Unveiling the Necropolitics of Oil on Migrant Bodies in Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Birds

Introduction

The phenomenon of temporary labour migrations to the Gulf states has been extensively discussed in scholarly discourse, referred to as the infamous Gulf migrations. The initial supply of labour was predominantly sourced from South Asian nations such as India and Pakistan, which formed the dominant workforce in the nation. Subsequently, countries such as Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka also contributed significantly to the labour force. The influx of migrant labour was specifically triggered by the Gulf Oil Boom in the 1970s and has now consistently spanned over five decades. Several other factors such as historical linkages, religious–cultural proximity, poverty and unemployment within the South Asian nations served as a push factor for these migrations. The initial migrants consisted primarily of semi-skilled and low-skilled workers that were embedded within a temporary contractual labour framework. South Asians today constitute the largest expatriate population in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries and have immensely contributed to the socio-economic, technological and educational development of the Gulf (Oomen 2016, 394). The formation of these Middle Eastern nations and their relation to energy is significant as they were constituted with the discovery of oil. ‘In 1930, there was no state of ‘Saudi Arabia,’ and no colonial power alone was strong enough to create one’ (Mitchell 2013, 207). The oil economy contributed to the formation of the modern Gulf nations encompassing Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman. The research situates the article in the phenomenon of the extensive South Asian migrations to the Middle Eastern nations with the discovery of oil.

The growing field of Energy Humanities explores the intricate ways energy permeates everyday modern lives, culture, social systems and even interpersonal relationships. Economic policies and historical discourses have reshaped the understanding of oil as complexly embedded within socio-cultural, spatial and political relationships that need to be investigated. The focus in the field has primarily been on the beginnings of oil culture, looking at how it breached private lives, giving individuals access to absolute power, especially with the apparatus of oil-electric production, leading to modern consumerism (Buell 2014). Prominent energy theorist Imre Szeman (2017) argues that all of today’s culture is a petroculture because they are all embedded in energy-driven growth and, hence, energy needs to be a part of any critical analysis (p. 278). Energy moves beyond a physical entity to a social relation, and in literature, this becomes a real challenge as Amitav Ghosh (1992), one of the earliest petrocritic, indicates that there is no ‘single work of note’ about the ‘oil encounter’, as it lacks a form to be represented in literature (p. 31). The significance of fossil fuels in defining modernity has stood in inverse relationship to its presence in our cultural and social imaginaries (Wilson, Carlson, and Szeman 2017). Debates and discussions on petrocultures have been predominantly centred on regions in the Global North. However, there has been a recent surge of interest in the emergence of oil fiction and developing a petro-critical paradigm within the Global South which this research attempts to contribute to.

One of the earliest Gulf petrofictions, Cities of Salt (1984) by Abdul Rahman Munif, describes in detail the discovery and exploitation of the oil industry and its effects on the local population by displacing them from their cultures of origin and distancing them from their natural environment. Farah Al-Nakib’s Kuwait Transformed (2016), a non-fictional work, has explicitly looked into the transformation of Kuwait, one of the first cities to experience oil modernisation. Her analysis shows the construction of clear cultural and social markers that differentiate the pre- and post-oil scenarios. A common aspect that Munif’s text and Nakib’s research highlight is that the pre-oil Arab land enjoyed and propagated a pluralistic coexistence; for example, most Kuwaitis were immigrants from Iran and Iraq, but that changed with oil urbanisation, which defined citizenship and promoted xenophobia. The post-oil scenario gave natives of the land wealth and power, which led to enhanced feelings of superiority and solidarity. The abundant access to surplus energy resources, particularly in the form of oil, wields the power to transform and reimagine constructs of space, community and national identity that began to shape the Gulf nations. The wealth brought in by oil led to the possibility of creating a utopia of towering buildings, endless consumption through an inflow of goods and shifted notions of time and space with highways and racing cars. South Asian nations played a significant role in furnishing the extensive labour force required to actualise this utopian vision within a sparsely populated region. Initially, both nationals and immigrant labourers shared the belief that immigration would be a temporary phenomenon. It was commonly perceived that once the state infrastructure was established, the responsibilities would transition to the emerging educated national populace (Al-Nakib, 2016, 89).

