Art In Palestine: A Narrative And Mobilisation Tool, A Necessary Means Of Survival
Words by Shahd Abusalama
The well-known Palestinian artist and art historian Kamal Boullata has
passed away in August 2019 but left behind a wealth of art and research,
rooted in questions of identity, resistance and exile. In his 2002 essay
“Art under the Siege,” he asked:
“How does one create art under the threat of sudden death
and the unpredictability of invasion and siege? More specifically, how
do Palestinian artists articulate their awareness of space when their
homeland’s physical space is being diminished daily by barriers and
electronic walls and when their own homes could at any moment be
occupied by soldiers or even blown out of existence? In what way can an
artist engage with the homeland’s landscape when ancient orange and olive
groves are being systematically destroyed? When the grief of bereaved
families is reduced by the mass media to an abstraction transmitted at
lightning speed to a TV screen, what language can a visual artist use to
express such grief? (Boullata, 2004)”
These questions have long troubled Palestinian artists as they
attempted to process and challenge a precarious and dehumanising reality
shaped by military occupation, apartheid and siege. I make a humble effort
to understand drawings I created in my late teens and early twenties, in
relation to these questions, situating it within a wider history of Palestinian
cultural resistance.
Since my birth in Jabalia Refugee Camp in the north of the Gaza
Strip, the biggest and most densely populated refugee camp in Palestine,
I have never known what life is like without occupation and siege, injustice
and horror. Growing up in a refugee camp was the window to understanding
our reality under Israeli colonial occupation. Art has been the way I naturally
sought from a very early age to describe what I felt was indescribable.
I was only nine years old when my parents noticed my drawing
skills that were limited to black warplanes, pillars of smoke in the sky and
crying eyes. This coincided with the eruption of the second intifada in
September 2000 when I used to accompany my mother and aunt to the
martyrs’ funeral tents to offer our condolences. I used to hate the green
colour, as it was associated in my memory with loss and mourning; the
martyrs’ funeral tents, which were disturbingly visible in the Jabalia refugee
camp’s landscape, were mostly green. The first poem I ever learned to
memorize by heart was one by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish
entitled, “And He Returned …In A Coffin”. As a nine-year-old girl, I stood
in front of many mourning families in those green tents, looked into their
tearful eyes, and in a powerful but shaking voice, I recited,
It was moments like these, during the tumult of the second
intifada, that fundamentally shaped my consciousness about the land and
my place in it. Since childhood, the scenes of war, the faces of martyrs, the
injured and political prisoners, the weeping of the martyrs’ relatives over
the loss of their beloved, have been haunting me with a desperate wish
for this injustice to end. These scenes pushed me to seek art as a way to
process those extraordinary surroundings, to reconcile with my wounds,
to express my emotions, memories and experiences, much of which is
collectively shared amongst the Palestinians.
Creativity in such a context is not only a necessary tool for
survival in a taxing background of violence but, as Boullata contented in
several articles, an expression of survival. For example, 100 Shaheed—100
Lives exhibition, by Ra’ed Issa and Muhammad Hawajri from Bureij
Refugee Camp in central Gaza, commemorated the first one hundred
victims of the al-Aqsa intifada. The exhibition grew out of their intimate
contact with the bereaved families and violence. Using a blend of abstract,
metaphoric and representational language, their artwork expressed “the
state of being a survivor of and eyewitness to daily death.”
Personally, observing more Palestinian children being born in
such a difficult reality that subjugates them to terror and trauma at very
young age is the most painful. As a result, most of my drawings are of
Palestinian children whose innocent facial expressions I find most telling
of our shared cry for justice.
Palestinian Art as a Visual Instrument of Resistance
Since the twentieth century, in their encounter with
Zionism and European imperialism, Palestinians, like
other colonised people, understood early on that
“questions of culture... are absolutely deadly political,”
in harmony with Stuart Hall’s thinking. We saw in practice
how the Zionist negation of the Palestinian people
is interwoven with negating everything they represent,
including Palestinian culture. The great robbery of tens
of thousands of books, manuscripts and artifacts that
coincided with the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine
is a testimonial event, which repeated itself numerous
times across the history of the Palestinian struggles.
Without culture, Israel can claim more easily that, to use
the infamous words of its Iron Lady Golda Meir in 1969,
“there was no such thing as Palestinians.”
Just as colonizers used culture as a weapon of
domination, colonized people tended to use culture
as a weapon of resistance, for culture is also “a critical
site of social action and intervention” which has the the
potential of destabilizing power (Procter, 2004). Although
art, music, and literature and every other form
of cultural expression of a people under a settler-colonial
reality are often sidelined by the more pressing
and life-threatening issues of daily violence and survival,
this does not imply their absence. Palestinian
cultural production has historically engaged with the
politics, suffering and challenges of the particular era,
and attempted to use these spaces, however limited,
to express resistance against British and Zionist colonialism,
to represent their struggles, pain and political
aspirations, and to solidify a national and cultural identity
undergoing an existential threat. In such a harsh
reality where the boundaries between the personal, the
collective and the political blur, Palestinians found it
hard to separate the aesthetic from the political in their
cultural and artistic expressions.
