PALESTINE BLACK SEPTEMBER
The 1967 Six-Day Arab-Israeli War resulted in thousands of Palestinian refugees and a renewed spirit of resistance for Palestinian liberation movements. Liberation organisations based in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon stepped forward with an alternative form of politics— armed struggle. Leftists from all over the Arab world, including many Iraqis who had been members of the Iraqi Communist Party, went to join these organisations and the resistance fighters, the fedayeen.
In September 1970, after a number of assassination attempts on Jordan’s King Hussein, the Jordanian military began to expel the liberation organisations from the country, laying waste to refugee camps in the process. Those events—which came to be known as Black September—haunted Azzawi for years and are represented in many artworks from the period, including drawings for the poem by Yusuf al-Sayigh Wait for Me by the Edge of the Sea.
Azzawi also turned his attention from literary to historical texts, creating a series of drawings, paintings and gouaches entitled Witness of our Times: the Journal of a Fedayee Killed in the Jordan Massacre of 1970. Here he reinterpreted the traditional resistance fighter in terms of the martyr al-Hussein, represented as both victim and witness.
*al-Dukhūl ila mamlakat tatawajjaʿ (Entry into a Kingdom of Suffering), 1972 Oil on canvas, 244 x 183 cm Private Collection, Baghdad
Ḥālāt insāniyya (Human States) No. 1, 1975
Gouache on paper, 43 x 38 cm
Courtesy of Tala al-Azzawi Collection, London
Al-Ṣarkha (The Cry) No. 1, 1974
Gouache on paper, 44 x 37.5 cm
Courtesy of Tala al-Azzawi Collection, London
Ḥālāt insāniyya (Human States) No. 2, 1975
Gouache on paper, 43 x 38 cm
Courtesy of Tala al-Azzawi Collection, London
Al-Ṣarkha (The Cry) No. 2, 1974
Gouache on paper, 43 x 37.5 cm
Courtesy of Tala al-Azzawi Collection, London
Ḥālāt insāniyya (Human States) No. 4, 1975
Gouache on paper, 50 x 44 cm
Courtesy of Tala al-Azzawi Collection, London
Ḥālāt insāniyya (Human States) No. 6, 1975
Gouache on paper, 43 x 38 cm
Courtesy of Tala al-Azzawi Collection, London
Ḥālāt insāniyya (Human States) No. 3, 1975
Gouache on paper, 40 x 30 cm
Private Collection, Baghdad
Ḥālāt insāniyya (Human States) No. 5, 1975
Gouache on paper, 40 x 30 cm
Courtesy of Hashim Samarchi Collection, London
Dia al-Azzawi at Highgate Studio, London, United Kingdom, 1982.
Courtesy of the Artist.