The GCC nations political–economic structure was stabilised by opening the doors to migration while restricting citizenship to the foreign population and dividing the population into groups of ‘citizens’ and ‘expatriates’. The migrant labour force in most of these nations is governed by the regulations set by the ‘kafala system’. The word ‘kafala’, translated as sponsorship, points to the foreign worker’s residence and employment in a given country which is directly tied to their sponsor also known as kafeel (Kassamali 2021, 102). The system ensures that as non-citizens, migrants are prevented from establishing permanent residency, partaking in sociopolitical activities such as forming trade unions and engaging in capital ownership. The kafala system remains a critical ingredient in the state’s capacity to ensure political control in a situation where the native population is a minority. These aspects have not hindered migrations, as for decades, there has been a substantial presence of migrant populations within these nations, often surpassing the Arab native population in numbers. The data collected show that 90% of the population of countries such as the UAE and Qatar are immigrants, with South Asian migrants forming a significant labour force (GMI 2024). It becomes evident that Gulf petrocultures are not just built but also sustained due to the existence of a global migrant population. Gulf migrant literature has begun exploring the complexity of the diasporic experience and registering their presence in constructing these magnificent cities. Using energy as a lens to read texts has become necessary as it adds a layer of understanding to the capacities and beliefs that define modernity. It demands a ‘new generation of oil- aware petro-critics’, who must embark on extracting a petro-presence within literary texts that sits ‘untapped, bubbling under the surface, ready to be extracted’ (MacDonald 2017, 14).

The Kerala–Gulf Migrant Population

The article specifically focuses on the migrant population from the South Indian state of Kerala, which forms a significant part of the migrant population and is primarily represented in the selected text Birds. To be more specific, a recent survey estimates that more than 2.28 million Malayalees live in the Arab world (Rajan and Zachariah 2019, 28). These migrants comprise not only educated white-collar professionals but also a significant population that is engaged in unskilled menial labour embedded within oppressive labour regimes. The exploration of these Gulf migrants has been primarily documented within the sociopolitical, economic, legal and journalistic spheres, but migrant literature and narratives have been a growing field. These cultural literary productions from the state include novels, short stories, lyrical Malayalam poetry, travelogues and movies that explore the heterogeneity of these migrant experiences (Menon 2020). Popular literary writers and their works such as Benyamin’s Goat Days (2008) and Jasmine Days (2014), Joy C. Raphael’s Slaves of Saudis (2013) and Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People (2017) belong to a category of growing Kerala–Gulf migrant literature. These works acknowledge the existence of a neglected migrant workforce through its realistic and testimonial narratives of suffering. The works recount the atrocities perpetrated on the migrants by the petro-labour regime, like the kafala system of contractual labour prevalent in most Gulf nations. These literary productions also serve as counter-archives actively reimagining histories and everyday experiences of generations of migrants and their families. Migrant lives become spaces for human rights violations as a constant state of temporariness and fear engulfs them which are recurring themes within these works. Swaralipi Nandi’s work on the Gulf migrant workforce and the petroleum regime becomes significant as she argues, ‘the Gulf migrant labor is absorbed into the fabric of capitalistic machinery and yet is not recognised as the legal labor-citizen, which adds to their precarious conditions of labor that suggests a connection between fossil fuel economies and systems of slavery’ (Nandi 2022, 137). The impossibility of the migrants’ permanence in the country inflicts certain vulnerabilities which permeate their identification, cultural production and sense of belongingness. The complexity of the structural aspects within the modern migrant labouring body and its relation to modern energy is intricately explored in this article.

The article situates the research in the novel Temporary People (2017) by Deepak Unnikrishnan, which draws its title from the experiences of temporality that Gulf migrants, also known as guest workers, experience on a daily basis. The novel is structured as a collection of interconnected short stories that narrate the experiences of expatriate workers located in the UAE. The featured characters come from different South Asian countries, but the narratives predominantly focus on the Kerala migrant population, which the author is a part of. Deepak Unnikrishnan is a second-generation migrant from the city of Abu Dhabi, and his work Temporary People narrates the life of Gulf migrants through a blend of varied narrative styles and the use of South Asian lingo that won him several awards. As Unnikrishnan writes: ‘When I started reading history and reportage [of the UAE], I realised that my experience of home wasn’t being documented. That made me mad because something was being erased….’ (Wimbish 2017). Priya Menon’s analysis of Temporary People applies Jacques Derrida’s concept of the spectre, which is both the visible and non-visible, phenomenal and non-phenomenal: a trace that marks the present with its absence in advance (Derrida 2012, 100). She argues that ‘Gulf Pravasis (a term for Kerala migrants) are spectral figures, non-present presences who represent the intersection of popular tales of Gulf emigration history and the abject realities of a harsh non-citizenry life’ (Menon 2020, 186). The absence applies not only to the recurrent omission of Gulf migrants from state or national narratives of both home and host countries but also to the vulnerabilities associated with the frequency with which they can each be replaced or repatriated (Menon 2020, 186). Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People becomes an attempt to make visible the presence of certain migrant lives that exist as a ‘spectral absence’ in the dominant socio-cultural and literary imagination.

