Column Basman Elderawi
Art is my heart
I can divide music into cold and hot songs depending on not only my mood but also the weather. On a summer day, I would play a song, close my eyes and let it move the breeze of air around my face. For a cold day, I would play a song that pushes adrenaline through my veins and warms up my body. Another division is light and deep: a light song, which can walk on your skin or a deep one, which can penetrate your skin and squeeze your heart. Adele’s “Set fire to the rain” was definitely one reason I have started to write. It took my emotions behind the physics. I feel the flames pouring over my skin. I feel the heat. She fired the rain. So how can’t she fire my heart!
Image par Gerd Altmann de Pixabay
Art reshapes me. Even now when some people have started to question the value of art comparing it to medicine and medical sciences, art has beauty and pain. The best component of being human. Even when some art plays hard with the truth, art is a more a matter of questioning than believing. Art has the key to exposure and the wild heart of a strong warrior, the unsaid truth.
Artist Veronique Gray – credit photo Luna Lucid
I am a science guy and I will always be. I always see regular people especially the medical staff and any other life saver as more than superheroes and I will rethink our “normal” again. I will always stand against the unfair distribution of the system but if science is my brain, art is my heart and they can’t work without each other.
Kelly Clarkson yesterday reminded me I still have a voice even if I don’t have a stage. I apologize for calling anyone voiceless I am not your voice and you have a voice. Pink told me that wild hearts can’t be broken and Kelly told me how I can be broken and beautiful. Pink told me that I am here and opening up my heart is not a sin.
Image par Jess Bailey de Pixabay
Today I watched a movie, “Ghost Hunting” about a director asking and using Palestinian prisoners to build a prison to re-enact their prison days. And to relive the experience again with letting their emotions and anger out. I am watching a new Series (Cluster/ (عنقود about 2014 assaults on Gaza and about a group of people detained in a clinic who can’t get out due to bombing and how they hardly manage to live inside. Watching an experience you have lived before, part of your life, makes your heart clenched and beat faster. I don’t know if the film or the Series heals them or me….or just bringing memories could serve as a kind of therapy. Yet I cried as I cried with Anthony Ray Hinton in his cell and as I cried with John Coffey at his execution chair in “Green Mile”. As I also cried for Sami Abu Diak and other prisoners who died without a last hug.
One foreign friend asked me if I watched the Netflix Series called “Fauda” and what I think of it. I bet many heard about that one. I have watched two episodes and found it surprisingly manipulated. Not because the actors couldn’t speak our Arabic accent properly but because the scenario’s writers forgot to include the occupation and the apartheid that lead to violence. They want revenge yet forget who started it all. Who started all the violence from the start?
Art can be manipulated. History can be manipulated but still art is adventure. I am not here to tell what is right or wrong. You can watch, ask and then search the truth. Remember art is about questioning rather than believing.
Image par janrye de Pixabay
Life is more than a movie yet a movie can be a life or can be a life changer. I want my heart to beat and my brain to ask, to analyse to create a movie and a movement with life. To remember that every life can be my life. And it should be a full life.
Basman Derawi is Palestinian, was born in Kuwait and lived there for two years before coming to Gaza. He is a physiotherapist for the Ministry of Health in Gaza. He thinks of writing as space where he can escape, the best place where he can feel free. He writes in both Arabic and English. He began drafting stories and poems a few years ago and is inspired by his questions, music, movies and people with special needs. One of his dreams as a Palestinian is to share and show Palestinians’ real faces as they struggle and work for their rights. He also loves to read, cook, and play video games and basketball.
