The Master's Tools

She is pictured preparing food for her family – baking bread, cutting chilis, and placing a hot tagine on the table. Handling bread from the oven with her bare hands is an act the artist associates both with his grandmother’s fearlessness – Hayoun remembers her saying, “A woman unafraid of heat is afraid of no man” – and with the limiting nature of the domestic role she had to play as wife and mother.

In the foreground she is shown with Amazigh facial tattoos, preparing harissa – made from Tunisian chili peppers. Harissa is an important ingredient in Tunisian cuisine, a local symbol of endurance which has been inscribed by UNESCO as part of Tunisia's Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Next to her, in the foreground, sits an Argentine mother embroidering on a sewing hoop. The stitchwork on her headscarf indicates she is one of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo), Argentine women who campaign for answers about their children who were forcibly disappeared during the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. This was a conflict in which tens of thousands of Arabs were caught up, having immigrated to Latin America from Lebanon and Palestine. The painting captures the solidarity in which Hayoun’s grandmother stood with others, her fearlessness and creativity, and the subservient roles she was expected to fulfil as a wife and mother.

The man in the painting represents the artist himself, as revealed by the name on his coffee cup. Hayoun uses blue as the “past tense” in his work, and pictures himself here in an impossible scene, sitting opposite his grandmother in different phases of her life. His paintings are often rich with symbolism, nodding to further layers of his own ancestry. The keffiyeh and watermelon are symbols of Palestine, and the tarboush he wears is an icon of the Egyptian ‘golden age’ of his grandparents’ generation. As Hayoun describes, “My paintings are for the diverse Arab peoples — not specifically Jewish, Tunisian, Egyptian, or Moroccan — but for all who identify as Arab.” This complex work pays homage to the nuanced histories of the North African diaspora, the familiar signs of a many-generational home, and the resilience of female elders.