The novel can be read as an oil fiction as it takes into account ‘the material conditions of its production in the context of extractivist regimes that thrive on the dispossession of the poor and marginalised’ (Balkan and Nandi 2022, 3). The invisibility of energy systems in popular cultural and political imaginaries is contributed by the elusiveness of oil as the primary energy source in the modern era, which is further explored. The article focuses on the story Birds from the novel, which narrates intimate experiences and stories of migrant labourers engaged in manual labour and contextualised within the construction sector. The story centres around the character Anna Varghese, a Kerala migrant who works in the city of Abu Dhabi, UAE. She migrates to the Gulf with the intention of working as a nurse but is instead offered an alternate job. Her job title is colloquially referred to as ‘Stick People’, a night-time job, seeking out injured labourers at construction sites and attempting to stick, glue or stitch up dismembered body parts of migrant workers. The other characters, such as Khalid, Iqbal and Charley, are migrant workers whose lives are complexly intertwined within the oppressive construction sector of the city. The narrative serves as a lens through which the oppressive labour conditions endured by these migrant workers are laid bare, revealing a workforce that remains precarious within the broader framework of the global oil complex. The article explores the interconnection between the sovereign role of Oil and the necropolitics of migrant labour extraction as seen through the analysis of the lives of characters such as Anna and Iqbal. It elucidates a nexus between energy dynamics and labour exploitation that leads to the devaluation of the human condition. Oil contributes to the necropolitics of migrant lives with its capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.

A petro-critical paradigm, as predominantly observed, has directed its attention towards the influential role of oil in shaping and reshaping prevailing socio-cultural conceptions and structures. However, it has tended to neglect the shifts occurring in the labour dimensions inherent within the petro-capitalist system (Atabaki, Bini, and Ehsani 2018). The article adopts the theory of necropolitics to examine aspects of modern migrant labour and power relations through a close reading of the text Birds. As developed by postcolonial theorist Achille Mbebme, necropolitics grows out of Michel Foucault’s theories on biopower and biopolitics. The framework provides a perspective through which the intricate interplay of power, sovereignty and mortality within the realm of contemporary global oil politics can be intricately explored. As Mbembe (2003) states, ‘To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power’ (p. 12). Necropolitics uncovers mechanisms whereby ‘certain bodies are cultivated or grown for the purpose of enhancing life and (re)production, while others are marked for or neglected into death’ (Quinan et al. 2018, 271). It constructs a new political economy based on constantly shifting boundaries among ‘legitimate’ subjects, indexed on life, and ‘illegitimate’ non-subjects, indexed on death, which can be applied to the clear migrant–citizen divide seen in these countries. Round and Kuznetsova (2017) further developed the ‘letting die’ framework to reveal the complexity of power and oppression, applying it to the case of Russian migrant workers. Necropolitics is not just about death or killing, be it violent or otherwise, but it is more centred around the idea of who can be left to die and to be injured almost to the point of death (Round and Kuznetsova 2017, 14).

Reports have revealed the exploitations of Gulf migrant workers as they are often subjected to long working hours without overtime pay or rest days, physical and mental abuse, poor living conditions and even death while trying to escape forced labour (Whitson 2015). Migrants are viewed as disposable, given their seemingly endless supply, and as they operate outside legal frameworks, they can be abused with near impunity (Buckley 2014, 340). The complexity of the ‘guestworker–citizen’ sociopolitical divide, where emigration to the Gulf does not offer the security of citizenship (civil, political or social), nor venues for social and cultural assimilation between the natives and migrants (Menon 2020, 186). It adds to the migrant workers expendability, as they are placed outside of formal citizen boundaries. The short story Birds reveals a nuanced perspective of migrant exploitation as labour in the narrative is forefronted. It employs magical realism as a narrative technique to portray the necropolitics on migrant bodies saturated in oil’s socio-politics. Looking beyond oil as a commodity, the article analyses its sovereign role associated with the extraction and exploitation of migrant labour, crucial for the sustenance of contemporary urban petrocultures.

The Vanishing Act in Oil’s Magic

The story, Birds, centres around a Kerala female migrant, Anna Varghese, who works in Abu Dhabi as ‘Stick People’ or called ‘stickers’ for short. As the narrator says, ‘She taped people. Specifically, she taped construction workers who fell from incomplete buildings’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 12). The precarity of the labour that migrants engage in is illustrated by Anna’s character and the job she engages in. She migrates with the intention of working as a nurse but is instead offered a nameless unheard job. The following is a conversation between Anna and Khalid, a Palestinian migrant worker who coordinated the Stick People:

‘Is it a big hospital?’ she asked him as he drove his beat-up pickup.

