1. LEFT: Sci-Fi Wahabi.
BELOW: The Girl
Who Fell To Earth
by Sophia Al-Maria
Harper’s BAZAAR Arabia Qatar Special |48
Living in the Gulf is surreal,
says Qatari-American author
Sophia Al-Maria, as she turns
Arabian clichés on their head
Words by Alex Aubry
PHotography:thierrybal
talkingpointThe
o the West, the Arabian Peninsula is still
something of a mystery and a bottleneck of
contradictions, tinged by images of gleaming
skyscrapers rising out of desert sands or veiled
women flashing the occasional Dior heel or
Hermès Kelly as they enter a shopping mall. Yet
to the most astute of cultural historians such observations are superficial
at best, especially to someone as observant as Sophia Al-Maria who may
ask you to dig a little deeper beneath the surface.
“In my practice, I’ve tried to move beyond Edward Said-inflected
arguments about Western perceptions of the Middle East being based on
false assumptions. Today I think the topic needs to be explored in
a much more nuanced and visceral way,” confides the Doha-based artist,
filmmaker and writer; a compelling storyteller, who uses these three
mediums to uncover alternative narratives about the Gulf region and
Qatar in particular.
When it came time to decide on the cover of her book, The Girl Who
Fell to Earth, some of the suggestions proposed by her publisher included
a model wearing an Afghan-style burqa paired with go-go boots,
undulating sand dunes, and seductive smoky eyes peering out from
behind a veil. “It made me realise how persistent this notion of
Orientalism is. Far from reflecting the content of my memoir, these
images somehow fed into this fantasy of the East. I eventually settled on
using a map illustrated by my friend Chris Kyung that visually captures
my journey,” says the Qatari-American artist, who decided to transform
her photo shoot for Bazaar into a playful nod to “Orientalist-inspired
book covers,” shot by Belgian photographer Thierry Bal.
Far from her studio in Doha, Sophia is chatting in a spacious London
apartment, in town working on her latest project, Al Nun. “It’s a series of
apocalyptic videos exploring environmental collapse in the Arabian Gulf
that will be projected onto a mirrored television cube,” explains the artist
of her latest multi-media installation for the Frieze Art Fair. “I feel I’m at
my most creative when I’m in Doha or anywhere in the Gulf,” confides
Sophia, who also explores cross-cultural connections to the Gulf through
her travels, noting that once jarring images of veiled women from the
Gulf walking the streets of London have now become somewhat familiar
to a generation raised on such encounters.
It is a story Sophia Al-Maria is all too familiar with. Born to an American
mother from Puyallup, near Seattle, and a Bedouin father from Qatar, she
spent her childhood shuttling between the Pacific Northwest and Doha; an
experience she chronicles in her memoir. Published in 2012, The Girl Who
Fell to Earth is part of a growing canon of literary works by authors such as
Bharati Mukherjee, Danzy Senna and James McBride that are bringing
bicultural stories to the mainstream, where once they existed on the edge.
Sophia’s memoir is notable for injecting a Gulf perspective into the ongoing
discussion of identity politics, while making the point that when different
cultures meet it’s not inevitable that they will clash. “We’re constantly told
about these contrasting worlds, but I think it’s less of a big deal than we
make it out to be,” says Sophia. “For example, there’s very little difference
between certain conservative elements of American society and the Gulf.
I think my father felt just as comfortable with my mother’s farming family
as he did with his Bedouin relatives. When people come from land, they
instinctively understand each other, despite not sharing the same language.”
The artist hadn’t intended to write a memoir at the tender age of 28.
T She had originally proposed a post-apocalyptic novel to her agent, who
swiftly turned her attention to a group of essays Sophia had penned for
Bidoun magazine. “They were originally conceived as humorous stories
about my parent’s different cultures. All of a sudden I was asked to collate
them into a book. I did have some initial concerns, as it felt a bit
presumptuous to write a memoir if you’re not 60 or haven’t lived through
a war,” says the author, who relied on her own diaries to recall poignant
moments in her life.
“I’ve always been obsessed with documentation and diaries. When
I was 14 I came across a book, The Journals of Dan Eldon, about
a young photojournalist who died at 23. His visual diaries inspired me
to keep one throughout my teenage years and into my early twenties.
