I am really looking forward to my trip aboard a container ship…
The ship above is a liquid natural gas carrier, so it will have a different feel, but the feeling of being on the seas…
It seems to be the thing to do nowadays, even by historians who don’t work on the contemporary era. And there seems to be a great deal of interest in shipping among artists as well – which is a very good thing!
Regimes of land tenure and ownership must form significant elements in the development of ports. How quickly do these regimes change? What are the processes by which title deeds are issued, exchanged, bought, and sold? Are there demonstrable differences between the land tenure regimes in the different countries of the Middle East? And differences between coastal areas and hinterlands? Does the fact that oil companies were significant actors in the making of many ports in the Gulf affect the development of these ports?
“The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time. Only in so far as the direct product can be realized in distant markets in mass quantities in proportion to reductions in the transport costs, and only in so far as at the same time the means of communication and transport themselves can yield spheres of realization for labour, driven by capital; only in so far as commercial traffic takes place in massive volume — in which more than necessary labour is replaced — only to that extent is the production of cheap means of communication and transport a condition for production based on capital, and promoted by it for that reason. All labour required in order to throw the finished product into circulation — it is in economic circulation only when it is present on the market — is from capitals viewpoint a barrier to be overcome — as is all labour required as a condition for the production process (thus e.g. expenses for the security of exchange etc.). The sea route, as the route which moves and is transformed under its own impetus, is that of trading peoples xat’ ezochn. On the other side, highways originally fall to the community, later for a long period to the governments, as pure deductions from production, deducted from the common surplus product of the country, but do not constitute a source of its wealth, i.e. do not cover their production costs. In the original, self-sustaining communes of Asia, on one side no need for roads; on the other side the lack of them locks them into their closed-off isolation and thus forms an essential moment of their survival without alteration (as in India). Road construction by means of the corvée, or through taxes, which is another form, is a forced transformation of a part of a country’s surplus labour or surplus product into roads. If an individual capital is to undertake this — i.e. if it is to create the conditions of the production process which are not included in the production process directly — then the work must provide a profit.
…
Circulation proceeds in space and time. Economically considered, the spatial condition, the bringing of the product to the market, belongs to the production process itself. The product is really finished only when it is on the market. The movement through which it gets there belongs still with the cost of making it. It does not form a necessary moment of circulation, regarded as a particular value-process, since a product may be bought and even consumed at the point of its production. But this spatial moment is important in so far as the expansion of the market and the exchangeability of the product are connected with it. The reduction of the costs of this real circulation (in space) belongs to the development of the forces of production by capital, the reduction of the costs of its realization. In certain respects, as an external condition for the existence of the economic process of circulation, this moment may also be reckoned as part of the production costsof circulation, so that, with respect to this moment, circulation itself appears as a moment not only of the production process in general, but also of the direct production process. In any case, what appears here is the determination of this moment by the general degree of development of the productive forces, and of production based on capital generally. This locational moment — the bringing of the product to market, which is a necessary condition of its circulation, except when the point of production is itself a market — could more precisely be regarded as the transformation of the product into a commodity. Only on the market is it a commodity. (Whether or not this forms a particular moment is a matter of chance. If capital produces to order, then neither this moment nor the transformation into money exists as a particular moment for it. Work done to order, i.e. supply corresponding to a prior demand, as a general or predominant situation, is not characteristic of large industry and in no way arises from the nature of capital as a condition.) ”
From Melville’s Billy Budd:
…war contractors, whose gains, honest or otherwise, are in every land an anticipated portion of the harvest of death….
And he is the inventor of “fog of war” too:
Forty years after a battle it is easy for a noncombatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to have to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it. Much so with respect to other emergencies involving considerations both practical and moral, and when it is imperative promptly to act. The greater the fog the more it imperils the steamer, and speed is put on though at the hazard of running somebody down.
I am ashamed to admit that I was a latecomer to the magic of Allan Sekula. Far too much of a latecomer. I discovered his stunning work on shipping and transport, last year; he died in August last year. His amazing film Forgotten Spaces stays with you, flashes of sound, slivers of images, whole stories, the mood of melancholy.
Sekula has a sense of place that prevents his representation of the sea from succumbing to maudlin transcendental meditation. His images and writing -however lyrical- convey the solidity, the lived-in-ness, the texture of ships, trains, homeless camps, ports and of the sea itself. He himself attributes his ability to capture these places so intensely, beautifully, materially, to having grown up in a harbour, to “a certain stubborn and pessimistic insistence on the primacy of material forces” which is “part of the common culture of harbor residents” habituated to ships that “explode, leak, sink, collide.” Not only does he manage to let you catch a glimpse of this, it is there in the rhythms of his writing, the harsh music of words, all those unforgiving staccato x’s, k’s, c’s in “explode, leak, sink, collide” that feel like they can be touched. And listen to this
Space is transformed. The ocean floor is wired for sound. Fishing boats disappear in the Irish Sea, dragged to the bottom by submarines. Businessmen on airplanes read exciting novels about sonar. Waterfront brothels are demolished or remodelled as condominiums. Shipyards are converted into movie sets. Harbors are now less havens (as they were for the Dutch) than accelerated turning-basins for supertankers and container ships. The old harbor front, its links to a common culture shattered by unemployment, is now reclaimed for a bourgeois reverie on the mercantilist past. Heavy metals accumulate in the silt. Busboys fight over scarce spoons in front of plate-glass window overlooking the harbor. The backwater becomes a frontwater. Everyone wants a glimpse of the sea.
