Linda Holmer interweaves her experience of teaching creative writing with a focus on children's books at the Tamer Institute for Community Education in Palestine with her experience of drawing lying on the grass during her course in Visual Narrative at the Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg. This is a personal essay on discovering the healing power of drawing

The cat's movements, using me like a piece of furniture. On its way, its own world. Stopping nose to my nose. Giving a puff – a ball of air? There's a language to that puff, more than just air. Feeling like I've always known there was a language in puff.

If I have the will to understand, find proof, it can't be done. If I'm willing to believe that what I experienced is true, there's an opening. I know it contains a language. A contact. I felt it in my body and with the movements, rhythm and timing of the cat. The form the puff took, how it felt between us.

In this essay I investigate the connection between verbal and nonverbal communication. Something about the will and willingness, the starting point being that I so urgently wanted to do something with (for) Palestine last spring. Reestablish my contact with the Tamer Institute there, where I held a course in creative writing with a focus on picture books in March 2020. Would it be possible to do something together in the interstices between the Tamer Institute for Community Education and the students to whom I teach Visual Narrative at HDK-Valand – the Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg? The Tamer Institute makes every effort not to speak in terms of for or against good or evil. They work for children in a region where everything is political. Working for children means, for instance, arranging storytelling sessions for fathers and children through the campaign "Baba, read to me", and reserving advertising space by the checkpoint, the wall around Jerusalem. They reach a lot of Palestinians there.

This is because as a Palestinian you have to queue up there every single day, if you work on one side of the border but are only allowed to live on the other. It is a border depending on whether you are Palestinian, depending on where you were born, depending not only on where you mother but also your father was born which, in turn, has to do with whether you were able, in childhood, to live at the same address with both your parents or just see one of them during the daytime or maybe not at all. And if not at all, you had to be prepared for your parents to be regularly called in for interrogation so as not to be committing a crime in spending time with you.

I reconnect with Renard Qubbaj, General Director of the Tamer Institute. She sends me children's drawings and pictures of the work for children's rights to play being done by the Institute in the Gaza refugee camps during the ongoing war. She asks me:

"Like these are footage, or illustrations, that have been done by the children of Gaza now, at this moment. So, I am wondering if someone can do an article around it, in English, an article of two pages, something like that, and if it can look at the … I don't know, the aspects of healing, and aspects of art and beauty … and then … would that be possible, or how, please advise."

Drawing as solace, I think, because wasn't that what I had done upon my return from Palestine, cast into a sudden situation with virtual teaching on Zoom because of the pandemic? When I began drawing sounds with my eyes closed? But can I do that for Palestine? Do I have the right and can I do it without sounding too naively enthused? Kind of "We shall overcome" vibes? I feel idiotic and self-absorbed.

I take a walk in the sun to help myself plan, thinking vaguely about how it might be done. Could we at the Academy in Gothenburg work online with Tamer, closing our eyes and drawing each other's sounds? A bumblebee buzzes past. I recall a meeting with Ibitsam Alqam, who took the course in Ramallah and invited me to spend the night with her family in Hebron. We sat silently listening to their chickens and the buzzing of their bees, gazing out over the landscape, the hills. 'There's an Israeli settlement on that one, and the one over there is where one of your "messengers" landed,' her husband told me. 'Messengers'?, I asked. 'The man who got swallowed by that fish,' was his reply. Aha, Jonah, the man who found himself in the belly of the whale and was later spit back out on land when he had thought things over and was prepared to speak to people again.

I'm thinking of place, time and space. On the level of horizontal action, in a narrative, and in terms of the symbolic. The difference between reading the Bible literally and metaphorically. In the story of Jonah – literally in the belly of the whale and symbolically withdrawn into isolation. Making contact, making an insight appear, our of the darkness and with renewed force. Doing things, working together in a community of action with others.

Many stories in the world of folk tales and of the picture book I am teaching now, can be interpreted at on least two levels. On the horizontal, linear level of action there is often an adventure. Cause and effect, easily to follow: what happens next? But there is also a vertical, symbolic, metaphorical level open to further interpretations. Relating the story to something larger, outside oneself, upward. And inward, how one feels the story, experiences it sensorily, sensually.

