As I became familiar with my job and the inner workings of the household, I worked on my “traditional” Himba clothing, usually at night when I was supposed to be off duty. Madam Dua supplied me with a faux-fur blanket with a leatherlike backing that was entirely inadequate for the task; each time I cut off a strip, the fur came undone from the leather, requiring hours of sewing and gluing each night. The old lady oversaw the entire project, carefully inspecting my work each week. I could not help but notice that it was similar to the costume Ming had made me wear in the DRC, particularly in terms of the general principle that less was more. It felt like I was making lingerie more than anything else, which supported my belief that there was a man behind Madam Dua’s guiding hand.
9
MY DAILY ROUTINE in the Kassab household continued virtually unchanged for the next couple of weeks. Each day, I awoke to clean the same things that I had cleaned the day before. The things I cleaned were already so clean that it was impossible to tell the difference. The only things that were not clean were those that some family member had touched. I could tell where each individual had been by the little messes they left scattered about the house. In reality, that is all I did—follow each member of the family around the house and clean up after them. It was amazing, I thought, that these people lived their lives knowing that every piece of food they dropped on the floor, every tissue they discarded, every object they moved or touched, and every smudge mark or blemish they left in their wake during the course of the day would be cleaned, removed, or restored to its original state of perfection by somebody else, usually within the hour. It was like tracking a herd of elephants by the piles of shit they left behind as they crossed an otherwise featureless desert plain, except I had to pick up each pile of shit as I went along, and I had to do it every day and for no real reason at all. I joked about this to Almaz one day, who laughed and said, “Maybe that is what your elephant dreams mean. They have led you here so that you can be an elephant tracker.” But I did not think so.
Even so, I quickly became an expert on the movements of the Kassab family and their servants. Like elephants, everyone wandered the house and occupied its spaces in relation to how much power and authority they wielded. Dr. Kassab and his youngest son moved about like solitary bulls, roaming with total impunity and going wherever they pleased. Their movements were the most random and hardest to predict, which sometimes made it difficult for the servants. Fortunately, the father and son were rarely home. The daily routines of Madam Kassab and her daughters were much more likely to revolve around the house. But they maintained their own internal pecking order that determined where and when they moved about. And even Madam Kassab—like an old cow—gave way when the bulls were around, either remaining in the kitchen when her husband was home or shadowing him in a deferential manner, ready to serve. The servants, of course, were silent apparitions, hovering or flittering about like shadows, tangible only when called upon.
I grew to despise Madam Dua with each passing day. Beyond the verbal abuse and the periodic slapping and kicking, the old lady held some unusual ideas about the health and well-being of the servants, ideas that might better be defined as a special form of torture. Most of her remedies were based on the application of heat to address injuries, aches and pains, or even something Madam Dua described as “temperature imbalances,” which she associated with a lack of concentration or general apathy leading to poor work performance. Any servant suffering from the latter would be made to sit in the baking sun in the late afternoon, sometimes for an hour or more, which in Dubai was pushing the limits of what most humans could endure. Madam Dua prescribed this treatment in a seemingly random manner and regardless of whether the individual had actually complained of anything or not. Of course, everybody quickly learned not to complain. But the old lady was the ultimate authority on the matter, and the fact that everything hinged on work performance made it difficult to believe that her diagnoses had anything to do with health. I was subjected to the treatment several times within the first two weeks of my arrival. Each episode made my head throb until I thought it would burst, and one time I vomited. Fortunately, as I learned to do my job to the old lady’s satisfaction, I seemed to build up my immunity to her so-called temperature imbalances and was no longer subjected to the treatment.
But of all Madam Dua’s therapeutic measures, the one most feared among the servants involved something called wasm, which she claimed was an ancient form of medicine among the desert-dwelling Bedouin tribes of the region. She practiced wasm on any servant who experienced an injury or complained of sore muscles, achy joints, abdominal pains, or anything else that seemed localized or acute. Again, the servants learned not to complain and tried to hide their injuries or any outward signs of distress, but the old lady had a keen eye and was always on the lookout for abnormalities or physical irregularities. Sometimes she simply decided that a particular individual was in need of wasm.
The procedure was simple: Three or four small iron rods were heated in a coal burner until they glowed red-hot. As the rods were heating, Madam Dua had the patient lie down and expose the injured or aching area. Taking a marker pen, she carefully drew a series of symbols on the patient’s skin. The symbols held a mysterious meaning only she knew, but it was clear that each was associated with a specific condition or part of the body. Symbols included a combination of dots, plus signs, x’s, circles, triangles, lines, and other things. The only thing servants could be certain of was that more symbols equaled more pain, since the markings essentially served as templates for the application of the iron rods. When they were sufficiently heated, Madam Dua pressed the rods against the person’s skin, using the symbols as a guide, explaining how the procedure increased blood flow to the area and stimulated movement. Nobody knew what to make of the old lady’s wasm treatment; the only thing it seemed to do was cause excruciating pain and extensive blistering. I noticed that Madam Dua seemed to take a bizarre pleasure from doling out the treatment; her weathered face twisted into a slanted grin and her eyes gleamed with delight as her patients screamed and writhed beneath her.
