Love for the Struggle: The Visual Politics of Memory in the Work of Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara

Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara has a distinct position within Palestinian art history, one where image, text and memory converge as instruments of documentation and defiance. With no formal academic training, he developed a visual language rooted in vernacular traditions, oral histories and revolutionary discourse, refusing the separation between the personal and the political, and situating everyday life, cultural memory and armed struggle within a single visual field. This text examines how he translated poetic, historical and lived experience into a visual language that articulated exile, struggle and cultural continuity in works seemingly grounded in cultural heritage. The works described in this essay are all low reliefs of sawdust mixed with glue, fixed on wood, and painted with acrylic. Throughout, I will refer to the artist by his first name, which is how he signed his work.

Abdul Hay was born in 1933 in Dawaymeh, a village 24 kilometres west of Hebron in Mandate Palestine. His father passed away when he was five years old and he grew up with his mother and five sisters, supporting the family through farming and operating an olive press at home. Women from the village often gathered at his family’s home to practice traditional embroidery, singing and conversing as they worked. In The House of Abdul Hay’s Mother (1990), he represents himself as a young boy perched in a pomegranate tree, observing these gatherings from afar. Indeed, he was immersed from an early age in a sensorial and symbolic world rich in personal narrative, celebration and grievance. He witnessed wedding processions where brides were carried on camels, henna rituals accompanied by dancing, evenings in the men’s madafa (guest hall) hosting itinerant singers, communal meals shared by the village during Ramadan and performances like the one captured in his The Traditional Al Samer Dance (1990).

Abdul Hay would later inscribe the sounds and words from these times in the margins of his works, as well as the revolutionary songs he recalled from his memories of the 1936 and 1939 uprisings against the British Mandate. The retaliations inflicted on his community, as well as the attacks carried out by Zionist militias on villages surrounding Dawaymeh, shaped his political conscience. On 28 October 1948, two massacres were committed against several hundred of his neighbours, including an assault on the Dawaymeh village mosque during Friday prayers. The surviving residents, including Abdul Hay, fled to nearby villages and were prevented from returning due to mines laid around the area, ultimately relocating to refugee camps in the region.

After his family had sought refuge in Al-‘Arroub Camp near Hebron, in order to survive he took up a variety of odd jobs, including working as a seasonal harvest labourer in Madaba, on the east bank of the Jordan. In 1951, he married his cousin, Rasmieh Ali Abu Hussein. He later moved to Ein es-Sultan Camp near Jericho, where he worked with an archaeological excavation team led by the British archaeologist Diana Kirkbride. By 1955, he had enlisted in the Royal Jordanian Air Force (RJAF), serving as an electrician and working hard to further his professional training within the military. The steady income from his soldier’s pay in this period allowed Abdul Hay to eventually purchase a piece of land in Jabal al-Qusur, Amman, where his studio and family home remain until today.

Following the launch of the Palestinian armed revolution in 1965, Palestinian militias, including the Fatah movement, began to recruit Palestinian, Arab, and international fighters. Having grown up with a strong attachment to his home village and nurturing the aspiration to return to his homeland, Abdul Hay came to understand his life as bound to the broader project of Palestinian liberation. But due to his service in the Jordanian Air Force, his desire to join Fatah was not possible. Following the violent clashes between the Jordanian army and Palestinian militias during Black September in 1970, he left Jordan to join the Fatah resistance in Damascus. In 1971, the Fatah leadership assigned him to an air base in Libya, where his wife and children would later join him.

In this, his furthest point of exile, Abdul Hay felt frustrated by his distance from the battlefront where he imagined himself as a fighter. The cultural arm of Fatah was active in publishing images and artworks about the Palestinian cause, and this might have ignited his imagination. He began producing sketches depicting fighters in moments of departure or armed vigilance but found these early attempts unsatisfactory in terms of his ability to fully convey the scale and intensity of the scenes he envisioned. This limitation abated when he began applying a mixture of sawdust and glue to the picture surface in order to construct reliefs over photographic bases. This technique enabled him to build layered surfaces, vary depth and expand expressive detail, further emphasised by painting the bas-relief.