Those were really key aids that helped me remember moments and
feelings from those years back and forth and in Egypt, where I lived from
18 to 24,” says Sophia, whose book has since received critical acclaim for
its candid views on growing up bicultural.
Part family saga and part personal quest, The GirlWho Fell to Earth also
traces Sophia’s journey to make a place for herself in two different worlds.
Throughout her book she is asked to check boxes, such as the day she
applies to college and must identify her ethnicity. Not content with the
prescribed fields, she ticks “other” and specifies herself as an “alien.”
Status is again put into question in a later scene; when asked which name
she goes by, “Sophia” or “Safya,” she curtly replies, “whichever.”
“Throughout the course of our lives we will go through many different
versions of ourselves as we grow. So to be labelled as one thing, or to
create some kind of unified people by virtue of nationality, language,
religion or race is increasingly outdated, especially for people who defy
that kind of definition,” says the author. “I think these questions of
identity are increasingly surfacing in the Gulf, especially amongst a young
generation experiencing cross-cultural encounters through education and
travel aboard, or even in their own backyard,” observes Sophia, who
studied comparative literature at the American University in Cairo, as
well as aural and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Her experiences of growing up in the Arabian Gulf during the 1980s and
’90s inevitably inform her work, which is focused on exploring ‘Gulf
Futurism’, a term she coined to describe an aesthetic unique to a 21st century
Arabian Gulf, drawing on hyper-modern architecture, urban planning,
popular culture and a kitsch sense of globalism. In her book she recalls
visiting Doha’s space-age Sheraton Hotel as a child. Designed by William
Pereira in 1982, its futuristic architecture and equally surreal interiors would
leave an indelible impression on her. “The lobby was a seductive Islamic
fantasy-future of hexagonal mirrors and disco-lit elevators” and that “hum of
invisible machines running the mother ship of the building.” At its centre
“was the largest standing chandelier in the world: a crystal palm tree.”
“I originally came up with the term Gulf Futurism to give a name to
this phenomenon of a highly visible transformation taking place in the
Gulf. In particular for Western journalists, who seem to perceive this
rapid development as some kind of regional freak show,” notes the artist,
pointing out that the most compelling stories are yet to be explored.
“For me the interest isn’t in the skyscrapers or the delusions of grandeur,
it’s in what’s happening to us physically, mentally and socially. Living in
the Gulf is surreal no matter who you are,” adds Sophia, whose thought
provoking work has been shown at New York’s New Museum as well as
London’s Architectural Association. “There are lessons to be learnt
thegulf
deconstructi ng
➤
Author Sophia Al-Maria makes the cliché
chic, posing in the style of an Orientalist
book cover that she eschewed for her
own novel, The Girl Who Fell to Earth
48|Harper’s BAZAAR Arabia Qatar Special Harper’s BAZAAR Arabia Qatar Special |49

2. 50|Harper’s BAZAAR Arabia Qatar Special
thierrybal
“Ifeel at my most
creative when I’m in Doha
or anywhere in the Gulf”
sophia al-maria
from the way the future exists in the Gulf right now, and I can
write essays about it but sometimes there’s nothing better than
evoking those feelings through art.”
The artist’s interest in the future was further explored in
Scout, her entry for the 2012 Gwangju Biennale in South
Korea, a fibreglass sculpture featuring a mysterious echoing
voice inside of it. Its soundtrack was lifted from the 1977Voyager
spacecraft’s Golden Record; a kind of “message in a bottle”
sent into space on a satellite, which
included the Arabic greeting “may time
bring us together.”
Sophia Al-Maria also goes by the
nom-de-plume Sci-Fi Wahabi, an
ongoing art project in which she takes
on the persona of a fierce, abaya-clad
alter ego, complete with laser sunglasses.
Reminiscent of a character from a 1980s
Star Trek film, the concept was originally
born out of her essay exploring
“the dystopian Gulf.” Since then Sci-Fi
Wahabi has manifested itself as
a performance piece in a series of real-life appearances and hologram
projections at international galleries and art fairs such as Art Dubai and
Doha’s Global Art Forum.