His pictures of destroyed shipbuilding economies are not pornographies of ruin. What Lefebvre was to cities, Sekula is to seas and ports. He writes about and photographs and films the people who work on ships, the longshoremen, shipbuilders and stevedores who are discarded when shipyards close (as he did in his stunning Dismal Science about Glasgow), the truckdrivers whose vehicles are the capillaries into which the heart of the cargo ship pumps its blood of goods, and ordinary life near shipyards and ports as he does so beautifully with the Mexican-American communities near the Long Beach Port.
When I was writing my first book, my constant companion was Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness (in sublime translation by Ibrahim Muhawi). It let me remember what I wanted to write about, and the beauty of its poetry prevented the congealing of my enthusiasm in the frigidity of so much academic reading.
I suspect Sekula’s Fish Story and his other essays will be my beacon (if I am allowed a cheesy pun) while I write about ships and ports and transport. He never loses his sense that the sea is magical, that there is a fetish quality about it – no matter how much of a workplace it also (even primarily) might be. That he was a constant and strong ocean-swimmer probably allowed him an embodied and affective connection to the sea, and there is a residue of romance in how he sees the sea as a place, which a lot of academics disavow and “critique”. I don’t know. I love the romance in his work as much as I do the materiality of the sea and port and sea-work and port-work he is so good at inviting us to see.
I hate to use the formally inventive and affectively brilliant Cities of Salt (by Abdulrahman Munif) as a sociological text or a total mirror of reality, which is what so many people do probably because until America’s Kingdom came along very few texts actually gave us something so powerful about the texture of racialisation in Aramco’s labour camps or about labour strikes by oil-workers in 1950s Saudi. But I am afraid the strange ways in which the fictional characters of the book are borrowed from reality and then bleed back into reality is too compelling in this instance.
Case in point: Subhi al-Mahmalji.
When we first meet him in the first volume of the quintet, he is a new arrival into Harran (the fictional version of Dhahran), has a shadowy past, and is most likely more a charlatan than a doctor (the comic “needle”-as-universal-cure theme adds to the air of levity when we are first introduced to Mahmalji). By the end of Al-Tih (trans. Cities of Salt), though, he is indirectly responsible for the death of a “traditional” healer, has already wormed himself into the heart of the crown prince, and has proven himself a rapacious, unscrupulous, and mercenary courtier. In Al-Ukhdud (trans. The Trench), the second volume of the quintet, he has consolidated his power by hitching his fortune to that of the king via marrying off his teenage daughter to him. By the time we reach Al-Munbatt, the fourth volume of the quintet and not yet translated into English, a coup has overthrown King Khaz’al (the fictional avatar for Saud ibn Abd-al-Aziz), Mahmalji has gone into exile, and Mahmalji slowly descends into madness.
Aside from the different genres and moods so effectively conveyed by Munif (from comedy to villainous epic, to tragedy), a history is distilled and crytallised in the story – and here is where things bleed into reality (or at least the reality of my research project) in all sorts of interesting ways.
Subhi Al-Mahmalji is based on a real figure, Rashad Pharaon, a Syrian who moved to Saudi Arabia in 1936, and who eventually became a physician to King Abd-al-Aziz and advisor to his son Faysal, and Khalid and Fahd after him.
Rashad’s son, Ghaith, is the person most relevant to my project, though. Ghaith who started his construction company REDEC in 1965 with startup capital from his father benefited like so many other big construction firms from the injection of petrodollars into that sector in Saudi Arabia after 1973. By mid-1970s, REDEC had revenues upwards of $1 billion per year and was involved in all sorts of construction projects including “a $500 million contract in partnership with the American company Parsons and was involved in the construction of Al-Assard Military City, one of the largest military construction projects in history”. But what came next is even more audacious – because Ghaith acted as the front guy for BCCI (the Bank of Credit and Commerce International) to break into the US market, the scandal of whose collapse is dizzyingly complex but comes down to extraordinarily mendacious and corrupt dealings, including vast sums being taken out as “loans” by shareholders who were using their shares as collateral!
Anyway, so far, so complicated. Where it gets even more interesting (at least for someone interested in the political economy of logistics) is that despite the man being on a an FBI most wanted list for white-collar crimes, one of Pharaon’s concerns in Pakistan was granted an $80 million contract to provide fuel to the US bases in Afghanistan. At the time, ABC reported that “An official at Attock [the Pakistani firm owned by Pharaon], who did not wish to be named, confirmed the refinery was supplying thousands of tons of jet fuel to the US base at Bagram Air Base every month.” I haven’t yet followed through on what happened next – but this is definitely something I will have to pursue!
