The Curse of Crude and Corruption in Abdelrahman Munif’s in Cities of Salt

This paper offers particular insight into the nature of the oil business, as well as the transformations and threats posed by the quest after oil, and that represent a wide variety of eras and major oil-producing regions of the world. It deals with Cities of Salt, the first novel in a quintet written by Abdelrahman Munif. It has been considered as the greatest and the only piece of “oil fiction” written after the Second World War, as Ghosh puts it. This novel is about the discovery, subsequent drilling for oil in the Persian Gulf in the 1930s and its socio-politico-economic consequences. The novel is a detailed attack on the rapacity and avarice of the American oil companies and the corruption of Saudi Arabia as the apotheosis of the crude-state. Munif’s text chronicles the arrival and installation of American oil workers in the oasis village of Wadi al-Uyoun, their disruption of its environmental conditions and basic rhythm of life, and their transformation of the coastal town of Harran into their base of operations and transport depot. The novel culminates with the Arab workers of the oil company rising up in demonstration against the Americans, the emir who was the proxy for the big American oil company. The radical changes wrought in Wadi al-Uyoun by the presence and efforts of the foreign oil company, figured symbolically in the tainting of the water supply of the oasis and the cutting down of its palm trees, alter its basic functional social organization, replacing the tribal model with that of the employees’ relationship to the company and consequently altering the identity of the Wadi’s inhabitants, the Bedouins and leading to their displacement. The paper traces the trajectory of obliteration of the Wadi by the capitalist forces and thereby displacing its indigenous populations.