Women of Kuwait

Finalist in the 2019 Lucie Photo Book Award in the Independent Prize category; acquired by the Getty Research Institute and the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and featured in Rolling Stone, Hyperallergic, Musee, Columbia University's School of Arts, and more.

Introduction

Stylistically, I decided to write all the stories in the second person and in the present tense to complicate the very binary of subject/object and of time itself. Because Maha wanted to point the camera lens into women’s bedrooms, I aimed to re-create some of the most intimate, vulnerable, unadorned moments in these women’s lives, and instead of inviting the reader to learn about them from a distance, I strove to merge the viewer with the Other being observed. Finally, I wanted to collapse time itself by allowing the reader to experience these moments as though they were unraveling instantaneously. In some stories I focused more on elongating scenes and on drawing out metaphors. In others, I prioritized chronology and narrative. In all of them, I aspired for depth and truth. Yes, we are all in a state of flux. What mattered to me in that moment was to capture with my pen what a camera might snap with its lens. And because I am primarily a poet, I focused on sound and emotions and images, and their relationship to one another.

Because we are women who live in Kuwait, we share similar challenges. We are still haunted by the trauma of the Iraqi Invasion at the end of the twentieth century. We are still coached against emoting, especially over losing our loved ones. We still grow up in homes where the tension between modern and liberal tendencies clash, sometimes violently, with more conservative interpretations of identity. We still develop tendencies, habits, and passions that are alien to our society. And almost everyone has a story of how their parents sacrificed their happiness in fear of what “The People” might say. I wanted to be fair to the women individually by writing about moments that shaped them, but I also had the book as a whole in mind, and I knew that I did not want to write, for instance, twenty-five stories about the impact of the war, or about losing a parent, or about the missed opportunities in life, such as those experienced by women who were forbidden from studying abroad. Therefore, I curated an array of moments that were both meaningful to candidates individually and provided variety and breadth as a unified collection.

I hope this project is seen for what it is: an artistic and/or poetic endeavor to capture an angle of female identity in Kuwait in visual snapshots as well as prose. This is not a project pretending to elevate a particular type of femininity or of Kuwaitiness. It is not an exhaustive list of all the categories of women in Kuwait. It is also far from claiming objectivity or neutrality in selection. After all, Maha and I are both artists. Our visions determine the elements we highlight and draw into the foreground, and those we overlook or push back into the shadows.

We hope you enjoy the book.

2019 Daylight USA

Genre: Collaboration: Photography & Poetic Vignettes

In Women of Kuwait, Maha Alasaker (Kuwaiti visual artist) and Nada Faris (Kuwaiti writer and performance poet) joined forces to represent modern day Kuwaiti women to a Western audience.

When Maha moved to New York, she learned that the everyday American has no conception of what daily life is like for women in modern-day Kuwait. Seeking to address this, she began making portraits of women in their bedrooms in 2015 and asking them about their lives. In 2018, she contacted Nada Faris, who interviewed the 25 women and wrote ekphrastic vignettes to accompany the photographs.

This intimate collection of portraits and poetic vignettes provides a never-before-seen look at what it means to be a young woman in Kuwait.

Website: womenofkuwait.com

Hardcover

Women of Kuwait

Introduction

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