In an untitled work from 1973, the artist depicts a freedom fighter, rifle in hand and head wrapped in a scarf, positioned at the centre of a tightly composed familial scene. A child reaches up toward him, arms raised in an attempt to embrace his father, while a woman stands behind them holds a cloth bundle of provisions, her presence signalling the traditional ritual of departure. The father’s posture conveys a moment of reluctant leave-taking, at once intimate and shaped by the demands of collective struggle.

This fleeting moment is rendered with a deliberate stillness, as if fixed in time. The surrounding space is stripped of contextual details, leaving only the uneven ground beneath the figures and thus intensifying the focus on familial bonds. Executed as a painted bas-relief on wood, this work employs the artist’s characteristic palette of greens, browns, and muted reds. A slender gold-painted frame encloses the scene, giving it a reverential quality.

In We Fight for Palestine’s Flag (1974), the artist shifts from an intimate domestic register to a composition that, while still focused on the family unit, foregrounds political struggle and national symbolism. At the centre of the composition stands a flagpole near which a family is gathered in tight formation. A girl holding a rifle in one hand raises the Palestinian flag, while the father, also a fighter, embraces his wife and a younger child. Set against an otherwise empty ground, these figures emphasise collective will over individual heroism. The work retains the artist’s simplified forms and characteristic palette, with rounded contours and minimal detail allowing facial expressions and spatial relationships to carry the emotional weight of the scene.

Read in relation to the work from 1973, a clear shift has emerged. While the earlier piece frames the family as the emotional ground of the struggle, foregrounding intimacy, separation and personal sacrifice, We Fight for Palestine’s Flag reorients this dynamic, steering it toward a broader expression of national struggle: the family in its entirety stands steadfast, demonstrating their collective political will.

In The Song of the Rifle (1975), Abdul Hay develops a more expansive narrative where landscape, folklore and armed resistance converge. At the centre-left, a fighter carrying a rifle strides along a winding path across rolling green hills. His forward-leaning posture signals vigilance, while the rifle he holds indicates his active participation in freedom fighting. Above him a fragment of the Palestinian flag appears against a patterned ground reminiscent of the keffiyeh, visually merging national identity with the terrain. On the right, two women stand upright looking up towards the fighters stationed on the hill while balancing large clay jars on their heads. Dressed in patterned garments evoking traditional embroidery, they have come to offer food and water to the fighters in the wilderness. This parallel register of activity links domestic labour to the infrastructure of resistance.

Executed in painted low relief on wood, with the edges of the work following the contours of the landscape it depicts, The Song of the Rifle is an early example of the artist’s integration of sculptural modelling with colour. The textured landscape, rendered in layered greens and earth tones, is framed by the keffiyeh motif, drawing on a vocabulary of Palestinian cultural heritage that had become increasingly associated with the Palestinian Revolution. This interplay of movement and stillness, militancy and tradition, articulates a conception of defiance as both geographical, political and cultural.

This geographical focus is understandable given that the artist produced these works in Libya. Encouraged by the positive reception to his earlier pieces exhibited in the Palestinian pavilion at the 1972 Tripoli International Fair, Abdul Hay began to dedicate more time to his art, and in 1978, with the support of the General Union of Palestinian Students (Tripoli branch), presented his work in solo exhibitions held across Libya marking the beginning of his recognition among fellow artists. Consequently, in 1979 he was invited to the founding conference of the General Union of Palestinian Artists in Beirut, where he met other Palestinian artists and learned more about the political frameworks shaping their work and relationships. That same year his assignment in Libya ended, and he relocated with his family and art to Yarmouk Camp in Damascus. There he set up a studio and divided his time between his studio and working alongside Mona Saudi and Mustafa Al Hallaj at the Fatah Art Department in Beirut.

