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  • From Farms to Foundaries: An Arab Community in Industrial Britain
  • Clare Oh
From Farms to Foundaries: An Arab Community in Industrial Britain. By Kevin Searle . Bern, Switzerland: Cultural Identity Studies, Vol. 17; Peter Lang AG, 2010. 232 pp. Softbound, $55.95.

In this book, Kevin Searle (University of Birmingham, U.K.) brings into sharp relief the challenges and hardships endured by Yemeni immigrants. In particular, through the lens of racism, class, and resistance, Searle contextualizes the lived experience of twenty-five Yemeni men who immigrated to the U.K. during the 1950s and 1960s to find opportunities for employment in the steel industry and who stayed on in the country, all of them now retired and in their twilight years. Using life history interviews as the book's foundation, Searle explores the men's experiences with emigration, employment, unemployment, social acclimation, and their daily attempts to find their way in an altogether different and new life without their families.

According to Searle, Yemenis constitute the oldest Muslim community in Britain. The first wave of immigration began in the early twentieth century, when newcomers found work in port towns, and then again during the British colonization of Yemen in the mid-twentieth century. From the start, the context of immigration from Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, to the U.K., and the complex history and relationship between the two nations, serves as an important backdrop for understanding the social environment in which the men first came to their newly adopted home. In 1937, Britain claimed the south of Yemen, then called Aden, as part of the Crown Colony. British forces were driven out thirty years later.

Searle's raison d'être for this book is to fill the gap of knowledge regarding the history of Yemeni immigrants, particularly in Sheffield, an industrial city in north-central England, known for its steel production. The extreme work-related hardships that dominated the daily lives of these men—and which constitute the major focus of this book—are made stark by the Yemenis' own words. Through the extensively quoted narratives, one has a sense of being there, right in the room with these narrators, and being taken back to the steel factories where they engaged in back-breaking, lung-clogging work or to the cramped rooms where the Yemeni steelworkers slept, up to four at a time. [End Page 249]

A distraction, however, is Searle's seeming preoccupation with the issues of "racism, class, and resistance," which he chronicles from the start of the men's journey to Britain in steerage class on ships, to their search for work, housing, and social relationships. The primary reason for this, explains Searle, is that the bulk of Yemeni migration to the U.K. occurred when "anti-Arab racism was at an apex" (3) largely due to Britain's involvement in the Suez Crisis in the late 1950s. Although Searle also paradoxically states that racism does not define the "totality of their experiences," just a page later he writes, "the aim of the research is to understand the meaning of racism and class in the life-stories" of these men's new lives in Britain (4).

The tension here is obvious. Although Searle's extensive use of oral history and personal narratives does illustrate an ongoing struggle with racism, there are also a number of instances where the quotes do not fit this argument. In the first chapter, for example, Searle quotes several narrators as examples of racist and classist treatment by white Britons, but the quotes actually depict pleasant and even helpful interactions. This brings to mind the common challenge that faces many oral historians: that taking quotes out of context may lead to a misunderstanding of the narrator's intent and meaning; at the same time, doing so makes it too easy for the historian or interviewer to take any selection of quotes for his or her own purpose. This is not to say that this was indeed Searle's intention, but it does underscore the challenge that arises when scholars are focused on seeing another's story through a selective lens such as racism or class.

The book succeeds...

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