‘Hospital?’ he repeated. Over lunch, he gently broke it to her that she had been lied to.

‘No job?’ she wept. There is a job, Khalid assured her, but he urged her to eat first. Then he needed to ask her a few questions. (Unnikrishnan 2017, 12)

The migrant body is limited to a merely labouring body as this is a common phenomenon where migrants find themselves assigned to jobs different from the initial job descriptions they apply for. This theme resonates in Gulf migrant literature, such as in Benyamin’s Goat Days, where the protagonist Najeeb is compelled to herd cattle in the desert, a stark departure from the employment he was assured. These migrants do not have the option of returning home as they are entangled in webs of financial debts and economic burdens. Anna takes the new job offered to her as, ‘… the middlemen pimping work visas wanted money—money she didn’t have, but borrowed. Cousin Thracy pawned her gold earrings. ‘I expect gains from this investment’, she told Anna at the airport’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 12). An outflow of indispensable family resources occurs to meet the expenses incurred in the migration process that results in migrant indebtedness. The lack of jobs and economic opportunities within their native lands is also a huge push for most South Asian migrants that makes their return difficult. The character Iqbal explains his decision to migrate to Anna, ‘Home’s shit’, he said. His village suffocated its young. ‘So small you could squeeze all of its people and farmland inside a plump cow’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 13). There is no option of return or the labour they choose to perform in the migrant country as they are solely viewed as labouring bodies due to an intersection of multiple factors. It highlights their precarious and powerless position within these spaces.

Anna’s job as a ‘Sticker’ primarily ensured that labour is resumed at the construction sites by putting migrant body parts together. The nuances of Anna’s job, which the story revolves around, point to the distancing of medical and healthcare facilities available for migrant workers embedded within the necropolitics of their right to life. The story is set in the glamorous city of Abu Dhabi and alludes to how oil dictated the relentless and limitless growth of urban spaces that Carola Hein terms ‘petroleumscapes’. ‘The supply of oil not only leads to the construction of roads and petrol stations but is also responsible for skyscrapers like the legendary Burj Khalifa in Dubai which were composed of energy’ (Hein 2021, 346). The defining aspects of urbanity characterised by its high-rise buildings are byproducts of the petroleum industry, which aids in constructing a modern ‘hyper-high-carbo society’ (Urry 2016, 8). The story follows Anna’s routine quest in search of fallen bodies, where she observes the swift and perpetual transformations occurring within the city. When Anna first arrived in the 1970s, the buildings were small, and construction was still young, but within a short period, the city expanded. The narrator describes, ‘Hamdan, Anna’s haunt, her hood, was growing from a tiny city centre to a mutating worm that refused to tire. The streets grew streets, parked next to slabs of steel and glass towering over trees planted to grow in exactly the same way’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 19). She compares the growing city to a mutating worm that ceaselessly expands and further describes how the land is reclaimed from the sea to foster additional urban sprawl, and the incessant construction of buildings all collectively shape the modern city.

In this land of endless growth, development is primarily made visible by the technical advancements powered by oil while the reality of a manual labour regime remains concealed. ‘The city was a board game and labor its pieces there to make buildings bigger’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 19). As Mitchell argues, ‘the erasure of human labor through the slippery technics of petrol testifies to the persistent forms of myth making so central to the American oil imaginary’ (2013, 103). The story Birds exhibits the complexities of the petro-labour regime as oil plays a sovereign role in obscuring and devaluing labour that contributes to the exploitation of workers. Oil works to concretise social relations through its ubiquitous but mostly invisible existence while simultaneously existing within the world of abstraction and concealment. Energy historians and theorists have extensively argued for the case of how fossil fuels replaced or negated slavery as a new master was born that unshackled the earlier structure of bonded labour. ‘Forced labour has been an indispensable aspect of farming societies worldwide for thousands of years. However, this was swept away by the availability of fossil fuels’ (Morris 2015, 131). A post-carbon era enabled lifestyles with technical advancements powered by oil that would have earlier necessitated the bonded labour of hundreds. This popular discourse where mineral fuels have enabled the development of labour-saving machinery has added to obscuring labour from the modern imagination.

