In Connecticut, A Museum of Palestinian Dreams

“We can stand shoulder to shoulder with the world’s greatest artists.”

So says Faisal Saleh, founder of the Palestine Museum US. Since 2018, he has directed the space. He also owns the building—an office complex in Woodbridge, Connecticut—and so is free from worry over upsetting the various bureaucracies who might hesitate to showcase Palestinian art.

A soft ban on Palestinian artists is, and has been, all too pervasive. (Saleh tells me: “The name ‘Palestine’ is radioactive right now.”) This year’s Venice Biennale, with its theme “Foreigners Everywhere,” panders to an idea of inclusivity. But when the Palestine Museum proposed the exhibition “Foreigners in their Homeland” as a collateral event, the proposal was rejected. Palestine also does not have a national pavilion, since Italy does not recognize it as a sovereign nation. Besides, according to Saleh, any art from Palestine is instantly tagged as Political with a capital-“P.” Thus, art and expressions are swept away to escape a boogeyman controversy. What gets left behind? Tough-minded work that deals with the struggle of love, anger, jealousy, fear, survival, loss, and, beyond this, a desire for what can come.

No matter: Saleh staged the exhibition anyway, renting Venice’s Palazzo Mora, where “Foreigners in their Homeland” is up until November 24, 2024. Most of the Venice artists have works on view in Connecticut, too, in the Palestine Museum’s permanent collection.

Loss—and the question of how to regain one’s bearings—is a common touchpoint in the works at the museum. Saleh wants to raise the profile of those Palestinian artists who know intimately the contours of loss, who long with passion for a space to give form to their dreams. When we face Khair Alah Salim’s painted solo cellist, who plays to her audience of three unpeeled oranges in an orange haze, we see how it is a clandestine joy—and a right too often taken as a privilege—to render a face, to paint fixed, concentrated eyes.

The museum doubles as a library of Palestinian literature, with texts in Arabic, English, and French. I have spent hours just poring through these books—primarily donated, Saleh tells me, by Connecticut locals, now sitting on shelves nestled below the paintings. There are classics like Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape (2007); there are novels of identity crises with dashes and sweeps of the Kafkaesque and the science-fictive, like Emile Habibi’s The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist (1974); there is poetry by luminaries like Naomi Shihab Nye (who writes about my home country, Honduras), as well as Fadwa Tuqan, Fady Joudah, and the essential Mahmoud Darwish. Throughout the museum, one experiences a harsh montage of image and text. There are the Palestinian kids’ drawings of daily scenes of a military violence they know so well. And there is Darwish, instructing “Be a child again,” in In the Presence of Absence (2006). “Teach me poetry. Teach me the rhythm of the sea. Take my hand, so we can cross this threshold between night and day together.”

What else is in the museum? There are photographs by Najib Joe Hakim, whose series “Home Away from Home: Little Palestine by the Bay” (2014–ongoing) centers portraits of Palestinians in the Bay Area. Alongside these photographs, one can also hear the subjects’ voice-recorded testimonials on Soundcloud. I was drawn to one portrait of a college-aged Tenaya Nasser-Frederick, to his pensive Jean-Pierre Léaud-ish face and recline. In his testimony, Nasser-Frederick talks candidly of the guilt he feels when he cannot “jump into” Schindler’s List (1993) in the same way as many of the Americans around him. I get what he means. Spielberg made a spectacle, a box-office hit, out of real Jewish trauma, creating a bank of obscene images (the cliché of a red-coated girl, prisoners soaked not with gas but water), the likes of which Israel has contorted and weaponized to justify acts of violence.

There is also Raghda Zaiton’s exquisite “Waiting” series from 2020, paintings of Palestinian women in states of rest. My eye is first drawn toward the elongated necks half-reminiscent of Modigliani. But I look further, and find myself more taken by Zaiton’s handsome, near-quilted tatreez, the pleasing colorful patterns that adorn the thobes of her women. Her elegant, crepe-flat figures get harmonized in a field, continuous with their surroundings: leaf-pinned walls, cityscapes, and moonglows of winey red.

I am so moved by the art here—and we haven’t even gotten to the majority of it, like the pop of color in Samia Halaby’s curving Orange Kiss with Sky (2015), which I instantly fell in love with—because, in its dailiness, it exists in welcome contrast to the images of shattered baby’s faces on the feed, shot journalists, the shock-image-mill of Western media. I dare say that Americans are more aware of the Palestinian as broken limbs than a whole body, a whole people. The Palestinian is a target; the gun is aimed at her. But she recalls the pillow, the space of dreaming. This is the situation revealed at the Palestine Museum. Salim sees a cellist who plays a song to oranges. Shall we listen to the song?