So there you go. The son of Subhi al-Mahmalji is on the run from the FBI while providing logistical supports to the US military, and his logistical support consists of fuel, presumably first drawn from the ground in Saudi and then processed in Pakistan.
On second thought, it is not just the atmosphere of terror in the ship that makes Jahnn’s book so interesting – it is also George Lauffer. He is what Jahnn fabulously calls “the supercargo” alongside his sealed coffin-shaped secret cargo of many crates, which the seamen imagine may be filled with living or dead female flesh.
In all the existential/metaphysical readings of the book -and I can entirely see why the book would be seen as an existential parable- I haven’t seen anyone refer to what makes Lauffer by far the most interesting figure in the book (perhaps to me because of my peculiar fascination with bureaucracies): he is the ultimate archetypal government agent, the kind of bureaucrat that Max Weber was so good at writing about, but so much more. He is authoritative and sometimes authoritarian. He knows what goes on in the ship because he has microphones everywhere (the Panoptican!). He surveilles, monitors, eavesdrops. He tries to control the captain, the ship, the stowaway, the seamen, through a politics of fear and suspicion. He is “the grey man” who is at once everywhere and nowhere.
And yet, what makes him so interesting is that he is sometimes vulnerable, terrified, powerless, desperate to please, desperate for love and respect, full of loneliness and rage. He is indecisive sometimes; weepy sometimes. As mysterious and strange as he is, as terrifying a figure of authority, he is also strangely compelling, in ways that the green and arrogant Gustave isn’t, can’t be.
When I started my maritime-and-ports novel-reading adventure, three people suggested Hans Henny Jahnn’s The Ship to me. One of the three is an author I hold in awe, so I ordered the book (printed on demand by Amazon) – surprised that I couldn’t find the book in any form anywhere and that there was very little on Jahnn himself out there. His Wikipedia page even has that random fragmentary feel of a biography put together by a robot doing machine searches. I eventually found a brief collection of blogposts by someone obsessed with Jahnn… There seem to be many out there; people who have read The Ship and who are haunted by him.
I have now read the book and I can see why. It is a strange book structured like a mystery, with extraordinary suspense, but with no compulsion to resolve even the most fundamental and troubling of the puzzles. I am not sure whether it is a parable, a philosophical reflection on reason voiced by stand-ins representing different views, or a macabre existential tale. Maybe it is all these things. For one thing, it is the first book of a trilogy the other parts of which have not been translated. For another, the translation has a mannered feel (it is beautiful, but very mannered) and given the absence of writing in English on Jahnn, it is impossible to say whether this mannered style (reminding me of Lautremont and Lovecraft) is the effect of the writing or the translation.
See for example, this passage:
Man is born with a demand for justice, as he understands it. Since his demand remains unfulfilled, a broad understanding of the arbitrary course of events gradually begins to develop in him. He makes the decisions of others his own. He hardens his thoughts to inflexible ideas and consoles his inner powers with a later or a beyond.
Or this one, in which a young bourgeois stowaway considers the experienced seamen:
And he discovered that he was inferior to these men. They had had experience in every direction. At fourteen they had already mistaken the joys of Hell for the bliss of Paradise, and, later, stood again and again with empty hands in a completely illuminated world . . . Gustave envied them, not for their miserable experiences, but for the particular smell of reality which would never be his because he didn’t have the courage, wasn’t sufficiently carefree, to let himself be torn to shreds for no good reason.
But what I found most delightful and terrifying about the novel was its description of the ship itself. Jahnn was the grandson of a shipbuilder and his detailed sketches of the ship, of its smells and feel, the tar and the wood and the copper, is a sensory experience par excellence. The ship breathes, is alive, is the source of dreams and nightmares, it is a mysterious space that seems to expand into infinity through secret passageways and doubled rooms and sealed bulkheads. It terrifies me because I hope to take a trip on a container ship eventually and the idea of a mirror world behind the walls of the ship is appealing to me in a macabre sort of way.
I will have to think about the novel more (I only finished it last night) – about the unresolved disappearances, the gathering of malicious rumours, the strange formalism of a pseudo-mutiny, the inexplicable oscillation between love and hate the main characters feel towards one another. But I am sure I will come back to it.
My sleep last night was bookended by two sublime mysteries – the shipping forecast with its peculiar poetry which maps a kind of mysterious geography with gale warnings and low visibility
Viking Forties Cromarty
Forth Tyne Dogger Fisher German Bight
Humber Thames Dover Wight
Portland Plymouth Biscay
Trafalgar FitzRoy
Sole Lundy Fastnet Irish Sea
Shannon Rockall Malin
Hebrides Bailey Fair Isle
Faeroes Southeast Iceland
And then waking up to the sound of Stephen Hawking’s machine voice who spoke of another geography so vast and unknown as to be the biggest mysterious sublime: an originary past the ripples of whose inflation travels through timespace like the ripples of the fracture of the tectonic plates through the oceans…
And it is He who tamed the Sea, that from it you might feed on flesh tender and fresh, and pull fineries to costume yourselves with, and see the ships plying its waters. That you might desire His bounty. Perchance you would give thanks.
The Holy Qur’an, The Bee (16:14)
Quoted from Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim
The Gamming 