I am often struggling with the semantics of these identities. When I get a table at Nobu Doha, I’m an expat. When i have my mandatory medical exam to get my residency card at the prison-like fortress in the desert, I am most certainly experiencing a small slice of the immigrant experience, or even less dignified, the experience of the foreign worker.
Me, seeking permission to exist and work in a country that is not my homeland, completely at the mercy of ceaselessly-subordinated officials who have their own bones to pick – for neither is it their homeland. They too, are temporary, imported workforce with little to no authority over their own lives. If we grow old, get sick, or lose our jobs or local sponsors, we become ineligible to exist here. In my day-to-day expat life, i would be entitled to boss them around, but not on this day.
In the case of Qatar, these freaky-friday-level, power flips involve a clash of class, race, history, economic improvement opportunities, cultural norms, religious beliefs and practices, and language barriers – just to name a few.
The medical exam wardens are mainly women, in keeping with Islamic gender segregation principles, and burdened by a long-practiced requirement to appear stern, even cruel, in their ministrations to us, other prospective foreign workers, gathered in silent, senseless, snaking, paper-gown queues, stepping up only the two permitted steps at a time but never waiting until there are four steps… all to meet their punitive instructions. Non-compliance is met with brutal and immediate rebuke. Sometimes we, the applicants, just don’t understand the instructions, and maybe in my case, a blatantly rule-adverse white girl from New Jersey, perhaps i just don’t wish to comply with group abuse that feels undignified and absurd. A wish is a privilege i am fortunate enough to enjoy, most days. I won’t go too deeply into what happened next, but the example is meant to hint at a precarious identity when one is a guest worker or a slave in a foreign land.
As an often-ignorant American who had never experienced living in this part of the world, i lacked comprehension or anticipation of my expendability and identity in a place or a group where i would never have an opportunity to become a member. The US is a nation where foreigners theoretically can immigrate, can become American – as futile, impossible and even fatal as these attempts may sometimes be, immigrants are possible.
“Others” can theoretically join our club, become one of US. Where i live now, i could never, not with struggle, education, funding, desire, marriage, – whatever – i could never become Qatari, could never join that club. Loopholes are rare and fleeting and perhaps as inauthentic as an oasis mirage.
Although an experienced expat in other countries previously, before this experience, i could never have comprehended these realities. Even now it’s hard for me to grok. Preservation of ancestral and cultural heritage is a pursuit sometimes noble, sometimes not. We throw genetic lineage into the mix as well. The balance of ancestral pride and welcoming and learning about the ‘other’ is what i had the blessing of knowing most of my life. How little i knew about how extremely rare this time, this place, this mindset was in history.
