The virus had been, had gone, had come back and then just hung around quietly in corners doing less harm but not no harm and getting ready to welcome its friends and relatives when the time was right. We all got used to it and memories of the first pandemic, rampaging through an unprotected population, killing the poor, old and the sick and sometimes the fit and active, faded. Life got back to normal. The rich got richer and the poor got ….well you know don’t you?
She was going to exhibit some of her work along with works by her mother and father. They would be shown in the gallery her parents had affiliated with in St Ives, set up as a rebellion against what some saw as the stuffy formality of many of the established artists in the St Ives colony. It was a good space, light and well lit, an amalgamation of old St Ives buildings an easy walk from the sea front. St Ives sometimes seems to have as many galleries as holiday lets in its narrow, cobbled streets. It’s a holiday resort with shops and restaurants to suit all pockets and, like much of the rest of west Cornwall, particularly Newlyn and Penzance, it has attracted artists for hundreds of years. It is true that the light reflected off blue-green seas has a special quality but there are other reasons too. West Cornwall is a land where the evidence of older civilisations is to be found on every hill-top and cliff promontory; it has an atmosphere like nowhere else, made of the accreted experiences of generation after generation of native Cornish and incomers from any and everywhere. The stunning landscapes which draw people today were, until quite recently, disfigured and polluted by the smoke, dust and poisonous effluent of over two thousand years of mining. Partly because of its isolation, at the far west of the country, it attracts people looking to escape a lifestyle, emotional pain or other kinds of injury and, in the winter, it hunkers down and waits for the rain, mist and greyness to lift, which, against all expectations, it eventually does. The pain and hurt are not easily left behind by all seeking a new beginning and it is a powerful place to those who are open to it. It has a higher suicide rate than the national or west-country averages.
The children, Izzy and Jonty, still she thought of them as the children though both were adults with lives of their own, they would come down for the show. That on its own was enough of a reason to exhibit. But she wanted too, to do something for Rifka and for the countless others displaced and forced to flee their homes, losing everything because of the cruelty and stupidity of others, walking long wearying miles to places they didn’t know in the hope that they would be safer and taken advantage of every step of the way by those who saw in their suffering and fear another business opportunity.
She had taken from her completed collage of Rifka’s journeys, the physical and the metaphorical, snapshots to make individual paintings. In more ordinary times she would not have offered her art for display; she lacked the confidence to show herself so publicly and anyway felt no need to have any talent she had recognised. Art is like theatre; it exposes the performer if it is honest. In both professions practitioners create personas as a means of protection, sometimes leading to loss or ambiguity of their true selves. Actors can lose themselves in their roles and still draw on their emotional experiences. Artists put their work out there hoping for praise and fearing worse. So she would not have exhibited except that it had become important to her. She had come to understand that the Armenian massacres were not something exceptional in their horror, terrible though they had been. In fact, they were just another piece of the chain of human brutality that stretched down the ages to the beginning of human civilisation. New links were being forged as she painted, on the Bibby Stockholm, in the English Channel, in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Afghanistan and Iran, in Sudan, in China, and, in time, pretty well everywhere. These events were not exceptional; they were as normal a part of human experience as breathing or ceasing to breathe. And so, for want of any better way to protest, she risked making an exhibition of herself. She knew her paintings would draw mixed reactions and some criticism but she was content to risk embarrassment and discomfort in this cause. Embarrassment and discomfort really didn’t stack up compared with the scale of suffering she was seeing and, increasingly feeling helpless to do anything about.
It only took a day to hang the works in one of the three exhibition rooms. Her parents’ works took up about half the space and would be, she knew, a big draw; many were previously unseen and uncatalogued and, in their time, her parents had been something of a golden couple. The rest of the space was hers and was centred around the collage, the largest piece of work in the exhibition. There was text to provide a background and to draw parallels from history and the present days.
She drew on research and on her own family history and tried to weave them together in a way which would inform and touch her audience.
“I am alive today only because an ancestor of mine survived the Armenian massacres. My works here are dedicated to Rifka, my great grandmother and to those all over the world suffering or fleeing from persecution”, she wrote and then added.
‘Remembering and dealing with violent past: diasporic experiences and transnational dimensions’
Much of the world’s migration flows today is driven by civil wars, armed conflicts, genocide, and other forms of large-scale violence against specific groups and communities. Never before in human history have there been so many displaced people in the world. Collective violence has long-lasting effects that transcend national boundaries and generations; its afterlives unfold in different places and across generations, leaving a lasting mark on individuals, societies and institutions. Present and past violence are inextricably linked, as in order to grasp and understand current violence, we compare and contrast it with violence that has already occurred in the past. It is also intertwined with the future, as collective violence gives rise to policies and laws designed to prevent these events from happening again…..How do conflict-affected migrant communities deal with legacies and memories of the past or ongoing violence? How do these legacies of the violent past shape their lives and affect integration processes in new contexts? What happens to the memories of violence as new generations come of age and how do they deal with these legacies?
