Ahmad Fuad Osman
‘Qahr’ ( قهر), 2023
mixed medium on canvas
183 x 153 cm
72 x 60 1/4 in
72 x 60 1/4 in
Copyright The Artist
Since the start of the Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, I saw hundreds, if not thousands of photos and videos of the genocide by...
Since the start of the Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, I saw hundreds, if not thousands of photos and videos of the genocide by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) but no images could fairly encapsulates their grief and sufferings better than the word ‘Qahr’ ( قهر ) if I am to translate it into painting.
Ahmed Firwana had just moved back from living abroad to his native Gaza a few months before October 2023, and was glad to be reunited with his family after spending years apart, wrote Marion Fernando of TRT World.
Days before the war broke out, he travelled to Belgium via Egypt, one of the few routes available to Palestinians when travelling abroad, for what was supposed to be a short work trip.
On October 15, he had lost his mother and father, brother and sister-in-law, as well as their three-year-old daughter, his niece, after Israeli airstrikes hit their home.
“When you leave Gaza, you travel on business for six days, and you discover that it is your family's last farewell, and you cannot go back and say goodbye to them, and your entire family had been martyred while you are far away, and you cannot even be there for their final farewell,” said a 25-year-old Firwana, “You then know the meaning of the word ‘Qahr’.”
“We translate ‘Qahr’ in the sense of what we see now in Gaza,” says 28-year-old Momen Talal Nassar, a Palestinian man, whose family home in Gaza City’s Rimal neighbourhood has been reduced to rubble by Israeli bombing.
“When a father has to console his daughter who had her hand blown off in a bombing, when the girl doesn’t know that she has lost her hand completely, and when her father lies and says that it's just a wound — this is ‘Qahr’.”
“’Qahr’ is when you find sixty or seventy percent of the country destroyed ... It’s when a mother runs back home and says ‘My kids were martyred before they had their dinner’,” says Nassar.
There is no English equivalent to the Arabic word ‘Qahr/Qaher’ ( قهر(. The dictionary says ‘anger’ but it’s not. It is when you take anger, place it on a low fire, add injustice, oppression, racism, dehumanization to it, and leave it to cook slowly for a century. And then you try to say it but no one hears you. So it sits in your heart. And settle in your cells. And it becomes your genetic imprint. And then moves through generations. And one day, you find yourself unable to breath. It washes over you and demands to break out of you. You weep. And the cycle repeats.
This painting is purely my own state of ‘Qahr’ for these past few months in regard to our Palestinian brothers and sisters, especially women and all those martyred children.
Ahmed Firwana had just moved back from living abroad to his native Gaza a few months before October 2023, and was glad to be reunited with his family after spending years apart, wrote Marion Fernando of TRT World.
Days before the war broke out, he travelled to Belgium via Egypt, one of the few routes available to Palestinians when travelling abroad, for what was supposed to be a short work trip.
On October 15, he had lost his mother and father, brother and sister-in-law, as well as their three-year-old daughter, his niece, after Israeli airstrikes hit their home.
“When you leave Gaza, you travel on business for six days, and you discover that it is your family's last farewell, and you cannot go back and say goodbye to them, and your entire family had been martyred while you are far away, and you cannot even be there for their final farewell,” said a 25-year-old Firwana, “You then know the meaning of the word ‘Qahr’.”
“We translate ‘Qahr’ in the sense of what we see now in Gaza,” says 28-year-old Momen Talal Nassar, a Palestinian man, whose family home in Gaza City’s Rimal neighbourhood has been reduced to rubble by Israeli bombing.
“When a father has to console his daughter who had her hand blown off in a bombing, when the girl doesn’t know that she has lost her hand completely, and when her father lies and says that it's just a wound — this is ‘Qahr’.”
“’Qahr’ is when you find sixty or seventy percent of the country destroyed ... It’s when a mother runs back home and says ‘My kids were martyred before they had their dinner’,” says Nassar.
There is no English equivalent to the Arabic word ‘Qahr/Qaher’ ( قهر(. The dictionary says ‘anger’ but it’s not. It is when you take anger, place it on a low fire, add injustice, oppression, racism, dehumanization to it, and leave it to cook slowly for a century. And then you try to say it but no one hears you. So it sits in your heart. And settle in your cells. And it becomes your genetic imprint. And then moves through generations. And one day, you find yourself unable to breath. It washes over you and demands to break out of you. You weep. And the cycle repeats.
This painting is purely my own state of ‘Qahr’ for these past few months in regard to our Palestinian brothers and sisters, especially women and all those martyred children.
