Thirst of Palms

The poetry collection Ali Abdullah Khalifa published in Beirut in 1970, carrying twenty-five full-page black-ink drawings by Nasser AlYousif. He made them across 1968 and 1969, and they are among the earliest sustained bodies of drawing in his hand: spare, quick, and built from the palm groves, thresholds and figures he had been recording in Muharraq since boyhood.

He described the commission himself in a 1985 interview held in this archive. After Mohammed Al-Fayez, whose pearl-diving verse he had already painted, "the second poet who stirred in me the desire to express his meanings was Ali Abdullah Khalifa, in the collection Thirst of Palms. My expressions of his images appeared as drawings in the collection's first edition. I then painted some of them in oil and exhibited them at the Bahrain Artists Family exhibition at Al-Nusour Club in 1970." That last sentence is the point: he did not treat the book as illustration work but as a reservoir. Drawings became paintings, and a decade later several became zinc etchings.

The collection has been read closely since. A 1994 study in this archive uses one of these drawings, God Protects the Fruit, to explain his recurring door motif: where no door is drawn, "the hand movements of the woman and the man form what resembles a door at the centre of the painting." A 2007 essay calls the book his experiment in abstraction, where he "internalised the poetry through drawing". The Sharjah Biennial 16 text of 2025 reads the drawings as a kind of divination, reading the signs of the past to navigate the present.

The friendship outlasted the book. Khalifa interviewed him for Akhbar Al-Khaleej in January 1984, and by the late 1980s owned Dar Al-Ghad, whose hall gave AlYousif his landmark zinc-etching solo exhibition in 1988; the letter approving it is also in this archive.

Ali Abdullah Khalifa, one of the foremost poets of Bahrain and a friend of the artist across four decades, died in 2026. The poems in this collection are his and remain with his estate. Reproduced here are the cover, the title page, the twenty-five drawings and the back cover, so that AlYousif's contribution can be seen whole without republishing the collection itself.