The fact that the King of Pop was urinating in the washrooms of my workplace would have seemed absolutely unbelievable in my previous employment. But an office in Birmingham this was not: these were the corridors of one of the largest property developers in the world, at the epicentre of the building boom, in arguably the most bizarre, ostentatious and mind-blowing city on the planet at the time: Dubai.
These three adjectives: bizarre; ostentatious; mind-blowing, were words that visitors used but that those of us who worked there rarely did. It was November 2005 and I had only been living in Dubai for seven months, but already the absurdities had become normalities. Michael Jackson taking a piss in the toilet? Not surprising. Writing a speech for one of the most important statesmen in the country? All part of the day’s work. Organising a tour for The King of the Zulus? Oh, do I really have to? I am being conceited for the sake of effect – of course these things were exciting and stimulating but they did become unsurprising. To use a cliché, those of us who lived and worked there quickly learnt to expect the unexpected, and as time went on, these sorts of things just caused the small raise of the eyebrow.
Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself
It was the second day of 2005 when I received the call from a former boss asking if I would be interested in a job in Dubai. She and her husband had moved to Dubai some months previous, after he had been offered the position of Sales and Marketing Director for one of the Emirate’s largest and most notable organisations – one of the three companies that was rapidly changing the face of the city’s landscape with incredible property developments that would not only provide homes and offices for millions, but would also stun the world with their ingenuity and pure, unadulterated excess. I was in Birmingham at the time, which wasn’t at bad as it sounds. In fact I loved living in the city, I had a great job which I had somehow landed after University, living with some of my closest friends in a typical post-University house enjoying the excesses which the first post-University full time job brings you (Jacobs Creek instead of Lambrini, Heinz Baked Beans instead of Somerfield Savers Own Brand, a living room!). I could afford to go out with more than a £10 limit, I didn’t need to spend money on 400 page Business Studies tomes, I didn’t feel guilty that I was watching TV instead of writing one of two 40,000 word dissertations, I was in a band. Admittedly not a great band, but an okay one with 4 of my very best friends. Life was good. La la la la la la la life was wonderful.
So when I received the call asking if I would be interested in helping to form the in-house Public Relations team for one of Dubai’s key organisations, I was tempted but I didn’t pack my bags straight away. First off, I had to figure out where Dubai was. One of my house mates had a large map of the world on the wall – the sort that when you are younger you put pins in to show where you have been, merely to be vaguely disappointed that you have only been to France and Cornwall – so her and I searched for Dubai on here. We found it, smack bang in the middle of the Middle East. Shamefully, I must admit that at this point, despite being a fairly well educated 23 year old, I knew absolutely nothing about Dubai or, in fact, the Middle East. The only image that I could conjure up was of wealthy Arab sheikhs (although I am not even sure I knew at the time that ‘sheikh’ was the correct term) at a wealthy horse race – I must have seen images of the Dubai World Cup on television. Armed with the knowledge of where on the planet it was, I started researching the place. Pretty much all of the articles I found were Daily Mail type stories of incredible property developments, sporting events and publicity stunts. In the weeks after being told about the job, suddenly it seemed that every day there was a story about the city. From English couples who had made a fortune investing in property to an underwater hotel that was due to be built, a seven star hotel in the shape of a sail to the success of Emirates airline, Dubai seemed to be in every newspaper that I picked up. One day, walking to work in Birmingham, I picked up a Metro newspaper and there, on the front cover, were Andre Agassi and Roger Federer playing tennis on the helipad of the aforementioned sail shaped hotel, the Burj Al Arab. Having just organised a publicity stunt for a Birmingham local business affiliation that involved getting business owners to stand together in the shape of a ‘b’, I realised that the opportunities in Dubai were levels above where I currently was, and the decision was a no-brainer.
From Shangri-La to Sodom in Three Years
I spent one month shy of five years in Dubai, which, by Dubai standards, made me a medium to long-termer. However, I am no more qualified than anyone else to write a critique of the city and there are thousands better placed to give a behind the scenes, tell-all story. To my regret, I did not keep a diary during my time there so I cannot even give a chronological account of the events and emotions that I experienced. But, having left Dubai for good (of that, I am sure – there are many pull factors which may tempt me back to the city, but I have done my time there and am absolutely convinced that I will not be seduced to return to live there again), I feel a need to, in some way, document my thoughts on the city which has grabbed so many headlines and caused so much interest across the globe in the last few years. Perhaps it is because I did not keep a diary and that it was such a key time in my life that I would like to ensure I archive my experiences before I forget them all. Or perhaps, having now left, I feel I can give a more balanced view than whilst I was living there.