Throughout the decades, artists have created alter egos through which
to communicate their message to an audience; a realisation Sophia made
from an early age. Fans of both film and music might hear an echo in her
memoir’s title to that of Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 sci-fi film The Man Who Fell
to Earth, staring David Bowie; an artist known for transforming himself
throughout his career. In fact Bowie would become a major influence on
a young Sophia living outside Seattle at the time. “It was this idea of
reconstitution that initially attracted me to Bowie, who, through his stage
persona Ziggy Stardust, suggested a way toward creating an alter ego or
curating one’s own personal mythology,” recalls the artist, who has also
observed this sense of transformation in the way woman dress in the Gulf.
“Women’s wedding receptions in the Gulf often present an opportunity,
and a safe space, for individuals to live out their fantasies through dress. I’m
not simply talking about women who are immaculately turned out in the
latest Paris couture,” notes the artist, pointing out a sub-culture that exists
within wedding parties built around a “do-it-yourself” approach to
glamorous dressing. “It’s a sort of over the top, fantasy styling one would see
at a Samba carnival or on a fairy tale princess. In a sense each one of these
girls is assuming her own alter ego at these events. It’s a very special thing to
witness when the feathers, sequins, contact lenses and extreme make-up
come out,” adds Sophia, who has adopted the traditional veil worn by
Qatari women as her own unlikely emblem of futuristic style.
“I thing there is something very futuristic about abayas, especially when
you consider that black robes pop up in everything from Star Wars to what
the Bene Geserit are wearing in Dune,” observes the artist. “To see the
figure of a woman in black on a flat horizon is a primally fascinating
image. In a way, it is an ultimate ‘LOOK;’ she appears like a rift in
dimensions. It completely transcends culture,” says the artist, who likes to
wear long black skirts and hoods when she travels outside the Gulf.
“I love the way the abaya allows for a certain boldness of shape and
attitude. It’s an empowering garment to wear when you aren’t doing
it for religious reasons and in the Gulf we’re
lucky like that. It’s less a religious signifier as
it has become to certain groups in other
Arab countries, than it is a signifier of
nationality. It’s also interesting to observe
how shifting abaya trends have become
impossible to keep up with. The waves are
quick and very age specific. You date yourself
with what you wear. For example, it wouldn’t be age-appropriate for me
to wear spiked Hellraiser epaulettes with China-style eyebrow dye, but it
looks amazing on my younger sister,” confides Sophia, who has also
trained her lens on the Gulf’s more recent past.
For Sophia’s generation in Qatar and the Gulf, the experience of growing
up amid rapid architectural and technological development stands in sharp
contrast to that of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation, who lived
a markedly different pre-oil boom existence. “In the span of one generation
we took a quantum leap from Bedouin encampments to skyscrapers, yet in
between there is a gap in history that has yet to be filled,” explains the artist,
whose work tries to make sense of this Gulf paradox born out of extreme
shifts that also manifested itself in women’s dress.
“When you think back to the 1960s and ’70s in the Gulf, there were
beehives and miniskirts and all the mod-cons, which I suspect enjoyed
early onset via Kuwait,” notes Sophia, adding that her own family’s
response to modernity was very different. “They were living in the desert
between Saudi Arabia and Qatar well into the late ’70s... for them it
wasn’t about modern dress at all and still isn’t. It’s very different to the
images I’ve seen in books like Arabian Time Machine by Helga Graham.
The women in my family didn’t cover their hair so stringently but they
did cover their faces from the sun, and have amazing skin as a result!”
recalls Sophia of pictures she’d glimpsed in family albums.
“It’s an amazing look to have a berg’a on with your ears out and four
shiny braids in a perfect part. I saw one picture of a relative with huge
silver wrist and ankle cuffs, a bright blue and pink calico jalabiya with an
empire waist and weird shoulder ruffles. Her face was covered with an
extra-long berg’a which had a pin in the side, almost Tuareg looking,
where she kept the keys to her trunk. That was a good look,” smiles the
artist, who believes that in order to project the future one needs to
understand their past as well. “That’s not something the Gulf has
wanted to do much of until recently I think,” adds Sophia, who is busy
working on her first full-length feature film, after winning an award
at Doha’s Tribeca Film Festival in 2009 for her one-minute short,
The Racer. Watch this girl take over the world.
A map illustration
by Kris Kyung from
The Girl That Fell to Earth
talkingpointThe
■
The author
photographed
by Thierry Bal