Kashkhaكشخة | ‘kash-khah adjective. In Kuwaiti dialect, a term denoting someone or something that is classy, stylish, elegant, or refined.
My “kashkha” adolescent self was often surrounded by the incessant humming of overlapping tête-à-têtes during her weekly family zwara[1]. Arabic conversation permeated the scene, covering everything from politics and fashion trends to life updates and, of course, inevitable gossip. When addressed, her Anglophone voice would intrude upon the intimate, aromatic space of her grandmother’s saffron-infused qahwa Arabiah[2] and boxes of either petit fours adorned with edible gold flakes or the multi-flavored macarons she would bring from Ladurée. She would hesitantly respond to her aunties’ probing questions, parading her familiar line: “hmm, madri shinu elkilma bil Arabi” (“hmm, I don’t know what the Arabic word is for what I’m trying to say”). Her sentences carried an irreconcilable linguistic tension; Arabic felt unnatural on her tongue, while an American cadence pervaded her thoughts and conversations. This familial space felt constricted compared to the protected enclave of her academic world at the American International School of Kuwait. There, she was unapologetically monolingual: English was refined sugar, satisfying and smooth as it melted in her mouth, while Arabic remained a rough-edged bitterness she could barely digest.
She was therefore anointed by her Arabic-speaking family with the highly sought social characterization of kashkha—an adjectival crown that ascribed intellectual sophistication and cultural refinement to students of American and British private schools. Yet the very diadem she wore felt like an ever-increasing weight, pulling her into a liminal space of cultural estrangement and disorientation as she stepped beyond the confines of her elitist Western school. Future zwaras and encounters with Arabic speakers left her embarrassed to be a young adult whose English only highlighted her underdeveloped mother tongue. If she was not a true Kuwaiti, then who exactly was she?
With time, this carefully constructed yet contradictory performance of the cosmopolitan kashkha became the catalyst for my academic research. In this autoethnographic reflection, I explore two pivotal epiphanies that inspired me to interrogate the layers of my hybrid identity. The first emerged during my undergraduate Contemporary Critical Theory class, where postcolonial thought revealed my internal “twoness.” The second unfolded during my graduate studies in “Literature and Social Change in the 19th Century,” where engagement with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Simon Gikandi’s “culture of taste,” alongside other key postcolonial thinkers, enriched my understanding of cultural hybridity, “worlding,” and epistemic disobedience. These frameworks now shape my aspirations as a scholar and future educator in Kuwait. By applying critical theory to my own cultural duality, I aim to bridge the linguistic and epistemic gaps in Middle Eastern research, transforming a once-conflicted identity into a tool for reshaping contemporary teaching methods in the Kuwaiti classroom.
At the age of twenty-five, I gifted myself the ultimate intellectual kashkha: a second major in English literature at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait. I believed that this field would refine my mind in a Eurocentric sense—to embrace a classical, Shakespearean, Western world was a cognitive prize that would solidify and celebrate my anglicized identity. It was true thaqafa[3] to read and critically analyze English-written books, was it not? Yet the much anticipated dramatic irony finally unfolded—it was the very practice of critical theory that subverted the identity that I had so loyally upheld.
Contemporary Critical Theory was the class that introduced me to postcolonial concepts such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s “double consciousness,” Frantz Fanon’s “white mask,” Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo’s “decolonizing the mind,” and Edward Said’s “Orient” and “Other.” As my British professor Dr. Piers Smith explained how the English language was a colonial structure imposed upon the colonized—or in the case of Kuwait, the formerly protected—my sugared adolescent world began to disintegrate. Professor Smith posed the rhetorical question, “How can you get a level of importance if you don’t speak English?” stressing that the language was a hegemonic signifier that demanded universal respect. I realized that in the private sphere of Kuwaiti education, English was the ideology that had culturally and linguistically separated me from my own people. I had been perpetuating hegemonic narratives of civility as I ingested a saccharine Western gaze that distorted my own culture. I had been convinced that as an Arab I had to be refined by the canons of English literature. I was thus invited to critically deconstruct my fragmented “Anglowaiti” self: a neologism coined by Kuwaiti author Nada Faris to describe Kuwaiti individuals who adopt English as their primary form of expression. They exist in a liminal state of social and cultural unbelonging as tradition rejects their Westernized mindsets, despite the language’s kashkha status.
I finally understood how Kuwaiti private schools that strictly adopt American or British systems result in students’ hybrid identities, where two separate cultures create a tension between one’s local identity and an imposed Western persona. Professor Smith posed yet another question: “Shouldn’t one be immersed in one’s own culture?” Right then, my once-shimmering Americanized guise dissolved without warning. I realized I no longer wanted to be associated with the “cultured” kashkha—a hollow Bhabhian mimicryof Western performativity—but sought to understand my Du Boisian cultural hybridity through my graduate studies, where I could finally defy the “worlding” and “culture of taste” I had so long embraced.