In the book Shah of Shahs (1986), Kapuściński comments on how ‘oil creates the illusion of a completely changed life, life without work, life for free, it expresses the eternal human dream of wealth achieved through a lucky accident… in this sense it is a fairy tale and like all fairy tales a bit of a lie’ (p. 43). This defining characteristic of oil, where, as opposed to other energy forms, it can be extracted without much work, fosters fetishistic representations of its value as a magical property detached from labour (Barrett and Worden 2014). The Gulf nations witnessed this miracle as they watched their lands transform with the discovery of oil that altered notions of time and space without hardly lifting a finger, a Gulf Dream that spread across nations.

In Birds, this perception is exemplified by the character Iqbal, an injured migrant worker who recollects that everyone in his homeland yearned to be a Gulf boy. ‘Before making up his mind, Iqbal had visited the resident fortune-teller—a man whose parrot picked out a card that confirmed the Gulf would transform Iqbal’s life’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 13). The tax-free money and tales of unparalleled wealth spread across the community by the return migrants acted as powerful incentives, beckoning individuals like Iqbal and Anna to embark on the Gulf journey. As the narrator says, ‘The city flirted with these people, making all give and give up. The air was spiked; everyone wanted a taste’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 20). These Gulf nations embodied a sense of unlimited abundance compelling migrants such as Anna and Iqbal to leave their families and personal identities in search of it. It possessed an almost addictive quality, as the tales of prosperity and wealth brought back by returning migrants fuelled the community’s desire to seek similar opportunities. Gardner’s research also adds to this notion that the culture of migration is interwoven with the culture of miracles as it is invested with the power to transform, and people are prepared to risk everything to gain access to it (2010, 262).

The underlying deception behind this glorified Gulf fairy tale is portrayed in Birds as the spectral absence of labour enables exploitation of the workforce who are primarily responsible for creating and maintaining these magical infrastructures. The devaluation of manual energy allows migrants to be objects upon which the sociopolitical and economic desires of the powerful can be inscribed. In his work The Energy of Slaves (2012), Nikiforuk argues that fossil fuels initially promised a libertarian utopia but instead constructed an army of fuel-hungry mechanical workers and an aggressive class of powerful carbon traders that demanded new structures of labour organisation. ‘Without much thought, we replaced the ancient energy of human slaves with a new servitude, powered by fossil fuels’ (Nikiforuk 2012, 28).

Birds portray an alternative reality that migrant workers exist in contrast to the idyllic depiction of the Gulf, characterised by air-conditioned commercial establishments, opulent residences, swift vehicular transit and conspicuous consumption. A migrant body constantly labours to construct structures to sustain the rapidly growing petroculture while the migrant’s existence remains outside the purview of the very structures they help create. Their labour unfolds within the harsh and scorching desert environment, an intrinsic climatic condition of the region from which oil shields the elite population. The character Iqbal explains the migrant labourer’s situation to Anna, ‘In the summer’, Iqbal continued, ‘you burn, the clothes burn. You smell like an old stove’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 14). Heat is portrayed as the true adversary of these migrants who could survive endless falls from buildings. Nobody was impervious to the intense and unrelenting heat that they unceasingly toil in. ‘…the Gulf’s heat baked a man differently. First, it cooked a man’s shirt and then the man’s skin’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 14). The severity and disregard evident in workplace conditions exacerbate the facets of exploitation experienced by migrant labourers, ultimately serving as a means through which political and economic power is furthered.

Interestingly, the narrative reveals the strategies employed by Iqbal and other migrant labourers to withstand the excruciating and prolonged exposure to extreme heat. Iqbal acknowledges the restriction on frequent water breaks due to the constant monitoring of their progress and work output. ‘So he followed one rule: when his skin felt like parchment paper, he stopped working and quenched his thirst, sometimes drinking water so quickly it hurt’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 14). He recounts experiences of witnessing a labourer shrink to the size of a child and grow back to his original size after drinking a tub of water. The extreme heat makes a man evaporate before Iqbal’s eyes, only leaving his clothes behind. Anna further adds, ‘There was a time when Anna patched up a man with skin so dry, she needed to rub the man’s entire body with olive oil after she pieced him together’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 14). The exploitative and dehumanising working conditions experienced by the labourers are portrayed by juxtaposing magic and realism, which also opens up the space for multilayered marginalised voices. The extent of human rights violations at the workplace is portrayed as ‘At lunch break, getting to the shade under tractor beds and crane rumps became more important than food. With shirts as pillows and newspapers as blankets, the men rested’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 15). These daily life narratives fit into the ‘let die’ framework as the migrant workforce is inscribed with ideas of labour viewed as cheap, temporary and socio-politically absent. It was also this intense heat that led Iqbal to his death as he lost his footing on the roof. ‘The heat’, he said softly. ‘The heat felled me’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 14).

