ABSTRACT
Identity politics promise liberation through struggle; but the criteria for liberation are often determined by the other whose very systems oppress us. We, as marginalized “Others” within white heteropatriarchy, are constantly required to address social constructs that relate to difference—be they race, gender, sexuality, etc.—rather than plot narratives based on our lived experiences. In practice, these constructs have broad implications for how we inhabit the world. This essay uses phenomenological, postcolonial, feminist, and critical race theory frameworks to assert how queer and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) artists can address the full range of their lived experiences in order to reclaim territories of lived experience that evade prescriptive canonization. In this essay, I use my experiences in the context of my family’s return to Kuwait from exile abroad. My experiences center around a set of photographs I encountered in my adolescence that details the physical impact of the first Gulf War on my secondary school. The photographs are to me a gateway to childhood memories of the war that were displaced by the numerous other migrations that followed. My questions about what happened to the school in those interim years have been left unresolved for decades. This essay uses theoretical and practical modes to frame the “missing years” that the documentary photographs in this essay illustrate. What happens when we lose connection with parts of our history? What transpires in those gaps and fissures? How does that loss impact our notions of self and who we are in the world? The text is organized in three parts. The first part (prologue) provides the groundwork and context for the second part, which is experiential in nature. The second part (monologue) is the “work.” Here, language, memory, and image come together to form, what I hope, are the beginnings of a rhizomatic complex. In this section, I adapt different modes of writing: Art-oriented, literary, critical, academic research, creative fiction, and experimental poetry. The last section (epilogue) fills in some of the documentary gaps, bridging the speculative nature of affective address with factual evidence which is essential to my record of these images and the people involved.
