This article appeared in Being Samia Halaby Issue #68 dedicated to spotlighting the journey of Samia Halaby, a Palestinian-American artist whose resilience shines through despite challenges like the cancellation of a significant exhibition at Indiana University. Halaby’s remarkable year, marked by global exhibitions and well-deserved acclaim, underscores her ability to transcend borders with art that prompts reflection on themes of identity, belonging, and social justice, serving as a bridge across cultural divides.
As an artist, Samia Halaby has sought to infuse her creations with the vitality and essence of life itself. With a profound connection to nature, she embarked on a journey to explore the very properties that animate the world around us. Through her art, Halaby delved into the intricate interplay of light, colour, and form, drawing inspiration from the organic rhythms of the natural world.
16 ½ x 11 5/8 in (42 x 29.5 cm).
Central to Halaby’s vision has always been her deep-rooted and troubled Palestinian identity, which found expression through themes echoing the land, soil, and olive trees of her country. In her quest to evoke the spirit of her homeland, she looked to the earth itself, finding inspiration in its rugged beauty and timeless resilience. By incorporating these elements into her work, Halaby not only captured the essence of her heritage but also celebrated its enduring vitality, even as the world witnessed Palestine’s ongoing struggle to exist.
Yet Halaby’s art is not purely nostalgic, or confined to serene landscapes and idyllic scenes. Unapologetically confronting the harsh realities of history, she boldly addresses the atrocities inflicted upon her people. One such haunting chapter is the Kafr Qasim massacre of 1956, where Israeli forces brutally massacred innocent Palestinian civilians. Her visceral depictions of this tragedy serve as a stark reminder of the ongoing struggles faced by the Palestinian people.
In her pursuit of truth and justice, Halaby employs a diverse array of mediums, from traditional painting techniques to unconventional materials like paper-mâché and knit clothing. Through each stroke of her brush or weave of her fabric, she breathes life into her art, infusing it with raw emotion and unwavering conviction.
In essence, Samia Halaby’s art transcends mere representation; it pulsates with the vitality of nature and the indomitable spirit of Palestine. Through her uncompromising vision and unyielding dedication, she invites us to bear witness to the beauty, resilience, and struggles of her people, while forging a powerful testament to the human experience over a period of decades. She simultaneously provokes, challenges and inspires us.
Olives of Palestine
Artist Zahed Harash, of the town of Shafa Amer in the Galilee, and I went to paint and draw the olive trees of Rama. They are all old, but this one is said to be the oldest. I painted it aware of the unique celebration of Palestine therein implied. While I sat on a blanket on the ground, Zahed sat in his van as he could not use his wheelchair on the hard chunks of ploughed soil. He found his raised vantage in the car suitable for work as he joyfully drove between the trees. For this, we were eventually punished by a flat tire. I wondered as I painted this tree, hemmed in as it was by a road sign and the shoulder of a new Israeli road, whether we were grieving over old, besieged trees, or celebrating our love of the olives despite all attacks on them as on us.
I asked why this tree was cut this way and was told that the Israelis beheaded trees during the first First Intifada. They grow back badly, sending out thin shoots from the top, the point of sudden injury, and from the bottom new shoots emerge from the roots. It is as though its mature root system has lost the magnificence of its branches and channels the overflow of energy into wild shoots. The tree’s capacity to produce precious olives is destroyed for years to come.
(35 x 50 cm).
Al-Badawi is the popular name for a fantastic old olive tree in the fields of the village of Walaje near Bethlehem. It is the subject of ambient folk tales that warn of tragedy if any part of it is cut, or if two-thirds of its produce is not given freely to neighbours, it has thus never been pruned. One part of the folk take declares that any branches or shoots that are cut will turn into snakes. As it grows and grows, the centre becomes a hollow olive tree trunk in which three to four people can stand, surrounded by two or more circles of shoots that have grown to huge size. Each shoot has become a mature olive of substantial size. So, it seems that an olive tree, untended by our beautiful Palestinian peasants, would end up resembling a banyan tree and looking like a veritable forest of its own.
I had just spent seven precious days inside the green line in occupied Palestine (the Israeli entity) staying at a hostel, using a rented car to drive to one of the oldest stands of olive trees in the Galilee in the northern parts of historic Palestine and spending 8 to 10 hours painting. On the very day of my return to New York, I found an invitation from the Art Car Museum in Houston, Texas, to participate in an exhibition titled “Faces.” The deadline to send the artwork by mail was on the following day. I decided to participate and thus at the dawn of the following day, jet-lagged, existing between time zones, still full of the impressions of the old trees, full of the ruminations regarding Zionist oppression, I made this self-portrait and wrote on it: “I Found Myself Growing Inside an Olive Tree in Palestine. We are ancient trees now. We lost many friends cut by Israeli butchery.”
The olive trees were on lands in the village of Rama and near the town of Shafa Amer, where my great friend Zahed Harash lives. I had just spent a week in Ramah’s olive orchards in the Galilee (al-Jallile). Zahed was there with me on the first day painting the olive trees, some of which are said to be as old as five thousand years. On the last day, a car drove into the field and a young man came hesitantly towards me. He asked me if I were Samia Halaby and when I said yes he became very excited. Yes, he said, I read the notice Zahed published that you would be here painting and inviting artists to join you. When he found out that I planned to be there all day he enthusiastically drove home and brought his materials and we painted quietly for a few hours. He showed me his work and insisted on giving me some art materials. Then he suggested showing me a great spot. He drove me further up the mountain and we found a typical Arabic outdoor café complete with a large fountain, a pool and tables under the trees, and we ordered coffee and chatted with the owner. Finding the isolated café was a rare experience that we as Palestinians catch here and there, events that stand out among years of the denied normalcy of our life and culture. For him it was the experience of enjoying the acceptance of an older painter and for me, of discovering that even inside the green line, living under huge oppression, our wonderful Palestinians preserve gems of our culture.
I had gone to paint these trees because the director of an NGO in Jerusalem told me that a Japanese scholar had found an olive tree near the town of Rama in Galilee whose carbon dating confirms it to be five thousand years old. This scholar thought it to be the most valuable object in all of Palestine. Furthermore, an Israeli highway was threatening its existence and the tree’s trunk is actually halfway into the shoulder of the busy highway. Expanding the highway would destroy it. I had been doing a set of drawings and paintings of olive trees examining how they share our fate as Palestinians. I have painted the beheaded olive trees which were cut low at the trunk to prevent them from giving fruit, the refugee olive trees which are uprooted by the wall and taken into private gardens inside towns, the stolen olive trees which are uprooted and planted in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and many others. Painting the old olive tree or Rama became a must. But what I found was an entire orchard of truly ancient olive trees.
The experience of painting the olive trees all day for seven consecutive days while living the quiet life of a monastic hostel allowed the trees to permeate my being. My mental sight was full of olive trees. I saw them clearly when I closed my eyes and they overlay all I saw with my eyes open. I began to be one of them rather than just looking at them. When I made the self-portrait I was mentally not yet in New York and existing in the isolation of my own studio. I did it aware of my most recent artwork and wanted the challenge of doing it in that same formal manner. I was really hesitant and full of doubt about it and was not sure if I should tear it up or send it. Eventually, out of the fatigue of everything, I decided to just do some final bold gestures and just send it no matter how doubtful I felt. I am now glad that I did it. It tells people just what I experienced there with the ancient olive trees with which I began to feel very sisterly, as though they were accepting me into an ancient collective of those who have seen tragedy and joy. I am rarely mystical but sometimes the romance of it assuages.