Menna Hamouda and her family had to flee into Gaza twice. She draws what she experienced with chalk and charcoal on walls and rubble.
myThey are dark portraits that the young Palestinian artist Menna Hamouda draws on the walls of houses in the Gaza Strip. Screaming women with children wrapped in shrouds, exhausted faces whose it is not clear if they are still alive or already dead. The combination of the black charcoals and the white chalk that she uses for her drawings on the walls and rubble give the images something dark, rudimentary, existential.
Menna, 21, has experienced a lot in the last five months. She comes from Beit Lahia, in the north of the Gaza Strip, near Israel. The location that the Israeli army first attacked after the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7. Menna spent six days in the city, where today barely one stone remains on another, when the bombardment became too intense.
“We just wanted to get out alive, that was our only goal,” he reflects. They fled on foot more than ten kilometers to Gaza City, where they found refuge in a school for another month. When Gaza City became the center of fighting, they had to flee again. The Israeli military had previously promised civilians a safe corridor to the south, but that was not the case, according to Menna. “That was a lie, there were tanks everywhere, there were shots, there were bombings in our vicinity. “Once again it was a miracle that we survived and reached Deir al-Balah.”
The city in the center of the Gaza Strip is now their new home. She lives in a tent with her family of six. There is also her father, who before the war was paralyzed due to a neurological disorder and was pushed in a wheelchair the entire way. “I didn't bring anything from my old life except what I was wearing and what I could carry,” she says.
Menna used to have a small studio in Beit Lahia where he taught others to draw. For her, art was above all fun with happy colors and images. She shows photos and videos from that time on her cell phone. A group draws portraits of teenagers in her studio under her instructions. Another video shows Menna painting the walls of a school in pink and sky blue, with motifs of children laughing and playing. In another photo, Menna smiles at the camera, smeared with paint.
“Before the war, Menna was a girl full of optimism. She loved life, she went out with her friends. “She dreamed of local and international exhibitions,” she says of herself in the third person, sitting on the floor of her shop. Her old life is like a movie that no longer has any meaning for her today.
But Deir al-Balah is no longer a safe place either. “At first I thought we were protected here, but here we are also bombed every day. Every time I escaped, another part of me died, thousands of times over,” he says. Like most people in the Gaza Strip, Menna is traumatized by what she has experienced and by the uncertain future. “I lost friends, my colleagues, many people she loved. Some are still under the rubble, others are injured. I have no news of others.” He fears it will be her next turn.
“I am an artist and I try to describe what happens inside me, trying to capture all this negative energy of the place in images.” She then packs her bag at the store to work outside. Since she had to leave her art supplies behind when she fled, she uses pieces of charcoal and chalk that she found in neighboring schools.
“Actually, chalk is intended for school blackboards and not for home walls. But in the Gaza Strip, the artist has to make do with what he finds for his work. The art we create depends not only on what we can do, but on what we have available,” he explains. He wants his drawings to be seen everywhere, that's why he goes out into the street and has started painting the walls of the houses. The images don't tell other people's stories, they are things she experiences herself, she explains. “I hear many stories every day. “There remain in me, in my head and in my heart, a lot of disturbing memories.”
Menna has something to say about each work. “This boy lost his entire family, he was the only survivor,” she says. Or: “This baby is three months old, he is dead” and: “This young man worked hard and saved to be able to afford an apartment, and now he is sitting in front of the rubble of his house.” drawings of the tragic stories that are written every day in the Gaza Strip.
And then he stands in front of his self-portrait. She wears a headscarf, but the portrait of the 21-year-old shows her flowing, gray hair. Her gaze is fixed. Black tears well up from one eye, the other is covered by a hand with a Palestinian flag painted on it, but beneath it there is blood running down her face. The artist describes her self-portrait with the following words: “She is strong, Menna tries to hide her pain. But at the same time she is trying to challenge all the pain that is inside her.” There it is again, the third person.
It is also the pain that paints the dark images on the walls of the houses, images that speak to the soul of a young and tense artist in the Gaza Strip after more than five months of suffering and war.
This text is based on material from a local cameraman in Deir al-Balah who filmed and conducted interviews there on behalf of the author. Currently only Palestinian journalists work in the Gaza Strip. Currently, foreign journalists only come to Gaza with the Israeli army.