Dilyara Müller-Suleymanova
There were two paintings by her father which were not for sale and some of the others by her mother she would never part with. The two by her father were both self-portraits of a kind. The first showed him in his sixties, slim, tall and greying and with tears streaming down his face. As a child she had worshipped her parents and particularly her father. It seemed they could do no wrong. They were both successful artists, bohemian and unconventional and she loved their being unlike the parents of many of her school friends. Her father would often take her with him on a drive to Penzance or Truro and she loved those times together, talking about any and everything as he drove. She could still remember the smell of leather in the old Morris mixed often enough with turps. and oil paint. He would often stop off on route and pop-in on a friend for half an hour or so, leaving her in the car, quite content to sit and read or sketch. Her mother was always keen to know where they had been and what they had done. Sometimes, when she was alone with her mother, she would ask whether they had stopped anywhere special on the trip.
She was in her teens when she realised why her father often broke his journey, that her mother knew and that she had been no more than cover for her father’s philandering. She stopped going with him then, claiming she would rather be with her friends and she felt her mother’s pain when he was out almost as keenly as if she were the one betrayed. They had of course both been betrayed one way or another.
Then, one clear sunny morning, when her father had stayed out all night, things fell apart. Her mother swam pretty well every morning the weather allowed but this time she left the house almost as soon as it was daybreak. She swam until she was exhausted, out into the bay – and then she drowned.
She left two notes. The note to her father said simply, “Goodbye. Look after your daughter.”
He never shared it with her but he kept it and she found it after his death. Her note was longer. “Leaving you is the hardest thing I have ever done but I think now you are old enough to understand and to live your life without me. You know I think, how hard I have found some of the things about the past few years and I’m afraid I can’t go on trying and hoping and hurting so I must do this. Try not to blame anyone or, if you must, blame me. Have a wonderful life; I know you can.”
She did not blame her mother; she blamed herself but mainly she blamed her father. And he blamed himself. The St Ives community was stunned and he became an object of pity and, of course, of condemnation. Her mother had been universally liked and the world and its dog knew of his affairs. What had seemed reckless but excusable, typically unconventional and wild ‘but then he was an artist’, was now seen through a different lens. He drank too much and had arguments with anyone he thought was judging him and he virtually stopped painting. His last work, the second painting she would never sell was of her father hopelessly caught in a whirlpool carrying him with ever-increasing speed towards its centre. On the back he had written, ‘I didn’t know.’
She had left home as soon as she could and after three years at university never went back until he was dying. She travelled, France, Italy, the Middle East, working in bars, cleaning, au pairing, being a pavement artist. She never forgave him and he never forgave himself.
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The gallery was a wonderful space to show art; pristine white walls, good lighting and, somehow welcoming rather than antiseptic or reverential. The private viewing was a crowded affair; it was a good turn-out; a mix of artists, friends of the gallery and people who just liked art. There were couples with children, at least two dogs with their owners, people dressed to the nines, people dressed casually and one or two in overalls who’d been working on the kitchen refurb. and stayed on for the buzz. She paused by the preview bar and listened to a stout, florid man, dressed for some reason in hounds-tooth tweed with matching waistcoat, as he ‘entertained’ three women, ‘one presumably his poor wife’, she thought.
“Of course, he’d had a tipple or two. Anyhow, he stepped back to look at the work, trod on a patch of wet paint and went arse over tit on the floor.” He paused to sip his wine and for effect and continued, “ Broke his hip, silly old sod. Dead within a month; pneumonia they said.” Another sip of wine and then, “And the moral of this story is…”
Before he could finish, in chorus the three women chanted, “keep the studio tidy!”
He looked slightly put out but smiled bravely and said, “It is just possible that I’ve told that story before I suppose, but how was I to know you were listening?”
The show was titled ‘A Family of Artists’ and she reflected that the words broken or dysfunctional should have been inserted if accuracy had been the priority. Better the way it was though, she knew. Her parents were still remembered by some and known of by many and the works, particularly her mother’s, were sought after. Apart from the gallery team she was not particularly well-known there and was able to keep a low profile on the night, chatting to a few acquaintances and listening to and trying to gauge reactions to the work. The children, having checked that she was ok, wandered off on their own, looking for some connection in the art with the grandparents they had never known. She had told them something of the story but framed her mother’s death as an accident and her father’s decline as a consequence of grief not guilt, which she supposed it might have been. She had told them more about Rifka and what she knew of her life – it was far enough away to see more clearly and feel less keenly.
She was able to overhear snatches of conversation and she sipped her wine and wandered around the gallery.
“I’m not sure that I approve of polemical art”, said an elderly, grey-haired man in cords and a linen shirt, looking at the collage and accompanying text.
“What the hell is it for then?”, asked his partner warmly. She had wonderful purple hair echoing the colour-way of the tattoos on her shoulders. “Did you know about any of this? I didn’t.”
‘Thankyou’ she thought as they continued to talk about her work. Talking about it was what she had wanted.
There was a buzz about the gallery that night. Some of the interest was in the art and some in the artists and some was prurient and some was compassionate.
“I’m not sure he deserved his bad press.”
“She really was more gifted than him wasn’t she?”
“We’ll probably never know what happened and she was ‘highly strung’, isn’t that the term?”
“It was probably an open marriage. I don’t suppose either of them was a saint.”
She had stopped at that and was tempted to intervene.
“Excuse me, but I think I own you a cup of coffee,” said someone at her shoulder.
