Science, Faculty of
Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES), Institute for
DSpace
UBCV
Reynolds, Kate Lai
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
For many diasporic communities, plants and foods often sustain ties to heritage, kin, and cherished places. In the Palestinian diasporic context, these relationships carry particular political weight, shaped by over 75 years of mass displacement, violence, and the ongoing settler colonial project of the Israeli state. In asserting sumud (steadfastness, refusal of displacement) to Palestine, Palestinian resistance often roots itself in the symbolic, emotional, and historical ties to the land through plant life, as echoed in the enduring protest chant, âwe will stay as long as olives and zaâatar.â This research investigated how diasporic women and youth narrate the significance of plants and food in connecting to their Palestinian identity and homeland. This thesis relies on analysis of oral life history interviews with three Palestinian women, and a focus group with five Palestinian youth (women and men), all living in Amman, Jordan. The research found that engagement with memories of Palestine can be facilitated through plants and food in the diaspora, serving to sustain Palestinian identity and sense of connection in the everyday. This was observed through sensory encounters with plants and foodsâthe taste of zaâatar, the feel of olives, and the scent of jasmineâevoking unrehearsed recollections that recall and sustain rootedness to Palestine, and impact the textures of everyday life. For the younger Palestinians, such sensory "inheritances" help cultivate belonging and a longing for return. Additionally, maintaining connections to plants and foods provides a tether to Palestinian identity, as forms of care are enacted across borders, gardens, and kitchens. The findings also suggest that participants enact their commitment to Palestinian return by contesting settler-colonial erasures of Palestinian relationships with land.
In the Scent of Jasmine and Flavours of Maqluba: Plants, Foods, and Connection among Diasporic Palestinian Women and Youth in Amman, Jordan by Kate Lai Reynolds A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Resources, Environment, and Sustainability) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) October 2025 © Kate Lai Reynolds, 2025 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: In the Scent of Jasmine and Flavours of Maqluba: Plants, Foods, and Connection among Diasporic Palestinian Women and Youth in Amman, Jordan submitted by Kate Lai Reynolds in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Resources, Environment, and Sustainability Examining Committee: Dr. Leila M. Harris, Professor, Resources Environment and Sustainability, UBC Supervisor Dr. Mohammed Rafi Arefin, Assistant Professor, Geography, UBC Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Juanita Sundberg, Associate Professor, Geography, UBC Additional Examiner iii Abstract For many diasporic communities, plants and foods often sustain ties to heritage, kin, and cherished places. In the Palestinian diasporic context, these relationships carry particular political weight, shaped by over 75 years of mass displacement, violence, and the ongoing settler colonial project of the Israeli state. In asserting sumud (steadfastness, refusal of displacement) to Palestine, Palestinian resistance often roots itself in the symbolic, emotional, and historical ties to the land through plant life, as echoed in the enduring protest chant, âwe will stay as long as olives and zaâatar.â This research investigated how diasporic women and youth narrate the significance of plants and food in connecting to their Palestinian identity and homeland. This thesis relies on analysis of oral life history interviews with three Palestinian women, and a focus group with five Palestinian youth (women and men), all living in Amman, Jordan. The research found that engagement with memories of Palestine can be facilitated through plants and food in the diaspora, serving to sustain Palestinian identity and sense of connection in the everyday. This was observed through sensory encounters with plants and foodsâthe taste of zaâatar, the feel of olives, and the scent of jasmineâevoking unrehearsed recollections that recall and sustain rootedness to Palestine, and impact the textures of everyday life. For the younger Palestinians, such sensory "inheritances" help cultivate belonging and a longing for return. Additionally, maintaining connections to plants and foods provides a tether to Palestinian identity, as forms of care are enacted across borders, gardens, and kitchens. The findings also suggest that participants enact their commitment to Palestinian return by contesting settler-colonial erasures of Palestinian relationships with land. iv Lay Summary Plants and food are important in articulating belonging and identity. For Palestinians of the diaspora, connection to certain plants and foods is tied to long histories of forced displacement and ongoing settler occupation by the State of Israel. Through engagement with diasporic Palestinians living in Amman, Jordan, this thesis explores how memories of, and engagements with, plants and foods are a crucial tool to maintain connection to the territory of Palestine and Palestinian identity. Sensory engagement with plants and food evokes memories, and maintains connections, that sustain connections to, and longing for Palestine across militarized borders and generations. Plants and food are thus not only important for sustenance, but offer senses of connection to and care for Palestine, especially given the historic and contemporary context of cultural erasure and displacement. v Preface I identified and designed this research in Fall of 2023 under the supervision of Dr. Leila Harris, and committee member Dr. Mohammed Rafi Arefin. I was responsible for independently conducting fieldwork in Amman, Jordan for four months, which entailed organizing and holding all the interviews, a focus group, and taking observation notes. Upon return, I was responsible for analysis of the notes and transcripts and the writing of the thesis. Drafting this thesis was my own responsibility. Dr. Harris provided at least two rounds of feedback, edits, and comments on the chapters of this thesis, and Dr. Arefin provided one round of comments and feedback. Chapters 3 and 4 are intended for publication but have not been submitted anywhere yet. No Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools were used in producing this work. This project gained ethics approval under the title âPlant Memories for Displaced Palestinian Womenâ with the BREB Ethics ID #H24-01104. vi Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary .................................................................................................................... iv Preface .................................................................................................................................. v Table of Contents.................................................................................................................. vi List of Figures ..................................................................................................................... viii Glossary ................................................................................................................................ x Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ xiv Dedication .......................................................................................................................... xvi 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Background and Literature Review .....................................................................................7 1.1.1 Return, Ø©Ø¯ÙØ¹ ........................................................................................................................................... 8 1.1.2 Sumud, Ø¯ÙÙ ØµÙØ§ ..................................................................................................................................... 11 1.1.3 Memory in the Uncanniness of Amman, Jordan ................................................................................. 18 1.1.4 Feminist Political Ecology and Gendered Everyday Resistance ........................................................... 24 2 Methodology ............................................................................................................... 28 2.1 The Research Process ....................................................................................................... 28 2.1.1 Recruiting and Interviewing Miriam, Shihar, and Balsam.................................................................... 28 2.1.2 Translation............................................................................................................................................ 29 2.1.3 Analysis ................................................................................................................................................. 30 2.1.4 Working with the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN) ..................................................... 31 2.2 Methodological Choices ................................................................................................... 33 2.2.1 Treatment of Memory ......................................................................................................................... 33 2.2.2 Oral life history ..................................................................................................................................... 35 2.2.3 Sensory Methods ................................................................................................................................. 37 2.2.4 Focus Group ......................................................................................................................................... 38 2.2.5 Autoethnography ................................................................................................................................. 40 2.3 Reflection on Dwelling ..................................................................................................... 41 2.4 Positionality..................................................................................................................... 44 2.5 Ethics of Research During a Genocide ............................................................................... 45 2.6 Brief Backgrounds on Miriam, Shihar, and Balsam & Map References ............................... 47 2.6.1 Miriam .................................................................................................................................................. 47 2.6.2 Shihar ................................................................................................................................................... 48 2.6.3 Balsam .................................................................................................................................................. 48 3 Plants as a Living Archive: Sensory Memories, Comparisons, and Imaginations of Palestine ............................................................................................................................. 51 vii 3.1 Background ..................................................................................................................... 55 3.1.1 Memories Among Palestinians ............................................................................................................ 55 3.1.2 Plants as Living archives in Literature and Practice ............................................................................. 56 3.1.3 Palestinian Oral Life Histories .............................................................................................................. 59 3.1.4 Discussion Roadmap ............................................................................................................................ 60 3.2 Sensory Echoes: Plants, Place, and the Practice of Narrating Memory in the Uncanny ........ 61 3.2.1 Tasting the Zaâatar ............................................................................................................................... 61 3.2.2 Feeling the Olive................................................................................................................................... 67 3.2.3 Smelling the Jasmine ............................................................................................................................ 74 3.3 Remembering The Future: How the Living Archive of Plants exists Intergenerationally ...... 77 3.4 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 89 4 Consuming Presence with Palestine: The Embedded Care of Sourcing, Preparing, and Consuming Palestinian Plants and Meals ............................................................................. 92 4.1 Background ..................................................................................................................... 96 4.1.1 Metabolism and Metabolic Literacy .................................................................................................... 96 4.1.2 Wujud/Presence................................................................................................................................... 98 4.1.3 Methods and Roadmap ...................................................................................................................... 100 4.2 The Processes of Procuring, Preparing, and Consuming ................................................... 101 4.2.1 Procuring ............................................................................................................................................ 101 4.2.2 Preparing ............................................................................................................................................ 106 4.2.3 Consuming .......................................................................................................................................... 111 4.2.4 The Depth of the Weaponization of Starvation ................................................................................. 116 4.3 Unpacking My Metabolic Literacy ................................................................................... 120 5 Conclusion.................................................................................................................. 124 5.1 Limitations and Future Research Avenues....................................................................... 125 5.2 Zeit wa Zaâatar (Olive Oil and Zaâatar) ............................................................................ 127 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................... 130 Appendices ........................................................................................................................ 142 Appendix A. Interview Guide for Oral Life History Interviews ...................................................... 142 viii List of Figures Figure 1: Persimmon tree in my grandparent's backyard. Photo taken by Author. (2025)............. 2 Figure 2: Palestinian Key outside Ariha with words "We Will Return". Photo by Reina91. (2013). CC 3.0................................................................................................................................. 8 Figure 3: Mug in a store in Amman that reads "I will stay as long as za'atar and olives". Photo taken by Author. (2024) ................................................................................................................ 11 Figure 4: Tiraz Center Thobes from Al Quds villages, adorned with cypress trees and flowers ca. 1920. Photo taken by Author. (2024)............................................................................................ 17 Figure 5: Street Art Depicting Palestinian Tatreez Patterns for the Amman Annual Baladk Art Festival. Artist: Dalal @dalalmitwally. 2021. Photo by Author. (2024) ...................................... 18 Figure 6: Ripening figs in Ajloun. Photo taken by Author. (2024) .............................................. 21 Figure 7: View of olive groves, Jordan valley, and Palestine in the distance from Ajloun Castle. Photo by Author. (2024) ............................................................................................................... 23 Figure 8: Map of Where Shihar, Balsam, and Miriam are from, and Amman. Basemap from Felt Satellite Imagery. Map Created By Author. (2025) ...................................................................... 