Gro Dahle, an author and poet who also teaches on our course, often works with both these levels in her own children's literature. She deals with sensitive subjects, such as sibling incest. The perpetrator In Octopus is turned into an octopus in his encounter, behind closed doors, with his younger sister (https://ceeanimation.eu/projects/octopus/ and a book published in 2013 with illustrations by Svein Nyhus). The curtains are pulled shut, sticky arms grab and entwine. A creepy, scary adventure for a child, and also exciting.. For an adult reader there are the keys to a very different, far more frightening story. Reality, not meant for children. And yet. The book as witness for the children who might recognize their own reality in the feelings. As a tool, without being pedagogical. This is the sublime, this is art and thereby it may also have pedagogical effects or, as Swedish children's writer Lennart Helsing said, "All pedagogical art is bad art – and all good art is pedagogical" (https://publicera.kb.se/tfl/article/view/11992). This is also how the Tamer Institute works. Not ducking to avoid that which is, that which exists in any case, working, as shown in the drawings of children at play in Gaza but without finger-pointing. The war is there in any case. Because, as Renad Qubbaj said in a voice message when she sent me the drawings: "Children are so thirsty for playing and can't act in structure way so they can talk and somebody can listen"

I have a walk in the sun to allow myself to do something that may feel absurd and trivial when there is a war on. Because the same thing applies to me as applies to the children, and to the artistic process. I pass Vasaparken where there is a tent camp demonstration. There's a sign reading: "Israel's killing children again. Enjoy your day." I stiffen. Become reactive. Ashamed for thinking I wanted to draw the sound of a bumblebee, a few chickens. My thought sticks between my shoulder blades with my freeze response, a reaction I recognize as shame. Afraid of doing something wrong. There are no options beyond for and against.

But I listen inward, beneath the shame and the stiffening, and my body responds with a memory: a meeting with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I was nervous. Feeling unworthy? Desmond Tutu had met people like me, like us, before. He softened us up, got us to let down our guard with his laughter. Let us imitate his pronunciation of the village of his birth. "It's hard," I laughed when I tried to make the click sound of his dialect. "Hard?" he asked. "Do you think fighting freedom from apartheid was hard?"

The same shame, my freeze response reaction then as now, when I read the sign outside the tent camp. And at the same time I recall how the meeting with Tutu continued. His laughter, the sound of it, how I can feel it in me, dissolving my fear. "Fighting freedom from apartheid is eeeeasy! It is what you are fighting for, that is hard. What are you for?" he asked.

My meeting with the archbishop took place in a dream which, the moment I try to put words to, becomes a story. In the dream this encounter is no more than a sensation, an image, a personal myth. A symbolic language, as described by Erich Fromm in The Forgotten Language (Henry Holt & Co., 1976), or the alternative type of knowledge/language known in philosophy by the Greek term gnosis. Truth, knowledge that can only be experienced subjectively, as opposed to objective, logical knowledge, logos. The vertical transcendent of wonder and awe, as I feel it, and to which I must listen, in which I must be, in order to strive for the self in me, and the only thing I can do, to strive for anyone or anything else. This also contains aspects of the word "enjoy", and its second syllable, "joy".

If I cease to acnowledge wonder and awe, it's all over, nothing left. Just as much war and disaster as in a society where children can no longer play. The same sensation as when I was locked into digital teaching on Zoom after my return from Palestine. In the belly of the whale?

Out of pure necessity I lay down between my Zoom classes and drew sounds with my eyes closed. Not drawing sounds as an indication of anything, but rather with the actual sound as my material, noice rather than sound, this text suggests. Inside this doing with noice I made contact. Between the person I had previously thought was myself and the one I previously thought was not me. The drawings were simultaneously abstract and wholly concrete. Their own uniquenessa contains a sort of particle truth. I draw sound as matter, material, particles and waves. Through me. When I get up I can see landscapes grow forth – that which is in between and that which unites. I draw my listening, my being in doing, detached from a manipulative ego.

This is what I continue doing later, along with others. There is something inexplicable in it. By setting a timer we are released from time as well. I want to write about it, about how I did something last spring with the drawings from the refugee camp, but now that it is autumn I know that the camp no longer exists. It can't be done, I can't do it. When I look at the text on the screen I become reactive. Re-acting, re-writing, criticizing.

I take my eyes off the screen and shift into a listening mode. Let my fingers write in their own peculiarity, keeping time to the clatter of the keyboard. Slow down and just write, listening. What I write can be only that which is and is not unnecessary, it is a doing, a wondering together with the text. I set up a meeting with my writing more than I write. Am alongside the writing. Look and see spelling errors. Wrote "unmecessary". Yes, thanks, not wrong, in fact necessary. Unmecessary doing. Unmecessessarily. With enjoyment, awe and wonder. And messily.

I think about the children's drawings Renad Qubbaj at Tamer sent me. How the fact that the writing on the drawings is in Classical Arabic written by an adult affects my perception of them. The explanatory texts make the symbolism of the drawings vanish, not least because the children speak colloquially rather than in Classical Arabic.

As I see it the drawings were made from a position where the drawing knows already and in itself that it will be looked at. Frida Talik, Artistic Director of The Museum of Drawings, spins her thoughts about this when we talk: that drawings made at school are different from drawings the same children make at home, which makes me realize I've done the same thing.

