As the horror of war continues to terrorize millions of innocent people in Palestine and Israel, I've been thinking about what creativity can contribute in the face of so much suffering. Last week, in part 1, I looked at these three ways:
Creativity can help us feel our feelings
Creativity can be a source of comfort
Creativity can be a form of nonviolent resistance
This week I'm adding three more ways creativity can be a source of support in troubled times.
4. Creativity can help us bridge the empathy divide. Many spiritual traditions point to a sense of separation as the source of all suffering. Violence is only possible when we see ourselves as separate from others and believe that we can harm them without also harming ourselves. With echo chambers, growing polarization, and the spread of misinformation it feels like we're farther away from each other than ever. The fabric of society fraying at the seams.
But creativity has a way of stitching us back together, of bridging the empathy divide.
That art and drama and music and storytelling can build empathy is well documented. Historically, books like Uncle Tom's Cabin and To Kill a Mockingbird, despite their limitations, helped white readers experience empathy for Black people in America. The Diary of Anne Frank helped millions of people empathize with the horrors of the Holocaust. I remember in school reading Zlata's Diary, which documents a girl's experience under siege in Sarajevo, and having my eyes and heart opened to a part of the world I'd previously known nothing about.
Vedran Smailović, the "Cellist of Sarajevo" played Albinoni's "Adagio in G Minor" for 22 days in the ruins of a Sarajevo market to honor 22 people killed while waiting for food there
Nathan Thrall's new book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama is a timely example in this tradition. It tells the story of a Palestinian man searching for his son in the wake of a tragic bus accident, "looking at the numerous and horrifying iniquities that the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank are forced to endure". The Guardian review says the book "brims over with just the sort of compassion and understanding that is needed at a time like this...[and] looks at the Israel/Palestine conflict with unflinching clarity and quiet anger, but above all, with nuance." Unfortunately, many events related to the launch of this important book have been cancelled in recent weeks.
The Hands Up Project works with students in Gaza . In 2021 five girls won a playwriting competition and came to London to perform their play. They described it as a chance "to show the world that the dreams of Gazan girls are similar to the dreams of girls who live in normal conditions".
What's one book/film/song/play/image that has helped open your mind and heart to the suffering of others, to feel connected to people living very different lives? Or perhaps to feel less alone in your own suffering?
5. Creativity can be a source of meaning. Viktor Frankl suffered the worst atrocities humans can inflict on each other in Nazi concentration camps. Yet, in his beautiful book Man's Search for Meaning, he affirms that even under the most tragic circumstances, we can still choose to find meaning through contribution, connection and courage. When we can't change the situation causing our suffering, we can at least choose what we make out of that suffering. As art therapist Shaun McNiff observes:
"Art heals by accepting the pain and doing something with it."
Research on post-traumatic growth shows that creativity can play an important role in turning tragedy into triumph. Frida Kahlo lived with chronic pain and had more than 30 operations in her life. Rather than give up her art, she used her art to try to transform her pain into something meaningful.
“The pain. The pain of heartbreak, the pain of sickness, the pain of betrayal. I take this pain, I express this pain, and I change it into something positive and beautiful. In these paintings, I am free of my suffering.”
The Wounded Deer by Frida Kahlo
She even found a way to paint from her bed. She wrote, "I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”
Yousef Al-Ajarma was born in a refugee camp near Bethlehem and grew up in such abject poverty that he has no memory of having even a single toy as a child. At 6 years old he started working in the vegetable market 4-8pm every day to help buy food for his family. As a teenager he spent two years in an Israeli prison.
During that two years the only thing that helped me to survive and overcome my suffering was using my imagination and making art. I carved stones and olive pits to make art pieces out of them. I also used to write poems as a way of expressing my feelings and emotions. I used to make picture frames from empty toothpaste tubes and then draw and write on them. All of this helped me to survive and to feel that my life had meaning.
He went on to earn a PhD in Expressive Therapies with a scholarship from the Ford Foundation and now helps others to use creativity to give meaning to their suffering. Yousef and other art therapists help people make sense of what happened to them, to externalize it and work with it. While we can't erase the event as part of our story, with creativity we can make sure it isn't the end of the story.
What's one book/film/song/play/image that has helped you make sense of something difficult you were going through?
6. Creativity can show us another way is possible. It's so easy to get dragged down into despair when faced with so much suffering. But despair only serves to sustain the status quo. Perhaps the biggest gift of creativity is helping us to imagine an alternative to the way things are. To envision a future of peace and prosperity for all.
When the amazing Ursula Le Guin received the National Book Award, she said she shared the award with all "writers of the imagination" who had long watched awards "go to the so-called realists". She continued:
Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.
It's important the spectators of suffering maintain enough hope in a better future that we keep actively engaged in bringing it into being. But it's perhaps even more important that people, especially children, trapped in tragic circumstances be able to find refuge in imaginary worlds. Writer Rebecca Solnit reflects:
The books of my childhood were bricks, not for throwing but for building. I piled the books around me for protection and withdrew inside their battlements, building a tower in which I escaped my unhappy circumstances. There I lived for many years, in love with books, taking refuge in books.
Art by Liniers for Rebecca Solnit’s letter from A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader
Holocaust survivor (and Neil Gaiman's cousin) Helen Fagin shares a powerful story about the healing power of story. In the Nazi ghetto, education was forbidden. But she started a clandestine school anyway. She quickly realized that rather than Latin or math, what the children needed "wasn’t dry information but hope, the kind that comes from being transported into a dream-world of possibility." So one day she told them the story of Gone With the Wind. "For that magical hour, we had escaped into a world not of murder but of manners and hospitality. All the children’s faces had grown animated with new vitality." When the class was over a green-eyed girl told her: “Thank you so very much for this journey into another world. Could we please do it again, soon?” Things got worse in the ghetto and only 4 of her 22 students survived, including the green-eyed girl. Many years later, when they met up in New York, the green-eyed girl introduced Helen to her husband as “the source of my hopes and my dreams in times of total deprivation and dehumanization.”
Malak Mattar is an inspiring young artist from Gaza. She does not gloss over the suffering in any way, and yet her images affirm beauty and hope.
“I will portray the beauty of where I grew up, despite the destruction and the erasure, wars and loss"
Last Night in Gaza by Malak Mattar
Painted during a series of attacks in Gaza in 2021, this painting shows a woman sleeping with images of the sunbird, the national bird of Palestine, and a symbol of hope. The sunbird migrates from the beaches of Gaza to the forests and mountains of the West Bank unconstrained by segregation walls and military checkpoints. If Malak can hold onto hope, so can I.
What's one book/film/song/play/image that has helped you to hold onto hope in dark times?
Writing this 2-part post has helped me feel more resourced as I bear witness to the ongoing atrocities in Gaza and a renewed commitment to creativity.
I want to acknowledge that the Middle East is not the only place of intense human suffering at the moment. It just so happens that my husband and daughter are Palestinian and my in-laws live in Palestine so this conflict fills my field of vision. But it's important we not forget that millions of people are facing inhuman conditions in Ukraine, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Sudan, Ethiopia, Myanmar... I take solace in the fact that we are getting less violent as a species. That places that were recently war-torn like Ireland and the Balkans now know peace.
And if creativity has taught me anything, it's that even if we can't see the solution right now, we can have faith that our collective creativity will carry us into a brighter future.