On Personal Strategies and Changing the World
For International Women’s Day
This is an edited version of the speech originally shared at The American University of Kuwait for International Women’s Day in March 2015.
I am the Corpus of my Work: On Personal Strategies and Changing the World
The path to equality is not a monolith.
We need to shed light on the heroes and heroines of our struggles. We need institutions that centralize expertise. We need to fund campaigns that distribute aid to the needy. Protests, marches, and sit-ins are also essential because they pressure elected officials and remind them that representatives answer to the public.
Nonetheless, consider the words of the Syrian poet, Muhammed al-Maghut, who wrote in 1984, “To become a great writer — regardless of which Arab country one is in — one must be truthful; to be truthful, one must be free; and to be free, one must be alive; yet to be alive, one must hold one’s tongue!”
If this is the conundrum faced by the Arab writer today — the choice between dying before telling the truth or living without disclosing it — is it really surprising that a large segment of the literature we produce nowadays is poor, and that which is considered ‘good’ is most often hidden and circulated among a few?
I am asking if there is no other way for change to take place outside of the spectacular, media-driven, and life-threatening scenarios we admire and have come to rely on as a society?
Put differently: is change only possible in a unilateral trajectory — a one-way street of grand designs and recognizable organizations? Or could the path toward equality be multiple, diverse, and intersectional?
If the latter, this leads me to another question. Simply put: Could it be that the cause is the motive that keeps us going, while our personal strategies determine where we go, when we cross paths with others, how we collaborate with colleagues, and how we carry on with our journeys afterward?
In other words, could the desire to make society more equitable be the fuel that drives us forward rather than the destination, which if undertaken strategically, will undoubtedly be personal?
I ask this question today because I believe that the desire to reshape the world does not belong to a specific organization, a certain class of people, or even to intellectuals.
The need to make the world a better place is innate in every one of us. It belongs to every living being, from the most ordinary to the most unique.
As a fellow human, I stand before you today to share my journey and, hopefully, inspire you to embark on your own.
Hence, allow me to discuss three points in particular:
- The importance of language,
- The importance of personal strategies,
- And the importance of human connections.
The Importance of Language
I write what I call Anglowaiti literature. It is literature in the broadest sense of the word, encompassing genres, styles, and topics. The prefix Anglo — a word that indicates a relation to England — refers to the language of the text. The suffix waiti is taken from the term ‘Kuwaiti’ and refers to the subject of the text.
Anglowaiti literature is created by an Anglowaiti for an Anglowaiti audience.
Even when presented abroad, the aim is to depict the Anglowaiti experience with all its complexity and nuance.
I do not write Oriental literature for international readers.
In coming up with the term and all that it implies, I had in mind the words of the founder of black power, Stokely Carmichael, “We have to fight for the right to invent the terms which will allow us to define ourselves and to define our relations to society, and we have to fight that these terms have to be accepted. This is the first need of a free people.”
I find our current discussions on identity limiting and even dangerous. In fact, a great number of people born and living on our soil lack even nominal recognition. By using a global language that is recognized nationally, taught with great vigor in schools, workshops, and universities, disseminated culturally in cinemas and national radio stations, and used in official announcements, I aspire to decenter the focus on our national identity today.
In Anglowaiti literature, I do not mean “giving voice to the voiceless;” rather, I mean inventing the terms with which we can redefine ourselves. It provides the means that will allow the majority of our population — currently invisible due to the language barrier and the limiting aspect of our present understanding of national identity — to tell their own stories in a shared global language.
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes, “Words are never ‘only words’: they matter because they define the contours of what we do.”
This is precisely why I write poetry, articles, and fiction about Kuwait in English.
I aspire to rewrite our future with a tolerant pen.
The Importance of Personal Strategies
To an outsider, I may seem like a naive woman, wasting my energy on diverse projects when I should be focusing on a specific style (such as writing memoirs) or cultivating a target audience. Outsiders claim that I sully the good work I do by writing across genres and for various ages, and because contemporary notions about art tend to flatten out its possibilities and render the world on a two-dimensional canvas (i.e., you’re either commercial or literary), I understand my detractors.
