to write the novel. In Jasmine Days, too, he distances himself from the narrative, while foregrounding his characters as narrators.
Benyamin’s name appears as the ‘translator’ of the novel, Sameera – the protagonist – as the ‘writer’ and Ali as the ‘inciter’ of the revolution. Through this quasi role-playing, Benyamin cleverly acknowledges that the writer’s role is to remain in the background and let the stories come forward and speak for themselves.
Fathima M. is a PhD student at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Texas at Austin in 2017-2018.