Absence

Author: H Copyright © 2007

Every sunrise I watch brick and mortar. Every sunset I scrutinize steel and iron ore. Every week and every month and year I witness them pumping and thumping, radically changing and ghettoizing Kuwait’s landscape. Mostly, vertically. Beautifully architectural commercial buildings to incompetent-looking bland structures are stretching skyward, as if struggling to reach God, like mosque minarets. They are neck-stretching one another, shoulder to shoulder, in too close for comfort proximity. And each added floor that is monotonously being added on top of the other in every building is another free space for the grabbing, because the concrete stocking up is being paid for by the small plots of ground below. Air isn’t. Sufficient spatial-planning down below, however, is augmented into near oblivion like a shadow, or a hauntingly nagging infrastructural ghost that is hard to shake.

Like the chunk and chunk sounds of oil rigs pounding and squeezing black golden oil out of mother nature’s bellied desert for hefty foreign consumption, foreign workers and the desert-oiled money that is connivingly financed in Kuwait is sapping underqualified and undertreated rural Egyptian workers with now Chinese, Nepalese, and Indian laborers from sunrise to sunset for the sake of a Kuwaiti identity that is based on unKuwaiti innovation. From schools, hospitals, roads and marinas, Kuwait is being built by a foreign entity that is contracted by Asian desperation, which is herded on morning buses like sardines, and an Arabic, Islamic inequality that is living and preaching otherwise.

Like the superficial majestic designs of the new buildings, in the shadows, social unity is being attempted by the minority. National songs, political gibberish, and rumor-mongering are flaunted, as hallow confidence that is built by a solid foreign presence. They all have fabricated our Kuwaiti infrastructure but without producing an authentic national identity. There is little — if nothing — Kuwaiti about any of our buildings, even the mud houses before the oil boom had spelled the same. They were mostly reciped by blood-staking manual laborers who have had little to do with anything Kuwaiti; anything Arabic or Islamic. The structures have all been sanctioned into creating a myth of an identity that is more genuinely absent than present. It’s one that is more fictitious yet presently, and comfortably, rewritten in Kuwaiti’s history books, while leaving absent what is true.

This perfectly echoes how such a country, for example, can eat such large portions of rice as a main staple when the same country is too arid to grow any form of rice. Rice has long been imported from a culture we have adopted – stolen – from India, like chia (tea), into our supposed Kuwaitization; lingo and all.