50 Figure 9: 1990 Poster of poppy published by the PFLP with Arabic text reading "A flower is a flower is a flag" by Adnan Al-Zubaidy. (1990). Public Domain. ................................................. 53 Figure 10: Drying Za'atar Leaves from Nablus. Photo taken by Author. (2024) ......................... 63 Figure 11: Olives growing on my street in Amman, Jordan. Photo taken by Author. (2024) ...... 69 Figure 12: Jasmine growing in LuWeibdeh neighbourhood. Photo taken by Author. (2024)...... 74 Figure 13: Me (author) picking limes and figs in Iraq Al Amir, Jordan. Photo taken by friend of Author. (2024). Reproduced with permission............................................................................... 79 ix Figure 14: Table spread for focus group. Photo taken by Author. (2024) .................................... 80 Figure 15: Diwali. Grape leaves stuffed with spiced rice and lamb, sometimes served with chicken, rice stuffed eggplant and zucchini on the side. Photo taken by Author. (2024) ............. 81 Figure 16: Maqluba being flipped over onto platter. Photo taken by Author. (2024) .................. 93 Figure 17: View from Balsam's neighbourhood in Wadi Al-Joz. Photo by Balsam. (2025). Reproduced with permission....................................................................................................... 103 Figure 18: Musakhan. A dish comprising of layered chicken and flatbread, seasoned heavily with sumac and pine nuts. Photo taken by Author. (2024) ................................................................. 108 Figure 19: Molokhea. A viscous stew made from molokhea leaves, often served with chicken. Photo taken by Author. (2024).................................................................................................... 109 Figure 20: Saucers of rooz bhaleeb. Rice and milk pudding dessert flavoured with rose water. Photo taken by Author. (2024).................................................................................................... 113 Figure 21: Maqluba. A dish prepared with spiced rice, fried cauliflower, potatoes, and/or eggplant. Often with chickpeas and chicken. Photo taken by Author. (2024) ............................ 115 Figure 22: Maftool. a traditional Palestinian dish centred around maftoul, or little beads of grain. Usually served with meat and chicken. Photo taken by Author. (2024).................................... 117 x Glossary Mandarin terms and Vietnamese dishes Ban hoi: Rice noodle pillows, served alongside meats, fish sauce, vegetables. Che: Vietnamese sweet soups and puddings Po po: Grandmother, motherâs side (Mandarin) Gong gong: Grandfather, motherâs side (Mandarin) Arabic Terms Akkoub: A type of thistle, often foraged. Ala aalbak: âOn your heart.â Response to saha. Awdah: âReturn.â Often referring to the right to return in the Palestinian context and in this thesis. Bismillah: âIn the name of Allah.â A blessing often said before starting a meal. Fatoor: âBreakfast.â Fellaheen: âPeasants.â (people from rural areas). Habibi: âSweetheart.â Term of endearment. Hameed: âSour.â Used in reference to Wood Sorrel plant. Hara: âNeighbourhood.â Jabal al Nar: âMountain of Fire.â A nickname for Nablus that symbolically evokes its history and relationship with Palestinian resistance. Keffiyeh: Traditional scarf with specific patterns based on region. Palestinian keffiyehâs are often worn to show solidarity with Palestine. xi Madaniyeen: City people. Myramea: âSageâ plant. Saha: âHealth.â A way to say, âenjoy your meal.â Samidoun, Samidoun, Ma baqiyye Zaâatar wa Zeitoun: âWe stay steadfast, we stay steadfast, as long as zaâatar and olives remain.â One of several iterations of this popular Palestinian resistance slogan/chant. Sumud: âSteadfastness.â Rootedness to the land. Often used to convey Palestinian refusal in light of the Israeli stateâs efforts of erasing Palestinian presence (physical, symbolic) on the land. Tatreez: Traditional embroidery practiced in Palestine. Wallah: âI swear to Allah.â Wujud: Presence, existence, being. Zahoora alaâatfah: âPassionflower.â Zeit Zeitoun: âOlive oil.â Dishes Referenced Fattoush: Popular salad mix, consisting of lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, and a sumac vinaigrette, sometimes with other crunch vegetables. Topped with fried pieces of pita bread. Knafeh: Dessert of shredded and fried layers of phyllo dough, layered between a stretchy savoury cheese filling, drizzled with a sweet sugar syrup that is sometimes flavoured with orange blossom or rose water. Strongly associated with Palestine, specifically Nablus. Maftool: Dish with a base of maftool which are small beads of wheat, served in a stew form with a variety of vegetables, meats, and most commonly chickpeas and onions. xii Manakeesh: Popular pastry, typically variations of toppings on a flatbread-like dough. Common toppings include cheese, ground meats, and olive oil and zaâatar. Maqluba: Dish made from layers of spiced chicken and rice, veggies (such as fried cauliflower, eggplant, etc.). Flipped upside down from a pot when served. Molokhia: Simmered stew with a base of stock and bitter, leafy greens called molokhia. Often served with lemon juice and chicken/meat. Mutabbal: Dip made from roasted eggplant, sesame, lemon juice, and garlic. Musakhan: Dish of large rounds of flatbread layered with chicken and sautéed onions, cooked with a lot of sumac and olive oil, (my personal favourite). Mujadara: Spiced (cumin, coriander, cinnamon) lentil and rice dish, often served with olive oil, lemon, and onions. Rooz bhaleeb: Dessert pudding comprising of rice, milk, Arabic Mastic, rosewater and/or orange blossom water. Often topped with cinnamon, pistachios, and/or other nuts Diwali: Mix of meat, rice, spices, and olive oil rolled into grape leaves and steamed. Drizzled with lemon juice and sometimes served with pomegranate seeds. Places Referenced Al Quds: Also known as Jerusalem. Capital city of Al Quds Governorate in Palestine, split by the Apartheid Wall. Al Khadar: Palestinian town in the Bethlehem Governorate. 85.5% of Al Khadar was occupied by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and is now Area C, meaning that Israel fully controls governance and security. xiii Al Khalil: Also known as Hebron. City of historic Palestine that has been under Jordanian rule since 1948, and occupied by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Amman, Jordan: Capital city of Jordan. Where the interviews took place and all participants reside. Ariha: Also known as Jericho. Where participant Miriam was born and raised in a refugee camp. Capital of the governorate of Ariha in Palestine that is in Area A of the West Bank, meaning that the Palestinian Authority controls most affairs, legally including internal security. Bilad Al-Sham: Also known as the Levantine region. Stretch of land encompassing modern day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. Beit Dajan: Village in Nablus Governate. LuWeibdeh: Neighbourhood in Amman where I lived during my time in Jordan. Gaza Strip: Isolated governorate in Palestine established in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. The State of Israel is currently committing a Genocide against the inhabitants of the Gaza governorate. Haifa: Port city that was annexed by the State of Israel in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, or the âNakbaâ. Nablus: Where participant Shihar was born, and Miriamâs family is from. Capital city of the Nablus governorate in Palestine that is in Area A of the West Bank. Vancouver, Canada: Where I lived and was based during the majority of the writing process of this thesis. Wadi Al-Joz: Neighbourhood in Al Quds, where participant Balsam was born and raised. Yafa: Port city that was annexed by the State of Israel in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, or the âNakbaâ. xiv Acknowledgements I wouldnât have pursued this research if it werenât for my po po (mandarin, grandmother), and Miriam, my host mother. I have been fortunate to receive so much care (and delicious food) throughout my life from my po po, which has resulted in my interest around diasporic flavours. I would like to extend my gratitude towards Dr. Leila Harrisâs attentive supervision and enduring support, which I do not take lightly knowing the bleak reality of how Palestine and the genocide is treated in academia across the world. She encouraged me to feel, and to let that emotion infiltrate the pages of this work. I would also like to thank my committee member, Dr. Mohammed Rafi Arefin, my professors and friends at IRES, and the EDGES research collaborative. Iâd like to thank the Ibn Battuta Fieldwork in the Middle East Award for providing financial support for my work in Amman, Jordan. Iâd also like to thank the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN), especially Lisa Shahin and Miriam Al Jaajaa, for their work and in allowing me to learn from them over the course of the four months I spent in Amman. You can learn about and donate to their campaigns, such as the Revive Gazaâs Farmland program, here. Thanks to all my friends in Amman who welcomed me with open arms and became my community; Kris, Sara, Amanda, Allisar, Min-Dju, Jessica, I hope to visit you all soon! I couldnât have written this without the support and patience from my family and friends. Thank you to Farah and Kaiya for our weekly discussions about the latest news in Gaza and the West Bank, providing an outlet to explore our emotions and unpack the horrors and hope each day brings in a safe space. Thank you to my friends Sam, Nick, Jenny, and Claire for welcoming xv me back to Vancouver with some much needed comforting company and encouragement. Thank you to Rachel, who made this thesis richer with her guidance and thoughtful conversation around memory work. And thank you to my sister Claire for our daily calls and her enduring support and care for me. I am grateful that the list of people I ought to thank is so long. I am so fortunate to have a global community of family and friends who have bestowed their care and time on me and my thoughts throughout the course of my Masterâs program and in writing this thesis. Thank you all, Iâm sure you know who you are! Of course, I would also like to thank all the participants in this research for sharing their intimate memories, imaginations, and knowledge with me. They did not only let me into their worlds, but have enveloped me with a care that has kept our relationships alive over eight time zones. This thesis is dedicated to the hours of laughter, deep conversation, and eating we spent together, and the hours more I hope to spend with them when I return. And lastly, thank you to the activists and academics that have sustained this global movement and attention towards Gaza with their platforms and work. In moments where I felt isolated, stuck, and outraged, their calls for Palestinian liberation have kept me focused. I am indebted to Palestinian scholars for their sacrifices, uproar, and refusals that has enabled me to do this work, and I am fortunate to have them as examples for how I can be a better researcher and person in the space of political ecology. xvi Dedication For Miriam, Balsam, and Shihar ÙÙØªØ±Ù ÙØ¨ÙÙ ÙÙØ¹(On your heart, twice)1 1 Introduction From when I was six to around twelve years old, I spent summers at my po po (grandmother) and gong gongâs (grandfather, both translated from Mandarin) home. In the dry Portland heat, my sister, brother, cousins, and I raced through their one-story suburban house, playing hide and seek, wrestling, and shrieking with laughter. At lunchtime, we kicked each other under the table and traded food like currency: âClaire, Iâll give you my pork if you give me the rest of your cheâ (sweet bean and rice pudding), or âIâll only play tag if you give me the rest of your longan (small, shelled fruits).â These summers were always loud, even when my po po drilled us through math workbooks, we giggled and snarked at each other. The moments of calm came when I lay beneath a persimmon tree in my grandparentsâ backyard, catching freckles of shade and counting the budding green fruits. While my younger siblings napped and my older cousins tormented the koi fish or played video games, I watched the fruit slowly mature in these moments. The persimmons didnât ripen until fall, when we were all back in school. I was the only one who liked the treeâs fuyu persimmons (firmer, crisper) over the gooier, more astringent hachiya variety that also grew in the yard. The sweet cinnamon bite of a fuyu persimmon felt more controlled, less messy, and more rewarding, especially after a whole summer of watching the treeâs progress. 2 Over time, I felt a particular kinship with that tree. Because my school friends had never tried a persimmon, let alone seen a persimmon tree, it felt like I had inherited some sort of special access. Years later, I chose to write a botanical essay on persimmons for a university course. At the time, I told myself I chose the topic because I didnât know much about the plant, as the assignment required that we turn to the scientific literature to learn more about a given plant. The following is an excerpt: Figure 1: Persimmon tree in my grandparent's backyard. Photo taken by Author. (2025) 3 âThe kaki persimmon, scientifically known as Diospyros kaki, belongs to the Ebenaceae family (Kennedy, 2019). The Ebenaceae family is known to encapsulate four genera that include ebony and persimmon trees and shrubs. The kaki persimmon is also commonly known as Japanese persimmons or Chinese persimmons. There are four varieties of kaki persimmons that are signified by their fruits. The two commercially common varieties are the hachiya and the fuyu persimmons. The word kaki is Chinese, written âæ¿â. The common name of the fruit, âpersimmonâ, is derived from the Indigenous Algonquin language, Powhatan, and means âdried fruitâ (Kennedy, 2019). The genus name, Diospyros, is a Greek word that means âFruit of the God Zeusâ (Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, 2023). Another common species of persimmon is Diospyros virginiana, commonly known as the American persimmon and has grown for a long time in the US with a native distribution from Connecticut to Texas (Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, 2023).