I Can, I Do, & I Teach: Living Life As Art.
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It took me close to 40 years to be able to say I Am What I Art, although that was always what I thought I was!
Ever since I was a girl, all I wanted to do was draw and write — to make marks with pen, pencil, color, crayon, chalk, stick on sand, wave finger in the air, or even imagine these marks in my mind.
When I was a little girl, I never thought I want to be an artist or I want to be an author. I just enjoyed the rippling pleasure of making marks. I also didn’t think about what others might consider to be good art, bad writing.
I didn’t ponder if I should write in English or in Arabic. And I didn’t carry the stigma of being labeled as an intruder to Arab literature because most of my education was in English. All that came a while later. When I was that little girl, the true pleasure was to let the marks be whatever they decided to be once they hit the surface.
Going to school, and in particular, doing O-levels in the UK (GCSEs they’re called now, I think), spoiled that feeling for me. I was now told by teachers, art teachers who were teachers not artists, that my art was wrong. Not good enough. That I was not supposed to draw that way.
They pushed and squeezed and shoved me into their own tiny perception of an art student and what art looked like.
I kicked and screamed all the way. But they kept on squeezing. Apparently, teachers believed you were supposed to kick and scream as they broke you into conformity. You were a rebellious child. You wanted to do things your way. Well, that’s no good!
They have to fix you, and you have to go through that same process of being melted down and reformed the way they were. They went through it; why shouldn’t you? They turned our alright, didn’t they?
To me this process was like being put through a meat grinder. Bits of me were being minced into oblivion. How could they not see the blood?
I failed art O-levels. I was not surprised, although it still makes me sad. I didn’t stop making art. But more in private. Shyly.
Somewhere around my late thirties, I started to get comfortable again with my own creations of art. Not just my own faults and shortcomings, but also my strength, my creative spirit, my gypsy womanhood.
I discovered that all along I have been what I art. Doing life as art. Growing back the art limbs that were minced in the creativity-crushing machine.
I learned to have the audacity to call myself an artist, an author, a creative person. And best of all, I started to teach art-journaling to others who, like me, thought they were not creative.
“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” ~ Pablo Picasso
*****
Fadwa Al Qasem is an artist, author and just a woman with a restless soul and a gypsy’s spirit. She writes in both Arabic and English, paints with her hands and feet, takes pictures, designs jewelry, dances, and sometimes does all of these things together! She holds a BA in English Literature, and has published two collections of short stories in Arabic — The Scent of Cardamom, in 2005, and Paradise No More, in 2011 — which include pages from her art journals, and which she has translated into English (currently awaiting publication). Her short stories have been published in numerous Arabic journals around the Middle East, and her English stories have been published in Banipal and as part of two anthologies, one in the UK and the other in the USA. Some of her journal pages will be included in a book to be published in the US about art journaling, along with works from other international artists. She holds art journaling sessions at her juicy studio to unleash the creative inner child within. You can reach her at ifadwa.weebly.com.
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