Kate Pullinger’s Yacub in Dubai is part of her network novel The Flight Paths which include multiple short digital stories. Yacub in Dubai tells the story of an Indian/Pakistani young man who wishes to leave his village to go work on a construction site in Dubai. After listening to a man who lost his foot on a construction site, he board a plane to find himself in a worse situation than he was beforehand.

On a more technical aspect, the piece of electronic literature is a elegant marriage of sound, images and written poetry. The work is combined with modified photographs creating a visual poetry. Music associated with the Middle East of music help creating ambiance. The work has limited animation and is built of static images who runs on the screen at a rhythm predetermined by the author. However, Yacub in Dubai is still partly interactive: the viewer is asked to click on a symbol to access the following page (flighpaths.net 2012).

Yacub in Dubai is different from earlier pieces of electronic literature because it has a different relationship with its medium. The piece, even if it deeply rooted into the computer language, is refreshingly simple to use and does not require a deep understanding of coding or video games to be enjoyed by the viewer. As predicted by Heidegger, the final product is moving away from its physical production (Heidegger 1977) . The Industrial Revolution deeply influenced literature as steam were now powering printing machines, making printed literature affordable and mass produced. Manual labour was no longer required in the process of making a book and it created dissociation between the product and the worker (Carmody 2010). The wonderful thing about Pullinger’s work is that the viewers do no longer feel that they are using technology to view a piece of literature. The product became an end in itself and using a computer to view is no longer laborious but highly intuitive. The poem has moved away from imitating print as it was attempting to do in earlier pieces, when electronic literature was still at its dawn (Hayles 2004). The work does not try to imitate any other media than itself, which is an accomplishment.

An aspect of the work that was striking is its critical quality: it denounces the working conditions and exploitation of immigrants. It also points out the polarization of social and monetary classes in a city like Dubai and the difficult living conditions in certain areas of the world. The best thing about this piece of electronic literature is that is draws attention on the globalization of workers but also on how it can be talked about in an artistic way, yet political. The piece is sponsored by Refugee Week, an organization trying to help people like Yacub. This opens the door to having a potential relationship between the non-profit sector and literature.

Kate Pullinger is a Canadian writer from Cranbrook, British Columbia. She expresses her ideas through both digital and print literature. After some years passed at McGill University in Montreal, she worked in Yukon and eventually moved to London, England where she still resides. She is deeply implicated in educating about digital literature and is presently teaching Creative Writing and New Media at the University of Bath Spa in England. In 2009, her achievements were rewarded and she won the prestigious General Governor’s Literary Award for fiction. For Flight Paths, she collaborated with Chris Joseph who took on the design and programming aspect of the project.

Carmody, Tim. “10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books,” The Atlantic. 25 August 2010.

Hayles, Katherine. Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep:The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis.. Poetics Today 25.1 (2004) 67-90.

Heidegger, Martin. The Question About Technology. New York: Garland Publishing. 1977.

Kate Pullinger Official Website.  www.katepullinger.com. 2012.

Pullinger, Kate. “Yacub in Dubai”, Flight Paths. www.flightpaths.net. 2012.

Refugee Week. Official Website. http://www.refugeeweek.org.uk/getinvolved. 2012.