â I threw myself into researching optimal altitude and soil p.H for the tree, digging into major exporters and importers of persimmons, and the common diseases and pests that threaten the tree. But in my pursuit of learning more about the fruit I forgot about what made it so special to me. My motherâs family is Chinese, but for generations have lived in Vietnam, up until the end of the war around 1975. In the year after writing the above botanical essay, I went to Vietnam for the first time with my parents, siblings, and po po and gong gong. This trio was significant for three reasons. Firstly, it was my motherâs first time back to Vietnam since fleeing post-war in 1976. At that time, my po po, mother, and two of my uncles spent over a year trying 4 to secure boat passage out of Saigon. To this day the stories of my motherâs childhood and that harrowing journey are seared into my mind, as I know that they are into hers. Secondly, this was my siblingsâ and my first time in Vietnam, ever. We only had rough contours of our Chinese/Vietnamese identity, shaped mostly by time spent at our grandparentsâ house. We didnât speak Mandarin or Vietnamese, and any cultural literacy we had came from small, interpersonal customs and quirks shared with our grandparents, aunts, and uncles. But most of all, understanding our heritage manifested through the various flavours of Vietnamese and Chinese foods my po po would cookâthe homemade fish sauce often drenching our plates. Going to Vietnam meant we could finally assign our childhood stories to concrete sights, and sounds, rather than just our imagination of the place where our family had come from. Lastly, this was my grandparentsâ farewell trip. While my siblings and I were experiencing Vietnam for the first time, my po po and gong gong were saying their goodbyes to friends and family and to the country itself. As I watched them slowly hang on each mouthful of pho, and buy bags and bags of fruits, I realized that there was something in those bites that couldnât be reduced to sustenance or nostalgia. The flavours carried something else, as I traced their eyes looking at how me and my siblings reacted to the authentic flavours they attempted to reproduce in their Portland, Oregon backyard and kitchen. Because of these reproductions, the tastes, noises, smells, and sights felt more familiar than foreign to me. I could understand menus or didnât need one at all when I walked up to street vendors selling noodle soups or ban hoi dishes, already knowing which components I wanted and didnât want. I flagged down carts selling the same fruits that Iâd grown up eating as rare treats: longan, soursop, mangosteen (my favourite). In Portland, theyâre hard to find and expensive when available. But in Vietnam, eating them in the humid air, with the background of 5 mopeds revving and street chatter, took me right back to my grandparentâs house. It could have been another summer day in their Portland home, no A/C, cut fruits, and the loud chaos of a dozen cousins. As we walked through Hanoi and bussed to Da Lat, I kept seeing sprawling persimmon trees, just like the one in my grandparentsâ backyard. While I wouldnât say I felt âat homeâ in Vietnam, I felt connected to the landscape in a way I hadnât expected. In Saigon, my mother took us to see where she had grown up. What used to be her familyâs lumber mill, was now half Converse store, half hotel. As we stood on the back patio of the hotel, looking out at the small river where many of my motherâs childhood stories took place, we noticed a vendor selling dried persimmons. We bought a handful and snacked on them as my mother told us emphatically what changed and had stayed the same. Rereading my botanical essay on the persimmon now, I realize how much was left out in my pursuit of âknowingâ the fruit. What was initially a love letter to a tree I had felt such affinity towards had stripped it of the memories, histories, and relationships that made it valuable not just to me, but to my mother and grandparents. In university, courses on the environment (particularly on traditional ecological knowledge) gave me frameworks to think through these connections. Texts on plant kinship and cultural resilience through plant knowledge resonated deeply. War, colonialism, migration, erasure, culture, and story became entangled with plants in ways I hadnât considered. Robin Wall Kimmerer pushed me to understand the affective, emotional relationships with plants is not meaningless, but a source of knowledge that is meant to exist, yet suppressed by scientific, objective, Western ideals of understanding land (Kimmerer, 2013). She writes that in traditional Indigenous ceremonies, sweetgrass is used, evoking people to âremember to rememberâ the 6 teachings and kinship with the land, âBreathe in its scent and you start to remember things you didnât know youâd forgotten.â I learned the Anishinaabe environmental traditions as outlined by Kyle Powys Whyte, interdependence, systems of responsibility, and migration, concepts that shape what he calls âcollective continuance,â or the adaptive capacity for identity and culture to persist through the relational passage of knowledge (Whyte, 2017). This personal and academic grounding shaped the questions I carried with me in university and beyond: How do plants entangle identity, and what does that mean when culture is otherwise inaccessible? In 2022 I went to Amman, Jordan for four months, where I built on over a decade of Arabic language and cultural studies. It was difficult to not think about the influence of displacement and identity when looking around Miriamâs kitchen. From the little magnets and photos on her fridge of Nablus and Ariha (also known as Jericho), to the mini-TV on the counter playing 24/7 news reports from Gaza. But she communicated the love and loss of her country the most through the flavours of her cooking. She served me Palestinian dishes with pride almost every evening, always explicitly telling me their Palestinian roots. She would scoop heaping amounts of food onto my plate and act disappointed when I told her I was full. But in the gaps between chewing she would compare, âin Palestine, you would be using hand-picked molokhea (green leafy vegetable, used in a stew by the same name) for better flavour.â These moments, over breakfast, lunch, dinner, picking unripe green almonds, and stuffing zucchini, reminded me of my po poâs relationship to feeding my siblings, cousins, and meânot just with the food, but embedded in the flavours were approximations of a life and land across borders. 7 1.1 Background and Literature Review The presence of Palestinian resistance rhetoric in Jordan, particularly Amman, is the outcome of over a century of ongoing displacement and dispossession. The linkages between land, sumud (steadfastness, translated from Arabic), displacement, wujud (presence, translated from Arabic), memory, and gender are what guide this paper. The initial research question informed by this literature asks: What role do landscape and plant memories of displaced Palestinian women in Jordan have in preserving and narrating Palestinian identity, and what practices do people engage in to maintain those memories and knowledge among displaced communities? What does the manifestation of memory of plants and landscapes mean, and how do these connections lay bare the lived and political significance of these practices for these women? I collected the oral life histories of Shihar, Miriam, and Balsamâthree Palestinian women living in Amman, Jordanâand conducted a focus group of younger Palestinians (women and men) in Amman who had never been to Palestine. The first chapter considers sensory memory and intergenerational imaginaries of Palestine to ask, âwhat is the capacity of plants as a living archive for displaced Palestinians in Amman, Jordan?â The second chapter builds from the first by asking âwhat are the processes related to food procurement, preparing/cooking, and consuming/sharing that link Miriam, Shihar, and Balsam to Palestinian land from afar, and in what ways do they narrate the care values and motivations underlying these linkages?â The following literature review touches on the greater themes of this thesis encapsulated in two main discussion chapters. While the chapters have their own literature reviews with regards to the specific bodies of literature they contribute and speak to, below is a guide to the foundational themes based in literature. In this section, I will briefly discuss Palestinian mass 8 displacement and return, Palestinian resistance political ecologies, feminist political ecology, while also setting up the role of Amman as the âuncannyâ proximation of Palestine, which is a throughline of this work. 1.1.1 Return, Ø©Ø¯ÙØ¹ Figure 2: Palestinian Key outside Ariha with words "We Will Return". Photo by Reina91. (2013). CC 3.0 This thesis engages directly with plants, and foods, not only as bodily sustenance, but as sustaining connection to identity and territory. For certain Palestinians, the connection to identity and territory has political implications tethered to ongoing settler occupation and cultural erasure which has been enacted, in large part, due to mass displacement and expulsion. 9 The Nakba of 1948 led to the mass expulsion of two-thirds of the population in Palestine, roughly over 750,000 people (United Nations, 2025). The Naksa of 1967 displaced an additional 100,000-300,000 Palestinians (Al Tahhan, 2018). According to the United National Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) the term âPalestinian refugeeâ also refers to the descendants of those displaced by the Nakba, those who are internally displaced (IDPs, Internally Displaced Persons) in Israel, those who were displaced by the 1967 Naksa and are face barriers to return, any IDPs following the Naksa, and Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes due to the current ongoing genocide1 in Gaza (UNRWA, 2025). According to the Palestinian nonprofit, the BADIL Resource Center, as of 2021, there was an estimated total of 9.17 million displaced Palestinians worldwide, with 8.36 million being internationally displaced and the rest being IDPs (al-Azza, 2022). Also as of 2021, 2.3 million of the 8.36 million refugees reside in Jordan (al-Azza, 2022). The definition of refugee by UNWRA does not reflect the total number of Palestinians who have been forcibly displaced since the 1948 Nakba and contribute towards roughly 40% of Jordanâs population (Alduraidi et al, 2025). Still, Palestinians remain largely underrepresented in Jordanian government (Wilcke, 2010). Most of the Palestinian population in Jordan reside in the capital city, Amman, as opposed to other municipalities that are primarily controlled and occupied by Jordanian Bedouin tribes (Wilcke, 2010). 1 Genocide is used throughout this thesis to describe Israelâs violence against Gaza. The characteristics of this violence has been applied to the constitutive elements of a genocide established by Article ii of the Genocide Convention by United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, in April 2024 (Albanese, 2024). Amnesty international, Human Rights Watch, Doctors without Borders, among other large international non-governmental organizations have also released statements calling upon the recognition of Israeli actions in Gaza as constitutive of genocide (Gritten & Foulkes, 2025; United Nations Human Rights Council, 2025; International Association of Genocide scholars, 2025; Bartov, 2025) 10 Due to the large, displaced population, core to Palestinian resistance is the notion of âReturnâ or in Arabic, awdah. The motif of Palestinian return is present in literature, poems, artwork, slogans, and is directly symbolized through the popular family practice of having keys as family heirlooms, often to family homes pre-Nakba (Albadawi, 2021.; Museum of the Palestinian People, n.d.). The right to return to oneâs homeland is an outlined fundamental UN human right for those who are displaced due to violence, however, has been continually and systematically denied for Palestinians (United Nations, 1978; Amnesty International, 2019). The 2018-2019 âGreat March of Returnâ were a series of demonstrations in Gaza to protest the restriction of movement and advocate for the right for Palestinians to return to the homes taken from them in the 1948 Nakba. During the protests, Israeli snipers killed 266 protesters, 50 of which were children, and injured over 30,000 people (Fayyad, 2019; Obermaier, 2024). As Partick Wolfe famously writes; âsettler colonialism is a structure, not an event.â (Wolfe, 2006). There is a current push, in activism and academia, to understand the Nakba as a concept rather than an isolated event. The âongoing Nakbaâ refers to the continuation of âcatastropheâ that has continued since 1948 to this day, characterized by the perseverance of Palestinian displacement, violence (structural and physical), and genocide in support of the Zionist project and its settler colonial goals (Eghbariah, 2024; Saad, 2019; Institute for Palestine Studies, 2024). It also attests to the ongoing efforts of the Israeli state in erasing, what Wolfe (2006) asserts is one of the most effective and utilized tools of settler colonialism. Erasing settler colonial violence, erasing existing cultures, and, on theme for this thesis, erasing the relationships to the land itself (Wolfe, 2006). Building on these ideas, this current research considers how longings of return are instilled and remembered by sensory aspects of plants, and within manifestations of food. 11 1.1.2 Sumud, Ø¯ÙÙ ØµÙØ§ âWe will stay on this land as long as there are Zaâatar and Olives.â You might hear this phrase at protests in iterations of, âSamidoun, Samidoun, Ma baqiyye Zaâatar wa Zeitoun,â which translates to âwe will stay, we will stay, as long as there are zaâatar and olives.â Itâs a popular Palestinian slogan, evoking the cultural, political, and traditional polysemy of zaâatar and olives to the Palestinian population in asserting their connection to the land through what grows on and from it. FiguFigure 3: Mug in a store in Amman that reads "I will stay as long as za'atar and olives". Photo taken by Author. (2024) 12 For Palestinians, this identity and belonging to the land is personal, lived, and political, something essential to the collective continuance. Indeed, this connection and commitment has fuelled an intergenerational fight against settler colonialism and genocide that has created a strong international resonance. The connection to the land is often referred to as sumud, often translated as âsteadfastness,â and is uniquely tied to Palestinian self-determination and opposition to settler occupation. Since the 1960s, the term has also been associated with the Palestinian liberation struggle, especially in reference to remaining on the land and maintaining daily life amid systemic violence and intimidation by Israeli settlers and the state (Rijke & Van Teeffelen, 2014). Sumud is sometimes viewed as conceptually adjacent to âeveryday resistance,â wherein knowledge, tradition, joy, and identity persist through daily acts of resurgence and refusal (Richter-Devroe, 2011). Land and plant-based symbols and engagement are paramount to the expression of sumud, establishing connection to the land through displacement, maintaining a tether and connection while maintaining a commitment to return. Oranges, poppies, cacti, zaâatar, olives, and more have meanings that have been developed through long histories, and daily engagements folded into experiences of occupation (Abufarha, 2008). Cacti is a symbol because of its durability as a plant (it always grows back), but also because of how it demarcates depopulated Palestinian villages. While the Palestinians were forced out of the villages, the cactus stays as a placeholder for their return, remaining steadfast to the land. Most famously, sumud is depicted through olive trees, meant to evoke the long Palestinian histories of tending and harvesting them, as well as the strong presence of olives in traditional practices and foods. Braverman (2009a, 2009b) explores the cyclical strengthening of olive trees as a symbol of sumud through the systematic damaging, burning, and uprooting imposed upon Palestinian 13 owned olive groves done by settlers and Israeli forces alike. These examples are just two of many that illustrate the intricate links between the land, foodways, and Palestinian resistance, both in narrative and practice, the nexus of the proposed research. Maintaining connection to the land from afar asserts territoriality symbolically and physically, keeping claims and connections for future generations. As a result, Palestinian identities manifest through various expressions of belonging to the physical land, evident in daily rituals, art, food, and political messaging, such as the mug in figure 3 (Hammad & Tribe, 2021; Ufheil-Somers, 2000). For Palestinians, maintaining cultural, emotional, and physical connection to land and its plants is paramount in challenging pervasive âdesert bloomâ rhetoric which has long been used to justify settler colonialism in historic Palestine. The âDesert Bloomâ is a Zionist2 trope that asserted that the land would thrive and âcome back to lifeâ under the care of Israeli Jewish settlers (George, 1979; Kershnar & Benjamin, 2011). This creates a narrative division between Palestinians, who are unfit to care for the land and therefore have no connection to it, versus Israelis, who belong to the land, can care for it, and revive it (George, 1979; Kershnar & Benjamin, 2011; Manna, 2020).3 Braverman (2009a, 2023) has detailed several instances in which conservation rhetoric has been used as a tool of asserting Israelâs settler colonial identity in Palestine. These narratives have fuelled the ideological work of organizations such as the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which has used afforestation and conservation projects around pine trees to assert territorial control (Braverman, 2009a). Braverman explicitly explores how as a 2 Zionist in this thesis refers to the movement for Jewish nationhood in a physical territory. I follow Edward Saidâs conceptualization of Zionism as heavily informed by European/Western settler colonial values. Said states that the three overlapping frameworks of Zionism rely upon erasing any Arab inhabitants and their history on the land, a narrative of âemptyâ territory, and the restorative value of Jewish nationhood ie ârebuildingâ a modern state. (Said, 1979) 3 With clear parallels to the messaging of Manifest Destiny, and other settler colonial tropes which have justified expansion and settler colonization (Layden et al., 2025; Said 1979). 