Forever Tainted

The international documentaries made on Dubai are careful with their camera work. It’s rare that you’ll see the skyline, littered with cranes and construction workers almost dangling from their deaths tens of stories up, without harnesses. The architecture looks brilliant on the outside. Sleek glass windows, buildings so tall from the ground you imagine they touch the stars at night, marble flooring, and in some of the higher-class hotels, faucets plated in pure gold. Look a little deeper and you’ll see the walls are cracking under the paint less than a year after construction was completed, the wiring is a mess causing random mini-explosions, plumbing backs up and the building itself is no more stable than a shack.

I fell into the trap of buying an apartment in Dubai. It wasn’t a month later that, that the air conditioner (a vital instrument for living in the UAE) stopped working. It wasn’t two months in when the toilet decided to continually flush itself with a constant rush of water making its way through the bowl, increasing my electricity and water bills to shocking amounts. It was the very first week I was there, that the pipes under my sink broke and my kitchen flooded. So very pretty on the outside, but its core is complete and utter crap. Still, that lovely little piece of property is worth about 33% more now, two years later then it was when I purchased it. Why? The illusion of Dubai is simply that grand!

Life in Dubai is much the same as most of these buildings. It is picture perfect on the outside, but disturbed at its core. Visit Dubai for a week and you’ll fall in love; stay there a few years and you’ll learn to despise just about everything about it. Dubai teaches you one thing really well, and that’s how to become a plastic person. The only problem with being plastic is, plastic can’t comfort your heart – nor can the plastic people you end up surrounded by. Material things take lead, while arts, emotions, anything that makes us human is forced on the back burner.

There isn’t a proper jazz club in Dubai. There isn’t a coffee shop where one can go and watch local talent, whether it be stand up, poetry readings or even a play. All of Dubai’s entertainment is imported for a short while – long enough to put on a show or two, then sent back home. In a place that populated, there has to be talent there somewhere. But who is actually looking for it? Who is willing to embrace it? And who is able to hold on to their own talents while the whims of personal belongings, and picture perfect life charades are taking over everything they do?

In the 12 years I lived in Dubai, outside of English class in school I met only one poet. He was a brilliant writer and most likely could have made something of himself on that talent alone. But he was Indian. And life in Dubai taught him that wasn’t ok. For months he lied to me and everyone he knew, taking on an assumed local identity, concentrating more on what people thought of him and how he could further deceive us of his roots, than he possibly could his writing. I don’t imagine he’s writing still. I don’t even know if I ever actually learned his first name. But he was a talent Dubai and Dubai’s society lost out on.

Dubai is an illusion. From the fairytale cities, to the Barbie-doll type people, there is no real life there; just plastic, paint and a decaying core.

Chapter II?

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Nationality plays the biggest role in your life in Dubai, with it being one of the most racist multi-national societies on the planet, if not the most. Walk into any coffee shop or restaurant and survey the tables. The first thing you’ll notice are how each table has its own nationality and invisible borders seem to separate each of the races as starkly as black on white. This mentality spread as far back to my days in an International High School there, where the school cafeteria was just as divided. I remember disliking this reality as a naive teenager and attempting to change it.

A new Indian girl had joined a few weeks after school started. She didn’t seem to click right away with those of her own nationality and it wasn’t uncommon to find her eating alone during lunch. I invited her to eat with us, partially out of sorrow and partially because at that time, I believed I could fix the world of all its ailments. She refused. A few days later, I attempted again and to my utter surprise she jumped up and screamed at me that I hated her and I did so because she was Indian. She then burst out in tears and ran out of the cafeteria. Coming from Canada and before this instance not really grasping the depth of racism I was shocked and disgusted by the accusation. I never did talk to her again. It was only years later that I realized how it must have felt for her, after having her parents beat it into her that all white people thought they were superior and since we thought so, we must be. I shit you not, later in life I have come across Asians who argue that the only reason Canada is a better place to live than the UAE is because Canada is run by white people (a complete loud of crap, but believed by many just the same) and the UAE is run by brown people.

Despite that being as far from the truth as possible for most new comers to Dubai, eventually westerns are given a superiority complex and find themselves in an ongoing battle with locals about who in fact rules their country, because despite the largest part of the population being Indian or Asians, they simply aren’t competent enough to take on the roll – it must be the Arabs or the westerners. Look at any job listing in the local papers and three out of four times, you’re going to find a requested race. Next to managerial or leading high paying positions, Westerners or locals are requested. Next to low paying administration or secretarial jobs, you’ll find Indians, Pakistani or Filipinos being requested. I dare anyone to find a domestic help, construction labour, or table waiting position in a restaurant, offered to locals or westerners. No, no, those low paying, low respected jobs are reserved for the lesser races – who cares if they have experience and degrees that make ours look like they came out of a cereal box!

