Between Home and Homeland: Reflections on New Paintings from the series Eltifaf-Bypass by Rafat Asad

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Jun 27, 2016 Palestine
[Detail of Rafat Asad`s \"Bypass #13.\" Image courtesy of Gallery One, Palestine.] [Detail of Rafat Asad`s \"Bypass #13.\" Image courtesy of Gallery One, Palestine.]

Between Home and Homeland: Reflections on New Paintings from the series Eltifaf-Bypass by Rafat Asad

By : John Halaka

The tension between home and homeland is an ever-present subject that informs the work of many contemporary Palestinian artists. Since the beginning of the uprooting and fragmentation of the Palestinian people by an extended and expanding settler-colonial occupation nearly seventy years ago, the Palestinian experience of home has become largely diasporic and transportable, while their vision of a homeland, appears and disappears like a promising mirage that seductively lays just beyond reach.

Rafat Asad’s new paintings investigate the chasm between home and homeland with somber images that reflect on the current state of a forced odyssey that continues to be imposed on the Palestinians. Although his artwork is by no means the first to consider the existential crisis caused by catastrophic displacement, Asad’s current paintings are at the forefront of an evolving pictorial tradition that investigates themes of loss, resistance, delusions, and responsibilities, in the epic journey of Palestinians. His images of roads, road barriers, and inaccessible vistas raise numerous timely questions regarding the endgame that may be looming just over the “next turn in the road.” By eliminating the use of figures, recognizable spaces, and overt political symbols Asad’s parsimonious compositions compel the viewer to soberly reflect on a critical juncture in the Palestinians’ historical journey on the “Trail of Tears.[1]”

Unlike many of his creative predecessors and contemporaries, Rafat Asad’s new paintings, examine the Palestinians’ troubled crossing between home and homeland from a perspective that deliberately avoids conventional tropes of repression and resistance. His compositions are completely devoid of representations of heroic struggle in the face of tragic suffering and are intentionally absent of personal narratives, intimate histories, national nostalgia, or theatrical gestures. Although several of the paintings are purposely commanding in scale, they are deceptively designed to initially look pedestrian in their compositional structures, and predominantly appear to prioritize formal objectives. At first glance, the viewer can easily mistake Rafat Asad’s paintings as formalist compositions that employ the geometry and the subdued color palette evident in the structures of guard rails, the curves of roads, and the physically imposing silhouettes of billboards and power transformers. In Asad’s paintings, the ubiquitous utilitarian structures that clutter highways are strongly contrasted against the shifting lushness and organic sensuality of landscapes that lay in the background of his compositions, just beyond the immobile barriers. 

                     \"\"                                                  [Rafat Asad, Bypass (2015). Image copyright the artist. Courtesy of Gallery One, Palestine.]

First glance observations of Asad’s paintings are intentionally misleading and have been orchestrated to disarm the viewer’s preconceptions and expectations. The formalism of the paintings allows viewers to gaze at the images without immediately pondering the narrative interplay of familiar similes, imbedded symbols, and intended messages. While the meaning of the paintings is calculated to reveal itself gradually, the pictorial weight of the black fields expedites the viewers’ emotional recognition of the content by imposing a mournful tone on the images. The black fields dominate the shallow foreground of each of the compositions and govern the viewers’ visual, emotional, and intellectual engagement with the paintings.   

Asad’s visual compositions act on the viewer viscerally and are accessed emotionally before they can be analyzed intellectually. It is at the intellectual stage of perception that the viewer begins to reflect on the tension that separates home from homeland, and to perceive the cyclical interplay between the metaphorical representation of national desire and political denial. The compositions that Rafat Asad arranges in his paintings deliberately tease the viewer with the possibilities of open space, distant travel, and the ability to envision a field of dreams that transcends predestined limitations. But the strategically placed barriers in the paintings deny the viewer access to the promised possibilities that deceptively appear just within reach. The barriers compositionally trap the viewers in the unambiguously lifeless black fields that define the shallow foregrounds. The overbearing black foregrounds dominate all of Asad’s compositions and serve as recurring mournful stanzas, demarcating the cyclical progression towards a repeatedly obstructed future.

