(Dahlia Alrayes, Queen’s University)
It is 2:30 am and my body won’t let me go to sleep because thoughts of where I grew up are plaguing me. An all year summer paradise where no taxes are paid, a support system where all attended private schools, a hub where malls are larger than small cities, and a place where anything your mind could rack up gets delivered right to your doorstep.
No Kuwait, I will never forgive you.
The world and I will never forgive you.
You and all your entitled citizens who think they have the right to abuse domestic workers to death.
Your surplus of rich, rich superiority complex bearers who raise kids without even looking twice at them and having them end up animal abusers.
The concerning abundance of insecure parents who blame anything and everything else when your child worsens society, so it doesn’t taint their reputation.
You make the world a hideous, inhumane place.
I will never stop thinking of how ashamed I mention that “Yes, technically, I am from here” because I am, and I have never said anything to stop the abuse; does that make me an abuser too?
Did my ignoring contribute to the one reported domestic violence act per day statistic?
Degrading lives of your helpers the way you do degrades no one but you.
I am done moping about every dog your children have damaged and watched cry for sport, every maid you’ve deemed subhuman, every soul that has died on your feet; all that is left is shame. I feel nothing but shame.
A place where good devout souls deem others as lesser; kill the helpers that clean, cook, organize, and live at their feet. Souls that pray to make it to heaven and fast until sundown and abstain from pork and pre-marital sex, because that is what makes all their ugly sins disappear. Yes, you will make it to heaven. All you need to do is avoid alcohol, then you could abuse any animal on the streets, insult any foreigner on your land, abuse any low income receiver that works only to serve you day and night and night and day so they could go home to their families, the way you do every evening from your shiny 32nd floor office, if they survive to see that day, that is.
Take the money away from those who can already provide for their children’s education as well as a dozen mansions and provide it to those you force into heat exhaustion.
Disparity in income would be the problem if we stopped allowing the underdogs to die under our conditions with no possible excuse.
Your god won’t help you or your hands that torture the lower class or your eyes that watch souls and bodies suffer.
So, put away your plastic smiles, your over-valued pieces of paper, your scholarships that praise mediocrity, your lives of purely protecting the middle class, your goddamn pride that celebrates nothing but a culture of being rich, having a superiority complex, modeling aesthetically pleasing restaurants and putting on pretty water shows at the hands of oppression. stop washing the blood and sweeping the bones on the ground under the carpet in the name of beauty. Stop playing god and toying with human lives at your disposal with your monstrous power to feel control over anything.
Silenced, damage souls, I hear you and I will never stop fighting for you. You will see your time of day. No more deaths of puppies in staged, grotesque “animal fights.” No more domestic helpers starving to death and being dumped out like a worn-out garbage bag that holds nothing but their abuser’s detritus.
Hate me. Ban me. Call me out on blaspheming a country that did nothing but pamper me, but an idea can’t be silenced. You can ignore my words but not the thoughts I just put in your head, thoughts that deep down, you know are nothing but truths. It’s frightening to admit to yourself that you’re a murderer, isn’t it?
Today is the last day. Your beautiful sunsets and lively 3-billion-dollar tourism centers won’t mute us for long.