Remembering Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour

0:00This week on the NPR Politics Podcast, Republicans are on their heels and about to spend a lot of money on ads. Some of these ads are going to be ugly and it's going to be a pretty negative campaign. That's the nature of a midterm when you've got an environment like the one that the Republicans are facing. We look at the Republican money machine with less than 40 days until the midterms. This week on the NPR Politics Podcast. Today on State of the World, remembering Palestinian artist Slimane Mansour.

0:33You're listening to State of the World from NPR, a human perspective on global events. I'm Christine Arismath. The Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour was born the year before Israel's creation and spent his life painting the faces and landscapes of Israeli occupation. His art was political and attracted fresh audiences on social media during the Gaza War. Mansour died in August at age 79. NPR's Lauren Freyer was one of the last reporters to visit him and has this story.

1:13I visited Sliman Mansour and his very vocal cat at their East Jerusalem home last winter. His sons were bustling around, a grandchild's artwork was pinned up on the fridge, and Mansour was in a recliner in the corner on oxygen. But vigorous, paging through old black and white photos, conjuring memories for his autobiography. That's the house where you were born. My grandfather built it in 1921. Mansour was born in 1947 to a Christian Arab family in what is now the West Bank, then under British control. My father died when I was like three years old. And my mother put me and my sisters and brothers to boarding schools.

1:56I remember the teacher, I remember the trees, the plants. At that West Bank boarding school, he learned about Mozart, whose music he would paint to for the rest of his life. He won an art prize as a teenager. On school field trips, he hiked the Palestinian landscape, which itself became his muse, even as it changed in war. Feeds of olive trees and fruit trees and many springs, water springs. I learned to swim in them, you know. It was like heaven, you know. I always try to rebuild that image in my paintings. If I paint a village and I see that the walls are broken, I try to make them again, to build them in the painting.

2:40So you can fix with art what... What Palestine is. What Palestine is. Yes. What Palestine is, he said. Mansour painted heroic, sometimes surreal figures in bright colors. a barefoot porter lugging all of Jerusalem in a sack on his shoulders. He told me he painted that one several times after real-life porters complained he used the wrong type of sack. They're a strong, capable woman with long necks and big hands. A beautiful symbol, a beautiful woman, with greenish eyes, you know, like olive trees, with long necks to be dignified, you know. And also, our hands are not like tiny hands, like they are working hands.

3:26And always there is a Palestinian embroidered dress. That's the identity of the motherland. His characters have agency, what Palestinians call sumud, Arabic for steadfastness or perseverance. But Mansour told me he didn't even realize he was Palestinian until he was an adult. In 1948, his hometown passed from British to Jordanian control. than in 1967 to Israeli occupation. I heard about Palestine, but I never thought I'm a Palestinian. I used to think that I'm a Jordanian. In the early 70s, I started to discover that I'm a Palestinian. So my art took like 90 degrees down. I started to think about Palestine in a different way.

4:16In a political way? In a political way. To paint what I face. To paint what he faced. He still featured verdant olive and orange trees, but he started painting their trunks tangled in barbed wire. He helped popularize the watermelon as a symbol of Palestinian resistance with its colors of the national flag. Sometimes I really hate it, you know. As an artist, I want to do more than politics. But I think he's under occupation. Mansour was active in the first Intifada uprising in the late 80s and early 90s. When I was young, I was also throwing stones and whatever. He did time in Israeli jails. One painting, called Prison, shows five handcuffed hooded men huddled together in unusually muted blues and greens.

5:04But the very paint he used to depict those scenes came from Israel. And in the late 80s, as head of the League of Palestinian Artists, Mansour led a boycott of Israeli art supplies, encouraging people to use other materials. I used to help my grandmother doing beehives from clay and mud. That remembrance stuck in my mind. When I thought about the material, I thought about the mud. People are made of mud. The homeland is made of mud. So mud turned out to be very full of ideas. The result was a series of paintings of biblical scenes, portraits, a dove with an olive branch made from dry, caked earth on wood.

5:52Mansour's works appear in museums across the Arab world. His prints hang in living rooms across the Palestinian diaspora. And lately, his posters get waved aloft at pro-Palestinian rallies on college campuses. Of course, I'm proud of that. And I love it, you know, but I try to hide it, you know. because knowing that you are famous, they expand your ego very much. And that's very dangerous for artists. Are you really worried about your ego now? Not now. I'm past that. He says the bitter irony that Gaza's destruction may have brought him more fame haunts him. He used to work there. In Gaza, we used to do exhibitions all over.

6:35When you look back now, does it seem like an innocent time? Yeah, very naive, yes, of course. Naive time. Why naive? We discovered that art can't change anything. It's too weak to change anything. It's too weak? Too weak, yeah. Art is too weak to change anything, he says. Should I take the door for you? After a few hours, it's clear he's tired. His son takes one arm, I take the other, and we help Mansour out to his terrace, which is teeming with green foliage. His thoughts return to the land. He says he worries. I inherited from my grand-grandfather, Olive Grove. I love it, you know. And I'm afraid all the time that the Israelis will confiscate it for the settlers.

7:30I'm really afraid. Do you think you will see peace in your lifetime? I wish, but I'm not sure. I wish, he says, but I'm not sure. Sliman Mansour died in August, not long after the autobiography he was working on when we met was published. And he was buried in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, not far from that olive grove of his grandfather's. Lauren Freyer, NPR News in Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem. them.

8:07That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening. This week on Here and Now Anytime, how climate change is literally shifting the earth beneath Alaskans' feet through floods, landslides, and melting ice, and what they're doing about it. Bring on the locusts, because we've hit everything else. I mean, luckily, Jitto is very resilient. Come with us to Alaska on Here and Now anytime on the NPR app or anywhere you listen to podcasts. If the creation of the universe was translated into music, what would it sound like?

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