Said al Siyabi’s Al Sira Tahki (2020) is a significant Omani historical fiction that situates the interrogation of the colonial encounter at the disciplinary intersection of two distinct yet related fields of archival studies and transoceanic studies. The novel re-centres indigenous knowledge of maritime spaces and cultures to interrogate the colonial logics embedded within western museums and expose their infrastructures that continuously propagate epistemicide in the cultural representation of post-independent Arab nations of Western Asia.
Al Sira Tahki demonstrates the regenerative potential of Omani literary traditions and their enactment of oceanic fluidity to propel cultural resilience that unsettles the authority of the colonial archive. Al Sira Tahki’s novel particularly mobilises Qurayat’s maritime space and culture as sites of recuperation for indigenous histories and identities within and against the Portuguese maritime archives that monopolise cultural memories.
Al Sira Tahki illustrates how global coloniality persists through maritime archives which embed frameworks dominated by Western perspectives to normalise political manipulation, cultural effacement, spatial control and economic monopolisation. In general, Al Siyabi’s novel evinces how the epistemic injustice of museums coalesce with the role of archiving, thereby posing a particular threat to the sustainability of indigenous maritime heritage and knowledge in the colonised areas of the Global South. These internalised prejudices and injustices eventually serve to normalise inequality and undermine the possibilities for substantive decolonial transition. In response, Al Siyabi’s novel initiates calls for disrupting these intrusive systems and engages with the reconceptualisation of contemporary postcolonial and indigenous maritime writings as an ontological intervention in the museums’ neocolonial knowledge erasure that has been variously disruptive to the expression of non-western voices and dissemination of pluralistic worldviews. In this regard, the centrality of Al Sira Tahki lies in its deployment of decolonial spatial turn that underlies a cognisant shift towards regenerating indigenous epistemologies of nautical spaces and maritime material cultures as sustainable and autonomous documentation of local histories. In particular, the novel functions as a local maritime intervention in the Portuguese archives of Torre do Tombo on Oman’s history.
The critical context of Al Sira Tahki, reveals further facets that require scholarly investigation. Most notably, the novel curates indigenous material practices as sustainable repositories that viably suspend neocolonial museums’ archival praxis of western authority and marginalisation of nonwestern cultures. In this regard, the novel illuminates how the Omanis had long developed relationality with the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean before colonial borders, maps and institutions were enforced to reconfigure the interpretation of the sea as an enactment of divisions. In particular, Al Siyabi’s novel re-inscribes the stories and traditions of Qurayat’s maritime communities as counter blue archives that reclaim local ecologies and pluralistic futures.
Al Sira Tahki also recovers the embodied histories of Portuguese colonialism by tracing the commercial enterprises of trading companies that control the transoceanic circulation and commodification of Omani textiles across the Indian Ocean. The novel then impels return to the ecological sensibility that distinctively shapes Omani textile production and redefines its maritime memories as counter histories. Thus, Qurayat’s fabric technologies operate as an experiential language that collapses distinctions between entities and privileges a relational mode of existence over divisions. These local fabric technologies present alternative narratives of individual experiences and national encounters that complicate the centralised accounts, the dominant systems of historical representation and the homogenising tendencies that are inscribed by the Portuguese archive. These fabrics endure a heterogeneous cosmology by resisting fixed and singular designations of culture and belonging.
In Al Sira Tahki, Qurayat’s aesthetic identity foregrounds accessibility and mobilises alternative modes of narration that transcend the dominant archival forms of representation. Qurayat’s fabric weaving practices enable individuals and communities to reclaim authority over their cultural representation in colonial archives. Through their material presence, Qurayat’s fabrics are transformed into media of historical and cultural agency that challenges mainstream visual cultures and spaces to facilitate inclusive and diverse epistemologies. Ultimately, Qurayat’s fabric narratives sustain the memory of its textile industry that sustained worldwide trade networks and connected the Sea of Oman with the wider Indian Ocean.
By recalling Qurayat’s indigenous textile practices, Al Sira Tahki re-asserts the marginalised forms of agency and visibility for the larger maritime community of Omani textile workers whose skills and practices had faced underrepresentation and restrained presence in the Portuguese archive. Thus, Qurayat’s maritime textile practices function as active agents that centralise ecological material heritage in the sustained expression of cultural agency amidst archival extraction. Overall, Al Sira Tahki propels maritime material culture as decolonial narrative that both interrogates the coloniality of maritime archives and establishes a discursive framework that re-imagines cultural refusal and resistance. By so doing, Al Sira Tahki disrupts Portuguese museums’ (mis-) and (re-)presentation of Omani history and exposes the capitalist machinery of their material injustice.
Dr Majda R Atieh
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literatures and Cultural Studies, SQU.
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