Cultural Bereavement in Older Emirati Generations

What is cultural bereavement, and why do older Emirati generations struggle with it when they haven’t moved from their home country?

Cultural Bereavement is explained as the “loss of social structures, cultural values, identity, and an almost unnatural attachment to the past” that comes with migration. The influx of people who came into the UAE for job opportunities found a thriving culture in the harsh conditions of the Arabian Peninsula. Despite the lack of sophisticated health care, infrastructure, and education, being an Emirati was deeply rooted in tribal traditions and  Islamic practices, which often shared through storytelling, poetry, and art. The pre-oil culture placed importance on how you treat your neighbors, how women adorn themselves and practice modesty, and how men take care of their families.

“If incomes are obtained by strength and not Allah’s will,
then no lion would ever starve, whilst dogs are full.”
(Ibn Daher, Ras Al Khaimah, 17^th century)

Is the rapid development to blame for the disparity between the generations? Parents may usually lament over how the younger generation is more liberal and modern for their taste, but the case for the UAE is a little different. We have not moved to another country, but the transformation of the surroundings have made the older generation feel alienated and homesick in their own homeland.

The discovery of oil has brought in a lot of positive change, with sophisticated healthcare and education. Before this, the situation was dire, especially with the high infant mortality. My maternal grandmother lost seven of her fourteen children, three during infancy and four at birth. She almost passed away giving birth to still-born twins. While her story is tragic, it did not stand out from the norm, when traditional remedies would fail to help and had sometimes proved to be lethal.

Susan Hillyard, in her book Before Oil, a personal memoir of Abu Dhabi 1954-1958, said, “All of them were illiterate. They hadn’t seen a picture book and couldn’t translate three-dimensional shapes into two-dimensional ones.” I am wary of this kind of generalization as both my grandmothers were literate and could read quite well, although one of them mainly read the Quran while the other mostly found joy in Arabic gossip magazines, crossword puzzles and during her later years Sudoku (sudooki as she called it, may she rest in peace).

After speaking to members of the society to describe what they miss, I have found that they never talk ill about the past, despite the hardships of their pasts, and fondly remember simpler times. When the center of their universe was the family, relatives, religion, and tribal connectivity. When playtime was running barefoot in the freej (neighborhood) and getting home by Maghreb prayers was the only childhood playtime rule. They speak of neighbors mingling every day, sharing meals, gossip, and chores. They remember sleeping on the roof when it was too warm to sleep indoors, their children celebrating Hag Al Leila by dressing up and going door to door and collecting sweets.

What they are going through is a yearning for the life that was simpler and easier to control. In the cultural bereavement here, the migration is historical rather than geographical. The past has been romanticized to block undesirable circumstances. The familiarity they felt with an Emirati-majority population, that shared traditions and customs, faded away as the community became more diverse and globalized.

This has resulted in a level of disassociation and resistance towards accommodating to such rapid development in a short time. While the majority did get on the fast track smoothly, there is still a gap that is difficult to bridge because some changes were borrowed from modern practices, causing an element of fear and suspicion.

The UAE has devoted a lot of attention to cultural preservation through its education system, legislation, employment regulations, and the most prominently through art, using murals on buildings, tunnels, and architectural fabric. But are we still sliding into cultural dilution? Or will we find a way to preserve what we are (or were) while catapulting into the future? Will being an Emirati change in terms of terminology?

I would like to borrow from Amin Maalouf’s book “On Identity”:

“For the rest of the world’s inhabitants, all those born in the failed cultures, openness to change and modernity presents itself differently. For the Chinese, Africans, Japanese, Indians…modernization has constantly meant the abandoning of part of themselves. Even though it has sometimes been embraced with enthusiasm, it has never been adopted without a certain bitterness, without a feeling of humiliation and defection. Without piercing doubt about the dangers of assimilation. Without profound identity crisis.”

Although Maalouf speaks as a migrant, whereas Emiratis have not migrated, there are a lot over overlapping factors. For example, the mother tongue taking second place to the extent that initiatives have had to be introduced to encourage Emirati children to speak Arabic with more fluency, despite them living in their own lands.

So this feeling of bereavement that the older generation feels is not unfounded, nor is it ‘being backward’ or retaining a complex. It is a grieving process that has given rise to resistance to change. We need to be more mindful and understanding about what circumstances they grew up in and how different their lives used to be. Just as we hope for them to understand our way of life, we must reciprocate and try to sympathize with their cultural bereavement.