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Cleveland’s PYM Honors Palestinian Martyrs in Two-Day Exhibit at SPACES Art Gallery
Cleveland’s PYM Honors Palestinian Martyrs in Two-Day Exhibit at SPACES Art Gallery
By Benjamin Mullin-Vanneste
“Everybody is everything to somebody”
Says Chance Zurub, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), when asked about the necessity of honoring Palestinian martyrs. This was the central theme of PYM’s “Devotion to a Nation” art exhibit, held from July 18th-19th at SPACES Art Gallery, on Cleveland’s west side. Artwork honoring Palestinian existence and struggle covered the walls of the gallery. Images of Palestine before al-Nakba (the Catastrophe) of 1948 were displayed, and a video of everyday life in Gaza before October 7th played on a nearby screen.
“GLORY TO OUR MARTYRS.” Surrounding these words hung pictures of Palestinian children martyred in Gaza, writings by Mahmoud Darwish, and a print of If I Must Die by the poet Refaat Alareer, who was killed by an Israeli air strike on December 7th, 2023 in Northern Gaza. Zurub describes a martyr as any person who has died in the service of the Palestinian cause. “When Palestine is ultimately liberated, these are the people who paved the way,” he says. Dunia Jaffal, also an organizer with the PYM, added that “martyrs are the people who made the ultimate sacrifice, and the least we can do is honor them.” Such people include at least 186 journalists and over 1,500 healthcare workers, who, along with 60,000 Palestinians, are confirmed (while many more are estimated) to have been martyred over 21 months into the genocide in Gaza. The exhibit paid homage to every martyr by displaying a bloodied doctor’s coat, a press vest, and a burial shroud the size of a child–also stained in red. Loss was not the only theme communicated, however—symbols of Palestinian resilience, faith, resistance, and longing for the return to their homeland also appeared throughout the pieces. Most of the artwork was donated from local community members, which helped serve another objective of the exhibit: to give people a space to pause and reflect. Jaffal told The People’s Press that “we’ve been experiencing a lot of loss and this place is sort of an outlet, a way to refuse that our martyrs become mere numbers–our own way to bring them back to life.”
The exhibit closed with an open mic, which reported around 50 attendees, mostly sharing poetry. Zurub emphasized the effectiveness of such an event for the PYM’s organizing, and said that “it really helped some people who don’t usually share their voice speak out” as a result of being given this platform. With this event and more soon coming, The PYM plans to further establish their presence in the Cleveland area, continue to advance the Palestinian cause, and honor the martyrs who have paid the ultimate sacrifice.
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