In a recent PMLA issue dedicated to Tragedy, Helene Foley and Jean Howard mention that tragedy indexes a growing sense of consciousness, saying, “In everyday and more specialized contexts, then, tragedy is a powerful term that can serve as a veil concealing difficult truths or as a lever of critique” (618). In this sense, tragedy participates in a process of poiesis, the making out of alternatives from a situation that needs a change. The following essay tracks the function of poiesis as both an artistic function and a sovereign function in the plays of Kuwaiti playwright, Sulyamn al-Bassam. Al-Bassam is a Kuwaiti playwright and director whose Shakespeare adaptations in the decade after 9/11 have continued to cause ripples within a regional Arab scene and have gained international acclaim. A reading of al-Bassam’s plays through the concept of poiesis aims to show the working of a new tragic sovereignty in his plays. Al-Bassam’s two Shakespeare adaptations are revealed to harbor renewed questions about the relation between the working of the imagination, sovereignty and the tragic contingency of action. These questions point toward a new theorization of political life and tragedy, and accordingly of a new sovereignty anchored in the figure of the refugee.