The Bookshelf

Zahra Marwan’s debut picture book, Where Butterflies Fill the Sky (March 29, Bloomsbury), is part autobiography, part children’s book, part artist’s book and wholly captivating. Through bittersweet text and delicate, playful watercolor illustrations, it tells the story of how Marwan’s family left Kuwait for New Mexico when she was 7 years old to make a new home in Albuquerque.

Marwan was considered stateless in Kuwait: Though her mother is a citizen, her father’s family missed out on registering as citizens when Kuwait became an independent country in 1961. And because Kuwaiti citizenship is patrilineal, Marwan and her siblings aren’t citizens either. That meant they faced both open discrimination and discriminatory laws. Stateless people weren’t allowed to attend public schools, go to college, access health care, get married or leave the country for fear they wouldn’t be allowed back.

“Their only career options were working low-wage jobs or joining the army,” Marwan explains in an author’s note.

Her parents wanted a better future for their family, so they packed up and moved to Albuquerque, an experience that was profoundly disorienting for Marwan.

“I used to wait outside for a bus to take me back to my grandpa’s house,” she tells SFR. “I had no idea what was going on.”

But it wasn’t all grim, she says. Marwan has fond memories of how that early sense of confusion blended into a mix of magical thinking and reality that continues to influence her art.

“I used to think a boy in my class could translate my thoughts for some reason,” she says. “I was a really weird kid.”

To wit, in Butterflies, Marwan’s family journey is represented by a two-page spread that shows her and other members tumbling into the sky, from the shores of Kuwait to the desert of New Mexico.

“I like to work the way things feel,” Marwan explains. “Tumbling from one page to the other is kind of how it felt.”

Telling her story in picture book form came naturally to Marwan, because pairing text and image has always been a part of her process. She usually begins with a line or two of text, and develops that idea in her paintings.

Marwan’s online portfolio Two Desert Illustrations brims with whimsy. Pigeons in party hats appear, uninvited (“Whenever I forget my studio window open, my toughest critics come in and have a party”), flowers bloom from the heads of five men (“Patrilineally not fitting in”) and a man has a curious encounter (“He took his boat out at night because the water was as still as olive oil. Alone, he was startled by a swimming cow”). It feels like flipping through someone’s journal, only that someone has an infinitely colorful and deftly wrought inner world. There’s something delightfully voyeuristic in the unexplained nature of it all. Each painting functions as a micro-fiction unto itself. The challenge, Marwan says, is in arranging those fragments into a cohesive, resonant story.

“I’ve been looking at picture books as a sort of poetic retelling,” she says—a retelling not bound by the literal; Butterflies has a poetic quality in the spare effervescence of its text and illustrations inspired by Persian miniatures. It operates under the surreal, expansive illogic of childhood, where the real and imagined coexist, and Marwan weaves symbolic elements of her Kuwaiti identity throughout the book: Two bulls watch over her as she sleeps and follow her through the book, a calming, protective presence. The symbology is inspired by “art from the ancient Dilmun civilization found in Kuwait and Failaka Island among ancient Greek ruins,” Marwan notes, and says the bulls represent her grandmother and uncle, the latter of whom was killed during the Iraqi invasion when he was only 33—the book doesn’t pander, which shows a respect for children’s understanding that similar books do not.

“I’m not particularly fond of the very commercial ones that are what people think kids need to see,” Marwan says with a laugh.

But not everyone agrees, and the book has already been criticized for being too mature, according to Marwan. She recalls a librarian who said Butterflies isn’t for children because they won’t know who Saddam Hussein is.

“Ask any Kuwaiti child,” Marwan points out. “These are real lived experiences for people.”

Such criticism hits particularly hard, she says, because of what statelessness continues to mean for Kuwaiti children. She remembers how, while working on the final art for her book, two stateless children in Kuwait committed suicide. It’s absurd, she says, to assume children couldn’t understand her book.

“What kid’s gonna understand?” she queries. “Well, maybe that one who knows how hard things are going to get as he grows older, or how hard they already are.”

And though Marwan is still impacted by statelessness, especially when borders were closed due to the pandemic, she counts herself lucky.

“I feel so grateful to have grown up in such different places, and that we came to a place where people treat me like I belong,” she says.

The parallels between New Mexico and Kuwait might not seem apparent on the surface, but in her author’s note, Marwan writes about attending public school in New Mexico: “I was taught to be proud of my heritage—maybe because so many of my neighbors had strong Indigenous and Hispano roots and had been subject to so much cultural oppression themselves. I lost the ability to live among my family, language and culture because of government rules, but I carry with me a constant sense of home.”