THAKLA
Thakla is a series of prints on layers of hand dyed gauze, resulting in overlapping images of the grieving women of Palestine.
This diaphanous book is meant to float in your hands like ash, and comes housed in a wounded leather folio, which has been lined with brightly painted poppies, representing the richness of the culture that is being erased, and in remembrance of the
children who did not survive.
6x8” (edition of 12) $1200.
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Western culture does not have a word for the unspeakable loss of a child, but the Arabic language provides the word “Thakla”.
This book, Thakla, is about the impossible task of dressing such a wound. When we dress our physical wounds with gauze, we know the blood will eventually cease to flow, and healing will come.
But this emotional and spiritual wounding bleeds out eternally, there is no suture, no remedy, and no revenge that does not create more wounding.
My book is specific to the Palestinian genocide, but I am also thinking about the universality of how women, and particularly mothers, suffer in situations where they are stripped of the power to defend their families. This is so for the Hispanic mothers who send their children over the US border knowing they may never see them again, the mothers who who watch their black sons go off to school knowing they are targets for police brutality, and mothers who face the torture of watching their daughters carried off to be sexually assaulted in Sudan.
This is through no fault of their own, but simply by existing as a certain race, religion, or culture.
Until I began working on this book, I never questioned whether or not it was valid for me to feel pain as a witness to other people's grief. Crying everyday listening to the news, I was hyper aware that my experience of it through the radio was inconsequential in the face of the anguish felt by these women in the worst moments of their lives. How could I express the etheric wound I
felt, this wound on humanity, without minimizing their pain?
I chose to do some crude carving of the images I was seeing, hoping to preserve anonymity for these women, while still portraying the weight of emotion. I had to carve each image several times, which allowed me plenty of opportunity to sit with their grief, and to consider the question, ‘Are there limits to one's ability to empathize?’
Gauze was named for Gaza, which was a centre of weaving industry in the Middle East from the mid 16th century.
