How To Belong: Alia Fawaz and the Art of Play
How To Belong: Alia Fawaz and the Art of Play
Alia Fawaz’s art show, Twin Village, opened on a Saturday night at a wine store in downtown Lafayette, drawing together a crowd made up of strangers and old friends. Paintings lined the white walls: broad swaths of emerald, teal, red, and deep orange making up rows and columns of women's faces. People were laughing and chatting with wine glasses in their hands, staring up at the work, spilling out onto the sidewalk. Alia was sometimes pulled in all directions at once, sometimes standing still in the swirl. She looked serene and happy, standing in an eggshell blue silk dress and red pumps, her dark hair piled up in a bun, eyes gleaming. For her, the show meant coming full circle, after a brutal welcome first coming to Lafayette fourteen years before.
Alia’s artwork is loose and layered, with bold and raw colors roughly describing imagined landscapes, animals, and bodies. Faces often appear as if underwater, with their expressions still clear even while their features are muddled and shifted. The faces come from inside her head, or from old family photos; the recurring and changeable expressions suggest that her subjects want many irreconcilable things at once. Traditional and modern Lebanese patterns and designs, remembered from childhood, play across broad leaves and along skin. Her more personal work diverges from her commission pieces: a series of precise, controlled, delicate “portraits” of people’s homes. Those portraits show another side of her sensibility and skillset, and what it looks like for her to paint for financial rather than emotional need. But in both this series and her personal work, she is alive to color, and driven by it.
Alia grew up in the late ‘80s in East Lansing. Right next door were two duplexes filled with her aunts, uncles, and cousins, who had immigrated there from Lebanon, and who she would visit after-school. Her dad ran a liquor store where she would help out, and her grandparents lived above it. On her mom’s side, her grandma was Irish-American, and lived in Flint, Michigan, “when Flint was still something.” She was a potter, and had gone to art school before she had kids. Visiting once a year, with soft pink carpets under her feet and crystal chandeliers dangling above her, Alia developed a taste for the delicate ceramics and paintings she saw there. At home, her father was a dominating force, and the community was close, the environment controlled. She made drawings and paintings in secret, and kept her work hidden. To her dad, art was play, art was wasted time. Living in a house that restricted expression made her need it that much more. Painting comforted her, reset her mood, and connected her to herself.
Alia was legally emancipated at fifteen, and began earning a living on her own, finding a job as a telemarketer for PBS. Through the next several years, she also scooped ice cream, laid carpet and tile, sold and installed roofing, bartended, washed dishes, and sold paintings door-to-door and at gas stations. At seventeen, she ran her landlord’s motorcycle shop, was a property manager at a real estate company, and held another job managing two townhome communities, all at the same time. She reflects, “all of a sudden it was like, I gotta pay rent, I gotta do this, I gotta do that, so I was always working.” Then in her twenties, she made a conscious decision to hold herself with a looser grip. She felt like she had never been young; she’d gotten used to working hard, being careful, and showing restraint. “I just wanted to be able to play,” she remembers. And then, “Louisiana happened.”
In late summer 2008, she moved to Lafayette. Looking for work and not finding any, she came up against a suspicion of outsiders that reminded her of the family environment she’d left behind. “It was all about, ‘do I know your daddy?’ and ‘where did you go to high school?’” she says, remembering that initially, “moving to Lousisiana was really a heartbreaking thing. For a long time I thought, man, this was not the place for me.” She left for a camp on the bayou in Carencro, just outside Lafayette, and a few years later moved to New Orleans.
“New Orleans has been good to me,” she says, “Art is more valued here. It's weird how it unfolded; I never expected to be a working artist. Because of the way I was raised, I still struggle in huge ways with finding value in what I do.” Alia’s father asked her once if she would start to hate making art if she did it for a living, and she says there’s truth in that. Her art is so tied to who she is; it’s difficult to feel dependent on it as an income source. There’s a tension between making what she feels like and making what she knows will sell.
Sometimes she’s taken on bartending jobs to ease that strain. Those night shifts meet another need—at the Dungeon in the French Quarter, “I can work topless if I want, dress up, be in total command of the stage, turn up the music—seventeen-year-old me always wanted to be able to do this.” The drive to work that developed while supporting herself as a teen hasn't eased. Relaxing takes effort. She says, “I'm a pretty restrictive person, which is probably why I think, ‘I need to play.’ I won't allow myself to do the things that I know that I need to do to make myself feel okay, and painting is one of them.”
Her art practice embraces that spirit now. “The only way I can really get started is to let go of control. Just putting some paint down, and pushing it around,” she says. Alia loves working on loose, unstretched canvas, and is devoted to oil paints because the colors don't muddle, so she can do a lot of blending and still keep vibrancy and depth. She gravitates towards deep colors, and any shade of green. Painting is as much about the process as about the final product—doing it because it feels good. She loves doing glazes, and putting down multiple layers of transparent colors. Most of the time, she doesn't decide in advance what a painting will be, but finds out as it happens. In her paintings, Alia works through feelings she wants to communicate visually because they seem either too complicated or too painful to convey with words. Much of her work comes out of processing her relationship with her family, her culture, and the idea of home. One recurring image is multiples of an individual face, which to her expresses conflicting needs and wants within a single person. Many of her portraits are made from found family photographs, especially of women that she never got to meet.
