Palestine Books

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Nahida Halaby Gordon, Editor

Foreword by Mitri Raheb

With a Discussion Leader’s Guide and color photographs.

Palestine Is Our Home contains the memories of Palestinians who have suffered loss of home, community, and country at the hands of a people who themselves have suffered greatly. The suffering and loss experienced by the Palestinians, which they call Al Nakba, continues to today and is aided by countries of the West. In spite of a brutal military occupation of their country, Palestinians have kept their identity as Palestinians and through perseverance have kept their culture vibrant and alive. They continue to build their communities in spite of the daily hardships, humiliations, and death inflicted on them by the military occupation. The book contains a brief contemporary history of Palestine, short essays, first hand testimonies from Palestinians who experienced different periods of their country’s painful recent history, and chapters on the liberation art of currently occupied Palestine and on the origins of the traditional Palestinian costume. Sixty-one black and white images – maps, photographs, works of art, traditional costumes, and embroidery – serve to illustrate the narratives and chapters of the book. A discussion leader’s guide and a series of questions at the end of each section are provided to aid group discussion and reflection.

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This book documents a narrow part of painter Samia Halaby’s insights resulting from the practice of actively seeing the world and painting it. It is an explanation of how shapes evolved in her paintings beginning in the early 1980s. These ideas were recorded in a little sketchbook, which started as a reply to a question posed by a friend of the artist. The a question was about shape not color and so it is that shape is the focus of this book even though one cannot really separate shape from color in painting as they cannot exist separately.

Book is available to purchase directly from the publisher. Please use the “Get In Touch” button on the contact page to reach the publisher directly.

By Samia A. Halaby

Art in Palestine is part of the liberation struggle. In her book Liberation Art of Palestine, Samia A. Halaby puts this art in context, explains its symbols, development and historical roots, and gives important insights into one of the conflicts shaking the world today. Material conditions sometimes made traditional art materials hard to find, so artists turned to using bits of exploded shell casings, leather and parts of houses destroyed by the Israeli army in their compositions. In spite of repression and attacks, Palestinian artists persisted. Halaby focuses her book on two broad movements of Palestinian art. One grew up in the liberation movement in Lebanon during the 1970s and the other drew its impulse from the first Intifada. She puts them in their Arab context, since the Palestinians are an Arab people, and shows their relation to the visual forms produced by Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism and the Mexican mural tradition, all of which reflect a revolutionary base. The use of certain symbols in Palestinian art--the cactus, the eye, the horse, the mother--is explained by Halaby in clear and illuminating detail. Full-color plates in the back of the book represent the work of many of the artists discussed, who are carefully put in their cultural and political context. As Halaby states, “The whole point of this book is to illustrate and explain that the true art of Palestine rests on the Palestinian struggle for liberation."