By Ica Wahbeh
AMMAN – Documenting towns for posterity is normally the job of ethnographers, historians, archaeologists or maybe photographers. The reason they do it is to restore history and recreate lifestyles, immortalise times or secure information for future generations.
Painter Mohammad Jaloos had that and other reasons in mind when he took it upon himself to keep records of different Jordanian and Palestinian towns. For the sake of capturing people’s way of life, between 1991 and 2000 he painted/documented Fuheis, Salt and Jerusalem. The preoccupation was mostly aesthetic; the artist was enjoying drawing in water colour, taking a break from the abstract work he was doing, “restoring my relation with the way I look at things”.
In 1998, however, on a visit to Nablus, the Jasmine neighbourhood (harat yasmineh) captured his attention in a particular way: the whole area had one entry and one exit, “making it look like one big house; under arches, passages take you from one street to another. One house, thousands of people”.
Captivated by the buildings and streets, “so similar to Salt in architecture and the yellowish limestone used for building”, he was convinced that he needed to put them down on paper. He set to work documenting the neighbourhood.
Deep down, the unexpressed fear that Israel will destroy this beautiful quarter made him painstakingly sketch and take photos of the place where the “children of the stone” of the first Intifada would take refuge, secure in the knowledge that the labyrinthine streets will make it impossible for them to be caught.
“I documented every house, every street, the entire neighbourhood,” anxiety gnawing at him. And for good reason. In 2002, two years after the second Intifada had started, the artist met “someone from ‘Jasmine Alley’ who told me that a big part of the city had been destroyed by Israel”.
The decision to paint the quarter and exhibit the works for “people to remember” it as it once was, was reinforced by “my friend Naser Abdelkarim, who encouraged me strongly to start the project, to start painting the city”.
And so the welcoming, warm old buildings of Nablus came back to life in Jaloos’ 37 water colours and three murals, endearing, familiar, still there, even if perhaps not anymore.
Stone buildings keep shade to the narrow streets. The play of shadows is as striking as the images; they give an extra dimension to the whole, stretching across streets or hugging the walls, playfully keeping in obscurity details that appear later with meticulous precision.
Street lamps, jutting awnings, metal works barring windows take little of the narrow cobbled-street space over which electricity lines hang in funny knots and shapes.
Clothes hand on a rope in a sunny patch and shop signs add colour to the mostly ochre and bluish grey water colours.
Stairways everywhere lead to upper floors or up the climbing streets, integral part of the architecture, eroded by time and footsteps, indispensable to the normal way of life of the residents. Arches connect buildings, stretch over streets, provide shade and make elaborate patterns on the streets below. They are graceful Roman, corbel, Gothic, bell arcades, solid, supporting structures, elegant slender geometric figures, practical and decorative at the same time, old building technique that defines centuries and human enterprise.
Occasional signs appear on the sun-bleached façades. Even the photo of a “martyr” is plastered on a wall; the neighbourhood had, after all, its fair share of stone throwers and destruction.
Jasmine, lots of it, climbs on walls, hangs from upper gardens and balconies, green, alive and holding the promise of fragrant evenings when neighbours come out on their porches to enjoy the cooler evening air.
Minarets are profiled against the clear blue skies, soaring, competing with the multi-storied buildings, trying to climb higher than the neighbouring edifices, just like the plants, thirsty for light and sun.
Human presence is scarce. A few chairs, cars, a vending stand on wheels, a few silhouettes appear here and there, but the place is mostly quiet, peaceful, lazing in the sun, centuries old and standing. Part of it at least.
The murals, in acrylic, present breathtaking overviews of the city at the foot of Jabal ‘Ebal, ochre yellow and succumbing to the houses that are slowly creeping up its slopes.
Blue-domed mosques tower over the cityscape, in the company of antennae-covered flat or red-tiled sloping roofs. Old trees, taller than the buildings, show their green foliage among buildings, oases of colour in the stone city.
Streets, windows, doorways, architecture – behind them all human presence is felt at all times even if not physically present.
Jaloos’ painstaking details, his masterful rendition of the story of Harat Yasmineh, make his work and the quarter’s existence even more poignant and captivating.
The paintings can be seen at the Royal Cultural Centre until May 15. To some, home will be brought closer.