In addition to avoiding wasm and other forms of abuse from Madam Dua, I learned different ways to resist my captors. And that is how I always thought of them—as captors, not as employers or managers or sponsors. To me, the Kassab family was no different than the SPLA soldiers in South Sudan. As far as I was concerned, I was still a hostage. But now I was determined to do as little as possible to help those who had taken my freedom. I provided Madam Dua with few details about my personal life, despite the old lady’s best efforts to find out more. I even began a misinformation campaign of sorts, telling her that I was actually an orphan and providing a long and totally fictitious account of how I was really from the Vambo tribe rather than the Himba, and that it only seemed like I was Himba because of traditional inheritance and adoption laws. I explained how my adopted Himba parents really did not care for me and thought of me as little more than a goat to be traded once I had reached a certain age. “That is why I am even here now,” I explained, “because they never cared about me and were very happy to be rid of me.” On occasion, I even managed to work up some tears, begging Madam Dua to adopt me so I could stay “as a special member of the family forever.” I knew the entire notion was absurd, but I took great pleasure in seeing the look of confusion on the old lady’s face. I also wanted to undermine any strategy to blackmail me by sending shameful photos to my parents. I kept my adoption story alive by alluding to it every now and then, mostly in an indirect manner so as not to overplay my hand.
I also performed as little work around the house as possible, an act of resistance made easier by the fact that the place was generally spotless anyway. I even worked out a series of sounds with Almaz—ranging from coughs and sneezes to banging our mops on the floor—to warn each other when a particular person was approaching. When nobody was around, we simply stopped working altogether. We also developed a method of stealing food from the kitchen that w
ent completely undetected by Madam Dua and others. With the assistance of the Pakistani gardener, we accumulated a small stash of items that we hid behind some loose bricks in the gardener’s shack. I felt a kind of strength in doing things like this; it made me feel like I was more than just a poor, suffering girl. With each act, I was placing a pebble on a pile that was becoming bigger and bigger. Eventually, pebbles would become rocks, rocks would become boulders, and the pile would become a mountain. This slow accumulation of effort and movement, this creation of something out of nothing, seemed to me to have a much stronger connection with my elephant dreams than anything else.
I knew that I was having an influence on Almaz too, so much so that my friend was beginning to reconsider her own situation. “Maybe we can open up a shop together in Addis Ababa,” she told me one day. “We can have a boutique and sell clothes, and I can be together with my children again. You can start a new life in Ethiopia. It would be nice, yes? To be friends and business partners?” I smiled and agreed that it would be nice.
As we grew closer, Almaz confided in me and told me more about herself and how she had ended up in Dubai. As it turned out, her original story about being recruited by the Kassab family and placed directly in their home upon arrival was not exactly the truth. She said she was sorry for misleading me but confessed to being ashamed of what had actually happened. “We are friends now,” she said, grasping my hands. “Friends are honest with each other.”
Almaz admitted that she never had a husband who died in a car crash. In reality, she had never been married. While she did have two children to support in Ethiopia, they were from different men who never provided assistance and had long since been out of the picture. She had tried for some time to find a decent job in her own country but with no luck. Finally, her best friend had told her about a recruitment agency in Addis Ababa that was looking for women to work in a five-star hotel in Dubai. At the time, Almaz had never even heard of Dubai, but the job paid well and promised many benefits, and the photos of the hotel were the most beautiful she had ever seen. Of course, the driving force behind her decision was her children, and like every mother she wanted them to have the life that she could never have. So in the end it was an easy decision for her. Before she knew it, she had completed the orientation course, signed a contract, and was on a flight to Dubai with a dozen other women.
Things did, in fact, go badly for Almaz when she arrived at the airport in Dubai. As she had told me earlier, her group was immediately whisked away to a back room, where several men and a woman took their passports and identity documents. The woman strip-searched them and took everything they had—money, cell phones, anything important. Those who protested were immediately shouted down and threatened with jail. It was an overwhelming ordeal, especially for a group of women who had never been out of Ethiopia before and had just experienced their first plane trip. Like Almaz, every woman was in a desperate situation back home: struggling to support their children or other dependents, abandoned by their husbands or boyfriends, and virtually destitute. They huddled together against the back wall of the tiny room, stunned into silence by everything that was going on around them. When they were told to sign new contracts, written entirely in Arabic, they signed.
