The Desert writes back

Aseel AlYaqoub’s practice is a love letter to Kuwait: its history, its people, and most importantly, its land. Studying how this nation came to be, she inevitably observed how British imperialism leaked into almost every aspect of its formation. Among many interests in Kuwait, oil was at the frontier. To locate it, the British had to navigate an ecosystem completely foreign to them – a desert they mislabelled as a barren wasteland to justify taming and exploiting it.

 “It destroyed the ecosystem’s history. It destroyed Indigenous narratives. It destroyed everything,” says Aseel. “The first master plan in Kuwait was designed from above by a British urban-planning firm and facilitated by British consultants.”  In 1922, the British High Commissioner for Iraq, frustrated with territorial rivalries, used a red pencil to draw lines on a map to define the boundaries of each territory, undermining the Indigenous tribes’ movement routes and modes of mapping – one of many historic events in Kuwait’s history that are tackled in The View from Above, Aseel’s debut solo exhibition at Bildmuseet, Sweden. As the title suggests, the British, through their maps, and later the Americans, through their GPS systems, always approached the desert from a distance and never confronted it up close. It was a passive object to be used, and yet this ecosystem is deeply intertwined with the history and lives of the tribes there, saturated with generations of stories and lineages. That disconnect between how the desert is made sense of is one of many points where Aseel’s work intervenes: “I want, through my work, to reclaim the land, to redirect the institutions that are enforced by these prescriptions because they tend to repeat rather than represent who we are.”

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 00 | Order Here

Kuwait, like other Gulf countries, ceased to be a protectorate and gained full independence in 1961. Yet, the imperial legacies are still alive and well. They inform policy-making and national identity, especially as it pertains to the desert. Decades after its independence, this dismissiveness of the desert landscape neglects the knowledge that has enriched it for centuries. 

Dr. Sara Al-Ateeqi, a Kuwaiti ecologist and director of operations at Al Shaheed Park Museums, critiques a harmful approach to “green,” “improve,” and “control” the desert in an interview with Kuwait Times.  “The damage is done when cultivating non-native plants in the heart of the desert and in large numbers, as has happened with the Conocarpus. We later discovered that its long roots damage the infrastructure and break pipes,” she says. “The real imbalance occurs when the only goal is to turn the desert into a green land without prior research. I wonder why we are ashamed of our beautiful desert nature.”

 This shame over an incredibly biodiverse ecosystem didn’t come out of nowhere. It was meticulously constructed to simultaneously belittle Indigenous knowledge of our lands and gain control over it. As we prepare for the future, it’s clear that our infrastructure and expansive cities will rely on the ‘emptiness’ of the desert. So how can we ensure these efforts are rooted in the knowledge and practices that helped us live and work alongside the desert for centuries? How can we avoid a direction influenced by misconceptions that ultimately work against the desert?

Like Aseel, Bassam Ahmed’s practice can provide some answers. He traces this knowledge and attempts to revive it. As a historian and illustrator, he archives the forgotten stories and traditions of Nubia that were lost to constant displacement and submerging of their homes. He specifically writes and publishes children’s books inspired by this heritage. 

Split between current-day Egypt and Sudan, Nubia was a victim of colonial practices that misconstrued what a desert was. Since the mid-19th century, the British pushed for the construction of dams in the Nile River to raise the water level upstream. They aimed to both supply irrigation canals and regulate navigation to give purpose to an otherwise “lifeless” desert. So they kept elevating it and building more with time, leaving thousands of Nubians killed and displaced in the process. 

“I descend from Debod, a village in the most northern part of Nubia, on the Egyptian side, and one of 45 Nubian villages,” says Bassam. “People woke up one terrifying night in 1902 and found water entering their mud houses from every side. There were no warnings or aid. They had to flee.”

 No matter the elevation of water, Nubians never gave up their land easily. With every submerged home, they built another one in a neighbouring Nubian village that remained untouched by water. “Stories of drowning haunt me, but I’m most fascinated about them always rebuilding, using anything and everything they had access to, refuting the allegations of deserts being useless,” says Bassam.

