No matter how long
you’ve lived in this arid, barren, desert of a country. No matter how many
summers you’ve endured. The scorching heat of May, will hit you like a
deafening, sweltering slap. A heavy suffocating blanket you can’t kick off. Still,
weighty air, like a plastic bag over your head, full of dust, and asthma
provoking humidity, strong garbage smells saturate the air, bringing you to the
lowest point of your human vitality and motivation.
The frequent dusty
days, color the whole atmosphere in a sickly urine yellow. The poorly paved
roads expand like a vulgar yawn. No trees, no flowers, no clouds. Thin,
malnourished palm trees, gone brown, wilting and bent, their top spiky leaves
touching the ground. The dryness of everything, the absence of nature, the
ugliness almost painful. Constant traffic choked roads, with broken fences between
them. Exhausted buildings spilling grimy worn washing, from dirty shabby
windows and balconies. The irony of luxury sport cars, shiny and expensive
looking, against a bleak, rough backdrop.
In a place like this;
where who you are depends on what car you drove, and the price of the watch you
wore, how can one dream? How can one grow, think, feel, create, inspire or be
inspired?
Every day I leave the
court house nauseated, and gasping for fresh air, the packed corridors and
lifts filled with smokers. My head grows heavier, a grey cloud swells inside my
brain. On worse days, a pair of filthy hands won’t stop heaping sand inside my
head. Burying my brain.
I represent a gynecologist
who killed a thirty-year-old mother, ‘it was an accident’, he explains to
me in his heavy Nigerian/British accent, ‘I did not know how advanced her
cancer was, the operation went wrong’. Wearing a dated brown suit, and a striped
brown and white tie.
I represent a woman who’s
divorcing her husband, who had raped her twelve-year-old brother.
I represent a man who’s
suing his employee for stealing a KD 15 internet router from the office.
On my way home, the depressing,
tired roads stretch before me. I replay endless stories of pain, loss and suffering.
The raw flesh of chickens turning on the grills, of small unhygienic takeout restaurants
scattered everywhere. White meat burning on fiery flames, reddening slowly, dripping
grease and fat and lard. While two filthy hands, keep shoveling sand inside my
head.
Kuwait 2017
