the cassandra pages

Aleppo

"Go to Aleppo!" my father-in-law exhorted us, on many occasions. It was his favorite among all the ancient cities, and he wanted us to see its beauty, which he described to us in detail, eyes closed, rhapsodizing. He and his two sons had gone to Damascus in 2000: a nostalgic final trip for the 90-year-old father and a bonding and learning journey for the sons, the elder of whom had been born there.  My husband, the younger son by 11 years, came home and immediately wanted to us plan a trip to go back together, to both Damascus and Aleppo. And we did just that, sending our passports to the Syrian embassy for the requisite visas. But shortly before we were supposed to leave, the political situation became very unstable, and we decided -- most unfortunately, in hindsight -- to postpone. As we all know, our entire world, and the Middle East in particular, changed irreparably after that, so we never made it to the city Mounir had loved and which no longer exists; what he remembered will never be seen again.

Back in 2016, Charles Wilkins, a professor at Wake Forest University, was interviewed about Aleppo on an episode of All Things Considered. He spoke of how Aleppo, one of the longest continually-inhabited cities of the world, had been well-placed historically as a caravan city and meeting point of east and west, and survived many occupations and sieges over the millennia.  Called "the Jewel of Syria", he described it in terms my father-in-law would have loved, before saying "I can hardly put into words my emotions in seeing this city brought to its knees in this way."

My father-in-law fortunately didn't live to know about the destruction of Aleppo in the civil war, and now that part of Syria has undergone yet another tragedy. To make matters even worse, international aid to the region, some of which is held by non-government forces, has been delayed or refused by the Assad government, which makes it hard to know if contributions of money are even getting through. 

I have nothing wise to say about any of this, just that I am sick at heart about this degree of suffering, and felt the need to put that into words here, for the sake of my family, the people I know who care about this region, and all those I don't know who are still there. Someone commented, after seeing the pictures of the earthquake devastation and the death toll figures, "There is no God," and I understand their reaction. Why this should happen, to people who have already suffered so much, defies comprehension, not just faith, if one is supposed to have faith in an intervening deity. However, there is one truth that believers and non-believers ought to be able to agree on, which is that human beings can either love one another or not; when we do, we are able to help one another in the midst of great tragedy, and when we don't, we not only create but compound enormous suffering. 

 

Thinking of Palestine

That's the title of this painting, done back in 2014. Like many of my still lives, it contains objects that are self-referential: this is my father-in-law's family's brass coffee pot, which we now have; the window with blue sky above eye level represents the Palestinian sense of enclosure and imprisonment; and the small fossil which I found in central New York, where I grew up, represents the remnant of Christians still living in Jerusalem.

Neither of my in-laws were Palestinian -- she was Armenian, he was Syrian, and both were Christian -- but they both lived in, knew, and described vividly the great ancient cities of the Middle East when they were inhabited by people of all the Abrahamic faiths, for the most part co-existing peacefully and respectfully throughout the centuries, although of course there were times of genocide and evictions, especially under Ottoman rule. This multi-faith existence was true in Damascus, Aleppo, Istanbul, Beirut, Alexandria, Jerusalem. And it is rapidly becoming true no longer.

I've been involved for two decades in trying to promote dialogue between the faiths, educating people about the history, and working for peace. The situation between Israel and the Palestinians is so much worse today than back in 2000, at the time of the second intifada. I won't go into the reasons here. My heart aches for the lost lives on every side, but especially for the innocent Palestinian children who have been killed before their lives have even had a chance to unfold, not that these nascent lives would ever have been easy or filled with opportunity.

In thinking about the events of the past few weeks, I keep asking myself what I can do. I will give to local charities that send money directly to families; that is certain. But I know that I have at times been guilty of letting my own anger, frustration, and grief make dialogue harder with those who disagree with me, or who understand the situation differently. Because I know a great deal about it, I'm sure I've sometimes come on too strong and added to division, rather than making it clear that what I care about most is peace.

However, the point I want to make today was written very well by the poet Leila Chatti, who said:

 

One cannot advocate for racial equality, LGBT & women's rights,

condemn corrupt and abusive regimes and other injustices

yet choose to ignore the Palestinians' oppression.

