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Ismail
Shammout, now living in Amman, Jordan, is a pioneer of Palestinian
contemporary art, a firmly established and widely recognized artist
of power and distinction.
In
1997, Ismail Shammout returned to his home town in Palestine, Lydda,
as a “tourist” after an absence
of 50 years. The visit was an intensely emotional experience: part
happiness at being once again in the town where he was born and
spent his childhood and youth, and part wrenching pain at the loss
and forced exile of his Palestinian people.
Shammout was filled with joy at finding the mosque and the church of
St. George still standing side by side as he remembered them. As a
child, he had attended many services in the church with his
Christian friends, and celebrated with them the big, joyous “Feast
of Lydda” in honor of St. George, who is believed to be buried in
the town. The first thing Muslim Ismail and his wife Tamam did, was
to enter the church and light two candles. Then they visited the
Mosque to pray and give thanks.
Next,
Ismail looked for the house where he, his father and grandfather had
been born. A Jewish family was now in possession of his family home
and Ismail was bitterly disappointed when he was refused entry.
Ismail
was just 18 years old in 1948, and clearly recalls the tragic events
of that time.
“Contrary to the myth perpetrated by Israel and the US and Western
media, the people of Lydda did not leave their homes voluntarily,”
says Ismail. In fact, led by their elders they were determined to
stay put come what may, and they had made a pact among themselves to
that effect.
Lydda
was an agricultural town of 25,000 Palestinians in the central
“triangle” part of Palestine allocated to the Arabs in
the UN partition plan of 1947.
On July
9, 1948, when the Israeli army entered Lydda in force, there was no
Arab army there, the townspeople had no arms or weapons, and there
was practically no resistance. Yet, in spite of this, the Israeli
army acted with deliberate ruthless brutality. All males were
rounded up and enclosed in a compound. A curfew was imposed for two
days preventing the purchase of food necessities. On the morning of
the third day, Ismail and his family watched from their windows as
Israeli soldiers gunned down their neighbors’ doors, and screaming,
striking and shoving with their guns, drove the people out on the
street. Then it was the Shammout family’s turn. Soldiers beat down
their door shouting “Out! Out!” As the terrified family hastened to
comply, they were body searched and all valuables removed. At the
last moment before being evicted Ismail had quickly picked up a
small photo album which was lying around and his prized British
Palestine passport. An Israeli soldier tried snatching them from
him, but Ismail stubbornly refused to let go. These two items were
all that the Shammout family-- father, mother, four sons, and three
daughters-- came away with from their ancestral home.
The
townspeople were first herded into compounds. “There were tens of
thousands of us, Ismail recalls. (Actually there were 25.00 people
forcibly evacuated from Lydda that day). “There were old men and
women, children, babies, pregnant women, sick people.” At noon the
Israeli soldiers, gun-prodding, striking, and kicking, with
indiscriminate brutality, drove the people out of the compounds and
marched them to the east, shouting: “yallah ‘ala Abdallah”, “Go, go
to Abdallah” referring to king Abdallah I of Trans-Jordan.
It was
Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, the July sun beat down
relentlessly as the townspeople were marched over rough, dusty
terrain towards the east, towards ‘Abdallah. Surrounded by
terrorizing Israeli soldiers they marched without food, without
water; thirst became an agony. They marched in bewilderment and
helplessness, parched with thirst, into exile, homelessness, to an
unknown destination.
At one
point, Ismail managed to slip into an orange grove, found an old
rusty tin and filled it with water from an outdoor tap. As he was
carrying the water to his family, an Israeli army jeep suddenly
blocked his way and an Israeli
soldier pointed a gun at his head and commanded “Drop it! Drop it!”
The
Shammout family marched all that hot July day, until midnight when
they reached the Arab village of Ni’lin, north of Ramallah, where
the villagers welcomed them with a couple of loaves of Pita bread
and water. “We were the lucky ones,” says Ismail. “We were among the
first to arrive. It took the others between two to three days to get
to Ni’lin. Many collapsed on the way. Many did not make it.”
For
three days the exhausted Shamout family survived on the few loaves
of bread the villagers could spare and slept outdoors on the rough
ground. Finally, the Jordanian army trucked the homeless refugees to
Ramallah, where the Shammout family was billeted to a girls’ school.
