Asian American Literature Fans

A Review of Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (Restless Books, 2017)

By Gnei Soraya Zarook

“Temporary People is a work of fiction set in the UAE, where I was raised and where foreign nationals constitute over 80% of the population. It is a nation built by people who are eventually required to leave” (Unnikrishnan ix).

For a bit more context before I start, I’m going to let Goodreads give us a summary of this work that I find so difficult to summarize for all its brilliance: “In the United Arab Emirates, foreign nationals constitute over 80 percent of the population. Brought in to construct the towering monuments to wealth that punctuate the skylines of Abu Dhabi and Dubai, this labor force works without the rights of citizenship, endures miserable living conditions, and is ultimately forced to leave the country. Until now, the humanitarian crisis of the so-called “guest workers” of the Gulf has barely been addressed in fiction. Deepak Unnikrishnan delves into their histories, myths, struggles, and triumphs. Unnikrishnan presents twenty-eight linked stories that careen from construction workers who shapeshift into luggage and escape a labor camp, to a woman who stitches back together the bodies of those who’ve fallen from buildings in progress, to a man who grows ideal workers designed to live twelve years and then perish—until they don’t, and found a rebel community in the desert.”

This is a collection that haunts me, makes me laugh, and breaks my heart, all within a few sentences of each other. It is one of my favorite things I have ever read, and I think one of the reasons for this is that I am starved for literature about this very specific group of people. My parents were migrant workers who decided to labor in the U.A.E. (and later on, the Middle East at large) in order to earn and send money back home to Sri Lanka. “Tax-free!”, as Iqbal, one of the construction workers in Chapter Two of Temporary People, bellows (15). I spent many childhood years in the U.A.E. and in Saudi Arabia, coming back home to Sri Lanka during the school holidays. So when Unnikrishnan’s characters talk about the massive cargo containers that workers use to ship goods from the UAE back home, I know what they are talking about. I can still smell them; I smell the wood alongside the promise that migrants will remit, will bring back home stuff, goods, presents, possessions, luxuries, capital, to make their years abroad worthwhile, to be able to say, “Look what I have brought.”

Unnikrishnan’s work reminds me of Shailja Patel’s equally unique Migritude, which went from being a one-woman performance to being a text that uses letters, personal history, political events, timelines, poems, and a suitcase full of sarees to explore three generations of migration in Patel’s family and to weave together the violence of empire and its impact on women. Patel’s answer to the looming question, “What have you brought?” is “I brought Migritude.” It is a brave answer, one that gets to one of the questions I still grapple with: Can we remit with things other than the commodities of capitalism? Even though Unnikrishnan does not explicitly ask or answer such a question, I read Temporary People as a form of remittance, given his note at the beginning of the work that states how much he wanted to write about the people who live and work without rights or protections in the UAE. I read it this way because I can feel the heart put into every decision that Unnikrishnan has made, from the glorious play on language to the speculative imaginaries to the stories told by his characters.

And yet, for every special kernel in this book that I recognize as a result of being a child of foreign nationals who worked in the UAE, there are many more instances that challenge me. Every few pages there are words I need to look up, references and gestures to real-world events, comparisons and connections that reveal even darker truths than the ones I was aware of. I spent an entire six weeks of a seminar with Dr. Stephen Hong Sohn on Asian American Speculative Fiction attempting to write on this book, only to find that I could manage to fit into one paper only the first story about a woman named Anna who stitches and / or glues together men who have fallen from construction sites where they work. I mapped out the story on a huge piece of paper stuck to my bedroom wall, and came to realize how much politics and history were packed into it. As such, this becomes a book that I so want everyone to read because while our reading can do little, perhaps, to change the state of things for foreign nationals in the UAE, it will certainly change the way you understand the glitz and glamour of the UAE, and perhaps the Middle East at large, and your own space within the flows of capital in the world. If nothing else, it will give you something to consider when you next encounter workers at airport layovers in this and other parts of the world.

So much care and thoughtfulness have gone into every character, even when that character is an elevator that molests children. Unnikrishnan’s characters are deeply real and multifaceted, and the facets that Unnikrishnan chooses to employ are significant. It is not that these characters are merely human and flawed, but that their desires are so impacted by their connections to loved ones at home and by the promises of the Gulf that it is difficult to know where they begin and end as desiring beings. As such, we are reminded through every step of reading this book about the ways in which desire is connected to the political. I'm reminded again of Iqbal, who, while dying in Anna's arms (none of her usual ministrations have worked to patch him up), tells her of a dream he has where he is a bird. With his talons, he grips the building he has helped build, and flies up and away with it, to someplace cool, so that he and his family can enjoy it. I'm so moved by this image, of the laborer who wants, of course, not to tear down the beautiful structure that he built within a system that exploits him to build it, but to enjoy it someplace else, someplace where living can be pleasurable. The idea that the material comforts of capitalism can and should belong to people in ways that alleviate and make enjoyable their existence in this world, I think, is something that fiction still has much to say about, especially to those of us who theorize about burning down that which does not serve an ethical vision of the world. But a character like Iqbal might have something different to say, and I think we should listen.

Buy the Book Here!
Gnei Soraya Zarook, PhD Student in English, at gzaro001@ucr.edu