The extremity of these migrant experiences is demonstrated by labourers who work on rooftops; as the character Iqbal says, ‘Men don’t burn up there; they decay’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 14). These labourers do not immediately succumb to the intense heat but slowly decay. A form of ‘slow violence’ (Nixon 2011) overtakes their bodies, being exposed to extreme working conditions as they are physically exhausted and diminished. The system works as a socio-economic slave body where workers are kept alive for the perpetuation and abuse of labour. The living arrangements of these labourers are equally disturbing. Their housing facilities, commonly denoted as labour camps, are characterised by the compact cohabitation of workers within confined spaces. As Iqbal narrates, ‘packed into bunk beds, not enough ACs, bodies baked, sweat burned eyes, salt escaped, fever and dehydration built’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 15). These substandard accommodations lack basic facilities and exist in unhygienic conditions that question the migrants’ right to life.

Labour camps are primarily located on the outskirts of the city, segregating the migrants literally and symbolically from the civic and cultural life that they enable through their labour. The heat affected these workers not just during the day but attacked them differently at night as they returned to their quarters. ‘Well, no one mentions the nighttime’, Iqbal sighed. ‘They should.’ At night, ‘heat attacked differently, became wet’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 15). They begin to sweat profusely, and the closely packed living space becomes a suffocating entrapment. Iqbal narrates the tale of the character Badran, ‘I knew a man’, Iqbal continued ‘who collected sweat’. He would go door to door with a trolley full of buckets’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 15). From the buckets of sweat from these migrant workers he creates a salty swimming pool for them in which they float and play in. The supernatural is portrayed as ordinary, and the ordinary is layered with the feelings and contents of being extraordinary. To fully comprehend the power held by the petro-labour regime, the article examines the inextricable politics of life and death in migrant lives.

The Echoes of Death and Life

‘Then he asked her, “Don’t you burn?” “Everyone burns here”, she replied quietly’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 14). Death and life are intricately weaved to delve into the complex interplay of power and sovereignty on migrant labouring bodies. Migrant construction workers are subject to dangerous and deadly conditions at worksites due to weak regulations, deficient training and the absence of appropriate facilities necessary for the construction of sophisticated structures. In Birds, labourers at construction sites were regularly injured, but it was rare that they died from their falls. To prove building sites were ‘death-proof’, some workers voluntarily hurled themselves from the top floor of buildings. These jumps did not kill them, but if they did not jump properly, they would crack, waiting until night-time for the Stick People to glue them back together. ‘Few workers died at work sites; it was as though labor could not die there’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 9). This line elucidates the profound dimensions of labour exploitation, underscoring how migrants found themselves bereft of agency even in matters concerning their own bodies. Even death does not become a choice and fails to offer respite from the adverse circumstances in which they existed. Mbembe’s theory on necropolitics is not just about death but about those the state deems appropriate to ‘let die’. This notion can be extended by situating it in the modern migrant socio-politics as Round and Kuznetsova (2017) state:

There are instances of death through violence or workplace negligence; the majority experience a ‘slow death’ whereby they are ‘kept alive’ in order to produce economic value, but in a state which ensures that they are subservient to the threat of violence, an ever-present background spectre. (p. 209)

The migrant labourer’s corporeal existence becomes inexorably subsumed by the labour they perform, impervious to disruptions even in the event of bodily injury, as their body parts would be stuck back together to perform their allocated work. The disposability of their bodies as culturally inscribed by the labour they perform condemns them to a ‘bare life’ (Agamben 2008) within the city as they are seen as temporary, not worthy of the rights prescribed to citizens. Notions of transience are embedded within these migrant workers due to their temporary contractual positions, precarious jobs, bendable labour laws and the use of oppressive measures by employers, which lack representation in discourse. The discursive manoeuvres that frame oil as purely a source of revenue have curtailed interest in looking beyond oil as mere finance (Ehsani 2018). The invisibility of these bodies and labour structures in mainstream discourse and everyday socio-cultural imaginary adds to oil’s sovereign role to control, harm and even extinguish human lives. This is clearly seen in the text as labour dictates the mortality of workers who are kept alive in a state of injury that reminds them of their disposability.

