Who Shall Give the Command to Spew Us Out?: On Systems of Loss-Creation and Shriveling

Once a shipping container turned into an Israeli settlement caravan, later repurposed to be a Palestinian construction site office and now sawed into sections by Nida Sinnokrot, Jonah’s Whale dominates the room in which it sits. This steel, portioned object is weathered; its history written into the layers of chipping rust, grey, pink, dark blue, and white paint, carved and graffitied over the years. You can see inside. The doors are thrown open, the glass removed from the windows, the segments that Sinnokrot compares to “the ribs of Jonah’s whale”[1] splayed out so you could walk in between them. The stained brown patterned carpet, still affixed to the floor by some miracle, and the grills over the windows are something you might find decorating a Palestinian family’s house. There is a floral red mattress encompassing the two sections furthest from the door. It is kind of domestic, but then you look at the exterior and remember that this structure, made up of steel, gypsum, and foam, moveable and temporary, has played a role in the mass transportation of goods and resources in global commerce as well as the claiming and shaping of landscapes. You look at the outside and see eleven cross-sections of an object that has been involved in the cycles and aesthetics of development and decay present in Israeli settler colonialism, real estate and building booms in present-day Palestine, and in the geographies capitalism has altered all over the world. 

In taking apart this container, Sinnokrot muddles interiority and exteriority, physically exposing global systems of power and the role objects have in influencing global subjugation and debt cycles. The title too refers to cycles of capital and debt at play in Palestine and Israel. The story of Jonah is told in Judiasm, Islam, and Christianity, the three most prevalent religions in the region. Jonah was swallowed by a whale for “defaulting”[2] on a promise with God, only to be released after three days of pleading for forgiveness and promising to repay this “divine debt.”[3]

It is important to note that Sinnokrot has intentionally used an object complicit in displacement and forced migration. I am reading a book by Andrew Ross called Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel. In the first chapters, Ross writes that during the first years after the Nakba, concrete was used as the primary material in building the new state of Israel.[4] This was a systematic decision to disadvantage Palestinian laborers, skilled in stone masonry, from the process and economy of building on the lands which they had been building for generations. Limestone, associated with the crumbling and backwards ideals of the Palestinians, would be replaced with cement, the hallmark of the new colonial Israeli aesthetic, which spoke to the perceived modernity and civilization Zionist settlers were bringing to the region.[5] However, with the nationalization of archeology and religion in Israel, the once shunned use of limestone, historically associated with traditional Palestinian homes, has become one of the most popular building materials used in Israeli settlements.

The use of limestone in Israel now serves as a reminder of the ancient birthright these settlers claim to have to the land,[6] the same ancient era in which Jonah was swallowed by the whale. The co-option of aesthetics is important to acknowledge and understand as part of power systems. Therefore the subversion of these aesthetics and materials, the dissection of them, is equally important. While Sinnokrot does this through the hybridization or transformation of objects significant to the Palestinian experience, I use the visual languages of institutions and presentation styles of what is perceived as positive information such as maps, diagrams, master plans, newspapers, didactics, display cases, manuals, etc. to subvert dominant colonial narratives.

[Lamia Abukhadra, How to Shrivel (2019). Image copyright the artist]

Seeing Nida Sinnokrot’s monumental sculpture Jonah’s Whale as part of his exhibition Expand Extract Repent Repeat in Berlin this past winter cemented something which I had been grappling to articulate for over a year: that there are systems, tools, and processes at play that force experiences of grief and sudden loss and attack the ability to form meaningful, intimate space. Sinnokrot is motivated to expose the complexities of an object involved in transnational trade and geopolitics. He writes that this is “the work of an obsessed surgeon searching for the cause of a disease, or that of an archaeologist carefully examining the petrified corpse of a creature yet to be catalogued.”[7] Similarly, I have been consumed by understanding and analyzing systems and tools involved in displacement and loss-creation. Since reading an essay by Sabrien Amrov, I have been using the term “infrastructures of intimacy"[8] to encompass intersections of home and home-making, romantic love, motherhood, safety, prosperity, place, and numerous other facets of belonging. As I continue to research Palestinian history, ecologies, architecture, geopolitics, and economies and experience and witness my own moments of grief, similarities in the causes, expressions, and cycles of loss have emerged. Displacement through illegal settlement or gentrification, the death of a loved one, or the sudden end of a relationship all result in an inexplicable void, a lack,[9] a deep desire or thirst which cannot be quenched.

