Rethinking Home and Healing
By Nadia Al-Sayed
Collage by Arwa Al Shamsi.
Anxiety, attention deficit disorder, and anthropology. Three realms that have helped navigate my journey with healing. The struggle to create a concise stream of thoughts leaves me roaming in many unfinished conversations and incomplete conclusions. These fragmented thoughts cloud my mind on sleepless nights. I have a love-hate relationship with them. They either keep me up at night or subdue me into a deep sleep by distracting me from the anxiety of not being able to sleep. Visions of walks through Jerusalem with my family merge with drives through my neighbourhood in London whilst trying to sleep in Kuwait.
I am a British-Kuwaiti-Palestinian woman; I spent my childhood in a suburban area of North London and my teenage years in the conservative city of Jeddah. I am fortunate enough to have a few places to call home, although being part of the Palestinian diaspora, it has always been an abstract concept. My constant introspection guides me to make sense of myself and the world around me through anthropology, in which healing has been widely studied. Whilst a large element of healing in Western discourse is the idea of ‘wholeness’, it remains reductionist to me. Healing is an active and dynamic process, sometimes painful, and filled with rude awakenings and unlearning. The pressure I have subconsciously put on myself to ‘heal’ has led me to rethink healing and home as an interconnected journey with no clearly defined destination.
The language barrier I had with my grandparents never prevented them from regaling me with vivid Palestinian narratives; especially my Teta[1] who was determined to pass down her memories of our homeland to my brothers and I. The real treat though was bringing out the photo albums, which she keeps safely hidden. They function as the verification and validation of her memories. As my grandmother would go through the photo albums, she would point out and explain the wider context of each photo with detailed references to the context: the weather, the people, sometimes even the conversations... One of the ways of being able to preserve the past is by embodying it through images and words. They provoke a bodily response and reaction. These pictures trigger an affective memory where you relive past experiences with emotional intensity, as caused by present experience. Whether the photos or my Teta’s commentary, I was able to construct some sort of a home.
Photos were not the only mechanism I used to construct a home and heal with. Marcel Proust and his Madeline are enough for us to know how food can evoke nostalgia, but it can also be more than that. It can remind you of home and connect you to your identity, which is deeply relevant to Palestinians. My Jido[2] used to tell me how he used to do the grocery shopping in the market in Gaza and would take bites of chillies, exclaiming how each one wasn’t hot enough. This simple anecdote helped shape and visualize Gaza, a home to my family that I have never known. The hotness and spiciness of my Jido’s chillies contrasts with my own memory of engaging in dérive and flâneur in Ramallah, where my dad picked a fig off the fig tree and gave it to me saying, “you’ll never taste a fresher fig than this”. The Proustian memories of the hot chillies in my Jido’s Palestine and the sweetness of the fig in mine form part of a mechanism I use for actively remembering these stories and processing my healing.
Material culture and social practices work as tools for the preservation and maintenance of cultural identity; it is what enables the diasporic community to be able to bring Palestine into their everyday life and sustain their Palestinianism, contributing to home. There is always an abundance of za’atar[3] in our pantry; as Edward Said famously (and correctly) mentions: ‘every Palestinian house has to have za’atar in their kitchen’. Orange blossom water was (and still is) the cure to everything, and we had different things with tatreez[4] delicately embroidered on them. My Teta always prepares a Palestinian feast whenever we go over, and during my university days would send me voice notes with step-by-step tutorials on how to make sahlab[5] and hummus (rated 9/10 by my dad, a harsh food critic), as well as me using Joudie Kalla’s cookbook ‘Palestine on a Plate’ religiously. Having these elements at home further helped me embrace rituals and preserve social customs, contributing to creating my own Palestinian space, another healing device.
There would be no memory without the passing of time, but “the passing of time also creates distortions, fosters nostalgia, makes repression easier, and threatens us with forgetfulness” (Sa’di, Abu-Lughod, 2007: 17). The diasporic community floats around a space in which we are trying to remember. We are trying to force ourselves out of the luxury of forgetting whilst ironically being deeply immersed in it. This adds a distinct dimension within healing. It's a painful and cyclical process in which one needs to learn to navigate and unpack in order to be able to try to heal.