Ah, a balanced view. There are hundreds of articles about the city, its staggeringly fast journey from fishing village to international metropolis, and its subsequent fall from grace during the current economic crisis. Perhaps as someone who has tiptoed around the outskirts of the journalistic industry, I shouldn’t be surprised by this but its worth pointing out: the large majority of articles written about Dubai are unbalanced pieces of lazy, shoddy journalism, with the angle of the article decided before the journalist arrives in Dubai (if he even visits the place at all). The amount of times that my colleagues or I met with European (mainly, it is sad to admit, British) journalists who had clearly come out to Dubai with the story already 80% written and were just enjoying a free holiday was startling. It didn’t matter what they saw or what we told them – the article bore no resemblance to these things. In the early years, the articles were positive descriptions of a 21st century Shangri-La, where anything was possible and all a western ex-pat had to do to make a fortune was to step off of the airplane. Never mind that the journalist had seen for himself some of the negatives of Dubai (I shall come to those at a future date), Dubai was the city of the moment, a Disneyesque paradise where dreams came true. In more recent times, Dubai is depicted as a rival to Sodom and Gomorrah for most evil city in history, where excess of every kind rules; a devil’s playground for tax avoiding lager lout Brits. In these instances it was always strange to me that the journalists were happy to enjoy themselves for five days in a five-star hotel, party in the bars and clubs and were generally as rude and arrogant as the ex-pat Brits that they depicted in their 400 words once they returned home.
What’s more, you could take 90% of those articles, tear them up into tiny phrase long segments, put them into new, coherent paragraphs, and you wouldn’t realise that the new articles were comprised of phrases from different articles by different authors. During these two distinct phases, the vast majority of articles about Dubai boil down to the same key components:
Shangri-La
1) A city of marvels and a miracle in the desert – the Burj Al Arab, the Palm, the World
2) HH Sheikh Mohammed as a world leader in innovation
3) The crane is the national bird of Dubai
4) Anything is possible – and anyone can make a fortune, unlike the UK where governmental bureaucracy holds you back
5) Move here or visit as a tourist and you will be surrounded by premiership footballers and Hollywood celebrities
Sodom and Gomorrah
1) A city of over spending, where Arab greed has led to huge debt
2) A ‘dark side’ – massive human rights issues, gross mistreatment of labourers who work on the building sites, prostitution, lack of press freedom, environmental and ecological disaster
3) Construction of mega projects has stopped
4) Lack of legislation has led to economical issues for expats
5) Greedy drunken expats living a life of excess
Whole swathes of the articles are copied from other articles and, when reading them, it often seems that the journalist in question believes that he is writing something new, something revelatory. Some journalists seem to base their career on trotting out the same article over and over again. One particular British journalist from the Daily Telegraph must have visited Dubai at least three times a year during my time there – and strangely it always seemed it was around the time of a major sporting event which he would attend, yet he wasn’t a sports writer and his articles did not even mention the event he had attended. Each time, his article would bear striking similarity to the last article he had written.
I would like to point out that these are not the ramblings of a bitter PR executive – as I said above, I do believe that I am able to take a balanced view now, as I hope the rest of my writings/essays/litanies of nonsense will show. I haven’t worked in media relations for a couple of years and when I did I actually enjoyed the vast majority of my dealings with journalists. It was just always incredibly disappointing to me that a supposedly top-class journalist would visit Dubai and through sheer laziness would not write the article that was there to be written. Don’t get me wrong, there have been some very good and accurate articles written about Dubai but on the whole the ones that I read were either facsimiles of a previous article, contained some blatant inaccuracies (probably due to poor research) or they would exaggerate points for affect (something I am certain to be guilty of throughout this piece but I am not a journalist; I do not have a journalistic responsibility). Yes, a journalist should have an opinion but s/he should at least make sure that basic facts are correct. For example, I can categorically state that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie do not own an island on The World development, just off the coast of Dubai.
