He has been here since he was 16.

Ishaq Ibrahim, owner of Abu Amer Furnishings at Mina Zayed in Abu Dhabi, has been at his shop at the port for 30 years. He is 46 years old, which means he has been at the Mina since he was 16.

30 years is longer than I have been alive.

On November 15th this year, it was announced that the abandoned Mina Plaza towers, sitting square across the Mina’s plant souk, would be demolished in 12 days. There was a plan: to redevelop the area, restructuring the fish and plant and vegetable souks as we know them, to achieve greater economic prosperity. The news blazed across social media like a series of little wildfires. Someone tagged me in a Facebook post, full of angry and crying emojis. People claimed unfair gentrification and loss of history and cultural heritage.

But Abu Dhabi was moving on. It was going to be a messy breakup.

Mina Plaza towers before demolition

I am in my early 20s. I have been in the UAE for nearly five years. My first memory of Mina Zayed is walking past fruit shops and date vendors in a black-and-white striped dress and feeling so stared at that I wanted to cry. Men called out to me, asking for my Whatsapp details, and my face burned. I was an angry-crying emoji. I ended up publishing a poem about it in which I likened women walking in the street to being sized up like a fish for sale in the port’s souk.

That was how my own relationship with the space began. My initial feelings of discomfort stretched and expanded with the accumulation of memory. I have other images and feelings attached to the port now: saccharine heaps of plums and clementines sitting on newspaper sheets like a film scene. A long conversation about literary theory over Chips Oman sandwiches at the place that used to be called Opal (now it’s Kuttyes Restaurant). My roommate and I being the only women in that room, nervously sipping karak while men mopped up curry from steel plates around us, scraping back plastic chairs and yelling across the room to each other. Buying an orchid plant at the start of every new semester to inaugurate my new dorm room, hauling it back awkwardly in the taxi, trailing soil beneath the seats. I remembered going on a date with a boy who was trying to win me back at the infamous rocks lining the port’s shore, with its deceptively smooth waters that could supposedly lead us to Iran. Marveling at the automatic street lights, blinking on and off intermittently like a relationship, on the way back home. I remember donning kitten heels and perfume to the art events at Warehouse 421, an early injection of Abu Dhabi’s modern cultural ambitions into rows of old warehouses that once sold furniture to residents. The Mina, in all its shades and changes, slowly absorbed itself into the colors of my own short but nascent life in this country.

When UAE residents first heard about the Mina Plaza demolition, so many people were upset, including me. I spent, like many others, the next few days visiting different areas of the port, talking to vendors, taking photos, having a feast of fish for dinner, attempting to document what I thought would soon disappear and decay like a stepped-on cigarette during the stampede for progress. Initial alarm at all the redevelopment news would, however, diffuse a bit; in a few days, it was announced that the shops would remain, still undergoing some kind of vague redevelopment plan, but intact.

I’m not the first person to write about or photograph Mina Port. NYU Abu Dhabi’s news publication The Gazelle has published several articles on it over the years, covering all sorts of topics ranging from the dwindling fishermen community to the politics of taste to the recent announcement of the redevelopment. Photo essays from rising and established photographers alike have been featured in The National and other publications. I spent time as an editor of the arts and humanities magazine Airport Road at NYU Abu Dhabi sifting through many photo submissions offering portraits from the port.

I remember one editorial meeting where we were discussing one of these submissions: a picture of a South Asian plant vendor wearing a traditional kurta, standing by a flowerpot in his shop. The picture was undoubtedly beautiful, but it made me wonder, Why was it taken?

We don’t typically walk into banks or the Carrefour supermarket or the Starbucks down the road and take pictures of those spaces or portraits of the people who work there. What draws so many of us to Mina? Why do we care so immensely? If the papers were to announce that Yas Mall or Abu Dhabi Mall were to be completely restructured within the next week, I’m sure there wouldn’t be as much of the outrage and confusion and frustration, even though such an event would inevitably result in its own shifts of employment and displacement for various businesses and employees.

In our discussion of the picture of that man next to the flowerpot, I asked my peers several questions. Was this taken because this is what makes the UAE exotic: the brown men, the workers, the old and “dingy” spaces? Are we just drawn to these kinds of scenes and people as artists because of their aesthetic appeal to the economic structures of how art is seen and circulated both here and in other countries?