Alia’s early artwork centered around Lebanese culture. She was drawn to Arabic calligraphy, and design work like what she saw carved into the rosewood tables her family had brought from home. She was that much more fixated on her heritage, she feels now, because she didn’t look like her relatives, because she was “half.” She desperately wanted to learn the language, and to visit her family’s village. Her grandparents were reluctant to share those things with her, believing she would have an easier life in the US the more she passed as white. The immigrant experience, cultural identity, assimilation, were not terms that were in the air at the time, “people talk about that now—they didn't then.”
In recent years, she’s started taking trips to Lebanon, visiting family and painting outdoors there. In Beirut, ancient ruins stand in the middle of the city, and the surrounding landscape looks rocky and bare from far away. But up close, land that’s not being tilled or taken care of is filled with figs, karob, and wild mustard seeds. In her home village in the south, “everyone’s always visiting. Everyone wants to know who’s new in town, and they just hop the fence to see what you’re doing.” She loves being there—for the striking images, the people, and the rhythm of the days. “You’ll walk from one house down the road to another little old woman’s house, and sit down in her kitchen to chat, and she’ll be making saj bread. You’ll go outside to get breakfast and bring it back to everybody. There’s so much food everywhere,” Alia says. And the whole time, walking on the roads knowing her ancestors stood on the same dirt, and being told that she reminds someone of this or that person from her family, who she’s never met.
During these visits, she started paying attention to the power of the women she met there. There’s a practice of exerting influence while preserving the outward appearance that the men are in control. There’s an unspoken language in looks and gestures. Finding an example of this, Alia remembers, one of the first times that she went to Lebanon she had needed an abortion just before leaving, and almost bled out on the plane. Her village is Christian, “so it’s very hush-hush,” but her family isn’t, and she told her aunt—her dad’s oldest sister, and very much a matriarch—who took care of her. “She changed my bedding, ‘cause I bled through everything, and it was this silent maneuvering, taking care of me, making sure I was okay. I would wake up early in the morning, and while I wasn't in the room, she would go in and change all my sheets and do all of the laundry for me. And that was it. It wasn’t spoken about. It was just, ‘I’ve got you.’ I appreciated that so much,” she says.
Thinking about other women in her family, she recounts that her grandmother was an elementary school teacher, and that both of her aunts were two of the first women to join the PLO in the ‘70’s. Her family belonged to a progressive community in the south of Lebanon that was inclusive regardless of religion. Stateside, Alia’s watched her older relatives' attitudes change over the years: “They've got this perspective now like, ‘it just really isn't the way it was when we were younger.’ They realize that they just want us to be happy; they see how goofy the world is.” That shift helps her feel more supported.
The last time she made the trip, Alia was detained by the Lebanese army for having the wrong kind of visa for that part of the country. While being held, she says, “they did not believe that I was my family’s kid—because I’m fair-skinned, I'm a white chick with tattoos who’s not covered up, so it’s not lining up.” Near conflicts at the border, she heard pressure waves, and saw Hezbollah soldiers transporting their dead. After she was let go, returning to New Orleans, she felt empty in a way she didn’t understand. Unable to sleep, she’d go each night to Aunt Tikis on Decatur, a 24-hour bar. “I don't know if you’ve ever been there, it's a terrible place,” she says, laughing. She’d get Michelob Ultra over ice, because it reminded her of a beer in Lebanon she liked, and sit in a corner, hardly touching the beer, for hours, and then do the same thing over again the next night. Recalling that time, “I really felt like I was losing it and I didnt know why.” She realized she was grieving for something she never had. She felt homesick for a home that hadn’t been hers, but could have been.
Now, making a home means setting her life up so she can paint. As a kid, painting was a refuge. She says, “I can't help feeling like my obsession with painting comes from that, because it felt like all I had then. I paint because I have to.” It still quiets her head—the feeling of being fully engaged while she’s making something. Nothing is better than that feeling. In Louisiana, in the community that she made between New Orleans and Lafayette, there’s an openness and honesty that diverges from the stifling and shrouded environment she grew up in. Alia feels like Lafayette has changed a lot since she first lived there, becoming more accepting of difference. She’s changed too, becoming more confident in herself and her work. She thought about naming her show there, How to Belong, but that felt too personal—Twin Village was her “secret code” for the same idea. She’s lived in New Orleans now longer than anywhere besides Lansing. It reminds her favorite neighborhood in Beirut, because, “the beauty and the ugly are in your face at all times. You can't escape it.” Compared with other parts of the US, art is valued in this city in ways less bound up with status and money. The approach to work-life balance down here aligns with her effort to allow herself rest. Those attitudes make it easier to remember that she is more than her capacity to work. Alia says she longs to be wherever she isn't, missing a place while she’s gone more than she feels satisfied by being there. She can’t tell if that’s because she’s a child of immigrants, or because she’s a person.
As the art show wound down, it got dark outside, and the visitors got pleasantly tipsy. It was a party as much as an exhibition, and no one was in any hurry to move on. The night slowed down inside the room. Catching a moment away from the rest of the crowd, flushed, Alia said that she was overwhelmed in the best way. That she felt connected, part of something. The opening was meant to run till eight o’clock, but past nine it was still full, and the crowd stayed behind as Alia left. She called a restaurant down the street to ask if they had room for ten, and got into the passenger seat of her friend’s car, laughing, with a pile of flower bouquets covering her lap. Dinner led into a small party at a house on the edge of town, filled with old and new friends. People danced in the kitchen and chatted on the porch, with the front door wide open between them, letting moonlight into the house and music out into the night air.
