46 WESTERN ASIA
In this chapter
- Geography and History
- Religion and Philosophy
- Literature
- Architecture
- Performing Arts
- Visual Arts
GEOGRAPHY and HISTORY
RELIGION and PHILOSOPHY
LITERATURE
Yehuda Amichai (Palestinian/Israeli)
Yehuda Amichai was born in Germany and immigrated to Palestina in 1936. He served in the Jewish Brigade in World War II and fought in the Israel War of Independence in the Palmach. His writing draws from these autobiographical experiences. His work often explores war, family bonds, love, and disillusionment. His works “An Arab Shepherd Is Searching for his Goat on Mount Zion” and “Jerusalem” are form his 1987 work Poems of Jerusalem. He explores contemporary Jewish experiences using language found in every life juxtaposed with language from epics and the Bible.
Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Compact Anthonology of World Literature II. University of North Georgia Press. By Anita Turlington, Matthew Horton, Karen Dodson, Laura Getty, Kyounghye Kwon, Laura Ng
Three Poems
I. “A Precise Woman”
A precise woman with a short haircut brings order
to my thoughts and my dresser drawers,
moves feelings around like furniture
into a new arrangement.
A woman whose body is cinched at the waist and firmly divided
into upper and lower,
with weather-forecast eyes
of shatterproof glass.
Even her cries of passion follow a certain order,
one after the other:
tame dove, then wild dove,
then peacock, wounded peacock, peacock, peacock,
then wild dove, tame dove, dove dove
thrush, thrush, thrush.
A precise woman: on the bedroom carpet
her shoes always point away from the bed.
(My own shoes point toward it.)
II. “An Arab Shepherd is Searching for his Goat on Mt. Zion”
An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
And on the opposite hill I am searching for my little boy.
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
Both in their temporary failure.
Our two voices met above
The Sultan’s Pool in the valley between us.
Neither of us wants the boy or the goat
To get caught in the wheels
Of the “Had Gadya” machine.
Afterward we found them among the bushes,
And our voices came back inside us
Laughing and crying.
Searching for a goat or for a child has always been
The beginning of a new religion in these mountains.
III. “My Father”
The memory of my father is wrapped up in
white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day at work.
Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits
out of his hat, he drew love from his small body,
and the rivers of his hands
overflowed with good deeds.
“Three Jerusalem Poems”
Jerusalem
On a roof in the Old City
laundry hanging in the late afternoon sunlight
the white sheet of a woman who is my enemy,
the towel of a man who is my enemy,
to wipe off the sweat of his brow.
In the sky of the Old City
a kite
At the other end of the string,
a child
I can’t see
because of the wall.
We have put up many flags,
they have put up many flags.
To make us think that they’re happy
To make them think that we’re happy.
Tourists
Visits of condolence is all we get from them.
They squat at the Holocaust Memorial,
They put on grave faces at the Wailing Wall
And they laugh behind the heavy curtains
In their hotels.
They have their pictures taken
Together with our famous dead
At Rachel’s Tomb and Herzl’s Tomb
And on the top of Ammunition Hill.
They weep over our sweet boys
And lust over our tough girls
And hang up their underwear
To dry quickly
In cool, blue bathrooms.
Once I sat on the steps by a gate at David’s Tower. I placed my two heavy baskets at my side. A group of tourists was standing around their guide and I became their target marker. “You see that man with the baskets? Just right of his head there’s an arch from the Roman period. Just right of his head.” “But he’s moving, he’s moving!” I said to myself: “redemption will come only if their guide tells them, ‘You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not important: but next to it, left down and a bit, there sits a man who’s bought fruit and vegetables for his family.'”
Ecology of Jerusalem
The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers
and dreams
like the air over industrial cities.
It’s hard to breathe.
And from time to time a new shipment of history
arrives
and the houses and towers are its packing materials.
Later these are discarded and piled up in dumps.
And sometimes candles arrive instead of people
and then it’s quiet.
And sometimes people come instead of candles
and then there’s noise.
And in enclosed gardens heavy with jasmine
foreign consulates,
like wicked brides that have been rejected,
lie in wait for their moment.
From Poems of Jerusalem by Yehuda Amichai. Tel Aviv: Schocken Publishing, 1987.
Mahmoud Darwish (Palestine)
Mahmoud Darwish, a poet and activist, is considered to be the National Poet of Palestine. Born in 1941 in a small village in the Galilee, Darwish experienced the razing of his village by Israeli soldiers when he was 7 years old. His family was never allowed to reclaim their land. The family returned a year later to what was now Israel and settled in the Arab section of Galilee. As a young adult, Darwish settled in Haifa, a city known for peaceful relations between Israelis and Palestinians. In college, Darwish joined the Israeli Communist Party and served as editor of their journal, where he began to publish poems. When he joined the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1973, he was banned from re-entering Israel. After many years of living in Beirut and Paris, he was allowed to return in 1995 and settled in Ramallah.