It does not add up.

You cannot pick and choose whose human rights matter more.

 

I'm glad to see this point finally being made by courageous politicians in the U.S. and by both Jewish and Arab activists all over the world, particularly the young. That gives me hope. All of us need to join together to try to find a solution, and to "be peace" rather than fighting the same battle in our living rooms and communities. We need to find ways to talk to each other, to tell each other our stories in the same ways that we have begun to tell stories about how we were abused as women, or as Black people, or LGBTQ+ people, or Asian Americans, as Jewish people or Muslims, or any other group that has endured marginalization, oppression, prejudice, and violence. We have to have the courage to be vulnerable, and open up our first-person narratives, because that is what changes hearts and opens formerly closed-minds to the lived reality of others.

And I would say to those who have closed their eyes to this particular oppression because they feel it's intractable, or too difficult to understand -- please ask some questions, please educate yourself by looking at multiple sources. If you don't think that the United States plays a major role in this oppression, and has used some of the same tactics in its own foreign wars, please educate yourself. If you don't remember what happened in South Africa, then perhaps you feel that peace is not possible. But I do not believe that, and I will never believe it.

 

Some resources to start with:

Another person who refuses to give up on peace is former US president Jimmy Carter. His book The Blood of Abraham: Insights into the Middle East, revised in 2007, "explains his understanding of the Middle East and seeks to provide an enlightening and reconciling vision for greater peace in the region."

Here is a book list about the history of the conflict from a Palestinian perspective, and there is a lot of other information on this website, Middle East Eye, including videos by young people made during the last month.

My friend Rabbi Rachel Barenblat has written movingly about her own feelings about the conflict over the years and the difficulties it has presented for her in her family and in her congregations; I'm happy to commend her posts to you.

Finally, I was moved to tears by this photo essay, They Were Only Children, in the New York Times about the children, Palestinian and Israeli, who have been killed in the most current conflict. If anything is a desperate call to us to do better, surely this is.

 

After a Party

Orchid and Dishes with Embroidered Tablecloth, 6" x 9", pen and ink on paper.

These recent drawings represent, I guess, a more inclusive view than some of my older, close-up still-lives. I've been adding some background indications of the interior space of the rooms for some additional complexity and a bit of close/far focus. It's also good practice in the sort of non-academic perspective I'm trying to achieve.

But there's a personal story, too. This drawing is a reminder of a special and happy evening with friends; I did it early the next morning, before we had cleaned up all the dishes and folded the leaves of our table back to normal size. We like using this tablecloth when we have a lot of guests - it's a deep red cotton, large, with twelve napkins, and came from Damascus, when my husband went there with his elderly father and his brother in 2000, before the wars. Originally, this type of tablecloth, called "Aghabani," must have been embroidered by hand in an elaborate chain stitch and traditional patterns. Later they were made in the countryside around Damascus by seamstresses who used embroidery machines.

The word "damask," of course, comes from "Damascus" -- the city was a center of elaborate silk weaving in the early Middle Ages, up until about the 9th century, because of its location as a trading center on the silk road. In a traditional flat-weave damask, there are contrasting warp and weft yarns, one shiny and one dull, that create the typical difference in sheen that characterizes a damask pattern. I don't know if these embroidered linens were done as a substitute for woven silk damask, or if they pre-dated them, but they utilize the same idea of a shiny design on a matte background. Jonathan brought back two for us - this red one, and another in pure white, but we also have a smaller grey one with gold embroidery that's very lovely. I never thought to use them as a base for still-lives before.

Monreale 1: the Cloister

We took our first excursion out of Palermo on a bright November morning after buying a ZTL pass that allowed us to take our car in and out of the limited traffic zone for one day. This time, in daylight, armed with our phone GPS and better prepared, we managed to find our way out of the tangle of streets that had snared us the first night, and soon were driving south, and already uphill, through Palermo's suburbs. Small trucks loaded with neatly-arranged purple cauliflowers, tomatoes, or artichokes were parked near intersections, and the farmers stood nearby, waiting to sell their produce to local residents who lived in these poorer, crowded neighborhoods. Soon we were out of the city, and heading upward into the mountains.

