Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.

AUTHOR AND ARTIST ZAHRA MARWAN SHARES HER BOOK "WHERE BUTTERFLIES FILL THE SKY."

A HEARTFELT STORY ABOUT LEAVING HER HOME IN KUWAIT TO FIND A NEW HOME IN NEW MEXICO.

JANINA MARIE FULLER, AUTHOR OF "THE GECKO IN THE BATHTUB," EXPLORES STORIES OF ANIMALS FOUND IN UNEXPECTED PLACES.

DIAGNOSED AUTISTIC, WHEN HENRY HESS WAS ALSO DIAGNOSED AS ARTISTIC - IT CHANGED HIS WORLD.

FINDING A HOME >> Faith Perez: What inspired you to write "Where Butterflies Fill the Sky?"

>>Zahra Marwan: When we left Kuwait when I was a child, I wasn't really sure what we were doing, or where we were going, or what was happening.

When we came to New Mexico, I didn't really understand why no one spoke Arabic anymore, or why we weren't going to my grandpa's house in a few days.

So, I was trying to create that feeling of what it felt like as a child.

>> Faith Perez: Why did you title the book "Where Butterflies Fill the Sky?"

>>Zahra Marwan: I don't have the right to live in Kuwait, but my mom is a Kuwaiti citizen.

In 2018, she became sick and was hospitalized, so I had to make an emergency trip home.

And, I'm allowed to stay there only for 3 months on a tourist visa.

And, there had been a lot of rain.

And every time I'd look up that spring, there were hundreds of butterflies in the sky.

And that's when I started putting the book together.

>>Zahra Marwan reads: "Where Butterflies Fill the Sky: A story of immigration, family, and finding home.

To my parents, who should have never had to leave, who gave us everything they could."

"From the desert to the sea, this is my home, where 100 butterflies are always in the sky.

Pigeons are kept and loved.

Boats sail the calm sea.

Mama's on the shore.

My aunties drink their tea.

Baba swims in the open water.

His sister takes the boat out to sea.

Me and my brothers are in our own world.

This is where I sleep, where my ancestors live and are always watching."

>> Faith Perez: So, there's a lot of different motifs that are reoccurring in the book.

Can you tell me a little bit about them?

>>Zahra Marwan: Sure.

Um.

Culturally, Kuwaitis keep birds at home, um, whether parakeets or parrots.

I like to talk about my oldest aunt who fights with her parrot every Friday at the family lunch.

And I have my mom's three sisters that keep appearing as like, grounding pillars of like, safety and protection and a sense of home.

>> Faith Perez: And there was also two ancestral bulls watching over you, right?

Can you talk a little bit about those?

>> Zahra Marwan: Sure.

It's definitely a cultural faux pas, religiously, being from a very conservative, Orthodox family myself.

Um, but there are ancient artifacts from the Dilmun civilization, or Mesopotamian sculptures that were found 10 miles off of Kuwait's shore.

And one of them was a bull.

So, I had these Mesopotamian bulls be the connection to ancestors and place that keep following the main character throughout the book.

So, this is my favorite illustration in the book.

It's me and my dad.

People often sit on the ground in Kuwaiti culture, on Persian rugs.

Here we have a Dilmun bull, and he's packing watermelon.

We would often eat watermelon after lunch.

There are flamingos flying.

They naturally migrate to the Kuwaiti shores in the winter.

There's a picture of my uncle, who was killed during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

He was killed with a grenade.

And this is also a point that I always keep in mind is, how he can always be listed officially as Kuwaiti when he had died stateless, fighting for our little home?

>> Faith Perez: What does it mean to be stateless, and why is it important to talk about this subject?

>>Zahra Marwan: Citizenship is very complicated, and it shouldn't be at all, right?

Three of my grandparents are Kuwaiti citizens and only one wasn't.

Um and, that was my father's father.

And all of them are historically and culturally rooted in Kuwait.

Um, my grandfather didn't apply before oil, and the window to apply was very small.

So, although we're there, we're from there generationally, culturally, and historically, we have no legal rights to live in our country.

>> Faith Perez: And what does that mean?

>>Zahra Marwan: It means you don't really have the right to an education.

You're not allowed to get married.

You're not allowed to leave.

You're not allowed to access healthcare.

You essentially don't exist.

Yet you're illegal and yet you're there.

>> Zahra Marwan reads: "Baba tells me there's magic in the place we'll go.

