Those Who Walk the Land, by Sabreen Haj Ahmad

Originally from Jenin, Sabreen Haj Ahmad examines the arsenal of colonial violence against nature. Her work explores both ecology and the Indigenous relationship to the world.

Those Who Walk the Land is a series of watercolors that visualize the stories of women in Palestine and in the diaspora. Mothers, daughters, and sisters recount the uprooting from their land and the persistence of transmission.

Female figures and animals emblematic of Palestinian culture (snakes, donkeys, camels) inhabit a floating world where the horizon line does not separate sky from earth. The figures rest on the artist’s palms and soles, which she traced onto the paper she paints directly on the ground.

Everything begins on earth: where jasmine and orchids bloom; where vines and olive trees take root; where the greed of black goats keeps thorny bushes from catching fire; where bees cut through the air heavy with pollen and ants till the soil. The transformation of this biodiversity, brought about by the introduction of invasive pine trees and bird species, is one of the weapons used in the planned destruction of the landscape.

Everything begins on earth, where mothers embrace the bodies of their sons before letting them rest. Where their tears swell the furrows of streams and irrigate the poppies, symbols of the dead. Sabreen Haj Ahmad emphasizes relationships of care within a colonial context: the umbilical cord and the stitches of embroidery bear witness to a holistic relationship with the land, both material and spiritual. Her watercolors, sometimes metallic, become illuminations, echoing compositions observed in the Christian and Muslim places of worship of her childhood. The landscape becomes a monument.

Violence against the land operates like that of the bulldozer: it erases the traces of Palestinian history, seeks to cover memories, and to conceal places of dwelling, worship, and remembrance.

Seventy years ago, the Israeli army destroyed numerous Palestinian villages. Pines were planted among the ruins of houses to hide them. But the roots of the trees eventually brought the stones of the foundations back to the surface. “The people,” said Kateb Yacine, “do not resist for their landscape, but with their landscape.” For everything begins on earth, where the orchid, the jasmine, and the poppy never wither.