The piazza outside the Duomo, Monreale

The piazza seen from the opposite direction. The Duomo is the central building behind the tall palm trees.

Monreale is located only about 9 kilometers from Palermo, but the drive takes a while because it goes so far uphill. We encountered our first switchbacks, and stopped at a pull-off to look down on a valley full of orange trees and tiled roofs, and back toward the sea. When we reached Monreale, a medieval hill town, all the streets were sharply angled and narrow, and only the very top of the town was flat. We parked in a commercial lot far below the street level, and climbed back up to the Duomo, or cathedral, in the town's central piazza, through tunnels formed by the tall walls of the old buildings, now full of lung-choking diesel fumes.

The extraordinary main doors of the cathedral, with Arab, Norman, and Italian/Byzantine elements.

The large bronze doors of the cathedral were shut when we arrived, and it was unclear where to enter. On a wall at the right, we pushed open an ancient wooden door to find ourselves in a gift shop that had been set up inside thick stone walls. This room opened onto a courtyard -- and as we stepped out of the stony darkness, we gasped. We were in the cloister of the Benedictine monastery that had been established after the cathedral was constructed, a square bordered by marble columns, each decorated with inlaid mosaic decorations and carved capitals, arranged around four quadrants of lawns inside clipped hedges.

Each quadrant of this garden had a small tree at its center, and the walkways joining them met at a large, low palm at the central point. It was a monastery cloister, to be sure, but unlike any monastery I had ever seen in Europe; the feeling was Arab, Spanish, Andalusian, and yet the carvings were Italian, and Christian. In one corner, a second room of columns formed an open "room" that contained a fountain with a broad basin: clearly reminiscent of an ablution fountain at a mosque.

These were conscious choices. King William II of Sicily, the grandson of Roger II, built the Montreale cathedral in 1174, and dedicated it to the Virgin Mary; today it's one of the most important and justifiably famous monuments on the entire island, but in an oddly remote location. The reason goes all the way back to 831, when the Arabs -- Islam would have only been 200 years old then -- took control of Palermo. The cathedral of Palermo was immediately converted to a mosque, and the Bishop of Palermo was allowed to go into exile in the hills. He settled in the small village of Monreale, overlooking Palermo and the sea, and built a modest church to keep a witness to Christianity. It remained so until the Norman conquest of the island in 1072. The Palermo cathedral was re-consecrated; many of the Norman royalty, including Roger II, were buried there. Partly to honor the memory of the exiled bishop, and partly because the Norman aristocracy was beginning to use this rural area as a hunting retreat, King William II built his great cathedral in Monreale. He also brought a community of Benedictine monks to the area, whose mission was to proselytize and convert the Arabs who formed the majority of the population. As in Palermo, Arab craftsmen were employed in the design and building, and, as we can see all over the world, the new religious leaders incorporated elements of the local religion in order to make it more familiar and acceptable. It's unclear how many Muslims actually converted, but the years of the Norman reign in Sicily were largely and deliberately peaceful for people of different faiths.

King William II of Sicily and his wife, Queen Joan of England, the daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. More about them in the next installment.

I have never been in a space that affected me quite like this cloister. It was one of the most beautiful and calm places I have ever experienced. We wandered through the colonnades and paths for a long time, studying the mosaic inlays and individual carvings, and absorbing the calmness that seemed to emanate not only from its history as a refuge from the outer world, but from the scale, colors, and harmonious placement of the individual elements, which achieved something close to perfection.

This was true for the courtyard as a whole, and also when one looked at the details: the stories carved on the column capitals had been carefully chosen, the inlaid mosaics which never seemed to repeat the same patterns. And instead of flower beds and vines, here were four single trees that reflected this particular place as well as the scriptures common to all the Abrahamic faiths: an olive, a date palm, a pomegranate, and a fig. I thought of my father-in-law saying, "When I think of the Arabs, I like to think of them in Spain." This was not Andalusia, but a place he would have loved just as much.