I see myself wanting to be there, in the doing, with the pupils at a girl's school in Palestine in 2020: "Take this pencil. It has something to tell you if you listen." The girls shut their eyes and draw. My feeling is that it is working. A moment of intensive presence, each on her own world, and yet with a collective energy arising from the doing. Could I have stayed here, maybe just hung the pictures up as they were, in celebration of our moment? Instead I pursued it and before long we had transitioned to performance and achievement. The drawings turned into ordinary drawings and the girls became the ordinary girls ready to jump up and perform. I, too, became the ordinary teacher who says: "Oh, that's lovely." Through I couldn't say that. Because I don't know their language. The whole event thus ran out in the sand of well-meaning pleasantries, lost in translation. But did it really? Isn't this me, in this writing, wanting to compartmentalize? Being good. Eager for the workshop to be the way I want it to be? In the dialogue with during the process of translating of this essay into English my memory recalled Hiba and Haneen from Tamer, who were with me at the workshop. Saying "It does not matter what you do, it's the fact that we do, meet these children that matters". I also remember, when it was time to clean up some, or maybe just one of the girls who had not shown her drawings, got carried away and smeared out the remaining paint all over her paper. Was deep into a picture, being, doing. I went over to her and joined in on the painting with my fingers. Wordless contact, and a gaze, confirmation. Exactly. We were in the picture together. Under layers of socially imprinted good cheer.

I recall how much I liked story hour when I was the same age as these pupils. How I rested my head on my forearms and drew. The schedule said Story Hour but we were allowed to listen with our fingers, our hands if we wished. Nothing had to be shown. I was into a drawing, I was drawing, and the boy sitting next to me sculpted a little green hippopotamus our of the school eraser. I remember this now and see the connection with how, even today, I spent my Story Hour trusting, in a doing free from preconceptions, then and thenre, more than during the scheduled art classes.

Being in that room along with others cannot have an aim and cannot be made into either a for or against Palestine. But I proposed to the students in our course that we spread out a roll of paper, lie on our backs and draw with our eyes closed and that I tell them about experiences with the voice of my heart, as ibitsam once spoke to me in our meeting in Hebron.

I tell them about Palestine, about Ibitsam, the bumblebee and the chickens, about listening with the voice of one's heart, about an Israeli aid worker, about a cactus. Listening to the call to prayer up on the old ring wall in Jerusalem and about sounds without borders. Mariam, one of the students on the course, takes over, speaks of her family's friends who are in Gaza right now and about a conversation with their daughter. It is lovely and true and sad and more. I am in my drawn line togethter with others.

Lose the line, forget to set the timer. Wonder if this is good or ridiculous? Become aware of myself. Am into the sound of the tree, drawing the shade and the wind of the tree. Am at the tent demonstration and at the same time up there in the crown of the tree, where the sound comes and tells me that I am all right. That I am only one little human being.

Drawing noice with a soft pencil/graphite has an immediacy to it, in its own simplicity. I am in the noice which is both outside me and inside me and in the movement that makes an impression on the thick satin paper. Which responds by also appearing, carbon atoms moving from the pencil to the paper with graphite evoking the paper itself, the weave in the cotton fibers induced by the carbon. Something is also materialized in this, the actual time we spend there, together.

Now, in October, I spread out the same roll again. Islands of student voices to which I listen with my line. I'm with the bumblebee and all of us again, binding, entering into a dialogue with a different time and a different space. Dialogue, doing, through logos? No, Dia, through, gnosis, of course. Entering into a diagnosis with the earlier drawing sessions on the roll.

Translated by Linda Schenck

The Author

Linda Holmer is an artist and writer, and is also course director for and teacher of courses in Visual Narrative at the Academy of Art and Design, Gothenburg University.

Arches at the The Museum of Drawings

Linda Holmer works with drawing as a state of being, as a way of seeing and being present. In her exhibition Arches at The Museum of Drawings in Laholm, Sweden, between 17 February and 28 May 2024, she showed primarily drawings made during the 2021 pandemic, a time of isolation and loneliness, spotlighting creativity and contact. Between Zoom teaching sessions Holmer lay on the floor drawing sounds "such as the murmuring of the water in the heating pipes, or maybe the sound of a neighbor making lunch". Also on display are later outdoor drawing sessions in the company of others.

The Tamer Institute for Community Education an educational non-governmental non-profit organization that runs educational and reading promotion projects for children and young people in the West bank and Gaza strip. The Institute was established in 1989 and its main office is in Ramallah. In 2009 Tamer was awarded the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, ALMA.

The student workshop

A student workshop in drawing was held with students in the course Visual Narrative at HDK Valand -- the Academy of Art and Design in Gothenburg, Sweden, where Linda Holmer also teaches a course called Making Stories through Picture Books for professional artists, illustrators, photographers or designers wanting to develop their capacity to express themselves in text as it relates to pictures.

Publicerad i Tecknaren no 4, 2024.