This Palestinian Canadian artist weaves stories of trauma and hope into her work

When Dalia Elcharbini and the art therapists at her foundation were tasked with telling one of their students that she'd never walk again, they were staggered by the heaviness of that responsibility. The student, a nine-year-old child from Gaza, was paralyzed from the waist down after her ceiling collapsed onto her during an Israeli attack. 

Elcharbini was connected with the child through the Our Stars School Foundation, a non-profit she co-founded that helps children cope with war-induced trauma.

"All her drawings were with legs — about when she's going to walk again," says Elcharbini. And although the team was nervous about the responsibility of breaking the news, they created a custom workshop specifically designed for the Gazan child's situation.

"The entire workshop is focused on how do we make her understand that she's unstoppable with her hands?" says Elcharbini. "We were trying to empower her."

"You have to help them cope with what they're feeling," she says about the kids she works with. "But you also can't promise them that they're going to have stability forever."

It's the tribulations of children like this in Gaza that fuel Elcharbini's drive to make artwork infused with the symbols of Palestinian liberation. 

Elcharbini, a Kuwait-born, Palestinian Canadian contemporary artist based in Toronto grapples with identity and belonging in her work, what she calls, a "natural extension" of herself. 

"When I make any piece, it's like my reflex, my instant response," she says. "It's always in the background, this urge to say something." 

Imagining freedom 

These days, Palestinian freedom is "hard to put into words," says Elcharbini. 

Before the Oct. 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, she says she was optimistic about a two-state solution where Palestinians could co-exist peacefully. 

Now, she approaches liberation in a more "radical" sense — a word she says she's careful using due to the multitude of meanings it takes on. 

A prime example is Elcharbini's Femme Fellah: a gilded image of the Statue of Liberty that combines the notion of liberty with the right of return. The statue stands tall, cloaked in layers of keffiyeh — the traditional, checkered headdress that represents Palestinian liberty.

The Palestinian right of return, a human right protected by international law, is the right for Palestinian refugees and their families to return to the homes they were forced to flee from during Israel's War of Independence in 1948. 

To Palestinians, that war is perhaps better known as The Nakba, or "the catastrophe," when almost "700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes." 

Keys, like the one the statue of Femme Fellah is holding, are quintessential symbols of the right of return. They're an homage to the Palestinian practice of keeping the keys to homes they were forced out of during 1948.

"Liberation and the idea of freedom, is very intertwined with our existence as Palestinians," she says. 

The painting is also sprinkled with soil and tiny stones at the bottom, sent to Elcharbini from a friend's trip to Jerusalem. 

It remembers an ancestral homeland, while acknowledging that some don't have the privilege to come back to it.

Dreaming of home

Growing up, it's the stories of ancestors that bind Elcharbini with her Palestinian roots. 

But it can be a kick in the gut remembering that she's never laid a foot in her homeland. 

In 1948, her grandparents were forcibly displaced from their village of Al-Ja'una by the Zionist militia Haganah. After being stabbed in the stomach during a nighttime raid, he fled to Syria, leaving behind what many Palestinians are forced to unwillingly renounce — home, family, and their livelihoods. 

But especially painful was a profound friendship he was leaving behind:  The one between him and his best friend, a Jewish neighbour who would often visit. Her grandfather, in return, would bring him sweets during Jewish celebrations. It inspired the painting Unconditional Playdate — Elcharbini's ode to friends separated by borders and the humanity that binds neighbours.

Unconditional Playdate features two children, one on each side of a wall, playing with toy cars with a gleaming Al-Aqsa Mosque behind them.

"They're playing with their cars with the peace sign on the plate," Elcharbini says. "The whole focus is on innocence and they look the exact same, they look so similar. They almost look like the same kid when you're looking at them." 

The beauty of co-existence was what made her question the seemingly never-ending cycle of revenge and violence that has often defined relationships between Palestinians and Israelis. 

"It was the most beautiful story that I just kept hearing over and over growing up," she says. "And I was like, what the hell? Why is this not reality?"

The two children are, says Elcharbini, "rejecting what the border symbolizes." Essentially, it puts peace, or the hope for it, into perspective. 

The day he left, his Jewish neighbour pleaded and cried out to him to stay — to which her grandfather said: "'If I stay, they're going to kill my kids,'" she says. "'If I leave, they'll call me a coward. But I value my family's life over anything.'" 

These stories Elcharbini heard growing up are what she tries to translate onto paper and canvas. 

"They're essentially what keeps fueling us to continue to resist and fight for our right to return with any tools we're given," she said. "Mine is art."