Yet I would estimate that in at least 85% of articles about property in Dubai and probably in at least 30% of other articles about Dubai, it states as fact that they do indeed own an island; some go as far as to say which island (allegedly Ethiopia). In fact, why have I just used the word ‘allegedly’? IT’S NOT TRUE!! Googleing ‘Brad Pitt Angelina Jolie Dubai’ brings up hundreds such articles – the first of which being the Dubai based business magazine ‘Arabian Business’. Arabian Business, owned by publishing house ITP, is one of Dubai’s most respected (and, I would say, best) business magazines, yet they got it wrong and were perhaps the catalyst to many of these other articles publishing this as fact. Unlike the majority of the other articles, at least Arabian Business quote their source: “Dubai-based celebrity and society web site Ahlanlive reported today that the film stars [Brad and Angelina] have bought an island with a view to turning it into a showpiece for environmental issues with the hope that it will encourage people to live a ‘greener life’’, the website said”
Arabian Business may quote their source, however that source is Ahlanlive. Guess who publishes Ahlanlive? ITP, publishers of Arabian Business. And so we have one journalist quoting a mate from along the corridor who, in the original Ahlanlive article, does not quote a source. (For the sake of trying to stick on this tangent, let’s not question how a showpiece for environmental issues could be built on a man-made island off the coast of Dubai, nor how platinum air-miles card holders Brad and Angelina could hold themselves up as leaders of the green movement). You can see how the blatant untruth can now be mistaken as fact: a journalist researching Dubai looks to the city’s most respected business publication, finds this interesting ‘fact’ and duly uses it in his article, without even thinking of a quick call to the press office of the developer of The World, Nakheel. Now, fair enough, the Arabian Business article does state:
“Nakheel does not comment on who has bought islands within The World without the permission of the owners”
and I do believe that Arabian Business would have put in a call to the press office, but I also know that the vast majority of journalists who subsequently used this as ‘fact’ did not make such a call.
Why, you may ask (if you haven’t fallen asleep, shut down your computer or attacked your screen with a sharp knife), have I taken a trip around this particular cul-de-sac? After all, it’s hardly revolutionary to state that journalists do not always check their facts. Two reasons: firstly, it shows how lazy some of the writing about Dubai is – some of the journalists repeating this falsehood actually visited Dubai and actually met with the press office of Nakheel but still did not check the veracity of the ‘fact’; and secondly, I know how the big, screaming whopper started…a press officer for Nakheel, whilst a little bored on yet another journalist visit to the islands of The World and asked for the three millionth time which celebrities owned islands on the world (I believe that the true number is precisely zero, but I may be wrong) said something along the lines of “I obviously can’t give you names but I will say that arguably the most famous couple in Hollywood visited recently and were very interested”. Two days later, the first article claiming that ‘Brangelina’ had bought an island on The World was published.
Riding close to the wind of truthfulness…but falling into a puddle of inaccuracy
To go back to my earlier point, when reading these articles that contained glaring inaccuracies or were clearly written with a predefined agenda, I read them with a feeling of immense disappointment. So many of the articles rode so close to the wind of truthfulness, were so interesting and compelling, but somehow fell at the last hurdle (a woefully mixed metaphor but one that hopefully emphasises the point). A classic example of this is an article published in the UK’s Independent on 7th April 2009
Titled ‘The dark side of Dubai’ (#3 in ‘The Ladybird book of Titles for Articles about Dubai, pipped to the top two spots by ‘A Desert Miracle’ and ‘A City Built on Sand’) the reporter Johann Hari describes his visit to the city and in doing so addresses the various issues popular in the majority of other such articles written in the past year: broken expat dreams; labourers; building projects that have been put on hold; ecology and sustainability; drunken Brits etc. The article is a largely interesting one, full of individual’s stories and quotes, and some great turns of phrase such as “a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing into history”, “an adult Disneyland, where Sheikh Mohammed is the mouse”, and “Dubai is Market Fundamentalist Globalisation in One City”. Further, to give Hari credit, he does something most others do not: quoting Emiratis, both those who are 100% pro-Dubai and those who have publicly criticised the city. He also seems to have looked deeper than others do, visiting the underground gay scene, a centre for disadvantaged women and the ‘homes’ of labourers. It is so close to being a very well written and researched critique of the city. But it falls short. Firstly, the article is spoilt by some blatant inaccuracies:
• “Thirty years ago, almost all of contemporary Dubai was desert, inhabited only by cactuses and tumbleweed and scorpions” – there are not, and there never have been cactuses nor tumbleweeds in the desert
• “…a resident of Dubai has the biggest average carbon footprint of any human being – more than double that of an American” - it is bigger but certainly not double
• “[Dubai] was built by slaves. They are building it now” – incredibly underpaid labourers living and working in sub-Dickensian conditions? Yes. Slaves? No
These inaccuracies may seem petty but for me it calls into question the veracity of some of his other statements and descriptions. For example, early on in the article he tells of a Canadian expat couple, the husband of which is in prison due to debt whilst the wife has been sleeping for months in the car park of a hotel. According to Hari:
“She is not alone. All over the city, there are maxed-out expats sleeping secretly in the sand-dunes or the airport or in their cars”
I don’t question this poor woman’s story but I can’t remember hearing of any such stories so for Hari to say that “all over the city” this is happening seems at best over-exaggerative, at worst made up twaddle, especially considering his other stretches of the truth.