This is especially true of Palestinian art, which historically
served as a visual reflection of the Palestinian
struggle. It aimed to depict the reality of the Palestinian
people, our struggles, hopes, aspirations, and urge for
mobilization at an international level against injustice.
It also acted as a tool to provide a self-representational
counter-narrative to the hegemonic Zionist one which
is largely based on the demonisation and the negation
of the Palestinian history and people to justify their colonial
domination. Art for many Palestinians was seen
as a way to participate in writing their own visual narrative,
to critically and creatively engage with their sociopolitical
surrounding matters, to express their identity,
and to amplify the Palestinians’ political demands.
Against the humanitarian imagery that reduced Palestinian
refugees to victims, or colonial representations
that slammed them as terrorists, Palestinian artists,
such as Ismail Shammout and Naji Al-Ali, sought to
transform the image of the Palestinians into active
agents of revolutionary change.
Over the course of the Palestinian struggle, the
Palestinian people increasingly regarded artworks that
expressed and challenged their living conditions under
Israeli control as a means of resistance. Many Palestinian
paintings displaying the ‘forbidden’ colors of the
Palestinian flag have been confiscated, and many artists
faced interrogation or even a prison sentence due
their art that Israel perceived as ‘an act of incitement’.
Let us not forget the late Palestinian influential exiled
artists Ghassan Kanafani and Naji Al-Ali, whose artistic
and literary production led to their murder.
Being a daughter of an ex-detainee means I have grown a unique attachment to the plight of the Palestinian
political prisoners, not only from a political perspective but also from a personal one. As a 19-year-old boy,
my father spent a total of fifteen years in Israeli jails, but he is only one amongst over a million Palestinians
who experienced detention since 1948, including children, women and elderly people. The stories of resistance,
resilience and repression that I grew up hearing about his stolen youth have made me develop a
particular passion to this cause. Currently, over 5 thousands of Palestinian detainees are in Israeli captivity
with no access to their most basic rights by the Israeli Prison Service, including fair trial, proper medical
care and family visits.
The plight of Palestinian political prisoners and their families, however, is not given the deserved attention
in the political arena, especially at an international level. They are not only marginalised, but also
dehumanised in a media discourse that tends to reduce them to mere statistics or defined their resistance
in terms of ‘terrorism,’ similar to the way Nelson Mandela and other anti-apartheid activists in South Africa
were represented.
Throughout my upbringing, I have witnessed their families’ immense pain as my family joined their
weekly protests in front of the Red Cross in Gaza, calling for dismantling the Israeli prison system and freedom.
As I developed more skills of expression, I coupled drawings with writings that recorded stories of
Palestinian detainees and their families with whom I developed an intimate relation after years of weekly
protests. Many expressed their pain as a form of imprisonment in time, another theme that inspired my
drawings in my attempt to communicate the families’ longing for a reunion with their beloved ones without
barriers in between.
I tried to depict their determination to break their chains which they expressed repeatedly in legendary
hunger strikes. “Hunger strike until either martyrdom or freedom” is a motto that many prisoners adopted
across the history of the Palestinian Prisoners Movement.
chains shall break
AN ONGOING NAKBA
My generation, the third-generation refugees, was already blueprinted with the traumatic events
of the Nakba, which for Palestinians, is not only a tragic historical event, only to be commemorated
once a year with events such as art exhibits and national commemorations. “It was never one
Nakba,” my grandmother used to say asserting that ethnic cleansing was never a one-off event
that happened in 1948, when Palestinians became stateless refugees. The Nakba is experienced
as ongoing; an uninterrupted process of Israeli settler-colonialism and domination that was given
continuity by the 1967 occupation, the violent invasion of Beirut and Palestinian refugee camps in
Lebanon, the two intifadas of 1987 and 2000, and the siege on Gaza and the constant bombardments
and demolitions across the shrinking occupied Palestinian territories.
Growing up hearing our grandmothers recount the life they had before, the dispossessed lands
that most would never see again, has formed the collective memory of the Palestinian people. My
grandmother described a peaceful life in green fields of citrus groves and olive trees in our original
village Beit-Jirja, one of 531 villages that were violently emptied of its inhabitants and razed to the
ground in 1948. The landscapes, the tastes of their fresh harvests, the sounds of peasants’ dances,
the joy of family gatherings and traditional weddings, all burdened her traumatic memory in a
sudden rupture that turned our existence into non-existence. She found consolation in storytelling
that cultivated inside her children and grandchildren a burning desire for return and a life of dignity.