I don't want to leave.

Mama says it'll be better for us.

I say my goodbyes without knowing why and travel far, far away.

To a new place, where each day feels like a year.

Where no one speaks like me.

Are my ancestors still watching?"

>> Faith Perez: What is it like to leave your home behind in Kuwait and come to New Mexico?

>>Zahra Marwan: The last time I was in Kuwait was this January, and when the plane lands, it makes me cry.

And when the plane leaves, it makes me cry.

And I've become almost totally foreign there other than family.

And every trip back I would notice I was becoming further and further removed from my home, whether linguistically or culturally.

I think nobody really wants to leave their home.

Yeah.

adapting to New Mexico?

>>Zahra Marwan: I think it's a forever ongoing process of how like, this is the only place where I feel like I belong that I can live legally.

And at the same time, I realize I'm not totally from here historically.

But there's always a sense of like, this is my home.

It's nice to feel like I belong at a place where I wasn't even born.

I mean I still remember like, my friend Adam Romero playing tag with me in the third grade or the second grade when I couldn't speak.

So, it's nice to know that there are people like that.

>> Zahra Marwan reads: "I'm so different from everyone here, but these new people show me I belong.

My family sends reminders that they are thinking of me.

And I tell them that I'm thinking of them too, that I miss them, and hope we can be together again.

That in this new place of high desert, I have found a home."

>> Faith Perez: Why do you have the bulls resting?

>>Zahra Marwan: Maybe that they feel a sense of comfort or also feel a sense of home.

>> Faith Perez: They can take a break from watching over.

>>Zahra Marwan: Yeah.

>> Faith Perez: Like, what's the feeling that you, you felt when you were creating this illustration?

>>Zahra Marwan: I don't know.

Um, maybe this one, that, I really do feel comfortable here.

That there are things I understand.

And feel really lucky that I'm like, uh, to have come to a place where people do treat you like you belong.

I feel like I've learned from people here to like, be proud of my language and culture and heritage, even if there's like, a system that tells you, you shouldn't be.

[Music] UNEXPECTED ADVENTURES The book is called The Gecko in the Bathtub- Encounters with Marvelous Creatures.

There are three stories in the book in which the animals are not in the normal context where you would expect to find them.

One is about the hawk on the porch.

One is about a monkey on my head.

And the other one is about the gecko in the bathtub.

And I knew I wanted the book to have sort of a lighthearted tone so I could have called it The Monkey on my Head, I guess or The Hawk on the Porch, but the title The Gecko in the Bathtub kind of made me giggle a little bit.

So, that's what I went with.

I was going to take a bath one day.

And I went into the bathroom and looked in the bathtub and there was a gecko.

It surprised me because, how did it come up through the pipes?

I didn't think it had come over the top of the bathtub.

It must have come up through the pipes.

But never has there been a time when we've run water in the bathtub or the sinks or the shower and had geckos float to the surface.

So, I still don't know how it got there.

The book is a collection of short stories and they are anywhere from two to five or five a half pages long.

It's great for bedtime reading for kids.

That's one thing that makes it a great book to read at night.

I think about a third of the chapters come from right around this house.

The Luna Moth is a moth that lives in Louisiana.

It's about this big.

I had lived here for several years and never seen one.

And I've lived in this property for several years and never seen one.

I walked out on the screen porch one day, and there was a Luna Moth hanging on the screen.

And I thought if I could catch it and release it, then we would get to have more Luna Moth.

But the moth was already deceased.

We still have it.

It's in a little shadow box on the mantle behind us.

The monkey was in Ecuador, as my son and I were enroute to the biology research station where we were going to stay for a week.

We had this stop over from which we had to pick up a boat, but the boat wasn't coming for about 45 minutes.

We were relaxing at the riverfront.

And suddenly, there was a monkey sitting on my shoulder.

It was up before I could respond.

And then it was on my head.

Clearly, this monkey knew how to be around people.

So, I wasn't really afraid of it.

But it also had a lot of teeth.

I was laughing very, very hard.

I had a baseball cap on that monkey was sitting on top of the hat.

So, if I had leaned over, it would have fallen off my head, but I didn't think to lean over.

And finally, it just jumped off and ran away.

So that was a pretty fun moment.

Also, from Ecuador, my son and our bird guide were with me when we saw the monster fish and the mother jaguar and her two cubs that were swimming right across the river right in front of our boat.

