In conversation with Ibtisam Barakat and Tamam el-Akhal about “The Lilac Girl”

 

Ibtisam Barakat (first from left to right), Tamam el-Akhal (second)

In conversation with the Palestinian-American author, educator, poet and translator Ibtisam Barakat and the emblematic Palestinian painter Tamam el-Akhal on the occasion of the release of the illustrated book The Lilac Girl in Greek.

Inspired by the renowned artist’s life and work, The Lilac Girl is written by Ibtisam Barakat and illustrated by Sinan Hallak.

Ibtisam Barakat: “The healing of others is a healing of ourselves too”

Inspired by the forced expatriation of the emblematic Palestinian painter Tamam el-Akhal from Jaffa due to the Nakba and her yearning for return, The Lilac Girl is an evocative, subtly political illustrated book addressed to children and adults.

When did you first come across her artistic work, when did you first meet her in person and what were your initial impressions of her as a person and an artist?

I first saw the paintings of her brilliant husband Ismail Shammout. I was in awe at his great art and talent, so I began searching about his other works and his life too.

Then I found out that he is married to an artist, Tamam el-Akhal, and began to investigate her work.

I saw that her art is great as well. I had a feeling that the fact that he is male and she is female has played a role in his art gaining more fame.

I met Tamam in person in Jordan upon the release of the Lilac Girl. Before that I spoke with her on the phone to see if she likes the story and feels that it’s true to the spirit of her experience.

Given the fact that you also moved to another country -in your case the USA- when you were young, albeit not in a forced manner, do you share Ms el-Akhal’s grief over the loss/occupation of a homeland and the yearning for return?

In the presence of the genocidal colonialism and the great injustice that is forced upon the Palestinians as a daily reality, all Palestinians move to other countries in a forced manner.

Some can move physically, some only “migrate” inward and gate themselves, some become depressed in the absence of any freedom, some become sick, and some break the cages in innovative ways.

Colonialism is violent and inhumane and that way it also forces innovation in expressing humanity. But to move somehow, actually or creatively, visibly or invisibly, and respond, is a must.

I moved to the US because I did not want to live in a war zone and in a country that targeted my life and my people’s life for destruction on a daily basis.

The Nakba never stopped. It only changed forms and is not often in the media. But if you look at Palestinian lives from year to year, you know the Nakba is going on unstopped for more than 73 years so far.

And the Nakba itself is the continuation of the Holocaust that took place against Jews in Europe.

The players changed, the name changed, the actual attempt of a group to destroy another group to have dominance and a “pure” presence as much as possible continues.

Some Jewish thinkers and activists acknowledge this reality too. I am grateful to them and their integrity. The Holocaust took at least 6 million losses of lives for the Jews before it was stopped.

For us Palestinians the Holocaust has taken so far 73 years of untold number of losses and has not been stopped. It’s an issue pertaining to the global forces that play with entire peoples’ lives.

Humanity has a long road to heal from the low-level consciousness that creates the reality of ongoing injustice for various groups, while others only either benefit from the abuse or just watch it.

Tamam el-Akhal, first oil on canvas

In previous years you have published two volumes in the format of personal memoirs chronicling your childhood and adolescence in Ramallah, Palestine. Why did you choose the format of an illustrated book in The Lilac Girl’s case?

I did not initiate the project myself. In 2019, Tamer Institute for Community Education put out a call for authors to write illustrated books inspired by Palestinian artists. I had not heard of the call because I live in America.

But they sent me a personal invitation. I read the invitation, and responded with a “yes” the very same day. Then I sat with myself for a deep soul search as to how to proceed, and I wrote the The Lilac Girl in one day. I cried from the first word to the last.

I then wrote another book, inspired by another Palestinian artist who specializes ceramics, Vera Tamari.

When all was published, I discovered that the end product that Tamer Institute published, was four books about four Palestinian artists, and two of the books were my books.

One about Tamam, The Lilac Girl, and the other about Vera, The Jar that Became a Galaxy.