14 result, territoriality and settler colonialism has extended to planting trees, or âplanting flagsâ replacing olive trees with pine trees as an ecological (Braverman, 2009b). As with settler colonial logics in the United States (U.S.), Israel has established nature reserves and parks with the consequence of displacing Palestinian villages on the land, some of which are later repopulated with Israeli settlements (Amira, 2021; Braverman, 2023; Sasa, 2022). The veil of conservation has also been a tactic of territoriality in the criminalization of wild zaâatar (thyme), myramea (sage), and akkoub (type of thistle) foraging. Human rights organization Adalah and activist legal scholar Rabea Eghbariah found that from the inception of the regulation to 2017, 100% of those fined or jailed for the offence of harvesting these wild plants were Arab (Adalah, 2019; Braverman, 2024). This is not just physical erasure of Palestinians engaging with the landscape, but a means of inhibiting Palestinians from engaging with their traditional knowledges, foodways, and histories as a means of erasure (Manna, 2020). These narratives, alongside those related to water management (Alatout, 2008; Dajani, 2020), green energy (Hughes et al., 2023), waste management (Stamatopoulou-Robbins, 2019), among several other political ecology themes, also have created ecological divisions that have implications of territoriality. In some of these works, this is referred to as green colonialism, green imperialism, etc. (Hughes et al., 2023, Sasa, 2022). Underlying these practices is Israelâs ecocide, in Gaza and the West Bank, that has persisted throughout Israelâs settler colonial project. Ecocide is intertwined with genocide, according to Dinc & Türk (2025), who view the destruction of the land as a way of âsocial deathâ for marginalized communities with identities shaped through material and spritial relations with the land. Ecocidal practices have existed long before October 7th, 2025, observed in Israelâs planting of non native trees, causing drought and a rise in seasonal uncontrolled 15 wildfires, the draining of wetlands, the rapid use of desalinization, deploying agricultural toxins on Gazan farmlands, uprooting olive and fruit trees and prohibiting replanting, and the mass amounts of water and air pollution from Israelâs military complex (Farr, 2024; Lambert, 2024). Since October 7th, 2025, Israel has destroyed or damaged upwards of 57% of all water infrastructure in Gaza, polluting waterways with sewage, toxic waste from explosives, debris from explosions, and medical waste (Lambert, 2024; Joseph, 2025). This is increasingly not just a matter of social death, but also physical health for Gazans, with infectious diseases such as hepatitis A increasing 384-fold since October 7th due to polluted water and foodways (United Nations Human Rights Council, 2025; Badri, 2024). Neimark et al. (2024) found that the emissions resulting from the first 60 days of conflict after October 7th exceeded that of the annual emissions of 20 individual countries and territories. While these works highlight the structural and discursive features of using nature-based narratives towards territoriality and use of ecocidical practices, there are other works that highlight the sumud of Palestinians by foregrounding the emotional, embodied, and everyday relationships they have had and continue to have with the land. For instance, (Tesdell et al., 2019, 2020) explores how the revitalization of traditional perennial rainfed agriculture has persisted and even increased socio-economic resilience of Palestinians in the West Bank. Braverman (2009a, 2009b) also does this by exploring the emotional and kinship-centric relationships with olive trees. In Simaan's (2017) decolonial ethnographic work on the olive harvest in Dar-el-Shoke, identifies communal forms of everyday resistance exhibited in replanting olive groves, and using unconventional means to access fenced off lands and restricted water to tend to the groves. In interviewing the farmers, Simaan (2017) asserts that sumud is a 16 sacrifice (having to deal with the violence and restrictions of being steadfast to your land) with the goal of securing community belonging to the land for the future. Iâll end this section with an example of how identity and land have been historically tethered in Palestine, through tatreez. Traditional embroidery of clothing (tatreez) uses place-based motifs of flowers, trees, water, fruits, vegetables, and other natural elements that were used to identify with the landscape in which people live (Ghnaim, 2018; Hesse, 2024). By wearing the appropriate tatreez patterns, a person could be associated with their village even when they were in another area. For instance, areas in Ramallah were often represented with palm trees and leeches, whereas in Beit Laham, tatreez would feature apple branches and roses, and in Yafa orange blossoms were more prevalent (Kawar, 2011; Tiraz Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress, n.d.) When I was in Amman, I visited the Tiraz Center, which displays the largest collection of traditional thobes and garments adorned with tatreez (Tiraz Widad Kawar Home for Arab Dress, n.d.). Propelled by Widad Kawarâs archival work, the Tiraz centre maintains the Palestinian footprint on the land though safeguarding and educating others on the various tatreez patterns and their meanings. 17 This thesis focuses on how these relationships, to olive trees, zaâatar, oranges, jasmine, poppies, etc. are narrated and manifested by Palestinians in a displaced context, showing their sumud to Palestine while not being physically on the land. The next section provides a lens into how the study area of Jordan is a unique location to explore how Palestinian sumud exists beyond borders. Figure 4: Tiraz Center Thobes from Al Quds villages, adorned with cypress trees and flowers ca. 1920. Photo taken by Author. (2024) 18 1.1.3 Memory in the Uncanniness of Amman, Jordan Figure 5: Street Art Depicting Palestinian Tatreez Patterns for the Amman Annual Baladk Art Festival. Artist: Dalal @dalalmitwally. 2021. Photo by Author. (2024) The connotation of sumud is heavily associated with the physical landscape as discussed in the previous sections, making it easier to conceptualize within the boundaries of Palestine. Sumud is perceived as âstanding your ground,â however Taher (2024) asserts the idea that ârecalling the relationship with the land and with home away from home is a central practice of Palestinian sumud.â Taher (2024) uses the concept of individual âwujudâ (or presence) with traditions and knowledges of the land as a means of evoking collective Palestinian sumud as a 19 form of cultural preservation and sustained engagement with Palestinian ecological knowledges. As Taher writes: âPracticing their wujud (existence/presence) is the only thing standing between their collective survival and the total loss of their homeland and of every right for them to be and stay in Palestineâ Presence with Palestinian landscapes in a displaced context, is intertwined with the everyday practicing of memory. Memory has been documented as an extremely significant tool in self-determination and the persistence of Palestinian traditions and knowledge amidst cultural erasure. Particularly, the perseverance of intergenerational memory has been a well-documented expression of sumud, passing on an identity tethered to Palestine and informed by a longing of return through memories enacted by food, memories, and traditions. In a talk I sat in on by historian and scholar Sherene Seikaly (2025), she echoes in the auditorium, âPalestine is shrinking, Palestine is everywhere.â Memory doesnât replace the physicality of being on the land, but it allows Palestine, through practices, emotions, and traditions to persevere beyond borders. This paper follows the tradition of Taher (2024) and Saad (2019) in their conceptualization of engaging with Palestinian memory as a non-sedentary or merely nostalgic practice, but rather one imbued with sumud and a means to narrate complex negotiations of identity, exile, and resistance. For Saad (2019), this approach to memory engagements offers the opportunity to humanize memory as individual experiences with loss and continued practice rather than viewing it simply as an âextractableâ form of counternarrative, in other words, only a significant form of resistance when used to recall specific events such as the 1948 Nakba. This continues the emphasis on the ongoing Nakba. In this paper this manifests as 20 privileging how memory informs the relationships and engagements built between Palestinians in the Amman diaspora and plants. Saad (2019) also uses Amman as a site to understand the role of memory in the âarchive feverâ of Palestinians in the diaspora. Amman serves as a unique site for Palestinian memory studies because of its uncanny-ness to Palestine. In climate, architecture, food, nature, and the population itself, there are striking similarities that seem to be only distinct because of colonial borders. Walking in downtown Amman, there are Palestinian keffiyeh sold at every shop, a permanent long line at Habiba, a popular spot for the Palestinian dessert, knafeh, and pretty much every taxi driver will be from Nablus, Jenin, or Al Quds. However, the presence of Palestine in Amman simultaneously highlights what is achingly absent and missing (Saad 2019). While things are the same, they donât match up with memories and vignettes of Palestine the way they shouldâthere is always a space of longing. The uncanniness reflects and challenges the colonial border that echoed throughout my time in Jordan. In Ajloun, I spoke to a group of men selling figs and pomegranates on the side of the road. I was trying to negotiate a good price for the figs, and they kept telling me it was second best, as close as you can get, to the figs grown in Jenin, a northern city in Palestine. Figure SEQ Figur21 Figure 6: Ripening figs in Ajloun. Photo taken by Author. (2024) From Ajloun, it would take about an hour and fifteen minutes of driving to get to the city of Jenin, there is even a road that connects the two cities. But instead, the fastest way to get to Jenin from Ajloun is going north to the Israeli border crossing âSheikh Husseinâ, then crossing into the West Bank. Based on my conversations with friends, taxi drivers, and my participants, this process can take upwards of six hours. While there arenât any publicly available statistics, it is well known that entry is commonly denied at this crossing disproportionately for Palestinians, but also for internationals as well, typically based on solidarity with the Free Palestine movement (GOV.UK, n.d.). As I stood on top of the Ajloun Castle, I saw the Jordan valley stretch groves of olive trees over an invisible border. As I meandered through an olive grove near my accommodations, I tried to make sense of the sentiment that echoed throughout my interviews, 22 similar, but not the same. This work has obvious connections to works on terroir, but in my work, this is more often emphasized through narratives of longing and memory, even as differences are attributed to the taste profiles as well (Hill, 2021; Barham, 2003; Prudham et al., 2024). In the absence of plants grown in Palestinian soil, is a presence of longing in this thesis, echoing the role of plants as agents as we begin to recognize how they facilitate and narrate relationships to identity and land in their sensory capacities (Dorion, 2021; Sandilands, 1999). For Dorion (2021), engaging with the invasive garlic mustard in Toronto provided insight into settler colonial practices of plant management. In this thesis, the plants and their echoes of Palestine as narrated by participants, provide insight into how they facilitate the commitment for return in creating an âuncannyâ environment rife with comparisons to home. 23 Figure 7: View of olive groves, Jordan valley, and Palestine in the distance from Ajloun Castle. Photo by Author. (2024) In discussing Palestinian sumud and plants in displacement, it was natural to approach the sentiment through a focus on the emotional, everyday, and embodied manifestations of sumud through plants. The following section gives a brief overview of this feminist political ecology approach, specifically in Palestine. 24 1.1.4 Feminist Political Ecology and Gendered Everyday Resistance Palestinian womenâs entanglements with nature, specifically how they narrate and exhibit these relationships, must be situated within the subfield of feminist political ecology (FPE). Traditional FPE centres gendered perspectives and experiences in relation to ecological issues and environmental (in)justice (Sundberg, 2017). Without consideration of gendered experience, inequalities are likely to be reproduced in development schemes, policymaking, and environmental management. This research contributes to FPEâs emerging emphasis on multidimensional and intersectional experiences with nature, focusing initially on gender, displacement, and Palestinian identity. FPE scholarship examines how various power structures shape gendered socio-environmental relationships and how such relationships are lived, narrated, and embodied in everyday life. Harris (2015, 2022) calls for future FPE to centre âthe everyday, embodied, and emotional aspects of society-nature engagements.â This broadens the scope of how nature might be conceived, experienced, and articulated, and it underpins this projectâs exploration. Attending to the âthree Eâsââembodied, emotional, and everydayâhighlights how environmental inequalities exceed economic or income-based measures and instead focus on how participants assign meaning and value to their experiences (Harris, 2015, 2022). A focus on lived, gendered experiences with the environment illuminates the various forms colonial resistance and cultural resurgence may take. Exclusionary legacies within public spheres continue to shape global power dynamics and access (Lilja, 2017; Lilja et al., 2017). Because cultural and social contexts inform individualsâ power and agency, resistance can take many forms. Legislative or political participation, which Sharpe (2017) describes as âconcrete 25 and observable behaviorsâ (e.g., protests, campaigns), is deeply contingent on access to institutional power. âEveryday resistance,â a term coined by Scott (1985), refers to more subtle, integrated forms of opposition enacted when open resistance is too dangerous or impossible due to identity, timing, or location (Lilja 2017; Bayat 2000). Bayat (2000) argues that everyday acts become resistance only insofar as they challenge, rather than reproduce, dominant power structures, situating their work in the global south. However, MacLeod (1992) argues that everyday resistance often contains elements of both subversion and conformity and therefore must be interpreted within the actorâs specific positionality. Though not explicitly, research speaks to the ongoing dialogue on how everyday resistance is narrated and understood through plant engagements, but from the perspective of Palestinian women who have been and continue to witness the erasure of their homes and culture in real time. Dowani (2022) emphasizes the communal and historical aspects of womenâs agricultural labor, particularly in her management of a Palestinian community farm. She describes how farming more generally fosters âcommunity knowledge sharingâ and provides the âtools to resist and combat an oppressive system which wants to erase [Palestinian] existence,â and as the farming population has dramatically declined in the West Bank due to a lack of income opportunity, women have largely been left to tend to the land (Dowani, 2022). But Palestinian womenâs ecological relationships extend beyond agriculture. Culinary practices, for example, serve as another form of cultural and political resistance. Food sovereignty, survival, and cultural resurgence are embodied in traditional cuisine. The maintenance and performance of Palestinian cuisine asserts cultural continuity and national presence, countering Zionist attempts to homogenize identity. Recipes, ingredients, and preparation methods are commonly passed down 26 through women, over generations and across family connections, with womenâs domestic labour as a crucial site of historical and cultural transmission (El-Haddad & Schmitt, 2021). This transmission resists not only displacement, but also appropriation and commodification of Palestinian foodways by Israeli actors. Despite these challenges, the kitchen endures as a space of gathering, knowledge sharing, and intergenerational resilience. The emotional and embodied dimensions of these relationships are central. Activist Christy Bischoff recalls visiting a Palestinian woman after settlers had cut down 102 olive trees: âAs we approached the woman sitting by the 102 olive trees that the settlers cut the night before, I saw the tears rolling down [her] face as she stared ahead. We were coming to pay our respects; it was a funeral, a graveyard where the 30-year-old trees were slaughtered.