Poverty porn. Orientalism. The man in that photograph could be my uncle from Delhi, stepping out into his garden after lunch. Why his photo and not a photo of a British expat sitting down to brunch instead? Why all these images of “migrant workers” and not casual families at their weekend barbecue or some newly-minted startup employees smoking outside glass offices with their briefcases?

Lukman

Recently, I was struck by a new article in The National showcasing a photography project by Alex Atack that portrayed “decades of regular family life in [the] UAE.” The word “regular” is what stuck out to me, like a popcorn kernel caught between my teeth. What did “regular” mean for, and in, this country?

Atack’s project, titled Unsentimental City, consisted of old photographs documenting different families’ time spent in Dubai from 1983 up until last year. “Maybe stories about Dubai get told in one of two ways, which is the seedy underbelly of Dubai, or the Ferraris and the seven-star hotels,” says Atack. “There’s never [stories about] any normal people who lived there for 30 years and who gave most of their lives to this place and made all of their memories there and made their home there and brought their kids up there. It’s never really portrayed as this kind of place, right?”

Atack hits the nail on the head. Dubai, and the UAE in general, suffers from being visually represented in an unfortunate binary. On one hand, there are the glitzy, tourist-friendly images: Burj Khalifa, oil money, sheikhs, lavish beaches, fancy hotels, gold, Ferraris, giant shopping malls, pet cheetahs. Then, on the other hand, there are grittier portraits of the underclass, as if to serve as a disturbing palate cleanser in contrast to the artificiality, the more manufactured images of luxury: grimy cafeterias, construction workers, immigrants serving tea and cutting cloth, half-built or abandoned buildings, mammoth-like cranes, and overflowing trash cans dribbling discarded toilets and mattresses.

We see this place with only two sets of eyes–a playground for the wealthy, whose cogs and pulleys are the bodies of the foreign and poor. But this dichotomy is incomplete, and thus, untrue.

I sat down and asked myself: why was my first impulse to go and photograph the Mina and its people when I heard it would be changed so irrevocably soon? I wanted to believe that this impulse was not entirely selfish, that as a journalist and photographer, it fell beyond just preying on the latest “scoop” like a shutter-happy vulture. And I do believe that it does, even if that selfishness is still part of it. When I went home and looked through the photos and talked about the experience with my friends, a more solid creative and ethical purpose began to gain firmness: I wanted to intervene and disrupt the binary.

I remembered the first photographer whose work pushed me to pick up a camera: Yasser Alwan. An Iraqi-American who took documentary street portraits of people belonging to Cairo’s working class. I had written a paper on him at university, arguing how his photos, all individual black and white portraits, strayed from depicting their subjects engaged only in the act of labor, so as not to solely define them as icons of poverty or labor, or as mere tools in a capitalist system. While Alwan’s photos didn’t restrain from showing the frequent poverty of their subjects, through ragged clothes or shabby surroundings, they chose to focus and linger instead on their subjects’ specific individuality, their complex facial expressions and postures. Each is a person and personality in his or her own right, making their lives, albeit in circumstances that may not be of their own choosing.

The notion that working people are simple, that they have simple ideas and emotions, compared to the complexity of the middle classes, is a prejudice with five millennia of class society behind it. But Alwan’s interest in the underrepresented lower working class rises above Marxist cliché because it is rooted in the specific, in individual people within that class, while simultaneously charged with a sparkling artistic intellect. It is the sophisticated game of tightrope played between art, political intervention, and a kind of archiving or social survey that makes his images so startling and stunning. And also, exactly what I wanted to aim at myself.

I didn’t understand how difficult and important such an endeavor could be until I started photographing in the UAE myself and talking to other artists based here, like my friend Myriam, whose GIFs populate this essay. Myriam grew up in Abu Dhabi, and her British-Algerian family has been here for decades. There are thousands of people like them, “regular” people, like Alex Atack and his own family, whose lives and identities have been indelibly impacted by their time in the UAE, whose memories will be stitched with the sanded down colors of Hamdan Street and Electra Street and long lacing highways between islands, forever. These people also include those like Ishaq Ibrahim, who has been at the Mina for 30 long years. Where do they belong in the image we have of this country? Those that don’t hold the passports, don’t necessarily operate the construction cranes, don’t hold masses of wealth, but whose memories, millions by the number, keep roots in this nation and its cities, whose identities have become inextricable from here because so much of them was formed in these spaces?

