Tag: Palestinian American Women

PALESTINE : Arab-American Artists: Saj Issa — ‘I’m interested in the consequences of globalization’

The first in the ‘Arab News’ series focusing on contemporary Arab-American artists in honor of Arab-American Heritage Month .

Los Angeles-based artist Saj Issa was raised between two different worlds. As the child of Palestinian parents who fled the First Intifada in the Eighties, she grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and spent her summers in Palestine. “Each setting brought out a different part me,” she tells Arab News.  

“At first, it took a minute for me to come to terms with that. I thought I wasn’t being authentic: The person that I was portraying myself as at school around my friends was different than the person I was portraying at home. But I realize that those are all parts of me. I don’t really see it as an issue so much now as I did when I was younger.” 

Issa is an emerging visual artist, who obtained a Master’s in Fine Arts from the University of California and has had her work displayed in LA’s museums and art fairs. Her drive to create art began in childhood, marked by a tactile tendency to paint and make crafts.  

“I grew up watching (creator of the US TV show “The Joy of Painting”) Bob Ross — America’s savior — and I was mimicking that action of holding a painting palette,” Issa recalls.   

Her ceramic tile pieces juxtapose design elements that are omnipresent in both Eastern and Western cultures. She merges major Western company logos — such as Nike, Coca Cola, and Shell — with Middle Eastern geometrical and vegetal patterns.  

“I’m interested in the consequences of globalization,” says Issa. “My choice of which brands make an appearance are based on which ones made a critical impact in the East. I utilize traditional tile work combined with corporate logos as a way to draw connections between the way that colonization seeps into the indigenous ways of life. Repetition is also a means to communicate habits of consumption, mass production and advertising.” 

That geometrical ornamentation continues throughout her other series, such as “Convenience Store,” which was partly inspired by her immigrant father’s former job in a corner store. The series’ portraits of workers evoke a feeling of nostalgia and loss of identity in a quick-transaction environment; standing behind the counter, surrounded by daily items, the workers’ faces — or entire bodies — are obscured by receipts.  

“I just want to build my own visual language through these mediums,” Issa says.  

source/content: arabnews.com (headline edited)

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Issa is an emerging visual artist. (Supplied)

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AMERICAN / PALESTINIAN / ARAB AMERICAN

PALESTINIAN-AMERICAN: Meet Nujoud Fahoum, the Palestinian-American Woman helping Plan Nasa’s Artemis missions

Nujoud Fahoum Merancy started the Twitter hashtag ‘YallaToTheMoon’ to support latest mission.

A Palestinian-American woman is one of the leaders of the Artemis missions, a programme by Nasa that aims to fly astronauts to the Moon.

Nujoud Fahoum Merancy, 43, is the chief of exploration mission planning at the US space agency and has been working in the space sector for more than two decades.

She started the Twitter hashtag ‘YallaToTheMoon’ to support the Artemis 1 mission, which is scheduled for another launch attempt on Saturday, from Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre. ‘Yalla’ is an Arabic word that translates to ‘let’s go’ or ‘come on’.

Before the historic event, Ms Merancy spoke to The National about her Palestinian roots and her involvement in the Artemis programme.

A stellar career

The Artemis 1 mission is an unmanned flight around the Moon that will test the performance of the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft.

If successful, it would pave the way for Nasa to launch Artemis 2 and 3, crewed flights around the Moon and the first human lunar landing mission under the programme.

“As a Palestinian-American, I’m very excited to be a part of this programme,” she said.

“And, really, Nasa and Artemis, it is a much more diverse workforce than it was during the Apollo era.

“It’s important to me and to a lot of us that it represents all of humanity and Artemis itself is international because we have international partners.”

Ms Merancy, a mother-of-two, earned her bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Washington in Seattle.

From there, she joined the aerospace company Boeing to work on the International Space Station.

She then started working on the development of Orion, the spacecraft launching on top of Nasa’s mega Moon rocket on Saturday that will fly around the Moon — and one day carry astronauts.

“From that, I’ve transitioned into the mission planning for Artemis, which is designing and integrating the missions across all the programmes for Artemis, and that’s my current role,” she said.

Connecting with her Palestinian roots

Ms Merancy went viral on the internet in 2019 when she posted her official Nasa photo, in which she wore a blazer embroidered with Palestinian tatreez, a traditional cross-stitch, that she bought during a visit to her father’s home town of Nazareth.

Her father moved to the US more than 40 years ago to go to college.

Although she was born in the US and does not speak fluent Arabic, she said her Palestinian roots were important to her.

“I don’t speak Arabic, unfortunately, it’s one of those regrets that I’ll always have,” she said.

“I know the basics, a few words here and there, and the polite greetings.

“But I do enjoy the food and that is something I grew up on. And then as an adult, I started cooking.

“So, I have a whole bunch of Palestinian cookbooks just to learn other recipes that my family didn’t teach me.

“I do like to cook Palestinian food and that’s probably the biggest connection to the culture that I have.”

Palestinian presence in the space sector

Other Palestinians are involved in the Artemis programme or are making a name for themselves in the US space sector through other projects.

Soha Alqeshawi, born and raised in Gaza city with her seven siblings, currently works for Lockheed Martin as a software engineering associate manager and looks after Orion’s back up-flight software.

And Loay Elbasyouni is a Palestinian-American electrical engineer who helped design Nasa’s Mars rover, Perseverance.

“My parents did their best to provide me and my siblings with a good education and shield us from the effects of the continuous horrific conflict that Gaza has been living under,” Ms Alqeshawi told Portuguese journalist Margarida Santos Lopes in 2015.

“Living under constant fear and despair where everything is uncertain and basic life necessities such as electricity and sometimes water are unavailable for most of the day.

“Although I was the only one in my family who had the opportunity to leave Gaza for the US to study and work, all of my brothers and sisters are college-educated with degrees in science, engineering and business.”

“Going to school was sometimes a dangerous journey that could have death waiting at any step of the way.

“However, that made us more determined to achieve our dreams in receiving an education.’

source/content: thenationalnews.com (headline edited)

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Nujoud Fahoum Merancy went viral in 2019 when she posted her official Nasa photo, in which she wore a blazer embroidered with Palestinian tatreez, a traditional cross-stitch that she purchased during a visit to her father’s hometown of Nazareth. Photo: @nujoud

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AMERICAN / PALESTINIAN