Emmalene Blake poses for a portrait in front of her mural showing Samia al-Atrash holding her niece Masa Khader, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza in October.
Molly Keane for NPR
Molly Keane for NPR
DUBLIN — This is a story about war, art and the power of social media to bring strangers together.
It begins with a news photo.
In late October, a photo from the Gaza Strip went out on international news wires showing a Palestinian woman kneeling and cradling the dead body of a small child wrapped in a white shroud.
Palestinian Samia al-Atrash holds her niece Masa, who was killed along with her family in an Israeli bombardment in Rafah, Gaza Strip, on Oct. 21.
Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images
Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images
Since Oct. 7, she has focused her art on the war in Gaza, including what’s become her most famous mural — inspired by that news photo. In early November, on the outer wall of a pub in Dublin, Blake spray-painted a reimagined scene of the woman, with a Palestinian flag as the child’s death shroud.
Photos of it went viral on social media. So much so that a few days later, she got an Instagram direct message from Gaza.
It was from Samia al-Atrash, the woman in the photo. She’s still alive, in her hometown of Rafah, in southern Gaza — where more than a million internally displaced people from across the territory have sought refuge.
“I was happy so many people had seen the mural, and I got in touch with Emma to tell her, ‘That’s me in the photo,’ ” al-Atrash, 26, tells NPR by phone from Rafah.
A long-distance friendship forms from Gaza to Dublin
Al-Atrash works as a freelance journalist in Gaza, and is currently staying in Rafah with her brother and grandmother — the only relatives she has left.
In that first exchange over Instagram, she told Blake that the child in the photo was her 2-year-old niece Masa. “You painted me and my sweet niece Masa,” al-Atrash recalls telling Blake.
The whole family was killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home in Rafah on Oct. 21: Masa Khader, her 4-year-old sister Lina, and their parents Loay Khader and Samar al-Atrash. The girls’ mother was Samia’s sister.
Pictured from left: Masa Khader, 2, Samia al-Atrash and Lina Khader, 4.
Samia al-Atrash
Samia al-Atrash
“They’re not numbers. They’re real people, who deserved to live. They had beautiful dreams and a beautiful, safe home,” al-Atrash says. “My nieces would come to my house every week. Masa would wake me up in bed and say, ‘Auntie, wake up! Let’s have breakfast.’ Those are beautiful memories for me.”
These were the happy memories she wanted Blake to know about.
“They were Samia’s world. They were everything that Samia has,” Blake, 36, recalls al-Atrash telling her.
Al-Atrash says she wanted to make sure Blake learned about her 4-year-old niece as well.
“I’d wanted to hold Lina too that day, when the photo was taken,” al-Atrash recalls. “But she was in pieces. So I couldn’t hug her.”
Blake went online and ordered prepaid cellphone service for al-Atrash so that they could keep in touch. They talk daily now. They exchange voice memos over WhatsApp.
“She’s a beautiful person. Our friendship has helped distract me from my pain,” al-Atrash says.
“I can’t even begin to comprehend what she’s going through,” Blake says.
A new mural in Dublin, and a poem
The two women have started fundraising for Gaza together. They’re selling prints of Blake’s mural and donating the proceeds to UNRWA, the United Nations’ Palestinian relief agency.
Their friendship has also inspired Blake to paint a new mural.
Emmalene Blake used a poem that she wrote called “Second Time Painting You” as a guide for the mural.
Molly Keane for NPR
Molly Keane for NPR
“I told Samia that I wanted to paint Masa as she should be remembered, and not as the image that the whole world has seen of her,” she explains.
On Feb. 12, after four days of spray-painting, Blake finished her latest work: a two-story-high painting of a giggling toddler, on a backdrop of pink — one of Masa’s favorite colors. It covers the entire outer cinder block wall of a Dublin tattoo parlor.
A picture of 2-year-old Masa and the finished mural done by Emmalene Blake.
Samia al-Atrash/Emmalene Blake
Samia al-Atrash/Emmalene Blake
It looks like any other laughing little girl. Only if passersby use their phone toscan a QR code that Blake has painted in the corner of the mural will they learn about Masa, a little girl from Gaza.
The QR code also takes you to a poem Blake has written to accompany the artwork.
“It’s called ‘Second Time Painting You,’ and it’s just about all of the things that I didn’t know the first time I painted Masa,” Blake explains. “Because I didn’t see a photograph of her. It was a photograph of her wrapped in cloth.”
A portrait of Emmalene Blake taken near her mural of Masa in Dublin.
Molly Keane for NPR
Molly Keane for NPR
Second Time Painting You
By Emmalene Blake
That cheeky smile. I sketch it now. One finger to your lips.
You look off to the side smiling at someone, something, that makes you feel happy, makes you feel safe.
I sketch your runners, white with a floral pattern. They match your light denim jeans, embroidered with delicate flowers. Your mother took the time to pick them out, match them up.
She carefully brushed your hair, pulled it into colorful bobbins. Put on your baby pink watch, so that you could see all the time you had. Or maybe to just hear the tick-tock of the seconds passing.
Two-year-olds don’t worry about time.
I didn’t know this about you when I painted you before. Didn’t see it. Didn’t see your smile. Didn’t see the feather in your hair. Didn’t see your flowery runners that match your flowery jeans. Didn’t see the baby hairs all along your forehead that you had yet to grow out.
See, when I painted you before, you were wrapped in cloth, your auntie clutching your shrouded body, rocking back and forth.
Whispering words meant only for you.
In the coming weeks, Blake plans a third mural — this time, of Masa with her sister Lina.
“I asked Emma to paint them together, because I wasn’t able to say goodbye to Lina like I said goodbye to Masa,” al-Atrash tells NPR. “I asked her to paint them together, somewhere where everyone can see them.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
