Remembering the “Soul of Falasteen” Art Night
Published in NB Media Co-op (1)
Published in NB Media Co-op (2)
(*artwork: Yet I Dance by Incé Husain)
“I had just heard the “soul of my soul” story,” says Laila Abuamer, co-organizer of the “Soul of Falasteen” art night held in January 2024 at Fredericton’s Charlotte Street Art Centre. “In the Arabic language, we use such deep words that we would never hear in the English language to describe the dearness of someone to your heart. So the “Soul of Falasteen” just reflects that deep connection to the land despite us not living there. It brought magic into the whole thing.”
The “Soul of Falasteen” art night was vibrant, joyful, and inescapably political. Performances were rich with poetry, song, and dance, embodying a resistance that defied the livestreamed gore of genocide in Palestine.
“I grew up with the pride of being Palestinian - the food and culture and beauty - and I will always hold that pride,” says Abuamer. “A lot of people knew about Palestine after October 7th, so all they've been seeing are limbs cut off, bodies, dead children, us mourning, Gazans in the most vulnerable ways. We are not really celebrating, but we’re almost raising awareness in a different form - we’re using art to speak up. It was a night that the community really needed.”
The art night featured many art submissions from community members. Paintings depicted fruits of Palestine, streets and mosques in Palestine, a gold Palestine sunbird. Graphic designs showed thobe-clad women dancing dabke. A knitted keffiyeh hung on a wall. Framed tatreez - of Palestinian flags and silhouettes of Gaza - perched on tables. A collage showed a series of phrases cradling images of children - “empathy beyond borders”, “camping beneath stars, not scars”, “let kids be kids”. Open to all, a blank “community canvas” accompanied by paints and brushes gradually filled with watermelons, Palestinian flags, keys, and keffiyehs.
Solidarity also flowed from interactive stations. A kite-making station, commemorating kites as symbols of hope for children in Gaza, welcomed attendees to write messages on paper kites. A “marketplace” displayed purchasable tatreez kits, bookmarks, and jewelry. A “tatreez table” displayed intricately embroidered pieces and stitching materials for all to learn.
Attendees left the night with “a piece of Palestine” - bottles of olive oil and za’atar. The gifts shed light on Israeli forces' routine burnings of olive trees and criminalization of Palestinians’ rights to pick traditional herbs.
“It all came from the heart,” says Maryam Mohammad, co-organizer of the art night. “We wanted the community to feel welcomed in our art. We wanted to tell them “you are all welcome to share this part of our life and this beautiful form of expression with us - as long as you acknowledge our pain”. I think everyone there was acknowledging our pain.”
The room overflowed with at least a hundred people. All the chairs were full. People without chairs stood. Some claimed the hallway, watching the night unfold through the open doors.
“Palestinians are used to being censored all the time,” says Mohammad. “In my childhood, I would have never seen anything like this. We’ve never seen our culture celebrated before. We’ve never seen people contribute and want to be part of Palestinian culture this way.”
Abuamer sang two traditional songs “very dear to the heart” in their original Arabic. She wore a traditional cream thobe laden with intricate peach-coloured tatreez, wrapped with a belt and a paired shawl around her head. She sang the fate of being born Palestinian - the reality of oppression and the yearning to return home. She sang resistance - lyrics coded with hidden messages that Palestinian women would sing as they visited imprisoned loved ones.
“(The first) is a very sad song at the very start, but towards the end it starts to talk about the hope we have of returning back to the homeland and the pride that we have in our people. When I sang it, I felt like, for the first time, I was actually expressing what it felt like to be a Palestinian. I always heard it as a young child,” says Abuamer. “(The second) highlights Palestinian women. They resist using songs. They would code the messages they’d want to send to their beloved ones, to resistance fighters, in the Israeli prisons.”
Overwhelmed with emotion, she “sang from the heart” to a “room full of love”. Some audience members knew the songs; the echoes of their singing reached her on stage.
Abuamer also performed an Arabic duet with a Lebanese singer; they sang the bond between Lebanon and Palestine.
“Lebanon throughout the years has always been suffering with Palestine,” says Abuamer, sharing that Israeli bombings in Lebanon increased with aggressions on Palestine. “Lebanese people are our brothers and our sisters. There’s a lot shared in our culture, and we’re neighbours.”
Three children - two boys in keffiyehs and a girl in a thobe - performed a song called “Give us our childhood”. They sang in Arabic, French, and English.
“It’s important,” Mohammad says of the song. “We constantly see children in Palestine not speaking their native tongue in a plea for the world to get to see them. And this is a theme - Palestinians learn English all the time just so they can reach the outside world.”