And there were about 15 of us on the boat, and everybody saw them.

Those were quite spectacular experiences because they were so, so, so, unexpected.

The story in the Galapagos Islands; this owl standing on top of a volcano in the middle of a hot, dry day with people walking around him, and he just didn't care.

It was like something from another world and later that day, we were on the same island, but in a different part where there was forest and it was raining.

And we came up on this vermilion flycatcher and this bird is just this bright, vivid scarlet red, that stood out so much against the leaves behind it and the gray sky and it was pouring rain.

And the two birds didn't really have anything in common except they were on the same island.

And they were both alone.

There was something about that moment when we drove underneath that bird.

It just felt like my dad who had passed about four years before that was just reaching down right into my heart and saying, I love you.

I'm here with you.

I'm proud of you.

My brother and sister are quite a bit older than me.

And when they were in high school, they had to take a biology class that involved a bird unit, but they weren't old enough to drive.

So, my dad drove them in these early morning birding trips on the weekends.

And, as a little kid, I always want to be with the big people, do what they were doing.

So, I tagged along.

And that's how I started to learn how to look at birds when I was about nine.

I never imagined that I would ever have a caged bird as a pet, because I think birds don't belong in cages.

When our friends who were moving, begged us to take their love bird because they couldn't take him with them to Hawaii, I couldn't say no.

I knew this bird already, because we'd spent so much time at their house.

And then when the mother of my son's friend had baby lovebirds that she didn't have space for, I took them too.

So, I had these four birds.

And we lived in a small apartment, the only reasonable place to put them was in my bedroom.

So, I had them in the bedroom.

I hung sticks from the ceiling.

I let them out a couple of times a day, they could fly around, hang out with each other or with me.

I have learned to notice.

I've learned to look for things that I don't expect to see.

I've learned to look around the corners of the windows on the outside to see what might be lurking in there or building a nest there or a web.

During the day, this little grey tree frog usually sits above the board, under the porch roof, and just sits up there.

A little hidey-hole, a little cubbyhole.

And then at night, we turn the porch light on around dinner time and at nighttime, she comes down and she sits on the lion's head or right on the porch light and she eats the bugs that are attracted by the porch light.

She does this little mini migration, up and down, up and down.

Sometimes I'll come out in the morning and she's still sitting on the lion's head.

Sometimes I'll come out in the morning and she's gone.

And then I think, she's gone, and if she's gone, I'll never know if I'll see her again.

And maybe two, three, or even four days go by and then suddenly she's there again.

I do have a relationship with the turtles.

Here's how I think of it.

Animals and these plants, they were all here way, long before we were, long, long, long before we were.

And I consider it a privilege to live in their space.

So, I thank them for allowing me the honor of seeing them, when the turtles float up to the surface or swim up and eat the cat kibble that I throw out for them.

I thank the hummingbirds that come to our feeders.

I thank the armadillos, even though they dig holes in our garden.

I just think that we need to kind of turn around how we regard our relationship with the plants and animals around us cause we're all part of the same system and it might be in some danger right now.

A NEW PATH >> When he was very young, Henry got a diagnosis of autism.

You know, and with that diagnosis, there came limitations, there came treatment pathways, medication pathways, like all of these things that come with it and it had a very medical orientation to it.

When he became an artist, and I say he got his arts diagnosis, and he became an artist, it changed.

It became an opportunity for community and expression, and having adventures and experiences that he never would have had if we had stayed in just one world.

I often introduce myself, and I'm like, oh hi I'm Henry's mom and they're like, oh what's your name, I never met you and I'm like, I love that, because this is who he is.

This is his community.

I'm just here to support him in being the best Franklinton artist that he can possibly be.

I think one of the impacts that I may have on Henry with his artwork, which is very little because it's really all from him, is that I make sure he has all his supplies.

He has the items he needs to work with.

The things he really wants to paint with or draw with.

I feel like I'm in the background always watching inventory to make sure he has things.

And I think it's one of the fun things that we do, to go to the art store together and I let him pick out whatever he wants to pick out cause he love to do it.

And I'm always amazed that, I'll think he has every blue color, every shade of blue he needs, and we'll end up with four other blues and we'll come home and he'll use them cause in his mind he already knows what he wants to make.

>> I am Henry Hess's sister that's how people know me in Franklinton sometimes and I love it.

I will always be happy to be referenced as Henry Hess's sister.

