One of the early texts that I wrote was a text I called “Zahrat al-Hanun” and gave it to Hashem Ali, because his paintings about the place and women were drawing me to his brush that was very attached to the faces close to us. As for what prompted me to choose this title for the text, that “the flower of tenderness” was associated with that fragrant smell of small and soft white flowers that henna trees produce in the form of scattered clusters in the dense branches, and I smelled its scent in my mother’s clothes, after she returned from the valley or the mountain, with some branches in her sleeve. The henna and those white flowers attached to it, and the peasant women who questioned them like these paintings, in his experience during the eighties in particular, I did not see the details of their faces only, but I smelled them like that fragrance.
What is important in the text - which was not published in any of my four printed collections, although it was published at the time in one of the local newspapers - was Hashem's invocation of it as an active part of recalling the city with its daily details, which permeated his color memory since the young man came to it in the twentieth of Aden, after he had been cut off livelihoods in Hadramout, which he arrived before the mid-fifties from Indonesia with his family. After the death of the father, he left school at the age of ten, and tried to subsist from the woodcarving profession that he had learned from a Hadrami professor named Al-Jafri, but it also narrowed him down, so he moved with his older brother to Abyan, then to Aden, where Abdullah al-Duwailah settled, and later became known as a respected journalist. Hashem chose the city of Taiz as his settlement in 1965, and since he moved to live there, he has never left it; He painted every detail of it including people and stone. He once told me: I learned more from Taiz as a place than an art academy would teach me in any country, in the West or the East, and in Taiz he launched his first solo exhibition in 1967.
More than forty years ago, specifically in the year 1978, Dr. Abu Bakr Al-Saqqaf wrote about “Man and the Earth in the Art of Hashem Ali” in his book – Writings 1:
Dr. Abdel Hamid Ibrahim says in his book “The Contemporary Yemeni Story” 1977, that the appearance of Muhammad Abd al-Wali in the world of the contemporary Yemeni story is like a plant emerging from among the rocks, and this is true of Hashem Ali’s art. Rather, I am looking for something harder than rock to fulfill the meaning that I want to express. Hashem has risen like light in the heart of darkness. And if Muhammad Abd al-Wali had found a path that many followed, with varying chances of success, then Hashem is the beginning, and every beginning is difficult. He started playing with colors and conversing with Saber and his girls, at a time when painting had no presence in the northern part of the country. His travels landed in Taiz when painting was a pagan trait, and the north was devoid of a single tablet or modern statue” (*) Dr. Abu Bakr Al-Saqqaf - Writings of the October 14 Foundation, Aden 1981, p. 108
During my visits to Taiz, I do visit him, so we could arrange a morning walk around, or go to his house, or with one of his many friends. We wander through its old alleys and markets and eat in its popular restaurants, before returning early with his Qat to his humble room, next to his small studio, which were separated from his originally crowded family home. As for the time for entering the studio, it was usually after the afternoon prayer, a habit that only the affection of his sitter or visitor or his presence outside the house would break. As for those who were accustomed to set with from his regular visitors, he would leave them to complete their Qat session in the humble room, and runs to the studio where he would stay busy for long hours by disposing of his artistic ideas on inks, paper, and fabrics; The same ceremony in which our bodies gathered in the spring of the year 2000, accompanied by Dr. Hatem Al-Sakr, to discover his worlds.
In his simple rented house in the middle of the 26 September Street towards the “fourth point” (the Yemeni Swedish Hospital) and across Al-Jahmaliyah, up or down towards the city, he surprisingly reconciled with the crowdedness of the dwelling, and with the noise of cars and motorbikes, whose machines are raised due to the loads of climbing the Aqabah. Rather, he considered this noise as part of the daily ear exercise on beautiful mischief.
He was not only an inspiring and pioneering painter of modern formation in Yemen, as scholars and interested people consider him and dozens of novice artists taught by him, some of whom became popular names inside and outside Yemen, but he was a true thinker and philosopher who embraced the history of arts and human civilizations in a remarkable way, and his mastery of English helped him to read more about other cultures.
He sided with narrations, modern poetry and music, so when talking to him, he would quote vivid examples from novels or works of poets and musicians, present on his tongue, to reinforce his ideas and what he wanted to convey to his listener.
Despite his long artistic experience, which spanned nearly half a century and gave him great fame, he did not rely on it originally. Until his last days, he continued to renew his themes and his color perspective, which became more splendid, joyful and poetic, even as he painted the mountain villages, one of which will be returned with this restoration in the memory of his passing, which was on November 7, 2009.
From the folk tale he was inspired, and from the stinging irony, he presented his visuals that resemble the pains of simple people, and from nature he questioned its visions huddled in color; He painted alleys, mosques, fruit sellers, water porters, porters, peasants and tambourines from the Sufis and Dervishes, hunters and rural women... He painted villages and animals with oil and black ink, so his paintings, with their plurality of stylistics, opened an outlet for students to read and theorize, making it easier for many of them to place them within the contexts of the school influence of contemporary art currents, which Hashem contacted by reading and not on the study bench.
From the colored stones of Taiz, he achieved his painting "The mural of the sun", in one of its parks near the College of Arts, before its artists and intellectuals honored him in 2012, by drawing a mural for him during the postal square on the occasion of the third anniversary of his departure, and shortly after, everyone rose up in solidarity with this mural, which was distorted by obscurantists who hate and criminalize art.
Moreover, he painted and sculpted everything related to the beauty of man and nature, even when they were in their most miserable state. Dozens of his students’ paintings, today’s painters and artists, are not devoid of their spiritual and aesthetic overtones, even as they try to act on his advice, which urges them to search for their own personalities, away from his influences and those of others.
Almost there is no home of his close friends without a beautiful portrait of his own person, which was painted and gifted to him by Hashem Ali, as an expression of special friendship. Here I remember that on one of our morning walks near the central market in 2003, he insisted that we enter a nearby photography studio, and asked his photographer friend, to take a side picture of me without telling me why? The next day, he gave me a copy of the picture which I put in my bag and forgot about it.
About two months later, my friend, the storyteller, Muhammad Abdul-Wakeel Jazem, surprised me with an envelope that he took with him from Taiz, and sent by Professor Hashem... Inside it, and on special cardboard, was a beautiful portrait of me. I was pleased with the fact that my face was painted by the great Hashem, and that with this painting he baptizes me as a close friend, as was read by our mutual friend, the late Al-Bahi Muhammad Abdul-Bari Al-Fateh, who was very close to Hashem as a friend, and the three of us brought together many meetings, and plenty of talkativeness.
He liked people and they liked him spontaneously; He knows people by their names and surnames and jokes with them very politely in their shops and outside in the street and market. I told him once while on the upper Tahrir Street: Do they know you as an artist, Professor? He said: I think that most of them do not even know my name, and they know my face due to my frequent daily passing in the same streets and places.
* Pictures in the article are from the archives of Muhammad Abdul-Wahhab Al-Shaibani
