SkatePal, Haraka Baraka20 Images
The Arabic phrase “haraka baraka” – or “al haraka baraka” – translates to “movement is a blessing” or “in movement, there is blessing”. The poetic aphorism might refer to many movements and shifts: moving the body, moving across borders, keeping resources flowing. To even imagine movement is blessed; “If you move,” a dear friend told me, “you’ll be provided for.” And is there a movement more freeing, more graceful, than the sort which skateboarding necessitates? Carving the pavement, skateboarders remap their cities – a rebellion in spaces where such movement is restricted.
Haraka Baraka, a new book by the nonprofit organisation SkatePal, is a celebration of Palestinian Arabic maxims that compares the shapes of the written language to the physical rhythms so familiar to skateboarders. SkatePal was founded after Charlie Davis travelled to Palestine in 2006 to teach volunteer English classes. “I brought my skateboard with me,” he recalls, “and saw how excited the kids were.” He co-founded SkatePal to establish a skateboarding scene in Palestine, inviting international volunteers and locals to teach kids to skate. In 2013, Davis, his brother Jack, and local skateboarders Adham Tamimi and Aram Sabbah – now SkatePal’s full-time manager – began building ramps. The local skateboarding community now includes the partner organisations Skateboarding.ps and the Gaza Skate Team.
While SkatePal’s first book, Sahten, was a cookbook featuring photographs and recipes, Haraka Baraka is about language, particularly informal, intimate Palestinian Arabic – the wisdom and humour one shares with their loved ones. A collaboration between SkatePal, designer Samar Maakaroun, and illustrator Hin Ching Chung, the book features photographs, Maakaroun’s original typography, and interviews with the SkatePal community, who were invited to reflect on their favourite phrases.
Maakaroun interpreted their selections into original typography. “Play is a major part of the type design experience for me,” she says. “The construction of the Arabic language is based on derivation: one single root word can sprout into a family of words through patterns. It’s already very elastic. It’s a connected, cursive script. On the page, if you stretch the kerning, you’re stretching a single baseline.” You might compare the act of visually reshaping the words – and their fluid ability to maintain their essence – to the way a board might flip, soar or grind against a railing. “In skateboarding, you can do a trick in different styles,” adds Davis. “When you write in Arabic, you can write words in different ways. There’s a parallel.”
The result is dynamic, alive. “Ya habibi” looks like swaying calligraphic script; the end of “a dog’s tail is crooked even if you put it in a hundred moulds” is coiled like a canine’s tail. “When God gives, he amazes; when he takes, he searches” looks like musical notes, interspersed with staccato-like dots. There are brief lessons – an introduction to the alphabet, a graphic indicating where phonetic sounds come from in the mouth. “Some of these phrases are the wisdom our grandparents share,” reflects Maakaroun. “When they’re used by a younger generation, they acquire a new meaning. There’s also that movement: the transition of these expressions through time, the movement in how we use them.” The interviews are arranged vertically, with Arabic on top and English translations on bottom, so that the languages “feed into each other. You don’t have to start from the back of the book, which is the beginning in Arabic, or the front, which would be the end.”
Folded between the typographic spreads, Haraka Baraka’s photographs function like mirrors, depictions of that aforementioned physical parallel to the language’s expansiveness. Captured by the SkatePal volunteer team over the last several years, the images illustrate the community that inevitably springs up around skateboarding. In one photo, a young boy carves a halfpipe at sunset, the Palestinian flag painted on a wall behind him. It accompanies an interview with Yasmeen Mjalli, whose favourite phrase is “dahleen”, or “we are rolling” – as in, “keeping on.” Yasmeen describes Arabic as “a constant unfurling of poetry”.
Haraka Baraka was in production long before the ongoing genocide; SkatePal made the decision to release it on schedule, given that their main objective is to continue supporting Palestinian skateboarders and children. “We need to invest in these communities because the networks that are created have hugely positive impacts,” Davis says. Maakaroun acknowledges that although “it’s nothing in terms of what the children of Palestine need today”, it is still a necessary celebration of language, history and life. Interviewee Mohammad Zo’bi describes his connection to Palestine as “a never-ending love story”. When asked what makes the language special to him, he replies, simply: “The magic in the words. The love in the lines.”
All proceeds from Haraka Baraka (available here) will support SkatePal, the Gaza Skate Team, and Skateboarding.ps.
