This Isn't a Song, It's Destiny: Zemira Poran Zion

This Is Not a Poem, This Is Fate

In the exhibition This Is Not a Poem, This Is Fate, Dr. Zamira Foran-Zion—a poet who has published three poetry books, a painter, and a poetry-workshop facilitator—presents a series of small works, like poetry postcards in color and drawing.

These are statements that are at once simple and convoluted, exploring the fusion, or alchemy, between the verbal and the visual. How can ideas and thoughts be expressed in a foreign language? Foran-Zion is a poet in visual lines and marks, and a painter who formulates herself in words. Thus, the foreign language comes into being in two territories and finds expression in leaps between one foreign language and another.

The foreign language shapes hidden ideas and thoughts: Is it a flower? Is it a bird? Or perhaps a woman bursting forth—or, heaven forbid, a monster? This duality creates a language that does not say things to completion. It seemingly says nothing, while at the same time saying everything that cannot be expressed directly.

A foreign language writes and doodles everything locked behind the heart’s bars: “I wrote and closed it away,” says Foran-Zion. “I wrote and closed it away because I could not say it directly.” Yet writing and closing away immediately also create an opening for release—a liberation expressing the feelings that a woman artist places onstage, in full public view. All this in a foreign language, lest the secret be revealed.

At the same time, this is an attempt to stand at the edge of an abyss without falling. For who has the strength to write when the house is burning? Who has the strength to paint when the house stands empty? Then the painting fills the emptiness with colors and monsters. Painting is like an escape from the monsters that exist in words. It constitutes an alternative world, or a parallel universe:

“This is not a poem, this is a wall;
this is not a poem, this is fate.”

Hagai Segev

Editing: Dr. Amit Kama