Gaza refugee artist in Paris embroiders her ‘pain’ on canvas
In her new Paris home, Palestinian artist Maha Al-Daya pulled a needle and thread through material as news for wartorn Gaza blared in the background.
“Before the war I used to embroider for happy occasions, but today I stitch away my pain,” said the 41-year-old visual artist, who also paints.
Daya, her husband and three children — aged eight, 15 and 18 — are among several hundreds of Palestinians to have been granted a visa to France since the war on Gaza broke out in October 2023.
Stitch after stitch, Daya embroiders impressions of the war on to drab-coloured material.
In one work, she has stitched red thread over most of a map of Gaza to show areas ravaged by now more than 21 months of war.
In another, Daya has sewn the Arabic words “Stop the genocide” in black wool.
Rights groups, lawyers and some Israeli historians have described the Gaza war as a genocide. Israel, created in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust of Jews during World War II, vehemently rejects the accusation.
From wedding dresses to war
Palestinians have for centuries painstakingly sewn long black dresses and adorned them with stark red embroidery, in designs still worn today in rural areas and at weddings or other celebrations.
But today Daya is using it to highlight the suffering of two million Gazans in the latest Israeli bombardment campaign against the besieged Palestinian territory.
Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, leading to the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Of the 251 people taken hostage that day, 49 are still in Gaza, including 27 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed 58,895 Palestinians, most of them civilians, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Humanitarian groups say Gaza’s population is facing famine-like conditions.
In April this year, Daya met French President Emmanuel Macron to show him her work when it was exhibited at the French capital’s Arab World Institute.
She says she gave him an embroidery bearing the words “Where are we going to go now?”
“Everybody is always saying this because we’re always being displaced,” Daya said.
‘Just a few days’
Daya and her family lived through six months of conflict in Gaza before they were able to escape the Palestinian territory.
Just days after the war started, she and her children fled their home in Gaza City — and its flowered balcony — with just some clothes stuffed into backpacks.
“I thought, it’s just for a few days, we’ll be back,” she said. “We had no idea it would last for so long.”
They found refuge with friends of a nephew in the southern city of Khan Younis — people they had never met before but who were incredibly kind to them, she said.
But in mid-December, bombardment hit that house, gravely wounding two of her nephews, one of whom had to undergo an amputation.
They then lived in a tent for four months.
“The cold was unbearable. In winter, rain would come inside,” she said. But they had heard of a Cairo-based agency that could put their names on a list so they could leave via the crossing point with Egypt for a fee of $4,000 a person.
A Bethlehem artist raised the funds to pay in exchange for future works by her and her husband, also an artist.
‘Difficult to find peace’
In Cairo, she started embroidering. Her husband picked up a paint brush again. “We were like birds who had been freed from their cage,” she said.
A non-profit set up to help Gaza artists called Maan helped her apply for PAUSE, a French government programme for researchers and artists in need.
Her application was accepted by Sciences Po and the Paris-based branch of Columbia University. After nine months in Egypt, the family landed in Paris. Daya started attending French courses in the morning and embroidering in the afternoon.
In the evening she joins her family in the university residence where they now live.
Yaffa, eight years old, Rima, 15, and Adam, 18, are back in school. “When I arrived here I was happy,” she said.
“But at the same time, there’s a sort on internal pain. While there’s still war over there, while people are dying, it’s difficult to find peace.”
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