â (Bischoff, quoted in Braverman, 2009b) Such experiences illuminate the depth of environmental grief and loss, and how nature becomes a vessel of both mourning and resistance. Agriculture, cooking, foraging, and other intimate engagements with nature constitute a deep kinship between Palestinian women and their environment. Because of this kinship, and the forms of its expression, Palestinian women are widely regarded as âat the heart of agroecology and food sovereignty in Palestine,â (Alqaisiya, 2023). These relationships must be understood through a lens that honours the emotional, embodied, and everyday dimensions of justice. Dowaniâs account reflects sumud as both a philosophy and practice: a refusal to surrender memory, survival, or culture despite occupation. Sumud manifests in the maintenance of Palestinian life in the face of systematic erasure, and for Palestinian women, there are also ways in which enacting this sumud challenges patriarchal forms of control (Richter-Devroe, 2011). Richter-Devroe identifies three interrelated forms of 27 sumud that are especially enacted by women in the domestic sphere: material survival strategies, cultural resistance, and social or ideational resistance. While gender is not treated explicitly in this thesis, the assumption of how gender operates in the domestic sphere of everyday resistance is the underpinning for this work and the selection of participants. The notion of sumud and everyday resistance have roots in Palestinian womenâs engagement with the landscape, whether agriculturally, in the kitchen, or other arenas of daily life. 28 2 Methodology The methods used in this research are deeply intertwined with praxis: sharing memories, knowledge, and values through oral histories, centring and eating plants as facilitation tools. As such, the methodological choices reflect and respond to the central argument of plants as living archives that are further developed in Chapter Three. This section outlines the key methods employed. The first section of this chapter focuses on the actual methods employed, then delves deeper into the methodological choices made regarding the use of oral life histories, sensory methods, a focus group, and autoethnography. Finally, the section ends on a more reflexive note, exploring the role of dwelling and my positionality, as well as the ethics of researching in this current political moment. 2.1 The Research Process 2.1.1 Recruiting and Interviewing Miriam, Shihar, and Balsam The quotes and vignettes in this thesis are primarily from oral life history interviews conducted with three Palestinian women living in Amman, Jordan over a period of four months. These three women have been anonymized, and will be referred to as Miriam, Shihar, and Balsam. More detailed contours of their lives are laid out at the end of this chapter. I recruited Miriam, Shihar, and Balsam in three different ways. Miriam was my host mother in 2022. I met Shihar through my work with the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN), whose partnership is discussed in the following section. Balsam was recruited through a friend of a friend who thought she might be interested in participating. All three women were over the age 29 of 40 and had spent at least 15 years living away from the West Bank. While they all now reside in Amman, Jordan, each has returned to Palestine to visit over the years. I collected over eleven hours of recorded conversations, along with several more hours of observation and field notes from my engagements with these women. I met with them in locations they chose, whether their office, their home, or a café, and shared at least one meal with each. Allowing them to decide where to meet was intentional and contributed to the praxis of this work. Miriam preferred to meet in her home, specifically in her kitchen where she and her children ate meals. As I spoke with Miriam about her memories, her children would occasionally exclaim, âI never knew that!â The interview setting encouraged intergenerational storytelling and knowledge sharing. With Shihar, we met at her office. Her lifeâs work is dedicated to food sovereignty and environmental justice, and her memories and stories are often connected back to the current political moment. Balsam chose to meet in a small café in LuWeibdeh, a neighbourhood near downtown Amman. During our second conversation there, she shared that she loved coming to LuWeibdeh. The imagery of the old buildings and the jasmine spilling from them reminded her of neighbourhoods in Jerusalem, or Al Quds in Arabic. I caught her gazing out the window on many occasions while she told me about Wadi Al-Joz, the Al Quds neighbourhood where she grew up. 2.1.2 Translation Most of the interviews were conducted in a mix of Arabic and English. Miriamâs interviews were entirely in Arabic, with occasional translation assistance from her daughter during our conversations. Balsamâs interviews were also primarily in Arabic, with a native Arabic-speaking translator present to assist when needed. Before participating, the translator was 30 fully briefed on the thesis concept, interview guides, and the ethical requirements of confidentiality and anonymity. The focus group was conducted in both Arabic and English, with the same translator present to provide clarification on specific words or phrases when necessary. My interview with Shihar took place mainly in English, though certain plant names, expressions, and segments were in Arabic. All individuals who provided translation support were appropriately compensated. Having someone present to translate for Miriam and Shiharâs interviews, as well as the focus group, was invaluable for real-time understanding without disrupting the intervieweeâs flow of thought. At the same time, I was careful not to rely so heavily on translation that it interfered with the natural rhythm of conversation. Since the focus group was not recorded (due to logistical issues with how the space was used), the translatorâs help in reviewing my notes afterward was especially useful in clarifying themes and wording from participantsâ perspectives. I remain in contact with all three participants, and while writing, I continue to reach out for clarification by sharing translated paragraphs and drafts in both Arabic and English. 2.1.3 Analysis After conducting the interviews, I listened back to the interviews and transcribed relevant raw audio clips using the software Cockatoo (Cockatoo, n.d.), which also assisted with translating the Arabic into English for analysis and writing. Anonymized translations of were crosschecked by a native Arabic speaker I then uploaded the transcripts, my notes, and photos into NVivo for thematic coding (âNVivo,â n.d.). I began with one round of descriptive coding to organize main themes. Within the descriptive theme of âengagement with plants,â I created more specific and detailed codes. From these specific codes, I conducted a round of values coding, 31 identifying attitudes, beliefs, and worldviews highlighted in participantsâ descriptions of their engagement with plants in Palestine (Saldaña, 2009). I isolated the main recurring values and then reviewed the transcripts again to assign these core values to relevant quotes. These values were âCultural Identityâ which included quotes on intergenerational knowledge, connection to the land, and a pride in Palestinian heritage, âResistanceâ, which included quotes about the ongoing genocide, Israeli settler colonialism, and actively combatting cultural erasure, and âCare for Plantsâ which encapsulated emotions and affinities towards specific plants and the desire to use them. But beyond coding and quotes, I decided that preserving the wholeness of these interactions was paramount to maintaining the storied importance of these oral life history interviews. This is why much of the discussion takes the form of vignettes and moments, enriched with notes I took during and after interviews, the focus group, and in my daily life in Amman. 2.1.4 Working with the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN) Before coming to Jordan, I reached out to several organizations that might be interested in my work. During a meeting with a woman from Al Hannouneh4, a Palestinian cultural hub focused on traditional dress and dance, she suggested I connect with the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature5 (APN). She had volunteered with them in the past and thought they would be interested in my research on Palestinian ecological knowledge and memory. 4 You can learn more about Al Hannounehâs work at this link: http://www.alhannouneh.org/en/about-us 5 You can learn more about APNâs work at this link: http://apnature.org/en 32 I was put in touch with the advocacy coordinator for APN, and we discussed what a partnership would look like for both APN and my research. I had weekly meetings with a supervisor to review the progress of my interviews and hear her thoughts on emerging focal points. APN also connected me with two of the three women I interviewed and helped promote the focus group through their social media channels. In collaboration with APN, I conducted literature reviews and gathered research for grant proposals aimed at addressing food and water insecurity in Gaza, Jordan, and Lebanon. Most of this research supported grants for smallholder farmers in Gaza. I also researched and restructured an APN presentation for high school students on climate issues facing Jordan today, highlighting the importance of climate in conversations about identity and politics. Beyond these tasks, I translated newsletters from Arabic to English and took opportunities to experience APNâs work beyond the office. I participated in a book launch event featuring the writing of APNâs executive director and in a tree planting event for a smallholding farming family that requested aid from APN. I worked from the APN office at least three days a week to complete these tasks and observe the organizationâs operations and priorities. The nature of the research and work I did with the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature helped ground the more personal and intimate conversations I had with participants in the current context of weaponized food and water scarcity in Gaza. While Gaza came up in the interviews, this partnership allowed me to further situate the emerging themes and values within the ongoing political moment and make sense of genocide and acts of war from the perspective of displacement and the loss of access to traditional and culturally significant food, let alone food itself. APN showed me how conservation and environmentalism are only made stronger by 33 centring the emotional and political relationships we have to our natures. They also opened doors for me to engage with other nonprofits focused on food sovereignty and cultural preservation. 2.2 Methodological Choices 2.2.1 Treatment of Memory Memory studies is a broader field that this research only touches on, but it offers useful methodological insights. Scholars in this field explore how memories are constructed and elicited in conversation with the present (Keightley, 2008). Crawford et al. (1992) write, âSubjectively significant events, events which are remembered, and the way they are subsequently constructed, play an important part in the construction of selfâ (p. 37). Memory reflects the present, values, and the self, situating it as a distinctive method for social science research. Memory is an ongoing process that links past and present. What and how people remember often changes with time and circumstances, thus it is questionable to frame memory as empirical or neutral (Keightley, 2008). Instead, memory can be methodologically useful in understanding how individuals and communities relate to the past in response to current personal and social realities of power structures, refusals, and resistance (Keightley, 2008). This research takes a similar approach. Rather than reconstructing a given point in time, or specific timeline, the narration and evocation of memory is used to understand the participant's relationship with the past given current realities. Researchers have elicited memory through oral life histories, visual ethnography, and material prompts such as photographs, music, and objects (Keightley, 2008). Often, soliciting memory is tied to how people represent and communicate memories, whether it be through photo albums, playlists, recipe books etc. (Keightley, 2008). Trauma, however, can make memory 34 more difficult and sometimes problematic to access in interviews (Keightley, 2008). To address this in part, Frigga Haug developed the âMemory-workâ method in the 1980s, which invites participants to narrate memories in the third person. This framing opens space for affect and sensory detail that first-person narration can at times suppress (Onyx & Small, 2001). In the vein of representation and solicitation, this thesis traverses how and why the representation of plants and food uniquely mediates memory communication and storage for the three Palestinian women interviewed. For populations facing occupation, colonization, and genocide, memory becomes a vital tool of resistance (Decter, 2022; Post & Rhodes, 2022; Whyte et al., 2019). Intergenerational storytelling sustains traditions and histories that challenge colonial narratives, disrupting dominant tropes such as the âwild,â âfrontier,â and âcivilizedâ (Hellmann, 2024, 2022; Miller, 2009; Brekelmans & Martin, 2024; Corntassel, 2009; Hoelscher & Alderman, 2004; Kühn, 2000). For displaced communities, memory sustains identity by tethering individuals to collective knowledge, histories, and values. Sharing memories also transmits identity across generations (Lacroix & Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2013; Granger, 2025; Vertovec, 1999). Engaging memory, then, is both a methodological tool and a praxis of survival under settler occupation: a way of sustaining knowledge, histories, and identities under threat of cultural erasure. In Palestine, memory carries a similar imperative. It is not just a romanticization of the past, but an active practice of resisting cultural erasure imposed by the Israeli settler colonial project (Rayan, 2024; Nimr, 2008; Sayigh, 2014; Masalha, 2012; Taha, 2024; Sela, 2018). Across the diaspora, memory allows Palestinians to maintain national identity (Litvak, 2009). Chapter 3 of this thesis explores the politics of memory in greater detail, but here it is important to note that memories of Palestinians have long been framed as counter-history, often through 35 âprepackaged testimoniesâ of events like the Nakba. While these testimonies are crucial in contesting dominant Western narratives, they often obscure the ordinary, lived experiences of memory that surface outside the formal archive (Rayan, 2024). Saad (2019) urges us to move beyond âextracting memoryâ toward observing how it emerges in everyday life to understand itâs affective qualities and pervasiveness. In this thesis, food and plants are explored in how memory is represented outside the formal archive. Exploring these memories is not just an act of nostalgia but one that actively shapes belonging for Palestinian women and younger generations. The practices of memory, through food and plants, also sustains the care necessary for sumud. To trace these dynamics, I draw on guided oral life histories, sensory geographies, a focus group, and autoethnography. 