Tewa Barnosa stated her identity directly: "I'm not Arab, I'm Amazigh, and I'm proud" (EP 20).
The declaration was not made as provocation. Tewa presented it as fact. She is Amazigh — the indigenous people of North Africa whose presence on the continent predates Arab migration by thousands of years. Her family is from Zuara, a predominantly Amazigh city on Libya's western coast. She grew up speaking Tamazight alongside Arabic.
Tewa described the trilingual street signs in Zuara — Arabic, Tamazight, and English. After the 2011 revolution, Amazigh communities in Libya began asserting their linguistic rights publicly. Zuara's signs were a visible marker: this city has its own language, and it will be seen.
The backlash was immediate. People who had never visited Zuara, never learned a word of Tamazight, objected to the signs. Tewa described this opposition as rooted in ignorance — not in genuine cultural conviction but in the reflexive discomfort of seeing a suppressed identity become visible.
Under Gaddafi, Amazigh language and identity were systematically suppressed. Tamazight could not be taught in schools. Amazigh names were discouraged or banned. The state promoted a singular Arab identity for Libya — a project that required erasing the Amazigh population's distinct heritage. Tewa framed this as attempted civilizational erasure: not merely a policy preference, but an effort to eliminate a way of seeing the world.
See: Amazigh Identity
Libya's Amazigh population is concentrated in the Nafusa Mountains, Zuara, and parts of the south (Tuareg communities). The 2011 revolution created space for Amazigh cultural assertion, but the gains remained fragile. Tewa's work with Waraq Art Foundation — which centred Libyan and North African art — was partly a continuation of this assertion through creative practice.
Her statement connects to the show's wider theme of Third Culture Identity, but with a critical difference: Tewa was not navigating between Libyan and Western identity. She was asserting a pre-Arab identity within Libya itself.