The necropolitics on migrant bodies is further illustrated through the character Charley, ‘I once knew a man who wanted to die’, said Iqbal. ‘He’d realized pretty early it was hard to die in the workplace or in the camps. He wasn’t unhappy. He just wanted to die’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 16). His accomplice, Iqbal, helps him get into work-related accidents, hoping that Charley’s family will be compensated after his death. With time, Charley starts losing his body parts; a few fingers, toes, a kidney and his penis, though he is constantly pieced back together by the Stick People for labour to continue. Charley’s decision to slowly disintegrate becomes a form of resistance against the petro-labour regime by taking charge of life or his death through his body embedded within the power politics. Where power is at work, resistance is seen too. Their plan, as Iqbal narrates, ‘If he played his cards right, in three years, he’d be properly broken, just not fixable, and the company would be bound to inform his family’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 17). His unfixable or broken body transcends the functional value attached to the migrant labouring body. In biopolitics, a body as cause and effect for its emergence as a category indicates too that there is a mode of feeling, of being aware of the body. It is made clear just how often life is wagered across a body’s duration or time, or a subject’s experience. ‘Such a possibility of grabbing hold of life all the way to the body is not limited to the state or the institution but is enacted as well by the subject of this new knowledge-power’ (Campbell and Sitze 2013, 14). The narrative takes an interesting turn as a dismembered Charley one day decides that he wants to live as opposed to his earlier decision. The will to live that exists beyond a perfect body shows a further exercising of power over his own body and embracing his vulnerable state. The violence that surrounds the migrant workers is not just limited to the physical but goes beyond, as their temporal existence is marked by loneliness and absence. As the narrator describes the situation:

Pedestrians mostly ignored those who fell outside the construction site, walking around them, some pointing or staring… But it didn’t matter where labour fell. The public remained indifferent. In the city center, what unnerved most witnesses was that when the men fell, they not only lost their limbs or had cracks that looked like fissures, but they lost their voices, too. (Unnikrishnan 2017, 11)

Oil’s role in concealing systems of extractive petro-labour leads to the isolation of a human workforce and helps position them as the other. Their position as guest workers effectively positions them on the periphery of conventional citizenship norms that allow the ‘let die’ ideology to be imposed on their bodies. As the excerpt suggests, the disposability and exclusive instrumental value associated with the migrant bodies allow pedestrians to step aside or exhibit apathy as a response to the injured at construction sites. It corresponds to Arendt’s (1973) idea that it is those who kill within this space who act in the belief that they are not committing murder as the victim lacks human character. In this case, the absence of regard or the implicit sanctioning of harm inflicted upon migrant individuals stems from their positioning beyond the established confines of formal citizenship boundaries. The concept of grievability, as proposed by Judith Butler, surrounds this discourse as it renders certain groups disposable, ‘for, if a life is not grievable, it is not quite a life; it does not qualify as a life and is not worth a note. It is already the unburied, if not the unburiable’ (Butler 2004, 34). Disposability and dehumanisation interlock to sustain the production of ungrievable migrant lives. The sovereign’s necropolitical exploitation of labour for the advancement of economic power is intricately tied to the idea of who needs to live and who can be let to die. The lines also point to a critical factor of how the migrants did not just lose their limbs or suffered injuries but also lost their voices, which symbolises their inability to vocalise their concerns or resist due to the lack of political support inherent in such stringent regimes. It becomes a critique of the oppressive and dehumanising force that offers these workers limited rights and even fewer avenues to protest their violation.

The exclusion of migrants from the established system becomes more apparent when the task of locating injured workers is delegated to an informal entity known as the Stick People. The job is to employ a quick fix by glueing or sticking body parts together as it is intrinsically tied to the labour they perform. It points to how they are distanced from urgent and proper medical healthcare systems. The narrator further adds, ‘Sometimes, the men fell onto things or under things where few people cared to look. Or they weren’t reported missing’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 13). Some of these fallen workers were not even reported missing as their existence was only tied to the labouring body, and an injured body wiped out the migrant’s presence in the foreign land. This socio-cultural inscription on the migrant identity is limited to or nothing more than that of the labouring body, which contributes to notions of alienation, discrimination and emotional estrangement. An underlying xenophobia also creeps in as the migrant force is primarily composed of South Asian labourers, which adds to the process of Othering. Nakib’s (2016) research on Kuwait and extended to other Gulf nations shows that there are clear markers of self-segregation in the city through the creation of differentiating social practices and changing patterns of behaviour for citizens that did not allow any form of integration with the expatriates.

