Book Review, part two"Palestinian Art" by Samia A. Halaby

WHY THE REVIEW WAS WRITTEN

An Exhibition of the Work of Palestinian Artists. Negative Attitudes Expressed in the Text of "Palestinian Art"

(An exhibition presented by the Swedish Government and curated by Ulf Thomas Moberg who is also author of the book, no publisher specified, printed by Almqvist & Eiksell, Uppsala 1998, copyright Cinclus, Box 14089, 161 14 Stockholm.)

by Samia A. Halaby, 1998

I was invited by the Swedish government to exhibit my paintings in Stockholm. Here is what happened to me and my fellow painters after we had been assured that this would be an exhibition about art and that the choice of Palestinian artist is based on traditional support of Palestine by Sweden.

The show was assigned to a curator whose primary qualification was that he was not connected to the government in an official way. A central exhibition hall at the Royal Academy of Stockholm was assigned to the exhibition until the pro-Israeli lobby at the Academy heard of this and ousted the Palestinian show to a secondary exhibition hall. An exhibition by a Swedish painter who would build a Synagogue out of his paintings would open two weeks after the Palestinian show at the main exhibition.

The exhibition was well curated and well installed and the opening was a good event. And, in spire of a lot of transportation problems and a very inhospitable reception, the seven artist arrived in Stockholm for the exhibition ready willing and wanting to talk to the press who was markedly absent. The artists came, lived in a bubble for four days, and then left. We had minimal and controlled contact with only members of government agencies. I would have loved to be in contact with Stockholm artists and art students.

A hard cover book was published along with the exhibition full of color photographs and a short introduction with seven chapters about the seven artists. The text of the book was not about art but rather a misinformed and insulting travelogue through Palestine with a shocking focus on the propaganda of Zionism. It is a servile gesture towards Zionist acceptance.

The title implies a treatise on the art of Palestine which spans millennia yet only the work of six contemporary artists is treated in the book. And confirming that the book is not about art is the fact that the labeling of reproductions is limited to author, title, and date. The sizes and the media of the works is not included.

The introduction is brief being limited to eighteen lines of disjointed ideas one of which claims that the book will show how study abroad has influenced the art work. This idea was never mentioned again.

The book opens through the historically inverted view of Palestine through the eyes of a Swedish traveler of 1859. The book gives us Palestinian Arabs a view of ourselves through the Biblical eye of a metaphorical telescope. We are deep down there far away in this forbidding and hostile view of us. We see our cities labeled in their Biblical versions. Versions made so familiar to them through weekly Sunday prayers that a deep sense of ownership has overtaken them. Our national lands have become their "Holy Land." They see neither its history before the bible not since the bible. Giving it to Zionism seems justified to them by the Hebrew origins of the Old Testament. The minuscule Jewish communities that have lived with us Arabs and whom we consider as Arab give them further justification.

After this opening by a 19th Century European traveler, the author describes Palestine of that time as being the "Holy Land" -- a fountain head of spirituality a land unlike the hotbed of political and military strife of today, a land full of various peoples each speaking their own language and all under the rule of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.

Throughout the book Arabians, Christians, Jews, Moslems, Palestinians, as well as some others are all mentioned as though they were separate cultures living harmoniously together. That all these can be listed one after the other as though separate entities fulfills the theories of "Ethnicity" and the Colonialist principles of "devoid and rule" more than they describe reality. A Palestinian is a type of Arab and they can be of any of the above three religions or another.

There is too much mention of differences in religious affiliation of Arabs and too much of description of local customs to highlight "ethnicity." Every opportunity to mention Christians and Christianity is exploited whether it is the presence of churches or the family history of individual artists. Islam is not similarly highlight. However Judaism is under heavy focus.

In this little monograph with an eleven thousand word essay about the work of seven Palestinian artists this author finds an excuse to include mention of Hebrew writings several times including a paragraph about the Hebrew script of the Old Testament. There is no mention of the fact that much of the bible survived through the Arabic language.

After each mention of a Palestinian city there is always a mention of Jewish history in it no matter how insignificant. Furthermore, to the novice, it is hard to know that Palestinians are Arabs. Those who know the Arab World from the inside will think the book is a nasty mix-up. Jewish history in the lands of Palestine is minimal compared to the millennia of continuous settlement by the Arabs and their ancestors and yet mention of Arab history is invisible. The book contains a cultivated absence of the name "Arab" and an equally cultivated abundance of the use of the name "Jew."

Whenever the tragedies of Palestinians are mentioned such as rape, genocide, massacre of innocents, refugeeism, loss of land and home and relatives, the ethnic cleansing are all mentioned in the passive case as though they somehow happened without a doer to the deed. Zionist and Israeli policies and responsibility for the brutal destruction of Palestine and Palestinians is not mentioned. In fact the book contains a clear acceptance of the rights of Israel over Palestine by the mention of Israeli Independence and by the amazing concept that our homes and lands stopped being under our ownership once Israel occupied them by the gun.

The book is full of discontinuities and misplaced information. The seeming innocence of misplaced fragment is belied by the obvious implications. Each misplaced fragment contain implications which are hostile to Palestinians. These hostile fragments lie within a friendly but anemic description of the artists and their work.

The first chapter is about the artist Rana Bishara and it opens with the lengthy quotation from a Swedish traveler as described above. The quotation and accompanying commentary occupy more than a third of the text of this chapter which is supposed to be about the art of Rana Bishara.

The remaining text in the Bishara chapter concerns itself as much with visiting her village and various religious presence and practice in the area as much as with her work. In it the reader has no idea that Rana Bishara is an Arab or that her village is dominated by Israel. Those settlers who encircle her village and who killed the Palestinian Arab boy featured in one her works are not identified as Israelis.

In the Chapter about Jumana Al-Husseini whose work utilizes scripts, the author takes the opportunity to deal with the history of writing and finds occasion to include several lines about the Hebrew writing of the Old Testament. The gross opportunism of this is typical of the text as a whole.

Two other chapters are unusual in their deception. One of these is the chapter about Naser Soumi who has created several installation works in homage to Palestinian cities. Counting the lines one sees that only 52 are about Soumi and his work and 82 are about the history of the Cities Soumi treats. Furthermore, consistent with the criticism above this history grossly reduces the significance of Arabic history to a few citations while stressing Old Testament and Jewish and Israeli history in relation to these cities.

Finally in the Chapter about Samir Salamah The author opens by telling us where Salamah was born and then takes that as an opportunity to expend a paragraph out of the four pages to tell us of the Jewish and Zionist history of that city.

For this reason I was driven to write the paper which follows. It was written under pressure with the hope that it might be duplicated and distributed at the show with the book. Of course the government agency in charge took ten days to print my paper which they said they will distribute to the press. They failed to tell me if it was in fact ever made available to the public at the show or with the book or made public at all.

The paper, as an open letter, attempts to do what the book sets out to do. It tells who we are and describes our art and its sources and influences.

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