'It shares the Palestinian experience of displacement': Basel Zaraa on his Cork Midsummer installation

Irish Examiner

17-06-2025

Can you describe what Dear Laila involves?
Dear Laila is an intimate, interactive installation experienced by one audience member at a time, which shares the Palestinian experience of displacement and resistance, through the story of one family.
I created it in response to my daughter Laila, who was then five, asking where I grew up, and why we couldn't go there.
As I couldn't take her to Yarmouk, the Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus where I grew up, I tried to bring it to her by making a model of our now destroyed family home.
The audience member sits in Laila's shoes and learns the story of the house, through the miniature, an audio piece, objects and photos. The story of the house is the story of our family, which in turn is the story of millions of Palestinians.
What do you hope an Irish audience will get from it?
I hope that this personal approach makes audiences feel more connected to the experience. As Palestinians, our individual experiences tell political stories. And this is not something we have chosen, but something that has been forced upon us by history.
I wanted to show how these historical events are experienced in the everyday lives of ordinary people.
Can you tell us about your family history?
We are from a village called Tantura in the north of Palestine. My grandparents used be a farmers, and in 1948, the year of the Nakba, a Zionist armed group attacked my village and carried out a massacre, killing more than 200 people from my village.
Those who survived, were forced to leave, and my great-grandparents were among them. They went to Syria, thinking they would stay for a bit and go back, but that never happened as Israel didn't allow anyone to go back to their homes and towns.
More than 750,000 Palestinian forced to leave their homes that year. Now I am one of the third generation to be born and grow up as a refugee in Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, which is one of 12 Palestinian camps in Syria.
Did your parents/grandparents continue to hope they would return home to Palestine?
Most of the Palestinians I know still have keys to their homes, or title deeds to prove that they owned a home in Palestine. As you say, I am one of the third generation that was born and grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp, and there are hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees still living as refugees today without any other nationality, in refugee camps in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, West Bank and Gaza.
They are waiting to go back home, as is our right recognised by the UN resolution 194, which states that 'Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date'.
Dear Laila was inspired by Basel Zaraa's desire to show his daughter their home in a Syrian refugee camp.
For you, Yarmouk seems to have really been a home – albeit with a desire to return to Palestine. What were the circumstances of when you had to leave?
Like all refugee camps, Yarmouk meant to be temporary, somewhere to stay until we returned to our villages and homes, but the tents became 'cement tents', and we got stuck there, generation after generation. So it's strange to say that Yarmouk, a refugee camp, was our home, but it was, and when we lost it, it felt like losing a home again.
I left just before the uprising began, on a spouse visa, expecting to be able to return to visit. But after the uprising started in Syria, Yarmouk became one of the worst hit places by the war, following a pattern of destruction of Palestinian camps that we often see in the region.
Most of the camp got destroyed and most of its residents got displaced and were forced to leave their homes again, which brought back the trauma of our first exile, when my grandparents were forced to leave Palestine.
Are there particular possessions that were important for you to take to the UK?
When I left I didn't know I'd be unable to return for a long time, or that when I returned the camp would be destroyed. The thing that has been most important for me is how we could rescue photos from Yarmouk, to preserve memories of happy moments in the camp, so our visual memory was not only of its destruction. When my father went back to see the camp after the siege was lifted, he was able to get some of the photos from rubble, and I use these photos in Dear Laila.
Obviously, what's happening in Gaza and beyond recently has reached whole new levels of horror. How has that affected you, both personally and in terms your art?
We as Palestinians have been living in trauma for 77 years - the wars haven't stopped, from 1948 to 1967, Black October in the 1970s, the siege of Beirut in 1982, the first and second Intifada, military and settler attacks in the West Bank, and the siege and continued attacks on Gaza over the last 20 years...
Personally, to witness what happened to my camp, Yarmouk, and to my neighbours and family and people, was a big trauma, which affected me, and most of us from the camp, deeply.
It took time for us to be able to comprehend what was happening to us. Art is a way of understanding this trauma and healing our wounds by facing what has happened, and telling our story.
My works try to tell the story of my community, in the face of the occupation's attempt to create a false narrative about what they have done to us. I feel this is my responsibility, as a Palestinian, as an artist and as a human.
Art always plays a big role in defending the oppressed and defending truth, and this is clear when you see how the occupation tries to suppress these expressions, whether that's the assassination of the writer Ghassan Kanafani, or the killing of journalists and intellectuals in Gaza today.
What do you think of the boycott movement (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel, particularly in an arts context?
BDS is an essential and effective tool for people around the world to show solidarity with Palestine and put pressure on the occupation, now more than ever. As witnesses to the ongoing genocide, we must put pressure on Israel with all the tools available to us, and the example of South Africa shows us that boycotts work.
Obviously, the situation in Syria is fluid, but what are your thoughts on returning to Yarmouk, possibly bringing Laila?
I returned to Syria after the fall of the regime. I wanted to witness this important moment in Syria's history, and was able to go a month after the dictatorship fell.
The dictatorship had been there for half a century, and, particularly in recent years, it felt like it would never fall, but it did, which is a reminder that although the road to freedom can be long, nothing lasts forever. It was incredible to witness Syrians celebrating these first moments of freedom, and when I was there my mind was in Palestine and imagining when this moment will come for us too.
I didn't take my daughter Laila or my son Ibrahim with me this time, but I hope to in the future. It was hard to see Yarmouk destroyed, we had always seen it on the news so much, but in real life it affects you much more strongly. But it was also nice to see the first time they had Eid in Yarmouk, with swings and children playing in the streets. It gave a feeling of hope for the future.
Dear Laila is on June 20-22 at MicroGALLERY, on Grand Parade, Cork. Tickets: €8. See corkmidsummer.com