Katherine Toukhy

Katherine Toukhy’s The Khayamiyya Monument (2016), and the open mic events that it catalyzed, are the culmination of personal written responses mediated by Toukhy between African and Arab women im/migrants and female U.S. veterans who fought in the Wars on Terror. Through the processes of collecting personal narratives, inscribing them onto the sculpture, and holding open mics, a space for testimony on the traumas of war and displacement in the im/migrant community took shape. Evocative of a severed tent or a flag worn by time and history, Toukhy’s work challenges obsolete ways of understanding militarism and power. -David Rios Ferreira

The Khayamiya Monument is an alternate war monument that was created in collaboration with African and Arab female im/migrants and female U.S. veterans critical of their time in combat in Iraq. It is a severed tent inscribed with their writings and has been used to activate community-led open mics that are safe spaces for sharing traumatic stories. By bringing the stories of all these women together, it stands as a critique of the myth that militarism could liberate anyone, through a feminist lens. 

Over many months, I shared space with women ESL learners at The Arab American Association in Brooklyn. They were refugees and immigrants from Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and Morocco. In the workshops, I introduced a line of poetry that dealt with gender and war trauma. We interpreted it together, from English to Arabic, and the women were invited to freely write a response, drawing from their personal experiences. They offered their writings for the monument as it progressed. I then located female U.S. veterans who had fought in Iraq, through contacts at Iraq Veterans 

Against the War, and invited them to write responses to some of the immigrant women’s writings. 

I traced excerpts of all these writings onto canvas to create a severed tent. All the writings were translated into both Arabic and English. To launch the finished piece, I collaborated with the ESL center to hold a women-only open mic which was a safe space for readers to share their work in Arabic. Over 100 women attended this event and read heartfelt stories of war, exile, and resilience, with the monument as a backdrop. 

While this work was completed in 2017, in today’s context it can be linked to the movement to abolish the racist underpinnings of our American police force. The militarization and policing of our communities both in the U.S. and through U.S. foreign policies abroad are interconnected. -Katherine Toukhy