The other thing that spoils it for me is the clear bias due to the obvious angle of the article, shown first in the title “The Dark Side of Dubai”, which results in a number of unbalanced depictions, not least that of the expat Brits. They (or rather, We) are portrayed as racist drunken morons, devoid of any social morals who live in Dubai solely for a alcohol fuelled lifestyle and whose only grumbles are banks which use faxes and not emails (to be fair, that is REALLY annoying!}, stringent drink driving rules (I’m all for them), and the traffic. Now I am not denying that there are a fair number of moronic Brits living a sun-kissed, tax-free, alcohol fuelled life in Dubai. Nor am I going to pretend that I have not enjoyed the odd night out where drink has made me dance like an epileptic monkey watching a McG film. However, Hari’s gross generalisation tars all of us British expats with the same bigoted, half-witted brush. Statements such as:
“When I ask the British expats how they feel to not be in a democracy, their reaction is always the same. First, they look bemused. Then they look affronted”
and:
“…one theme unites every expat I speak to: their joy at having staff to do the work that would clog their lives up back home”
damage the point Hari is trying to make. Some of us actually have views on what it is/was like to live in a non-democratic society and we certainly didn’t all have live-in maids walking five steps behind us in order to clear up our alcohol induced vomit trails.
And so, like a number of others, Hari’s article merely serves to infuriate those of us who know the city, rather than have a positive influence on us. Of course, we were not the audience for his article, but if only Hari had not succumbed to the temptations of over-generalisation, gross exaggeration (if that is not an oxymoron) and publication of blatant untruths, he may just have written a very accurate depiction of Dubai’s negatives. Not that I am saying it is not worth reading – 80% of it is a fairly accurate depiction - but if you do read it, please take it with that metaphorical pinch of salt we perhaps all need to ingest when reading travel articles or critiques of cities by writers who visit the city for just a few days. And, when reading it, do it with the knowledge that it is written from a fairly oblique standpoint and appreciate that, along with all its negatives, Dubai actually does have a lot of positives.
But perhaps in all of this I am being harsh – is it really possible to write a truly new essay, article or commentary about Dubai? Is it possible to find a new angle, to reveal a new layer to the city? I am not sure it is. After all, I have already used some of the oft-written clichés. Rereading what I have already written, the following clichés appear: “the epicentre of the building boom”; “bizarre, ostentatious, mind-blowing”; “rapidly changing the face of the city’s landscape”; “pure, unadulterated excess”; “from fishing village to international metropolis”. So perhaps, whilst attempting to retrospectively discuss my time and experiences in Dubai, I will end up writing carbon copies and duplications of other accounts of the city. Further, despite my criticisms above, I am sure that I will fall into the quagmires of generalisation, exaggeration and stretching of the truth. For that, I can only blame the lack of a diary to revert to and the desire to make this more interesting than a chronological account of my time. I can only write my feelings and my emotions, and writing retrospectively these will naturally be slightly skewed. But then, unlike those I have criticised above, I do not have a journalistic responsibility. I am writing these accounts for me and me only. If others read them, then great, but I have no responsibility other than to myself.
It is my belief that only those who live and breathe a city can write with authenticity about it. And even then, every single person will have a different viewpoint. What will follow (whenever I get around to writing the next pieces) will be mine.
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