Your collaboration with Sinan Hallak on this was of crucial importance. Has it been a joint venture or did you work separately?

Sinan Hallak is a Lebanese illustrator and I am a Palestinian author. Sinan did a great job on the project. I like it that the text is spare and the art is spare too. This has resulted in an elegant book.

We worked separately and the completed story came first. Tamer Institute chose the artist after they got the completed book.

There was a committee that gave comments for adjusting the images and making them meet the Palestinian spirit and expression- for example, adding keys on the ground.

The keys symbolize all the keys Palestinians took with them when they were forced to flee their homes during the Nakba. Many still have their keys with them.

It’s wonderful that an illustrator who is not Palestinian can contribute in this beautiful way. I am thankful to everyone who helped in the production of the The Lilac Girl.

You are the founder of Write Your Life seminars, aimed at encouraging groups and individuals to turn life stories into literature. How do these seminars operate?

Many people dream of writing their life stories but they don’t know how, and doubt that their stories are important.

In the workshop I collaborate with the participants to reclaim the sense of the “unique” value of their voices and lives and that each person is as important as any other. The hierarchy of importance is fake.

Life needs every single atom in it, and humanity needs the expression of every human being always. At Write Your Life, we write as an expression of freedom and ownership of self and of a central place in the human story.

One issue we explore, for example, is how a person feels about their names. It’s surprising how complex a person’s relationship to their first or last name can be.

So, I will ask the readers of this interview here to engage this question:

Take a deep breath. Write your name on a piece of paper and hold your name in your hand. Look at your name for a minute and let it speak to you. What does your name want to say to you? Write that down.

I hope you enjoy this beginning of the Write Your Life workshop.

Have they been an eye-opening, therapeutic experience for their participants?

They are powerful and healing experiences. When a person moves from silence to speaking, from hiding to shining, from despair to hoping, from ignoring self to keen curiosity and love for self and life, the entire world changes.

I just led a workshop for 50 writers and interested people in Indonesia via Zoom platform. The excitement and aliveness could be felt.

People breathe better when they know they are valued, and reconnect with whom they are, and what their life stories are- essential and necessary.

The Lilac Girl is a big Palestinian breakthrough in how we finally can offer the Palestinian human, especially the child, a way to transcend the Nakba by means she or he possess, the great imagination and love of Palestine and our great human spirit.

No Nakba and no colonialism can ever destroy these.

The Lilac Girl was recently released in Greek by Strange Days, an eclectic co-operative publishing house based in Rethymno, Crete. What does its publication in Greek signify to you, and especially by a small, independent publisher?

I am thrilled about this translation by Strange Days. The Greek language is at the root of civilization as the Arabic language is. That these two languages meet in one of my books feels like a co-operative cross-cultural triumph.

I have never been to Crete, but now my words have. I feel great joy and I look forward to the day when I see in person that great part of our glorious planet.

Primarily against the public sentiment, consecutive Greek governments, regardless of political orientation, have upgraded/broadened the political and economic ties between the Greek and the Israeli state in recent years.

How do you assess this choice?

Our world at this time is experiencing a leadership crisis in all of the countries, East, West, South and North. Decisions are made that don’t further the course of humanity on a more just, healing, and wiser path.

That’s alright, though. I have a deep belief that the time will come and humanity as a collective will discover a cure for “injustice” like we are striving to find a cure for Covid-19.

It’s our destiny as a species to learn more empathy as we go. That’s my belief and I work toward cultivating more empathy in my personal and professional worlds. With more empathy, we see that the healing of others is a healing of ourselves too.

According to your sister, as you write in your memoir Balcony on the Moon, Coming of Age in Palestine, “being Palestinian teaches you to be ready for any destiny.”

Looking back on your life and choices, have you ever had second thoughts about relocating to the USA?

I made the right decision to move to the USA, a country where I could heal my voice, and then begin helping in the healing of others through the creative and leading powerful art of speech and the written word.

Had I stayed in Palestine, I would not have accomplished what I have accomplished in America. I consider all of the planet my home and I love America as much as I love Palestine.

