Letters to the Unliving and Unborn [for Palestine]

Adi Magazine
Fall 2023

We are the land and the land is us. / Its holiness and grime cannot be dispelled from us.

Rami habibi,

I will tell you about Palestine.

I will not tell you that as you grew in my womb, I also held the children of Gaza there, I will not tell you that some were dead and some were alive.

I will not tell you that I hope you will save us all, myself included.

I will not tell you that every day I see us marching into the apocalypse, with you at our lead.

From Visionaries to Vloggers: Media Revolutions in the Middle East 

Media Majlis - Northwestern University at Qatar
Publisher: Akkadia Press
Fall 2019

LAG: What are the popular icons of protest graffiti from the Middle East? A wide range of symbols come to mind, at their forefront the Lulu (Pearl) Roundabout. Indeed, the Lulu Monument was demolished given that it was the site of popular uprisings in Bahrain.

CG: Many icons, like the Pearl Roundabout in Bahrain, are tethered to local traditions, while others belong to contemporary global visual cultures. For example, during the 2011 uprisings in Egypt, the Sphinx, Queen Nefertiti, and pharaonic motifs emerged as a ‘uniting’ visual force to promote Egyptian-ness (and female fortitude), while other icons, such as the Obama campaign posters and even spoof KFC ads, transcended national borders and languages.

In Libya, much of the opposition mocked Muammar Gaddafi and his Green Book (his political philosophy first published in 1975), symbolically thrusting both icons of state into the ‘trash bin of history’. As for Syria, much darker forms of satire have taken aim at Bashar al-Assad, in some cases turning him into a lisping and shifty finger puppet. In the latter two cases, Gaddafi and Assad (like many incumbent rulers) are in essence depicted as anti-heroic figures—that is, icons against which to pitch oneself, and with which to draw sharper lines of distinction.[2]

— From the book essay, “Taking Up Space: The Staging of Political Graffiti in the Middle East”

The Autistic Interface
 

The Outpost
Summer 2015

In the digital age Muslim women are finding themselves caught between contradictory social values: to self-promote or to cover up. But what is the cost to life at either extreme? 

 In the Arab world we not only “give face” but we “whiten faces” by singing someone’s praises or “darken faces” with insults. In Kuwait, you humiliate someone by “cutting [their] face”. And things get even more complicated when we begin to talk about women’s faces. From my vantage point, it seems we are divided between two extremes: either dissecting women’s faces or cutting them out of public view altogether, in one hand the plastic surgeon’s scalpel and in the other the censor’s black marker.  

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Abdul Rahman

Ashkal Alwan Home Workspace Project
Summer 2013

Ramadan was over now. It was Wednesday so it was still a couple days until Friday prayers and lunch after. Diwaniya had happened the night before, and it wasn’t football season. So tonight, Abdul Rahman could try and find some Quran verses on his phone to send to his coworkers over their group chat. Maybe he would order KFC for a late night snack. He wondered which wife’s turn it was to cook. The older woman was better at chicken but the younger one definitely made the richer sauce. 

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Immortality and Al Khidr in Ancient Arabia

FIND Ancient Art Arabia
Spring 2014

A number of shrines dotted around the Gulf in Iraq, Iran, Bahrain and Kuwait as well as in the Levant have been erected in the name of Al Khider, although many have been demolished. Women hoping for health and fertility arrive at these sites with talismans, stitched flags, and bottles of rosewater, which they sprinkle as they pray for children

Al Khider’s legacy in Kuwait is a troubled one – shrines built in his name were demolished three times – once in 1937 and two more times in the seventies (the latter being in 1977) – after a fatwa was issued by Sheikh Al Jarrah claiming that the shrine and the famed site of Al Khider’s footprint on Failaka island drew a kind of reverence that was tainted with polytheistic blasphemy or sherek. Although it isn’t mentioned in the fatwa, polytheism had been central to Failaka island for thousands of years, where there was a shrine dedicated to Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt by followers of Alexander the Great.  >>>

A Bird in a Tree, a Tree in a Bird

WTD Magazine
Winter 2016 - #WTD07 (feature + cover art)
 

I walk in the middle of summer, in the middle of Ramadan, in the middle of Beirut, in the middle of Basta, in the middle of the street. There is no way forward with so much baggage, but I push on. We are weighted by our emotions, by our pasts, by our bundles of self-consciousness; and by the effort of all the connections we make.