Darwish published his first volume of poetry at 22. His poems address the exile of the Palestinian poetry and were often read and recited a nationalist meetings, events, and protests. When “Identity Card” became the protest song of the resistance in the 1960s, Darwish was placed under house arrest. “Victim Number 18” (1867) was written to memorialize the victims of a 1965 Israeli attack on a Palestinian village at the start of the Suez War in which 48 villagers were killed. The speaker is one of the victims of the attack. “Identity Card” (1964), the speakers embody the lives of ordinary Palestinians.
Victim Number 18
Identity Card
Write down!
I am an Arab
And my identity card number is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth will come after a summer
Will you be angry?
Write down!
I am an Arab
Employed with fellow workers at a quarry
I have eight children
I get them bread
Garments and books
from the rocks..
I do not supplicate charity at your doors
Nor do I belittle myself at the footsteps of your chamber
So will you be angry?
Write down!
I am an Arab
I have a name without a title
Patient in a country
Where people are enraged
My roots
Were entrenched before the birth of time
And before the opening of the eras
Before the pines, and the olive trees
And before the grass grew
My father.. descends from the family of the plow
Not from a privileged class
And my grandfather..was a farmer
Neither well-bred, nor well-born!
Teaches me the pride of the sun
Before teaching me how to read
And my house is like a watchman’s hut
Made of branches and cane
Are you satisfied with my status?
I have a name without a title!
Write down!
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks..
So will the State take them
As it has been said?!
Therefore!
Write down on the top of the first page:
I do not hate poeple
Nor do I encroach
But if I become hungry
The usurper’s flesh will be my food
Beware..
Beware..
Of my hunger
And my anger!
Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Compact Anthonology of World Literature II. University of North Georgia Press. By Anita Turlington, Matthew Horton, Karen Dodson, Laura Getty, Kyounghye Kwon, Laura Ng
Hanan al-Shaykh (Lebanon)
Hanan al-Shaykh is a Lebanese writer living in London. She grew up in a restricted patriarchal environment created by her father and brother, both devour Shia Muslim. She attended a traditional Muslim girls’ primary school and then later a more culturally diverse school for girls before attending the American College of Girls in Cairo. Al-Shaykh worked as a journal in Beirut and then began writing creative fiction.
The Women’s Swimming Pool is a short story revealing al-Shaykh’s ongoing concerns, such as the conflict between modernity and tradition in the Middle East and women and their desire for freedom in teh Arab world.
Copyright: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Compact Anthology of World Literature II. University of North Georgia Press. By Anita Turlington, Matthew Horton, Karen Dodson, Laura Getty, Kyounghye Kwon, Laura Ng
The Women’s Swimming Pool
I am in the tent for threading the Tobacco amidst the mounds of tobacco plants and the skewers. Cross-legged, I breathe in the green odor, threading one leaf after another. I find myself dreaming and growing thirsty and dreaming. I open the magazine; I devour the words and surreptitiously gaze at the pictures. Exasperated at being in the tent, my exasperation then turns to sadness.
Thirsty, I rise to my feet. I hear Abu Ghalib say, “Where are you off to, little lady?” I make my way to my grandmother, saying, “I’m thirsty.” I go out. I make my way to the cistern, stumbling in the sandy ground. I see the greenish-blue waters. I stretch out my hand to its still surface, hot from the harsh sun. I stretch out my hand and wipe it across my brow and face and neck, across my chest. Before being able to savour its relative coldness, I hear my name and see my grandmother standing in her black dress at the doorway of the tent. Aloud I express the wish that someone else had called to me. We have become like an orange and its navel: my grandmother has welded me so close to her that the village girls no longer dare to make friends with me, perhaps for fear of rupturing this close union.
I return to the tent, growing thirsty and dreaming, with the sea ever in my mind. What were its waters like? What colour would they be now? If only this week would pass in a flash for I had at last persuaded my grandmother to go down to Beirut and the sea, after my friend Sumayya had sworn that the swimming pool she’d been to had been for women only.
My grandmother sat on the edge of a jagged slab of stone, leaning on my arm. Her hand was hot and rough. She sighed as she chased away a fly.
What is my grandmother gazing at? There was nothing in front of us but the asphalt road which, despite the surfs rays, gave off no light, and the white marble tombs that stretched along the high mountainside, while the houses of Upper Nabatieh looked like deserted Crusader castles, their alleyways empty, their windows of iron. Our house likewise seemed to be groaning in its solitude, shaded by the fig tree. The washing line stirs with the wind above the tomb of my grandfather, the celebrated religious scholar, in the courtyard of the house. What is my grandmother staring at? Or does someone who is waiting not stare?
Turning her face towards me, she said, “Child, what will we do if the bus doesn’t come?” Her face, engraved in my mind, seemed overcast, also her half-closed eyes and the blue tattoo mark on her chin. I didn’t answer her for fear I’d cry if I talked. This time I averted my gaze from the white tombs; moving my foot away from my grandmother’s leg clothed in thick black stockings, I began to walk about, my gaze directed to the other side where lay the extensive fields of green tobacco, their leaves glinting under the sun, leaves that were imprinted on my brain, and with the marks of them still showing on my hands, towering and gently swaying.