Even before the construction of dams, Nubian homes were inspired by the ecosystem surrounding them. They used raw materials, especially from plants native to their villages, to build and decorate them, creating captivating patterns inspired by the movement of sand. At one point, “there were a million palm trees in Nubia. Each part of it was used somehow: to build ceilings and beds. To cook and feed each other. And to seek shade,” explains Bassam. 

To understand how our ancestors were inspired by deserts, we must develop personal and collective tools to look deeper into their other creations. Artist Alymamah Rashed creates a specific methodology for painting, one that gets her closer to the many Kuwaiti mythologies she disentangles in her work. Her training pushed her to contemplate the mundane, recurring objects she was surrounded by in Kuwait’s desert and islands: pebbles, flowers, bricks, and oil spills. “The collection of these objects made me gaze onto bigger subjects and histories, specifically in relation to the archaeological scene in Kuwait, including Failaka Island and Subiya,” says Alymamah. “For me, it’s about emitting myself into the object or the natural being and imagining myself to be it. I don’t let it influence me – I just enter it and respect it as if I were entering a shrine.”

Her methodology is inspired by pioneer Kuwaiti artist Basil Alkazzi, whose work was part of a larger movement of centring spiritualism in painting in the 1960s. He’d look at a flower and he’d become the flower – an angle that enabled him to abstract everyday natural scenes and reach  their true essence. This bond Alymamah creates with her objects gives her unprecedented insight into an ecosystem’s history, encompassing its present state and glimpses of its past. “I relate to the desert through archaeology. It’s almost a minimalist relationship,” Alymamah explains. “I find an entirety in one single pebble that I would collect from Subiya, for example. A 10-minute walk from where I found it, there is an archaeological site of artifacts tracing back to the Bronze Age.”

Despite the different historic and geographic points each of these creatives use in their approach to the desert, they all seem to overlap on certain aspects while developing their own specificity. How can we, then, make sense of the nuances of each case depending on its peculiar context while also observing the similarities that bring them together? 

Dr. Brahim El Guabli, one of the founders of  Desert Futures Collective, has shaped the field of Saharanism. Growing up in the Amazigh city of Ouarzazate, he noticed that the desert surrounding him was used to build prisons. The Sahara also had a long history of being a playground for the French Army to test and develop weapons. To try to make sense of the violence being carried out in and around his hometown for the mere reason of being a desert, he started connecting it with other struggles around the globe, developing Saharanism in the process. “The choice to use a desert to test anything is just the tip of the iceberg of a long lineage of ideas, discourses and endeavours that emptied deserts, killed all life in them, and made them available for all sorts of enterprises that none can dare even imagine to carry out in urban or forest spaces,” says Dr. El Guabli. “I have called this phenomenon Saharanism to draw attention to the ideology underlying it and also in order to show that there are many similarities between the ways deserts are treated across the globe.”

Dr. El Guabli’s work doesn’t stop at grouping and labelling the different fields of knowledge that manufactured, exploited, and perpetuated the inhospitality and impossibility of life in the desert. He aims to imagine what the future of the desert and life in it could look like, inviting us to think of it in parallel to other vast ecosystems. “I am not saying anything new when I say that deserts are not dead. Deserts are bustling with life, but it is high time that we stopped associating life with humans only. When life is redefined, and humans insist on taking desert life into account, deserts will be treated like seas and oceans,” he emphasises. “They will be seen as complex ecosystems and environments where life takes myriad forms even if the conditions are harsh or less than ideal for human beings.” 

While an abundance of images and theories still dictate how the desert is perceived, this special ecosystem remains a home for different forms of life around the globe. These creatives and scholars know this intimately: they see and feel how this ecosystem has impacted their livelihoods and communities. And they specifically focus on how it will continue to shape their futures. Across their different fields and creations, they help us imagine a future wherein we see the desert eye-to-eye, working alongside us and not for us. They show us how it has always pushed back – the biodiverse, thriving life in it is a testimony of how it has always resisted.

Originally published in Dazed MENA Issue 00 | Order Here