Abuamer says the art night “brought joy to the children”. An art station for children flowed with drawings; some drew protests for Palestine, some painted the words “Free Palestine”. One child drew himself becoming friends with the children of Gaza, the Palestinian flag behind them.
“Younger me would have loved this,” says Mohammad. “I’m so happy to see these kids and I hope this night stays with them and will be a beautiful memory for them in the future…Many people read and intellectualize the Palestinian issue so much, but for someone like me, this kind of cultural stuff was what we lived and breathed growing up. All these cultural elements are things that make us Palestinian. ”
Mohammad recited an original poem called “Tightrope”, an ode to diasporic existence. It spoke of longing, heartache, foreignness, remembrance, uncertainty. It began: “I am a woman born of two places I have never seen.”
“Part of being in the diaspora is never finding your place,” says Mohammad. “It was a poem that I’d been thinking about for years and been rewriting for years that I never felt I could get right till recently.”
She wore a tatreez-rich red cape on stage, a recent gift from Gaza. Her mother had travelled to Gaza last autumn, returning on September 28th, 2023.
“It was extra special because it came from Gaza right before the aggression,” says Mohammad. “My mom also said that when she went to pick it out, all my cousins and my aunts went with her and they all picked it out together for me as a gift, which I thought was really cute. It was like I was carrying all the generations of Palestinian women in my family that night.”
She shares a related memory of a white dress she wore to a wedding when she was four or five. Her mother sent it to Gaza, where it cycled from cousin to cousin.
“Every single one of my cousins has worn that dress. I think it’s really special, that full circle moment where they got to pick an outfit for me,” she says of her red cape. “These are all family members I haven’t met before.”
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The art night stage also flared with a traditional jingle dress dance by Wolastoqiyik artist Emma Hassencahl-Perley. The dance originates from three distinct Ojibwe communities and has been shared cross-culturally.
“We feel very connected to the Indigenous community because they have also undergone colonization, they’ve also undergone genocide,” says Mohammad. “These are things that are known about Canadian history. We have many outspoken Indigenous members of the community who speak out about Palestine quite consistently.”
Hassencahl-Perley teaches at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design in the Wabanaki Visual Arts program, lectures on Indigenous art history, and curates Indigenous art at the Beaverbrook art gallery. Abuamer invited her through Instagram to the “Soul of Falasteen” art night.
“I felt inspired, called upon, to dance, and it’s kind of hard to explain why, but it had been the first time that I danced in a couple of years,” says Hassencahl-Perley.
She shares the story of the jingle dress dance. It begins with the sickness of a young girl. Her uncle, or father figure, dreamt of the dance and the dress, and made the dress out of rolled tobacco upon waking. When the girl wore the dress and danced, her ailment healed.
“The dance represents healing,” says Hassencahl-Perley. “And the person who wears the dress has the responsibility to pray for the healing of a person, a community, any current issue plaguing the world.”
Hassencahl-Perley describes the art night as “really warm” and “welcoming.” Her initial nervousness about dancing on stage began to fade. She settled into the evening with Elder Alma Brooks, a Maliseet elder from Saint Mary’s First Nation. Brooks offered a prayer to the art night and spoke about the paralleled experiences of Indigenous women worldwide. She extended her prayer to mothers, grandmothers, and children of Palestine. She did a smudging, the smoke of burnt sage quietly filling the room.
“Love comes naturally in grief,” says Hassencahl-Perley. “There’s anger but there’s love as well, and that’s the healing quality of the process. There’s also a lot of talent to be shared with speeches and stories and poems.”
When Abuamer and the children sang at the art night, Hassencahl-Perley became lost “in a trance… transported to a different place”. Though she doesn’t speak Arabic, she felt comforted and moved.
“Laila sang a couple of songs. She reminded me of my friend, Amanda, who will sing in our language. It brought me to such a comforting feeling, and also reminded me of being in the powwow circle when people are sharing songs, or when I’m in a space with my friends and they’re singing. She brought me into that comfort,” says Hassencahl-Perley. “When the children sang a song in Arabic, my initial reaction was that I knew it was very moving. (When they) translated a verse in English, it became very gut-wrenching - they’re singing this plea for Palestinian children to grow up and have a normal, healthy childhood. It brought me back down to reality, because the song was so nice, and then it was so real.”
She describes the paralleled experiences of Indigenous women as a shared understanding of how women hold a nation intact.
“Western powers understand that they have to eradicate women and children,” says Hassencahl-Perley. “We understand that it is to bring a nation to a halt. (Palestine) hit home in that aspect, to the violent history of Turtle Island throughout colonization.”
Hassencahl-Perley says the Israeli occupation reminds people of children’s experiences in residential schools; that there is a shared history of displacement from rightful homelands and constant gaslighting insisting otherwise; that there is a shared experience in having limited access to resources that were once abundant.
