Two women sit in a field. One wraps her arms around another—a comfort. Another touches her hair with one hand; holds an orange in the other. Cheeks rosy with the sun and their lips are closed, untalking. They look straight ahead, their eyes refusing to stray. The wind takes one woman’s hair to the left; the other woman’s hair to the right. They are friends or sisters. In the close holding of one to another, their love—and loss—is palpable.
I often see The Mourning of Spring, by Haya Ka’abneh, online. In recent months, it has found itself in my social media feed marking the opening of the Palestine Museum Scotland, in Edinburgh. The volunteer-run gallery was founded by Faisal Saleh, whose family fled Palestine during the Nakba in 1948. With a sister gallery in Connecticut, Palestine Museum Scotland is Europe’s first and only museum of contemporary Palestinian art.
Born in Amma, Jordan and raised in Jericho, Palestine, Haya Ka’abneh now lives and works in Ramallah. Ka’abneh often draws on her Palestinian heritage and weaves its symbols throughout her paintings, depicting the lived realities of Palestinian women. Her work is deliberate and insistent.
And so, Ka’abneh works with watercolour—such is bound to her subject. Watercolour is an unruly medium. In some instances The Mourning of Spring sees the paint sink down in wavering pastel lines, crossing a hand or plant it ought not to. Ka’abneh, I read, works with watercolour to reflect the difficult lived realities faced by Palestinian women. But, in this, The Mourning of Spring’s wayward watercolour lines also speak to the strength of Palestinian women; they continue, despite.
In the painting the women wear black dresses. The dresses are similar, but not the same; each has a different embroidered pattern. A maroon red holds right angles and gentle dots; vertical lines reach down into triangles and small squares repeat themselves. In their difference, the patterns are in communion with each other. Tatreez, Palestinian embroidery, is deeply symbolic, with patterns bound to specific places and people. For Palestinian women, passing patterns down is an act of heritage. In her paintings, Ka’abneh passes these patterns down, too. A heritage continues, despite the inherited violence.
Two birds appear. One sits atop a woman’s hair; it is blue and green. Another sits within the flowers, landed; it is blacked out, colourless. I am uncertain until I am not. The long curving beak, the blue and green sheen; Ka’abneh’s painting features the Palestine sunbird. The bird’s coat has a likeness to the swathes of blue, green and purple across the sky and field. In such colours, Ka’abneh offers hope: much like the Palestinian sunbird—who flies unbound by borders—the Palestinian land and sky will one day be free, too.
The Palestine sunbird returns throughout Ka’abneh’s paintings. It finds itself upon women’s heads, their hands, their shoulders. The bird resides across the Middle East and in parts of Africa. In its travels, it pollinates the plants. Borders do not bind the Palestine sunbird. In 2011, artist Khaled Jarrar created a passport stamp of a Palestine sunbird. Jarrar approached individuals, offering to stamp their passport. Soon, he designed postage stamps too. In 2015, the bird was named the national bird of Palestine, after Israeli authorities attempted to change its name. The Palestine sunbirds remain—both in full colour and blacked out.
I return to the orange, led by the sunbird. Unpeeled and held—not too tight, but protected, all the same. Its orange colour is warm, solid; with the exception of a short, quick line upon the woman’s hand, the colour is reserved for the fruit. The green stem is bright and steady, fanned by two wing-like leaves spreading out. We see the orange, almost, in full. Ghassan Kanafani—the martyred Palestinian writer, artist and politician—wrote of oranges, too. His short story, The Land of Sad Oranges, follows two young boys as their families are forced to leave their oranges trees on the eve of the Nakba. A handful of oranges are taken to Lebanon, however, they do not last—they rot. Much like the young boys and their families, the oranges have been severed from their homeland.
Online, I find that oranges appear often in Ka’abneh’s works. They sit in fruit bowls and across bedroom floors. Always, they appear untouched, uneaten. The fruits of Palestinian land are denied to Palestinian people; and yet, they continue to hold them dear.
Mourning, too, is an attempt to hold dear those we have lost, those who have been taken. The title presses itself upon the painting and its audience. Its verb—that present participle—suggests, somehow, a continuation, a regularity. Such is the violence of genocide. Placed next to each other—mourning, spring—the phrase seems almost oxymoronic. Said aloud, it is both spring’s morning, with hope and birth and renewal to come, and spring’s mourning. Again, such is the violence of genocide. And, as such, lilac’s lovely slip into crystal blue and the warm embrace of the women and the sweetness of the untouched orange is all too far from incongruous.
The Mourning of Spring is not a painting in a minor key. Rather, Ka’abneh shares the intimacies of grief as vivid and colourful—and, in this, deeply tangible. In their solidness of form, the women become urgently present. Their eyes demand another’s to look into. We cannot—and must not—look away. On my screen and in the museum, the women remain.