Contributed by Faisal Hamadah

Kuwait is a country that adores the status quorum: stability at the expense of improvement, while everybody’s still rich, and yes, we all do have oil fields in our backyards. During the 90’s and most of the 00’s, this was reflected in much of the art coming out of the country. Despite a rich history of cultural and social criticism in the arts, Kuwaiti art experienced a fissure during the 80’s which further expanded following the Iraqi invasion, a time when patriotism became mandatory and where unity and identity were built on trauma and indignation.  Since, Kuwaitis have been expected to consistently tow the party line, embracing a stringent consumerism as the way of life in order to emphasize that we ARE okay. This precipitated a cultural xenophobia that is historically inaccurate to preserve this supposed ‘ideal’ Kuwait, where traditionalism and national identity clashed with unchecked consumerism to create a truly contradictory state.

While neighboring struggles for revolution may have not brought a full-scale revolt to Kuwait, they’ve brought the next best thing – a rapidly expanding conscientiousness.

While neighboring struggles for revolution may have not brought a full-scale revolt to Kuwait, they’ve brought the next best thing – a rapidly expanding conscientiousness. Contemporary and conceptual art has become a ‘scene’ in the country attacking, with the tools of postmodernism (pastiche and irony) the forgotten, ignored and whitewashed spaces of discourse such as cultural heritage, gender identity, and consumerism.

Intentions aside, the art becomes redundant and fails to be politically potent. Much of it participates in the same manner of spectacle that it is commenting/critiquing on, relying primarily on methods of cultural substitution to achieve its message. The recipe is simple: take a product, glam it up to the extreme, make sure the script is in Arabic or for more irony, in broken English, rinse, repeat.

The motifs are always present: designer patterns, matchboxes, Pepsi, and a LOT of veils, usually in conjunction with each other. This, while occasionally funny, sometimes pretty, sometimes poignant and always interesting, eschews narrative on principle to an extreme that doesn’t allow for contextualization. The art becomes too obvious, and does not inaugurate an opportunity to question, for the artist has already provided all the answers.

The disappearance of narrative also takes with it the most recognizable and immediate of Arab art forms: storytelling. This dislocates the art from the society at large, gives it elements of ‘faddishness’ and ‘foreignness’, and makes it fail to achieve the cultural relevancy that it needs in order to communicate to a societal circle that is larger than the Western educated crew of Kuwaitis who tend to frequent the galleries that are popping up all over the country…

And then Bu Tilli comes along with his wrinkly dishdasha and broken dreams. Over the course of three minutes and 21 seconds, Bu Tilli walks the viewer through a typically uneventful day in his life. He drives around a bit, and then goes home to watch some TV. He heads to a Starbucks to have a Frappuccino, after which he goes home and tries to sleep. The titular Bu Tilli narrates the day. Apathetic and bored, Bu Tilli is a pastiche of modern Kuwaiti youth who cannot break the rhythm of his day, and subsequently cannot take control of his life.

Turn on him, Turn on him

In the first scene, Bu Tilli, in what we can sanely assume is an inner monologue, complements himself on his driving, calling himself the ‘best driver on the face of the Earth,’ after he aggressively overtakes a fellow driver. He is reflecting a distinct Kuwaiti preoccupation with driving as a space of control and independence. For a bit of context, driving in Kuwait is an excruciatingly dangerous affair. When I first received my license, my grandfather told me to assume that ‘everyone other than you is a crazy person,’ on the road, but this is at the best of times. At the worst, everyone is a predator, desperate to prove their power by overtaking, speeding and ‘betweening’ (the act of recklessly darting between cars in different lanes in order to not have to wait for the person in front of you to drive at their own pace). Bu Tilli participates in this aggressive form of driving, and uses it to assert his identity very early on, thereby earning himself, and the clip, a Kuwaiti identity. His dissatisfaction stems from a slighted nature, wherein he is not acknowledged as a driving god by ‘his job, his family, his friends.’

What have I gained, personally?

When Bu Tilli returns home and switches on the TV, images of white-clad men duking it out for supremacy accost him. Bu Tilli is clearly upset, as the people fighting are the Kuwaiti parliament, a body that is widely viewed as ineffectual and corrupt. He is unhappy not because the parliament is a laughingstock, but because he can’t see any way that they have helped him. “Till when will we remain silent?” asks Bu Tilli, which is as close as he will come to realizing that the problem isn’t the parliament, but with Kuwaiti silence and the distinct voyeurism that stems out of stasis. Instead of attempting to do anything other than think about this, Bu Tilli goes to Starbucks.