2.2.2 Oral life history Oral life history is a well-established approach, which has also been engaged in scholarship focused on Palestinian political ecology and memory-work. Rooted in postcolonial and feminist methodologies, it challenges dominant âofficialâ narratives, often monolithic and politically motivated, by centring individual experiences, motivations, and emotions as they relate to peopleâs environments over time (Dhunpath, 2000; Smith, 2012). In doing so, it provides space not only for the subaltern to be heard, but to speak in their own voice, one of the reasons this method has become prevalent in Palestinian resistance scholarship and archival practice (Peled, 2014; Sayigh, 1998, p. 2; Sleiman & Chebaro, 2018). Oral life histories can reveal how social, physical, and institutional environments shape lived experiences and decision-making in ways that may challenge a researcherâs assumptions (Dhunpath, 2000). This method also offers value to the narrators themselves, who are given the 36 opportunity to reflect on and reinterpret the meaning of their experiences in the present, which I understand as an extension of reflexivity. These reflections generate insights that are meaningful to the narrators, often dissolving the boundary between data collection and analysis (Smith, 2012). This approach is widely practiced within feminist literature, where it highlights the often-overlooked role of gender in shaping life experiences, as well as the gendered traditions of storytelling and memory. It also challenges dominant notions of objectivity, which are often rooted in androcentric criteria (Geiger, 1986). In the Palestinian context, oral life histories are not only a cultural tradition but a critical form of knowledge transmission and record keeping shared between generations (Rayan, 2024). Rosemary Sayigh, a key figure in Palestinian oral history work, emphasized the significance of womenâs recollections as ârich sources of national history, culture-laden and inflected by specificities of gender, class, origin, period, and diasporic regionâ in her research with Palestinian women living in and around the Shatila refugee camp near Beirut, Lebanon (Sayigh, 1989). Oral life histories allow for an interrogation of the supposedly homogenous nature of gendered and domestic life by revealing the layered nuances of displacement (Sayigh, 1998). Scholars such as Abd al-Hadi, (1999), Kassem, (2011), and Nashef (2022) have also examined the role of women in Palestinian collective memory, focusing on the intentionality of their inclusion, the forms of their erasure, and the resistance that memory work enables. Memory in this thesis is explored through detailing what recollections are elicited in relation to certain plants (which is discussed more in the next section and Chapter 3), but also in how memory informs day to day interactions with plants and food (Which is explored in Chapter 4). 37 Rather than asking for a chronological account of life events, my approach to oral life history centred around engagements with specific plants, cooking, and/or eating together over the course of multiple interviews. Conversations flowed organically, grounded by the sensory presence of food and plants rather than confined to the abstract assumptions of a structured interview guide. For example, while Miriam cooked a particular dish, I asked questions specific to the ingredients, her memories of the dish, how she learned to prepare it, and whom she associated it with. As we prepared, smelled, and tasted the meal together, more stories emerged, unfolding through shared sensory experience rather than directed questioning. 2.2.3 Sensory Methods This thesis is grounded in sensory memories and imaginations, as elicited by plants and food. For many diasporic communities, food can elicit a feeling of belonging. For Palestinians in the diaspora, food and gathering around eating âweave together Arabic language, flavours, smells, and aesthetics,â of what they remember and had left behind (Forrest & Maurice, 2022, p 230). More broadly, sensory geographies forefront the emotional and embodied connections to oneâs surroundings (Morris, 2020). Using sensory knowledges and observations in research is also a call to the researcher, as Crang (2003), to not fall into the dichotomous trap of researcher versus the researched. In slowing down, smelling, tasting, touching, and listening, the researcher can become more literate in the co-creation of the moments shared with participants, through emotional, affective processes that are elicited (Paterson, 2009). Emotional engagement is seen to be a crucial force in learning, and as someone who is learning and listening from these women through their memories and food, it becomes only natural to pay attention to the more sensory aspects of the work (Morris, 2020). Chapter 3 delves more into intently into the role of sensory 38 methods and the praxis of studying and using plants and food as a means of facilitating memories of the women themselves. But ultimately, this is a method that is complimentary to the oral life history work in bringing in bridging theory and praxis of memory and reflexivity. In the interviews, I would either bring in fruits or flowers as a gift. The more planned sensory methods came after seeing the responses to these gifts. Rather than asking to describe their relationships to olive trees, simply holding an olive seems to bring them back to more affective, grounded, and personal memories. Sharing meals, as I mentioned before, also allowed for conversations about comparison ie. âIn Palestine, this ingredient would taste fresher because xyz.â Using comparison to describe Palestine revealed itself to be a key characteristic in how its fruits, herbs, and vegetables are communicated to younger Palestinians by their family members. When I saw how conversations would change upon having the physical plants or foods present, I was more intentional in my gifts. I also planned the focus group of younger Palestinians around a shared meal, allowed them to recreate the spaces in which they absorbed their belonging to Palestine. We ate stuffed grape leaves and zucchini, eggplant dip, falafel, hummus, as we chatted amongst one another. Also featured on the table was a bowl of fruit, flowers, vegetables, and herbs that were mentioned by Shihar, Balsam, and Miriam in the oral life history interviews. Each focus group participant was encouraged to take something from the bowl that resonated with them. While holding, peeling, smelling, and eating these plants, the introductory conversation was naturally about why they had chosen the way they did. 2.2.4 Focus Group A recurring theme in the literature on Palestinian memory is the importance of intergenerational transmission for sustaining resistance. This insight led me to consider how 39 relationships to Palestinian plants and landscapes are passed down to younger generations born and raised outside of Palestine. I was curious how the relationships and knowledges that the women I had interviewed (in the oral life histories) trickled down towards younger generations of Palestinians in developing identity and connection to Palestine. I chose a focus group format to explore this question, as the literature emphasizes the significance of collective memory in transmitting traditions, values, and knowledge across generations. These issues are explored more thoroughly in Chapter 3. I organized and facilitated a focus group with first and second generation Palestinians (who were born and raised in Jordan, but had a parent or grandparents that were born in Palestine). Participants were recruited through social media, with support from the APN and a local cultural space that shared a Google Form and links to consent forms and study information. All five participants had at least one Palestinian parent, but had never visited Palestine themselves. Although age was not a specific criterion (beyond being over 18 years), all fell within the 20â30 age range. The focus group consisted of three women and two men. The findings of the focus group are limited to a section of Chapter 3. and are not referenced as often as the oral life histories conducted with Miriam, Balsam, and Shihar. I was particularly interested in observing where participants' knowledge overlapped or diverged. As Munday (2006) notes, focus groups allow the researcher to âobserve the processes through which individuals construct their own realities and make sense of themselves as a group who share common values and ways of understanding themselves and their world.â I also chose the group format because I was concerned that discussing plant relationships in a one-on-one interview might feel too mundane or abstract. In contrast, I hoped that a group setting would prompt richer conversation through comparisons of shared and divergent experiences. 40 During informal pilot sessions with friends, I found that minimal facilitation was needed once the initial prompt, What do (Palestinian) plants mean to you? was introduced. The same dynamic occurred in the final focus group: participants began engaging with each other directly, raising questions, sharing reflections, and weaving personal stories around themes of resistance, identity, and displacement. One of the most meaningful outcomes was how the participants naturally connected with one another. By the end of the session, they had exchanged phone numbers to attend future events, grab coffee, and stay in touch. These interactions that were rooted in shared plant memories and knowledge became a vivid example of how varied life histories can come together to form a collective memory shaped by displacement and animated by a shared longing for a free Palestine, and a desire to one day see it for themselves. 2.2.5 Autoethnography I spent extended periods of time with Shihar, Balsam, and Miriam while collecting their life histories, which allowed for the building of meaningful, trusting relationships. And over food, the focus group became a launching point of connections. Although it was not my initial intention to insert myself overtly into the narrative, omitting my presence would feel disingenuous, especially given that the origins of this research are rooted in personal questions of food and identity. Because the themes of Palestinian displacement and memory are deeply personal and require care and depth, most interviews and the focus group were conducted in an interactive, conversational format rather than through a rigid interview guide. These interactions often took 41 place while eating or engaging in shared activities, allowing for natural conversation and collaborative meaning-making (Ellis et al., 2011). While I used thematic coding and regularly reviewed my findings in consultation with a local organization in Amman, the choices of what to highlight in this thesis are ultimately shaped by what I found most compelling or âepiphanyâ-inducing (Ellis et al., 2011). This paper reflects my lived experience of conducting this research. It incorporates journaled vignettes and moments from Amman, using autoethnography not only to frame my presence, but also to mirror the oral storytelling of the women I interviewed which bridges their narratives into the words written here. 2.3 Reflection on Dwelling As I mentioned before, many conversations were shaped by the surroundings, expressed through foods, growing plants, teas, snacks, and more, ultimately influencing the third chapter. Gibson (2018) advocates for âplant centredâ methodologies in ethnography, emphasizing walking and pacing oneself with plants as a form of data collection that foregrounds care. This approach stems from understanding plants not as passive creatures but as actants with histories and engagements deeply intertwined with our own survival and identities as humans. For Gibson, this practice of dwelling took form through walking along heavily vegetated paths, sitting with plants for extended periods, sketching, smelling, touching, and even sometimes tasting them. This âeducation as attentionâ, which she references from Pitt (2016, p93), instills care for these more than human beings by reminding us of their agency and how they are âalways in a relation to the world into which it growsâ (Holdrege, 2013 as cited in Gibson, 2018). 42 However, I found that the care and dwelling I increasingly felt towards the olives and other vegetation in Amman was deeply informed by the emotions and stories I felt throughout the oral life interview processes. As participants repeatedly compared Ammanâs uncanny vegetation to that of Palestine, I kept looking out for the plants they mentioned specifically. For me, this brought the uncanny presence and absence of the womenâs stories into my everyday life as an observer of the growing pomegranate trees and the olives gradually falling from branches onto the street as the season moved deeper into winter. Slowing down to dwell was not only a sensory or physical engagement. As I interviewed the three women about their lives and memories connected to plants and landscapes where they grew up, there was a natural cadence to the conversation that was calming. At one point, when Shihar was sharing her experience in Beirut as a young college student, she recalled the ocean. We had earlier been discussing the white phosphorus bombings in southern Lebanon and the encroaching violence in Beirut from Israeli forces. When she mentioned the ocean, her body visibly relaxed and she closed her eyes. âItâs what I think about when I have trouble sleeping,â she said, imagining the foam from the waves crawling up the beach and then being drawn back again by the tide. We took deep breaths together, both so hypnotized by the memory that our speech slowed and my breaths at least became deeper and more intentional. This slowed speech pattern became common as Miriam, Shihar, and Balsam recalled memories with plants and nature. Just as one might dwell among plants, we dwelled with plant memories. Rather than following a chronological account of their life histories, the conversations were organized around emotions, associations, and everyday life. By drawing on plants in everyday life as facilitators, we were able to dwell in memory capes more naturally, emotionally, and meaningfully. We also 43 embodied the ongoing negotiations of memory in the process, rather than treating memory as something existing in a vacuum. For example, a key mode of dwelling that brought forth discussions about memories and knowledge was eating. With each participant, I shared at least one meal. During these meals, contours of meaning that might have remained unspoken were revealed through practice. Reflected in one of the chapters is when I ate breakfast at Shiharâs home with her extended family on a Friday. I was introduced to aunts, uncles, and relatives who had recently fled Beirut due to increased aggression in the city from Israeli forces. Despite the heaviness that lingered inside me, the breakfast was joyful, filled with laughter and eating manaeesh, flatbread topped with various ingredients, and hummus. After the meal, Shiharâs husband told me that in Islam, sharing a meal is sacred and deeply significant in bringing people together. When you share a meal, you share trust. Dwelling with the food and the people further entwined me in the care relationships I was forming with these women, which is tethered to the more theoretical work of the fourth chapter on metabolism. Blackmore (2025) explores the methodology of eating, finding pathways for care work through metabolic literacy. In that research, the researchers and community members together consume the plants in the Bogota river basin while simultaneously interviewing farmers and others who rely on the polluted river for their livelihoods. Blackmore thus suggests that eating becomes a reminder of entanglement with surrounding natures, evoking care centred research. I often think back to this, reflecting on the weight of care and trust in the meals we shared and what they mean in my relationships with Balsam, Miriam, and Shihar. Care and metabolic literacy in this regard is discussed more in chapter 2, but this serves as a reminder of the praxis of this work evoking the same care and empathy discussed in the content of it. 44 2.4 Positionality I am a researcher at the University of British Columbia based in Canada and prior to attending graduate school (in 2023), I have lived in the United States my entire life. In 2011, I began taking Arabic language classes offered through my public middle school curriculum, sponsored by the Qatar Foundation. I continued studying Arabic throughout my high school International Baccalaureate program, providing opportunities to learn about the diverse cultures, traditions, and political landscapes of the Middle East. In university, I minored in Arabic Studies and political science to complement my human geography major, which led me to a four-month study abroad program in Amman, Jordan in 2022. During my time in Amman, everything I had learned through videos and lectures was brought vividly to life, encouraging me to form meaningful connections and relationships with the people I met. I stayed with a host family throughout the program, and my host mother, Miriam who also happens to be one of my research participants, largely inspired this work through our daily conversations around her kitchen table. I am a native English speaker and hold an American passport. I come from a lineage of settlers on Multnomah and Chinook lands and have chosen to study at institutions located on Kalapuya (in Oregon) and unceded Musqueam territories (in B.C.). I have benefited from services and communities that have ensured relatively consistent social, economic, and physical safety. I also possess privileges of options and mobility, advantages that are easy for me to take for granted but become starkly obvious as I cross oceans and borders to conduct research with people who cannot return home or face significant barriers to seeing their ancestral homeland. As my time in Amman approached, I questioned whether the experience would meet my research expectations. Any participant or person I approached would be justified in being 45 offended at the thought of sharing their life with me. Why should they be so vulnerable with someone they donât know? Why share be vulnerable with an American at a time when U.S. tax dollars are directed toward Israeli weapons used in genocide and settler colonial violence? Why trust a settler, full stop? Building trust amidst these differences meant acknowledging them openly rather than concealing them, engaging in honest conversations about my identity and experience as an American when asked, which happened frequently. This project operates deeply within the context and impacts of settler occupation while simultaneously being researched and written by someone who is an uninvited settler. This tension remains unresolved but is not unacknowledged. While not the central focus of the research, throughout this work, I touch on what it means to be invited into the homes and lives of these women and others. 