Remembering the Soul of Falasteen Art Night

On Sunday, February 23, the 2025 Falasteen Art Gala will be held at Fredericton’s Charlotte Street Arts Centre, building on the vibrant success of the Soul of Falasteen Art Night held last year. Entries are by donation with a suggested $10 contribution, and the event will run from 2:00 to 5:00 PM.

“With this year’s event, we are hoping to introduce and highlight Palestinian artistic techniques and mediums that we didn’t highlight last year,” says co-organizer Laila Abuamer. “We will be having an auction, and we will be fundraising for Gaza. Our team is yet to discuss where the funds will go but by the time of the event it will be clarified to guests.”

There will also be raffles and favours for guests, and support for Gazan artists who are still in Gaza.

“We are boosting their Go-Fund-Me [pages],” says Abuamer of the Gazan artists. “Practicing your art here is a privilege because Gazan artists are finding it quite hard to practice their own art.”

Updates on the planned Falasteen Art Gala can be found at the Soul of Falasteen Society Instagram page. Abuamer shares that the Soul of Falasteen Society emerged as a group this year; it aims to organize a series of artistic events that “keep the Palestinian culture alive and uses art as a way to raise awareness of the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian people.”

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Abuamer says far more organizers, volunteers, and local sponsors are involved in the gala this year. A dozen community members signed up to help within the first twenty-four hours of the Soul of Falasteen Society’s call for volunteers.

“This just tells us about how excited people are to be part of this and help with it.”

Abuamer and Maryam Mohammad, co-organizers of last year’s Soul of Falasteen Art Night held in January 2024 at the Charlotte Street Art Centre, reminisce on their vision for the first art night and how the night unfolded.

For more coverage of last year’s art night, see the NB Media Co-op’s accompanying article, ‘Called upon to dance’: Indigenous artist performs at Soul of Falasteen Art Night.

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“I had just heard the “soul of my soul” story,” says Abuamer of choosing the name ‘Soul of Falasteen’ for last year’s art night. “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 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 28, 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.”

Incé Husain is a neuroscience graduate student and journalist who writes for the NB Media Co-op and the Antler River Media Co-op. She pursues local stories independently at The Unprecedented Times. She is based in London, Ontario.

A version of this article was first published by the The Unprecedented Times on January 18, 2025.