Where are they in the images made of the UAE?

Mudassar

“A city is never just a binary even if it is shown as one. ”

The photos in this essay were all taken within the course of a week, during which Myriam and I visited the Mina together. We spent several hours, however odd and unusual we looked to the people around us, talking to the people working in the plant souk, taking down names and numbers to send their pictures to, laughing and joking around that their bosses would come catch them being “models” for us. The port is a male-dominated place: some men flirted, some were skittish of our modern clothing and cameras and our level of English, but most were kind and amiable and excited to pose and preen in their everyday element amid the hubbub of carting plants to cars and taking orders. They talked blurrily about the redevelopment announcements, expressing vague sentiments about maybe moving their shop to Musaffah or just finding something else to do if things went awry after the demolition. They had been here, making their lives, for years, but they would do what needed to be done to adapt.

Later, I asked myself again: why do we care so much about Mina Zayed? When I look at these photos, remembering the process of taking them, the sun setting like honey that day, peering up at the plaza towers that would fall in a few days, trading Urdu and Hindi jokes with some of the men, legs aching with satisfied fatigue... the answer seems deceptively simple. We care about a place because it matters to its people. Because places and cities are containers of memories, living breathing photo albums, and those experiences and moments shape our identities and who we are. When students at my alma mater NYU Abu Dhabi heard of the redevelopment, they immediately leaned on their memories of the port, tagging friends about buying plants there together as first-year students, or getting karak in the middle of the night, or sitting by the water laughing their worries away. The Mina is one of the first places that NYU Abu Dhabi staff take newly-arrived first years during orientation to acquaint themselves with the city. It is a site that is already threaded into our personal narratives of Abu Dhabi from the first moments we get here.

For long-time residents and those who have grown up here, like Myriam, the weight of memory, and thus care, is heavier. During a bike ride through the warehouses to reach some of the newer coffee shops and juiceries that have cropped up during the early stages of Mina’s redevelopment since June 2019, Myriam tells me that all these warehouses were flourishing stores once, where her and her family came to buy essentials. “There was no IKEA then,” she told me. “You came here because it had everything.” We passed several men living out of trailers who had set up small dinners for themselves outside, tea glasses and cookers jutting out from the trailer on makeshift blanketed tabletops, a tin with toothbrushes by the side, a small cracked dressing mirror tacked on the side of the caravan. We were passing people’s homes, their whole lives. “You know,” Myriam said. “Some people can come here for a short time and make a place like Mina their playground and then lay claim to it, saying we need to remember its stories. Sure, it’s valid that they’re upset they might lose it. But it’s different for people like me. I grew up with Mina. It was part of my childhood.”

Kasim

Imran

Afterwards, over ice cream, Myriam and I discussed our experience. I asked her, “Do you think it’s enough? Even as people in the UAE with privileges ourselves, our social class, our educational background, the luxury to stay without work comfortably for a period of time and be okay–was it truly all right or enough to enter a space like Mina, take pictures, and call it a day?”

“It’s not,” she said, and I nodded. It was exasperating but true. The people showcased in our images may not have the time and access to voice their own memories and thoughts about the Mina, as precious as they may be–but we did, even if our connection to the place comes with a more unwieldy power dynamic.

But the last thing either of us wants to do is appropriate anyone’s narrative of Mina, especially of those who have been working there for ages. The best we can do is offer our own perspective from what is borne from the encounters and experiences we have of the place. We can show and describe what we see, colored by our own identities, and the way we move and live in this city. And we can hope that others add to the chorus, creating space for all sorts of pluralities and narratives of Mina to come to life.

Myriam’s GIFs and my static photos often depict the same person in their “portraits,” but while the subjects are the same, the images are so different from each other. They come from two sets of eyes, two perspectives with their own weight of histories and experiences behind them. I like the slight formal contrast between them too; one set is in movement while the other is still. Moving images–“little cinemas,” as I like to think of them–can provide us with the rhythm of movement in expressions or bodies or surroundings. Meanwhile, in a static photo, the entire figure is stilled, like the effect of a semicolon in a long descriptive passage that lets us pause before moving on.