Asad’s paintings prompt a litany of questions: Where did these roads originate? Where do they lead? Who built them? Where does one stand in this journey? Are the barriers designed to protect or to restrict? Why is access to the landscapes repeatedly denied? Has the land become an open-air-prison? Are the blatantly imposed barriers that restrict and control movement perceived as normally occurring structures by inhabitants/inmates who have grown habituated to their presence? If the nomadic concept of home is where the refugees happen to temporarily settle on their forced “Trail of Tears” then are Rafat Asad’s narrow and sterile black fields a metaphor for the tiny slivers of land that remain of the so-called Homeland/Bantustans/Reservations that the Palestinians have been driven into? Does Asad deliberately place the viewer in the shallow black foreground space so that we become psychological participants in the physical and emotional abyss presented in the paintings? Are the imposing barriers and guardrails metaphors of denial that prohibit access to the desired homeland? Are the blurry and distant landscapes metaphors of an increasingly vanishing homeland? Has the dream of Palestine become as unattainable as the land has become inaccessible?

Rafat Asad’s new paintings are his most ambitious, subtle, and sophisticated works to date. Their conceptual complexity and pictorial intelligence are directly informed by the fact that the images are created by a forty-four-year-old Palestinian artist whose entire life has been defined by the seemingly routine, yet utterly abnormal, daily encounters with the violent restrictions and repressive manipulations of a militarily enforced settler-colonial occupation.

Asad’s new paintings offer a mournful assessment of the actual outcomes of the numerous so-called peace strategies that have been foisted on the Palestinians. The images remind us that the various internationally imposed road-maps-to-peace have deliberately driven the Palestinians deeper into the black hole of occupation while deceptively promising them the normalcy of a homeland. Rafat Asad’s paintings of roads-to-nowhere, offer no opportunities to exit or to turn around. They provide no signage, no road markers, and no accessible information. The slivers of roads depicted in Asad’s paintings present little more than a freshly re-paved “Trail of Tears.” 

            \"\"                                       [Rafat Asad, Bypass #15 (2015). Image copyright the artist. Courtesy of Gallery One, Palestine.]

In each of the paintings, the road and the landscape presented are fundamentally disconnected from each other through the use of colors, surface treatment, clarity, and focus. There is also a deliberate confusion in the perception of motion in the paintings. This momentary misperception is calculated to further distinguish the static nature of the journey. At first look, Asad’s compositional arrangement of the guardrails and other immobile structures seem to suggest that the viewer is moving forward on the highway. But a closer look reveals that the sharp-focused depictions of the guardrails, fences, and silhouetted billboards identify the viewer as standing still on this highway. Adding to this misperception is the fact that the blurry landscapes appear to suggest forward motion. The indistinct landscapes look like cinematic projections of moving fields that are being screened behind a stationary prop, in order to imply a sense of forward movement from the vantage point of the viewer. But in fact the opposite is depicted in Asad’s paintings. It is the landscapes that are moving away while the vantage point of the viewer is completely stationary. The fixed vantage points conveyed by the thin slivers of foreground spaces communicate an absolute stillness of movement, advancing the metaphor of being increasingly trapped in a devastating political black hole. The black fields represented in Asad’s paintings are airless, sterile, and vacuum-like in the disturbing pictorial power they exert.

In Asad’s illusory journeys to a homeland, what at first appear like ordinary representations of roads, guardrails, and barriers, serve fundamentally as metaphors of constant and seemingly accustomed restrictions. Asad’s paintings are presented as ordinary scenes that comment on the unordinary existence of indigenous inhabitants who continue to be herded into disconnected “reservations.”

Corralled onto a highway to nowhere, the displaced and trapped travelers possess nothing but their dreams and imagination to transport them beyond the rigidly imposed barriers, and carry them from nomadic homes to a desired homeland.

*Eltifaf-Bypasswas on view at Gallery One from 4 April until 19 March, 2016.

