Shamma Al Bastaki

Biography

Shamma Al Bastaki wrote her first poem, “Sunshine”, at the age of seven. A classmate had shown the teacher verses he had composed with his brother; at home she told her mother about it and heard that she could do the same. The teacher printed the text in the school newspaper, and the music teacher set it to music and the class sang it.

She was born in Dubai; the sources give different years of birth: 1996 or 1997.

At fifteen she learned of Untitled Chapters, a group of Emirati women writers founded by Fatma Al Bannai in 2011. She felt herself the youngest among them, but they accepted her, and from then on her poems became more sonorous, meant to be read aloud. She began reading before an audience at the same time.

She studied at New York University Abu Dhabi in two fields: Social Research and Public Policy, and Literature and Creative Writing. From 2015 she was a student ambassador for Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the museum commissioned her for several projects, among them one in collaboration with Jenny Holzer Studios. Her article “Rethinking Universality” has been included every year since its publication in the course “Museums in a Global Context” at New York University. In 2021 she received a postgraduate diploma in Diplomacy and International Relations at the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy. Then came a master’s degree at Harvard: for two years she served as cultural chair of the university’s Harvard Arab Student Association, and she took courses at MIT, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School. Her thesis “Al-Majaz: A Crossing”, written under the supervision of Professor Steven Caton, won the Best Thesis Award of the Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies in 2022.

Her main book is “House to House” (Bait La Bait). It is three volumes of ethnopoetry and photography, built on oral histories from the Dubai Creek communities and rendered as poems. An excerpt was published in the journal Asymptote, and in 2019 the collection won her the ADMAF Creativity Award. By her own account, the text is taught at universities in Japan, Taiwan and the United States. The poems “The Sparrows are Waiting” and “Veto on the Feminine Noon” appeared in the Harvard Graduate Review. She was one of the first members of the Cultural Office Women’s Creative Network, launched by Sheikha Manal bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. With others she co-founded JARA Collective, a small press that publishes chapbooks and experimental writing; it has sister presses in New York, Bangalore and Paris. She has spoken at the Emirates Literature Festival, the Al Burda Festival and the Hay Festival, and for two years was co-curator of “Hekayah: The Story”. She has read her work in London, Washington, D.C., New York, Boston and across the Emirates.

A visual strand develops in parallel. In 2014 she won second place at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in Los Angeles. In 2016 she took second place in the visual arts competition of the Abu Dhabi Festival for the calligraphy-based painting “Writes with a Knife”. Later she took part in the Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (Cohort 6): ten months of study with faculty from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her final installation of sculpture, photography and film, “El Ash”, was shown at the group exhibition “Community and Critique” at Warehouse 421.

Dolls hold a special place. She sews them herself, drawing on folklore research, then photographs them and other toys and prints the images using lenticular technology, so that the picture changes when viewed from different angles. In this way she turns to Emirati heritage and family ties. It seems to me that what matters is not the folk backdrop but that she has made the image of the doll itself the subject of her work.