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The Absurd Injunction to Not Belong and the Bidūn in Kuwait

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2020

Claire Beaugrand
Claire Beaugrand*
Affiliation:
French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Social Sciences (IRISSO), Université Paris Dauphine-PSL; University of Exeter
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

In a tweet posted on 29 March 2018, a bidūn activist—who was later jailed from July 2019 to January 2020 for peacefully protesting against the inhumane conditions under which the bidūn are living—shared a video. The brief video zooms in closely on an ID card, recognizable as one of those issued to the bidūn, or long-term residents of Kuwait who are in contention with the state regarding their legal status. More precisely, the mobile phone camera focuses on the back of the ID card, on one line with a special mention added by the Central System (al-jihāz al-markazī), the administration in charge of bidūn affairs. Other magnetic strip cards hide the personal data written above and below it. A male voice can be heard saying that he will read this additional remark, but before even doing so he bursts into laughter. The faceless voice goes on to read out the label in an unrestrained laugh: “ladayh qarīb … ladayh qarīna … dālla ʿalā al-jinsiyya al-ʿIrāqiyya” (he has a relative … who has presumptive evidence … suggesting an Iraqi nationality). The video shakes as the result of a contagious laugh that grows in intensity. In the Kuwaiti dialect, the voice continues commenting: “Uqsim bil-Allāh, gaʿadt sāʿa ufakkir shinū maʿanāt hal-ḥatchī” (I swear by God, it took me an hour to figure out the meaning of this nonsense), before reading the sentence again, stopping and guffawing, and asking if he should “repeat it a third time,” expressing amazement at its absurdity. The tweet, addressed to the head of the Central System (mentioned in the hashtag #faḍīḥat Sāliḥ al-Faḍāla, or #scandal Salih al-Fadala), reads: In lam tastaḥī fa-'ktub mā shaʾt (Don't bother, write what you want).

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 726 - 732
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Beckett, Samuel, Endgame: A Play in One Act (London: Faber and Faber, 1958), 26Google Scholar.

2 Yūsif al-Bāshiq (Būbāshiq) @bobashig, Twitter post, 29 March 2018, https://twitter.com/bobashig/status/979440149854654465.

3 Bidūn, an Arabic word meaning “without,” is used as a shorthand for the expression “without nationality” (bidūn jinsiyya). It refers to people who have been excluded from citizenship since the 1960s initially as a result of inconsistent policies. Since then, they have been in contention with the state of Kuwait over their entitlement to nationality. The state has regarded them as illegal on its territory since a 1986 decree.

4 The Central System is short for the official name, the Central System for the Remedy of the Situations of the Illegal Residents (al-jihāz al-markazī li-muʿālajat awḍāʿ al-muqīmīn bi-ṣūra ghayr qānūniyya).

5 See, in the Palestinian context of precarity and occupation, the excellent piece of Bhungalia, Lisa, “Laughing at Power: Humor, Transgression, and the Politics of Refusal in Palestine,” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 38, no. 3 (2020): 387–404Google Scholar.

6 As a reminder, the concept of absurd was coined originally to refer to a nonorganized literary movement and specifically but not exclusively to playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet. The literary critic Martin Esslin, who described the theory, noted common points between playwrights that primarily conveyed a sense of incomprehension and even despair in the face of what was felt as a lack of consistency and cohesion in the world. The plays are characterized by incomprehensible plots that seem to start and end arbitrarily and are propelled by unmotivated actions and meaningless dialogues; Penguin Plays: Absurd Drama (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1965), 12. Here the concept of absurd is understood more broadly than in the definition of the “theater of the absurd.”

7 Darwish, Mahmoud, Journal of an Ordinary Grief, trans. Muhawi, Ibrahim (New York: Archipelago, 2018), 66Google Scholar.

8 Beaugrand, Claire, Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality and Society in Kuwait (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018), 128CrossRefGoogle Scholar, emphasis mine.

9 Kuwaitis by origin are legally defined as persons and their descendants who are able to prove their continued presence since 1920 in “Kuwait,” a yet to be defined sovereign territory at the time.

10 US Department of State, Kuwait 2018 Human Rights Report, 16, https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/KUWAIT-2018.pdf.

11 Kuwait has the financial and technical means to carry out mass DNA tests. An August 2015 DNA test law made it mandatory for all citizens and foreign residents to be included in a national DNA database. Initially designed to address security concerns, the law was widely criticized internationally for its privacy implications and subsequently abandoned when the constitutional court judged it contrary to the constitution.

12 Elsheshtawi, Yasser, Temporary Cities: Resisting Transience in Arabia (London: Routledge, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Thomas McGee, “The COVID-19 Crisis and New Agency for Stateless Bidoon in Kuwait,” LSE Middle East Centre Blog, 27 April 2020, https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2020/04/27/the-covid-19-crisis-and-new-agency-for-stateless-bidoon-in-kuwait.

14 Abrar al-Shammari, “The Rise of Bidun Literature: Representation and Advocacy in Kuwait,” Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington Blog Post, 2 December 2019, https://agsiw.org/the-rise-of-bidun-literature-representation-and-advocacy-in-kuwait.

15 Esslin, Penguin Plays, 23, emphasis mine.