She shares that Canada rewarded the killings of Indigenous people, with Nova Scotia offering legalized bounties for their murders (see page 24). Written in 1756, a cash bounty - not rescinded to this day - reads: “a Reward of Thirty Pounds for every male Indian Prisoner above the Age of Sixteen Years brought in alive or a scalp of such Male Indian Twenty Five Pounds…Twenty five pounds for every Indian woman or child brought in alive”.
Hassencahl-Perley’s jingle dress was made from ripped shreds of the Indian Act bonded to the red of the Canadian flag. Established in 1876, the Indian Act legislated the forced assimilation of Indigenous communities.
“The Indian Act controls our lives on a daily basis in ways that mainstream society may not expect. It determines who’s an Indian, who's not, how they access education, where they live, where they're buried.”
The dress honours Hassencahl-Perley’s grandmother and Indigenous culture. She began creating it as an undergraduate, finishing it in 2018.
“With the dress, I wanted to talk about the Indian Act’s impact on culture bans - dance, language, prayer, ceremony. Those things were outlawed through the Indian Act,” says Hassencahl-Perley. “I made the dress almost like a replica of my great grandmother’s dress because she is noted as being responsible as the person who brought culture back into my community when the church still had heavy control.”
Hassencahl-Perley’s awareness of Palestine came in October 2023 through Indigenous art communities on Instagram. Some Indigenous artists were criticizing others for being silent in the face of violence in Palestine. They were adamant that Palestine was a “land back” and “every child matters” issue, mirroring the core of Indigenous rights movements in North America.
“They were urging us to not look away, and stand with love and solidarity with Palestinian struggles for liberation because these issues affect us both historically and globally.”
She shared that Indigenous artists organized a “Turtle Island Indigenous Artists for Palestine” art raffle fundraiser to raise money for Glia International, a company 3D-printing medical supplies for Gaza, and other community-led initiatives for human rights in Palestine. They raised over $60,000 dollars, with art donations from over a hundred Indigenous artists. Hassencahl-Perley considers art to be a “language that everyone can speak a little bit of”, uniting people across worldviews and offering an intuitive window into communities’ belief systems, morals, values, and histories.
“The arts sector cannot return to the former state of censoring marginalized and racialized experiences under colonialism,” says Hassencahl-Perley of the role of artists. “In this territory, we believe that artists are the recorders of history, the truth seekers, the truth tellers. The role of the artist is supposed to be this conscious effort of love - to illuminate through creativity. And we recognize that art upholds everything in our lives - languages, laws, traditions, histories, politics. So art often becomes a visual language or identity of sociopolitical movements as well. By participating, we exercise our power and our care for others. ”
Hassencahl-Perley has been sourcing and sharing information about Palestine from Palestinian journalists, like Bisan Owda and Motaz Azaiza. She says she has “learned everything from social media”, aware of the constant propaganda in mainstream Western news. Her “tidbits of information” span early histories of occupation, Palestinian symbols of resistance, and tatreez motifs.
“I can’t help but think that if this (genocide) were going on in a country with predominantly White people, then awareness of it would be so expansive. I'm not naive in that. I hope that it sheds more light on systemic racism, on any kind of barriers that have been set up throughout colonization and how deeply ingrained it is for communities,” says Hassencahl-Perley. “We didn't have camera phones five hundred plus years ago, so we actually don't understand the level of horror and atrocity that our ancestors faced at that time. We are understanding the levels now.”
***
Indigo Poirier and Nomaan X, organizers with Fredericton Palestine Solidarity, volunteered at the art night. They helped prepare the allocated room at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre, and coordinated groups of other volunteers recruited through social media. Both greatly enjoyed the art night.
“I had never seen an event like this,” says X. “Most people I spoke with were very impressed - people were saying there should be more. It was educational. If someone just walked in and had no idea what was going on, they would have learned something about the situation. It was cultural but it was entangled with the political situation.”
X had been “reading about Palestine for a while”, but acknowledged that discussions about Palestinian culture are often drowned out by their surrounding political landscapes. Abuamer’s songs drew X to an appreciation of Arabic detangled from the religious contexts in which he had learned it.
“It felt completely like - in my head - outside of religion, there is no Arabic. So I never had any appreciation for it or reason to look into it,” says X. “And now it is coming back in a more organic way, as a language that people use for talking and singing and for writing poetry. That feels much nicer and more relatable.”
Poirier says the turnout at the art night was “really beautiful” and “way more than expected”. As the night unfolded, she pondered Indigeneity, decolonization, and connections between Palestine and Indigenous history.
