Gaza Tragedy Through The Paint-brush

As if his works were from a distant crumbling past, Gaza artist Ahmad Mahna documents the aggression on his little enclave. He uses the aid boxes dropped from the parachutes for the starved to draw on and tell a painter’s story of a painful genocide.

Mahna says the goal of drawing is not only to document Israeli crimes but to send a message to the world, there are people in Gaza who love life and have needs beyond food and drink and want to tell the world not to forget their tragedy of forced displacement and ethnic cleansing they are subjected to by a heinous Israeli power as narrated in Al Mayadeen.

As a citizen living in a besieged enclave, Mahna has always been accustomed to difficult circumstances and never felt bound by the routine methods followed by world artists to see their creations come to light.

When he does not find the appropriate tools, he turns to whatever is available to him. Such may include paper, pencil, wall, piece of cloth, glass and even an old, neglected wooden board. In the artist’s eyes, these “worn-out” things can be transformed into inspiring artworks.

“Being across from an UNRWA school is a major incentive to draw,” Mahna pointing to the scenes of displaced people running to shelters as the aggression thickens combined with people fleeing under guns and bombs with a life of misery, water queues, bread and firewood, and of wounded carried on shoulders.

These tragedies, oppression and grief have become sad material for Mahna to transfer onto  paper and passed on to the world.

Today the Gazan artist’s mark is everywhere via his works and murals, saying it’s difficult to stand idly by amidst the horrors, so he armed himself with his charcoal pen, and divided the “carton” into four paintings beginning with “A Four-Year-Old Girl Carrying a 16-Liter Gallon of Water”, and published it on the social media.

It became an instant hit, generating much and unexpected interest with many asking him to draw more about the sufferings of the displaced. Today,  Mahna is a “beacon” for many artists, and the owner of dozens artistic pieces which tell the world, through simple lines, the meaning of the ethnic cleansing taking place in Gaza, through such titles as “Escape from Death”, ” Last Embrace” and others.

Mahna says the painting comes out of a “first-time situation I experience” with emotions flooding whether its love, fear, anger or sadness. He fills his painting with details that convey a reality of interconnected circuits surrounding the lives of residents including death to provide basic needs daily, movement of passersby to and from hospitals that is daily routine due to the bombs and air-raids, and the incessant spread of diseases that is everywhere.

Because the tent has become the main “hero” in the story of Palestinian displacement, Mahna transfers the canvas into a painting with rich details, focusing on the scorching temperatures melting people inside, the insects, scorpions, and snakes surrounding them like a barbaric army from every direction, and the sounds they hear from every corner, nullifying the individual privacy and the human need for rest and calm.

Coffee and Painting

“There is no one left who has not been affected by the war,” says Mahna, a former employee in one of the art institutions that must have surely long disappeared by now.

He lost his job and looked for an alternative to provide him with his daily bread, so he opened a rag-tag tea and coffee kiosk whilst making wall paintings where passersby would stop for the coffee and ponder the paintings with judicious respect for the skilled maker, as if directing words of thanks in showing their suffering.

Like others, Mahna did not at first comprehend the ongoing war of extermination till three months after the massacres when he shook off the cloak of despair and decided to stand up again. He opened his own studio under his downtrodden and ramshackled house.

It was only then did he feel he returned to the world he belonged to, amidst the looks of children escaping the boredom of the shelter that now surrounded him from every direction, reminding him of his societal role in managing workshops to relieve their psychological stress through art.

Mahna describes himself as a street artist because his drawings express the now decrepit state of society and its conditions. From drawing destroyed homes and the color of the rubble, Mahna gives passersby hope in a city reduced to ruins. There is plenty to draw from: Images of corpses left in roads, limbs, mass graves, grief of bereaved mothers over their sons and their screams over those who remained under the rubble to the depiction of the ungodly famine in north Gaza.

Mahna faces difficulty in obtaining drawing materials. Charcoal pencils can run out at any time. Aid boxes have also become difficult to obtain in light of the increasing gas crisis, as residents prefer to burn them to prepare food instead of producing several paintings to look at while they are starving. He pointed out he faces the same problem that forced him to set fire to the wood that supports his paintings, but he is still trying to keep art alive in Gaza despite everything.

Dr Marwan Asmar is an Amman-based writer covering Middle East affairs