I painted a picture in my vivid imagination of a green springtime landscape with curvaceous hills, dotted with vaulted brushstrokes of olive trees and chaotic splashes of wildflowers against paler tones of limestone and grass. Perpendicular angles of stone village houses stood like lost sheep in a pasture of freshly tilled farmland under a hazy and cloudless blue sky. In the distance a small city was discernable mostly by the minarets of its mosques and the dust of its streets. Such is the view from almost any village in the north of the West Bank, where April aromas of rural Palestine match those of a Canadian forest meadow; a place where only grasshoppers break the silence.

But the artist in me threw this painting away, because all I could focus on was the blemish; the disfigured antithesis of artistic inspiration in the center of the landscape. This flaw of flaws was the Jenin Refugee Camp. But it wasn’t the artist in me, with his verbose narrative, that led me here; it was the human. My artist wants to make life a beautiful portrait, while the human knows, by its very existence, it can affirm the absence of beauty in life. And what more is the absence of beauty than the reflection of damnable devastation in the eyes of refugee sitting on the rubble of what’s left of his home. The artist finds a wealth of opportunity in the grey area that lies between the unreal and the real, and when he so chooses he can extend his canvas no further than the realm of the beautiful bliss of the imaginary world. If he disobeys his instinct, he can paint away the blemish with the single touch of his brush. But the human, as a mortal manifestation of the reality of life to which he is bound by his senses (no matter how hard he might try to direct his senses to the imaginary world), cannot draw a single breath of air outside of his corporeal world. So the artist and his vivid imagination stayed in the village, while the human and his monochromatic realism went to the camp.

--R.A.J. 21/04/02