During a training period in Zagreb, Abdul Hay was alarmed to hear a woman refuse to attribute an embroidered dress as Palestinian, after she bought it from an Israeli merchant in Jerusalem. This encounter prompted a renewed commitment to documenting the rural life of pre-1948 Palestine, this time adding the embroidery motifs. His work, Costumes of Five Regions of Palestine Relief (1990), presents a row of seven women dressed in richly detailed traditional Palestinian garments—dresses typically worn in Beersheba, Hebron, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Ramallah—each costume likely representing a distinct region or the local variation of a regional tradition. The composition is frontal and rhythmic, with the figures aligned side by side against a flat, vivid blue background which heightens the intensity of the meticulously rendered textile patterns. These are dominated by dense geometric and floral embroidery in red, green and white—colours strongly associated with both the Palestinian flag and visual culture alike. Each costume differs subtly in cut, motif embroidered around the neckline and sides, as well as the head covering and other accessories. One woman has turned her back to show the embroidery on the fringes of her dress, two others raise their arms, adding variation to the composition.

The scene is framed by trees that stretch to the top of its composition, with red roses blooming throughout. At the bottom Abdul Hay added a decorative band, as if the women occupied a ceremonial space. Perhaps the trees symbolise rootedness and serenity, while the diversity of the costumes certainly signals the richness of the Palestinian heritage under threat. Conceptually, the work reads as an act of cultural preservation. Given the historical context, however, the work can also be seen as another attempt to map Palestine, using the different regional floral and geometric handstitched patterns of its women as a key.

Al Ghazal fi Shar as-Sabaya (Courtship in the Maidens’ Hair) (2009) animates female figures within stories of love and social connection. At the centre of the work, a man and a woman face one another, with the man looking into her eyes and gently holding her braided hair, while the woman returns his gaze, establishing a reciprocal exchange of affection. Her dress is richly patterned with traditional motifs that, along with his long robe and white head covering, signify the couple’s rural background. These figures are set against a flat blue ground enclosed by a decorative border with red floral motifs, while along the work’s upper edge a handwritten verse drawn from a traditional Arabic folk song reads:

Your hair, a vineyard of grapes – I rest in its shade;
and in your embrace, after supper, the evening finds its hour.

Within this framework, love and companionship are positioned alongside rather than in opposition to the conditions of struggle. Perhaps the woman is the man’s lover, but perhaps she is also his beloved homeland, whose embrace starts time and offers rest.

In a similarly themed work, The Red Rose (2011), another peasant, this time seated, plays a stringed instrument, his body angled toward a standing woman who leans forward to offer him a red rose. Dressed in richly patterned traditional garments, the figures are in a flattened green field enclosed by a decorative border bearing an Arabic inscription. Their exchange constitutes a tender dialogue of affection in which sound and gesture function as parallel expressions of intimacy.

Produced when the artist was 78 years old, the work gives away some shifts in Abdul Hay’s typical style of executing his works. As his eyesight deteriorated due to cataracts, contours and details became visibly coarser, particularly in the rendering of the hands. This coarseness, however, does not indicate a loss of intention; rather, it underscores the persistence of his attention to detail, evident in elements such as the intricate tattoos inscribed on the musician’s hand.

The work is accompanied by a verse drawn from Palestinian folk song tradition that the artist sought to preserve and reactivate within his practice:

There are many reasons to open doors –
by fortune, I found the door of love,
and it overshadowed the doors of courage.

Can one interpret this as meaning that the artist has accepted his retirement from the national mission he had committed his life to? In another untitled piece from 2008, the artist brings together love, exile and resistance through a tightly constructed symbolic arrangement that references Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, ‘A Lover from Palestine’ (1966). A woman stands in a small boat propelling herself forward with two oars, her elongated figure wrapped in a keffiyeh-patterned veil that visually merges her body with the language of national identity. Behind her, a man in traditional garb stands on the shore, one hand raised in a gesture suspended between farewell and benediction while the other holds a rifle.

Within the flattened green field, interrupted only by a band of blue water, the artist has inscribed the following verses from Darwish’s:

I saw you yesterday at the port,
traveling, without family, without provisions.
I ran to you like an orphan,
asking the wisdom of the ancestors:
Why is the green orchard pulled away
to a prison, to exile, to a harbour?
And how does it remain, despite its journey,
despite the smell of salt and longing –
always green?

