Naji Al-Ali still inspires Palestinian painters

By Salam Abu Sharar

RAMALLAH, Palestine (AA) - Suhad Al-Khatib, 41, arranges the tools of painting as she prepares for a new painting in ink, after leaving acrylic painting since she began her story with Naji Al-Ali, whom she describes as her inspiring teacher in a painting she presents to tell the world the Palestinian story.

For more than 10 years, Al-Khatib was based in the US and studied the history of the Palestinian cause and Al-Ali, telling about them through her paintings there, expressing herself on "her second diaspora" as she describes it.

Al-Khatib's origins go back to the city of Lod that her family abandoned following the 1948 Nakba and has endured the diaspora since her birth.

“Due to my paintings that tell the story of the Palestinian cause, I was exposed to several pressures and threatening from those how are against our cause in the US, remembering Al-Ali was a real supporter for me to continue,” she said.

In Al-Khatib's view, the experience in the diaspora as a painter let her realize deeply the circumstances and complexities of the Palestinian cause and her responsibilities in telling her land story internationally through her art.

“Al-Ali was the real and honest symbol for the freedom for me through his art, he was one of the rare people who didn’t let us down,” she told Anadolu Agency.

Al-Khatib highlighted that she rediscovered her identity through ink and paintings and is still working to tell the complete story of the Palestinian struggle.

“When I began to study Al-Ali's personality and his political history as an artist, I felt I found a treasure of freedom,” she described how she was affected by his work intellectually.

Al-Khatib believes that Al-Ali was the true model of how a Palestinian painter should be in telling the Palestinian story -- free and courageous.

Al-Khatib drew Al-Ali's attention for the first time in 2016, while she was looking for a radical thinker who she can treat with his output as an intellectual reference.

Al-Ali, who lived in the diaspora, made a clear effect on the Palestinian consciousness for the generations inside and outside Palestine.

When she talks about Al-Ali, Al-Khatib calls him “the uncle,” although not related to him, and describes the feeling as "an emotional belonging."

She said she is moved particularly by his remarks that he would draw on the walls if he was banned from drawing in newspapers.

“When you study his story, you find it was easy to be paid by anyone, but he has definitely refused to do so, he remains for us as a person of all times, " Al-Khatib said.

Al-Ali was a Palestinian artist born in 1938 in the northern Palestinian village of Al-Shajara, located between Tiberias and Nazareth, and he was assassinated in 1987 in London.

With every single incident in Palestine, Al-Khatib paints it in her own way and publishes it through social media platforms with intellectual content related to the story of the incident.

She paints Palestinian people, "martyrs," inmates, and the daily life stories in the streets, jails, homes, making a connection between what she experienced in her job on the humane rights and advocacy with the women and Palestine and what she is painting.

“When you fight all your life to preserve the Palestinian identity that so many people in this world want to take from you, you know why the art is important to me as an artist who has been abandoned many times since she was born,” Al-Khatib said.

She stressed that the Palestinian Authority is working outside Palestine to limit the painters' activities.

“They are working against us, painters, to make us worry about succeeding in our careers and gaining money, and to isolate us from our real history and struggle,” she added.