Iqbal narrates this isolating experience as he could tolerate any amount of heat or injuries, ‘The sun never conquered him. His body was strong. But what he couldn’t control, he told Anna, were the reactions of people he passed in the street’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 14). Being inscribed with notions of disposability and limiting their identity to their labouring bodies, they are perceived and treated as less than human. The endless cheap labour supply and their temporary stay add to the necropolitics of exploitation as they are placed outside the formal framework of citizenship. As no right can be enforced outside the horizon of an established political community, human rights would be meaningless for groups who could not belong to any political community. Hence, in principle, those who should have been at the very centre of all human rights were, therefore, paradoxically excluded from any human rights. Oil’s pervasiveness, technical advancements and a growing economy promulgated the notion that it could substitute anything and anyone within its sphere of influence. ‘People no longer needed each other to survive’ (Al-Nakib 2016, 190). The abundance of energy that oil facilitates engenders a tendency to overlook the humane presence within these spaces as they are woven into a profit-oriented petro-capitalist system that easily discards or replaces them. ‘The language of violence is intentionally distant and scientific, normalising the violence through the rationale of the state’s predestined right to kill’ (Nandi 2022, 147).

The story Birds ends with a metaphorical depiction of flightless birds which becomes imperative in understanding the recurring ideas of the life–death dynamics in migrant lives. This symbolism is exemplified as Iqbal recollects an incident involving his friend Nandan, who held a pigeon captive within a cage and affixed an iron lock around the bird’s neck, effectively tethering it to a state of immobility. Iqbal’s endeavour to liberate the pigeon results in a tragic mishap, as the bird leapt to its demise from the rooftop due to the constraint of the iron lock. ‘The bird, in a panic, or perhaps, hope, began hopping toward the edge and jumped. “But I hadn’t had time to remove the lock,” said Iqbal’ (Unnikrishnan 2017, 17). The remorse from the incident permeates the dreams of both Iqbal and Anna, resonating deeply with their personal experiences of confinement and restricted freedom as migrants. It is their desperate attempt to fly out and escape the exploitative conditions, but a symbolic lock around their necks hinders them from achieving this.

The kafala system binds migrants to their native sponsor, locking their lives to an individual who takes ownership of them. Employers also confiscate workers’ passports to prevent their escape, and some deliberately fail to issue proper identification cards that prevent their free movement in the city. The commitments back home to their family and financial debt cycles that these migrants are trapped in add to the weight around their neck. It is a pervasive physical and psychological systemic oppression inflicted upon these migrants that instils in them the belief that there is no feasible means of emancipation from these adverse conditions. Nandi’s (2022) research asserts how petro-economies essentially replicate slave economies through their overt parallels of borderless labour extrication from the global fringes. Mbembe’s (2003) theoretical exploration of the slave experience engages with a triple loss: the loss of home, rights over their body and political status. The analysis points to how migrants undergo similar feelings as their displacement leads to feelings of loss of home and family, the exploitative living and labour conditions point to lack of support from political agency and a distorted value to their body all points to the necropolitics in migrant lives. The story ends with the other birds reminding Anna to fly with her wings as she descends from the building. The opportunity for escape appears within reach, yet it is entangled within a web of multifaceted factors that act as impediments, hindering their pursuit of the desired freedom.

Conclusion

As Ehsani (2018) and other scholars have argued, it becomes crucial to reincorporate class and labour relations as integral and fundamental to understanding the significance and dynamics of the global oil complex. Unnikrishnan’s depiction of the precariat migrant condition by juxtaposing the real and magic enables the representation of oil’s power in inscribing meaning and value to the migrant’s life, death and body. By acknowledging and examining the intricacies of migrant labour that sustain modern lifestyles, the analysis offers an alternate discourse in energy studies. The article’s focus on the Middle East as a site of petrocultures opens up further avenues to explore, as most of the focus in the field has been on the Global North. The underlying role of oil is explored through the rapid growth of petroleumscapes defined by its towering skyscrapers and highways that spatially and temporally alter lives. The notion of limitless and magical growth is centred around the unlimited access to energy. The magical property ascribed to oil plays a pivotal role in rendering the migrant labour force invisible and constructs modern-day forms of servitude. This invisibility is apparent as they remain conspicuously absent within the broader socio-cultural imaginary and popular imagination. Applying Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics and the let-die framework to the selected text reveals how the obscurity of manual migrant labour adds to their exploitability and oppression for economic gains. The lack of access to primary health care, inhospitable living and working conditions, restricted access and movement and the lack of political agency are dehumanising systems embedded within the petro-labour regime. A system that treats migrants as outside of the socio-cultural norms and laws of the nation leads them to experience a sense of everyday bare life, which reveals a threat to death as a banal everyday experience. Viewing them as only labouring bodies and reducing them to an instrumental value demonstrates Mbembe’s idea of to let die and to injure almost to the point of death. Oil, the culturally dominant energy, becomes an underlying sovereign power to dictate conditions and premises to achieve the dream of unlimited growth where human labour is sometimes sidelined.