These faces tell tales of fortitude, hardships

A long overdue exhibition of photographs was opened at the National Museum on Wednesday and runs until November 6 .
The photographs are the work of Dr Eugene H Johnson who has travelled the globe in recent years capturing the lives of people not only in exquisite monochrome photographs but also in short narratives telling the story behind each portrait. Now he has turned his attention to Oman and has created a permanent oral history record of the lives of those born before Oman’s Renaissance in 1970. The hardships of this period are etched in the faces of the subjects in each portrait

The stories are poignant and many of them focus on the daily struggle for survival. The major preoccupation of many of these tales is finding enough to eat. This endless struggle is summed up in volume two in the story of a mother coaxing her hungry children to sleep by telling them that the meat, cooking in the pot on a wood fire, is too tough so they should rest while she boiled stones which never became tender.
There are many similar accounts of extreme poverty and deprivation. Life was about survival. Many of the men made long and difficult journeys by sea and land to neighbouring countries to find employment. 'Work or starvation were the only options,' says one participant. Yet these people overcame adversity. There was a sense of community often lost in the modern world and many of those interviewed have lived to a ripe old age and are still active, despite the hardships they have endured.
'Work is love made visible,' says one participant.

There are accounts of seafarers and fishermen, farmers and those who depended on livestock to eke out a living. In the mountains of Salalah, some families lived in caves. 'Life was not very different from that of the roaming animals, cattle and camels,'comments one Jabali.
The story-telling behind the portraits is the piece de la resistance of this project.
“As a young boy, Said’s father had often told him about an old man who had prophesied that one day there would be boats made of steel that would fly in the sky and others that would move on the ground. He also told them that one day there would be small boxes from which the sounds of men would come and others in which people would move about.”
We now know that he was describing planes, cars, radios and televisions but at the time he was thought to be majnoon (mad).

Although most of the subjects are men there are also accounts of life by women. Early arranged marriages were common and the lives of women were preoccupied with collecting water and wood for cooking as well as raising children and tending goats, cattle. Infant mortality was high, many children did not survive infancy and women frequently died in childbirth. Only traditional remedies were available, including branding with hot irons called wasm or firing.
In 2010, the United Nations ranked the Sultanate of Oman at the top of the list of 135 countries in the world in the rate of improvement in human development over the past 40 years.

Many informants in the book comment on the importance of making today's youth aware of their recent history and not take progress for granted. This exhibition goes some way towards this goal and a nation-wide project in government schools which focuses on the importance of oral history is also under discussion.

Maggie Jeans