My gaze reached out behind the thousands of plants, then beyond them, moving away till it arrived at the tent where the tobacco was threaded. I came up close to my grandmother, who was still sitting in her place, still gazing in front of her. As I drew close to her, I heard her give a sigh. A sprinkling of sweat lay on the pouches under her eyes. “Child, what do you want with the sea? Don’t you know that the sea puts a spell on people?” I didn’t answer her: I was so worried that the morning would pass, that noonday would pass and that I wouldn’t see the green bus come to a stop by the stone my grandmother sat on and take us with it to the sea, to Beirut. Again I heard my grandmother mumbling, “That devil Sumayya….” I pleaded with her to stop, and my thoughts rose up and left the stone upon which my grandmother sat, the rough road, left everything. I went back to my dreams, to the sea.
The sea had remained my preoccupation ever since I had seen it for the first time inside a coloured ball; with its blue colour it was like a magic lantern, wide open, the surface of its water unrippled unless you tilted the piece of glass, with its small shells and white specks like snow. When I first became aware of things, it was this ball, which I had found in the parlour, that was the sole thing that animated and amused me. The more I gazed at it the more cold I could feel its waters, the more they invited me to bathe myself in them; they knew that I had been born amidst dust and mud and the stench of tobacco.
If only the green bus would come along–and I shifted my bag from one hand to the other. I heard my grandmother wail, “Child, bring up a stone and sit down. Put down the bag and don’t worry.” My distress increased and I was no longer able to stop it turning into tears that flowed freely down my face, veiling it from the road. I stretched up to wipe them with my sleeve: in this heat I still had to wear that dress with long sleeves, that head-covering over my plaits, despite the hot wind that set the tobacco plants and the sparse poplars swaying. Thank God I had resisted her and refused to wear my stockings. I gave a deep sigh as I heard the bus’s horn from afar. Fearful and anxious, I shouted at my grandmother as I helped her to her feet, turning round to make sure that my bag was still in my hand and my grandmother’s hand in the other. The bus came to a stop and the conductor helped my grandmother on. When I saw myself alongside her and the stone on its own, I tightened my grip on my bag in which lay Sumayya’s bathing costume, a sleeveless dress and my money.
I noticed as the bus slowly made its way along the road that my anxiety was still there, that it was in fact increasing. Why didn’t the bus pass by all these trees and fallow land like lightning? Why was it crawling along? My anxiety was still there and increased till it predominated over my other sensations such as nausea and curiosity.
How would we find our way to the sea? Would we see it as soon as we arrived in Beirut? Was it at the other end of it? Would the bus stop in the district of Zeytouna, at the door of the women’s swimming pool? Why, I wondered, was it called Zeytouna(*)? Were there olive trees there? I leaned towards my grandmother with her silent face and long nose that almost met up with her mouth. Thinking that I wanted a piece of cane sugar, she put her hand to her bosom to take out a small twist of cloth. Impatiently I asked her if she was sure that Maryam Al Taweela knew Zeytouna, to which she answered, her mouth sucking at the cane sugar and making a noise with her tongue.
“God will look after everything.” Then she broke the silence by saying, “All this trouble is that devil Sumayya’s fault–it was she who told you she’d seen with her own eyes the swimming pool just for women and not for men.” “Yes, Grandma:” I answered her. She said, “Swear by your mother’s grave.” I thought to myself absentmindedly, Why only my mother’s grave? What about my father? Or did she only acknowledge her daughter’s death? . . . “By my mother’s grave, it’s for women.” She inclined her head and still munching the cane sugar and making a noise with her tongue, she said, “If any man were to see you, you’d be done for, and so would your mother and father and your grandfather, the religious scholar–and I’d be done for more than anyone because it’s I who agreed to you and helped you.”
I would have liked to say to her, They’ve all gone, they’ve all died, so what do we have to be afraid of.? But I knew what she meant: that she was frightened they wouldn’t go to heaven.
