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Mulham Assir
"99 Names" by
Suzanne Klotz
Suzanne Klotz
is the creator of Thy Kingdom Come: Pocket Guide to the Holy Land, a
vividly coloured book of captioned drawings that portray
Israeli-occupied Palestine as she saw it between 1990 and 1995.
To describe this work is in a sense to add a fourth lens to the view of
the Israeli occupation and the associated war crimes being committed to
perpetuate it, because the book is the artist's vision of images seen
through the naive eyes of an imaginary American tourist woman and her
little daughter who arrive in the "Holy Land" excited to explore it.
Therefore it is (1) fact (amply documented by the captions) filtered
through (2) "innocent" observers' perception, (3) illustrated by the
artist. Yet, for all the distillation, the images in the guide pack a
staggering punch.
The guide consists of 44 pages, each a separate vignette, all forming a
condensed pictorial "zioclopaedia" that is, as the artist puts it,
"geared to educate the readers in one brief 'reading' about two
paramount issues: the American citizens role in the destruction of
Palestine, and Israel avowed and false identification of Zionism with
Judaism and its spurious claim of representing all worldwide Jews."
"The Question" by
Suzanne Klotz
Perhaps to define the guide
it is best to start with what it is not. It is not a comic book in the
traditional form of a segmented epical narrative. Each page can be torn
from the book to stand on its own like a fractal containing the features
of the whole, spelling "Occupation." What the American woman and her
daughter see is shown in a series of pictorial snapshots, each of which
contradicts the sanitized and sloganized concept of the "Holy Land" --
"a land without people for a people without land" -- a Zionist lie
pervasively promoted in the American mass media.
The device of the presentation through innocent eyes, reminiscent of
Salingers approach in Catcher in the Rye, serves to obscure the artist's
editorializing voice and at the same time revs up the shock of
"discovery" by the "innocents". It also prompts the viewer to wonder
"But how can they not know what is being done in their name, with their
tax dollars? How can anyone not know all this?"
It is not an allegorical comic book in the manner of Spiegelman's Maus,
in which the predatory cats represent the Germans, the ruthless, greedy
pigs stand for the Polish people and the defenceless mice for the Jews.
Klotz's guide does not indict any ethnic or religious group as a whole,
but it forcefully and clearly blames an ideology: Zionism, which breeds,
in a state arrogantly self-proclaimed as a "Light Unto Nations," a
culture of hatred. Legislated hatred and racism are epitomized by
Israeli top leaders calling the Palestinians cockroaches, and by current
leaders calling for their expulsion, a "final solution" to their desired
aim of making Israel a state "for Jews only." The artist sees Zionism as
a misrepresentation of Judaic values.
The guide is not, although it has that effect, a sarcastic travel
brochure depicting highlights of the Zionist military occupation of
Palestine any more than The Inferno is Dante's tourist guide for Hell,
although it would help a first-time visitor to cut through the miasma of
propaganda down to the truth of Israel's apartheid, occupation and war
crimes.
Detail from
"Shuhada" by Suzanne Klotz
Finally, despite the
numerous captions encapsulating data and facts of Israel's systematic
and ongoing land grab, ethnic cleansing and brutal oppression of the
Palestinians as well as verifiable facts and figures related to the
unlimited and unconditional American support (financial, military and
diplomatic) of Israel, the book is not an illustrated pamphlet. Word and
image are fused, whether the words are external captions or graffiti
integrated within the image, into a visual whole. Nevertheless, Klotz
herself considers the images simply as illustrations of what she saw
with her own eyes over several years of close observation of life in
occupied (and/or under siege) Palestine.
In a sense the artist herself was at one time as an American visiting
Israel for the first time. As a guest artist in residence at Mishkenot
Shaananim -- a non-governmental, non-political, international
multicultural centre in Jerusalem -- she first saw the realities on the
ground in 1990. She returned many times for extended stays over the next
five years, creating art programs, often in collaboration with
Palestinian artists, and became familiar with the horror of Palestinian
life under Israeli occupation only a street away ("just across Jaffa
Street"), yet a world away from the relaxed and comfortable surroundings
of Israeli life. She observed the moral compromise of many Israelis who
had internalized the dichotomy of privately disagreeing with the
government policies infringing on the Palestinians' basic human rights
without publicly opposing them.
