The Summer I Turned 14
This is the story behind why I paint. It runs about a minute.
I was fourteen the summer I met myself.
My parents took us to Lebanon many summers. That year, a part of me I hadn't nurtured opened up, and I felt whole.
One week in, I woke at six in the morning to what I thought were fireworks. I went out onto the balcony and watched Israel bomb the airport. It was July 2006. We lived the next thirty days there. My mother, my two brothers, and me. My father flew into Syria and drove in to be with us.
I grew up in America being told what my people are, and I was good at believing it. Nobody tells you that the country doing the bombing gets to write the story about the people underneath it.
I've had my story told for me more than once since then. So I paint.
I'm Maya, a Lebanese Muslim mother of two, painting in San Diego. I build a surface up in layers until it holds light the way I want it to. I'm not trying to decorate a wall. I want to make something that lets a person be seen whole, instead of described by someone who benefits from getting them wrong.
This is one story. There are others, and they all end up in the paintings, whether or not you can see them.