I began to sweat and my heart again contracted as Beirut came into view with its lofty buildings, car horns, the bared arms of the women, the girls’ hair, the tight trousers they were wearing. People were sitting on chairs in the middle of the pavement eating and drinking; the trams; the roasting chickens revolving on spits. Ah, these dresses for sale in the windows, would anyone be found actually to wear them? I see a Japanese man, the first ever member of the yellow races outside of books; the Martyrs’ monument, Riad Solh Square. I was wringing wet with sweat and my heart pounded–it was as though I regretted having come to Beirut, perhaps because I was accompanied by my grandmother. It was soon all too evident that we were outsiders to the capital. We began walking after my grandmother had asked the bus driver the whereabouts of the district of Khandak al-Ghamik where Maryam al-Taweela lived. Once again my body absorbed all the sweat and allowed my heart to flee its cage. I find myself treading on a pavement on which for long years I have dreamed of walking; I hear sounds that have been engraved on my imagination, and everything I see I have seen in daydreams at school or in the tobacco threading tent. Perhaps I shouldn’t say that I was regretting it, for after this I would never forget Beirut. We begin walking and losing our way in a Beirut that never ends, leads nowhere. We begin asking and walking and losing our way, and my going to the sea seems an impossibility; the sea is fleeing from me. My grandmother comes to a stop and leans against a lamp-post, or against the litter bin attached to it, and against my shoulders, and puffs and blows. I have the feeling that we shall never find Maryam al-Taweela’s house. A man we had stopped to ask the way walks with us. When we knock at the door and no one opens to us, I become convinced that my bathing in the sea is no longer possible. The sweat again pours off me, my throat contracts. A woman’s voice brings me back to my senses as I drown in a lake of anxiety, sadness and fear; then it drowns me once again. It was not Maryam al-Taweela but her neighbour who is asking us to wait at her place. We go down the steps to the neighbour’s outdoor stone bench, and my grandmother sits down by the door but gets to her feet again when the woman entreats her to sit in the cane chair. Then she asks to be excused while she finishes washing down the steps. While she is cursing the heat of Beirut in the summer, I notice the tin containers lined up side by side containing red and green peppers. We have a long wait, and I begin to weep inwardly as I stare at the containers.
I wouldn’t be seeing the sea today, perhaps not for years, but the thought of its waters would not leave me, would not be erased from my dreams. I must persuade my grandmother to come to Beirut with Sumayya. Perhaps I should not have mentioned the swimming pool in front of her. I wouldn’t be seeing the sea today–and once again I sank back into a lake of doubt and fear and sadness. A woman’s voice again brought me back to my senses: it was Maryam al-Taweela, who had stretched out her long neck and had kissed me, while she asked my grandmother, “She’s the child of your late daughter, isn’t she?”–and she swore by the Imam(*)? that we must have lunch with her, doing so before we had protested, feeling perhaps that I would do so. When she stood up and took the primus stove from under her bed and brought out potatoes and tomatoes and bits of meat, I had a feeling of nausea, then of frustration. I nudged my grandmother, who leant over and whispered, “What is it, dear?” at which Maryam al-Taweela turned and asked, “What’s your granddaughter want–to go to the bathroom?” My mouth went quite dry and my tears were all stored up waiting for a signal from my heartbeats to descend. My grandmother said with embarrassment, “She wants to go to the sea, to the women’s swimming pool–that devil Sumayya put it into her head.” To my amazement Maryam al-Taweela said loudly, “And why not? Right now Ali Mousa, our neighbour, will be coming and he’ll take you, he’s got a car”–and Maryam al-Taweela began peeling the potatoes at a low table in the middle of the room and my grandmother asked, “Where’s Ali Mousa from? Where does he live?”
I can’t wait, I shan’t eat, I shan’t drink. I want to go now, now. I remained seated, crying inwardly because I was born in the South, because there’s no escape for me from the South, and I go on rubbing my fingers and gnawing at my nails. Again I begin to sweat: I shan’t eat, I shan’t drink, I shan’t reply to Maryam al-Taweela. It was as though I were taking vengeance on my grandmother for some wrong she did not know about. My patience vanished. I stood up and said to my grandmother before I should burst out sobbing, “Come along, Grandma, get up and let’s go.” I helped her to her feet and Maryam al-Taweela asked in bewilderment what had suddenly come over me. I went on dragging my grandmother out to the street so that I might stop the first taxi.
Only moments passed before the driver shut off his engine and said, “Zeytouna.” I looked about me but saw no sea. As I gave him a lira I asked him, “Where’s the women’s swimming pool?” He shrugged his shoulders. We got out of the car with difficulty, as was always the case with my grandmother. To my astonishment the driver returned, stretching out his head in concern at us. “Jump in,” he said, and we got in. He took us round and round, stopping once at a petrol station and then by a newspaper seller, asking about the women’s swimming pool and nobody knowing where it was. Once again he dropped us in the middle of Zeytouna Street.