An advocate of human rights long before her Jerusalem epiphany, Klotz
had spent time in Australia, deeply touched by the plight of the
Australian aborigines. Ironically, when she left Australia to go to
Israel for the first time, many of the aboriginal artists asked her for
a great favour. Forcefully alienated from their ancestral culture, the
Christianized Aborigines with no hope for redress in this life cling to
the hope of help from their masters' gods. They asked her to stick their
written prayer in the Wailing Wall when she got to Jerusalem, which of
course she did. Long after this memorable incident Klotz created a
Portable Prayer Wall (marked Guaranteed and Made in the USA). As a way
of making prayer intercession available to all, wherever they are,
including those unable to reach the city now being cleansed, the
Portable Prayer Wall has about it the inventive practicality as well as
the wry irony of something that Mark Twain (one of the earliest
anti-colonialism voices in America) might have come up with.
Detail from "99
Names"
Suzanne Klotz has an impressive body of work dedicated to the
Palestinian tragedy and the destruction of Palestinian society and
culture. The reason why Thy Kingdom Come deserves more space is not only
because it is highly comprehensive and representative of her vision and
talent, but also because she has been unable to publish it in the US. A
digital documentary introduction to it, called The Other Side of the
Holy Land, which she created in a college workshop, was attacked in the
local press in her city (Sedona, Arizona) by the leadership of the City
Arts and Culture Commission and described as anti-Semitic in a
front-page article in the local paper. Equivalent to a persona non grata
branding, this type of accusation creates an atmosphere in which an
artist sees previous commitments reneged on by galleries and exhibit
organizers, fails to find a willing publisher, and finds it increasingly
harder to show and sell ones work. This is not surprising: after all,
Americans now live in the time of the Patriot Act, and Israel's
perceived enemies are America's enemies.
A recipient of numerous prestigious grants, scholarships and awards
previously, especially when her work and interest were captured by
"safe" (lobby-less) causes like the plight of Australian aborigines,
Klotz found that her guide attracted the FBI rather than accolades. The
newspaper article culminated with a call from an FBI agent who claimed
she was being investigated following a denunciation of being an Israeli
agent. Under this pretext she was subjected to an interrogation related
to her travels and activities, which made her feel as if she were in an
Israeli airport rather than in her own home. Undaunted, Klotz
participated in the College Art Association Democracy Wall exhibit in
Atlanta in February 2005, where she showed images from the guide stamped
CENSORED, together with enlarged quotes from the slanderous article that
had described her work as anti-Semitic. She explains her persistence
thus: "It is not about me. It is about the fate of 5.4 million
Palestinian people and about our tax dollars that finance these crimes
against humanity."
Her commitment to the Palestinian cause is above all else spiritual. A
deeply compassionate and genuine humanist, Klotz believes that the
spiritual teachings of all major religions are the same. She also
believes that Zionism has not only perverted and misrepresented Judaism
to both Jews and Christians but is also misrepresenting and demonizing
Muslims and Islam to the world.
Her current work is a
collection of 99 books she is creating, each representing one of God's
attributes. As she is working on them, she says that each day she
selects one attribute to meditate on to achieve a deeper understanding
of the virtue and apply it during the day. One of her dreams is one day
to be able to create an art salon in southern Lebanon where she could
meet with women to create artworks that incorporate traditional
techniques, crafts and calligraphy.
The salon would ensure the preservation of traditional arts and culture
and the art would further the understanding that whether one says Allah,
God, or Dios, the meaning is the same. Our moral obligation is to all
people, because we are children of the same God.
"Occupied Home Tour"
installed by Suzanne Klotz in Arizona
Until then, underemployed
and over censored, she continues to work with imagination, talent and an
apparently inexhaustible reservoir of compassion, endurance and hope. A
telling example of her vision, talent and resourcefulness was seeing a
house under demolition in her hometown one day and realizing that it
would make the perfect medium for her installation -- a life-size
depiction of a destroyed Palestinian home (or for that matter, Lebanese
or Iraqi). Judging by the photographs, the installation, especially
given the mountainous landscape of Sedona, so similar to many places in
hilly Palestine, was eerily evocative and strongly moving.
Mulham Assir is a Lebanese writer based in Beirut and Madrid.
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