By Rania Marjieh
originally in Arabic, published in Bukja بقجة, translated by AI
Toward a spiritual, social, and political understanding of the image
I. The visual moment that becomes a question of existence
This painting cannot be viewed as a frozen event. It is a moment that reaches beyond itself, trying to grasp an instant in Palestinian time—a time that never ceases to renew itself. And we do not know where that instant begins:
Does it begin with the man hunched over in grief?
With the crowd struggling over the opening of a closed gate?
Or with the silence that binds them together without reconciling either one with the other?
Here, Abdul Abdi acts as though he is creating a double mirror:
A mirror reflecting the exhausted individual, and a mirror reflecting the community pressing forward in search of some form of survival.
II. The man in the foreground: “a prophecy of experience”
Sitting in this painting is an existential act.
The man is not sitting by chance; he is sitting because there is nowhere else to stand.
It is as if the earth is too narrow to bear him, and the sky too distant to shelter his head.
His features are not those of an individual; they embody years of drought, a deep despair that needs no tears for us to understand it.
The lines the artist used to draw the man’s face are more than visible marks. They are the contours of inherited exhaustion, like the lines in the trunk of an old tree bearing the traces of every wind that has swept over it.
His hands resting in his lap do not signify surrender, but the wisdom of someone who knows that shouting cannot open a closed gate.
The children behind him are not merely background; they are an extension—
an extension of the man’s wounds,
and an extension of questions about a future that does not know where to place its first step.
III. The crowd: “a mass of voices the world cannot hear”
In the background, Abdul Abdi presents the crowd as a single entity.
Faces without detail.
Bodies without clear boundaries.
Yet arms are raised, shoulders press together, and the air is filled with tension.
The crowd moves as one heavy mass, not as a collection of individuals.
This is deliberate:
The artist wants to say that the tragedy is collective, the outcry is collective, and hope, when it appears, is collective too.
The raised hands are not a prayer…
They are a protest…
A need…
A plea for help…
A supplication to open the gate, to open fate, or to open life itself.
They are not merely pushing against one another…
They are trying not to fall out of history.
IV. The gate: a symbol of power and of loss
The gate is the painting’s harshest element.
Its lines are hard and metallic, cold, unmoved by the needs of the poor or the fears of children.
It is a gate closed in the mind before it is closed in the painting.
A gate that divides “those who wait” from “those who suffer,” “inside” from “outside”—even though reality does not truly tell us where inside ends and outside begins.
This gate symbolizes:
An authority unable to protect people
Imposed borders that cannot be questioned
Decisions made behind walls beyond the people’s reach
People standing on the threshold of promises that are never fulfilled
It is a gate that says:
“You will remain here… in the waiting zone.”
V. The white: a space of open meaning
What is unusual about this painting is that the whiteness is not an absence; it is a language.
The empty spaces play an active psychological role:
They are the void of existence, the space between question and answer,
the emptiness Palestinians inhabit between a homeland being stolen and a reality pressing in on them.
Here, the white holds everything that has not been drawn.
It holds the past we have lost and the future we fear we may never reach.
VI. The tension between the individual and the community: an untold story
The seated man and the pressing crowd do not look at one another.
This visual separation is no mistake; it is part of the idea:
The man represents broken wisdom.
The crowd represents broken energy.
And Palestinian life is always moving between these two forces:
Experience, grown weary, and crowds that cry out.
As though the artist is whispering:
“The nation is moving…
but the individual is fading.”
Or perhaps:
“Pain here belongs to no one…
it is shared.”
VII. The plate before the man: the meagre offering suspended between life and dignity
A small, modest, nearly empty plate.
A minor detail, yet one that carries meanings as large as the cause itself:
Hunger
Scarcity
Waiting for charity
Waiting for a political settlement
Waiting for justice
Waiting for someone who never comes
The plate resembles a divided homeland,
where the people are given a little… far too little…
while the commotion behind it promises much and gives nothing.
VIII. Why is this painting so painful?
Because it depicts a moment every Palestinian knows:
The moment of waiting.
The moment of standing at the threshold of the unknown.
The moment when faith wears away but does not die.
The moment of protest that no one hears.
The moment of hope that comes from a child peering out from behind an exhausted man.
This painting is not realistic…
It is existential,
reaching beyond place to depict “the condition of a people,”
and beyond time to ask the same question again and again:
When will this gate open?
When will the man be able to stand instead of sit?
When will the child move forward instead of hiding behind an exhausted back?
Conclusion: a painting that resembles an entire people
This is not a passing scene, but a testimony.
A testimony to humanity’s struggle with the wall,
with the self,
and with the long wait that devours the spirit as it devours time.
It is a painting that says everything left unsaid,
opens a wound wider than what we can see,
and, despite its harshness…
offers us a small hope, like the face of a child peering out from behind an old, weary man.