The Frappucino as signifier of impotence

Bu Tilli goes to Starbucks for a Frappucino, the national drink of Kuwait. The sickly sweet concoction of coffee, caramel, and cream doesn’t do much for Bu Tilli, for his dissatisfaction have reached epic proportions. “Your taste becomes rotten after a couple of sips,” thinks Bu Tilli at his Frappucino. For Kuwaitis, consumption (particularly of foreign imports) is therapy, and considering diabetes rates in the country, may not leave us standing for long. Bu Tilli’s dissatisfaction with the Frappucino is a pivotal ideological break with his society, as he admits that what he’s drinking is actually disgusting.

Starbucks in Kuwait has also become the space to “fix it” i.e. find a lover. In a society with no communal social environments outside of malls and restaurants, where arranged marriages are still generally the norm, and where universities are segregated based on sex, the need for a place where young people can interact becomes imperative, but the spaces which have arisen to fill this void are generally not conducive to actual interaction.  This is due to the voyeuristic gaze of those also present, who become ‘informers’ against those who act outside of the cultural norm. When Bu Tilli sees a girl he has ‘scoped out’ at the café, he asks “How do I speak to her? Do I just follow her to her car? I don’t know how to do that.” His lack of inter-sex socialization turns Bu Tilli, again, into a static voyeur, one who cannot take action, and who jumps from seeing a girl that he finds attractive to wondering if she could “‘love him for who [he is], in spite [his] looks.” His silence is reinforced, and this is reflected in the narrative by the fact that Bu Tilli never speaks to another soul during the short.

Hunger as disease

Lying in his bed, Bu Tilli is unable to sleep, and is hungry but doesn’t know why. He recalls a previous experience similar to this from his childhood where he wakes up hungry, sleeping in between his parents. He tells his mother that he is hungry, and she utters the Kuwaiti equivalent of ‘shut up.’ The untranslatable nature of this utterance, which when literalized translates into ‘eat hay’ in Arabic, is apt for Bu Tilli because he’s a goat. This pun situates the piece as strictly Kuwaiti, the phrase being a common one in Kuwait, especially by parents who don’t want to tell their children to ‘eat shit’ (the other equivalent of ‘shut up’ in the dialect’) and is almost non-existent outside of the Gulf.

It’s a unique and rich signifier for Kuwaitiness, and is reflective of a space where hunger for anything other than what you are given is viewed as childishness, and a refusal to ‘eat’ what is ‘on the table’ a heresy of thanklessness. This infantilization of Bu Tilli is the culmination of his anti-journey. He starts off trying to be a man, but ends up back in his parents’ bed.

Can you score?

Bu Tilli is a departure from most contemporary Kuwaiti art in its ability to perform effective commentary, but mask it behind a comedy that plays upon what we know of the place. This tendency towards a socially relevant comedy is a historical aspect of Kuwaiti art (specifically in Kuwaiti theater of the ‘golden age’). The artistic innovation of the piece is its penchant for absurdity. In the shot above, we have a very typical Kuwaiti hallway, leading to Bu Tilli’s bedroom. We see the itty-bitty basket, hanging on the wall and the implied image of Bu Tilli standing under it, trying to score (and probably failing) makes me laugh forever on the inside. We laugh at Bu Tilli because a) he is a goat going around the affairs of a Kuwaiti youth, and b) because his introspection is humorous to an audience that is not used to seeing representations of such aimless introspection. The juxtaposition of these two signifiers creates an incongruity that is impossible to ignore, and has one chuckling throughout the clip.

There is also the matter of the formality of the video, which intermingles images of Kuwait with close-ups of Bu Tilli, close-ups that change angles and perspective but maintain their focus on the protagonist. This generates a link for the viewer between Kuwait the place and Bu Tilli’s monologue, at times giving us the impression that Bu Tilli is merely a cypher for the subconscious of a nation. That the art is released from the confines of the gallery and stage, and into the democratic space of Youtube, allows for the piece to speak for itself, without explanatory captions, and more importantly, without a price tag. This is perhaps the biggest accomplishment of the anonymous auteurs behind the clip, and a powerful indictment of Kuwaiti consumerism.

Now let’s hope for a second episode.

Related posts:

1. Kuwaiti Parliament Circle Jerk
2. Gaza Bound Goats Busted In Rafah
3. Youth and Good Looks
4. Keffiyeh infiltrates our nation’s youth
5. The Palestinian Youth Network