A SPECIAL exhibition running at St Comgall’s is giving a voice to the children of Gaza who have been facing an unprecedented military onslaught for the past seven months.
Moon Tell Me Truth is a collection of work by children from Gaza, who were asked to create an illustrated poem in response to paintings by two Palestinian artists. Visitors to St Comgall's on Divis Street can see the original paintings on display by Malak Mattar and Layla Mohammad Ibraheem Al Haj Abed and read the children’s poetry inspired by the artwork.
Pupils from Holy Evangelists Primary School and St Louise’s College recorded many of the poems from the children in Gaza and also contributed their own poetry.
Most of the students featured in the exhibition are now displaced and their schools have been damaged or destroyed as a result of the latest Israeli onslaught on Gaza. At least two students have been killed by Israeli airstrikes – Obada Mohammad Abu Oda and Fatema Saidam.
Holy Evangelists’ Primary School teacher Sean Mullin has been involved in Palestinian activism for over a decade and has travelled to the region as a human rights observer. He said the background for the exhibition coming to Belfast can be traced back to when three teenage Palestinian students travelled to the city for ten days in October 2022 through the Hands Up Project, which connects children from around the world with young people in Palestine.
“The three girls Yara, Rahaf and Malak performed in St Louise’s, Coláiste Feirste and Glengormley High and other various schools across Belfast,” said Sean. “They spent time with host families here and had a massive impact on the people who they met and the people they came to know.”
Those close links between the students and the teacher who accompanied them, and the local school community, led to growing concern after the October 7 Hamas attack and Israel’s response.
Some of the Palestinian artwork on display
“It was through the conversations that we were having through grief, through worry and fear with the Hands Up Project and the people who we knew from Gaza – the girls who came over and the teacher who accompanied them – that the idea of this exhibition came about," said Sean. "The Hands Up Project has worked in England and has exhibited poems which have been written from children in Gaza from a book called Moon Tell Me Truth and the idea was hatched then to take those poems and bring them to Belfast as part of an exhibition.”
Eleven-year-old Fatema Saidam's poem is one of those featured at St Comgall's.
“It features on the billboard outside the building,” said Sean. “It's a poem about the senses, about being able to see, about being able to speak, being able to feel with your hands, about being able to play with your feet and being able to run – it’s a beautifully structured little poem – and she died in the early days of the Israeli onslaught. Her poem has become a rallying point for a lot of activism which is happening in schools over the course of the last few months. The children in my class took her poem and wrote their own versions of it and then committed them to video, which is featured here in the exhibition.
“Despite the obvious tragic circumstances in which Fatema lost her life – the cruelty and the barbarity of it – her poem, which is basically a call for peace, is being used in her memory as an inspiration for a lot of kids from Belfast and across Ireland.”
One of the illustrated poems at the St Comgall's exhibition
I ask Sean, how does a teacher approach the Israel-Palestine conflict in the classroom.
“With great delicacy and you use your own judgement and you let the children lead the conversation,” he says.
“One of the things about the Let’s Talk About Palestine Fortnight, which Teachers For Palestine are involved in – one of the things that came out of that in terms of planning for it, was how do we as teachers answer the questions that pupils are coming to us with because this is happening right now in the world and kids are aware that it is happening on the news, it’s on their phones.
"So rather than have it treated as a taboo subject and something that people are scared to talk about and engage with, because they’re afraid of being accused of being anti-Semitic, what we’re doing through this event and through Let’s Talk About Palestine Fortnight is de-stigmatising it and we’re letting the children lead the conversation.”
Moon Tell Me Truth will run at St Comgall's until Monday May 13.
