I didn’t paint the war … but there is no doubt that the war exists in  the paintings I made at the time.  

Picasso, about his work L’Aubade (1942)

As well as L’Aubade, in Paris I also saw Dora Maar’s photos of  Guernica, which documented the course of its creation. I was  struck by how Picasso had transformed a raised fist—which,  like a kind of rallying cry, holds a tuft of grass up to a sun—into  a horse with its mouth wide open. The sun then became a lantern. What a horror. What a scream. What misery. And all of it  so shamefully current, as H. might have said. I thought of Henri  Michaux. 

“Full of night … (full) of debris, of heaps of debris, of cries as well,  especially cries.”

Paris was different. There, I sang everything I could, for a different Middle East, for Syria: Canti di una possibilità. And after  returning from Paris, after those 12 days, after the missile struck  the prison with pinpoint accuracy, after all that, I decided on  the title of the piece and asked myself what G. might still have  written. And whether it was a coincidence that I came across my father’s  poem at the very same time I was thinking about L’Aubade. 

“… Even if there is no-morning, be the morning glow yourself.”

Farzia Fallah