I washed my hands and forearms in the fountain basin, and we left to go inside the cathedral. 

Green Almonds, reprise

The following conversation with my father-in-law occurred almost a decade ago, but whenever I see green almonds in the market, they remind me of him, and I buy a few -- though I probably like looking at them more than eating them. This year, I drew and painted some.

--

Green Almonds

"Such grapes we had from my uncle's vineyards in Bludan!" he exclaimed.

"What else?" I asked.

"Figs, apples..."

"Are you hungry now?"

"Not hungry, but I feel like I want to eat."

"You mean, just have something to chew on?"

"Yes," he smiled, as if he was relieved someone understood, but when the three of us suggested several things, he just shook his head no, smiling rather sadly.

"He's been asking for nuts today but he refuses what I offer," the caregiver said. She was a young woman of twenty-two or so, pretty, with dark hair and eyes, wearing large star-shaped earrings.

"What kind of nuts have you been thinking about?" I asked him.

"Green almonds."

"Ah! I've seen them but never eaten any. How do you do it?"

He explained how you crack and remove the outer covering, to reveal another shell that has to be removed in turn. "Sounds like a lot of work," I said.

"Yes, but that's the point. You sit and do it all day... We got those in Bludan too, there were lots of different kinds of nuts in my uncle's orchard."

"I'll look this week and see if I can find you any, sometimes they have them at the market."

He seemed to sleep again after this burst of conversation, and then opened his eyes. "Tell me," he said, lowering his voice just slightly and giving a small nod toward the caregiver who sat at the desk a mere six feet away. "Do you think this is a Bludani girl?"

--

Green almonds in a chased copper and silver Damascene bowl from the family home in Syria.

We did bring him some almonds a few weeks after this conversation, for his 99th birthday. He was quite frail at that point, but his eyes lit up when he saw the fuzzy green nuts in my hands. "What do I do now?" I asked. He told me where to find a hammer, and I went out on his balcony and hit one of the almonds along its seam, as he had explained. Because they are green and relatively soft, I found out that you have to give them a decisive whack it the right place, and then the nut will open to reveal an inner, thin brown covering, with the nearly-white almond inside. (More recently, I've discovered that a regular nutcracker does a much cleaner job, but it isn't nearly as satisfying as the hammer.) My father-in-law looked delighted, and he worked over the cracked shells to extract the nuts with his slow fingers, put them one by one in his mouth, and happily ate them.

He died a month later, nine years ago today -- July 25, 2008.

Since January, I've been working on a manuscript adapted and expanded from those posts, under the title The Fig and the Orchid, to finally make it into a book. I'm thinking of illustrating it with drawings like the ones here. My father-in-law was a Syrian immigrant to America in the late 1940s: he was a teacher, scholar of Arabic culture and language, a Unitarian minister, writer, thinker -- and a larger-than-life character. Considering world events, it seems like a good time for such a project. I know that some of you here have been along for this ride a long time, and read those posts about him long ago, for others this is a new subject. Would you be interested in such a book? What would make it the most compelling for you?

Sorrow, Solidarity, and Soul-Searching in Quebec

Vigil in Montreal last night. Photographs by Jonathan Sa'adah.

The news of Sunday's attack on the mosque in Quebec City, and the deaths of six people, hit us very hard. Coming on top of Trump's travel ban, last weekend, I had to wonder if the timing was coincidental, or if the young perpetrator had been pushed over some personal edge into action by the anti-Muslim rhetoric from a U.S. administration. His political identity, however, had been in place for some time; he was a sympathizer of Marine lePen, of the French far-right, and had expressed anti-Muslim, anti-women sentiments on the web.

There has been a racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim element in Quebec for a long time. Here in the larger and very diverse city of Montreal, some tend to cast blame on Quebec City and the rural areas of the province, which tend to be more mono-chromatically French-Canadian, and where separatist sentiment maintains a stronger foothold. In Montreal, significant numbers of non-white people run for office and are elected from their districts; this is another way in which change is slowly happening. Another is that the fluently-bilingual younger generations seem to have less interest in division of any kind, and I find it heartening to know and talk to these progressive, globally-concerned young people, for whom travel -- even on a shoestring -- is a priority. But plenty of racism occurs here as well.