There is an invisible racial hierarchy in Dubai that tourists may fail to see, but those living there know where they stand. And there are a number of generalizations that can be made about each race based on that race living and working in the emirate. At the top of the racial hierarchy you’ll find the locals and the westerners, each of which complaining that the other thinks they rule the UAE. Most other nationalities will simply call it even between the two, once they put aside their own racial preferences.

Just below them, you’ll find the Arab nationals from countries like Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and Palestine. This nationality takes up few of the moderate to low paying jobs, and can somewhat rarely be found in the higher paying, more prestigious ones. However, when they do land such a job, they’re the first to flaunt it by taking out excessive bank loans to create the facade that they’re living the high life. This nationality is the one that drives beat up, old BMW’s and get ridiculed for thinking their cars are the shit, or should they stumble on a big enough bank loan, they’ll drive Mercedes spending their very last dirham (local currency) on it, along with a matching brand-named wardrobe, while having a barren flat to live in and little food to eat at home. And at the end of the day, who can blame them? If you don’t look good in Dubai, you must not be anyone!

The next tier is where the eastern Europeans fit in. The women in this category are more often than not accused of prostitution and you’ll rarely find them working a job away from serving tables at a shisha or coffee shop. They’re widely believed to have one purpose in Dubai, and that’s to find a rich local to marry for the sake of getting that all too famous Emirati passport. I lived with a Russian girl once. She was one of the hardest working, innocent sales people I’d ever come across -- but I must be wrong about that because UAE society says so.

The lowest form of life according to this hierarchy, are the Asians, whether they be from India or China, labourers even get their own lower-class, cheaper shopping centers. You’ll find that these are people who built this country and continue to make it thrive. They’re also the least paid the least respected and for some reason (perhaps the long, underappreciated days working in the sun?) the worst smelling. God forbid! Many of the major shopping malls have forbidden bachelors (another loose term given to the labour workers who build the country) from being in them – God forbid they clash with the shiny, picturesque interior. No nightclub will allow them entrance and many residential buildings have forbidden them from taking up residence in them. On the other side side of the coin, Asian or Arab taxi drivers will bypass another Asian or Arab for a western looking traveller a block or two down the street, based on the generalization that Westerners travel to less congested places, and they tip better*2.

One of the more complex observation of a society as racially fucked up as this one, are the numbers of people who actually seem to suffer racial identification crisis. Ask an Indian or Arab who has a Canadian passport where he’s from and he’ll tell you he’s Canadian, despite not having ever lived a day there. Ask an Eastern European who has married a national where she is from and she’ll tell you she’s local, despite having no local blood in her. In Dubai, there too much attention is paid on race, denying your race, judging others by their race, or denying you’re racist, when the truth be told... If you’ve spent enough time there and still come out claiming you’re not racist, you’re a liar and no Dubain (excepting those in denial) will believe you.

I’ve been back in the West more than a year now. I’m still trying to shake the idea that life is really only skin deep. I know some former Dubains who despise the UAE based solely on that that disgusting transformation of their once non-bias personality, conceived while residing there.

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Should I continue? I think I'm going to have to. I'm just having too much fun writing... (And it's been a while!)

And this is how I'll start it...

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An observation - all that is and could be Dubai

D is for Dubai...

There seems to be a fad of books being published with the layout alphabetic, one letter per essay as part of the overall theme of the book. Well, this book is about Dubai and I’m not nearly organized enough to actually follow an A through Z theme on the things that inspire me, enlighten me, or down right out piss me off about this booming Middle Eastern oasis. None the less, letters make for a great chapter titles and I’m too lazy to think up something original, so I’m ripping off that idea. And like any good start I guess I’ll start at the beginning.

A is for Assholes...

Whether you’re in Dubai on vacation or as an expatriate resident you’re bound to run into one constant there and it’s the assholes. Assholes on the roads, assholes in the clubs, assholes writing to papers, assholes on UAE blogs, assholes in the malls, assholes you pay your rent to, assholes begging for change, assholes jaywalking across the ten-lane highways with no regard for their lives or yours, assholes trying to scam you, assholes charging you more for products depending on your race, assholes being assholes, and assholes raping assholes in the front page news. Assholes, assholes everywhere!