2.5 Ethics of Research During a Genocide I conducted this research during an ongoing violence increasingly recognized as a genocide (Albanese, 2024; Bartov, 2025, see page 9 footnote), as well as scholasticide and the systematic erasure and marginalization of Palestinian scholars and knowledge. During the time I was prepping, researching, and writing this thesis, Gaza-based NGO Al Mezan reported that over 13,419 Palestinian students have been killed and 21,653 injured, with an additional 651 teachers and professors killed and 2,791 injured by Israeli forces and strikes (Mezan, 2025). Final graduation exams for secondary students to get certification before applying to universities have been postponed for almost two years. According to the UN Human Rights Officer of the High Commissioner, 95.2% of schools have sustained damage, with 88.5% of all schools in Gaza requiring major reconstruction and have been repurposed by the Israeli military as operations 46 bases and detention centres (Mezan, 2025; UN 2024). These are numbers that donât just reflect the current state of education in Palestine, but will surely impact future generations' abilities to access and feel safe in their schooling as well. This consideration extends to where Iâm from, the United States, where there are various barriers to conducting research on Palestine, and many Palestinian scholars are faced with detention and deportation for pro-Palestinian sentiments. Here, I think about Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia university student who resided in the United States as a lawful green card holder and permanent resident. Khalil was detained for over three months by ICE without a warrant, in response to his leadership as the lead negotiator in the Columbia University pro Palestine demonstrations (ACLU, 2025; Sinha, 2025; Fadel, 2025). Just this past June, his holding was ruled unconstitutional and was released, however is still fighting appeals by the U.S. Federal Government. Universities across the United States have hefty financial investments in companies with direct ties to the Israel and the genocide. Student encampments and protests have urged divestment, with some resulting in partial divestment, review of investments, and/or suspension of ties with Israel. This reality makes the opportunity to engage with these stories even more urgent and fraught, and a dimension of privilege I have experienced as I carried out this research. Additionally, my research focus on food has become an urgent issue in the context of the weaponization of starvation against Gazans through the most recent blockade lasting from March 2023 to present. August 2025, a level 5 famine in the Gaza Strip has been announced by the Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), indicating catastrophic levels of food insecurity thatâs legacy of malnutrition, starvation, and mortality will plague public health concerns for future generations, even if the blockade were to end now (International Rescue Committee, 2025; 47 World Food Programme, 2025). As people in Gaza face exorbitant prices for a limited amount of just staple ingredients, my ability to take part in large Palestinian meals as a part of my research is another unresolved tension I felt while writing this thesis. As this thesis will explore, food is not just about physical nourishment (which is of obvious importance), but there is also spiritual nourishment in the connection to Palestinian histories, cultures, and community that it provides. Now Palestinians in Gaza are faced with eating whatever is available, and at times these are with ingredients that are not in traditional Palestinian cuisine. While physical nourishment has become the priority, it is also a reminder of how the genocide has torn Palestinians from their identities, in attempting to force them to forget. 2.6 Brief Backgrounds on Miriam, Shihar, and Balsam & Map References 2.6.1 Miriam Miriam was born and raised in Ariha (also known as Jericho) in a refugee camp, however her identity is tethered to Nablus, where her parents and grandparents were born and lived before the 1967 Nakba and subsequent forced relocation. She went to an UNRWA school until second year of middle school, leaving due to the frequent raids the Israeli army carried out in the school, and as she states her education was âmarked by oppression.â Despite spending most of her childhood in Ariha, Miriamâs grandparents remained in Nablus in their historic home, offering as a place to visit during the summertime and where the family went for weddings and other special occasions. Miriam has a total of eight siblings, with only one living in their hometown and the rest strewn throughout Europe and Jordan. Miriam left Nablus after marrying because of economic opportunity and better job prospects for her husband, and raised her five children in Amman, Jordan. While Miriam lives in Amman, she has tried to make at least one trip every year 48 to Palestine to visit her family in Ariha and Nablus, including to visit two of her sons who eventually moved there. However, with aging and the increasing stress of security and moving across the border with Israeli checkpoints, she has only been back once in the past three years. 2.6.2 Shihar Shihar was a participant that I contacted at APNâs suggestion. Shihar is in her late 60s and is a prominent figure of an NGO. Shihar was born in Nablus and lived there until the age of six before leaving then coming back after four years only to be forced to leave during the â67 war, which then prevented her and her family from coming back again in the following years. In her time away, she lived in Syria, Iran for three years, and Lebanon for 15 years where she got married just a few days before the â82 occupation of Lebanon. The occupation, especially in southern Lebanon where most agricultural land is, meant less job prospects for her and her husband, both agricultural engineers. Given this, they left for Amman, Jordan to start their career and family. She chose her anonymous name, Shihar, in reference to the time she spent in Iran as a child and partially influenced by the missile launch from Iran to Tel Aviv military bases that flew over Jordan the night before our interview. Shihar means city and place. Her father was a politician and resistance scholar who has influenced much of her guiding principles in life and her work. Shihar has only been back to Nablus once after leaving in 1967. 2.6.3 Balsam I met Balsam through a friend I had made at APN, she is in her 50s and is from Wadi Al-Joz, a neighbourhood in Al Quds. She was born and raised in Wadi Al-Joz and went to university in Al Quds as well. She traveled to Amman with her grandmother, whom she was very close 49 with, for the first time to celebrate finishing high school. This was the first time she had ever left Palestine. During the trip, she met her future husband whom she married four years later after graduating university. Her husband was Palestinian but lived in Saudi Arabia, and so she relocated to Jeddah following the marriage. She worked as a video editor in Jeddah before having kids, and then relocated to Amman after that. She described her time in Jeddah as isolating, with entrance fees to visit beaches, which she contrasted with the ease in which she would vacation to the Red Sea in Haifa. When they were living in Jeddah, her husband would romanticize living in Amman saying things along the lines of âLetâs go to Amman, stay in the middle of the fields, plant, and live,â Amman also offered more opportunities for independence and freedom for socializing than in Jeddah, which was important to Balsam to provide to her children as she had in Wadi Al-Joz. And very significantly, Balisan and her husband were under Kafala contracts, and they lacked the necessary security and stability to build a life in Jeddah. Amman for them offered more secure job opportunities. Balsam used to make annual trips back to Wadi Al-Joz to see family, but the length and frequency has shifted since October 2023. 50 Figure 8: Map of Where Shihar, Balsam, and Miriam are from, and Amman. Basemap from Felt Satellite Imagery. Map Created By Author. (2025) Nablus Wadi Al-Joz Ariha Amman Legend 51 3 Plants as a Living Archive: Sensory Memories, Comparisons, and Imaginations of Palestine Shihar tells me that most of her memories of Nablus are in the hara, a word I struggled to understand. It translated to âneighbourhood,â when I looked it up on my phone. I asked Shihar if that was how she understood the word, and she shook her head no. She offered âunbuilt landscape?â but then pursed her lips and shook her head again. I asked if she could draw it for me, to help me understand what the hara meant to her. She took the pen and paper and started drawing small trees and homes in a semicircle, âitâs kind of an invisible boundary, where you have a sense of safety. Itâs an unbuilt landscape, where me and the other children explored every inch of.â After drawing the contents of the hara, she sketched a blob surrounding the homes and trees, âthis is the hara.â She remarked. But I didn't understand this until she started telling me about her memories in the hara. Shihar reiterates a few times throughout the interview that her memory of Nablus isnât very clear, that the specific events and timelines are difficult to recall, having left when she was only six with her family and returning for less than a year when she was ten. But tells me, âWhen I remember Nablus, I remember it as a beautiful flower,â from the hara. She recalls how poppies grew beautifully along the rocky cliff sides that Nablus is known for, their clusters of red peeking from between rocks, âNablus is filled with these, anyone from Nablus will tell you.â she says, as she meanders into her memories picking poppies, wood-sorrel, and passion flowers as a child. She pulls up photos of the flowers on her phone to show me, generic google stock images that she embellishes through vivid sensory descriptions, âThis is wood sorrel, where you take the stock, and it has a very acidic, like a lemon taste,â she puckers 52 her lips to express the sourness. Wood-sorrel is commonly referred to as hameed in Arabic, which directly translates to sourness. She googles a picture of a bright purple and white flower which strikingly different petal shapes and sizes, âAnd this is zahoora alaâatfah, a beautiful plant. We used to take out some pieces and lick the nectar. It has a very sweet nectarâ¦ We used to run and pick all the flowers for it.â I reach for similarities in my taste buds, trying to remember the elementary school practice of pulling pistils from flowers to reveal the sappy nectar. When revisiting my notes from the interview, I revisit the symbolism of the poppy, something I has seen in some resistance art pieces and graffiti (see Figure 9), but I never took the time to understand its greater symbolism. The flowerâs colours black (seeds) red (petals) and green (stem) mimic those of the Palestinian flag, and evoke the symbolism from the story of Adonis, which has been adopted into Palestinian storytelling about the poppy being coloured by the blood of people who died on the soil, specifically martyrs of Palestine (Abufarha, 2008). The poppy, according to Abufarha (2008), is the physical representation and symbol of the sacrifice made by Palestinian people that resist in giving up their relationship to the land.6 6 This is similar to how poppies are associated with Veteranâs/Remembrance Day and often in commemoration for the World Wars, also symbolizing the blood spilt on soil by soldiers that come back in the vivid colour of the flowers. 53 Figure 9: 1990 Poster of poppy published by the PFLP with Arabic text reading "A flower is a flower is a flag" by Adnan Al-Zubaidy. (1990). Public Domain. But there was something about Shiharâs individual memories of the poppies that imbued the symbol with something more grounding and emotional. I could see the memories flooding in when she told me about the bouquets of poppies she made for her mother, plucking them from 54 the rocky hillside. Her mouth softened and she gazed over my shoulder. Her breath and pace of conversation slowed like she was sharing a poem, and every pause was intentional. In those paused, my mind coloured in a rough sketch of the hara and the children in it, playing, fighting, and running among the trees and homes alike. In these stories itâs not just the flowers I imagine but the people amongst them, I can imagine them speckled along the jagged rocks and bright flowers, together forming the mountains of fire, or Jabal al Nar. The initial definition of âneighbourhoodâ didnât quite evoke the sense of community, safety, and play that was embedded in the notion of the hara. If anything, the stories, the slowed breathing, and the soften gazes, the descriptions of sweet and sour smells and tastes communicated what was the hara, for Shihar. I complimented her ability to recall these vivid details and memories, comparing it to my own ability to remember anything before the age of six. Shihar said that this ability is ingrained, maybe because it's survival. This chapter traverses the âsurvivalâ embedded in remembering these stories with the landscape for Shihar, Balsam, and Miriam. What does survival allude to for them in this context? And how can plants, in their sensory capacities to communicate touch, taste, and visuals, act as a living archive of Palestinian memory for not just those to remember, but those to imagine Palestine? What follows is a short literature review on Palestinian literatures related to memory, plants as living archives, and the means in which oral life histories and intergenerational accounts were explored in this research. 55 3.1 Background 3.1.1 Memories Among Palestinians Memory is a deeply documented tool for cultural preservation and sumud, asserting counter-histories, sustaining identity, and offering imaginative geographies of return for those Palestinians living in exile (Rayan, 2024; Nimr, 2008; Sayigh, 2015). This makes Palestinian archives a target within the broader settler-colonial project of âmemerocideâ occurring at mass scale. Over the past century, physical archives have been targeted by the Israeli settler colonial regime. In just the past two years, hundreds of Palestinian libraries, archives, cemeteries, universities, and mosques have been reduced to rubble by the Israeli military, destroying with them the written and material traces of Palestinian histories, cultures, and traditions (Librarians and Archivists with Palestine 2025; Masalha, 2012; Taha, 2024; Sela, 2019). This includes the Central Archives of Gaza, bombed in November 2023 as one of the first targets of Israelâs military campaign (Chahwan, 2024). In light of these physical attacks, the preservation and transmission of memories of Palestine has become even more central to cultural and political resistance. Yet the way in which Palestinian memory is understood as resistance has often privileged a coherent, factual narrative of specific events, particularly when oral histories are used to reconstruct Palestinian historiography (Masalha, 2012). While this can be effective in contesting dominant narratives of events like the Nakba and Naksa, it risks portraying memory as static, like archival artifacts waiting to be dusted off and displayed. Saad (2019) challenges this framing by asking: âHow might we navigate our commitment to historiographically reconstructing Palestinian voices without fixating on a search for the 56 âessential historicityâ?