Painting Without Paint: Four Sisters, Three Dresses

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/jinte.6.1.0002
• Pages: 17-29
• Published date: 11 November 2022
• Date: 11 November 2022
• Author: Nuveen Barwari
• Subject Matter: Kurdish art,Kurdish diaspora,United States,Kurdish dress,jilli Kurdi,Iraqi Kurdistan,instersectionality,conflict

Journal of Intersectionality

17DOI: 10.13169/jinte.6.1.0002

Painting Without Paint: Four Sisters, Three Dresses

Nuveen Barwari

Adjunct Instr uctor of Art Appreciation , Tennessee Stat e University

Abstract: Nuveen Barwari uses the multiple layers of the jilli Kurdi (Kurdish dress) as a metaphor for

the multiple layers of a Kurdish diasporic identity. Using Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity, Barwari

engages with the jilli Kurdi as artistic inspiration, describing it as private space for an individual, and for a

diasporic community as anapparatus that works in opposition to transparency, protecting the unseen, and

resisting a colonial gaze.

Keywords: Kurdish art, Kurdish diaspora, United States, Kurdish dress, jilli Kurdi, Iraqi

Kurdistan, intersectionality, conict

Gulistan

I am a person, I am a place

I exist

I am a ower that lives in the mountains

I am Gulistan

Land of the owers

I am the sister who washes the dishes

I am the mother who weeps for the children I buried in the mountains

I am the wife who sold her gold for her husband’s bail

I am Gulê, the reason Shexo is in a dark cell

I am the aunt that sews all the dresses

I am invisible labor

Commodication

Objecthood

I can’t spell or you just don’t know how to read

I am the diaspora kid going to the bazaar to pathetically buy, buy, buy,

stu, stu, stu, to stu, stu, stu my suitcase

I am the suitcase that says

“There is no suitcase big enough that will help you ll that void”

I am the father-in-law that asked for a handful of soil from the homeland

I am a stateless ag

I am a rag that was made from old clothes to wipe the kitchen counters with

I am the sumac that needs to be grinded

I am Gulistan

My mother tongue is a shard of glass, and my mouth is bleeding

I exist