 

[1] “The Trail of Tears” is a term first used by the Cherokee Nation to describe the genocidal removal from their native lands, of all indigenous tribes living east of the Mississippi River, in the southern United States.

To facilitate the flood of white settlers who coveted the fertile lands of the Indigenous People, the forced removal of Native Tribes was repeatedly and brutally implemented throughout the Americas. President Andrew Jackson’s signing of “The Indian Removal Act” into law in 1830, made the genocidal removal of the Native Tribes that constituted the Indigenous People of North America, an officially sanctioned and militarily enforced policy of the settler-colonial government of the United States of America.  

 

 
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Mar 13, 2016 Lebanon
Selim Temo By :
Selim Temo

On a Day of a March…

“In his eyes was the sorrow of an Arab horse that has lost the race.”

Yaşar Kemal

On a day of a March…

The three of us are sitting in a hotel garden right above a park. A jovial giant, a cheerful exile, a lucky me... Beneath a sky full of birds… The wind is blowing like a forgotten whisper; the smell of moss is arriving from distant seas. The jovial giant’s phone rings. “Only three people know my phone number: Mehmed, Selim, and the other is…” says the giant as he answers his phone and lends his voice to his dear wife.

The month of March, the year is 2006…

I have a cold. Brother Mehmed is healthy. The giant is happy. The words he utters on the phone, which he has a hard time placing properly onto his ear, are lighter than roses and mingle with the air as if they were mist.

The giant does not get along with his cell phone. Once he called me while my son was riding his bike. We had a long conversation as I followed with my eyes my son’s wobbly moves on his bike. With such excitement, he talked about a novel that might take twenty to thirty years to finish. His voice was cut off suddenly. When it came back, he asked “Who was the girl who spoke a second ago?” Then his voice was cut off again. There was a thing called pay phones back in those days. “Please insert more coins,” or something in this nature, would say a female voice.

Our first meeting was as exhilarating as this one… I was waiting at the Esenboga Airport in Ankara with a staff member and a car Bilkent University provided for us. The year was 2002. The 15th of May. The giant and Zülfü Livaneli emerged from the VIP room. As I was walking toward them in a rather excited mood, I saw the giant embracing with his left arm the leader of Saadet Partisi, Recai Kutan. With a euphoric voice of a tree that hosts a flock of birds from the sky, he said: “Say hi to Necmettin!” Then as I expressed my willingness, under the weight of words becoming heavier in my mouth, to accompany him during the symposium dedicated to him, he quickly asked in Kurdish “Are you Kurdish?” When I said yes, he pressed me against his chest tightly. I sat next to the driver’s seat as Livaneli and he in the back… It was either at the traffic stop or perhaps during the traffic jam when people walking on the sidewalks began to interact with the giant by way of beautiful gazes, waving hands, sending kisses. I thought this must be what it means to be one of the greatest writers in the world.

One day, a very long day, he came to visit my little family all the way from the other end of the city. When I told him I work on Kurdish poetry, he mentioned that he, with Cahit Sıtkı, worked on the early translations of Kurdish poetry. In the darkness of the 1950s, they would hide in some corners and recite Kurdish poetry to each other as they translated them. The jovial giant was thrilled when he heard about Ehmedê Xanî Library, the project of mine that is etched into my dreams. Joining me in my crazy dream project, he said: “I will donate all my books to this library. And you know, among them are the Gallimard encyclopedias.”

The PhD program at Bilkent University offered a seminar on Yaşar Kemal in 2004. Süha Oğuzertem, who taught this seminar, changed our understanding of Yaşar Kemal entirely. We learned that his language in each novel is significantly different from one another. In each novel, there is, as if, a distinctly new novelist. We invited him to the seminar. He came. As he was entering the room, he turned to my dear professor, the late Talât Sait Halman, and said: “Talât, accept Selim into the PhD program, because his father is a dengbêj!” “He is already in,” said Talât.