I like that the difference in our images and our perspectives are so apparent because it points to this larger importance in how we document a place, and that is to cultivate a diverse body of work about it. The greater the pool of varied output and creativity exercised about a single thing, the richer the understanding we can achieve–and the easier it becomes to resist damaging binaries that render whole people’s memories and narratives invisible, skewed, or forgotten.

Perhaps that explains why there is so much work made on the Mina already. Our deep collective care for this space manifests in our impulse to create and record as much about it as we can. Any threat of damage or irreversible change to a site in which thousands of individual and collective memories have been birthed and raised accelerates that urge: we feel we must cling on, and remember–continue to remember–in as many ways as possible, a place that matters to us and the people who animate it and who we share it with.

I don’t doubt that I will continue to keep photographing and writing about Mina Zayed and other potent spaces in Abu Dhabi as I keep living here. I think of art as giving limbs to my thoughts and perceptions, so it may move towards others. My own street photography and portraiture strive to prothestitize, in both written and visual forms, the contradictions, quirks, and complexities that come in contact on the street, whether that’s between spaces, languages, social classes, genders, etc. That is why, like Alwan, I choose to photograph the street. And that is also why I simultaneously choose art as a medium. I’ve always resisted more ethnographic or sociological modes of recording difference in society, eschewing their way of making systems and categories out of people, in favor of individual narratives, of specificity and its creative color. Of course, those modes are important in their own right, but I myself remain interested in approaching documentation and diversity in a more poetic way–sculpting all the scuffs and sundries of daily life and how it is experienced in order to re-complicate them and venture unabashedly into their frictions and ambiguities. And the place where the most disparate elements of a city are thrown together are street spaces, like the Mina, which carry a palimpsest of histories.

“If the streets are a city’s lungs, then its people are the breath.”

Even if we destroy something, when we demolish and redevelop, what was before still lives in the memories of thousands who were once there. Right now, we do not have the power to change such massive tides of gentrification and progress that are steamrolled by powerful, wealthy figures of authority. We cannot stop the casual, minutes-long explosion of structures that took years to build. Even though I can only imagine how much of that painstaking construction process must have once occupied the quotidian lives of thousands of laborers. They may owe years of their memories to the building of that structure which we can now sign away to nothingness in a matter of seconds.

Buildings and spaces and streets and cities come up and crumble, decay and change, every single day–especially in the UAE. You’d think that as residents of this country, which has always been at the forefront of developing its economy and infrastructure at the fastest rate, we would be used to the transience of what it means to live here. The transience, not only of bodies–the expats and immigrants–but also of roads, buildings, shops, souks, movie theaters, markets. You’d think that we would learn to be “unsentimental,” as Atack named his project. Perhaps some succeed. They forget. They move on. They enter new relationships, as things change around them. But many of us are still, hopelessly, very, very sentimental.

We choose to remember, for years and years and years.

References:

Molyneux, John. The Liberty of Appearing: The Photography of Yasser Alwan. Peacock Imprint, 2008. pp. 11-27. Print.

Wigoder, Meir. “Some thoughts about street photography and the everyday”. History of Photography, 25:4, 368-378. Web.

Text and static images by Vamika Sinha. GIFs by Myriam Louise Taleb

Vamika Sinha is a co-founder and editor-in-chief of Postscript Magazine. She is a writer, poet, and photographer from Botswana and India, currently based in the UAE. Vamika holds a BA in Literature and Creative Writing from NYU Abu Dhabi, and her writing and art can be found in The Independent, KGB Bar Literary Journal, The Bangalore Review, and AAWW's Open City, among others. Find her on Instagra: @vamika_s and @foodqueenhoney

Myriam Louise Taleb is a multimedia artist and a recent graduate of the SMFA @ Tufts University. Through her love of performance art and curatorial practices, Myriam has had the opportunity of bringing people together through curating Performance Art Popup Exhibition “Running Late” around the Boston area. When Myriam isn’t sifting through trash (one cat’s trash and another cat’s treasure), she's focused on portraiture, photo-collages, and thinking about the effects that postcolonial identity has had on her upbringing, amongst an array of other thoughts. Follow her on Instagram: @myriaml.tea and @mltphotog

Sentimental City: Caring for Mina Zayed

دخيلك يا عدرا

Two Poems