The spatial division between land and water structures the composition, staging distance, displacement and the inevitability of departure. Abdul Hay, like his figure, longs for a receding homeland, his ‘green orchard’, and like his rural subject, who is both lover and fighter, remains separated from it. The raised hand suggests appeal or invocation, while the rifle, held close to the body, signals a restrained yet persistent attachment to armed struggle. As in Darwish’s poetry, personal and political forms of love remain inseparable.

This was not the first time the artist engaged with Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry. A pivotal moment in Abdul Hay’s practice occurred during the Israeli army’s siege of Beirut in 1982, where he established a working station and, over the course of three months, produced 14 works while under bombardment. He later departed Beirut alongside Palestinian fighters on ships bound for Tunis, an event Darwish recounts in his major poem, In Praise of the High Shadow (1983). In Exodus from Beirut to the Sea (1983), Abdul Hay incorporates verses from this poem into a field that stages forced departure as both a visual and textual lament. A tall, cloaked female figure stands to the left, sadly embracing an elongated tombstone, while three smaller figures, fighters carrying their packs, exit towards the right. The two are separated by a visual sea of words drawn from Darwish’s poem.

The towering figure, read as Beirut itself or as the broader Palestinian struggle enacted within it, embodies endurance as well as a rejection of abandonment. The departing figures, reduced in scale and repetition, convey, as in Abdul Hay’s earliest works, grief, exile and reluctant departure. The inscribed text intensifies this sense of displacement –no surrender in Beirut, only the sorrow of departure, carried ‘on the tears of the city’. The imagery of ships, absence and the unanswered question, ‘Where do you go?’, infuses the work with a sense of suspended finality.

After Tunis, the artist returned to Damascus in 1983 and gradually expanded his practice, creating larger and more densely populated tableaus, staging communal rituals such as bridal processions, traditional gatherings and harvest scenes. During this period, he also exhibited widely in Europe, presenting both his siege series and works addressing solidarity movements in Ireland, Latin America and South Africa. His work continued to engage contemporary political events, including the assassination of the noted political cartoonist Naji Al-Ali, the outbreak of the First Intifada in 1987, and a sharp critique of the Oslo Accords—positions that contributed to his eventual estrangement from Fatah and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

In 1992, he relocated to Amman, transferring more than 400 works produced over the previous two decades from his studio in Yarmouk Camp to Jabal al-Qusur in Amman. There, his practice came to reflect his transformed condition, that of a fighter removed from the battlefield yet continuing the struggle through a form of image-making that remains rooted in his rural origins and his displacement during the Nakba. His later works often depict the fighter in a domestic setting, including his attire. Nevertheless, although the militant garb is set aside Abdul Hay’s spirit remains resolutely militant.

This spirit is evident in Al Shaheed (The Martyr) (2008), which depicts a procession of men and women in richly patterned traditional garments advancing across the foreground, linked in a unifying horizontal rhythm. Their tightly aligned bodies form a continuous frieze accompanying the martyr toward burial. At the centre of the composition, the coffin, with red roses growing atop it, serves as an emotional and symbolic focal point. The flowers, a recurring motif in Abdul Hay’s work, here carry a dual resonance, signifying mourning while also suggesting regeneration, positioning sacrifice as a generative force within the people’s struggle. This reading is reinforced by the accompanying inscription, which frames the bodies of the fallen not through loss alone but as a passage through which others move toward the homeland.

The village unfolds above the procession as an ensemble of simplified architectural forms, with arched doorways, clusters of homes and rows of trees, and is inhabited by onlookers, including children who observe the funeral procession from windows and rooftops. This upper segment of the composition introduces a statement: while the procession marks a moment of loss borne by one generation, the presence of youth signals continuity and transmission. The built environment, in turn, anchors memory within a specific place, rural Palestine, suggesting endurance beyond individual lives.

Formally, the work retains Abdul Hay’s method of wedding low-relief modelling with a vivid palette, while its scale and density amplify the work’s narrative force. The repetition of figures and the horizontal progression across the panel produce a sense of collective movement, within which individual identity recedes in favour of a shared social and historical condition.