There’s something about the transitional nature that is Dubai that transforms people into assholes. On the roads, there’s no consideration for life, period. It’s not uncommon to watch road rage take control of the sanest of people, causing street fights at red lights, or drag-racer-wannabes on the main highways. As of 2008, the second leading cause of death in the emirate, were road accidents; the first cause cardiovascular disease*1. At the rate of any in habitant seeing at least one car accident per day every day, this comes as no surprise. The roads are well paved and predominantly strait; the cars are more often than not new luxury models so there’s only one explanation to this anomaly – Assholes being assholes behind the wheel.

Late one night I left my girlfriends place and stopped at a red light at the intersection on my way home. I found myself whiteness to some of the biggest assholes of them all. In the middle of the intersection, plastered on the road was an Asian man, his head crushed under his helmet, blood seeping from what seemed like every inch of his being. His arms and legs twitched constantly and you just knew he was taking his last breaths of air. He may have been the erratic asshole motorbike driver just prior to getting his ass whipped off his bike by some even bigger asshole of a driver, who had since disappeared, but neither of the two could possibly beat the asshole-ishness, when compared with the spectators of this man’s demise.

Standing in the middle of the road, not a single meter from a dying man was a crowd of men; some watching this man with morbid curiosity, some sipping tea and smoking cigarettes, but the majority of them just gabbing away like death wasn’t staring any of them in the face. Not one person went to hold this man’s hand, not one person attempted to offer him assurance, hope, nor whispered a word of encouragement in this man’s ear while he waited in vain for the ambulance to arrive. There is nothing else you can use to describe such a group of heartless bastards who could idly stand by and watch a man die, other than ‘asshole’.

In fact, there pretty much only one group of people in Dubai in my mind, that measure so closely on the asshole scale as the group of bystanders who could watch a man die without flinching, and those would be the suicide-for-cash types. Up until recently the laws in Dubai said if you were driving a car and some dipshit jumped out in front of you and died, you would not only face a jail sentence but you’d have to pay obscene amounts of blood money to the deceased’s family. Not long ago, it was discovered that a number of lower-class labourers who found themselves not meeting their idea’s of wealth while actually working to send home to their family, decided the quickest way to get rich quick was to commit suicide by killing themselves in an effort to weasel the living driver out of thousands of dollars. This tactic worked for a number of years. Only an asshole would destroy his life, and that of another person’s for cash. Thank God the authorities caught on and are now revising that law.

In the shopping malls and clubs you have assholes of a different sort. You have the ignorant expatriates walking around like new money, dressed to the nines in designer fashion clothing, as if that somehow covers up that they’re soulless no-ones craving attention and acceptance of others. They’re the very same assholes you find abusing their domestic help in the line ups of supermarkets, screaming obscenities like, “I thought I told you to grab the Lite, not Low Fat mayonnaise!” They’re the very same ignorant twits that park across two parking spaces, because for the first time in their life they have a semi-luxury car and they fear someone should park beside them and scratch their paint opening a car door in the obtuse manner that they themselves would, had they still been driving their shit Datsun, or Toyota Corola.

These same assholes seem to migrate to the nightclubs, and once you add alcohol to the equation you get a whole dimension of the assholes that they are. Take said assholes above, add sluttiness and no inhibitions about being a racist, egotistical, dumb-as-a-board-self-importance twat to the conclusion and you’ve defined night life in Dubai. Assholes I tell you, all of them!

If you’re into a larger than life cinema experience, over the drunkenness that is a nightclub don’t fool yourself into believing you’ll find fewer assholes during the show. UAE nationals cannot live without their cell phones. And though this trait once only belonged to this small percentage of the population, it’s catching on and UAE nationals or not in the movie, you’re going to hear more phones ringing and full-fledged conversations during the show, then actual dialog you paid to see. And if the phones aren’t enough to ruin your night, you can bet your asshole at least one asshole thought it appropriate to bring screaming children along for the show. Enjoy the cinematic experience that only Dubai has to offer.

In the “Letters to the Editor” section of local news papers, you find the same assholes writing the same bullshit that can be found of the majority of UAE based blogs. The complaints about rising rents, the horrible traffic, the commentaries and critics of locals, the locals bashing the expatriates, at the end of the day it’s all the same, over and over and over and over again. Nauseating repetition is the theme in any written media composed by the general public. Thus, it’s only fit to close this with the reality that I’m an asshole too. Stay there long enough and you can join the club!

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What do you think? Would it sell?