Someday, in my imagination, the Palestinians would give other people who need refuge a home in Palestine, and all would have equal rights and would be welcomed.

All nationalities in general, while they are organizing elements, should be of much lesser importance compared to humanity.

This is a one planet that needs to understand that what happens in the East affects directly what happens in the West, and vice versa, like a body. There is a wonderful unity to humanity and the universe at large.

Would you consider returning to Ramallah permanently or do you feel that your voice as a person of Palestinian origin is being heard/respected in the North-American public sphere?

Living in America as an immigrant is a very important human experience.

In America one can see new perspectives and can meet people from many backgrounds, and also can live in a culturally complex society, with all the good and all the problems of that too.

I would be so happy to live in Ramallah and Jerusalem, where I was born, permanently if the situation changed to one where living there is more of a constructive experience.

But wherever I live on the planet, I will aim to do work that helps to increase the freedom for all people, and to inspire towards more empathy and the beauty of courage and creativity.

Tamam el-Akhal: “I have always been drawn to express the Palestinian cause”

Being uprooted from your homeland -and especially when you know that the Israeli occupying forces prohibit you from returning to it as an inhabitant- is extremely painful. What do you most fondly recall from the pre-Nakba period?

I most fondly recall my doll that I made with my own hands as a child and I was attached to it, and wanted to take it with me, but I could not take it with me when we were rushed and forced at gunpoint on April 28, 1948.

Also, I used to make my own kites and fly them. That created trouble when the kite dipped into the hookah of the neighbor and ruined her afternoons.

I loved it when people were happy, like when the Palestinian leader Amin Al Husseini was announced to be coming: there were great festivities, and I loved those festivities.

I enjoyed seeing my people happy in Palestine. And I took that happiness into my paintings later on.

There weren’t many Palestinian -and Arab ones in general- female painters in your days- if at all. How do you interpret this fact? When did you become aware of your special talent?

True. There weren’t many if any female painters that I knew of at that time. I do not know why.

It was my father who discovered my talent and encouraged me initially when I was a child. Then, after the Nakba, a leading Lebanese poet encouraged my school principal to help me go to art school. That started my journey to a lifelong experience of art.

This talent started bearing fruits in Egypt, and was further nurtured when you met your late husband, Ismail Shammout, partner in life and art. Were you complementing each other, while evolving as artists?

Yes. Actually, Ismail’s proposal to me was: “What do you think if we become two wings of one bird that represents Palestine?” Even before we were married, we exhibited together as artists, traveled together and complemented each other in art and life.

Diverse, colorful and vibrant, your art is deeply rooted in the Palestinian heritage and cause. Has the preservation of memory -of people, places, events, moments- always been at the heart of your artistic, political and personal concerns?

I have always been drawn to express the Palestinian cause, life, feelings, experiences, aspirations, and especially the great feelings of joy and triumph in addition to the honest struggles.

I love music and the performing arts too and I transform the performance’s feelings into vibrant paintings. People enjoy this and can relate to these expressions in my paintings.

In the past you were politically affiliated with the PLO. Where do you stand politically at present?

Ismail and I were never affiliated with any political movement that did not represent the entire Palestinian people.

Ismail and I were close friends with the leaders of all political parties, but our cause was not any political party- only Palestine mattered to us, not this or that party. Art cannot be limited under political “umbrellas”.

Thanks to the recent publication of The Lilac Girl in Greek too, your art, life and personality have crossed boundaries and found their way to the Greek readers.

Are you happy about it?

Yes, very much. The Lilac Girl is a great work of art.

I am honored and thrilled that the book, written by the brilliant Palestinian author Ibtisam Barakat and illustrated by the talented Lebanese illustrator Sinan Hallak, is now published and is being translated into other languages around the world.

Have you traveled to Greece?

I have visited Greece three times, and I took my children there too. My family loves Greece. It’s beautiful and inspiring. Ismail and I exhibited artwork in Greece too.

You’re almost 87 but actually look much younger! Where do you owe this youthfulness and vitality? To painting?