Then, behind the hotels and the beautiful buildings and the date palms, I saw the sea. It was like a blue line of quicksilver: it was as though pieces of silver paper were resting on it. The sea that was in front of me was more beautiful than it had been in the glass ball. I didn’t know how to get close to it, how to touch it. Cement lay between us. We began enquiring about the whereabouts of the swimming pool, but no one knew. The sea remains without waves, a blue line. I feel frustrated. Perhaps this swimming pool is some secret known only to the girls of the South. I began asking every person I saw. I tried to choke back my tears; I let go of my grandmother’s hand as though wishing to reproach her, to punish her for having insisted on accompanying me instead of Sumayya. Poor me. Poor Grandma. Poor Beirut. Had my dreams come to an end in the middle of the street? I clasp my bag and my grandmother’s hand, with the sea in front of me, separating her from me. My stubbornness and vexation impel me to ask and go on asking. I approached a man leaning against a bus and to my surprise he pointed to an opening between two shops. I hurried back to my grandmother, who was supporting herself against a lamp-post, to tell her I’d found it. When I saw with what difficulty she attempted to walk, I asked her to wait for me while I made sure. I went through the opening but didn’t see the sea. All I saw was a fat woman with bare shoulders sitting behind a table. Hesitating, I stood and looked at her, not daring to step forward. My enthusiasm had vanished, taking with it my courage. “Yes,” said the woman. I came forward and asked her, “Is the women’s swimming pool here?” She nodded her head and said, “The entrance fee is a lira.” I asked her if it was possible for my grandmother to wait for me here and she stared at me and said, “Of course.” There was contempt in the way she looked at me–was it my southern accent or my long-sleeved dress? I had disregarded my grandmother and had taken off my headshawl and hidden it in my bag. I handed her a lira and could hear the sounds of women and children–and still I did not see the sea. At the end of the portico were steps which I was certain led to the roofed-in sea. The important thing was that I’d arrived, that I would be tasting the salty spray of its waters. I wouldn’t be seeing the waves; never mind, I’d be bathing in its waters.
I found myself saying to the woman, or rather to myself because no sound issued from my throat, “I’ll bring my grandmother.” Going out through the opening and still clasping my bag to my chest, I saw my grandmother standing and looking up at the sky. I called to her but she was reciting to herself under her breath as she continued to look upwards: she was praying, right there in the street, praying on the pavement at the door of the swimming pool. She had spread out a paper bag and had stretched out her hands to the sky. I walked off in another direction and stopped looking at her. I would have liked to persuade myself that she had nothing to do with me, that I didn’t know her. How, though? She’s my grandmother whom I’ve dragged with my entreaties from the tobacco threading tent, from the jagged slab of stone, from the winds of the South; I have crammed her into the bus and been lost with her in the streets as we searched for Maryam al-Taweela’s house. And now here were the two of us standing at the door of the swimming pool and she, having heard the call to prayers, had prostrated herself in prayer. She was destroying what lay in my bag, blocking the road between me and the sea. I felt sorry for her, for her knees that knelt on the cruelly hard pavement, for her tattooed hands that lay on the dirt. I looked at her again and saw the passers-by staring at her. For the first time her black dress looked shabby to me. I felt how far removed we were from these passers-by, from this street, this city, this sea. I approached her and she again put her weight on my hand. (*) The word means “olive tree” in Arabic. (*) This refers to Ali ibu Abi Talib, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, and is an indication that the characters in the story are Shi’ite Muslims.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 Fairleigh Dickinson University. Used under FairUse
ARCHITECTURE
The White City of Tel Aviv
Back in 1933, when the Nazis took power in Germany, approximately 60,000 Jews left Germany for Mandatory Palestine. Since many, if not most, of these immigrants came from urban backgrounds in Germany, they naturally sought to settle in a city in their new homeland. To accommodate them, thousands of dwellings had to be built in Tel Aviv. Around 150 architects were involved in this huge enterprise, six of whom were former Bauhaus students (the Bauhaus was an art and design school in Germany that was shuttered by the Nazis in 1933 and whose importance is astonishing given its very brief and tenuous fourteen-year existence). [1]
The direct influence of the Bauhaus on the architecture of what came to be known as the White City of Tel Aviv is evident, for example, in various workers’ housing estates. On Frishman Street, Arieh Sharon designed the residential complex known as Me’onot Ha’ovdim Hod. This required a special building permit from the city, since it contravened the Geddes Plan—Tel Aviv’s prevailing master plan at the time, named after the Scottish urbanist who envisaged it as a garden city, with public gardens surrounded by residential blocks and small streets, and main roads crossing the city from east to west and south to north. In Sharon’s housing estate, the opposite was proposed: a U-shaped building surrounding a garden, in keeping with the socialist construction principles taught by Bauhaus director Hans Meyer.
In keeping with Meyer’s design philosophy, the focus in Sharon’s design was on the welfare of the community, which was served in part by the central garden, but also by other social facilities, such as a kindergarten and a grocery store for the local residents. To this end, Sharon involved the project’s future residents throughout its design and construction, making the process a highly democratic endeavor. This is not the only aspect of this housing estate that reflects Bauhaus principles. Like the Bauhaus School buildings in Dessau, it features a flat roof. In addition, in keeping with the Bauhaus edict of no ornamentation without function, it has no purely ornamental elements. The modernist demand for functionalism is also evident in the design’s consideration of the local climate: each apartment has windows facing both west and east, to facilitate the passage of cooling sea breezes, which was especially important before air conditioning had become widely available. The apartments’ balconies—modeled in size and proportions after those of the studio building in the Bauhaus Dessau known as Prellerhaus—were also highly functional, since they could be used year round.