They do not expect to see someone working on a personal strategy that is undeclared or unenforced by established institutions. One that is multilayered and composed of phases. A strategy that will only bear fruit over a long period of time.
However, I am a strategist, and there is a method to my madness.
In fact, when I decided to become a professional writer, I was 17 years old.
I wrote a 10-year plan to improve my language skills and knowledge and to discover myself and the world I occupy.
Now, when I write for children or young adults, I show them that I was also in their shoes, full of life like them, and feeling emotions such as anger, sadness, and confusion. I demonstrate how social expectations can harm their sense of self. More importantly, I illustrate how they can maintain their youthful exuberance, willpower, and playfulness even after becoming adults.
When I write for an older audience, I provide access to knowledge that is often hidden from view due to market standards (such as tastes, genres, and age range), academic or intellectual standards, or even sociopolitical ones. I expose my adult readers to a variety of styles, subjects, and stories, and encourage them to question their own mental compartments and evaluative systems. Then, I engage them with questions, issues, and scandals. I explore new technologies to experiment with social networking devices that allow a person to transcend borders and divisions, and to reach audiences that would otherwise be invisible or difficult to reach.
For example, I interviewed a Kuwaiti woman about adoption and another about the state of social workers in Kuwait. I wrote stories that discuss the lives of an interracial family, a feminist who participated in the Blue Revolution of 2003 that ended up giving women the right to vote, and the lives of members of a Shia family in the 1980s, told from the point of view of a seven-year-old girl.
I developed my own personal strategy because, although I disagree with many of Barack Obama’s policies, I do believe in his initial message, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”
The Importance of Human Connections
I want to emphasize that if the endpoint is to create a better, more inclusive, and more tolerant future, one that safeguards dignity and encourages creativity and critical thinking, we need to prioritize human connections.
Because people no longer even assume that some of us might have strategies, they tend to think in superficial terms. For them, success is defined in terms of profits, recognition, fame, power, or social elevation. Hence, people often ask, “How many books have you sold?” “How many awards have you won?” “How large is your fan base?”
For writers with material goals, I suppose these things are important, but for someone trying to change Kuwait, one poem, one article, or one story at a time, these elements are trivial. I do not judge the success of my work in these terms. Rather, I base the entire value system of my work on the strength of human connections.
I will give you an example before I conclude this speech. I receive emails from readers who tell me that my writing has transformed them. I hear the same phrases after performances, face to face, when people shake my hand and share their stories.
I recently experienced such a heartwarming encounter.
In 2009, when science fiction writers Dani and Eytan Kollin published The Unincorporated Man, I asked to interview them for Kuwait Times newspaper. Their book won The Prometheus Award for Best Novel of the Year, and at the end of the series, Tor, one of the largest publishing houses for science fiction and fantasy, sent me the final installment, which I reviewed on my blog.
That was in 2012.
Recently, on Instagram, I was contacted by a Kuwaiti woman who informed me that the review I had written had had a significant impact on her life.
It made her question the state of education in Kuwait and the future of her children. She then took the initiative of pulling her young ones out of school and embarked on homeschooling — an option that isn’t available in Kuwait. In other words, she has now developed her own personal strategy. Her biography on various social networks reads:
“I’m a Kuwaiti homeschooler and have been homeschooling in secret since pulling my kids out of school in 2012. I finally decided this was too precious of an experience to keep it to myself and so [I’m] here to share the joy and the goodness that I’ve found in homeschooling.”
She reminded me of a quote by another US president, John F. Kennedy: “Those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
I certainly do not take credit for the Kuwaiti woman’s efforts. In fact, she should take credit for mine because empowering people to create their own visions and personal strategies is the reason I keep writing.
I believe wholeheartedly in Carol Becker’s definition of art.
She writes, “We need to see art as it is — a sociological phenomenon.”
Thus, it can change the world.