In spite of liberal immigration policies, nearly every one of my immigrant friends has faced discrimination and considerable difficulty when trying to settle in Montreal, too, particularly when trying to find employment, but also in more subtle and insidious ways. Racism against the indigenous population is not merely an historical national disgrace, but a severe ongoing problem. However, perhaps because violent crime and incidents of mass murder are much less common here than in the U.S., we have failed to extrapolate from racist attacks on women with headscarves, or vandalism at mosques, that sooner or later something like the Quebec City attack might happen.

Hate crime has risen in Canada and across the province of Quebec; an article in the Montreal Gazette from November 2016 titled "The Trump effect and the normalization of hate in Quebec" contains analysis and statistics, as well as this prediction, so uncomfortable to read in hindsight:

A study of the terrorism and extremism incident database... calculated that five people had been killed in 49 white supremacist incidents in Canada between 2001 and 2015, at least seven of them in Quebec.

“One officer told us ‘we know they’re here but until something happens we won’t do anything,’ ” Perry said. “They’re waiting for someone to be hurt or a mosque to be burned down.”

Daniel Gallant, a former white supremacist who spent ten years with Neo-Nazi groups in Alberta, is now getting his law degree and dedicating his life to anti-radicalization efforts. He says his job "just got a lot harder" with the election of Donald Trump.

Gallant...says another factor that may explain the increase in hate crimes is how “normal” the ideology has become. It was normal for him, growing up in Alberta. There is still Canadian legislation in force — like the Indian Act, for example — that is reflective of white supremacist ideology, he says.

The Soldiers of Odin, for example — founded in Finland with the express motive of creating fear in the Muslim community — have set up at least 12 new chapters in Western Canada in the last eight months, Gallant said. The Quebec chapter, les Soldats d’Odin, were among several anti-immigrant groups who marched in Quebec City last month.

“They are garnering huge public support by watering down the message and casting a wide net to allow as many people as possible into the organization.”

The study noted that white supremacist groups had been emboldened by an "enabling climate" such as the "divisive discourse of the Charter of Values in Quebec," proposed by the Parti Quebecois and defeated in the last election, and nationally with some of the policies of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The study's authors conclude:

“In a word, hate is increasingly 'mainstream,' and thus increasingly legitimate. In part, this has been accomplished by toning down the rhetoric, and doing away with the white robes and brown shirts. But it has also been accomplished by forging links with the ultimate authority: the state.”

I was sorry to see a blaming mindset at work on Sunday, when the news media released the names of two suspects, one of which was a Muslim name, and speculated -- against all common sense, but of course picked up by Fox News -- that there might be a link to Islamic terrorism. The second suspect was released after a night in jail and identified instead as a witness. Upon entering the mosque and discovering dead and wounded victims, he had run when he mistook an armed police officer for the shooter. Yesterday it became clear that the actual terrorist was neither Muslim nor Middle Eastern, but a home-grown white-supremacist armed with an assault rifle, completely illegal here. This, not Muslim fundamentalism, is the true face of terror in North America, and it's high time we admitted it.

Today, the great majority of the people in this province are appalled, grieving, and doing some necessary soul searching about racism and the rise of the far-right in Canadian society and in Quebec specifically. The photographs in this post are from a vigil in Montreal last night, attended by thousands of people who came out in the freezing cold to stand together in solidarity and love.

Personally, I am reeling from the pile-up of recent events. It's been difficult to sleep, and difficult to ignore the news and my own thoughts enough to work. However, I'm trying to take my own advice to heart; on Sunday I spent the day singing, and yesterday afternoon I managed to do some research and writing, and I've continued that today; soon I'll go off to the pool and swim my laps.

What we're witnessing, however, is unprecedented in North American democracy. The feeling is that we've embarked on a voyage through unknown waters, where Sirens and Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis lie in wait, and only our collective wits, determination, and love can save us.

