Al Qalam: Poets in the Park

Al Qalam in brief

An upcoming art installation commemorating the first Arabic-speaking community in the United States
Soon to be located at Elizabeth H. Berger Plaza

Al Qalam: Poets in the Park

Just steps away from this park, the first Arabic-speaking community in the United States took root. From 1880 to 1940, immigrants from present-day Lebanon and Syria made their home on Washington Street between The Battery and Albany Street. Known to New Yorkers as “the Syrian quarter,” “the Syrian colony,” or sometimes “Little Syria,” about 1500 “Syrians,” as they were called, lived on the east side of Washington Street. Their homes were crowded tenements that had been carved from single-family residences built in the early nineteenth century. Like their Irish, German, and Eastern European neighbors, the Syrians lived with no indoor plumbing and no access to fresh air or light. Infant mortality rates were tragically high. Yet the Syrians not only survived but thrived.

About the artist

Sara Ouhaddou’s recent practice emerges from her encounter with writers from New York’s historic Little Syria neighborhood, whose lives and philosophy reshaped her understanding of cultural legacy in diaspora. Figures such as Khalil Gibran and Ameen Rihani arrived in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century and confronted questions that continue to occupy artists in the diaspora: Having left one’s homeland, in which language should one write? How does culture evolve as it travels? Establishing Arabic printing presses and translating their own texts between Arabic and English, these writers assumed authorship over their linguistic and cultural transmissions, making their heritage accessible within new landscapes.

For Ouhaddou, this history resonated deeply with her own experience. Living between France and Morocco, her practice is similarly shaped by a diasporic alienation from the Arabic language. In Morocco, access to formal Arabic is mediated by ethnicity, class, and education; for many, the language of literacy remains distant and institutional. Ouhaddou’s own relationship to Arabic is marked by this divide and is intimately connected to its sounds, rhythms, and visual presence, yet removed from its standardized written form. This tension proved generative, prompting her to find a new connection to the language through image.

Engaging the Arabic alphabet as both structure and form, Ouhaddou approaches script as architecture, dissecting, fragmenting, and recomposing it into abstract configurations. Drawing on regional geometric patterns and inherited artisanal knowledge, she treats language like architecture, producing works in glass and mosaic that represent deconstructed poems. The resulting forms are intentionally illegible: an “unreadable translation” that remains universally accessible. Viewers can recognize the presence of embellished text without needing to decipher it. Grounded in visual heritage from the Arab world, she reclaims ornament and craft as living, intellectual traditions inseparable from cultural memory and artistic innovation.

LILA NAZEMIAN