Note on Censorship in Kuwait 🇰🇼 See Bothayna Al-Essa’s quote on Kuwait’s worsening regulatory conditions.

Kuwaiti TV shows love to unpack the nation’s decline. While people are afraid to say anything remotely critical today, the early 2000’s were different times. It was so common back then to hear leading actors, writers, and producers gripe about Kuwait’s strict censorship laws.

They were so outspoken about the neglect they endured. No adequate spaces for their shows/rehearsals, making alterations to their scripts, working through bureaucratic red tape, and so on. It was so easy to motivate myself to leave given those circumstances!

I was alone in the wilderness, with nothing to cover my back, exposed to prosecution and fines and facing the ogre of censorship with its thousands of arms. And in the grim world of capitalism, it was a struggle to convince anyone to invest in a book instead of buying a caffè mocha with cream or getting a Botox shot.

That year, I felt I was being slapped in the face time and again as I saw books that had been approved in previous years being banned. One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I’d bought from the bookfair in the nineties, was apparently now not allowed. The Arab Cultural Center’s Arabic edition of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four was approved, while Dar Al-Tanweer’s edition was not. The banning of Ghassan Kanafani’s timeless novel, Men in the Sun, was particularly painful. And Nikos Kazantzakis’ Zorba the Greek was banned and approved, then banned and approved again several times in one year. When one of Abdul Rahman Munif’s novels was called in for inspection, I asked the censor for an explanation, since the novel had been approved and in circulation for years. She said the author might have changed something between editions—as if Munif having been dead for twelve years was of no consequence!

The system was arbitrary and irrational, a bureaucracy with neither head nor tail, like a poem by Baudelaire. I’ve always wondered whether some hidden genius lay behind its effectiveness, or whether it was the complete lack of such genius that propelled it.

Over the past ten years, it has become clear to me how many of our freedoms have been curtailed. What the censor used to approve in the nineties is banned today. The state has rolled back decades of progress while society—with the help of the latest platforms and technology—has gained access to content so vast it’s impossible to censor. It’s our exclusively homegrown version of Alice’s Wonderland, absurd and devoid of logic. The only difference is that it’s far from what any of us would call fun.

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🎙️ Born out of the culture shock +Aziz experienced moving from public to private school, this song was written as a sarcastic ode to privilege. The future is made when we annihilate stereotypes of our people.

Listen to Was6a on Spotify or Bandcamp.

🎙️ If you were to introduce the Palestinian struggle to someone, where would you start?

* Read: Mahmoud Darwish (poetry), Joe Sacco’s Palestine.

* Reflect: On media consumption habits and complicity in systemic violence.

🎙️ Brian and I got together to reflect on the release of Mishriff last year. With the EP released, we’ve been able to explore new ways of being with each other and we’re so excited to start bringing you into our world.