The Kuwaiti society is flooded with a wave of cultural renaissance, and at the forefront are the artists, poets, and writers who make up Kuwait’s new identity. New culture attempts to document old and new, remembering Kuwait’s past while transforming society’s malaise into numerous pieces of art.
Story is still a powerful tool of cultural heritage and preservation. One of the best-known of Kuwait’s oral tradition characters is a man who has become stardom material through his performative re-reading of national myth and contemporary history. His stories, with emotive performances, take one back to far-off pasts of times long ago of days of old of generations ago, namely those concerning desert life and coastal past of the country. They are not entertainment but also moral lessons and vehicles for the reaffirmation of such values as heritage, oneness, and force that are expressed through cultures.
The Kuwaiti poetry is being reclaimed, especially for women poets writing on identity, home, and displacement. Their poetry is well-placed to chart the dialectic of roots in culture and the surf of globalization. In elegantly crafted verse, they engage the largesse of life in the Gulf today on homelands. They reclaim a voice written to larger publics, i.e., among younger generations that are negotiating issues of identity in an open-ended society.
In art, most present-day painters are eliminating contemporary taboos regarding the application of paint, installation, and conjoined media in mediating issues in society since the problem of environmental sustainability, social justice, and conflict in culture remains an open question. They put themselves to inquiry and subject the locus of meeting of language, identification, and representation to inquiry. Through exhibition and collaboration, the movement of art has succeeded in putting Kuwait on the map. There has been a boom of art exhibitions as well as culture festivals in Kuwait well organized for the sake of remembering and preserving Kuwait’s living art cultural heritage.
These have been the spaces where the new and the old artists have succeeded in exhibiting their arts to more and wider audiences. Literature festivals, to a large degree, have been the writers’ and poets’ arena of tradition every year where they find an opportunity to engage with the masses and understand the role of literature in casting and molding national awareness. Their work is that which defines Kuwait’s identity. Artists, oral poets, and poets utilize the people’s voice, heritage, and love and quilted a common existence and community. Piecing their pieces together into something in their own work, not only do they keep the thread of country history intact, but they flesh and bring live to the rest of the world.
Kuwaiti elder generation cultural generations head the revolution of a fecund, complete generation to national identity. Every read story, every read poem, and every wall brush mark is a testament to a bounded culture trapped in tradition, but existentially available to the now—and the creatively available to tomorrow.