The architecture of the White City is founded on the tenets of modernism in the first half of the 20th century. Although the Bauhaus stood squarely within this tradition, it did not “invent” it, nor was it its sole champion. Noted architects such as Le Corbusier, Erich Mendelsohn, and many others were also modernist architects without being part of the Bauhaus, and their influence is notable in Tel Aviv. Yet, despite its diverse architectural heritage, Tel Aviv’s White City is often referred to as the capital of the Bauhaus style.
If the Bauhaus School is defined as the school of architectural functionalism, the White City of Tel Aviv may undoubtedly be considered the global capital of the Bauhaus Style. For more than an exemplar of a particular style, the architecture of the White City is the product of the idea of functionalism—namely, a focus on the well-being of its inhabitants, which is to be achieved through functional design.
The architects of the White City were constantly seeking functional solutions for the challenges posed by the local climate, as well as for social questions and the requirements of daily life. This gave rise to highly imaginative functional architectural elements: projecting concrete ledges that wrapped around the buildings to shade the windows below; perforated balcony balustrades to aid natural ventilation; and reconfiguration of ribbon (or strip) windows to provide a better balance between light and airflow.
Residential buildings were placed upon pillars (dubbed pilotis by Le Corbusier) at the ground level, to provide shaded gardens. By facilitating airflow beneath the building and aiding ventilation of the entire urban space at street level, they fulfilled a climatic as well as social function. These semi-public areas were often further cooled with fountains and featured garden furniture that invited the inhabitants to share the space in their free time. The rounded corner balconies of some buildings—from where you can see everyone and everybody can see you—echo the works of Mendelsohn. They invite one to linger and give the city its extroverted and joyful character.
The city of Tel Aviv has successfully completed the restoration of Dizengoff Circus, designed by architect Genia Averbuch—likely the world’s only “Bauhaus Piazza”—to its original design. Regarded as the traditional center of the White City, it is striking for its simple design: a round space, surrounded by nearly identical buildings, featuring curvilinear horizontal slit balconies. The simple, elegant architectural language of this circle makes it a paradigm of local modernist architecture.
Bauhaus Center Tel Aviv, located next to the renewed iconic Dizengoff Circus, is considered as the unofficial spokesman of the White City, presenting special exhibitions, guided and self-guided tours as well as local artists’ work reflecting modernism, books, and “White City Souvenirs.”
In 2003, the White City of Tel Aviv (so called because of the large number of white or light-colored buildings built there in the Bauhaus style) was declared a World Heritage Site by virtue of its very large number of modernist Bauhaus buildings that were constructed in the 1930s and 1940s. Today, half of these—around 2,000 buildings—are protected heritage sites.
Copyright: Micha Gross, “The White City of Tel Aviv ,” in Smarthistory, August 7, 2023, accessed June 1, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/the-white-city-of-tel-aviv/.
PERFORMING ARTS
World Cinema
Video URL: https://youtu.be/qfu0lbsIGSs?si=Cc4WNrku3UgEQn27
VISUAL ARTS
Shirin Neshat, Rebellious Silence, Women of Allah series
In Rebellious Silence, the central figure’s portrait is bisected along a vertical seam created by the long barrel of a rifle. Presumably the rifle is clasped in her hands near her lap, but the image is cropped so that the gun rises perpendicular to the lower edge of the photo and grazes her face at the lips, nose, and forehead. The woman’s eyes stare intensely towards the viewer from both sides of this divide.
Shirin Neshat’s photographic series Women of Allah examines the complexities of women’s identities in the midst of a changing cultural landscape in the Middle East—both through the lens of Western representations of Muslim women, and through the more intimate subject of personal and religious conviction.
While the composition—defined by the hard edge of her black chador against the bright white background—appears sparse, measured and symmetrical, the split created by the weapon implies a more violent rupture or psychic fragmentation. A single subject, it suggests, might be host to internal contradictions alongside binaries such as tradition and modernity, East and West, beauty and violence. In the artist’s own words, “every image, every woman’s submissive gaze, suggests a far more complex and paradoxical reality behind the surface.” [1]
The Women of Allah series confronts this “paradoxical reality” through a haunting suite of black-and-white images. Each contains a set of four symbols that are associated with Western representations of the Muslim world: the veil, the gun, the text and the gaze. While these symbols have taken on a particular charge since 9/11, the series was created earlier and reflects changes that have taken place in the region since 1979, the year of the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Islamic Revolution
Iran had been ruled by the Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi), who took power in 1941 during the Second World War and reigned as King until 1979, when the Persian monarchy was overthrown by revolutionaries. His dictatorship was known for the violent repression of political and religious freedom, but also for its modernization of the country along Western cultural models. Post-war Iran was an ally of Britain and the United States, and was markedly progressive with regards to women’s rights. The Shah’s regime, however, steadily grew more restrictive, and revolutionaries eventually rose to abolish the monarchy in favor of a conservative religious government headed by Ayatollah Khomeini.
