Mnemonic Violence and Narratives of Pain: Contesting Saudi Cultural Memory in The Goat Life
Abstract
When the three-hour film The Goat Life was streamed by Netflix in July 2024, it faced strong opposition and severe criticism from countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), leading to a ban on it all over GCC except the UAE, for misrepresenting Saudi Arabia and its people. The movie highlights the harrowing experiences of Najeeb Muhammad, a migrant labourer from Kerala (India) who arrived in Saudi Arabia but was abducted, tortured, and forced to live on a goat farm in the desert. In view of Saudi Arabia’s centuries-old cultural tradition, centred on karam (hospitality), rahmah (compassion), and ihsan (moral excellence), this paper uses the interrelated theoretical concepts of cultural memory wars and mnemonic violence from the broader theoretical framework of cultural memory studies to analyse the movie's portrayal of Saudi Arabia and its people. Although the narrative is rooted in a deeply affective recollection of migratory precarity and indentured labour, its epistemic imbalance facilitates the slippage from personal memory to collective misrepresentation. Despite the fact that raḥmah, karam, and iḥsan form an interlocking ethical grammar that challenges reductive representations of Saudi society, these concepts do not deny the possibility of injustice or abuse; however, these codes refuse the elevation of such incidents into cultural essence. The study concludes that theologically grounded, socially operative, and ethically aspirational, these cultural and ethical codes offer a counter-discursive framework through which cinematic narratives like The Goat Life can be read as partial, selective, and ideologically overdetermined rather than representative.
Keywords: mnemonic violence; memory wars; the goat life; narratives of grief; Saudi culture
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