Diving for Pearls, and a Connection to the Past
It was not like the old days: This time, the ships were smaller, the journey was shorter, the work was easier and these young sailors were surely softer....
But none of that troubled an elderly diver, who watched with approval as a new generation of Kuwaiti men embraced the sea, trimming sails and clapping their hands as they sang the old pearl diver’s songs. For the diver, Khalifa al-Rashid, 74, the young men represented a hope that in a country transformed by oil — into a land of sprawling shopping malls, luxury cars and subsidized lives, where citizenship has long been a ticket to privilege — there was still room for something old and difficult....
The trips also serve another purpose, some observers say. In a nation racked by arguments about who truly belongs, the pearl expeditions celebrate the history of the country’s most prominent families, recalling the days when they were merchants who made their livings from the sea....
It has been decades since Kuwaitis made their living from the sea. The trade, practiced throughout the Persian Gulf, was crippled by the Great Depression, the emergence of cultured pearls from Japan and the discovery of oil.
The divers themselves were probably indentured servants, according to people who have studied the trade, living on money they borrowed from boat captains. They dove to pay their debts, and if they died before repaying the loans, those debts were passed on to their sons or brothers.
“Many people don’t even know about the economy of Kuwait before the oil age,” said Anh Nga Longva, a professor at the University of Bergen, in Norway, who has studied similarities between the economic conditions facing the divers and those facing migrants in Kuwait today....
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But none of that troubled an elderly diver, who watched with approval as a new generation of Kuwaiti men embraced the sea, trimming sails and clapping their hands as they sang the old pearl diver’s songs. For the diver, Khalifa al-Rashid, 74, the young men represented a hope that in a country transformed by oil — into a land of sprawling shopping malls, luxury cars and subsidized lives, where citizenship has long been a ticket to privilege — there was still room for something old and difficult....
The trips also serve another purpose, some observers say. In a nation racked by arguments about who truly belongs, the pearl expeditions celebrate the history of the country’s most prominent families, recalling the days when they were merchants who made their livings from the sea....
It has been decades since Kuwaitis made their living from the sea. The trade, practiced throughout the Persian Gulf, was crippled by the Great Depression, the emergence of cultured pearls from Japan and the discovery of oil.
The divers themselves were probably indentured servants, according to people who have studied the trade, living on money they borrowed from boat captains. They dove to pay their debts, and if they died before repaying the loans, those debts were passed on to their sons or brothers.
“Many people don’t even know about the economy of Kuwait before the oil age,” said Anh Nga Longva, a professor at the University of Bergen, in Norway, who has studied similarities between the economic conditions facing the divers and those facing migrants in Kuwait today....