Khaled Jarada is a visual artist, born in 1996, studied multimedia, participated in various local exhibitions, and has experience in drawing comic books for children. Hani Al Barie is a writer, from Palestine, born in 1990, started writing poetry, published his first book entitled “Maybe” in 2013, and then began to pay attention to writing for the child. He has 4 picture books for children, working in Tamer Institute for Community Education, on programs related to encouraging reading between Palestinian children and youth.
Khaled Jarada is an artist, Hani Al Barie is a writer both of them based on Gaza. Their drawings and poems deal with the border experience during a pandemic. They focus on the barriers, like dots that separate the different worlds from each other. With a brush, a color, and a poem that accompanies it, they erase then recreate this border between inside and outside.
Week 1
Here is the almost-dead, which escapes, like all dreams,
It’s at his heart that the hand of the desert extends,
He carries all the seas of this universe and trots.
He wears blue, and his green days,
He carries all the joy,
All the ruptures, all the sorrows and the disappointments
He wears winter and searches for another land,
Where he will say to the raining clouds,
To sow the sea in a land other than the one we know.
Hope was the last breath of the traveler,
Hope was his land.
Week 2
So,
This is his first picture,
The traveler shrinks on himself, his boundaries are clear,
This is not unlike his features, as everything mixes
Who are like him,
We don’t know what that will wake him up shortly,
Let’s write all of this about him,
We don’t know what changed his heart,
Its borders are clear, and this is not similar to its features.
The traveler was alive, in a place of confinement.
Others were with him, others were like him.
Week 3
For the first time,
The traveler opens his eyes to see his city of light,
The neighbourhood looks like the city, embraces it,
The traveler wiped away the night darkness of his eyes, to know the city, his city, the first colour.
The traveler says to himself: « Sleep, little one, so that fear will go away and be reassured.”
The earth was calm within the traveler’s arms.
The earth slept. Like everything.
The city was above all the home of the traveler,
The city was his land.
Week 4
Thus, the earth becomes narrow, the researcher does not sleep in its secret.
He does not sleep, does not wake up,
It is the same as the one who is fed up with it,
He does not like anything about it, and its door scares it, the door of the sea
The semi-sleeping, semi-dead says: You are my last door, and you are the key.
This sea does not rest, and does not sleep.
The traveler sings and doesn’t do anything good to sing.
The sea was the traveler’s last door, the sea was his fear.
Week 5
He was asking
But no door provides answers
Almost dead dream
He lost consciousness
It’s raining water and the smell of onions
The almost dead wakes up, dies, dreams and breaks
Smiling
His heart is bad and fragile
So now the almost dead is crying.
Week 6
This is his last trip,
The almost dead says nothing
But he feels a light and hidden joy
Twenty-four roses are wilted in his soul
But another rose will sprout shortly
The almost dead does not know a river
But on a certain edge,
The almost dead is seated
Waiting for his birth again
This is what will happen in a moment.