The day I returned from England. Winter, 2011… This time I called him from a frosty garden. He never wished to exhaust people yet had a voracious appetite for story telling. Witnessing that was such a great pleasure and honor for me. During almost an hour-long conversation, he mentioned again the plans on a novel that would take twenty to thirty years to finish, and the third volume of Akçasazın Ağaları… In fact, he had already told me the ending of Bir Ada Hikâyesi (A Story of an Island) in 2004. He would burn the island in the end! It was such a heavy burden not being able to tell anyone about the ‘end.’ This meant: he, who always put on strong emphasis on “the human” in his nearly sixty years of stellar literary career, would burn everything he had uttered to humanity during his own century. Then the fourth volume of the book came out: My son’s grandpa Yaşar could not burn his island. Yet the speech he sent to be delivered at the ceremony of the honorary doctorate degree he received from Bilgi University was his farewell letter to the world. He talked about literature as an act of responsibility toward the world. With this, he was bringing joy to his island for the last time.

A refugee, a stutterer after seeing his father getting killed, an orphan whose right eye was carved out with a knife, a poverty stricken person, a person who shivered often, an ill-treated Kurd, a revolutionary, a dengbêj, a bard, a mourning flâneur, a story teller, a solemn spirit, a genius of diegesis, a body who fills the world, a chest who embraces the world, a sea of smiles, an island of there-is-always-hope, a human being… he was.

We, three of us, in a garden in the middle of a peninsula on a day of a March were talking as if we all had hard candy in our mouths. The exile paused our convivial conversation with a serious sentence. “I am going to the South,” he said. “The Kurdish government is going to give me the state’s honorary medal. Do you have any message you want me to deliver, Yaşar Baba?” They stared at each other for a while then forgot about me, and the glasses of tea. Tears began to swell in their eyes. The silence lasted like a long winter.

“Tell them that I love them dearly!” said Yaşar Kemal, after a long pause. “I have,” he said, “about thirty novels. Tell them to translate all into Kurdish.” He then turned to me: “Selim can do the translations.” Turning back to Mehmed Uzun, he continued:

Tell them, a people can become a nation only when they pay their writers. I receive a lot more for English or French translations of my work. What I ask from the Kurdish government is $100,000. Ask them to send me this money. I would then go to the bank. There I would ask a bank teller “My daughter, Kurds have sent me money; let me have it.” The bank teller would put the money on the table. Then I would weep profusely while pressing the stack of Kurdish money against my chest. Then I would find your number in my phone list of three numbers. “Mehmed,” I would ask, “find me the bank account number of one of the organizations for the martyred peshmerga so that I can send them the money.

The three of us, on a day of a March in one year, were sitting and conversing in a place somewhere in a world. Now, two of us are no longer on this earth. One of them found out he got cancer on his way from the emancipated part of his country after receiving the honorary medal, then said goodbye to a thousand year old exilic condition and toppled down like a tree on a hillside near Tigris. The other entered the warm chest of the world, leaving houses, shadowy courtyards, plains, wild pears, the mountains with purple violets, nomads with poetry, azat birds[1], the songs of the fishermen, the library shelves, ants, apprenticeship of birds[2], the deer pattern on a kilim spread inside the tent of a dreamy tribe burned to ashes, the blue butterfly, chukars, winds that yellow the weeds, borders, prison doors, the frosty waters of early springs as orphans.

For all, I am mourning over the loss of both.

*Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Radikal Gazetesi on February 28, 2015, and is translated by Öykü Tekten.

Öykü Tekten is a poet, translator, and editor living in New York. She is the co-creator of KAF Collective and pursues a PhD degree in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. 

  

Footnotes

1. Yaşar Kemal tells the story of “azat kuşları” in his novel The Birds Have Also Gone. The fictional characters in this novel would buy the birds near the places of worship only to set them free.

2. The phrase “apprenticeship of birds” (kuşların tilmizi) refers to the pseudonym of Feqiyê Teyran (1590-1660), a legendary Kurdish poet and writer. Kurds believe that Teyran spoke the bird language. He was also mentioned in Yaşar Kemal’s novel A Story of an Island.