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.

The binary concept of the Other found in European and American Orientalism is disrupted when viewed from a Latin American perspective. In the writings of the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, for example, the Other is not entirely a foreign entity but rather something that is at once foreign and yet familiar. A similar relationship can be found between the East and the West in the writing by Kuwaiti Mai Al-Nakib. In Borges’ short story collection El Aleph (perhaps not coincidentally the first letter of the Arabic alphabet), the reader finds mirroring images of the Other which lead to an ironic familiarity between East and West. Many of his stories, like those found in Al-Nakib’s collection, deal with an ongoing quest for identity and belonging, a quest shared by many writers of the South. As argued by Julia Kushigian in Orientalism in Hispanic Literary Tradition (1991), one cannot apply a traditional notion of Orientalism in a Latin American context as this does not take into consideration the complex relationship of Spain to the Arab world during the 800 years of cultural interaction during the period of Al-Andalus. Michel Foucault has also stated that power is a “complex strategic situation in a particular society” thus relationship of the Gulf countries with the West does not lend itself to a simple transplantation of Said’s theories because many of these countries were not directly colonized, and because their current relationship with the West has differences from other post-colonial nations. This paper seeks to challenge the hegemonic narrative of Orientalism held by the West by introducing a “south-to-south” exploration of the image of the Other in Arabic literature, using theoretical approaches and literary comparisons by and about writers from Latin America. This will serve to complicate and enrich Orientalism and its usefulness in analyzing new literature from Arab Gulf nations.

In 2014, Mai Al-Nakib, a Kuwaiti writer born in the seventies, collected some of her short stories, and tied them together with a set of vignettes. The stories are separated, a separateness that is reminiscent of the sense of alienation that the writer seems to feel toward her homeland. But what ties these stories together is the desire to collect objects, a desire that stems from a need to instill order in a chaotic and haphazard world. The idea of home is elusive and no longer tangible to the characters in this book. As home appears distant, the characters, in a very Freudian reversal, condense their memories of their homeland to fit into small objects that they collect. Longing for the safety enabled by the sense of belonging, the characters attempt to establish some sense of order, exhibited most clearly in the repetition of the number four in the stories, hinting at the four walls that hold the objects, or the four points that contain them and perpetuate a sense of housing. Through these collected objects, the characters reach glimpses of a home believed to have changed beyond recognition. These objects, much like the vignettes that separate/unite the stories in this book, connect the characters to their lost home. Yet home is not lost, as the collection of objects and the memory they bring proves in every story. Could home simply be misplaced? Could this feeling of loss of home stem from other feelings of loss? Loss of mother is poignantly felt in most of these stories. But how have loss of mother and loss of home manifested themselves in a collection of objects, and in a desire to contain memories and feelings? What do these objects actually connect to? Are they bridges to old memories, estranged homes estranged, lost languages? This study, in a psychoanalytic reading, locates what the text is involuntarily hiding, the home that the characters are prevented from seeing. The objects, in their hidden lights, not only remind the characters of worlds forgotten, but actually recreate these worlds and find them yet again. The Hidden Light of Objects simultaneously presents and covers perceptions of identity in regards to home, identification with objects, and a desire to heal the rift between perceived alienation and home. The objects, then, are a compass, a necessary illumination that maps the tracing back of the self.

Manuel Castells addresses language as “a fundamental attribute of self-recognition […], the establishment of an invisible national boundary less arbitrary than territoriality, and less exclusive than ethnicity […], a direct expression of culture, […] the trench of cultural resistance” (Castells,1997 , p.52). In my presentation I would like to investigate the use of an estranged language, English, by a Kuwaiti author, Mai al-Nakib, in her collection of short stories. Writing and recording words, storytelling and diaries as active actions performed by the main characters in the book signal a distance from everyday life and reality that is mirrored by the use of the language, an estrangement pervading the characters in specific moments of their existences. The short stories are marked by a vivid sense of loss, signaled by the sharp changes brought about in Kuwaiti society by historical markers as the oil era or the Invasion. The longing for a different past reveals the longing for a different future, a sense of impotence conveyed by the use of language. To what extent can the use of English in Gulf literature be seen as a form of displacement? How can a ‘foreign language’ convey a sense of literary Kuwaitiness and national belonging? Or can this be a means to bridge transcultural hybridity in the younger generations, in the post-Invasion/post-Liberation era? The examination of the short stories will focus on the use of language paralleled by the sense of loss and estrangement of the young women protagonists in their native Kuwait, employing literary and sociological critique tools.