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This is an archive article published on November 25, 2011
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Opinion The art of memory

A site of intimidation under Gaddafi has now been turned into a museum celebrating the civil war

indianexpress

New York Times

November 25, 2011 02:53 AM IST First published on: Nov 25, 2011 at 02:53 AM IST

YAFRAN,LIBYA – In a country where creativity was stifled to ensure the pre-eminence of one man,art can be the best revenge. Inside the gutted shell of a building that once housed a Gaddafi-regime intelligence unit,the paint of a new mural of a tree whose roots are feeding on the blood of fallen rebel fighters is drying on the wall. The house was half-destroyed in fighting between Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s forces and the rebels who brought him down — and that’s exactly the way the artist Belgassem Grada hopes it will stay.

The slight,wiry oil-field engineer never thought of himself as an artist — at most he used to doodle in his spare time. But today Grada,47,has turned a former outpost of intimidation and symbol of Gaddafi’s stranglehold over Libya into Freedom House,a museum devoted to memorialising Libya’s civil war.

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Residents of this mountain city in western Libya flock to see Grada’s reimagining of Gaddafi,often bringing along visitors from out of town. “This was a place of ignorance under Gaddafi,now it’s a place to learn and express ourselves,” Grada tells me. People can create their own art in the children’s drawing room,where paints,brushes and markers are readily available — their pictures plaster the walls.

Grada’s project is a first step for Libyans toward using the dictator’s centres of power to fight the poisonous legacy that still looms over this desert country. The very literal art might not be especially nuanced — caricatures of Gaddafi,scenes of falling rockets — but it will help ordinary Libyans demystify the dictator and claim a future. Before Gaddafi’s fall,people couldn’t even pause near the building without arousing suspicion. Now they can wander through the museum and contribute to the project.

Grada has turned every symbol of Gaddafi’s power and propaganda against him. Gaddafi called revolutionaries rats; Grada has drawn Gaddafi as a rat. He painted Gaddafi,his son Seif al-Islam and Abdullah Senussi,the powerful intelligence chief,stealing petrol and drinking blood on a spider’s web that symbolises the networks of patronage Gaddafi used to maintain control. Around the web,Grada listed the problems besieging the country during Gaddafi’s rule: “Sabotage,destruction,HIV.,violation,jail,unemployment,revenge,ignorance.”

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The idea for the museum grew out of a mural Grada painted on the sidewalk gate under the museum,which sits on a small hill above the street,when Yafran first expelled Gaddafi’s army in June,two months before rebels captured Tripoli itself. “I was thinking to make a war museum to collect all the weapons. Then I thought why don’t we draw? To draw something from the destruction,” Grada says.

Grada painted his way up the staircase from the gate and decided to transform a centre of horror to a memorial of triumph — even while the war was still raging. He drew a map of Libya on one of the walls and labelled each city with a red dot as it was liberated in the fighting. He made NATO planes out of cardboard and suspended them from the ceiling by wire.

There is a room of children’s drawings; another room is devoted to prisons and torture chambers,documenting local mass graves from this war as well as other massacres under Gaddafi,like the slaughter at Abu Salim prison,where in 1996 Gaddafi’s forces killed up to 1,200 prisoners in one day. There is also a room devoted to the fighting inYafran.

Grada is still collecting a salary from his former employer,and the local transitional council has given him the right to do whatever he wants with the building. In the new Libya,Grada hopes there will be support for the arts as a way of healing and self-expression.Sarah A. Topol