There's no "I" in identity

“Identity politics are bleak” - this is how my dear friend and artist Sylvia starts her undergraduate thesis titled: 100% Chicano-ish. I have to say I agree with her.

Hi, I am Ebti and I am a female artist who was born and raised in Egypt, hence I am seen as an artist of color, a BIPOC artist, a part of an underrepresented (often times oppressed) group of people.

I looked up the word identity in the Oxford English Dictionary:

1.a. The quality or condition of being the same in substance, composition, nature, properties, or in particular qualities under consideration; absolute or essential sameness; oneness.

My first big art show I got in I had submitted a photographic installation that thinks about mourning and grounding. The curatorial label next to my work, used the words diasporic communities and also the word liminal. In the writing that I submitted for this show and up to this day I never use the word diaspora in reference to me or my work. It’s my choice not to use this word. First of all this word has a very specific history and second of all it does have a certain weight to it, a weight I choose not engage with, a weight I don’t want to carry.

Mourning self portrait, 2019-2020, 9 archival pigment prints and pins, 39 x 57 in

I was hanging out with two dear artist friends one day and we were talking exactly about how art work created by artists of color/BIPOC artists will always be considered art about being different. Even abstract work? So the question came up: Can brown people make abstract art? We then joked around and talked about creating a show that includes only abstract/geometric brown shapes made by brown artists. We laughed a lot. We never put that show together

There are a lot of BIPOC artists who make abstract art, of course there are. Many of the names I can think of are well established, famous artists, I wonder how their journey looked like. I am talking about myself and most artists of color around me. This is a conversation we have all the time.

Is my work Arab-American because I am? Is it Egyptian? Is it female? What do we do with poetic work that may not necessarily subscribe to either of these categories? Can we just see it as it is?

The weight of representation is unbearable.

My work is personal and is informed by how I grew up. And though I grew up in Egypt, my upbringing is just one of many versions of ways to raise kids in Egypt. I am my identity, I am informed by my own family and memories, which were shaped by our socio economic situation, the political climate of that time, my education etc… My work and my thoughts are in no shape or form representative of a whole country let alone more than one. But it seems like there’s no “I” in identity. It’s only a big “We”.

So now that I addressed the elephant in the room, I am ready to going back to ignoring it. I won’t be able to force people to see me or my work one way or the other. The artist is dead anyway.

Yalla Bye.*

*changed after Kathy said it would be funnier than just Bye and she is totally right.