Gaza Cactus

Jessie Fisher: What is the medium and scale of the original work?
Emna Zghal: The original work dated 2024 is 72”x72” (183 cm x 183 cm), ink, collage, and ink pen on paper.
Jessie Fisher: Is this the first time you have used prompts from another writer in your work?
Emna Zghal: No, it is not the first time that I used work with text. Check here. I guess the closest to this project would be “The Prophet of Back Folk” that used the text of a single poet. 
Jessie Fisher: Could you discuss your process, specifically how an image forms for you, does it flow through a series of work during a particular period of time spent ruminating on forms and subjects or does it emerge uniquely within each image?
Emna Zghal: It differs from one painting to the other. For this one I knew it was going to be displayed in public and all that was on mind was Gaza. Two years ago, I started corresponding Nasser Rabah, the Palestinian poet, living in Gaza. I asked then if he had a favorite animal or plant for me to study its pattern, as organic patterns are my subject-matter. The picture of a cylindrical-shaped cactus he had in his house, bombed recently, piqued my interest, which inspired a few drawings, but not much more. At the outset of this piece, I knew that Nasser’s cactus needed to be there, his poetry that I co-translated had to be there, and a reference to Gaza had to be there, how they would all fit together, I didn’t know.

First was the map of the strip occupying the diagonal of the picture. I wrote the word Gaza multiple times, I added Dresden, Guernica, Aleppo, but I was not satisfied. I covered the words with a thin rice paper, but it didn’t adhere uniformly. Further down the process, I tore the parts of that thin paper as you see on the top left of the map.

Then came the cactus that now you see in green. I had the idea of rendering its shapes collaging the printed lines of a woodcut I did of the pattern of the pineapple rind as both plants are made of these different clumps. It was a time-consuming process to cut these lines and glue them bit by bit, but to me, that rendered these lines with more variety and surprises than a painted line. In nature, these details draw us in. With the same pattern and method, I covered the rest of the surface, and painted within the lines flat gray and brown for the green to stand out.

Once that was done, I was no longer sure about writing the poem in the painting, but the map of Gaza was still little animated. With fillable pens, I wrote in washes of India ink and walnut ink. I started writing in Arabic in the middle, with no sense of how it was going to look. I was very nervous all along this project, because I had a deadline, which is unusual in my process, but the idea of doing a design on the computer where I can work out ideas prior to painting was not appealing. Having the doubt transpire reflects the truth of the process and is more suggestive of the turmoil of war. The way it worked out is that the texts in Arabic and English overlapped in the southern part of the strip, and I wrote the last part of the English version of the poem in the north. Nothing makes sense in war.

The poem I copied was “In the Endless War,” In the 17 years of the blockade of Gaza, war was cyclical as it was throughout the recent history of Palestine, and Nasser’s poem refers not only to the emotions of the inherent danger of war but also that it repeats. Copying the poem, already familiar to me while having no news from Nasser for over a month then, was deeply distressing.

One other feature of this war was the suffering that it brought on the young of Gaza, and I wanted something in the painting that celebrates these children and the hope that the survivors among them embody for the Palestinians and our shared humanity. I painted pieces of the cutout woodcut prints with ink in yellow, orange, blue and purple, and cut them in different size flowers to be the blooms of the thorny cactus.