In Abu Dhabi’s Women

By Deborah Williams

For the 20 years I lived in Manhattan, pedicures were an occasional splurge, dependent on the weather and my wallet. Now that I live in Abu Dhabi, where the desert heat means that sandals are a year-round staple, pedicures are regular events. Nail salons here are ladies-only enclaves; men go to "gents’ saloons" to be waxed and tweezed and polished. I have never been allowed inside a saloon (there is no booze involved, this being a Muslim country where alcohol is strictly regulated), and I’m not sure why the gents get the extra o, but I’ve discovered that the world inside the ladies’ nail salon offers more than just choosing between "Wicked" and "Red Hot Rio," or submitting to the quick pain of eyebrow threading.

When I first moved to Abu Dhabi, all I could see were the women swathed in black abayas, who seemed to me so mysterious in their veils: They were so different, I thought. And when I saw these women in the salons, chatting to their friends or on the phone in rapid-fire Arabic, it was hard for me to imagine that they were gossiping about kids or family or husbands, or just debating the merits of a full French mani-pedi.

Only in the salons do the Emirati ladies shrug off their abayas and sheylas (the scarf that goes over the hair), which are the convention for dressing in public for all Emirati women. The public privacy of "women only" means that it's not uncommon to see a customer with her feet in the soaking tub and her shirt down around her shoulders so that the masseuse can give her a neck rub. The women who work at the salons usually speak Tagalog or Thai, as well as English, and the customers rattle along in everything from English and Arabic to Russian and Urdu. So many languages float through the air that it sometimes sounds as if I’m getting my toes done at the U.N. Every time I visit the salon, I vow to restart my Arabic lessons, although I realize that wanting to eavesdrop may not be the most high-minded reason to learn a language.

In 2011, when I moved to the city to join the faculty at NYU Abu Dhabi, I saw the women in the salon in three categories: locals, expats, or migrants. Locals and expats were being tended to; migrants did the tending. "Expat" conjures images of Grace Kelly, zipping along the coast of the French Riviera in a convertible, effortlessly manicured and chic. "Migrants" aren't effortless; they are, at least in the popular imagination, the people who fix the convertibles rather than drive them. What I’ve come to realize, however, is that when you live in a city like Abu Dhabi, where more than 80 percent of the population comes from somewhere else, "migrant" takes on a whole new meaning.

Many of Abu Dhabi's residents move from city to city at contractually determined intervals, following the latter-day Silk Road of the oil industry: Kazakhstan, Lagos, Houston, the Gulf. They are migrants, although that's not usually how we describe well-paid executives, and all of us, from executives to manicurists, are bound by the kafala system of employee sponsorship without which no one in the United Arab Emirates can be granted a work visa. No one comes to Abu Dhabi to find herself (although sometimes it happens anyway). Usually, soul-searching types head to Bali, Provence, the plains of Africa. People come to Abu Dhabi to work, and for work you need a visa, and for a visa you need a sponsor. It's simple: If you’re not Emirati, you’re a migrant.

From a U.S. perspective, this stark distinction may seem quite alien but it also collapses the mentality of "other" that is so pervasive, in America and elsewhere: It's the attitude that created Brexit and colors the nail-bitingly close elections in France.

True, I’m not sending my siblings to college one foot at a time, like Janice, who tends to my toes while telling me about the brothers she's supporting in Manila. But at the same time, her reasons for being in Abu Dhabi—to give her family a better future—aren't that much different from my own, or those of my friend T., getting a neck massage in the next chair over. T. is a former corporate lawyer, but her visa says she's a housewife. If you’re the unemployed female "trailing spouse" (a designation that makes wives seem vestigial, like the pinky toes of a marriage), then as far as the visa office is concerned, whatever career you had before you arrived is irrelevant. T. quit her job to come here and help her husband build a consulting business; together, they are supporting relatives back in the States.

As Janice, T., and I exchange stories about our long-distance families and the lingering sense of homesickness that never quite leaves us, an Emirati woman leans in for an opinion: Do we like the pale pink or the coral? After a few minutes of discussion, we all go with the latter, pausing for a moment to admire our painted feet before heading for the door. The Emirati woman departs for an event, I go home to grade student papers, T. to cook her family dinner, and Janice to Skype with her brothers: Different lives, yes, and yet not so dissimilar, either. The longer I live in Abu Dhabi, the more the distinctions I’d made when I first moved here—between "expat" and "migrant," between "us" and "them"—have begun to dissolve, rubbing away like the unwanted calluses on my feet. And as those lines vanish, the world looks like a very different place.