The continuity of our liberation struggle, from one generation to another, resembles hope for
the Nakba generation and their descendants, another theme that several of my drawings attempted
to express –. They were my response to several Zionist leaders who assumed that “the old will
die and the young will forget.” The drawings come to assert that the old may die but the young will
keep on holding the key, until our inalienable right to return is implemented. In 1948, most refugees
fled in a haste and fear, taking whatever they could carry at a moment’s notice. They carried the
keys of their homes in their exodus, and although many know that their homes no longer exist, they held onto their keys, passed it to their children, making
the key become a symbol of the undying Palestinian
hope that return is inevitable. The young generation
is perceived as those who will carry the burden of the
cause and continue the struggle of the previous generations
until freedom, justice, equality and return to the
Palestinian people. Thus, Palestinian children became
the symbol through which “We nurse hope”, as Mahmoud
Darwish said.
The majority of Palestinians have become politicised
due to their complex and intense political reality that
shapes every aspect of their lives. I am no exception.
David Gauntlett suggested that creativity is a part of
showing connectedness and participation that can affect
artists’ lives positively as it can lead to greater general
happiness and consequently less depression and
better physical and mental health (Gauntlett, 2010).
Drawing was a tool in which I found empowerment to
my voice. It served as a tactic to overcome the state
of siege and occupation imposed on us, to escape
the feeling of helplessness that can be easily felt in
such suppressive and oppressive life conditions that
the Palestinian people endure. It was also a tool that I
used to engage politically and socially with the harsh
surrounding. With the internet becoming accessible, I
resorted to online social networks to reach out to the
international community, believing that the Palestinian
people’s struggle for liberation is a central global issue.
The turning point of my life was at the age of 17,
when I lived through “Cast Lead,” a 22-day massacre
which Israeli forces committed in Gaza. During that dismal
period, as Christmas and New Year celebrations
were being marked around the world, we all had a terrible
sense of alienation from the rest of the world as
we remained in darkness amidst continuous bombing
and mass killing. Around 11 am on the 27th of December
2008, we were attending the mid-term exams. It was a
normal day until Israeli warplanes started shelling all
over the Gaza Strip, announcing hundreds of victims
from the first hour. The chaos that ensued at school
and the living horrors that followed for 22 days of bring
stricken by military machines from land, sea and air, left
a lasting impact on everyone.
There was no safe place in Gaza, and when people
fled their dangerous areas to UN schools as a make-shift
shelter, such as Al-Fakhoura where my father worked as
a security guard, they were bombed by white-phospho-
MEMORIES OF WAR
rous ammunition, an internationally-banned weapons.
A few families then sought refuge in our home, believing
that it was relatively less dangerous. One of them
was the family of my childhood friend Aliaa Al-Khatib.
On the morning of 5 January 2009, her father Ali left to
check on his elderly parents who lived through Nakba,
refused to leave their home. He promised to be back
before night fell with more food and clothes for his
family. In the evening, my father received a phone call,
carrying unbearable news to his wife and 6 children: he
was walking near his home when an Israeli helicopter
shelled him, tearing him to pieces. That morning was
a goodbye none of us had anticipated but death was
closer than we thought.
At night, I was sitting in blackout, surrounded by
my mother and siblings in one small room of our house
under one blanket. No voice could be heard, just heartbeats
and heavy, shaky breaths. The beating and
breathing grew louder after every new explosion we
felt crashing around, shaking our home and lighting up
the sky. Then suddenly, the door of our house opened
violently and somebody shouted, “Leave home now!” It
was my dad rushing in to evacuate our house because
of a bomb threat to a neighbour. I remember that my
siblings and I grasped Mum and started running outside
unconsciously, barefoot. For three days we stayed in a
nearby house, powerless as we sat, waiting to be either
killed, or wounded, or forced to watch our home destroyed.
Thankfully, that threat turned out to be a tactic
of psychological warfare Israel used to break people’s
will for liberation.
This merciless and inhumane attack killed at least
1417 men, women and children. I wasn’t among them
but what if I had been? Would I be buried like any one of
them in a grave, nothing left of me but a blurry picture
stuck on the wall and the memory of another teenage
girl slain too young? Would I have been for the world
just a number, a dead person? I refused to dwell on that
thought.
Many drawings of mine were inspired by the memories
attached to this traumatic event and similar experiences
that proceeded. The trauma was relived
whenever an attack was repeated. Most importantly,
resorting to art was a necessary means that helped me
preserve my sanity amid traumatic events that I experienced
throughout my life in the suffocating blockade of
the Gaza Strip. It allowed me to engage with the politically-
fueled reality and express the suppressed voice
and denied rights of the Palestinian people in visual
forms that can communicate universally. ✳