Josep Pla in Hormuz and the Persian Gulf: his gaze at the "funnel" of the world

LondonThe weekly magazine Destino published an editorial note on January 17, 1959, which resonates strongly today. It stated: "As we announced to our readers, Josep Pla has boarded a tanker in El Ferrol to produce a series of major reports exclusively for the readers of Destino. The information we have commissioned from our friend is about oil. Europe is dependent on this fuel, and it is necessary for a journalist like Pla to explain to us, with his unparalleled acuity, all the political and economic problems involved in the extraction and exploitation of oil." Almost seventy years have passed, and not only Europe, but the whole world is dependent on it.

Reviewing those texts means traveling back in time and taking a history lesson. Obviously, through a colonialist, Europeanist, central view of the world of seventy years ago. Only from that perspective of the late fifties can comments like this be understood: "On our route there is a procession of oil tankers, which come and go, loaded or in ballast. The officers have calculated that the number of oil tankers permanently in the Persian Gulf is about two hundred daily, including those loading in ports, those arriving, and those departing. With an average of forty crew members per ship, that makes eight thousand men – generally Europeans – who work with all their senses to supply gasoline to Passeig de Gràcia, the boulevards of Paris, London's Mayfair, and Fifth Avenue. Within the chaos of this world, there are two things that work: oil and aviation."

Beyond the possible clash with the facts and the perspective of the 21st-century reader, the quality of the texts is always admirable. And its pause and reflection when it comes to using adjectives represents an exquisite mastery for a journalism that, at this point, is forced to generate a new headline every time Donald Trump opens his mouth. And it never stays silent.

In itself, moreover, reading the pages that emerged from this journey is as pleasant as the navigation that Pla describes through the Red Sea, the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Oman, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Persian Gulf, "an aquarium of turbid waters, which depending on the light of the day take on an oily and olive color or a clearer green color".

The nine original articles

Between January and April of that 1959, Josep Pla published in Josep Vergés' magazine nine reports in the best tradition of travel literature that he himself had helped to forge and strengthen. The original texts were titled: Del Ferrol del Caudillo a Port-Said. Notas de viaje; El canal de Suez; El Guirigay árabe; De Suez a Mena El-Ahmadi, Kuwait (Golfo Pérsico). Notas de viaje; El Golfo Pérsico; Leyendo El Corán; Un país petrolífero: Kuwait; Egipto: El Cairo and Vida en un petrolero.

Subsequently, these writings would appear in Catalan, with stylistic interventions and additions of content, within volume XVIII of the Complete Works, On the sea, publishedfor the first time in 1971. The part that includes the articles that concern us is titled A long journey between Kuwait, in the Persian Gulf, and Valparaíso, in Chile (1959-1960), and are found, approximately, and depending on the edition used, between pages 305 and 420. They are the result of notes taken between the moment Pla sets sail from Ferrol, aboard a tanker, the Baltimore, on December 26, 1958, and arrives in Ceuta on January 30, 1959, after a journey he defines as "a fascinating voyage". He would still write other texts on the occasion of those same days, which would also be published in Destino, but which did not fit into En mar. In any case, that journey, like so many others he made during forty years writing for Destino, gave him enough time to do a lot of work. He himself said in another of the volumes of the Complete Works (39): "Let's not talk about the long journeys on oil tankers, just days and days, listening to the wind and the crash of the sea. Literature is always an escape from boredom, and I have fought boredom by filling paper."

Pla arrives at the Strait of Hormuz between January 10 and 11, 1959. He does so with the gaze of a seaman and the skepticism of a European accustomed to milder landscapes. What he finds is not so much a fascinating exoticism, which also exists, as a harsh, almost mineral reality that repeats itself relentlessly. His portrait of the Gulf of Oman, the Persian Gulf, and Kuwait is not romantic: it is physical, economic, and, above all, demystifying. He sees the Strait of Hormuz as a gateway to a system in full effervescence.

The centrality of oil completely transforms his perception of the region. The Persian Gulf is, for Pla, a functional space, almost industrial: a "funnel" where ships, interests, and energy flows converge. Geography is subordinated to economics. Even when he describes the landscape in detail – the ferruginous mountains of Oman, the infinite deserts, the murky waters full of life – everything ultimately refers to a background idea: this is an inhospitable territory that only makes sense because of what is extracted or transported there.

The coasts he sees from the water also seem to him "of a dry, horrible hardness"; the deserts, interchangeable. The perception also extends to the human and social dimension. When he speaks of the coastline of the Pirate Coast – the future Coast of Truce – he describes it as an almost inaccessible space, made for piracy and only dominable by a maritime power like the British, whom he admires uncritically. His is a vision marked by an imperial logic: natural and human disorder can only be corrected by the discipline of a people like the English.

The same gaze is transferred to Kuwait, where the contrast between desert and oil modernity becomes even more evident. On the one hand, the country is presented to him as extremely simple: a capital, a port, a few villages, and the oil wells; the rest, pure desert. Kuwait, they tell him, is one of the few countries that can be fully known. And he accepts it ironically, as if it were a kind of "complete" country precisely because it is elemental.

When he enters the city, what he sees is accelerated, chaotic, disordered growth: new avenues, blocks under construction, the old original core destroyed, runaway traffic, shops galore, and an absolute dependence on imports. Kuwait goes from being an "unpresentable Arab camp" to an expanding city in a few years.

Seventy years later, the great value of these texts by Pla is to remind the reader that Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, under changing gazes and with filters that he himself might not adopt, continue to demand what the writer did master: distrust of appearances.