Hazem,
Hope you are awake now, and managed to celebrate your Happy,29th/30th birthday!
There was a suggestion to extend our conversation beyond tomorrow, thought I’d like that, but I have too many projects in my plate, and should say that it was great few weeks; conversing with you, knowing something of your mental and “Damascus” landscapes, and seeing your visual thinking through your moving images and still ones . (Hope you are not disappointed by this)
Tomorrow, I am rather busy, and we are all (minus Kindah) going to visit friends for the New Year eve. You’ll welcome the 2010 2 hours ahead of us, and I hope I’ll manage to write to you before the British New year !
I am very fond of the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, and of his “spiral” writing. And as we are at the end of our dialogue, It might be time to tell you more about my beginning/luggage:
“I grew up in the southern volcanic mountains of Syria, and my childhood was shaped by the poverty of the place, the people’s highly developed art of survival and the lack of every thing. My first teachers were very special; they had never been educated at Art Schools, in fact at any school. Some I never, or barely, met.
My uncle Suleiman, my mother’s brother, who I never met, formed, with his resourcefulness, my early vision; he discovered, at the time of hardship, an unusual source of income, unexploded bombs! At the time of the French Mandate in Syria, many of these bombs were left unexploded, and my uncle found his way to make spoons, and coffee pots out of them. Until one day, sadly, he met his death, when he found his last unexploded bomb, but his legacy lives on.
This is the way he was brought up, and he had to follow my Lebanese grandmother’s school of thought. She, in turn, couldn’t do anything else but pass it on; she had her way of surviving the mountains’ cold nights, and made a rather thick quilt out of the remains of the family’s worn-out clothes. Though I barely met her, as she had died before I learnt to hold a pencil, her legacy “the quilt” formed my early nightscape, and my first encounter with abstract form.”
Here is the remains of my grandmother’s quilt:
“As a child, I was a keen learner! I started to go to school when I was five [thinking about your parents registering your birth-year later than it was, so you “wine” an extra year in the school], but had so many difficulties learning to write the alphabet of my tongue, particularly the first letter of my name “I” . My mother, then well in her forties, had hardly any form of schooling, set out to help me forming the first letter of my name. She asked me to show her my “ع”, and I did. She held my hand in her hand and together we “drew” the letter “ع”. She asked me to do it again. My mother was very generous, she made me understand that this letter was not just a letter, part of a word, a fragment of a whole language, but a picture. It took me many attemtpts, with and without her hands, and then I did, not very well, but I did, and since I started to learn how to form my “eye”.”
Many moons later, my mother was living alone, my father died; we all left home and were away, I thought I must teach her how to read and write. I started to teach her. Of course, she had many difficulties learning to write the 28 letters of our alphabet. When we arrived at forming the 18th letter, the letter “ع” I held her hand, and I reminded her with the way, when I was little, she held my hand and together we “drew” it. She couldn’t remember; she was so keen to carry on learning the remaining ten.”
Here is my mother hands “drawing”:
Here is an urn (to keep water)made her hands too:
“The smell of the orange skin burning on the top of the stove, marked the transition from one year to another, this was our New Year Eves’ ritual [Our friend has an open fire but no stove, so I’ll be thinking about the smell of orange skin burning tomorrow]. In front of the stove my father used to roll his cigarettes very beautifully. His smoking ceremony carved a yellow tinted hole between his index and middle fingers, and blocked his heart with smoke. In the evenings occasionally, friends of the family and relatives came to visit, and we all sat round the stove, the kerosene lamp burned and a story-telling event starting to unfold. My father had many stories to tell; he spent his life away fighting against the French.
He was absent, and my mother had her mountain to climb; she was married to my father, who was, in turn, older than her father. So for us all to survive, my mother had to rely upon her hands; she was the daughter of my Lebanese grandmother. Among many things, she used to bake and sell bread, she sewed, wove and prayed. She used to make a sweet out of semolina for me to sell in the street. In my turn, I served it on newspaper cuts, with a flattened spoon, and to Zena, my regular first customer, I used to give extra pieces. Zena and I used to look at the mirror images of the newspaper’s printed words, imprinted on the bottom of the semolina sweet. Shadows were long at the early mornings of my summer holidays; the silence of the street was broken by the sound of donkeys’ hooves and the morning greetings, to both of us, by passing people, heading eastward to the mountain.
I am the youngest of five children, two girls and three boys. My older brother, Shaher, was a calligrapher. He used to write signs on buses, cars, shop-fronts, he even eloquently wrote, with his fine brushes and black paint, on the front wall of our house “The Calligrapher Shaher”. I was impressed by it, I found a stick and black shoe-polish and underneath I wrote “and Issam”. My brother did not notice it, or pretended not to. A few days later, I went to cut my hair. Adel, the barber knew of my brother, but had no money to pay his services, so he asked me to write a sign on his shop-front. Though it was only two words “Salon Al-Iعtidal”, it took me many hours to do it. I, secretly, used my brother’s brushes and paint, and by the end of the day I was paid with a free haircut.”
Here is the front of our house - notice ” The Calligrapher Shaher”!
Here is a sign I did when I was 12, and it is still there!
“I never knew the future of my past. Not unlike the gypsies in my city who go about carrying their whitening tools, and music with them, I do carry my mountains and I know that my uncle Suleiman, my Lebanese grandmother, my mother and her hands, stories of my father, “the Calligrapher Shaher”, the roof of our old house, the lack of everything, my toy TV, my first finger painting, Adel the barber, Naseeh the piano-accordion player, my silent teachers, my half-room, my fragile I. not E, my bad teachers, Yura and the squatters artists in the old Parisian factory, my lack of English idiom, my Group See, The ADC theatre skip, Gilgamesh, the British Museum, my students, the Mayans, the Cubans, “Cambridge is a Puzzle”, Professor Strathern’s Kina shell, my wife Candelaria and boys Mourad and Sami, the knot-hole in the dark attic of my studio and the old 12 volume Encyclopaedia Britannica, are all part of my DNA as an artist.”
Issam
