Of Systemic Violence, Addressivity, and ‘the Oil Encounter’: Representing the Gulf’s Indian Diaspora in Benyamin’s "Goat Days"

This chapter discusses Benyamin’s novel Goat Days, one of the rare books to fictionalize the life of an Indian labourer in Saudi Arabia. If Benyamin’s novel opens some refreshing inroads into the systemic violence pervading migrant management in the Gulf, a key element throughout the text is that it grants “full” subjectivity to its labourer protagonist while complicating an essentializing construction of the Gulf experience in terms of a binary opposition between the “hapless Indian victim” and “the bad Arab victimizer.” Crucially, Benyamin strategically deploys second-person forms of address that alternatively refer to the implied reader, to the protagonist’s Saudi Arabian boss, to Allah, and even to the goats that the main character finds himself in charge of upon his arrival in the Gulf. The narrator recounts the different forms of violence that he endures yet, as this chapter demonstrates by applying M.M. Bakhtin’s notion of addressivity, it is the shifting (and sometimes ambiguous) referentiality of such “you” forms that enables the representation of the psychological violence that he experiences.