At a Safe Distance

Beneath a photograph of the refugee camp at Calais, France, known as "the Jungle", in yesterday's New York Times, this caption appeared:

"The squalid camp, growing and festering for over a year, has become a symbol of Europe’s faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis."

The sentence was a quote from the article itself. This morning, the first thing I saw when I checked my Instagram feed, were the photograph and caption, posted by Teju Cole, with the following comment (quoted here with his permission:)

Sometimes it's not the photo, it's the caption. Sometimes it's not the caption, it's a single word. What work is the word "festering" doing here? The caption is an excerpt from the article, which you can find yourself. "Squalid" is permissible in context but imperfect, but there are at least two problems with the framing of Calais as a "symbol of Europe's faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis." The first is that this is a crisis for those who must leave home, not for those who receive or refuse them. Europe does not have a migration crisis. The second problem is that Europe is not a country. There's a reason there's no "Jungle" in Germany, and there's an opposite reason there isn't one in Switzerland. Whatever is happening in Calais is about French policy and British policy. Italy is another thing. Hungary is a different thing. But that's all about the framing.
-
What I keep coming back to is that word "festering." I've heard it before. What festers? What instinctual response do we have to that which festers? I think I know the kind of work the word is supposed to be doing. That work is all about mislocating the crisis. And when the crisis is mislocated, when it is about those who must witness the crisis rather than those who must undergo it, then other actions, otherwise unimaginable, become compulsory. After all, what is one to do with people or places that are "festering"?

[Later this morning, I note that the caption has been changed to read "The squalid camp has become a symbol of Europe’s faltering efforts to handle its migration crisis." The text remains the same in the article itself; the New York Times does follow TC (one of their own critics and authors) on Instagram.]

What, then, is actually "festering?" In my opinion, it is our hatred and fear of "the other" who will somehow take away or undermine what we feel is rightly "ours" -- our jobs, our health, our security, our resources, our prosperity...and, if we dig deeper, our very whiteness and privilege: god forbid, one of them might intermarry with one of our children.

Well, you know what? That's exactly what I did. 35 years ago I married the son of a Syrian immigrant and a refugee from the Armenian genocide. And that changed forever my ability to be indifferent to or distant from those who are not white, Anglo-Saxon, American, Protestant, English-speaking, Euro-centric...you can fill in the adjectives yourself. I was already a young person leaning in the direction of difference; I was curious and open. But I had not yet been broken open. And if we carefully defend ourselves forever, if we hide behind words and never take action, our hearts will never be broken and we will never truly understand or help the other out of that brokenness. We will simply sit at a safe distance, maybe spouting outrage and sadness at the world's ills, but our empathy will be temporary and we will not have to change, grow, or give anything that is an actual sacrifice of self. Outrage is, frankly, cheap. My question to you is, what are you willing to do?

--

Language does matter: I agree. We have seen it at work in this deplorable election season, both for good and for ill. We are not, in general, careful with it, but taking great care with words is supposed to be the job of journalists, as well as speechwriters.

I would like to recommend another article, "What Does it Mean to Help One Family?", about the Canadian response to the plight of the refugees, which shows the complexities of both immigrating and helping. We will be welcoming a refugee family through the cathedral sometime in the coming year; at the present time they are still mired in paperwork in Beirut. This will not be the first time I've tried to help people making a new life in a new country, nor will it be the last, and every single time I know that I am not doing enough. I feel compelled because of my parents in-law, who had been helped by others and who never forgot that. Their story changed me: for their sake, as well as my own conscience, I cannot turn away. And then I became an immigrant too -- an immigrant with money, relative security, and language skills, to be sure -- but I found out firsthand what it means to leave your past behind, with all its practical and emotional connections and knowledge, and have to begin again to build a new life in a new place.

We all need to be more careful with the language we use. We cheapen our empathy by spouting  platitudes, we speak when we ought to be listening, we use words for effect and shock value that linger and cause great harm, and in this word-intensive internet environment, we invest a stream of empty words with weight as if they represent acts of actual sacrifice or self-emptying.

Words matter; they descend from our heads to our hearts and continue to live there, as a sort of compost for our emotions and actions. In the heart, certain things fester, and others flower; which way it goes is ultimately up to us.

