Remembering the Sea: Personal and Communal Recollections of Maritime Life in Jizan and the Farasan Islands, Saudi Arabia

People create narratives of their maritime past through the remembering and
forgetting of seafaring experiences, and through the retention and disposal of maritime
artefacts that function mnemonically to evoke or suppress those experiences. The sustenance
and reproduction of the resulting narratives depends further on effective media of
intergenerational transmission; otherwise, they are lost. Rapid socio-economic transformation
across Saudi Arabia in the age of oil has disrupted longstanding seafaring
economies in the Red Sea archipelago of the Farasan Islands, and the nearby mainland port
of Jizan. Vestiges of wooden boatbuilding activity are few; long-distance dhow trade with
South Asia, the Arabian-Persian Gulf and East Africa has ceased; and a once substantial
pearling and nacre (mother of pearl) collection industry has dwindled to a tiny group of
hobbyists: no youth dive today. This widespread withdrawal from seafaring activity among
many people in these formerly maritime-oriented communities has diminished the salience
of such activity in cultural memory, and has set in motion narrative creation processes,
through which memories are filtered and selected, and objects preserved, discarded, or lost.
This paper is a product of the encounter of the authors with keepers of maritime memories
and objects in the Farasan Islands and Jizan. An older generation of men recall memories
of their experiences as boat builders, captains, seafarers, pearl divers and fishermen. Their
recounted memories are inscribed, and Arabic seafaring terms recorded. The extent of the
retention of maritime material cultural items as memorials is also assessed, and the roˆle of
individual, communal and state actors in that retention is considered. Through this
reflection, it becomes clear that the extra-biological memory and archive of the region’s
maritime past is sparse; that intergenerational transmission is failing; that the participation of state agencies in maritime heritage creation is highly limited; and that, as a result,
memories current among the older generation have limited prospect of survival. These
memories, recorded and interpreted here, identify the Farasan Islands as a former centre of
the pearling industry in the Red Sea, and identify them and Jizan as open to far-reaching
maritime-mediated cultural influences in an era before the imposition of the attributes of
the modern nation-state.