Wars and occupations across Arab countries have provided material for cinematic, literary and artistic works seeking to document suffering and protect memory from oblivion. Rather than attempting to capture the full picture, creatives have told major stories through individual characters and everyday details, such as crossing checkpoints, recording a family history or depicting life inside a field hospital.
Palestinian cinema revisits the individual experience
In Palestinian cinema, this approach has helped present the cause as a human experience extending beyond direct political rhetoric. Film studies researcher Mafi Maher says Palestinian directors have succeeded, since Rashid Masharawi’s film “Haifa” was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996, in breaking stereotypes and benefiting from their work’s international presence.
In Lebanon, directors portrayed the effects of the civil war through Beirut’s divided streets, as Maroun Baghdadi did in his 1982 film “Little Wars”. In Syria, the team behind Feras Fayyad’s film “The Cave” followed a doctor running an underground field hospital in Ghouta, which was being bombarded. Fayyad said he wanted the film to serve as a historical record informing future generations about what people experienced.
Novels and poetry document the region’s wars
Novels and poetry played a parallel role in anchoring the experience of war in Arab memory. In Palestine, literary works addressed the Nakba, the Naksa, the uprisings and the occupation, while poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Rashid Hussein, Samih al-Qasim and Tamim al-Barghouti became part of the collective memory associated with displacement, resistance and identity.
In Sudan, Mansour al-Souim’s novel “The Borders of Ashes”, published two years before the outbreak of the Darfur war, depicted a corrupt general who incites fighting and burns villages. Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin also conveyed the effects of war in his novel “The Messiah of Darfur”.
Rabea Jaber’s novel “The Birds of the Holiday Inn” and Elias Khoury’s “Sinalkol” documented the burdens of the Lebanese civil war, while Baghdad and Iraq’s pain after the 2003 US invasion appeared in Saadi Youssef’s poems. Exile did not sever Arab creatives’ ties with their homelands; it instead gave some of them new spaces for writing and access to a wider audience.
Visual art preserves the identity of exile
In her study “Palestinian Art: Imagining the Motherland”, researcher Tina Sherwell divides Arab artists into categories, including artists who define their identity through cultural heritage and blend their Western experiences with their Arab roots. Palestinian visual artist Ismail Shammout, who lived between Kuwait and Germany, depicted the wounds of the Nakba in his paintings and presented Palestinian women in embroidered dress as bearers of identity and memory.
Other intellectuals chose to write in English, including Edward Said and Susan Abulhawa, who conveyed the Palestinian experience to readers outside the region in her novel “Mornings in Jenin”. The importance of creative memory becomes clear when material evidence is looted or destroyed.
In April 2003, Iraq’s museums were looted during the US invasion, and UNESCO estimated that about 15,000 artefacts were stolen. As part of the material memory was lost, films, books, poems and paintings continued to record the experiences of individuals and cities reshaped by war.
