Camille Zakharia: Elusive Homelands — The Prelude

The series Elusive Homelands consists of two parts. The first part, Elusive Homelands—The Prelude, is comprised of ten gouache and pastel paintings representing the mythical past, or the common separation from one’s family and culture, that most emigrants experience. They constitute the cultural and historical back-drop against which the stories of the real-life immigrants in Halifax and their familes discussed in Elusive Homelands—The Immigrants are set.

While some of these works are fictitious—that is, they do not represent an actual event—the majority are in fact autobiographical and based on my own experiences and those of my immediate family in Lebanon. They describe the realm of distant memories and dreams rather than reality and have therefore been executed in a medium vastly contrasting that of photographic collage, allowing a different scope of expression and iconographic vocabulary. None of us immigrants ever thought that we would lose all of those aspects of our lives one day that we took for granted back home: the slow pace of life, the close family ties, the care of our neighbors, our defined cultural identity—its habits, stories, and music. We all experienced a last meal with members of our families before departing and then the day of departure. Almost all of us knew someone, or someone who knew someone, who had died as a result of the Lebanese civil war, or who was desparate to marry someone with an American Green Card or other foreign residency just in order to be able to leave the country safely. Such hopes often resulted in disappointment.

The subdued, earthy colors used in these works, as well as the choice of stylistic elements more associated with the past— the types of clothing seen, or the expressionistic features of faces and gestures—contribute to an overall aura of the homeland as a dream land, partly romantic and partly grim, upheld by memories unfounded in the reality of the present.

Camille and Sulaf Zakharia

Camille Zakharia: Cultivate Your Garden

The Cultivate Your Garden suite is an autobiographical work. It is a complex, highly textured photographic collage inspired by Voltaire’s literary satirical classical novel, Candide, whereby Voltaire ridicules the optimistic theory of “all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” Candide, the naïve hero of the story, learns this philosophy of life and goes on a series of adventures where he experiences the disaster of war, hunger sickness, and torture. He settles down at the end of the novel to “cultivate his garden” and seek fulfillment from the modest routine of everyday life.

In this work, though, there is a twist to the original story. Because of the Lebanese civil war, I had to leave Lebanon and look for a garden to cultivate abroad. Drawing upon my early photography, I constructed a mythical landscape. This monumental photographic installation is composed of seven panels, which in turn are populated by somber, monochromatic figures that dominate the foreground in contrast to the rich and colorful background. A hybrid of Beirut, New York, Paris, Bahrain, and places in Turkey, Greece, and Canada—locations that at one point or another in my life I have called home—the dreamscape represents my surreal garden and resonates a sense of displacement. The figures are people whose acquaintance and friendship have accompanied me throughout my journey.

Camille and Sulaf Zakharia

Camille Zakharia: The Immigrants

We, as immigrants, constantly search our innermost selves to justify our selfishness, and our noble explanations abound. “We really didn’t leave our families for a better future for ourselves. It’s all for our children.” Our aging parents, whose multitude of sacrifices ensured our ability to emigrate in search of this “better life,” may suffer our loss, but this is what they really want for us, a better future in a foreign land thousands of miles away from them. We did not forsake our homeland. It is our homeland that betrayed us with its wars, its corruption, and its failing economy.

Our choices are the optimum solution for all concerned. Our children will have an exotic dimension to their otherwise integrated foreign identity gleaned from their knowledge of the faraway land of their ancestors and the flavorful food of their childhood. We, with our strange accents and unusual clothes, will be a source of pride for them, and they will grow up appreciating our sacrifices, the long hours we worked in jobs that we were overqualified for, just to give them a fighting chance at a better future. Our differences and idiosyncrasies will not embarrass them in front of their friends.

Our parents, who talk to photographs of grandchildren they have never held, will take lonely, broken hearts to their graves. But we assure ourselves that they are happy to see us doing so well, so far away. It is, after all, the reason why they sacrificed so much to educate us. Their hearts swell with pride at the knowledge of their sons. They worked night and day to put us through engineering school. Now we run our own business in our new homeland. They feel their efforts have been duly rewarded, even though our training did not prove useful in the end. Our corner stores are still the best in the neighborhood.

And our countries, whose political and economic demise we participated in, hold up their heads as their young, government-educated, multilingual citizens flee to build the economies of foreign lands while those of their own crumble.

Yet we, the martyred immigrants, choose to believe that we sacrifice all and expect nothing in return. As our children rebel under our pressure to turn them into the ideals that we could not live up to, we blame this foreign land, for its social ills are not our fault. It is no wonder that our children succumb to its many temptations. We did not face the same pressures in our youth.

Camille Zakharia

Camille Zakharia

Camille Zakharia holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He was born in Lebanon but left during the civil war in 1985. Since then, he has lived in various countries, including the United States, Greece, Turkey, and Canada, where he has become a citizen. He currently lives in Bahrain with his wife Sulaf, who has collaborated with him on many of his projects. He has used his camera as a tool to document the journey he has embarked upon since leaving Lebanon, photographing segments of his daily activities and reflecting on issues related to home, identity, sense of self, and belonging.

Zakharia is the recipient of a number of grants and awards, the latest of which is first prize in the collage category of the International Photography Award 2006 for his study Lebanon-Canada via Bahrain. He has shown his work in galleries and museums across North America, Europe, and the Middle East, among them the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Toronto’s Gallery 44 for Contemporary Photography, Wichita Center for the Arts, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Museum of Fine Arts of Florida State University, Artemisia Gallery in Chicago, Sharjah Art Museum, and the gallery of Tayib Bank in Bahrain, as well as a number of galleries in Greece, The Netherlands, and Turkey.

Elusive Homelands exhibition was presented at the VCUQ Gallery, Doha, Qatar, October 4–November 8, 2007
VCU School of the Arts in Qatar was established by Virginia Commonwealth University and the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development.

Images and text courtesy of Camille Zakharia and Blackbird (online journal of literature and the arts [Spring 2007, Vol. 6, No. 1], a collaboration between the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and New Virginia Review, Inc.)

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