child’s play within the Palestinian landscape SAMER WANAN
A child finds five boxes lying on the ground. Sitting on the floor, small hands randomly pick and choose from the toys placed there: boxes all the same size and yet each feels different as if emotions are imprinted in their materials. The first box, heavy and dusty, has pieces rattling in it. Opened, the child’s hand runs over the rough surfaces inside, discovering small gaps among its pieces, like dry cracked mud. When the box is tipped all the stone-like parts scatter on the ground, like characters brought to life. ‘Which one is next?’ One is made of old wood, with plants and trees engraved on it. Warm to the touch, this box is hard to open. When it does, the flowers engraved on the outside take on colour and vitality on the inside. Yellow toys inside feel like jellies. All together they are players in a theatre, or in a court. Another wood box; this one is lighter. Inside, thin clear sheets hang vertically. Black marks on them appear to be a flying bird, maybe a running person, the sheets aligned like a flip-book. Turn the box upside down, they reassemble into a different pile, the birds have a different life as the sheets slide smoothly, shuffled by little hands. The golden box is next. Cold, dense; metal. Carefully opened, a grainy sticky sand clings to fingers. Digging deeper, tiny buried objects surface and are discovered. The last toy, a black box, is hiding in the shadows. Laying a hesitant finger on it, the mysterious box opens slowly. ‘But there is nothing in it!’ It is nudged, lights flicker inside. Trying to capture the light, a sharp pain is caught instead, a sting from something very pointed. Unpacked, a fuzzy stuffed object like a stitched glove lies on the floor. The little hand rubs it. It feels magical.
Roland Barthes, in one of his essays in Mythologies , comments on the relationship between children and adults through toys. 1 An adult man sees a child as another self , demonstrated in the way that common toys – speaking about French toys at the time of his writing – are ‘a microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects’. He differentiates between two kinds of toys: invented forms constituted by a set of blocks inviting an open play, and others that are manufactured in a socialised way with a literal meaning, providing no room for the child but to accept the adult world as it is, turning the child into a user rather than a creator. This questions how toys mediate the relationship between generations, or convey generational dynamics. I approach this relationship within the Palestinian context while exploring the role of play and tactility. To do so, a collection of designed artefacts are used as mediators, taking the form of toy boxes and short stories, based in research-by-design methodologies. The child, in the Palestinian context, is the figure onto whom ancestral generations project their own hopes for liberation and return to homeland. The child, therefore, represents
a future that necessarily includes the liberation of the Palestinian people from suffering. How adults introduce historical events, cultural heritage and identity to children who embody such hopes is a particular case. With a child living in such a violent and oppressive environment, how does it affect their playing patterns and sites of play? While the formation of a child’s subjectivity depends on the environmental experiences they are living under, there is the possibility of introducing new perceptions of the situation with each generation. Perceptual experiences and hidden narratives within a particular spatial condition and time can be traced by close attention to children’s spatial playing patterns, and material traces they leave behind. A sort of chronicle emerges out of each generation’s forms of play and their toys, carrying the particular tensions that define their environment. Reading it outward will reveal a larger system of forces at play which, in turn, shapes the Palestinian children’s playscape and its material footprints. In an attempt to adapt and appropriate, or even protest against, their imposed environment, the Palestinian child occupies the available small spaces that engulf their own bodies through play .
1 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies. Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1957, pp 52-54
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on site review 44 : play ©
Samer Wanan
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