by Alia Yunis

In one of my favorite photos of my mom, she and her friends peek out of a train heading to Baghdad on a short holiday escape from Kuwait, circa 1958. I asked her once why they were going to Baghdad. The answer was simple. It was the most cosmopolitan city in the region then, as it had been for centuries. “We had to buy clothes, so we could stay fashionable,” she explained. “You should always care about how you look, even when no one can see you.”

Her adventures of going to Kuwait as an eighteen-year-old English teacher remain some of my most beloved mom stories. Back then, she was part of planeloads of Palestinians who went to Kuwait from an airstrip near Jerusalem to work in the newly rich country. Her job, along with her fellow Palestinian and Egyptian teachers, was primarily to educate teenage Kuwaiti girls from the elite families. These young women had all been told they were being prepped for a glorious future, an irony, as their teachers were coming to Kuwait to survive a future that appeared to hold little promise for Palestine. In fact, my mom’s income went back to her parents to spend on her younger siblings until they too were able to come work in Kuwait, the girls as teachers, the boys as engineers. They primarily graduated from Cairo and Beirut universities, paid for in large part by my mom’s Kuwait income, along with that of her older brother. My mother would frequently ponder, throughout her life, whether migrating to the Gulf for money rather than staying in Palestine cost them Palestine. That is a question that lingers in my mind and heart.

This morning before I started writing this essay, I asked my mother, lost in her dementia, if she remembered when Iraq entered Kuwait in 1990, some 30 years after the photo on the Baghdad train. She did not. My mother also no longer recalls her time there in the 1950s and 60s, the dust, the heat, the locusts, the questionable living standards of the teacher housing, the lack of edible food, to the point she actually had to receive something she called “liver shots” (probably B12 shots). She doesn’t mention her fellow teachers anymore, many of whom remained lifelong friends, most now gone, or the students who didn’t know the word for cucumber in English because they didn’t know what it was in Arabic or any other language. She loved those students, particularly Badriya, a girl from the ruling family who stayed in touch with my mom through letters and telephone calls for decades after she graduated. Badriya’s mother would send rice dishes to the teachers’ accommodations when she saw how much weight my mom was losing. My mother still smiles faintly when I mention Kuwait.

Maybe that’s because my mother can’t remember how the story of the Palestinians and Kuwaitis climaxed in 1991. This is when the Kuwaiti rulers, reinstated after the Americans ousted the Iraqis, expelled my mother’s siblings and her many cousins and their families from Kuwait. Their crime was being Palestinian, and thus this made them complicit in supporting Saddam Hussein because the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat had done so. Right after the Iraqi invasion, at an Arab League meeting to decide how to respond to the event, Arafat found himself caught between his two biggest financial supporters, Kuwait and Iraq. While he did not agree openly with Saddam’s military actions, he told the Arab League that he preferred that the region resolve the situation without the Americans interfering on behalf of Kuwait. The Kuwaitis viewed this as siding with Saddam.  

In cars and convoys, nearly 400,000 Palestinians left Kuwait with their children and whatever fit in their vehicles, traversing through Iraq to Jordan, along the way bribing Iraqi soldiers with some of their limited possessions that held a lifetime of memories.

Displaced for the second or third time in their lives, these Palestinians, some rich, some with little savings, restarted again in Jordan. Jordan was a country for which they held passports, but had never lived in. It was the passport given to Palestinians living on the West Bank who were technically under the Jordanian mandate after the 1948 partition of Palestine. The passport allowed the Palestinians to travel for work, namely to Kuwait.

In the 1990s, the displaced ranks would grow in Jordan by thousands with the arrival of Iraqi refugees as the Gulf Wars ensued. My mother decided to join them. She also had never lived in Jordan. But she had missed her brothers and sisters since leaving Kuwait in the 1960s.

