Ismail Fahd Ismail is one of the leading literary figures in Kuwait today. He claims to have a Kuwaiti father and an Iraqi mother. He was born in the Iraqi city of Basra in 1940, where he lived until the late 1960s when he moved to Kuwait. He has published around fifteen novels, a collection of short stories, and some critical works on Kuwaiti and other Arab writers. His novels are comparable—in terms of length, technique, subject-matters—to those of the Egyptian Najib Mahfuz, the Palestinian Ghassan Kanafani, and the Saudi-born Abdul Rahman Munif. Before moving to Kuwait, Ismail had, however, established himself as an ‘Iraqi’ writer. Even after his relocation, many literary critics and commentators continued to refer to him as Iraqi. Adding to this confusion about his national identity is the fact that the majority of his writings—especially those published before the 1980s—did not treat any issue relating to Kuwaiti society. His earliest novels were about the political turmoil in Iraq in the late 1950s, which he personally witnessed as a youth. And the rest depicted similar chaotic situations in Egypt and Palestine. Even when in the early 1980s he was ‘compelled’ to write about Kuwaiti society, the result was “far from convincing, either socially or artistically”. The two novels he wrote then about Kuwait “lack[ed] local color”. This paper will examine not just the Iraqi influence on the author, but also, the issue of identity in his works. Special attention will be paid to his seven-part novel, Ihdathiyyat zaman al-uzla [The Occurrences of the Time of Isolation] (1996). This novel chronicles the day-to-day events of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait (August 1990 to February 1991). Interestingly, both the titles and the contents of the last two parts of the novel treat the Iraqi traumas occasioned by the US-led “Operation Desert Storm”—the Second Gulf War—through which Kuwait was liberated. Does the novel reflect a conflict of identities on the part of the author? In addition to answering this question, this paper will examine the novel’s representation of the collective sufferings of the Iraqis both under Saddam Husain and during the Second Gulf War.