Zuhdi al-Adawi

By Samia A. Halaby

Except from the book “Liberation Art of Palestine”

Artist Zuhdie Al Adawi was born in 1952 in Nusairat refugee camp in Ghazze, where his parents had settled after their forced eviction from Al Lidd in 1948. He grew up with his parents’ memories of the traumatic march through the wilderness forced on them by Zionist gangs. With the 1967 war of occupation, Adawi joined the freedom fighters. He was captured and imprisoned at Askalan in 1970, and remained there until 1985.

Adawi completed his education studying with other prisoners. Prison authorities allowed the Egyptian Ministry of Education to conduct an exam, which he passed, and thus earned his baccalaureate. Adawi began making art without any special training. He worked on handkerchiefs that were folded and taken out in the pockets of family members. When handkerchiefs were unavailable, he too used sections of his pillow covers. He said that whenever the guards discovered them, they would place them in solitary confinement for one full week.1

An exhibition of the art of Palestinian prisoners at the Soviet Cultural Center in Damascus took place one month before Adawi left prison. After the exhibition, prison authorities began to search visitors thoroughly, and Adawi had to invent new ways to smuggle his art out. He was sent to Lebanon in 1985 when a prisoner exchange agreement was completed between Israel and the PLO. In Lebanon he studied for six months at the Center for the Visual Arts. Shortly thereafter, Adawi moved to Damascus, where he found a more suitable environment and began a new period of experimentation.

In Day of the Prisoner, 1984, Adawi combines symbols of imprisonment and patriotism into a coherent image. Through handcuffs and prison bars there appears a woman whose hair is arranged in the colors of the revolutionary flag. She wears a red kufiyye, a scarf symbolic of the Palestinian revolution. Arched doorways, a flame, lightning, crowds of people, chains, and the cactus plant, the latter symbolizing patience and endurance, complete the picture. In another painting, Stronger than the Battering Rod, 1984, Adawi is able to assemble and cohere a large number of symbols. The first image presented to us is the rod dripping with blood. Behind it the prisoner stands firm but looks backward towards a group of symbols of Palestine, with crowds of people in attendance. These crowds tell us that political prisoners fear being forgotten in prison, while the picture implies the stubborn endurance of those who have a just cause.

A prisoner with a huge snake coiled around his chest stretching his hand over barbed wire, a huge hand marked with the star of David crashing a small head into the earth, and a prisoner looking up from a deep hole into light, are some of the images that Adawi painted while at Askalan prison. In Hunger, 1984, Adawi paints Hebrew markings on the shirt of an emaciated prisoner, and shows his intestines through his shirt. In another painting, commemorating the massacre at Sabra and Shatilla, a huge purple octopus with a knife in one tentacle is slaughtering people.