Parsley, the family vegetable

Still life with parsley, green glass bottle, and beaded flowers. Watercolor, approx 6" x 6". April 3, 2016.

J. and I have often joked that I should have carried some parsley in my wedding bouquet, it's that ubiquitous and important in our family cooking. We are never without a large bunch or two in our fridge, waiting to be turned into taboulleh or added to rice pilaf, meat dishes, fish, a soup or stew, or just eaten sprig by sprig. Mint and parsley are the essential herbs for Middle Eastern cuisine. So I wasn't surprised when, visiting our niece last weekend, we saw a bouquet of parsley as part of the still life arrangement on her dining room table. During the weekend, parsley made its way into a tray of kibbeh, and kibbeh-yogurt soup the next night, as well as being an essential ingredient in our niece's recently-invented house pesto, which doesn't use either garlic or basil, but instead, freshly-chopped parsley, mint, cilantro, and pine nuts, seasoned with olive oil and sweet lemon: it was a fabulous hors-d'oeuvre served with goat cheese and French bread.

The painting/drawing, however, was not only a chance to suggest the frilly leaves of parsley, but to explore green in its various shades and textures. I've drawn that glass bottle and the beaded flowers before, but this one was more successful. The washes of color went onto the page first, and then the lines, which I tried to keep as economical as possible. I'd like to try it again as a pure watercolor, but unfortunately we're back in Montreal, having left snowy New England behind. It's still cold here, but the light says "spring," and pretty soon there will be a pot of parsley growing on our terrace, ready to be snipped for supper.

Narrow and Wider Views: Niqab and Election Day

In an hour or two, I'll be voting in Canada for the first time. Oddly enough, this morning I got into the metro during the morning rush hour, and who should be standing next to me but a young woman in a niqab. Unlike headscarves, face veils are really not very common in Montreal, and when I see a woman in a niqab I usually feel disturbed, and sometimes angry, especially if she seems to be following subserviently after a man. Personally, I wish no woman felt she needed to wear one, and particularly wish no woman would ever be pressured into veiling her own face, but I was appalled by Stephen Harpur's recent remarks about this - as if I needed one more reason not to vote for him.

Some non-Muslim women here have been wearing face veils as a protest against Harper, but from the details of the veil and other aspects of her dress, and the way she was acting, I was sure this young woman was genuine. I watched her looking furtively around herself, worrying perhaps that someone would say something negative, and my heart went out to her. We were both holding onto the same central pole in the subway car,  and I decided to try to make eye contact. When she looked at me, I smiled as warmly as I could. Her eyes crinkled and lit up in a smile. We both exited the metro at McGill and I walked near her up the stairs; my main emotion was simply to be protective in that crowded place. We didn't speak; perhaps I should have tried. She went through the turnstile, turned in the opposite direction, and was lost in the crowd.

One of the reasons I part ways with most politicians is that they take positions that are all theory and no compassion, and when they single out an individual, it is often to use them for their own gain. It's far more telling to ask how we would act in an ordinary daily life situation with those who are different from us, or seem to question or even threaten our own values. Because human being tend to isolate themselves into groups of like "otherness," we often don't have the opportunity to find out. In the case of extreme religious conservatism, there are often rules that prohibit contact. But when faced with an actual real person in a real situation, I think most (certainly not all) people will find they are moved by human emotion and compassion, and will act accordingly. When observing my own emotions today, I saw this shift from theory to reality take place, and I was grateful for the encounter which showed me a deeper part of myself.

I had another encounter like this on the flight back from Berlin to Montreal this summer, when I was seated next to an ultra-orthodox Jewish couple traveling with a large family group from Israel to Montreal. I was on the aisle and the wife, much younger than me, was next to me. Neither one of them spoke to me during the whole long flight and they seemed nervous and determined to keep to themselves. We ate our separate meals, and when it was necessary for them to get up and use the restroom, I was careful to move into the aisle so the man would not have to touch me or even speak to me. Before landing, we were all given customs declarations to fill out. I did mine, but soon realized that my neighbors, heads bent together, speaking in worried voices, were having a hard time understanding the form. Finally I turned to the woman, smiled, and asked quietly if she needed some help. She gave me a relieved look, and we managed to exchange enough information in English that they were able to finish the task; she also told me that they were all going to Montreal for a family wedding. It was clear that she was nervous about the trip, and had perhaps never left Israel before. We didn't speak much more, although I would have liked to, but to my surprise, when it was time to get our heavy carry-on bags down from the overhead compartment, the husband gestured to me, asking if I needed help with my bag, which I gratefully accepted.