It is paradoxical that the interrogation of my two selves took place over six thousand miles away from home, at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University. The small plot of American land that had once overtaken my mind in high school was now replaced with its real, physical counterpart as I pursued my MA in Literary and Cultural Studies. Now, however, my Anglowaiti mind began to prioritize a long-neglected Arabness, as both East and West finally coalesced. My professors astounded me with their carefully-curated syllabi; they provided reading material that not only met my specific research questions but also offered critical approaches that forever altered the way I think about culture and identity. It was within this academic environment that the course “Literature and Social Change in the 19th Century” became my primary focus.
In order to sustain the quiet defiance I had built during my undergraduate years, my priority was to reconcile with the dissonance of my hybrid identity in this interdisciplinary class. Mosaic-like answers began to emerge through the parallel figures of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Antoinette Cosway in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Rhys, a white Creole born and raised in Dominica, stood out to me as a pioneer of literary deconstruction; she revisits, challenges, and retells Bertha’s story through a postcolonial lens, recentering a narrative for a subordinated character who shares the author’s intricate relationship to her own sense of belonging and lineage.
In one of our assigned articles, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Gayatri Spivak explains how the figure of Bertha/Antoinette encapsulates the imperialistic “worlding” of “distant cultures: exploited but with rich, intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation. Bertha’s “madness” and forced isolation symbolize hegemonic attempts at linguistic and cultural erasure of the Creole, where imperialistic narratives dominate canonical texts, ultimately shaping the Other as an anomalous threat. Rochester’s renaming of Antoinette to “Bertha” is a literal example of psychological sovereignty, imposing a “refined” whiteness (or in my Anglowaiti interpretation) a linguistic worlding that contorts her Caribbean identity to fit a contrived “culture of taste.” These novels resonated deeply with me as I realized how internal schisms emerge due to the perpetuation of Anglocentric ideology, whether rooted in enslavement, colonization, or imperialism. Spivak’s note on English-framed curriculization manifests in Kuwait’s American-based educational systems, which almost entirely neglect studies of the Arab world and fail to integrate even a hint of postcolonial frameworks.
As I reflect on my kashkha, zwara-self, I feel a belated embarrassment—ashamed and bewildered that it took me this long to finally embrace my heritage. I was once a champion of Gikandi’s “cultured subjects of modernity” as I proudly anchored my identity to the embedded principles of Anglocentric “high culture.” Though Gikandi writes in the context of slavery, his critique of how “cultural or conceptual quarantines seemed to be necessitated by the common belief that the black, as unmodern, was either a source of shame or a toxin that threatened the well-being of civilization” reflected my devaluation of the Arabic language. I was, as Gikandi eloquently puts it, “invested powerfully in the aesthetic and the literary as the mark of cultural achievement.” In my own life, this meant unconsciously upholding the belief that Westernization was the epitome of modern refinement: anything remotely Other was a sign of regression. My monovisual perception had left me blind to a multifaceted, pluralistic world.
As I prepare to enter the pedagogical sphere as an educator, I propose to embrace “epistemic disobedience” — a concept introduced by Walter Mignolo and described by Professor Wassif as “a means of resisting the idea of zero-point epistemology.” This concept has shifted my perspective, teaching me to defy my once-monological acceptance of epistemic coloniality. I look to the eminent Egyptian historian al-Jabarti and his scholarly defiance during the French invasion of Egypt; his critique of Bonaparte’s Arabic-written proclamation serves as a powerful example of linguistic and ideological resistance to French colonialism. Professor Wassif explained that Egypt was “already a center of knowledge when the French arrived,” prompting me to reflect on the role Arab scholars and educators must play today in reasserting our discoveries, histories, and contributions to academia, even when taught in the English language.
When students step into my future classroom, I want them to challenge hegemonic narratives of linguistic and cultural modernity by questioning biased literary works of the past. At the same time, I would celebrate the works of classical antiquity while revealing the interconnectedness of Islamic thought with Greco-Roman rhetoric and theology. Epistemic disobedience is not merely the process of dismantling the colonial afterlife; it is a matter of redefining pedagogy, allowing different literary voices to be equally amplified rather than overpowered by what was once deemed canonically dominant.
That is how I hope to be as a scholar and educator in Kuwait. But how do I act today in the intimate spaces of my weekly family zwara? I try to speak more Arabic, even when my Anglophone thoughts are not entirely expressible. I challenge myself to be my own translator, celebrating my mother tongue in a setting where it is forever appreciated. I still pick up the phone to order sweets in English from our local dessert shop, but I now bring girs egaili, luquaimat, and ghuraiba[4] to the chatter-filled living rooms—a complementary taste to the qahwa Arabiah. Most of my ideas come from the Western world, but they are now beautifully multifaceted thoughts that inhabit both East and West. They are then translated into Arabic, and I finally share them with my family without a hint of performative kashkha. I enjoy my petit fours with a hot istakana[5] of chai aswad[6] — a silent, edible celebration of two worlds in a traditional, Kuwaiti home. I am not purely Anglophone, nor am I only Kuwaiti. I am both, and I am humbled by that twoness.
[1] Weekly family gatherings that traditionally take place at grandparents’ homes
[2] Arabic coffee
[3] Culturedness, especially in knowledge and education
[4] Three different types of traditional Kuwaiti sweets
[5] Traditional Kuwaiti glass tea cup
[6] Black tea
