Soils of Sumud: Materialisations of Palestinian steadfastness in Jumana Manna’s ceramic practice
This dissertation, submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for BA (Hons) Culture, Criticism and Curation, traces the multivalent meanings of sumud over six decades, contextualising its contemporary reconfigurations within the resurgence of indigenous land practices to resist the genocide in Gaza. It considers the Palestinian landscape a site of memory and posits clay as a material that retains this meaning. After examining Jumana Manna’s artistic practice, it concludes that Manna’s ceramic khabyas enact sumud by materialising fragmented Palestinian temporality, preserving cultural heritage, and reclaiming Palestinian presence and agency over the land.
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Manna translates the khabya’s form into hollow, cubic sculptures made of clay. Some are pronouncedly architectural and faithfully recreate the khabyas’ structures, while others render them in various states of anthropomorphic mutation (The Special One, 2018) and disintegration (Window With Ledge, 2018). Though individual in their silhouette and scale, some sculptures from Manna’s Cache series possess corporal traits, their industrial angles softened into organic geometries and expressive features with an anthropomorphic appeal. Their openings allude to gaping eyes, or hollowed stomachs which will never again carry grain; their asymmetric corners bent akin to wonky elbows or tired knees. If the khabyas that haunt the ruins of the West Bank remain there, continuing to bear witness to the terror and destruction inflicted on the homes that surround them, then Manna’s sculptures are their souls, their spectres.
Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology becomes an essential framework in the attempt to understand these forlorn spirits. Spectres, according to Derrida, are entities that, despite not being alive in the traditional sense, have power to influence the lives of those who are. ‘A ghost never dies,’ wrote Derrida; ‘it remains always to come and to come back’ to inhabit the spaces between presence and absence, present and past (1994, p. 123). Derrida invites engagement with these spectres as a means of accessing otherwise elusive and hegemonised knowledge and meaning. He asserts that ‘it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of [...] every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time’ (ibid., p. 202). Hauntology then, is a means of opposing the rigid ‘conjuration’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 202) of hegemonic ontologies, which rely on the ‘modern temporality of progress’ and mobilise the past to justify the disparities of the present (Taher, 2024, p. 270). Haunting deconstructs this linear understanding of time, instead revealing the paradoxical nature of the temporality of the oppressed. The suffering and trauma generated by colonial violence are thus nonlinear, fragmented, and ‘cumulative in time’ (ibid., p. 268). Said describes Palestinian experience by such a temporality: as ‘scattered, discontinuous, marked by the artificial and imposed arrangements of interrupted or confined space, and by the dislocations and unsynchronized rhythms of disturbed time’ (1986, p. 20).
Manna’s khabyas render such fragmented, textured terms of Palestinian temporality palpable, and her understanding of ‘the power of materials and space’ and ‘the symbolic value of sculptural presence’ (Manna, 2022a, p. 7) are evident throughout the Cache series. Her creative process for the sculptures began by sketching khabyas from reference photographs derived from her field research in the West Bank, during which she began to depart from the vessels’ original forms. Using a slab technique, she then worked alongside craftsmen in Marrakesh to create four warmly handmade ceramic plates, which were fused to form a sculptural volume. Once constructed and brought into being, Manna’s family of khabyas was finished with the mellow colours that tadelakt imparts. Some are chalk-white, anaemic and pallid from their years spent underground, while others are washed with a reddish hue. Some take the form of playful, bashful spirits with rose-pink cheeks, stubborn and refusing to rest. Traditionally used in Levantine architecture to give walls a durable surface by laboriously polishing lime-based plaster with stone and soap, Manna’s application of tadelakt moves her sculptures ‘away from more decorative objects’ typically associated with ceramics, instead imbuing them with ‘functional and architectural’ qualities (MoMA PS1, 2022). In referencing ceramic heritage, Manna’s sculptures do not merely resurrect traditional culture but, as Julie Peteet observed in relation to politically active Palestinian women in refugee camps, they also homogenise contemporary art and craft practices, consciously devising ‘a blend of old and new to form a culture of resistance’ (1993, p. 50).
In referencing the almost-forgotten khabya form and resurrecting venerable ceramic techniques, her sculptures at once excavate and preserve the Palestinian past, and reflect on its fragmented present. Since the essence of the contemporary Palestinian existence is marked by dispossession and dispersion, Said suggests that these experiences should be expressed through ‘unconventional, hybrid, and fragmentary forms’ of representation (1986, p. 6). Manna’s khabyas are indeed liminal and grotesque: part-object, part-space, part-creature, their squat, uneven bodies seem capable of shapeshifting despite their sturdiness, remain enlivened despite their damage. ‘Oppressed subjects often act in this way,’ observes Rana Issa; they ‘insist on the right to be present’ and resist their repression by appearing in their ruin, ‘dressed in their destitute condition’ (2022).