It was at this point that the truth of what happened to Almaz completely diverged from what she had told me before. Instead of being sent directly to the Kassab household or, for that matter, to a luxury five-star hotel, she was taken to a dingy nightclub and put to work as a “server,” a meager euphemism in Dubai for a sex worker. Her manager was a rough, overbearing Iranian man who raped her repeatedly during the first couple of weeks. He told her it was a way to “break her in.” But it was also a means of shaming her because he knew that, as a defiled woman, Almaz would be left with few if any options beyond sex work, which made her less likely to run away or return home. In fact, and as Almaz quickly learned, “breaking in” the new women was a common practice, not only at that particular place but also at many of Dubai’s most popular nightclubs. Despite her experience, Almaz did try to run away in the beginning, but she was immediately caught and thrown in jail. The police called her manager, who came down and severely beat her right there in the cell as two policemen stood by and watched.
As Almaz told her story, she described the realities of working in one of Dubai’s most notorious nightclubs. Each night, an endless parade of drunk tourists and businessmen from around the world appraised her in the cold, fierce manner of men without burden or expectation. When they purchased her, they demanded the same things, did the same things, threw the same useless words at her day after day, night after night, until she learned to anticipate everything they said or did and respond automatically. Many had strange fantasies and desires, but Almaz would not go into detail about those, telling me only that she learned to anticipate and finesse those as well.
One of her most disturbing memories from that time involved men who requested very young girls. In most cases, these men specifically wanted the girl to be a virgin. The women referred to these men as “cherry poppers”; they made up a surprisingly large portion of the overall clientele, despite the fact that sex with a virgin was an extremely expensive service because the inventory had to be replenished constantly. If the man was drunk or less discerning, the manager simply offered him any girl and claimed she was a virgin. In fact, several girls, all of whom were seasoned veterans at acting afraid and uncertain, were kept on hand for just such occasions.
Almaz often wondered aloud at how, after a while, a person could become used to almost anything. “It became a job like any other job,” she once told me. “I was making a lot of money, more than I could ever imagine making in my life. And I was able to send much of it back home to my children.” She would have made even more, she explained, but the recruitment agency took its cut, which included a “finder’s fee” for the cost of the plane ticket to Dubai and room and board at the nightclub. She was never quite certain of the remaining balance on her debt; she was told only that it would take years to pay off. Sometimes she wondered if her best friend back in Addis Ababa, the one who had told her about the job in the first place, had been paid for recruiting her, and how much she actually knew about the life she was sending Almaz to. “Such things can make you crazy with doubt,” she once told me. I understood exactly what she meant.
Almaz also talked about the role of roving “agents” in Dubai’s nightclub scene. These were individuals who worked on behalf of a particular client—maybe another nightclub or a wealthy individual—by actively “hunting” for women to come work for them. When agents passed through their club, Almaz told me, the women were made to line up in front of them so they could take photos to pass along to their clients. If their clients liked what they saw, they bought out the woman’s debt, and her contract and all of her identity documents were transferred to them. Almaz told me how these lineups resembled auctions, where multiple agents bid on a particular girl, shouting over one another while taking directions from their clients over the phone. Sometimes agents took the girls in the back. “For a test drive,” Almaz explained.
Almaz herself was selected by an agent about six months into her job at the nightclub. The agent worked for Dr. Kassab’s eldest son—a man all the girls referred to as the Jackal—and just like that she was transferred to the Kassab household to work as a maid. Initially, she thought it strange that someone would hire a maid from a nightclub, but she quickly discovered that there were other job responsibilities. Whenever he was in Dubai, the Jackal hosted a series of parties, or what Almaz and all the women associated with these parties referred to as “special events.” The guests, as Almaz described them, were all “big men”—businessmen, politicians, United Nations officials—men of power and influence. Many were white men from the United States and Europe. Special events were lavish, well-catered affairs that usually ran over the course of an entire weekend. Some were held in massive tents in the middle of the desert. The women were there to serve
and pleasure the men in every possible manner. The Jackal liked to brag that his “harem” included women from around the world and that he personally selected each one for her exotic beauty and because she represented a particular country or region. In between special events, many of the women worked, like Almaz, as domestic servants in various households.
“It is not so bad,” Almaz told me. “I do not make as much money as when I worked at the nightclub, but I do not have to fuck as much for a living. And the men are still the same. It makes no difference if they are rich and powerful; it is the same hungry look in their eyes.” She shrugged her shoulders. “And so that is how it works here. And it is what you should expect now that the Jackal will be returning home. It is why you are here.”
* * *
One evening, Almaz approached me and told me that we would be taking a break from our regular duties the following day. The eldest son—the Jackal—was returning from an extended business trip in several days, and we were to clean his apartment and prepare it for his return. I was glad for the break and eager to get a sense of Dubai and the general surroundings, especially since I had not once stepped off the property since arriving over a month earlier. My life had already become a dreary, lifeless existence, and I yearned to find out more about the world around me. Toward that end, I asked Almaz about the eldest son, but she offered few details. In fact, she seemed strangely quiet.
I Am Not Your Slave Page 14