We all need to reach out of our self-protective little worlds and find the common ground, because it almost always exists. In my experience, it doesn't matter what the "difference" is - race, religion, sexual orientation, gender, age. It was good to discover that my bonds with these women as women and fellow travelers were  stronger than any political or feminist views on either of our sides. How much better it would be to start from there.

The Icelandic posts will continue, but the Canadian election is important and may represent a big change, so I wanted to devote a little space to it. Harper is extremely unpopular in much of Quebec and British Columbia, but it looks like the rest of the nation -- even the more conservative provinces -- may join us in denying him a majority this time around. Then it's a question of whether the Liberals and NDP can form a government together if there is no majority. Let's hope so.

Still Life as Self-Portrait

Coffee pot, fruit, and bowl of almonds on a Druze chest. Pencil on paper, 2002.

Another version of the same subject. I love how free this drawing is.

This week I've been taking breaks from designing, carving, and printing illustrations for my Annunciation project by doing some studio cleaning and organizing. I started with my eleven-drawer flat file, where I keep most of my finished paintings, drawings, and prints, as well as supplies like acid-free tissue and glassine paper. All the big paper sheets go into a larger five-drawer flat file beneath this one. Anyway, I went through two drawers of old drawings and threw out a lot of uninteresting work that had no reason to be kept -- and that felt really good.

Coffee pot, fruit, almonds, and tambourine on a Druze chest. Pen and ink on paper, 2002.

But in the process, I found many things I certainly wanted to keep, including some sheets from large, old sketchbooks, such as the drawings in this post.

I was interested to see that even though they date from 2002, they're in a style quite similar to what I've been using lately. In some ways they're looser than the current ones - which doesn't please me so much, though it may be partly a result of the much-larger paper size here - but they're also more derivative of the Matisse and Picasso drawings I was poring over at the time. I'm curious to see that even back then, I was using some of the same favorite objects that have appeared in my work in recent years: the family coffee pot, the hourglass-shaped brass vase, the carved Druze chest.

Hydrangeas and blown glass rooster. Pencil on paper, 2002.

A still life, as I think I've written before, can be just as much a self-portrait as a picture of one's own face. In 2002, in the aftermath of 9/11, I was working with interfaith peace groups and thinking hard about our own family's Middle Eastern heritage, trying to put that into some sort of context with my own family background. The flowers in the vase above were certainly from my own garden, and represented me; the blown glass orb in front of them was part of a trade I had made with a Vermont artist, Paedra Branhall. My mother-in-law had died not long before; this glass rooster was hers, from a collection made by her Armenian uncle. The silver bowl with pinched corners was a family heirloom from my father-in-law's family in Damascus; those were also his leather-bound books. He was well into his mid-90s,  and I was beginning to try to collect some of his stories, which eventually became the "Fig and the Orchid" series here. And my husband and I were starting to think about the possibility of moving to Canada. Looking back, these choices form a much clearer portrait than I ever consciously realized at the time.

Here's a final drawing, this one in red Conte crayon on newsprint - which reminds me how much I love drawing in that particular medium.

Here, the blending of family histories is even more deliberate: the aloe plant is from my father-in-law, the lemons a Middle Eastern symbol; the tile at right was from Rhodes and belonged to my mother-in-law; the brass hourglass vase had been on my own grandmother's desk; the little covered ceramic pot at left was made by my mother, and the flowered cloth was one I had bought myself. Thirteen years later, I still use these objects (minus the aloe plant and lemons, of course!) in my daily life and in my drawings, as a natural matter of course, not deliberate exploration or statement: there's something reassuring about that.