Shadow of the Sun: Inside the nightmare of Kuwait's sun-trapped migrant workers

Kuwait and other Gulf countries conjure a tantalizing image of opulence and grandeur in the global mind. A country famous for its oil reserves and conservative Muslim identity, it is a vision in which city, desert, modernity, and tradition have fused.

Despite being opined as a gem in the Middle East offering architectural marvels and redolent dishes, the treatment of its migrant worker population is a discomfiting story that eclipses this mirage of brilliance that Kuwait has exhibited to the world.

Though a fictional novel, Shadows of the Sun, Taleb Alrefai’s debut novel is a harrowing testament to this reality. It documents the plight of Helmy, a young and destitute Egyptian man.

"Shadows Of The Sun is written with tact, candour, and humour that will bewitch the reader. The knowledge that Helmy’s narrative reflects Alrefai’s experiences makes the novel a harrowing testimony of Kuwait’s injustice against its foreign residents"

Although he is a highly qualified teacher with a bachelor's degree in the Arabic language, he lives paycheck to paycheck in a small room of his parent's home with his wife, Saniya, and toddler, Saad. His wife suggests that he go to Kuwait to earn more money.

Thus, inebriated by her embellished stories of a luxurious Kuwait and propelled by his impoverished and futile state, he makes a desperate decision to relocate to the Gulf country for some time.

However, his tale will reveal that the riches of Kuwait are not easily attained and are tainted by debauchery.

In his preface, Alrefai says, “Almost a historical document on my life and the lives of the workers with whom I lived for fifteen years, Shadow of the Sun presents a human landscape set in and reflecting Kuwait.”

And so Helmy’s story echoes Alrefai’s fifteen years of working in a powerful Kuwaiti construction company. A poignant and novelized version of his autobiography, this is a tale of the psychological despair wrought by systemic corruption.

Helmy is a complex and wretched man. Despite his higher education and passion for knowledge, his qualifications as an Arabic teacher leave him with a meagre salary, which he says “vanishes by the end of the first week,  then I'm in debt for the rest of the month."

He marries his wife, Saniya, under societal pressure at a young age without a secure financial status. His scanty income can not afford his family a private residence, new clothes for his young wife, or toys for his son. This leaves them at the mercy of his tyrannical father and the histrionics of his mother, who wages daily battles with her daughter-in-law.

The volatile and oppressive environment of their one-room accommodation and poverty result in a mental catastrophe for Helmy.

While there is genuine affection for his wife, he has a clandestine affair with Nema, the youthful wife of Saniya’s decrepit uncle, Hajj Metwally. Ironically, it is Metwally who helps him secure his visa to Kuwait. Leaving behind his mistress, forlorn wife, and wide-eyed child, he finds himself in a reverie of boundless dinars and ease.

But his life in Kuwait is an insidious cycle of securing work permits, civil IDs, bureaucratic fees, and months of unemployment.

With the help of his cousins, Dessouki and Sebai, he eventually secured a position at The Abu Ajjaj General Trading and Construction Company.

He encounters a myriad of players in this company who are involved in a rapacious paradigm of fraud and intimidation. Mr. Rajai, Taj, Sheikh Hassan, Mr. Morsi, and Mr. Bakri shatter his dreams of a new life silently and surreptitiously. He is met with fees upon fees to secure a job and earn a living, misappropriated wages, humiliating work conditions, and devastating isolation without his family.

He also becomes intimately acquainted with other migrant workers from around the globe, namely, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Egypt, all with strikingly parallel accounts and fates. With an artistic ingenuity, Alrefai threads himself as a character into Helmy’s story.

Introduced as an ominous and enigmatic man who seems to know more about Helmy’s destiny than he does himself, it is later revealed that he is a Project Manager at the construction company employing Helmy. Taleb Alrefai becomes a phantasmagoric figure, haunting him throughout the novel.

"People only abandon the comforts of their homelands and families under profound despair. His penury nearly pushes him onto the margins of society, invading the peace of his home and consciousness. But the poverty gap between rich and poor countries seems impossible to breach"

Helmy is a caricature representing the quandary of thousands of stateless citizens in Kuwait. Migrant workers comprise two-thirds of the country’s population.

They remain bound to the unjust kafala system, which links their visas to their employers and requires employer consent to switch jobs or leave employment. Moreover, they remain vulnerable to multiple forms of abuse with limited and convoluted avenues for redress.

In the novel, we witness the direct impacts of the Kafala system as Helmy can not escape his undignified labour at the Abu Ajajj Company. He is placed in Khaitan, an arid and desolate part of Kuwait that houses single men and labourers, partitioned from the wealthy Kuwaitis.

Working long hours under the blistering and unforgiving desert sun, fatigue and despair become the standard. Helmy notes that workers sacrifice their lives to work overtime and increase their insufficient wages. It was “a hellish wheel with no mercy." 

Throughout his time in Kuwait, he wandered between the nebulous limbo of unemployment, debt, and demeaning work. Alrefai deftly illustrates Helmy’s spiral.

He becomes consumed with his father’s foreboding proclamation that he will find nothing in Kuwait, and a line from an Iraqi poem, “What have you made of yourself?” obstinately recurs in his ruminations. He muses that “Poverty was more bitter in estrangement.” 

All the while, Alrefai, the project manager, perplexes him with a contradicting, benevolent, and curt demeanour. We witness the degradation of destitution and the conditions imposed on workers in Kuwait by a Machiavellian system that seeks to perpetuate a class system saturated with humiliation and falsehoods.

People only abandon the comforts of their homelands and families under profound despair. His penury nearly pushes him onto the margins of society, invading the peace of his home and consciousness. But the poverty gap between rich and poor countries seems impossible to breach.

Shadows Of The Sun is written with tact, candour, and humour that will bewitch the reader. The knowledge that Helmy’s narrative reflects Alrefai’s experiences makes the novel a harrowing testimony of Kuwait’s injustice against its foreign residents.

When people can not make ends meet and grow weary of watching others enjoy their lives, they feel captive to the world.

Those who can ameliorate their positions, instead, only solidify their situation. Alrefai reminds the silent global audience that there are thousands of Helmys in Kuwait and beyond who continue to contend with avaricious forces.

Their anguish must be given a voice that emphatically resounds. It must be allowed to transcend the gluttony and predatory policies of the Kuwaiti government, which have led the pursuit of livelihood to death for too many.

Noshin Bokth has over six years of experience as a freelance writer. She has covered a wide range of topics and issues including the implications of the Trump administration on Muslims, the Black Lives Matter movement, travel reviews, book reviews, and op-eds. She is the former Editor in Chief of Ramadan Legacy and the former North American Regional Editor of the Muslim Vibe

Follow her on Twitter: @BokthNoshin