“Several families had to share one room,” Ismail recalls. For two
weeks, Ismail and his family subsisted on bread and water. But then,
Ismail’s father who had been a wholesale produce merchant in Lydda,
realizing that the Israelis had no intention of allowing the
refugees to return to their homes, moved his family to Khan Yunis in
the Gaza area, where he had business colleagues, and there, with
thousands of other refugees, he and his sons eked out a living.
In Khan
Yunis, Ismail and his brothers worked at anything they could get.
They sold bread. “We sold anything there was to sell. We learned to
make halawah (a sweet confection} at home and sold it to children.”
When a school was opened for the refugee children, Ismail and a
brother applied as volunteer teachers. They taught school in the
morning on voluntary basis, and sold halawah to the children in the
afternoon.
Throughout this period Ismail had held tight to his dream. His
overriding love was drawing and painting and his dream was to attend
art school and become a great painter. He had been drawing and
painting since childhood. His talent was soon recognized by the
school authorities in Khan Yunis, and he was appointed art
instructor in three schools, this time with a tiny salary. It took
Ismail a whole year to save 10 Egyptian pounds ($ 30). With this
paltry sum in his pocket, and a big chunk of courage, Ismail left
for Egypt in search for his dream. He applied and was admitted to
the college of Fine Arts in Cairo. After school he worked as a
messenger and assistant at a poster advertising agency. He painted
in every free minute, and in July 1953, Shammout carried over 60
paintings (oil, watercolor, and drawings) to Gaza for the first ever
Palestinian art exhibition.
In Gaza
his paintings were received with great interest and pride. Here was
a Palestinian artist with Palestinian themes, which aroused intense
emotional response among the viewers. The success of the exhibition
gave Shammout self-confidence and an appreciation of the power of
painting to educate, influence and affect. One of the paintings
exhibited was the now well known “whereto”. A distraught father, on
the forced march out of Lydda, carries a sleeping child on his left
shoulder, while a little girl clutches his right hand and looks up
at him in exhaustion and bewilderment, and a third child trails
behind: a graphic record of the heart-rending loss and helplessness
with which each of the viewers identified.
This
exhibition was followed by a second exhibition in Cairo which was
inaugurated by president Jamal ‘Abd Al-Nasir of Egypt. Shammout
displayed 55 paintings. Two other Palestinian artists were invited
by Shammout to participate. Tamam al Akhal (Shammout’s future wife)
and Nihad Sibasi. This exhibition met with equal success. It was
very well received in Palestinian and Arab art circles, and was
given sizeable coverage in the Egyptian press. With the money from
the sale of his paintings, Shammout, still following his dream,
traveled to Italy to enroll at the Academia De Belle Arti in Rome.
Three months after his arrival, he won first prize at an exhibition:
the prize was two years study at the academy. Shamout’s dream had
been realized!
Palestinian themes and the tragic Palestinian experience continue to
be a hallmark of Shammout’s work. He and his wife, Tamam are in the
process of recording Palestinian history in oil on canvass. To date,
they have produced eight large wall- sized panels (each 2x1.6
meters) of Palestinian life in Lydda and Jaffa (Tamam’s home town)
before, during, and after the “Nakbah”, the Palestinian holocaust of
loss and expulsion. Shammout’s painting of life in Lydda before 1948
depicts in colors of sun and fruit the tranquil, peaceful joys of a
small agricultural community.
These
epic pieces of art are witnesses to Palestinian history, to the
Palestinian attachment to their land, the wrenching pain of loss and
exile, and undying hope for future redemption. They are Ismail and
Tamam Shammout’s finest legacy.
Mrs. Joury was born in Nazareth, Palestine,
and is now a Jordanian citizen. She began her education at the
Beirut College for Women in Beirut, Lebanon, continued at the
American University at Cairo, Egypt, and obtained her B.A. degree
from Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Mrs. Joury received a M.A.
degree from Haverford College at Haverford, Pennsylvania. Following
the completion of her studies, she worked as an Information Officer
for the Jordanian Tourist Department, as an Instructor and Assistant
Dean of Women at the American University of Beirut, and in the
Research and Translation Office in Beirut. She was also employed as
a Librarian at the Arab States Delegation Office in New York City.
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