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When we flew over Iraq at dusk, a wonderful sense of beauty overcame me. This was the Iraq, a country that in my head had only been an abstract collection of news media reports. There were endless valleys with lights shining in the most remote and unexpected places. I had never seen a country so beautiful from the tiny window of a plane. I thought of all the pain and hardship that has devastated this beautiful country in a fight for–
We passed over oil fields with flames shooting up in the air, flares, that act as a safety mechanism for escaping gas.
South of Kuwait came the Persian Gulf. Even from 10.000 meters above ground, I could recognize large container ships. When the darkness descended, we saw something as from a childhood fantasy. Dozens of ships, in my memory over a hundred, hurdled together around an oil rig to form a nightly battalion. Life came together to protect itself around a glowing red flame. A floating city formed.
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Hamad International Airport in Qatar was a stopover for most passengers, a gate from the west to the east. For me, it was final destination. I didn’t choose to go to Doha, it was a non-optional leisure trip on company expense.
It was late night when we set foot on Qatari soil. Six of us cramped into a five-seater in front of the arrival hall, all part of the board of directors of a company of around 500 people. We headed to the hotel, a cozy five-star resort located on the artificial coastline. I had detached from the conversation and looked out at the empty lands. We drove on a large highway, brightly illuminated. The streetlamps did not throw cones of light like back home but covered evenly the surface of the highway as if it was unfeeling daylight. The city of Doha, too, was illuminated on every corner and turned the city into a spectre. It was half one when we arrived and we all went to sleep without a further word, everyone on a different floor of the hotel.
By 10 in the morning the temperatures had climbed up to 40 degrees Celsius. We met in the lobby and took a cab to some exhibition. A sad event with nothing much to show. It was heartless, soulless, joyless. Its theme centred around the green desert and was filled with buzzwords that nonetheless gave me a sense of hope. Maybe we weren’t lost. If the rich and powerful Arab states were in for green energy, sustainability, a clean tomorrow, maybe things could be alright. We walked around aimlessly until the afternoon. For the first I experienced outside air conditioning. While the sun relentlessly boiled down, a large open plaza of the exhibition was at room temperature. This amazed me more than any of the show-and-tell pavilions. My group debated about the energy cost of such a thing if it were built back home.
Silently, I separated from the group and took a cab to the museum of Islam. Every now and then a stadium from the World Cup of 2022 appeared. Parts of them were built by slave labourers. I got out of the cab early to walk the rest of the way. I was the only pedestrian. In the museum garden, I was the only visitor next to a myriad of gardeners, planting and watering thirsting trees.
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In the museum my steps echoes through the halls. My eyes wandered over the Islamic artifacts but in my head only roamed the energy question. I had never seen a country so rich in energy. It sold energy to the world and with the income it hired cheap workers from Asia and Africa.
I went back to the hotel.
I liked staying in hotel rooms. Back home I had a hard time cleaning, cooking, showering. Now I realized that the question of energy had taken me over long before I had come here. In my Berlin flat, I had not been able to overcome the dwarf threshold that prohibited me to move whenever I needed to get up and do something. I was so terribly afraid that I could trigger a series of events, by which I would end up losing control. Simple tasks robbed me of all energy, emptied me, and threw me into a pit of self-loathing. I worked too much. Something my therapist calls scooping from an empty bowl. The decision to go out, to watch a movie, or to cook for myself was not dependent on my desire to do so or on my monetary means, no. I hadn’t named it yet, but now I realized that for months I had simply looked at it through the lens of energy: Would doing it leave me with enough energy to get through the exhaustion of work?
I sold my energy to the company. Qatar sold its energy to China, South Korea, India and Japan. In turn, it bought the energy of immigrant labourers. I guess that made me different from the state of Qatar. Maybe.
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The next day we took a trip to the dunes. We were taken in two SUVs that first drove through the empty inner city before it entered the grey outskirts. There, for the first time seemed to be remnants of a real human population. Undecorated square homes.
A few kilometres behind the workers homes were only stony desert and huge settlements of villas, that all looked exactly the same. Arab versions of the McMansion. They were empty, build in a rush to accommodate rich assholes that either never came or didn’t stay.
Then came the gas fields, thousands over thousands of pumpjacks with horse heads relentlessly pumping as if hammering into the earth, connected to huge pipelines that stretched beyond the horizon.
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Lastly, the sand desert. Or dunes. Complete calm came over me.
My boss took me aside. I lied and said that I thought yesterday’s exhibition had been interesting. Eye-opening. He answered: But you do realize this is all bullshit? Did you see a single solar panel? Look around you, it’s oil and gas. They hold 20 % of voting rights at Volkswagen. Things are not going to change. Don’t be naïve.
Repetitive tasks scare me because I can’t see an immediate result. If I invest into cleaning my flat once a week, I would see only minimal betterment each time I did so. The same goes for showering and every other homely task. I can go two days without a shower and not stink terribly, and I can order food instead of cooking many times and not feel the processed food affecting my body and mind.
Qatar did not seem to have that problem of getting repetitive tasks done. Energy and labour were endless .
I had tried and got a cleaner for my apartment over a website. A wonderful guy who smiled an embarrassed smile whenever we would talk. He couldn’t speak neither German nor English. He had asked me to pay him in cash and without a contract to which I agreed. I tended to overpay him out of guilt.
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​​Back in the city of Doha, I saw orange helmets below street level laying cables at every corner. Above me, tiny figures in orange vests worked high up on metal beams. On every stripe of greenery were gardeners, on every door stood doormen, every spot in any place was accounted for with a cleaner. They all turned their faces when I walked past. They talked sparingly and with subservience. Only one gardener stared at me with such unconcealed spite, his eyes burned themselves into my memory. Less than 12 % of the country’s population are Qatari. The others live in the outskirts and build and maintain an empty paradise for the few.
On my last day, I went to a tearoom I had been in the day before and a woman laughed and welcomed me back with sincerity. That was the only time since the plane ride that I felt good.
I went back to the hotel one last time. Normally, I liked staying in hotel room. But more than ever the visits of the cleaning staff embarrassed me. I pretended to be a simple man from a little German village overwhelmed by the ways of the world. I smiled an embarrassed smile.
On the way home I did not have a window seat. I couldn’t see the Persian Gold nor the beautiful valleys of Iraq. In a way, I was happy with that. I think seeing them again would have taken away from the first time.
I must get my life together. Energy is not the problem.​ I only feel that I haven't enough energy because at one point in my life, it ran out. If I were to accept that I have energy, I would come into the uncomfortable situation of actually needing to care for myself. Of cooking, cleaning. And then some invisible barrier would be broken. What if I am not happy? What if in my deepest self, I am rotten?
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