I think this is due to the lifestyle that I have lived with all of its details. Also, the fact that I don’t use make up at all, only traditional Palestinian natural olive-oil based soap. It’s the only soap I have ever used. The results are clear!  

Where do you plan to have your work stored and exhibited when you will no longer be physically around?

I have three sons, and nine grandchildren. They will be the custodians of the artwork.

Our home in Palestine, the one I fled from in 1948, has just been turned into an art gallery for Israeli art. I think this is symbolic and I think to myself that it’s a preparation for my artwork to go home again. There will be a gallery ready!

I warmly thank Tamam el-Akhal for engaging with my questions and for personally selecting the photos of her paintings featured in the article, which represent different stages of her artistic evolution.

I also thank Ibtisam Barakat for translating my questions to Tamam el-Akhal into Arabic and then transcribing/translating her responses into English.

The central photo of the article comes from the book launch in Jordan and has been offered by Ibtisam Barakat.

The Lilac Girl is published in Greece by Strange Days.

Nathalie Handal: “Music and photography are the flesh and bones of my poetry”

 

Born in Haiti to a family of Palestinian descent, Nathalie Handal is a well-known French-American writer and poet.

Her latest poetry collection, the profoundly erotic, passionate and political Life in a Country Album, received Palestine Books Creative Award last year. In conversation with Nathalie Handal.

Erotic, lyrical, “nomadic”, nostalgic, passionate, political, sensual, cosmopolitan yet deeply culture-specific, is your poetry -and your approach to its composition- a reflection of the multiplicity of your identity?

Being myself means being many different places. People often want one answer, but questions often have more than one right answer.

We are made of many selves, as well as images others carry of us. And we naturally show a different side to each group, but still exist in one body and have to negotiate our multiplicity.

There is a tendency to feel lost in between our pluralities, but I have found diversity balancing. And writing has allowed all my selves, cities, languages to exist tunefully together.

Life in a Country Album, your awarded latest poetry collection, is indeed loosely structured as an album -perhaps photographic-, and your poems often resemble photographic snapshots. How do you relate to photography as a medium?

When I held my first camera -a Canon AE-1- at fourteen years-old, I became conscious that photography would teach me stillness. I realized that photographs collect worlds and eternities.

Later when walking became fundamental to my poetic practice, I realized during my wanderings that my mind is always photographing.

With every book I am building a geography of many people and places. To take photographs is to take the world. To collect photographs is to collect worlds. To photograph is participating in another person or place’s transience.

And it has also been a vital way to witness and record my vanishing city of Bethlehem and its natives.

The collection consists of different albums both photographic and musical.

Music and photography are the flesh and bones of my poetry.

My dream is to live like poetry, be alive like music, and pause like a photograph.

“Music always takes us back/to the cities we are made from,” you write in Orphic. Which cities -and which music, among which rebetiko- are you made from?

My ancestry is the sea. I am made of many Mediterranean cities: Bethlehem, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Akka, Beirut, Tripoli (Lebanon), Venice, Rome, Naples, Palermo, Marseille, Paris, Thessaloniki, Mostar, Zagreb, Malaga, Granada.

No landscape moves me like that of the Mediterranean- it plants my body in the land and still lets me be water.

My other cities are London, Port-au-Prince, Mexico City, Santo Domingo, New York City; and to some extent Lausanne, Dublin, Yerevan, Saint Petersburg, Shanghai, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires.

They have all played a role in forming my identity. But my main instrument, my drum, is NYC. That is where all my cities converge. I would never have understood my complexities had I not become a New Yorker.

Music is a city. Like poetry it comes from a place I don’t know, yet am most intimate with. Music is memory is melody is magic.

Our playlist like our bookshelves is a biography- and mine are filled with global beats, languages and styles.

I first came to the rebetiko of the fin-de-siècle. The rebetiko that took me to Smyrna. To the songs that dived into the depth of displacement, exile, war, loss, social injustice, the lives of refugees, to Piraeus, ports, love and death.

