A Spectral Archive: Mona Kareem's Feminist Imaginary in Ināth al-Ashbāḥ (Femme Ghosts)

Abstract

Abstract: In this article I explore Mona Kareem's visionary feminism in her trilingual poetry collection Ināth al-Ashbāḥ ( Femme Ghosts ) (2019). I intervene in the classist colonial logic embraced by contemporary liberal feminism in Kuwait by offering a critical alternative in Kareem's poetics of the body. The article examines Kareem's engagement with the gendered, classed, and racialized body as a site of knowledge production that proves illegible to the oil-producing state. It argues that Kareem expresses a "spectral archive" from the embodied knowledge of marginalization in her poems "Eulogies for Futures to Come/Marthiyāt al-'uyūn" ("Who Hide Their Eyes"). The spectral archive is a haunting literary site of knowledge which exposes the violence of systemic oppression and exceeds nativist narratives of subjectivity constructed by official national history. It emerges in her deployment of the speculative, emphasis on the tension between the corporeal and the spectral, experimentation with poetic form and translation practices, and positing queerness as a liminal process of detaching normative gender from sex assigned at birth. The spectral archive underscores the failure of sovereign standards of subjectivity to grasp the role of feminist poetics in creating transformative imaginaries, it represents a new ethical approach to feminist discourse on social justice in Kuwait.