Colours on the road
Amina Elbendary encounters an unexpected Palestine
"Colours of Palestine" is the spot-on title of Adib Fattal's exhibition, which closes today at the Ewart Gallery. It is part of the Year of Palestine events hosted by the faculty and students of the American University in Cairo. And its most striking feature, not surprisingly, is colour. The visitor is initially disoriented by the apparent absence of seriousness. Fattal, a 40-year-old Palestinian-Syrian born outside Palestine, offers an unexpected perspective on his homeland. His paintings, all strikingly similar to each other in style, have a child-like simplicity about them. This comes across at first glance, no less by the use of felt-tip pens than by simplistic draughtsmanship. The sophistication does not fully emerge until one takes a second, more careful look.
Part of the Palestinians' struggle for existence involves reaffirming a national identity and confirming that they belong to places, and, more importantly if somewhat more abstractly, to the place, Palestine. Activists, artists and scholars have worked hard to keep the memories of obliterated places alive, to revive the names of forgotten landmarks, to redeem a history in order to build a future. And so it is not surprising that Fattal's exhibition is another roadmap to Palestine. The paintings are titled and arranged around the important cities of Palestine: there is Jaffa, Al-Lod, Ramallah, Gaza, Ramleh, Acre, Jenin, Safad. Jerusalem, naturally enough, enjoys pride of place. The paintings are almost iconic, reducing the identity of a place to a few potent symbols: Jerusalem, for example, consists of Al-Aqsa Mosque and the walls of the city, Jaffa of figures picking oranges.
Fattal's work disorients not only due to its childlike qualities, but by virtue of the eerie decontextualisation of the country on which it is based. His is a Palestine of folklore rather than of life or memory, a perfectly timeless place where there is no indication of history -- occupation, colonialisation -- or present-day struggle. Any vision of modernity is replaced by such quasi-mythological choices as the overabundance of camels, for example. Fattal's works act like a prism through which the uninitiated can see a country otherwise familiar only through newsreels. You leave with a different, fresh imagination of Palestine; one that is decidedly colourful and perhaps increasingly needed.
The artist hardly ever uses black. This is not the Palestine of occupation and resistance, of death and defiance, of curfews and barbed wire, of bullets and ambulances. Instead he paints undifferentiated colourful human figures, among which you can barely make out men from women; the men seem to be wearing a fez-like form of headgear. All faces are identical circles with small dots and pecks. Children seem slightly smaller than adults. In the drawing of Bethlehem, which stands out by its blue rooftops, we see figures carrying crosses up the hill. In Jerusalem, in which we see little more than Al-Aqsa Mosque and its surrounds, prostrated figures are obviously in fervent prayer.
At first glance, Fattal's Palestine seems a little too quiet for comfort; his figures static rather than dynamic. But the closer you look, the more indications of life you notice among the icons who populate these surfaces. There are figures in fishing boats, others walking, some picking oranges, some praying. There are many trees, palms, oranges and other water-wheel shaped trees. There are many animals, camels, cattle and flying birds. There are funny-looking coloured clouds, gold and silver suns and moons. And there are all the basic colours: red, green, blue, yellow, orange. There is also a lot of white. The backgrounds of drawings are often left untouched, preserving the original colour of the paper, over which tiny specks of colour accumulate gradually, which adds to the impression of suspension in time. Even the drawing Full Moon Over Jerusalem doesn't indicate night at all. Perhaps this is an eternal Palestine.
In a generous gesture, Fattal has donated the proceeds from one of the paintings as well as the sales of the posters of the exhibition to one of the student clubs at AUC. Cairo To Camps has been involved in helping children and students at Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut, the first Egyptian student organisation to embark on such a project. Club members are organising another trip to the camps this August to work with Palestinian refugee children on theatre, creative writing and painting. Fattal's contribution from his art should provide opportunities for other Palestinians, still children, to dream their way into the future and to imagine their variously prosperous Palestines.
Walking through the enclosed Ewart Gallery, looking at Fattal's drawings, is like walking through a map of sorts. Even as they are almost subversive in presenting an alternative image of Palestine, one can't help thinking of the other reality, the one that involves a "Road Map to Peace" and a Separation Wall. In Wall of Jerusalem, Fattal draws two walls encircling Al-Aqsa Mosque. The first appears to be a stone wall, in brown, at the foreground of the sketch. The other wall, located behind the mosque, consists of dabs of colours. These colours are very tightly juxtaposed like pixels on a computer screen. In between are the trademark figures, praying, playing, hanging around. It is as if Fattal's wall of colours is his answer to that other infamous wall.