I wear short-shorts in the middle of one of Beirut’s most conservative neighborhoods, Khandak El Ghamee, also known as Basta Fouaa and Tahta, the upper and lower parts of the neighborhood marked by Shia mosques like bookends on a shelf. When men look at my thighs I repeat my mantras, the onslaught of self-cheerleading that comes with living in the Cult of the Self. Own it. Goddess energy. The Divine Feminine. All bodies are sacred. 

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Kuwait: Open the Doors

Brownbook Magazine
September 2012

When people who haven’t been are faced with the prospect of imagining what Kuwait is like, they often are stumped. They may picture burning oil wells from the Gulf War, the (Swedish-designed) Kuwait Towers or a derivative version of Saudi Arabia - iconic images but certainly not intimate ones. The irony of Kuwait’s benign but clichéd reputation is that everything great about Kuwait is indeed intimate; hidden literally and figuratively underground in basements, diwaniyas, chalets, warehouses and holes in the wall.

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Of Kings and Ants

The Ideological Guide to the Venice Biennale
May 2013

The politics of scale are aptly identified in the Kuwait’s pioneering art pavilion at the Venice Biennale, entitled “National Works,” and forms a useful framework for tracing Kuwait’s cultural development. Featuring artists Sami Mohammad and Tarek Al-Ghoussein, curator Ala Younis aims to “re-interpret Kuwait’s modernization project.” 

Kuwait, upon the discovery of its oil in the late 40s, positioned itself as a global giant of generosity. This kind of well-intentioned self-regard is illustrated in the works by artist Sami Mohammad, which mirror the birth of Kuwait as a nation. Younis contextualizes the naiveté of Kuwait’s nation-building project by placing Mohammad’s works alongside those of Palestinian-Kuwaiti artist Tarek Al-Ghoussein, whose “K-Files” photographs shed light on Kuwait’s grand national ambitions and the slow decay of its modern infrastructure. Furthermore, the pavilion highlights how Kuwait’s inception has been problematized by neoliberalism and post-Gulf War individualism, also the turning point at which 600,000 Palestinians were exiled from the country. >>>

The Engagement Party

Berlin Quarterly
Spring 2015
 

She was going to be a mother of the bride for the first time. Linda’s head roared with the sparkling pain and blinding glory of her daughter’s upcoming nuptials.

Her bedroom in Beirut let in much more sunlight than the one in Jeddah and she wasn’t sleeping well. She sipped deeply from the glass of sparkling water and lime that she kept at her bedside table alongside the remote controls to the three different satellite services and hence all the global news channels – flicking through them again although she already had seen all the headlines. News anchors’ guilty faces sandwiched between crumbling buildings that fell away to advertisements for skin whitening creams that faded to nuclear agreement talks which made way to Korean pop stars in plane crashes and religious leaders coming out of limousines.

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Mubkhar in Kuwait

Brownbook Magazine x Atharna
Winter 2017

‘The water used to come right up to the front door,’ says Laila Al Hamad. She stands at the entrance of a one-level building that’s been her family home since the 1960s, located on Kuwait’s long, seaside Gulf Road. Once a house and a beach residence, it now houses Zeri Crafts, an organisation created to elevate Kuwait’s cultural heritage.

With teak shutters and rectangular windows, the house looks much like most traditional Kuwaiti houses. One room opens up to the next, for the ease of family life and to allow the cool air to flow. But the quarters in this house are not arranged around a courtyard as is often the case – they all face the sea. The family property has served a number of purposes, from being rented to expats from Palestine and later serving as living quarters for Al Hamad’s sister upon her return from university to finally, today, housing an office and shop. ‘Opening up Zeri Crafts here felt like an opportunity to re-own the idea of ‘home’,’ says Al Hamad, who has lived abroad for a good deal of her life. >>>

Geographic Gnomons: Ala Younis in Conversation with Liane Al Ghusain

Ibraaz
July 2012

LAG: There were some really interesting themes in this exhibition, namely the concerns of Palestinians that moved to and lived in Kuwait but also the spirit of consumption that has taken over modern Kuwaiti audiences. You really reached out to them in a way that they could directly identify with and yet at the same time you encouraged them to read the subtext.

AY: It was a smaller society that met on so many levels and in so many places. When consumer items appeared, they were known about and acquired, the same with TV and radio. And for many Palestinians there was no place to go back to in the summer, so they very much invested in their homes and cars because that was home for them. >>>