Via Dolorosa #2
This is from my Via Dolorosa collage series. From time to time words fail to capture what I am seeing or experiencing. As I begin to listen to the stories of the women from 1948 I am continuously awed by their determination to exist against all odds. Walter Benjamin said, "Memory is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie." What happens then when memories of the past are connected to dead cities?
Here is Zeinab's story:
Zeinab Al-Saqqa is a refugee living in Burj Al-Barajneh refugee camp in Lebanon. She is shown here wearing the wedding dress she wore before being evicted from her home in the Palestinian village of Al- Nahr. The dress is the only possession she brought with her when she fled for her life. Her village was depopulated in 1948 by the Carmeli Brigade of the Israeli military. Two settlements, Kari and Ben Ami, quickly took over the land.
Artistic notes: I used the black and white iconic photo of refugees fleeing their homes to contrast it with the portrait of the elderly Zeinab in her white embroidered wedding dress. I can hardly imagine what thoughts and feelings she had putting on this wedding dress again after so many years of waiting and suffering. I used my photos of poppies to indicate time, Spring in Palestine. The poppies come in April. They signal both rebirth and the blood of the martyrs. And the rose, the eternal symbol of love, of mothers, of life with thorns, this is the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Suffering.
I'm struck by the brilliant red rose juxtaposed against Zeinab's gaunt, aged face, on the one hand, and against the stark black-and-white photo of the refugees, on the other--refugees who, though fleeing, are advancing slowly toward us, the viewers. Their humanity and dignity are preeminent, despite the horror implicit in their flight. Their shining white clothing presents the refugees as if they are a holy band, like white-robed martyrs processing to the New Jerusalem. The two children--the little curly-haired girl and the tall,lanky boy caught midway between childhood and adolescence--together with the matronly figure accompanying them, convey an essential innocence belying the face of the Nakba's terror. The boy's facial characteristics transcend his ethnicity, thus subliminally though unintentionally establishing, at first glance, a bond with Western viewers of this old photograph. Might he not be English, Jewish, German, or American? Is he really an Arab of Palestine? Are Arabs really different from us, after all?
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