The Greco-Turkish War took a lot of space inside of me. In certain ways, I feel it is part of my greater story. That of the Mediterranean- migrations and uprootedness. Also, my mother, I am told, has a Constantinople Greek surname.

It is said when they left Constantinople they went to Venice, converted to Catholicism, intermarried, and went to Palestine as Venetians. The family always spoke of their Greco-Venetian roots but it impossible to trace their routes. 

 I learned later the origins of rebetiko can be traced back to the prisons of Athens in the 1830s and to the Greek populations of Constantinople, Smyrna and other Anatolian cities, who created their own music based on traditional Greek and Eastern rhythms.

And in the 1920s these various musical traditions and styles merged together, creating what is known as rebetiko. This Greek urban blues caught me the first moment I heard it.

Many consider the 1930s the golden period of rebetiko, when it was most authentic. But I think of how rebetiko united Greece after the Nazi occupation and the civil war.

It didn’t matter what social class you came from, rebetiko became a voice for the oppressed. It’s extraordinary. Of course, traditions change so did rebetiko, and it is now a fundamental part of Greek culture.

One of my favorite moments is the taxími.

I have gone to taverns, bars, and concert halls to listen to rebetiko so I am not a purest. That said, rebetiko is not only music, it is a state of mind. In that sense, maybe it only existed when it was played in the fringe.

A special section of your poetry collection is devoted to your “conversations” with the emblematic Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Do you consider him as one of your major influences as a poet and a reader of poetry?

I met him in Paris in my early twenties. He gave me my first writing assignment- to interview Allen Ginsberg, who died a month later. He was a major influence. Each time I return to his work, I am moved deeply and differently.

And our conversations continue to be a map of inquiries.

“But even in love/war inhabits me,” you confess in Even in Love. Do you refer to war as a state of mind or to particular wars as well?

Once war begins, it doesn’t end. It continues inside of us, follows us to death, and stays inside those we love and have left behind. War doesn’t bring peace, is ends it.

“Let me ask again- love isn’t a lie but a country is?” you wonder in Declaration of Independence. Is love a continent, a country, a terra incognita, or, indeed, a mirage?

Everyone has a map of a country in the heart but no one can be certain that country loves us the way we want it to.

Whether you decide it’s a continent, a country, a terra incognita, a mirage, all or none, love is difficult. It requires intelligence.

Love shouldn’t be about falling in but about stepping in a blank page like in poetry, and joining the silence. And in the center of that silence is sense.

You are an avid traveler and a genuine travel writer.

What do you enjoy the most in the mental preparation for a journey, its materialization and its literary reworking, and to what extent has the pandemic redefined your concept of traveling?

Touching the distance…

Knowing the journey invents itself. The most exhilarating is what isn’t planned. How the voyage translates you. How it transforms you but you only discover later, often much later.

The pandemic has stopped the constant traveling but I am always in motion. I miss the world and look forward to its reopening.

73 years after the Nakba, yet another brutal bombardment of Gaza Strip by the Israeli state occurred in May, while the “Western world” maintained an equal distance from the colonialist perpetrator and the resisting -and rightly so- victim.

No one is free until everyone is free. Mandela said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”

What are the prerequisites of a truly just and viable solution to the Palestinian issue for you?

An end to apartheid, the occupation, the denial of refugee rights, an end to crimes against humanity, to corporate and state complicity like in the case of the United States which enables occupation.

Palestinians must be given their rights under international law.

The photograph of Nathalie Handal featured in this article has been kindly provided by her.

Life in a Country Album is released by University of Pittsburgh Press in the USA and by flipped eye publishing in the UK.

You may discover more about Nathalie Handal and her multifaceted work by delving into her personal website.

Nayrouz Qarmout: A confident and daring literary voice from Gaza Strip

Born in Yarmouk Refugee Camp, Damascus, in 1984 and “returned” to Gaza Strip at the age of 11, author, journalist and women’s rights activist Nayrouz Qarmout is one of the most dynamic, politicized and talented contemporary Palestinian voices.