In the context of Palestine, the seventy-plus years of ongoing occupation complicates how and why these losses are experienced; physical and metaphysical infrastructures of intimacy are occupied, disrupted, and attacked on a daily basis. Gazans die of cancer because they are denied entry to Israel for treatment while drug supplies dwindle due to the blockade.[10] You’re in love with someone who lives in another colonial zone, or in another country while you live in the West Bank? Tough luck, the chances of building a life with a loved one during apartheid are slim.[11] All the while, Palestinian homes are bombed, raided, taken over by settlers, bulldozed, and built over. Today we see the beginnings of illegal settlements in Israel demarcated by caravans such as the one Sinnokrot has co-opted. I see similar trailers in the US and associate them with the beginnings of gentrification.

Experiences of displacement and loss are equally common in places such as San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and in Minneapolis, where I live, due to rapid unethical urban development. I have watched entire city blocks get demolished and rebuilt into luxury condos while homeless populations set up tents along scenic bike trails. Have you noticed that the construction tools used to bulldoze homes in Palestine and build illegal Israeli settlements are the same ones demolishing your favorite community gathering spaces for more condos? Cycles of settler colonialism and capitalism are replicated and repeated globally.

There are also poetic, visual, and symbolic connections between the processes of losing an infrastructure of intimacy. Early in 2019, I printed a layered photolithograph titled HOW TO SHRIVEL.This piece is comprised of a poem printed on to vellum affixed to a diagram printed in dark red. Through the layering of text and image, I equate the process of shriveling to experiencing the loss of an infrastructure of intimacy. As Sabrien Amrov writes, “home embodies many different ideas.”[12]

[Detail, How to Shrivel (2019). Image copyright the artist]

In the context of Palestine, citrus is an economic symbol; of times in which the orange industry brought Jaffa prosperity and trade. In a familial context, I have heard several stories involving family members picking citrus fruits from trees in front of houses that were stolen from them. Upon returning to their place of diaspora, they are unable to consume the citrus. The fruits are left to shrivel and rot. My distant relative Kanaan Abukhadra’s accounts of displacement, recorded by Robert Fisk, are filled with a bitter, hardened grief. For decades he is unable to part with documentation of his land ownership in Palestine, keeping a small archive of relatively worthless legal documents, receipts, mortgages and deeds in an old blue suitcase. Yet when his sister in-law offers him oranges from the trees in front of his house, tangible objects from the home he dearly misses and has not seen since 1948, he cannot bear to eat them. He throws them away.[13] After experiencing several losses of my own, I began compulsively drying citrus fruits all over my house.

When citrus shrivels, it becomes indurate, stone-like. Coincidentally, the primary building material in traditional Palestinian homes is limestone, also called Jerusalem stone. In contemporary Occupied West Bank and Gaza, most Palestinians are directly involved in the physical building of their homes, actually putting in the bricks themselves.[14] We participate in the very creation of our infrastructures of intimacy, making their loss or destruction that much more devastating. I imply that there is a causation between the process of shriveling described in poem and the images it sits on top of; a line drawing of a crane and two masterplans for Israeli settlements currently in the process of being built, components of the systems causing mass displacement and destruction in Palestine.

In losing an infrastructure of intimacy, you are subjected to some form of ruin. Defined by Jalal Toufic as “places haunted by the living who inhabit them,”[15] I see ruins existing as both physical spaces such as an abandoned home, and metaphysical spaces such as memory and intimate relationships, haunted as we inhabit and revisit them. Viewed from a specific angle, the ruins of a Palestinian residence resembles the elastodynamic condition large bodies of water exhibit after earthquakes, called “Love waves.”[16] This diagram provides little positive information. Instead I embed my own alternative, sometimes imagined frameworks which bring to light strange intimate and historical connections and poetic occurrences in the Palestinian experience.

In his description of Jonah’s Whale, Sinnokrot asks, “how shall we escape from the pathological debts that hold claim on our lives? Who shall give the command to spew us out?”[17] I do not know. As I research and create a body of work centered on the loss of infrastructures of intimacy I too am left with a burning question: How do we who live amongst and in the aftermath of the ruins of these infrastructures reactivate spaces, memories, artifacts, and experiences through generative acts of self-determination?