Feature: Caricature leads Palestinian deaf children out of silent world

Fourteen Palestinian deaf students are taking caricature drawing lessons in a classroom at a school in the West Bank city of Ramallah, the Islamic Charitable School for the Deaf.

Local cartoonist, Mohamed Sabaa'neh, volunteered to train students suffering deafness and hearing impairment.

The course is trying to explore a new way for those deaf students to interact in the society and through a new technique in drawing, offering them an expression tool and a means to improve their critical thinking.

Being a sarcastic media tool through portraying things either exaggerated or oversimplified, caricature provides those students with room to express mixed feelings about their daily life issues, as well as social, environmental, cultural, political or economic issues they care about.

Sabaa'neh said that his training methodology includes another side, which is "the development of their critical thinking."

The students, mostly females, crowned their works in an exhibition marking the close end to the school year.

In a joint exhibition for artistic and innovative works of school students, the deaf student featured an assortment of their creative works and a special corner dedicated to their caricature drawings.

Speaking in her sign language with apparent excitement, a student who exhibited five drawings in the exhibition, Sanaa Al-Khawaja, said caricature drawing allows her to speak her mind and sharpened her skills in drawing.

"She would be sometimes upset, unhappy, stressed or that she sees something that she could not speak about, this was a release to allow her to express her state of mind, so she benefited her skills and her psychological state," interpreted her teacher.

Away from his office and drawing table, Sabaa'neh gives time to interact with the students, a vulnerable sector of the Palestinian society in order to help alleviate some of their suffering through release.

"Caricature is more than an art, it is an art and a tool to convey a message or a voice, it is a visual language through which this segment of the society can deliver their voice and their problems to the surrounding society without the need to learn their language or any new languages," he said, stressing that caricature is by itself a language, that all people shall use.

Deaf children in the Palestinian society suffer lack of resources, particularly in the education sector. Their chances in mainstream and higher education are slim, let alone the extracurricular opportunities that are down to the minimum.

In the West Bank, there are 11 schools serving students with deafness or hearing impairment and six in Gaza.

The most recent statistics by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics suggest that there are at least 17,000 Palestinians are deaf, most of whom are enrolled at non-governmental or charitable schools, while a small segment is integrated in public schools, all of which show little attention to modern education tools such as arts and sports, due to shortage of resources.

For the school that hosted the caricature drawing initiative, the main interest is nurturing the student's ability of interaction with local community.

The school principle, Houriyah Safi, said she feels it is important that her talented students to learn new ways to express their ideas.

"It is not merely a tree they see and draw, or a house they see and draw, it is rather self expression and a way to read the thought of deaf students and a way to communicate with the local community in order to understand them, their needs and pay more attention to them," she explained. Endit