Her first trip abroad -after multiple UK visa rejections- ever since moving to Gaza Strip and participation in last year’s edition of the highly acclaimed Edinburgh International Book Festival justifiably generated considerable interest in her work.

It also served as a painful reminder of the plight of the Palestinian people living under Israeli occupation, as well as of their persistence to continue the struggle for existence and self-determination.

The long-awaited The Sea Cloak, her first collection of short stories due for release on August 22^nd by Comma Press, features 11 stories, 10 of which previously unpublished, with the exception of the self-titled one, included in The Book of Gaza.

All of them provide a profound and multidimensional insight into the contemporary Palestinian society, in particular that of Gaza Strip, mostly -but not exclusively- from a female perspective focusing on women of different ages.

The elegiac, emotional, at times even humorous eponymous story sets the tone, displaying remarkable stylistic maturity and a sense of narrative economy uncommon for a debut author.

What is even more remarkable is that Nayrouz Qarmout dares to tackle controversial, complex and delicate issues, such as the fighting between Palestinian political factions (14 June) and the mentality of a suicide bomber (Our Milk).

The Sea Cloak undoubtedly proves for yet another time that the short story form is alive and well among Palestinians of different ages and should reach out to wider audiences on a worldwide level.

The author has been invited to participate in this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival on Monday 12^th of August (more info may be found here, here and here).

Hopefully she won’t have to experience a similar ordeal to the one inflicted on her in 2018 before reaching her destination.

Nayrouz Qarmout’s The Sea Cloak & Other Stories is released by Comma Press on August 22^nd.

Mahmoud Salameh: “I respect cartoons and they respect me, too”

Poignant political cartoonist and director of animation films, Palestinian Mahmoud Salameh, born in Yarmouk camp in Syria, has been living for the past 3 years in Sydney, Australia, as a political refugee. He talks to me about his experience as a refugee, his art, Palestine, that he has never even seen, and the situation in Syria.

When and where were you born?

I was born in 1972 in Yarmouk camp, in the south of Damascus. Before the revolution, 160.000 Palestinians were living there. It has been in existence since my parents came from Palestine as refugees.

Where in Palestine were your parents from?

My father from Bir Saba (Beersheba), in the south of Palestine, my mum from Haifa.

How was the situation in the camp?

In the beginning, the situation was very hard for the Palestinians, you know. Now I can see how my parents were feeling, because I’m a refugee for the second time, having reached Australia, a beautiful country, where we’re being supported and taken care of.

Are your parents still alive?

My father is dead, but my mum lives in Dubai with my brother.

As a refugee, you must have faced many difficulties before settling in Australia, though. How hard has this experience been for you?

It was hard, because I remained a lot of time in detention, almost 17 months. I understand that the government follows a process with regard to the refugees reaching the country, especially those without papers arriving by boat. They want to control who each one is. But my case was clear- I have my documents, my papers, my experience. Everything was clear. I don’t know why so much time was required. 

Do you think that the fact that you’re an artist and your work is known play a role in you being recognized as a refugee- at the same time when others, who don’t have similar work to produce, have been less fortunate, or not fortunate at all?

The situation is difficult for everybody. The chose me for security check, maybe because I’m a Palestinian. When we arrived by boat, we were 10 Palestinians, 9 refugees from Iraq and me from Syria. The fact that I’m an artist, a political cartoonist, constituted a very good reason, so that I was granted protection. I was, in fact, accepted after my first interview at the detention center. As I already said, it just took a long time, until the security check was conducted.

How were you treated by the authorities?

Very normally. They transported us to the detention center on Christmas Island.

That’s good, because this is not the case with all those who have been forced to leave their countries either as refugees, or as economic immigrants. Most have horrible stories of abuse and hardships to tell- and then, to deal with the difficulty integrating into a new country and society. So, you’ve been luckier than others.

That’s true, but there was a different government then. Now, they’re sending the refugees and the immigrants to other detention centers, where the conditions are very bad. Sometimes, women are raped there by the guards. Recently, a few months ago, a woman, who became pregnant after having been raped, gave birth to a child.