“I’m native. Since I started learning about Palestine, I had been coming at it from the perspective that Canada is also a genocidal settler colonialist project, it’s just a few hundred years further ahead. And Canada for the most part has been pretty successful in doing that. There are still native people here. But we don’t have sovereignty over our land, or even our transitional forms of governance have largely been replaced. The connections were pretty much immediately obvious.”
One speaker at the art night talked about missing the olive trees in Palestine. This reminded Poirier of “how vital it is for a culture to be tied to a place”, and the massive loss when such bonds are severed. She cherished Abuamer’s song about Palestinian women singing in code to loved ones in Israeli prisons; it showed her the sheer strength of Palestinian culture.
“I found that (song) really inspiring, because to me, a culture that’s still alive and vibrant is able to evolve and adapt like that and come up with new situations in response to oppression and hardship,” says Poirier. “It gave me more faith in the resistance. Most of what I'd been seeing on social media from Palestine was really awful and sad.”
For Poirier, art is “an escape”. It inspires happiness and bonds, drawing on the role of emotions in shaping who we are.
“Sometimes I think that we tend to undervalue the role that emotion and connection plays in forming who we are. So I feel like that aspect of humanizing people, almost feeling that you have a direct connection with them, even if it's someone you've never met - I think that's something you can only get through art. Really good artists - they can speak directly to your soul.”
***
Rebecca Burns, a nurse and organizer with Fredericton Palestine Solidarity, experienced the art night as an attendee.
“I was really curious about the cultural experience of it all as a positive complement to all of the work we have been doing with trying to end the genocide,” says Burns. “I was excited about the beauty and the cultural aspects.”
Like Poirier, Burns was moved by Abuamer’s song about Palestinian women singing encoded messages. It overwrote rampant Western stereotypes that reduced Arab women to meek, oppressed caricatures.
“Laila spoke about how, in her experience, the women that she looked up to the most are Arab women, and this was one example of that strength and that power. That really stuck with me.”
Burns appreciated the art night’s inclusion of work from non-Palestinian community members who had been marked by Palestine. Their creations were inspired by personal understandings of Palestine and experiences in solidarity movements. She also liked the interactive stations at the art night, like the kite-making and the blank canvas.
“The fact that the artists that had produced works of art - many of them were not Palestinian and were just impacted by what they had learned about Palestine and the struggle - I thought that was really cool. Initially, I had imagined a Palestinian art night to have (only) Palestinian artists.”
Mohammad’s poem was also memorable for Burns. It evoked images of a young girl trying to place herself in the world and decipher her roots amidst all-encompassing pressures to conform to Western norms. As Mohammad’s poem rose to its climactic finish, she recited: “How was a child supposed to know to hold on? How was a child supposed to predict this ache of longing that would grow in her bones as she matured? How was a child struggling to fit in, smiling through the stares, supposed to know?”
“I wish I could read it again because it was amazing,” says Burns. “It wasn't just the words. It was the delivery. The speed of it. The intensity of it. It was the feeling. How would you know, at that age, that you would want so much to connect with your history and identity? Most teenagers probably don't really realize that. And then, how do you go back? How do young children communicate that to their parents? You just don't know what you're going to want to know in the future.”
Burns grew up in the United States. She says she “did not have a broad perspective” until moving to Canada.
“I remember this sort of feeling that there was a “good side” and a “bad side”, and that Israel was the good side. That was just the vibe that was around.”
In 2014, she attended a film festival documenting the illegal expansion of Israeli settlements and Israeli forces’ destruction of Palestinian farms and olive trees. This opened her eyes.
“I’ve always carried that experience with me, though not being directly involved in any solidarity efforts. Until last year - that was when I really became immersed in it.”
Burns shared that her sister in law, who she had invited to the art night, said the event left her feeling “the most connected to humanity that she had felt in a really, really, long time”. She left with a door prize that her daughter had won - a basket filled with food from the Middle East - and talked meaningfully with a Palestinian community member. Prior to attending, her sister in law was not aware of Palestine.
“She was crying during the event as well,” says Burns. “And we've been able to have more conversations since then. She did not realize that there were Palestinians in Fredericton - she connected to humanity and a realization. To meet someone directly in your own community and hear a bit of their story - it was just very powerful for her.”
The art night closed with standing ovations. Burns described a “surge of energy, a palpable feeling of connection”.
“People were yearning for a sense of the beauty and the richness of the culture. And seeing so much cultural destruction - in the libraries and the universities and the historical archives and all of these things that were destroyed - it was like a night of recreating or showcasing those things,” says Burns. “The overall feeling that I came away with was a sense of strength, resilience, and beauty. And that would be the words that came to mind for me for what “the soul of Falasteen” is.” ♦
Excerpts of this article appeared in The NB Media Co-op on February 11th, 2025:
https://nbmediacoop.org/2025/02/11/remembering-the-soul-of-falasteen-art-night/
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