Samakh 1948

Elements such as: a black ‘blob’ in the centre; a figure at the foreground; and a building behind the figure. We can ask ‘what is this black ‘blob’ in the centre of the photo?’, ‘who is the person standing in the foreground?’, ‘what is this building which is half hidden behind the person?’. We can give verbal answers to these questions. ‘The black ‘blob’ is a cow standing in front of an open shop or store’; we don’t know who is the person or what the building behind him or her is. However, in art we are after visual possibilities and speculations, rather than answers. While identifying the photographic elements is important, ‘cracks’ are equally important as they ‘open the door’ to a symbolic thinking which comes from memory and the imagination. On the one hand, memory is historically and culturally informed; memory is in tune with my past (which is not only mine), of kibbutz childhood trauma and of trans-generational traumas. On the other hand, imagination, according to Gaston Bachelard, ‘separate us from the past as well as from reality; it faces the future. … If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee.’[1]

[1] G.B., The Poetics of Space, p. xxxiv.

Two extracts from A Lake Beyond The Wind by Yahya Yakhlif (2003).

1. ‘Samakh, the South Shore, 1948

Radi sat in his uncle’s shop, behind the plumbline scales. As he waited for his uncle to come back, he sold a few things but mostly he was just bored. People in Samakh didn’t really know what to do with themselves. They were waiting – waiting for the unknown. The whistle of the Haifa-Deraa train didn’t sound now. There was nothing to fill the space of the small town except anxiety; nothing, any more, to evoke a sense of security.’

Yahya Yakhlif, A Lake Beyond the Wind, Interlink Books, (1991) 2003, p. 1.

2. ‘Next morning we moved among the groups of refugees crossing the river into Jordan; among wan faces with dead eyes, faces drained by shock.

There were mothers trying to nurse from breasts where the milk had dried up, and pale-faced men carrying children too exhausted to walk any further; people waiting for their families, suitcases, bundles and abandoned possessions, all amid a clamour shot through with the sounds of lamentation.’

Yahya Yakhlif, A Lake Beyond the Wind, p. 212

Samakh 1948 - 2013

Monday 22 July 2013

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