Shirin Neshat was born in 1957 in the town of Qazvin. In line with the Shah’s expansion of women’s rights, her father prioritized his daughters’ access to education, and the young artist attended a Catholic school where she learned about both Western and Iranian intellectual and cultural history. She left, however, in the mid-1970s, pursuing her studies in California as the environment in Iran grew increasingly hostile. It would be seventeen years before she returned to her homeland. When she did, she confronted a society that was completely opposed to the one that she had grown up in.
Looking back
One of the most visible signs of cultural change in Iran has been the requirement for all women to wear the veil in public. While many Muslim women find this practice empowering and affirmative of their religious identities, the veil has been coded in Western eyes as a sign of Islam’s oppression of women. This opposition is made more clear, perhaps, when one considers the simultaneity of the Islamic Revolution with women’s liberation movements in the U.S. and Europe, both developing throughout the 1970s. Neshat decided to explore this fraught symbol in her art as a way to reconcile her own conflicting feelings. In Women of Allah, initiated shortly after her return to Iran in 1991, the veil functions as both a symbol of freedom and of repression.
The veil and the gaze
The veil is intended to protect women’s bodies from becoming the sexualized object of the male gaze, but it also protects women from being seen at all. The “gaze” in this context becomes a charged signifier of sexuality, sin, shame, and power. Neshat is cognizant of feminist theories that explain how the “male gaze” is normalized in visual and popular culture: Women’s bodies are commonly paraded as objects of desire in advertising and film, available to be looked at without consequence. Many feminist artists have used the action of “gazing back” as a means to free the female body from this objectification. The gaze, here, might also reflect exotic fantasies of the East. In Orientalist painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance, Eastern women are often depicted nude, surrounded by richly colored and patterned textiles and decorations; women are envisaged amongst other beautiful objects that can be possessed. In Neshat’s images, women return the gaze, breaking free from centuries of subservience to male or European desire.
Most of the subjects in the series are photographed holding a gun, sometimes passively, as in Rebellious Silence, and sometimes threateningly, with the muzzle pointed directly towards the camera lens. With the complex ideas of the “gaze” in mind, we might reflect on the double meaning of the word “shoot,” and consider that the camera—especially during the colonial era—was used to violate women’s bodies. The gun, aside from its obvious references to control, also represents religious martyrdom, a subject about which the artist feels ambivalently, as an outsider to Iranian revolutionary culture.
Shirin Neshat, Faceless, Women of Allah series, 1994, black and white RC print and ink, photo by Cynthia Preston ©Shirin Neshat (courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels)
Poetry
The contradictions between piety and violence, empowerment and suppression, are most prevalent in the use of calligraphic text that is applied to each photograph. Western viewers who do not read Farsi may understand the calligraphy as an aesthetic signifier, a reference to the importance of text in the long history of Islamic art. Yet, most of the texts are transcriptions of poetry and other writings by women, which express multiple viewpoints and date both before and after the Revolution. Some of the texts that Neshat has chosen are feminist in nature. However, in Rebellious Silence, the script that runs across the artist’s face is from Tahereh Saffarzadeh’s poem “Allegiance with Wakefulness” which honors the conviction and bravery of martyrdom. Reflecting the paradoxical nature of each of these themes, histories and discourses, the photograph is both melancholic and powerful—invoking the quiet and intense beauty for which Neshat’s work has become known.
As an outspoken, feminist and progressive artist, Neshat is aware that it would be dangerous to show her work in conservative modern-day Iran, and she has been living in exile in the United States since the 1990s. For audiences in the West, the “Women of Allah” series has allowed a more nuanced contemplation of common stereotypes and assumptions about Muslim women, and serves to challenge the suppression of female voices in any community.
Copyright: Dr. Allison Young, “A-Level: Shirin Neshat, Rebellious Silence, Women of Allah series,” in Smarthistory, July 12, 2017, accessed May 31, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/shirin-neshat-rebellious-silence-women-of-allah-series-2/.
Mahmoud Hammad, Arabic Writing no. 11
The 1965 painting Arabic Writing no. 11, by Syrian artist Mahmoud Hammad, is composed of bright, interlocking shapes of textured pigment on a flat blue surface. Primary fields of color are arranged following a pictorial logic of cutout shapes rather than layers. The artist maintains distinct edges between the complementary color combinations: yellow-gold on red, red on navy, green against orange, and so on. The result is a consciously controlled abstraction. As if to exaggerate the constructed quality of the painting, Hammad adds one cartouche of loosely inscribed writing in the lower right—a nod to the expressive and mystical types of abstraction popular elsewhere.
One of five canvases Hammad exhibited at the 8th São Paulo Biennial in Brazil, Arabic Writing no. 11 represents a particular approach to abstract painting practiced by artists in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Hammad uses letter forms from the Arabic alphabet as the central elements of his compositions. As suggested by the titles of the other paintings he sent to Brazil, which include Arabic Writing nos. 8, 12, 13, and 14 in addition to no. 11, he based each composition on a text—phrases selected from Arabic literature, folk culture, or the Qur’an. In the case of Arabic Writing no. 11, its originating text is verse 36:58 from the Qur’an, “Peace, a word from the blessed Lord.”
