Stories of Sand, Cities of Salt
Artists old and new ask questions about what is real and lasting in our world.
There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount , a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand…There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.
—Edward Paul Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
In 2004, the artist Kiluanji Kia Henda was traveling through the Namib desert of his native Angola. At one point in his journey, he reached an abandoned city that had almost disappeared beneath the windswept sands. It contained no inhabitants—merely the remains of structures that once served a purpose but now were almost formless echoes of their past. Among the ruins, he came upon a strange sight: a rusty metal sign with the word Miragem (“Mirage”) written upon it. For Kai Henda, the word became an inspiration to consider how certain cities have sprung seemingly out of nowhere, gleaming citadels often surrounded by emptiness. As he noted in a 2017 interview:
I was really fascinated, maybe in a negative way, by the ability to build a city in the middle of the desert, but at the same time have a desert inside the city. Dubai was where I could tie together two of my passions – the desert and architecture. At the same time, it was revolting. It makes you feel angry to see how we can be so far away from the needs of the majority of people, just spending money and resources to achieve someone’s dream. Dubai had a lot of influence on what has been built in Luanda, and in other cities in Africa. Some people call it “Dubaization.”
“Dubaization” was first used in 2004 by the architect and writer Yasser Elshetawy, and he explains its origin thus:
The dominance of Dubai during that time, and the proliferation of its megaprojects, made such a connection, however tenuous, very attractive. Yet since then the term itself – Dubaization – has been adapted and used in many discussions, papers and forums. For instance, a recent article discusses the ‘Dubaization of Barbados’ whereby the government is criticized for the development of offshore islands. In a similar vein, an urban forum held in Panama defines Dubaization as ‘the dense construction of high-rise buildings’ in a discussion centering on the proliferation of these developments in Panama City. Energy experts in India decry the ‘Dubaization’ of its cities – equated here with the construction of what they call ‘glass towers’.
Elshetawy adds that, “in some instances, the term goes beyond the incursion of real estate companies and mega-developments to denote certain qualities – and it is here that it acquires a negative dimension.” Kai Henda examines the questions posed by the new architectures of places like Dubai and Luanda in various works, and he is one of the artists featured in a new exhibition spotlighting African artists (A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography) at the Tate Modern in London. One piece by Kia Henda caught my attention as I looked at the works on display online. It is called “Rusty Mirage (The City Skyline),” consisting of eight black and white photographs of architectural skeletons built near the Qasr al-Azraq in the Jordanian desert.
Kia Henda has noted that he based his desert creations on sona (singular: lusona): sand drawings made by the Lunda Tchokwe people (of eastern Angola). The drawings are made by a narrator as he tells a story, as one sona artist explains:
The storyteller starts by making a series of dots, evenly spaced, in a rectangular array. Each drawing has a set number of rows and columns of dots. Once the narrator makes the dots, the drawing can begin. The drawing itself is made up of lines that weave in and out around the dots. The narrator must draw and talk at the same time, without stopping. The listeners follow the storyteller closely, listening and watching as the drawing develops. If the storyteller hesitates, the audience smiles or laughs at the mistake.
The lusona below, for example, is used to tell the story of a leopard who asked a stork for some feathers to line his den. Later, the stork asked the leopard for a piece of his skin. The leopard did as requested and died as a result. The leopard’s sons tried to avenge his death, but the stork escaped. In the drawing, the winding line is made as the storyteller recounts the stork’s tortuous escape through the swamp.
In the sona tradition, the drawings accompany proverbs, fables, games, riddles, and, as above, stories about animals. They both contain and transmit the stories through their shapes and patterns, the fact of which suggests that Kai Henda’s creation is also a story told through its metal lines and forms. Looking at the images and their setting, we can imagine them as mirages that suggest either what was once there and is now gone or what was possible but never realized.
Most of the photographs in the set contain people—builders, occupants, wanderers?—but the first and last do not, suggesting perhaps, the emptiness of that lost city in the desert and of the people who build and occupy the creations that Dubaization makes out of nothing. The starkness of the metallic constructions, moreover, stands in sharp contrast to the emptiness of the sky and the barrenness of the ground below, suggesting that there is nothing human in these kinds of places, merely curious and ephemeral creations that could arise one day and disappear the next.
As I reflected on Kai Henda’s work, I thought of Abdelrahman Munif's novel quintet about the Middle East. The first novel, Cities of Salt (which the author originally wanted to call “Wilderness”), was published in Lebanon in 1984. Set in a fictional state in the 1930s, it begins with a group of American petroleum engineers arriving at Wadi al-Uyon, a desert oasis.
