News Chronicle · Shippensburg, Pennsylvania · 4 March 1975

CP-1975-008

Refugee art on display at SSC during March

Transcribed from the clipping

“‘Children’s Testimony at a Time of War’ is a selection of crayon drawings by Palestinian refugee children that will be on display during the month of March in the Huber Art Center at Shippensburg State College. Kamal Boullata, a Palestinian artist living in Washington, D.C., will speak at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 5… The 35 pictures were done by children, ages 5 to 14, who were made refugees as a result of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Many of them were children of parents living in refugee campus near Jericho when the 1967 war began, but all of them came to live in the Baqaa Refugee Camp north of Amman, Jordan, where they fled from the fighting in what John P. Richardson of ANERA describes as ‘the terrifying trek east to escape attacking soldiers and warplanes.’ Richardson also describes the camp which accommodated 36,000 persons. ‘The shelters, sanitary facilities, water supplies, clinics and schools that were established were rudimentary. The entire situation conspired to oppress the spirit as well as the body.’ A young artist from Amman, Mona Saudi wanted to do something for the children in the camp, so in 1968, she left her studies in Paris and went to Baqaa camp with paper and crayons giving the children an opportunity to express themselves freely outside of school… Titles of some of the pictures are ‘Girl, Tent and Apple,’ Fatima Salem, 6; ‘Planes: Birds of Prey,’ Fatima Abdul Fattah, 9; ‘Shepherd Watching His Sheep,’ Neimeh Salem, 6; ‘Assifa Goes to Battle,’ Mustafa Hussein, 11; and ‘Mosque of Omar,’ Muhammad Kandil, 11. Neimeh Salem spoke of the children’s ordeal, ‘We walked in the mountains and the valleys all day, passing the dead, the bombs… the planes were following us wherever we went… it was like walking in a dream.’ The artist Boullata praised the children, ‘In front of the human monumentality of these naked works created by the tiny hands of sincere children, I feel all my best work is now reduced to the size of a postage stamp.’”

Context added by this archive

Six Palestinian children named with their ages, and one of them, Neimeh Salem, aged six, quoted at length. The archive holds a companion piece printed six days later that names none of them.

Cite this item

"Refugee art on display at SSC during March," News Chronicle, 4 March 1975. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1975-008. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1975-008

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