After I left Lebanon, my home country, 32 years ago, I lived in many places, including the United States. While there, I realised that I had two choices: I could permanently resettle in New York, where I would always be an émigré, or I could temporarily move to the Gulf in hopes of easily returning to Lebanon someday. I chose the latter option, and I've lived in the UAE for 17 years now, working for a major regional market research centre in Dubai. I've thought of myself as a "temporary émigré" for so long that my notions of home and abroad are almost totally blurred together.
Last Autumn, I decided to take a job with Gallup, the international polling organisation. Gallup does not yet have an office in the UAE, so they could not sponsor my residency. When my old residency visa expired in mid-July, I became practically country-less. My 15 years of residence meant nothing to my banks, landlord and insurance companies. I was financially paralysed. In July, I had to leave the country, pay a fine for exceeding my residency grace period, go to Kuwait and re-enter the UAE on one-month visit visa. It was issued only after two nervous days of bureaucratic delays. This is the only way I can be with my wife and two children. Every month and every time I leave the UAE for business I will have to reapply for permission to be here.
My situation was, of course, the outcome of a choice I consciously made. But it was still unsettling. I left Lebanon 32 years ago, and look forward to the day when I can return for good. But I have no idea when it will come. Plus, my children have never lived in Lebanon; they were born and grew up here in the UAE. This is where their friends and lives are. My own life, however, has been more virtually located. Every day, I exchange dozens of e-mails with colleagues, clients and fellow scattered émigrés. I read news online from Lebanon and other places I have spent my years. Though I literally live in Dubai, it is my virtual world that sustains me. Phone and data lines pump oxygen through my lungs and blood through my veins. The internet is my library and intellectual gymnasium.
Of course, I physically pass my days in the concrete world of the UAE. But my ability to build a life here is totally conditional on the willingness of a company to sponsor me. This has (I realise now, as a non-resident) made it difficult for me to forge meaningful ties to my concrete world, where everyone comes and goes as their employers and economic concerns dictate. Perhaps this is why I feel so comfortable travelling by plane. By literally separating me from any earthly place or time, flying makes my everyday social alienation seem like a more natural state of affairs. It's a temporary cure for my everyday uncertainty (what community do I belong to? Where will I retire, and how? Where will I be buried?), or, really, a doping of that uncertainty with a dose of airborne unreality. The longer the trip is, the more I enjoy it - until the time comes to think about landing and leaving.
The UAE has been like a long plane ride for me. I haven't come to know many of my fellow passengers, because we all know we are leaving when our trips end. Still, 17 years is a long time, and I have inevitably become a little bit attached. I built my career here. Opportunities and challenges I met here made me the person I am today. But I have tried my hardest to remain disengaged. One has to leave.
In Mount Lebanon, where I grew up, my mother used to send me to our neighbours for a pinch of salt if we had run out. This was more than a place; it was a community, a group of people naturally engaged in each other's affairs. For years, my only real community in the UAE has been my family. I know a few families in my building. We see each other in the lobby or lift, and talk about rent increases, traffic, that sort of thing. We are friendly enough, but somehow no one ever says "why don't we meet sometime at our place?" If the kids next door are making noise late at night, we won't knock. But we might go downstairs to complain to the watchman.
I don't even know for sure who my landlord is, though I've heard he lives in my building. One day I thought I saw him in the lift, and I wanted to let him know that my family is happy with our apartment. I said hello and asked if he was the landlord. He responded by saying "God is the owner!" Our conversation was over, but I couldn't get too upset. I hadn't been eager to know him. Earlier this year, I went to Etisalat to complain that our apartment's land line telephone was very noisy. The clerk smartly suggested that I avoid unnecessary service charges by testing myself whether the problem was with the line or with the set. "How would I do that" I asked. "By replacing it with another set," he said. "Borrow one from the neighbours," he added tentatively. This struck me as impossible. Our neighbours are possibly the friendliest people in the world. But if I hadn't managed to have a real conversation with them once in the last 10 years, how could I ask for their phone now? I had to buy a new set to see if my old one was broken.
We are told that the Dubai of today is no more than a miniature prototype of what is yet to come. It may evolve into the type of place where people can form communities. I hope so. Gallup will be opening an office in the UAE, so my immediate visa problems may pass soon. But eventually I need to belong, to engage, to do something other than ride an aeroplane by myself, connecting only to my virtual world.
In order to wait for my visit visa in Kuwait, I had to extend my hotel stay. Returning to my room, I suddenly found it small and confining, like a five star prison. I complained, and the management was kind enough to upgrade me to a small suite for the same rate. I went right to bed, and woke up in the morning with a direct view of an abandoned graveyard. None of the graves were marked. It struck me, probably because of my mood, as a warning about the unremembered life that awaits those who live and die in aeroplanes.
Jihad Fakhreddine is a Regional Research Director for Gallup, the international polling organisation.