Referring to the 2008–2009 war on Gaza, which resulted in the killing of over 1,000 Palestinians and extensively damaged swathes of Gaza’s dwellings, infrastructure and public facilities, Abdul Hay responded with a number of works. Chief among these was Gaza (2009). Enraged by the Israeli atrocities, Abdul Hay departed from symbolic condensation toward a more direct visual confrontation with contemporary warfare. The work is structured through vertical pressure: aerial assault descends from above while the figures below push upward in what appear to be strained, angular directions, producing a visual field organised by impact rather than narrative sequence. Nevertheless, as in many of Abduly Hay’s works a female figure anchors the scene. Positioned in its centre, she carries four children within the folds of her traditional dress, thrusting a rifle into the mouth of a monstrous reptilian aggressor, while her other arm raises a rocket. Nearby, a young girl carries the bodies of multiple martyrs, her small frame bearing their disproportionate weight. In contrast to the relational structure observed in The Martyr, this inversion of scale, in which a child becomes the bearer of the dead, condenses a sense of the collapse of generational order, underscoring the immediacy of loss. Interlaced within this frenetic scene are five veiled and camouflaged fighters, their bodies woven into the forceful momentum of its chaotic and densely packed composition: women, men and children attempt to shield the young from the descending bombs. Alas, bodies of different sizes have accumulated, and the ground is saturated with flowing streams of blood.

The presence of aircraft and weaponry marked with the aggressors’ symbols introduces an explicit geopolitical dimension rarely this overt in Abdul Hay’s earlier works discussed in this essay—which I chose to focus on—where heritage plays a key role. Violence is not abstracted in this work but attributed, and the scars on the bodies are also holes punched in the surface of his low relief work. Limbs fragment, blood gathers along the lower edge, and figures collapse into one another, disrupting the rhythmic ordering seen in his earlier processional scenes. Gaza’s composition reinforces the catastrophic conditions it depicts.

If Gaza confronts the immediacy of destruction and fragmentation, it also emerges from the broader escalation of violence witnessed across Palestine in 2008. The artist addressed this symbolically in Jerusalem Calling, constructing a densely populated and symbolically charged vision of a city where sacred architecture, communal ties and identity converge. Once again, at the work’s centre stands a monumental female figure, her body adorned with intricately patterned fabric and a large silver key that hangs from her neck. Balanced above her head is a stylised rendering of the Dome of the Rock, transforming her into both bearer and embodiment of Jerusalem. Children are balanced on her shoulders and atop the palms of her outstretched hands, participating in the act of lifting and calling that extends the figure’s gaze outward. Nearby, another woman extends her braid to form a bridge upon which a multigenerational group ascends to reach the Dome. Across the work, men, women and children in richly embroidered dress have gathered, their raised arms echoing the call, while others engage in quieter exchanges. White doves rest on surrounding domes marked by crescents and crosses, awaiting a response.

The prominence of the Dome of the Rock situates the work within the symbolic geopolitics of Jerusalem, while its placement atop the central figure of the woman suggests that the city is carried by and inseparable from its people. The inscription at it top reinforces this reading, invoking historical leaders that once came to the city’s rescue.

Produced in the context of escalating violence in Jerusalem in 2008, including confrontations at the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex and the broader conditions of siege surrounding the war on Gaza, the work translates political urgency into a densely layered visual field. Its accumulation of figures, symbols and articulations conveys Jerusalem as a site of ongoing struggle and a solid expression of the cause. Perhaps, the Dome of the Rock is what Abdul Hay was referencing when he inscribed these lines from a poem on another piece from the same period:

Blue earrings painted on your ear so fair,

Yet you’re the cause of all the ache I bear.

Abdul Hay Mosallam Zarara often spoke of the worlds he strived to capture stepping into his studio. His works transported him to the landscapes and social life of his youth in Palestine, even as they remained in dialogue with the harsh reality of contemporary events. Until his passing in Amman on 1 August 2020, he sustained this movement between lived memory and unsettled political present, constructing a visual archive in which memory is actively reworked through image, songs and material culture across his 50-year practice. He reframed loss as a condition of continuity, where displacement, love and resistance remain structurally intertwined. By translating poetry into images and embedding lived experience within symbolic form, he produced a body of work that insisted on the persistence of presence against erasure. In this sense, his art operates as an ongoing act of cultural and political assertion.