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Sama Shakra
I am 18. I am from Jaffa and I live here with my mother. I am a poet. This is my first experience with photography. Through this work I learned more about Jaffa – little things I’d never seen before. You can look at a picture and see little details. The project led me to ask about my family history more. I asked my mother and my aunt all about the history of the family before 1948.
I already knew that the Jewish army took the house, but I didn’t know that the family escaped in the middle of the night in a small car. The Jewish army made an announcement that if they did not take their wives and daughters they would all be raped. So the family left for Ramallah but the journey was too hard – it was hot and they had a month-old baby. At Yazour they turned around. Back in Jaffa they found an empty destroyed house not far from the one they had left, and moved into it.
My work is political. It is about what is happening in Jaffa and the Palestinian Israeli reality. Now there is Yom Ha’azmaut – 60 years of Israel. You see on TV that Jerusalem is important for the Jews: ‘we must fight for the Jewish legacy,’ they say. But what about the Arabs? What about us – our rights? Are we thin air? Don’t we count?
Photography is a new way to express myself. In poetry you know what you’re going to write about but when you go out with the camera you don’t know what you will see – what will come out. For example, I knew about the house demolitions in Jaffa, but when I looked at my photograph ‘Wall’, I said ‘look how easy it would be to break that wall of doors, but no Arab will. We are too scared.’
‘Wall’
This picture represents everything that is wrong in Jaffa. I am sure that even these doors are taken from a destroyed house. You can see from the words written in red: ‘ya’ad’ – destiny; ‘she’ivat chol’ – sucking sand. They are sucking everything out of Jaffa. They just want to build new, overpriced houses and push the poor people out.
The funny thing is, it’s the Arab workers who build these houses - and they just want to eat. You could easily knock these doors down but no Arab would dream of doing it – we are afraid.
‘Mohammad and Luba’
Even their names are so strange together. Mohammad is my brother – the youngest of two – and Luba is his wife. She is from Ukraine. They met in Tel Aviv and after some time together decided to get married. She became a Muslim in Jerusalem and they married in Ukraine.
A plate has broken and Luba is sweeping up. Mohammad is getting up to get away – he didn’t want to deal with the plate. He called ‘Luba Luba’ to deal with it. He called me also. Mohammad is the father I never had. When my father wasn’t there, Mohammad was.
You also see in this picture my older brother and his wife.
 ‘Friday night’
On Friday night everyone in the family comes to my house to relax and eat. In this picture you see my mum, my older brother Ibrahim and his wife Wardeh, which means ‘rose’, and their daughter Aida, named after my mother. On the left are my aunt Nawal and her husband Ahmed. Nawal is a healer through the Koran. A lot of people from Jaffa come to her and ask her to read for them. If you have stomach ache, feel anxious or suffer from the evil eye. When you hear her read from the Koran you feel really good. She feels what you feel. Once she read to me – and knew everything I felt. I was hot and she became read. I love it when Nawal comes to my home. You feel as if an angel came through the door. I have never seen a woman with so much strength apart from my mother. Nawal and Ahmed are living proof that love exists and lasts for years.
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