How are you treated by the people, with whom you communicate on a daily basis- from your fellow artists, to those in the place where you reside and the simple people on the street?

Because I’m very capable- I’m involved with animation and visual arts, acrylics and oil- and very active with the people around me, I have very good relationships with them.

How did the Refugee Art Project get in touch with you, in the first place, and then help you get your work more known?

The Refugee Art Project is a group that creates art especially for refugees and collects the work of refugees from detention centers and out of them. Some of the people involved in the events organized aren’t refugees themselves, but, whoever wants to support the refugees and send a message to the people, is welcome in this group. I got in touch with them when I knew only a few people in the country. The manager of this project is a friend of mine.

Tell me how you started drawing political cartoons.

I started publishing my cartoons in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1997. I lived in Lebanon for 3 years. The situation there was much better than in Syria, where I couldn’t publish my work, because I would get into trouble with the security services. You knew what sort of government was in power, what kind of system was prevalent. It’s difficult to express your opinion in Syria, you have to be more flexible towards the government and with regard to the things you want to talk about. I didn’t like that situation, though. I respect my cartoons and I think that they respect me, too. When I returned to Syria in 2000, I had a very good name. So, I started organizing exhibitions, where I invited my friends. In 2003, they made me sign a statement that I wouldn’t draw anything against the government. I, therefore, started making educational animation films for children, for economic reasons, until 2009.

Why did you choose Australia as your country of immigration?

Going to Europe was very difficult, and I was worried that, if I went there, I might be sent back to Syria, because, at the time, Syria had good relations with some European countries. Moreover, I have a brother in Perth, so I thought that Australia was the best option for me.

I assume that you’re still involved in animation.

Yes, I’ve made 2 films and I’m now working on a new one with an Aboriginal director. I was also involved in the Palestinian Film Festival, where I was responsible for the opening animation.

You’re Palestinian. I’m wondering, have you ever lived in Palestine?

No, never. I haven’t even seen Palestine...

How attached do you feel to Palestine, Palestinian culture and politics?

I’m very angry. What Israel and Zionism have done to my country is that they have kicked out all the people without any right. Since they have the power, they do what they want and there’s nobody to judge them. They still punish the people to this day.

What about Syria? Do you feel close to the people who have been forced to flee from it?

Absolutely! What I like in Syria is the people, they’re amazing. As a kid, I saw how they were treating the Iraqis. If a Syrian family had a spare room, it gave it to the Iraqis. They taught me how to help, too. So, in 2006 I volunteered in the border with Lebanon, welcoming refugees. What has now happened to the Syrians makes me sad, they suffer in Europe.

Do you think that a solution to what they’re facing may be found? What’s the best thing that could happen in Syria?

When the Syrians started the revolution, they were demanding rights and wanted freedom. Believe me, they have a cosmopolitan mentality, they love other cultures. Because of the fact that the regime treated them so badly, it “broke” them. They had been suffering for 40 years and, in 2011, the time had come for them to take a step, to express their opinion, and that coincided with the Arab Spring. They didn’t expect that the regime would be so harsh and bloody, though. 300.000 people have been killed, 11.000.000 Syrians are expatriated and Assad is still in power. What kind of President is he?

With all that’s happening, and not just in the Middle East, do you feel any hope for the future?

I remember my parents. We’ve been living out of Palestine for 66 years and still hope to return there. Of course I’m not optimistic, because the situation is in the hands of those that have the power: USA, Russia, Iran, Turkey. What happened in Syria is not similar to what happened in Egypt or Tunisia. It’s complicated. Russia insists on supporting Assad, I think that the USA wants to destroy Syria, because it’s close to Israel, and the Syrian regime is just sectarian and mafia-like. Syrians love their country, though, and will continue their struggle.

Mahmoud Salameh’s personal website is http://salamehm.com/index.html

His page on the Refugee Art Project’s website is http://therefugeeartproject.com/home/the-cartoons-of-mahmoud-salameh/