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By Ria Riesner

Teachers who arose early on Saturday, October 20th for a CCAS Outreach workshop entitled “Art and Writing, Inspiration and Imagination: Learning about Arab Culture” were rewarded when they entered the CCAS Boardroom and beheld a visual feast of lush, saturated colors in the paintings of Helen Zughaib, a Lebanese-born, Washington-based painter.

Attendees included 35 educators of grades 5-10 from the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia—art and literature teachers, English as a Second Language instructors, and history and social studies educators.

Zeina Seikaly, CCAS Outreach Coordinator, welcomed the group and explained the day’s program, then introduced Ms. Zughaib.

Helen Zughaib’s paintings have been exhibited nationally at institutions including the US Library of Congress, the World Bank, the United Nations, the Arab American National Museum, the US Embassy in Baghdad, and in the art collection of the White House.

The artist explained the inspirations and ideas behind her paintings. When she first arrived in Washington, she was impressed by all of the monuments. “They were beautiful!”, she said, but “they needed some color!” So she painted stripes and dots in her renditions of them, adding shades of aubergine, turquoise and carmine to the Capitol and the Washington Monument.

One collection, entitled “Stories My Father Told Me,” is composed of several gouache paintings illustrating her family’s personal history as well as the cultural and religious traditions passed on through several generations of her family. A colorful carpet is tucked under her grandmother as she sits on a boat bound for America. Others, done in watercolor and gouache, charmingly depict the process of making foods traditional in her village in Lebanon, such as kibbeh and other treats that marked special religious and regional events.

Ms. Zughaib’s artwork can be viewed at her website, http://www.hzughaib.com/

Zeina Seikaly then presented noted Egyptian writer/illustrator Mohieddin Ellabbad’s The Illustrator’s Notebook , an eye-catching work that incorporates both Arabic and English text and drawings, and poses thought-provoking questions such as: Why are maps and atlases oriented in the direction they are? How is it that the “flesh” color of paint, which is supposed to represent European and Western skin, is marketed in other parts of the world under the same name? Could the reader produce the exact shade of his or her own skin? Could the reader produce art based on the patterns of lines in the palm of his/her hand?

Ms. Seikaly distributed copies of the hardcover book to the teachers to use in their classes. Ms. Seikaly also gave out a curriculum unit that she developed based on Mr. Ellabbad’s book, a set of 30 classroom activities titled “Creative Journaling Activities for Middle School Students.”

This set of activities provides educators with specific activities for the classroom that are relevant to Mr. Ellabbad’s book and which encourage writing and creative expression while also nurturing a curiosity about Arab culture. They include a mapping exercise that turns the world “upside-down,” an introduction to the Arabic alphabet, and activities that involve Arab culture. The final activity invites students to write Mr. Ellabbad to tell him what most inspired them about his book, and to include copies of their original artwork based on activities suggested in The Illustrator’s Notebook.

In her own session, Ms. Zughaib also explored the idea of creating a journal based on Mr. Ellabbad’s book, using pictures, newspapers, and varied items collected from students’ own lives. She presented teachers with a journal she had composed herself, with scrapbook cut-outs of pictures that inspired her, patterns, colors, and writing. She encouraged teachers to use the book as a model for journaling or collage projects in the classroom.

The workshop comprised two sessions—the morning for teachers of grades 5-7, and the afternoon for teachers of grades 8-10. Both groups met over lunch and were able to share ideas with each other and with the speakers. The program was sponsored by CCAS with partial funding by Georgetown’s National Resource Center on the Middle East.

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