I want to share a story about the complex reality of Israel-Palestine – a timely occasion given the recent publication of a blog by the GDI Students for Palestine group. Many years ago, I was involved in a research project that engaged with Eritrean asylum seekers in Tel Aviv, and have since maintained multiple connections to academics and civil society networks engaging with topics of migration, refugees and asylum. Some of those associates are about to publish an edited volume called Home in the Making: Arts of Asylum Seekers in Israel. One of the editors had asked me for a foreword, which I wrote, as promised, last December, and was initially thankfully received. So far, so good. However, I was recently told, with some pain by said editor, that the other members of the editorial team did not want my text published, and as this was an inclusive process, it would not appear.
In my foreword (the full text can be accessed here), I focus on art as an act to claim freedom and as a means to understanding the pain of the other.
I was inspired to write my cancelled contribution by Nowhere, a one-person play written and performed by actor and artist Khalid Abdalla that I saw in Manchester in autumn 2024. He is Scottish-born and was brought up in London, but his life is deeply intertwined with past migration journeys of his Egyptian parents and ancestors. These were journeys of political activism, persecution, flight, refuge – and in Nowhere they become intertwined with the marks those journeys left on his body and mind. Nowhere is a vivid example of how artistic expression and creation are vital in place-making, the creation of belonging, and everyday struggles against oppression and for a better world. Nowhere goes to the core of what art produced by asylum seekers often is about: to essentially insist on being treated as a citizen in the place where one lives, works, loves, cries, eat, celebrates – however temporary this stay may be. Nowhere can be read as a vision of utopia, but also as a place that is temporarily created in acts of understanding, conviviality, solidarity, or joint emotional connectedness.
Artistic expressions become meaningful in unique ways for people who have migrated and expect to live long-term in settings where their legal status is likely to remain liminal indefinitely, where the possibility of citizenship-status remains a vague dream. Nowhere in a literal sense here can become a permanent condition characterised by uncertainty and fear. But Nowhere also carries the potential of conviviality in the everyday. Or it becomes the start of a continuous journey made visible.
A focus on arts allows specific entry points into the documentation, analysis, and narration of lived experiences of forced migration, or the imagination of those, and as such arts can also be produced by artists without direct experience of migration traumata. I am reminded here of the work of a collaborator in a recent research project of my own – Kenyan artists Munene Kariithi. While Kenyan by birth and with no direct experience of migration, he beautifully captures the lives of migrants and the ambivalence of migrants lives between trauma, memory and the everyday in the city. His paintings let the viewer evocatively experience what it may mean to be in a liminal place of exile. This relates back to Nowhere, as essentially all humans have a piece of nowhere inside them. Art is a means to bring this piece of Nowhere to the surface, connect at an emotional and affective level with what being human may mean, transcending one’s own personal experience through doing so.
This creates multiple links between art and solidarity in situations of forced migration. Looking at this theme with reference to Home in the Making, written before the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023 that have transformed Israeli society in ways yet to be fully understood, raises important questions here. One question I kept myself asking when reading the final manuscript was whether the same scenes of conviviality, solidarity and togetherness that become visible in the book would still be possible now. Are those Israelis who engaged and worked with refugees still in the country, especially as the ‘liberal exodus’ has gathered pace? I know quite a few Israelis who used to work in the refugee NGO sector who have since left or are making plans to do so. How has their outlook on life and solidarity with others changed since the October 2023 events? Can art still reach out across difference in the same way, makes emotional connections and links different types of traumata rather than separating them? One would hope so.
At the same time, there is a proverbial elephant in the room that exists regardless of the events of October 2023. Solidarity as expressed in and through the arts is centred on solidarity in face of state-based oppression against asylum seekers. The Palestinians who are also part of Israel rarely appear, and at various times the similarities between the history of asylum seekers in Israel and Jewish citizens is evoked by asylum seekers – a joint history of displacement and refugee-ness. The displacement of Palestinians does not figure, along with their trauma of the nakba. When I interviewed Eritrean asylum seekers in Tel Aviv for a different research project around ten years ago, the only time Palestinians were mentioned was as a people to be despised, mistrusted, and viewed as exploitative employers. The solidarity sought and experienced seems limited and fragile, and oppression and trauma of asylum seekers and Palestinians interpreted differently by all sides, creating borders instead of conviviality.
In Home in the Making, these borders are powerfully brought to light in the story of Omad, a Fur-speaking asylum seekers from Darfur in Sudan and a theatre performance that aims to imagine a shared home. Palestinians in the audience see the story of a Fur African from Darfur persecuted because of his ethnicity, and forced to get rid of his Arabic name, as sharing characteristics with the Israeli persecution they may have personally experienced. They cannot understand why Omad performs in Hebrew and English, and why he does not want to speak Arabic with them. Omad, in contrast, who was forced by the Arabic speaking government of Sudan to take on an Arabic name alien to his identity, and whose Fur name is indeed Omad, feels reminded by those comments of the oppression against him back in Darfur, when he was forced to speak Arabic, the language of the oppressor. For Omad, having become a refugee, regardless of all the hardship that also comes with this, is also a liberation: The liberation to use his birth name and to speak the language he chooses.
In the telling of the theatrical undertaking between asylum seekers and Israeli citizens, those narratives do not converge or come together. Acts of solidarity and the emotional connection to the suffering of others remain incomplete.
But home is not only constantly in the making (and unmaking) for those who are long-term residents in the cities of Israel and lack secure status. It is also a fragile concept in the occupied territories and the Gaza strip, all in different ways under Israeli control. One chapter in the book focuses on various walking tours in south Tel Aviv and their interpretation as an art-form. It does invite reflections on different forms of mobility and enforced non-mobility as experienced by asylum seekers and Palestinian citizens alike. It demonstrates through a look back in history the linkages between the centre and the peripheries, where south Tel Aviv and Jaffa and its populations have been examples of graduated forms of citizenship and life worlds that remained unrecognised by mainstream society.
Can art overcome such divisions and ultimately recognise the trauma on all sides? Can it fulfil the promise that Abdalla’s Nowhere tries to invoke: a place where we strive for conviviality, solidarity, and live emotional connectedness, even for a fleeting moment in the theatre? A moment that may, however, endure and become part of how we see the world and act in it?
I want to end by invoking a piece of work of Gazan refugee-camp born painter Mohammad Al-Hawajri. His series of paintings from 2010-2013 called Guernica Gaza uses famous paintings from the ‘Western’ Arts cannon (including Picasso’s Guernica, but also work by Van Gogh, Delacroix, Chagall, and others), inserting snapshots from everyday life in Gaza, through painting, collage, and photographs. Those snapshots bring the trauma in Gaza to light when, for example, a peaceful harvest painting by Van Gogh is made to include the black smoke of an explosion rising on the horizon, or Delacroix’s Liberty leading the people is foregrounded by Palestinians wounded by snipers.
But for Mohammad Al-Hawajri, as for art-producing asylum seekers, art is not just a means to raise awareness of suffering. It is, more importantly, a means to open a space for dialogue and solidarity. And, perhaps most importantly, it is an act of personal liberation, captured in his words: ‘Art is my lung to breathe freedom’.
Freedom, however, to be meaningful, always includes the freedom of others.
Image: Tanja Müller, Photograph of painting from Guernica Gaza series, taken at the Documenta Exhibition, Germany, 2022
Note: This article gives the views of the author/academic featured and does not necessarily represent the views of the Global Development Institute as a whole.
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