Art in the time of monsters
Academic, poet and sculptor Samer Abdelnour writes on confronting earthborn monsters in Gaza and the chimeric imaginary.
Glimpses by Samer Abdelnour | Originally published in the print edition, October 11th 2024
Earthborn monsters. Earthborn savages. Fearsome aborigines. Redoubtable beasts. This is how a tribe of six-armed giants known as the Gegenees are described in the Greek epic The Argonautica, before being slaughtered by Hercules and the Argonauts. I first read about the Gegenees while researching a sculpture project to express the apocalyptic horrors inflicted on our people.
Children’s starved tortured buried torn hanging bullet-ridden dust-covered bodies. Bodies without limbs. Limbs without bodies. Pieces in plastic bags and shrouds. I am suffocating, seeking some way to externalise an enduring indescribable concrete pain, pain, perhaps by turning it into objects, concrete things I can speak with, shout at, hold, put away, lock away. A physical objectification. But how does one externalise holocaust?
A question came to me one night: Must our children be born with multiple limbs? I began to explore the idea of our children forcibly evolving under pressure of seismic bombardment, into creatures, like crustaceans. Like woodlice, gifted with fourteen limbs and the ability to conglobate when threatened. How incredible if our children could instinctively roll into their protected selves at any hint of danger. Or lose three limbs and still have eleven. But no, this is too close to the genociders’ rhetoric. This is how they see us, how they legitimate our slaughter. Two-legged beasts. Human animals. Ants. And this is how they want us to see ourselves.
So I turn to mythical creatures and contemplate the possibility of our children being like the Hecatoncheires, giants with fifty heads and one hundred arms. How many decapitations can a child with fifty heads endure and still survive? How many amputations can a child with one hundred arms suffer and still live a good life? But then again, we are not like the Hecatoncheires, are we? They were born of heavens and sky, siblings to the incredible Titans and Cyclops.
But the Gegenees, we are like them. I see ourselves in them. Native people defending their homeland from foreign invaders, resisting extermination. This is why they are dehumanised, why they are slaughtered, like us. How prophetic. A literary ethnic cleansing conceived in the 3rd century BC by a writer living in such close proximity to Gaza.
I refuse to believe the Gegenees were completely annihilated. Some always survive, don’t they? Please tell us that some survive. Tell us how they survive. Aren’t we living proof? The descendents of the Gegenees, the monster’s monsters! And Hercules and the Argonauts, they are not heroes but monsters. How could they be anything else? Just look at what they have done, what they do!
No doubt this is what the narrator intended. She must be one of us. Tell me she is one of us. A Palestinian child, transcended. Flung into history by force of the intense bombardment, using advanced experimental weapons. A Palestinian child from Gaza wrote The Argonautica. And she wrote it for us. Not just as a warning, but to let us know she survived. That she lived to tell her story.
Yes. This is what happened. And not only her. Every incinerated, vaporised, scattered, missing child escapes suffering by transcending into transtemporal exile. An immaculate transtemporalisation. To another place, another universe, where they are safe and live a good life. Perhaps some become artists, writers and poets, who, through their works, find ways to reach us, warn us, comfort us, Return.
Now is the time of monsters. And in this time of monsters, art is defiance.
A Refusal. Of genocide, of Nakba, of erasure. So we create to show ourselves. That we live and were loved, still love, are defiant even as we suffer. That we are steadfast.
When I shape clay my mind quiets, and my hands, still mine but not exactly, seem guided by a cathedral thinking I’m not intended to fully grasp, but still find familiar. A connection to those of us, those parts of us, our children, exiled across time and space. Yes, this. Our art is a living archive, narrating our existence across generations. To remind ourselves; we are still here, we have always been here.
To transcend time. To prove the self. To insist on life. To remember and to help others remember. So that others may lead a better life – Refaat Alareer, from the introduction to Gaza Writes Back
Samer Abdelnour is an academic, activist and artist.
