GULF, by Mo Ogrodnik
Five women from different countries and social classes find themselves living in and around the Arabian Peninsula in Mo Ogrodnik’s debut novel, “Gulf,” a passionate if uneven look at the physical and emotional violence that women migrants face in the Persian Gulf region in particular, where tens of millions of foreign workers live today. Unfortunately, the premise tying together these disparate characters is as tenuous as it sounds, resulting in a portrait of women in the Middle East that feels reductive, at times even stereotypical.
Newly wed to the heir of a Saudi Arabian railway empire, Dounia is forced to move from Jeddah to a sprawling new mansion in the “desolate industrial complex” of Ras al-Khair, an epicenter of the region’s wealth, rapid modernization and maze-like construction sites. University educated and ambitious, she once hoped to join her father-in-law’s empire, as he was the one who “saw her potential” beyond the home. But his unexpected death leaves her feeling “useless and rotten,” isolated in the role of pregnant housewife.
When Dounia hires a Filipina domestic worker named Flora to be her maid and nanny, the latter is grieving her infant son’s recent death in a hurricane back home. “In the Gulf States, your employer is your sponsor,” Dounia explains of the region’s exploitative kafala system that often amounts to indentured servitude. Descending into postpartum depression, obsession and paranoia, she takes Flora’s passport and phone and treats her with increasing cruelty.
Meanwhile, Justine, a curator at the Museum of Natural History in New York, moves to Abu Dhabi with her teenage daughter, Wren, to oversee a falcon exhibit at a brand-new museum, lured by the job’s promises of financial security and adventure. There the privileged American expat will become disastrously entangled with Eskedare, an Ethiopian teenager who has traveled to the U.A.E. on forged documents.
The final thread concerns Zeinah, a Syrian university student whose parents coerce her into marrying an ISIS fighter — “even though girls in Raqqa were drinking antifreeze and committing suicide to avoid marrying ISIS fighters” — in the vain hope that the union will protect her from the same violence that led to her brother’s abduction and murder, after he protested the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Her husband, Omar, encourages her to join the “Al-Khansaa Brigade,” a kind of “female morality police” that promises its jihadist recruits “liberty, even if it meant the surveillance of others.”
A filmmaker and professor who formerly taught at New York University’s campus in Abu Dhabi, Ogrodnik writes in cinematic scenes that move quickly between these five perspectives. Perhaps as a result of the fast pace, Ogrodnik’s protagonists often feel more like archetypes of victim and victimizer than flesh-and-blood individuals. “Flora was kind, and her tenderness was infuriating,” Dounia thinks as she seizes her employee’s connection to the outside world. “Something she felt compelled to destroy.” Zeinah is neither a migrant nor living in a Persian Gulf state, and her inclusion in the novel does little more than evoke the stereotype that a story about the Middle East must somehow include a terrorist. Joining Al-Khansaa, she falls easily into the sadism of ordering the public torture of women who disobey Shariah law, and Ogrodnik describes her inner turmoil with a heavy hand: “She felt a strange sense of sisterhood and camaraderie with these women, but she questioned the nature of this connection. It could be so many things: her loneliness, the trauma and violence that had befallen her brother, her family, her city.”
The dialogue too can be didactic, Wren’s American friend stating a theme of the novel outright: “My mom says the hospitals are filled with women workers trying to escape. Women with broken ankles who’ve jumped from high floors. Last month a woman was killed walking down the middle of the highway with her hands up. Lots of them are trafficked.”
There may be a point to this flattening, to collapsing distant regions into one narrative, and reducing whole lives to symbols of privilege or lack. The abuse of women is not limited by geography or class. But to come to life on the page, fictional characters and places cannot be reduced to generalizations.
GULF | By Mo Ogrodnik | Summit Books | 422 pp. | $29.99