In the last and perhaps most poignant story of the collection, a Kuwaiti woman held captive in Iraq for ten years returns to her family. Worried she will feel “left out, a foreigner in her own home. Unheimlich” they decide to replace everything exactly as they had been “before she was lost to us” (225). In another story, the protagonist Amerika (named by her parents “to commemorate their nation’s gratitude to America” 195) collects objects which initially connect her to the US, but in the end become “the residue of loss, the triumph of fury” (212) when her beloved America rejects her. Does the violent demise of Amerika and her box suggest the impossibility of the kind of transcultural identity she had embraced all her life? Is the embodied silence and the “litany of objects” (237) of the freed captive a way for her to create a hybrid identity that can come to terms with the “new” Kuwait? It is from the nexus of power, subjectivity, discourse (in this case “the silence of objects”) and global feminism that I propose to read the stories referenced above. I will be considering especially the way Foucault formulates power (not dominance) with the interests of global feminism in mind (which considers for example the issue of cultural imperialism in addition to class, race, ethnicity, etc.). The female protagonists in the stories referenced above both experience an inability to communicate with their family/community through speech, turning instead to a “silence of objects” as a means of agency to overcome loss and create a sense of belonging. Francesca Royster’s “Silence and the Meanings of Home” explores the silences of domestic spaces, “the still and silent objects that occupied those spaces, as well as the stories embedded in them” (176), creating an embodied silence which becomes a communicative gesture (per linguist Kris Acheson building from Merleau-Ponty’s concept of embodied language ) – here achieved at least in part through the objects themselves, which according to Maurizia Boscagli’s Stuff Theory are commodified yet endowed with transformative power. Building from a Foucauldian feminism, this paper seeks to explore the transformative potential of silence and objects as a means of overcoming personal and political trauma in the negotiation of identity in a post-Invasion Kuwait.