My mother was the first in her family to go to Kuwait, and she was also the first to leave. Like many Palestinians, I can say I would not exist today if not for Kuwait. My parents met at a mutual friend’s home, when my father, then living in Chicago, was visiting his brother in Kuwait. My parents were introduced and married in Kuwait without a wedding, and the two of them then went to the United States, where my father had been living for ten years. America was what my mother found most attractive about my father – she could now pursue her own dream of studying at an American university. My parents would never have met and married in Palestine – my grandparents would not have allowed their daughter to marry a villager, even though the occupation of Palestine had leveled everyone’s wealth – well, aside from many of those who were able to reclaim their financial status in Kuwait. For many of my mother’s relatives – particularly engineers who would build the infrastructure of the country – Kuwait offered not just money for survival but eventually abundant riches. Some would later move to Saudi Arabia, again to construct the physical framework for a future of luxury, opportunity, and, most importantly, safety and security unimaginable to those still in Palestine.

My mom’s siblings and cousins were for the most part in their late 40s and 50s when they left Kuwait for Jordan. Some still had kids in elementary and high school, and some had kids already in university. None of my cousins stayed in Kuwait, aside from two, the sons of my Aunt Suad. That’s because they had a Syrian father and therefore Syrian passports. This was probably the only time a Syrian passport was beneficial in the Gulf, which has always had a strained relationship with Syria’s Assad regime. But Aunt Suad, with her Jordanian passport, being essentially a code word for Palestinian, had to leave.

My mom would not smile about Kuwait if she could understand Aunt Suad’s situation today. For 30 years, Aunt Suad was a school teacher in Kuwait. She couldn’t live off her savings from that job for long, so she worked as a school administrator in Jordan until she reached retirement age. By then, her sons were working in Kuwait and could send her money. When Kuwait allowed Palestinians to come back as visitors, although not to live there, she went back every year to see her sons and her many Kuwaiti friends.

In January 2020, just as dementia was ever so slightly creeping into her world, Aunt Suad went to visit her kids for two months. By the time those two months were over, Kuwait had a COVID national lockdown. Like my mother in Jordan, the isolation of the lockdowns sped up Aunt Suad’s dementia. Her son petitioned the Kuwait government to let her stay after her visitor’s visa expired. The answer was no. Since then, he has tried over and over again, from the bottom of ministries to the top of ministries. The answer is always no. Nor is Aunt Suad allowed to get a COVID-19 vaccine, as she is not a legal resident. Not even if she is willing to pay to be inoculated. My cousin keeps paying fines for violating the limitations of her visa, but now he has run out of reprieves. My aunt must go back to Jordan, where there is no one to take care of her: her children can’t join her in Jordan without giving up their jobs, which support her.

Why won’t the Kuwait government give residency to an 85-year-old lady who has educated generations of Kuwaiti girls, whose children and grandchildren were born and still live and work there? A woman who was kicked out and lost most of her possession but still considers Kuwait home? The Kuwait government told her son, “We don’t need foreigners to take advantage of our healthcare system and hospitality.” They welcomed her when she was young and strong. But this frail and elderly “foreigner” who spent most of her life in Kuwait is to be exiled again. My aunt, in her fog, still puts on make-up and high heels every day, not remembering having been told many times that she can’t stay in what she still remembers instinctively as home.

Perhaps we can think the 1991 eviction of Palestinians was an overreaction. What is less debatable is this lack of humanitarianism at home, away from the international gaze. That bright shiny future my mother’s students were promised in the 1950s was only for Kuwaiti nationals, not their “foreign” teachers. Kuwait, it turns out, isn’t like my fashion-conscious Mom on that train to Baghdad. It’s a place where no one, not even the government, says to themselves, “You should always care about how you look, even when no one can see you.”

Alia Yunis is a visiting associate professor at New York University Abu Dhabi, where she teaches film and heritage studies, including a class on science fiction and human anxieties and a class on film/media in the MENASA (Middle East, North Africa, South Asia) region. A filmmaker, photographer, and writer, Yunis has worked on projects on five continents and her work has been translated into eight languages. Her feature documentary, The Golden Harvest (2019), made its debut at Thessaloniki International Film Festival, won Best of the Fest at its US debut at the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival and has played in several other festivals. Her critically-acclaimed novel, The Night Counter, was published by Random House in 2009.

The banner picture is of Alba and fellow teachers, Kuwait, mid-1950s. All photos are courtesy of Alia Yunis.