Tight Space 2019

Ghassan Kanafani offered a profound understanding of imprisonment in his novel Umm Saad. Through the voice of the novel’s heroine, Umm Saad, he writes:

“Do you think we do not live in prison? What do we do in the camp except walk inside that strange prison? Prisons come in many forms, cousin, many forms! The camp is a prison, your house is a prison, the newspaper is a prison, the radio is a prison, the bus, the street, and people’s eyes… Our lives are a prison, the past twenty years are a prison, the village headman is a prison… You speak of prisons? You have been imprisoned all your life. You deceive yourself, cousin, into believing that the bars of your prison are flower vases. You yourself are a prison. So why do you think that Saad is the one who is imprisoned?

And then she add

“Listen, I know that Saad will leave prison… the whole prison, do you understand? And where will Saad go? To the revolution, of course. If Saad does not go, then who will?”

Despite the pain and sorrow that Kanafani never leaves unanswered, his text is imbued with revolutionary optimism. Umm Saad foretells liberation and believes that a new generation will carry the banner of freedom.

Kanafani wrote Umm Saad in 1969. In this novel, a character who had appeared lost and uncertain in his earlier works reaches a new level of political awareness and revolutionary maturity.

Through Umm Saad, Kanafani embodied a revolutionary consciousness needed by all those who are crushed by reality yet continue to dream of a better future. He seemed to possess a prophetic vision, writing about our present as if he were living it himself, urging us to summon the spirit of resistance, to rebel against imprisonment and the jailer, and to reject a reality that persists despite the absence of Umm Saad and the disappearance of her revolutionary consciousness.

Tight Space is a series of forty ink drawings on paper. It is a record and expression of a condition that I denied for many years: a state of nihilism, disorientation, confinement, disgust, paralysis, helplessness, fragmentation, division, and the loss of hope a prison within a prison.

The unstable human forms that inhabit these drawings are expressions of refusal and rebellion against reality. Yet they may also be surrendering to their own fractures and dispersal. They drift through the narrow space of the picture plane searching for a window, or perhaps for a revolution visible on the horizon but without hope.

Unlike Umm Saad.

Tight Space

40 drawings
Ink on Fabriano paper, 300 gsm
30 × 42 cm
2019

Read Umm Saad. My message is there.