Laala Kashef Alghata (18 February 1990)

We dissolve and corrode in our own memories
of faults and scraped knees, of little children
who bullied us and now, looking back, seem
so breakable and fragile; how were we ever scared?

We hide tokens behind in our childhood just in case
we get a ticket back someday so that we can look
into a string of evil eyes and see our lives floating by,
not quickly and in one breath but slowly, like our brains
are on backward speed, our relative velocity is
negative in relation to that of the rest of time.

We wonder when we will stop painting
lipstick mouths and girls with smooth, glossy legs;
when will we be true to ourselves and appear
natural, our legs unshaven, and refuse to conform?
So we paint what we cannot yet be, perhaps
never can become, and let the world beg of us
to decipher our unconventional paintings:
we are only worthy when we decide to cross boundaries.

We used to love being trapped in candy-striped
hula-hoops, flinging our hips and counting past
a hundred, laughing as we break our best friend’s
records, being admired, applauded, and receiving
powdery kisses on our foreheads from our mothers
saying, “congratulations, sweetheart” and asking
if we would show them how good we are. Never mind
that we were not always good, never mind that we hurt
people sometimes in an effort to be called wonderful.

We are those girls who refused to wear shorts
underneath their dresses to go to school, but ran
anyway, our underwear flashing until our mothers
realised and forced us to choose between being a lady
and wearing shorts underneath our dresses, to hide
the shame of being told what colour underwear we had on.

We are the girls who loved art, but even at eight years
had formed our own opinions, breezily claiming Van Gogh’s
flowers stupid, Picasso a genius. When we saw the Mona Lisa
we snorted, asking what was so important about her mundane
smile and disregarding Da Vinci’s artwork, shaking our heads
(as if we were adults) and walking out of the Louvre, saying,
That was pathetic, not nearly worth its surrounding hysteria.

We’ve grown now, we’re the in-betweens, the girls who
nobody knows quite what to do with, not old enough
to be taken too seriously but too old to be ignored.

We’re the ones with avid opinions of our own and dark
eyeliner in sharp lines around our eyes, kohl weaved carefully,
reading whenever possible and constantly creating: poetry,
paintings, photography. We visit the galleries that no one
else knows what to make of, befriend new authors and artists,
swapping ideas, relating our work to each other’s.

We go to artists’ houses and spend hours pouring over
their work with them, feeling colour and texture and getting
re-inspired, realising our dreams between two lines of colour
scratched into a surface of acrylic and mixed media. We learn
from those artists and create our own work, shrouded in
our identity, work that may seem simple or otherwise
too complicated; yet we are more conceptual than you,
we dare to have our work free, elastic, to be understood
on many different levels that we ourselves did not consciously mean.

Our art does not always define us (we are too much for that) ,
but our work will continually define those who relate to it.