A formative example of this conflict of resisting to forget is the role of the television and the news. Within many Palestinian households, the television is reserved for the daily news, symbolically representing the need to feel closer to home, and the obsession with always being updated on what is happening. I recall the summer I spent in Ramallah, in which silence dominated the local restaurant I dined in due to everyone rigidly eying the live reports in Jerusalem. I remember that every time I go to my grandparent’s house we all stare at the television, as we watch poignantly to what is going on. What differentiates Palestinian memory from any other group, is that the Nakba is not over. It is not the ‘past’ because “Palestinians are still living the consequences or because similar processes are at work in the present” (Sa’di, Abu-Lughod, 2007: 14).
Amidst Said’s (2001) definition of exile being “the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home”, and describing it existentially as a “condition of terminal loss” caused by “a discontinuous state of being” (2001: 173) and Janet Abu-Lughod’s (1988), assertion that “exile to the Palestinians… is neither transitional nor transitory; it is an inherited state” (1988: 63) – what exile means for the Palestinians becomes understood. Our conditions are still unstable, their status unresolved, and their dispersion and displacement continuous. The idea that exile is an inherited state with an “unhealable rift” and that we are living in a ‘continuing Nakba’ (Jayyusi: 2007: 114) where Palestinian memory is all tied to an eternal present forces me to question the meaning of healing in the context of the Palestinians. Are these elements a hindrance to being ‘healed’? Can we ever find a ‘home’?
“All of us speak of awdah, “return” but do we mean that literally, or do we mean “we must restore ourselves to ourselves”?”
The ‘right to return’ is the desired vision that all Palestinians dream about. All of these elements discussed above have been dimensions I have explored on my journey to try to understand ‘home’, healing, and my [Palestinian] identity. I cannot claim that all these realms can heal all of the wounds of multigenerational trauma that Palestinians are born with, but I am claiming that they can operate as personalised mechanisms of healing that we can each practice to try and make sense of ourselves, homes, and the restoration of our heart that which Said asks us about.
For the case of the Palestinians, they know where they come from and that their roots run deep, however, they do not know where they will end up. The endless journey [home and to healing] is filled with heartache, homelessness, homesickness, and saudade. Whilst uncertainty and anxiety hang over us, we are fueled by hope, resilience, and resistance for our desired destination: justice and freedom. Though I still question whether the state of being ‘healed’ is in the cards for the Palestinian people.
Adapted from a wider research piece investigating ‘The Meaning of Home: Landscape and Memory of Palestinian Women in the ‘Diaspora’’
[1]: Colloquial kinship term used for grandmother
[2]: Colloquial kinship term used for grandfather
[3]: Mix of herbs like oregano, basil, sumac, thyme and sesame seeds – very typically Palestinian, usually eaten with olive oil and bread, but can be used for cooking in various ways. Typically, a Palestinian kitchen staple.
[4]: A specific type of cross-stitch embroidery produced mainly by Palestinian women. It is an intricate type of art, in which different colours of the thread represent different parts of Palestine, and the motifs also represent the different villages and districts of Palestine. Traditionally used as a form of storytelling for Palestinian women who mainly inhabited a village life.
[5]: Popular Palestinian winter drink
Bibliography
Abu-Lughod, J. (1988). ‘Palestinians: Exiles at Home and Abroad.” Current Sociology, 36(2): 61-69.
Jayyusi, L. (2007). ‘Iterability, Cumulativity, and Presence: The Relational Figures of Palestinian Memory’. In A.H. Sa’di and L. Abu-Lughod (eds.) Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. (New York: Columbia University Press) 107-133.
Sa’di, A.H., Abu-Lughod, L. (eds.). (2007). Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory. New York: Columbia University Press.
Said, E.W. (1986). After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives with photographs by Jean Mohr. New York: Columbia University Press.
Said, E.W. (2001). Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta Books.
Nadia Al-Sayed (@nadzals) is a British-Kuwaiti-Palestinian sociocultural anthropologist and multidisciplinary creative. Nadia was born and raised in North London until she was eleven years old when she moved to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. She currently is working in research and curation. Nadia currently lives between London and Kuwait. Her interests include but are not limited to travel, art, literature, and Arab film. Her research interests vary across nostalgia, spaces, identity, wellness and home - all with a specific focus on women and the MENA region.
Edited by Fatima Al Jarman
Collage by Arwa Al Shamsi