Hammad is credited with establishing calligraphy as a pathway for generating abstract art in Syria. [1] However, it is a curious feature of Hammad’s work in the 1960s that he manipulated the texture, color, and spatial ratios of words to the point of illegibility. Even though the ligatures and dots among the painted shapes of Arabic Writing no. 11 make visual reference to Arabic orthography, neither native speakers nor foreign observers could decipher the words without assistance from the artist. Hammad in fact took steps to cloak linguistic meaning. Although he kept detailed studio logs that list the originating phrases of the paintings, he tended to exhibit them under generic series titles such as “writing” or “composition.”
The decisions behind an abstract painting such as Arabic Writing no. 11 raise important questions about art in the 1960s, a decade of independence movements and liberation struggles. What meanings can abstract art hold for an artist working in a formerly colonized country? In the context of an ex-colonial nation-states such as Syria, which claimed its independence from France in 1946, many activists looked to art and culture to help provide roadmaps to nation-building and modernization, often in the guise of figurative arts that documented traditions past and future. Hammad did not pursue this route in Arabic Writing no. 11. What meanings, then, did he expect the forms of his work—which are based on text but cannot be read—to convey to audiences?
Language games
Many of Hammad’s contemporaries mounted justifications for abstract art based upon the historical precedents found in Arab-Islamic art, including highly innovative geometric surface designs in architecture and illuminated books, which provided a basis for characterizing abstraction as a local practice rather than foreign imposition. But Hammad professed relatively little interest in reviving motifs from the past. As he explained in a 1965 essay, he considered abstraction to be a shared language of contemporary life; processes of industrialization had subjected all areas of developed society to abstraction. [3]
For Hammad, the already abstract status of Arabic characters made them ideal vehicles for responding to contemporary conditions. To create Arabic Writing no. 11, Hammad made numerous studies of ways to transform the handwritten outlines of “Peace, a word from the blessed Lord” in Arabic into experimental forms. He duplicated and mirrored words, moved and stacked elements, adjusted color combinations, and filled in negative spaces and gaps. Planes of contrast color sometimes appear as framing devices, other times as lines of segmentation. Once Hammad transferred his preferred arrangement to canvas, he began to build up shallow impasto volumes. This further transformed the physical presence of his different shapes.
Even though Arabic Writing no. 11 stems from a Qur’anic passage, the final painting relinquishes its visual connections to divine speech. In place of identifiable textual referents, the impasto forms of meticulous brushwork seem to speak of human agency. They are records of how Hammad decided to place certain colors and volumes into certain places on the surface of his painting.
In other paintings, Hammad selected texts that further emphasize the arbitrary nature of language conventions. Several of his early abstract paintings use the phrase abjad hawaz, which are pseudowords made from the first seven letters of the Arabic alphabet as a basis for recollecting their sequential order. Even when Hammad kept the letters of abjad hawaz in discernable forms, the words themselves hold no lexical meaning.
Huroufiyah
Hammad’s 1965 painting, Arabic Writing no. 11, expands how we understand artistic uses of Arabic letters as a historical phenomenon. Scholars have come to recognize the incorporation of Arabic calligraphy into modern painting as the major development of the SWANA region in the 20th century. Although different names for the trend have been proposed, a 1990 study by critic Charbel Dagher popularized the umbrella term “Huroufiyah,” based on the Arabic word for “letters.” [5] Recent scholarly commentaries have focused on the problem of tradition as a resource for modern artists. Iftikhar Dadi demonstrated how artists working in postcolonial South Asia used Arabic texts to offer commentary on membership in the transnational community of Muslim believers. [6] Nada Shabout has highlighted how artists in Arab nation-states practiced Huroufiyah in response to a national identity crisis by connecting with the past yet still allowing for invention. [7]
In the case of Hammad, the artist largely avoided a dynamic of revivalism by separating his painting from calligraphy as a traditional art. In this, he had company from among other Arab and Muslim artists. In January of 1965, the arts writer Ghazi al-Khaldi assessed the trend of using alphabetic characters in plastic arts, situating Syrian artists among a wide cohort of painters using calligraphy to escape from representational art. [8] Al-Khaldi cited European artists such as Paul Klee, and introduces contemporary Arab practitioners such as Saad Kamel, from Egypt, and Ahmed Mohamed Shibrain from Sudan. What the artists have in common, al-Khaldi reports, is that the letter allowed for total freedom in creation. Hammad pushed his shapes much further in this direction than many other Huroufiyah artists. His boldest work with Arabic letters made illegibility into an artistic virtue. Beginning from the already abstract forms of written language, Hammad went on to deconstruct and reconstruct the shapes to arrive at other possible forms of painting. This multiplied the available avenues for producing abstract art.
Copyright: Dr. Anneka Lenssen, “Mahmoud Hammad, Arabic Writing no. 11,” in Smarthistory, August 28, 2023, accessed May 31, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/mahmoud-hammad-arabic-writing-no-11/.