He is so amazing, and I get to hang out with him and it's a really great opportunity for me to be in Franklinton.

He doesn't really communicate with his words very often, so a lot of times it is with his art.

And I think that being his sister I'm always around him, and I can kind of pick up on how he feels really easily.

So, I am one of the people that can sometimes prompt him into doing certain projects or working on certain things, but not everyone can.

Henry is very inspired by old, classic movies.

He really loves musicals.

He loves the Wizard of Oz, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Mary Poppins.

He loves a lot of the old classics.

I think there's a lot of color, a lot of style influences in there that you don't necessarily see in modern day movies.

And they were what he gravitated towards when he was little, and I think that watching people being expressive in certain ways helped him figure out how to express himself on his own and through his art.

>> My interaction with Henry was to broaden that scope, to kind of pull him out of that world and show him the reality - like hey, why don't we draw from reality a little bit, like do portraits, or plein air, that sort of thing.

Him attending the Sunday figure sessions that we do has really made a huge impact on the way that he views even the scenes from the movie.

He's adding more background elements to it.

And his portraits are starting to take a more accurate shape, right?

And that's just through practice.

It's not me telling him how to do it because, for somebody like Henry, or just like any artist, you can't tell an artist how to make their art.

Like, it's a process of failures and successes that allow us to do that, and Henry has always bucked against that, and I learned that when he was 15 years old, 14 years old.

>> My role as it pertains to Franklinton has always been Henry's dad.

That's what I answer to.

That is what I'm most proud of, and just being Henry's dad in Franklinton and carrying heavy things and hanging artwork is what I do.

>> I remember, like, walking past Henry's studio frequently and seeing him face down in paper, just working all the time.

The term we say is committed lines.

Like, he'll dive in.

He draws what he feels.

He draws-- like he's not trying to make it look exactly like what the object is.

There's more-- it's a motion.

It's movement.

His lines are quick.

And they show movement.

So, he thinks in a three-dimensional way instead of just like a still from a thing.

He wants to capture the essence of that.

He starts with a flat piece of paper, and then as he works through, let's say Dorothy's house, folds it all up.

One piece of paper.

He has the interior design and the exterior design of Dorothy's house.

Or it could be, you know, any number of things.

Like a car from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

He pays attention.

Not every single piece is like that.

But the pieces he cares about the most will-- have all that.

Like, the floor plan is there.

Like, who thinks-- and he took that from a film.

He took that from a film.

And that's like, where his brain is.

I will construct her house, and this is what I remember it looking like.

It's so cool.

I don't know anybody that does that, except for Henry.

>> Henry's artwork is just very unique, and it's completely inspired by what he wants to do and how he feels and how he sees the world.

And I think that's something really unique, is that when you walk into his studio, it's almost like walking in a story book and walking into a cartoon and seeing the pictures and the characters really come to life, and that's one really amazing aspect of his artwork.

>> What I have always wanted just like for everybody, is like, we all should be able to do it.

Like, we should all be able to navigate this world, and some of us need a little help.

My goal for Henry is that because he has a difficult time communicating, I wanted to help him build his network.

So, like, introducing him to young people, introducing him, taking him into the community so he could see because he's not going to ask questions about like-hey I would like to learn welding.

And so it's like, why don't I reach out to artists that I know in the community and say, hey would you be willing to just hang out with us, show us what you do and talk about it a little bit?

And so, by doing that, they meet Henry.

The young people are meeting Henry, and then when they have workshops or they have exhibitions, they're going to think of Henry and invite him to be a part of it.

You know, because he may not be able to go, I want to be in that show.

But someone's gonna be like, Henry should be in the show.

So, I think that's really just to expand his network.

>> We talk about Henry's future.

We talk about things that are important for him.

His friends from grade school say come up and they say, is Henry still drawing, is Henry still doing his artwork?

And they get so engaged and they are so excited to hear that that's what he's doing, that he's an artist.

Because that's what he needs to be doing for his career and what makes him happy.

So, when we talk about a meaningful, happy, fulfilled life, it's going to include art and it's going to include artists.

It's kind of what we've discovered.

Right?

The people who are in this community in Franklinton, how they interact, how they communicate, they see themselves in Henry.

And Henry sees himself in them, and that's a pretty unique environment for him.

Autism changed his life in one way.

But his artistry changed his life in a path that we never saw coming, that has been one of the best things that's ever happened to him, and to our entire family.

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Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.