The people of Wadi al-Uyon had before only met the Arab merchants and travelers who crossed their desert. The Americans’ presence worries them, so the patriarch of the oasis asks his ruler, the emir, to exclude the men, but the emir refuses. As the story progresses, the emir’s son succeeds his father and accepts the offers of the Americans to exploit the nation’s great petroleum reserves. Soon, a new city called Harran arises in the desert, divided into two sections: a glamorous one for the Americans (and the local elites) and a shabby one for the workers and poor. In time, the emir becomes isolated, surrounded by sycophants, and oblivious to the lives of his people. The emir’s dream—to be like and live alongside the Americans in a “modern” world—comes true, but the culture that had sustained his desert people for centuries is gone, washed away in a river of oil. As one critic of the novel noted:
Almost overnight, Harran becomes a supercity, overwhelming the desert. Ports are dug, roads are carved, a pipeline laid. The emir, thanks to his American friends, commissions the construction of a home as fine as the ones the Americans themselves live in. Seeing his new home for the first time, he slaps its walls with his palms to confirm its sturdiness, in the same way we kick the tires of a used car we are inspecting. The Bedouin laborers, earning more money than they ever dreamed possible, are told to sell their camels, which they do reluctantly. The last link to the freedom they knew as desert wanderers is gone. Some clever men, such as Ibn Rashed, grow rich by forging partnerships, sometimes with the Americans, sometimes with other Arabs. But no one is very happy, and the reader suspects that money and the oil company have become forces as powerful as God.
In Cities of Salt, the emir and his followers often come across as confused, distraught, or overcome by the world in which the Americans live. One passage, in which the ruler and his male entourage look through a telescope — a gift of the Americans — at foreigners cavorting naked on a yacht, is emblematic:
Anyone who saw the emir and his deputy taking turns falling prone on the ground and shouting, rubbing their hands and exchanging comments and information would have thought they had lost their senses. Sparks flew from their eyes, which glowed visibly red from lust and contact with the telescope; their lips were limp and trembled nervously, and the occasional involuntary shouts from one of them spurred on the other, who pleaded, anxiously and pathetically, to let him have his turn quickly so he would not miss the glorious moment.1
The scene of the emir’s opulent degradation contrasts with how most ordinary workers feel about the wealthy foreigners who now control their land:
“From the first day they came and set their stinking feet in Harran, we’ve been no better than camel piss. Every day it’s gotten worse,” said Ibn Naffeh, pointing to the American compound. “I told you, I told every one of you, the Americans are the disease, they’re the root of the problem, and what’s happened now is nothing compared to what they have in store for us. Someday you’ll say, ‘God rest your soul Abu Othman, everything you said is true.’”
Unusually for a novelist, Munif came to his writing career with a Ph.D. in oil economics from the University of Belgrade and several years’ experience working as a director for the Syrian Oil Company.2 His deep industry knowledge does not overwhelm the novel; rather, it lies in the background, showing itself not in specific details of “realism” but in the wider understating of his story. So compelling was Munif’s criticism of the oil-rich nations of the Middle East that several Arab countries censured Cities of Salt, a book still banned in Saudi Arabia, his father’s native land.
Munif was asked to explain the first novel’s title, and he said: “‘Cities of salt’ means cities that offer no sustainable existence. When the waters come in, the first waves will dissolve the salt and reduce these great glass cities to dust.” Munif wrote about the Middle East, and Kiluanji Kai Henda’s African art reiterates the depth of meaning contained in the title of Munif’s work, for there are cities of salt all over the world, edifices that seem strong and eternal but are, beneath the surface, only mirages that will disappear “when the waters come.” While these artists comment on the physical world, I believe there are cities of salt that exist on an abstract level, wherever societies or individuals create grand narratives built on deserts of lies: from racial theories used to justify genocide to denials of the essential common nature of all human beings for political gain. People also build cities of salt in their own minds—imaginary structures that fill their mental landscapes to justify a certain way of life or to cope with life’s disappointments.
I first read Munif’s novels several years ago, but they have stayed with me. I suspect Kai Henda’s skeletal creations will also linger in my mind: modern symbols of worlds—physical, political, psychological—that appear, sometimes only for a moment, and then are swept away into nothing by the sands of time.3
Abdulrahman Munif, Cities of Salt, Trans. Peter Theroux (Vintage International Edition, 1989).
The son of a Saudi Arabian father, and an Iraqi mother, Mounif was born in Jordan in 1933 and moved in 1952 to study law in Iraq. He was expelled from the country in 1955 for his political activities. From Baghdad, Mounif moved to Cairo, where he continued his critiques of the area’s regimes, which led Saudi Arabia to revoke his citizenship in 1963. He moved to Lebanon, where he began his writing career. An opponent of both the Gulf wars, he was writing a book on Iraq when he died in 2004.