â Her work on materializing Palestine in exile critiques how alternative modalities of memory, particularly those embodied in everyday objects, are often overlooked in pursuit of linear, empirical reconstructions. Rather than asking âwhat happened,â Saad shifts the focus to how objects carry âenduring sentimentsâ of Palestine for those in exile. This understanding of items as a living archive, one that collapses past, present, and future, is key to this paper. How can we trace these enduring sentiments through slowness, emotion, and embodied engagements with plants in Amman, Jordan? In the following chapter, I ground this research in existing literature on the non-material dimensions of plants in Palestine, particularly their function as living archives. I then turn to my approach to oral life histories, before using interviews, a focus group, and participant observation to argue that in what they offer sensorially. Plants serve not only to narrate loss, but also to imagine futurity, instill belonging, and cultivate a longing for return. 3.1.2 Plants as Living archives in Literature and Practice Israeli settler colonialism has long marketed itself to the West through narratives like the âdesert bloom,â which frame the landscape as barren before Zionist cultivation (Sasa, 2022). These narratives systematically erase Palestinian plant histories and ecological relationships, casting Palestinian presence as absent or unproductive. In response, the assertion of memory, tradition, and emotion through the landscape has become central to articulating Palestinian belonging and the right of return. While rooted in a distinct geopolitical context, these practices resonate with North American Indigenous knowledge systems, where storytelling and ecological traditions function as political acts of resistance and cultural resurgence (Kimmerer, 2013; Whyte, 2013; Daigle, 2019; Groat & Anderson, 2021; Taunton, 2010). In both cases, land-based 57 memory is not merely symbolic, it is enacted, preserved, and adapted intergenerationally as a form of survival. The following two examples of this section, Palestinian olive trees and the work of Vivien Sansourâs Heirloom Seed Library illustrate how the non-material dimensions of plants function in both literature and practice as living archives of memory, resistance, and rootedness. In Palestine, certain plants carry implications of territoriality, power, mobility, and agency. Braverman (2009a) explores how Israeli regulations restrict Palestinian farmers from accessing and tending their olive groves, limiting not just movement, but engagement with the landscape itself. These constraints prevent the practice of traditional knowledge that has historically tethered Palestinian identity to land, threatening its erasure. Olive trees, in particular, have become symbols of Palestinian sumud (steadfastness to the land and identity), resistance, and rootedness in the face of settler colonialism (Simaan, 2017; Braverman, 2009b). In parallel to these place-based restrictions, they have also developed transnational strategies to preserve plant heritage. For instance, seed-saving initiatives, most notably the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library7 (PHSL) founded by Vivien Sansour, have been established to protect and circulate Palestinian seeds by transporting them across borders (Meneley, 2020; Nazarea et al., 2013). These initiatives recognize plants not only as ecological artifacts but as living vessels of memory and identity. As Sansour writes: âHeirloom seeds also tell us stories, connect us to our ancestral roots, remind us of meals our families once made at special times of the year. The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library (PHSL) is an attempt to recover these ancient seeds and their stories 7 You can learn more about PHSLâs work at this link: https://viviensansour.com/Palestine-Heirloom 58 and put them back into peopleâs hands... to tell the stories of food and agriculture that may have been buried away and waiting to sprout like a seed.â (Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library, n.d.) In a 2024 interview with The Guardian, Sansour explains that unlike centralized seed vaults (such as the one in Norway), a seed library is a collaborative practice, preserving not just the seeds but the knowledge, attachments, and stories embedded in them (Bauck, 2024). These seeds are distributed across borders, some even thriving in Californiaâs increasingly arid climate, as part of a mission that intertwines biodiversity conservation with cultural survival. Amid the ongoing starvation in Gaza and violence against West Bank farmers, seed saving emerges as both a practical and symbolic act of cultural continuance (Meneley, 2020). The practice of the seed library illustrates the resistance embedded in diasporic engagements with Palestinian knowledge and histories as capsuled within plants. This chapter also explores the significance of these stories and heritages in a diasporic context, specifically how growing, eating, and engaging with plants outside of Palestine and in Amman functions as a site of active memory and resistance. While PHSL emphasizes collective survival and transmission, this chapter turns toward the individual, affective, and sensory dimensions of these engagements. The polysemy of plants for Palestinians are expansive. Fruits, vegetables, herbs, and dishes serve as both mnemonic devices and modes of embodied cultural preservation. In the context of displacement and erasure, maintaining and transmitting this identity is crucial, not only for individual resilience, but for cultivating a future-oriented commitment to return across 59 generations. The following section introduces how I explored these themes through Palestinian oral life histories, and the context in which this research took place in Amman, Jordan. 3.1.3 Palestinian Oral Life Histories I used oral life histories in my research, a well-documented practice aligning with the typical cultural values of oral traditions (Rayan, 2024; Masalha, 2012; Sayigh, 1998; Blachnicka-Ciacek, 2020; Nimr, 2008). However, instead of asking for a chronological telling of life events and memories, my approach to oral life histories were rooted in engagements and memories around certain plants, mapmaking, and cooking/eating with over multiple interviews and hours. As a result, conversations traversed emotions and stories more organically, being grounded by the plants in front of us, rather than strictly relying upon the abstract assumptions that informed my interview guide. For instance, while Miriam was cooking a certain dish Iâd ask her questions specific to the dish and the ingredients in it, memories of it, how she learned to cook it, and who she might associate with it and why. As we prepared, smelled, and tasted the meal together, more stories would bubble to the surface. Naturally, these interviews were conversational, discussions emerged from photos they wanted to share with me to sitting for fatoor (breakfast) in their garden. What resulted was a space for the âunrehearsed recollectionsâ of memory as Saad (2019) coins. These were situations where they werenât being asked to recall moments, but rather how their surroundings evoked and captured moments from their past. I also held a focus group/lunch of five Palestinians born and raised in Amman, Jordan, ages ranging from 20 to 30 years old, to understand the lineage of plant and nature related memory and how they comprehend these memories as a facet of their identity. I had spent the 60 previous couple months leading up to this lunch interviewing and collecting the life histories of Miriam, Shihar, and Balsam, three women who were born and lived in Ariha, Nablus, and Wadi Al-Joz respectively. With guiding questions focused on plant engagement and memories, I got insight into the plants that meant a lot to their respective identities (with significant overlap), including ones that I had never considered much before. Almost unintentionally, in preparation for the lunch, I spent a lot of time with these plants in a way that brought out more-than-human ethnographic experience, buying, collecting, and preparing them with the knowledge imparted upon me by Miriam, Shihar, and Balsam. 3.1.4 Discussion Roadmap Rather than framing diasporic Palestinian identity as nostalgically static, I build on Saad (2019) in that everyday engagements with plants constitute dynamic, multi-sensory experiences of belonging in the displaced identity. These acts do not aim to reconstitute a lost homeland in perfect form, but rather cultivate a presence that insists on Palestinian sumud through the act of engaging with traditional knowledge and memories. Through the examples of zaâatar, olives, and jasmine, I show how the physically similar natural landscape between Jordan and Palestine offers a sensory threshold in evoking Shihar, Balsam, and Miriamâs memories. In this section, the taste of the zaâatar, the slick sheen of the olive, and the overwhelming scent of jasmine are the facilitators. Following this section, I delve into the more intergenerational aspect, revealing how these memories are passed down intergenerationally through sensory comparisons and examples in a displaced context, providing the opportunity to visualize Palestine. These intergenerational 61 memories instill belonging that informs continued commitment and longing for return for the participants, all of whom having never even been to Palestine. Finally, I end with a reflexive discussion on sensory memory, and my own experience in imaginations and dwelling with the knowledge and stories shared with me. This section is meant to evoke questions about international solidarity and my experience building relationships with my participants through my methodologies and engagements. 3.2 Sensory Echoes: Plants, Place, and the Practice of Narrating Memory in the Uncanny 3.2.1 Tasting the Zaâatar In 2022, I was living with Miriam for a few months while studying Arabic in Amman. When our four months ended, she pulled out a large plastic bag of zaâatar from the top of her fridge. One kilo of zaâatar from Nablus that she explicitly told me to bring back home. âTaste it, Habibtiâ she said, opening the plastic bag up to my face. I took a pinch of the zaâatar and let it melt on my tongue, tasting the strong mix of nutty sesame, herby zaâatar, and a slightly sourness of sumac. She firmly told me that I needed to share it with my friends and family, and when I did, to say it was from Nablus. As much as this one kilo of zaâatar was a gift, its taste was also meant to be a messenger, in its flavour, carried a representation of Nablus that was different then news articles or factsheets. It represented the grooves in between the rocks where zaâatar grew amidst the poppies among the powerfully upright mountains of Nablus. It was meant to connect an international âoutsiderâ to a Nablusi through the flavour. I brought the zaâatar to Ireland, where I met up with a friend from the U.S. In our hostel, we found some virgin olive oil, bought some flatbread, and I 62 showed her how to portion her dips so that she was getting the perfect proportions of zaâatar, olive oil, and bread in every bite, just like how I learned from observing Miriam. When I came back to Amman for the conversations and engagements that fuelled this thesis, I visualized sitting in Miriamâs kitchen and asking her about what zaâatar meant and why she wanted me to specify it was from Nablus. And the day after I arrived in Amman, I went to Miriamâs home and sat in her kitchen and asked those questions. Instead of answering them directly, Miriam yelled for her son, Khaled, to come into the kitchen. Standing over a foot above her in height, she instructed him to bring down a large white plastic platter from the top of the fridge. On the platter were zaâatar leaves plucked from sprigs, curled up and pale, but not completely dried enough to grind into the spice blend. They were foraged in Nablus and brought over recently by a friend of a friend, Miriam tells me. 63 Figure 10: Drying Za'atar Leaves from Nablus. Photo taken by Author. (2024) Just like the bag of zaâatar she sent me home with, she told me to inhale deeply from the platter. It smelled more earthy, less pungent than I remembered. Taking an inhale of the zaâatar herself, she tells me how âNablus is beautiful, with fertile, mountainous land. The air is clean, and you can smell the olive, thyme, and sage in the mountains.â She handed me a leaf to chew on and instructed Khaled to lift the platter back up to the top of the fridge. I ask Miriam, directing 64 her attention to the prepared zaâatar on the kitchen counter, âIs the zaâatar you have on the table from Nablus as well?â She says no, and tells me that it has gotten harder to bring za'atar across the border. She tells me that the Jordanian zaâatar helps her to ration out what she has left of the Nablusi Palestinian zaâatar. âItâs hard, it doesnât feel good. I love the zaâatar from Palestine. The zaâatar in Jordan is okay, but not the same. The taste is a little different. But at least it meets the need.â The difference in taste is, in part, emotional. The zaâatar in Jordan doesnât represent the taste of Nablus as her Nablusi zaâatar does. But it meets the need in its physical presence and the ability to use it on dishes and as an ingredient proximal, but not exactly, like Palestinian zaâatar. But when I asked Miriam if zaâatar is a Palestinian plant, there was a distinction to be made that wasnât initially intuitive to me. Zaâatar is not strictly Palestinian, but zaâatar grown in Palestine means something different than the zaâatar grown outside of Palestine. Shihar shared a similar notion with me informed by her pan-Arab nationalist vision- âZaâatar along with akkoub is a Mediterranean plant, it's in Lebanon. It's in Syria. These lines drawn between these countries are colonial lines.â The physical presence of these plants, according to Shihar, are not bound by the colonial borders that people are. But because these borders exist, the governance of plants and people characterize their relationships, the meanings, in a way that Edward Said referred to as "contrapuntal," always in conversation with the broader settler colonial dynamics. For Miriam, the taste of Palestinian zaâatar matters because of Israelâs attempts to separate Nablusi and other Palestinians from the herb. 65 Zaâatarâs symbolism as a symbol for Palestinian sumud came because of the herbs common presence in Palestinian daily lives as food, medicine, and physicality on landscapes, but also from a deep mourning out of the 1976 siege of Tal-al Zaâatar, a Palestinian refugee camp that was attacked by the Lebanese Christian Militia during the Lebanese civil war, after a 52 day siege (Swedenburg, 2003; Bradley, 1982). The siege was heavily aided by Israel, who was responsible for originally displacing those in Tal-al Zaâatar. The attack ultimately led to the campâs disbandment, over 3,000 refugees in the camp were killed, 10,000 were injured, and many suffered mass evacuations without resources (Daoud al-Ali, 2024). Following the siege, the zaâatar plant became a political symbol because of the shared name with the refugee camp. As Swedenburg writes, âanother powerful symbol of heroic resistance and sufferingâ¦ was added to the herbâs polysemy.â (Swedenburg, 2003). Just one year after the siege, Israel restricted the wild foraging of zaâatar for stated conservation purposes, however as of 2017, 100% of those fined by the regulation have been classified as Palestinian, making the regulation a form of environmental injustice and disproportionate structural violence against Palestinians and their ability to traditionally engage with the landscape (Eghbariah 2017; Manna, 2020). In place of wild traditional foraging, farmers with access to land and permits, typically Israeli, domesticated and grew zaâatar to sell. Palestinians were forced into a corner of having to buy a symbol of sumud from the very population displacing them and settling on their land. The inaccessibility, lack of mobility, and politics around zaâatar in Palestine is what makes it Palestinian zaâatar. This is what separates Palestinian zaâatar, from Jordanian zaâatar, and more broadly Palestinian landscapes, from Jordanian landscapes as well. But in returning to Miriamâs emotions around having to use Jordanian zaâatar rather than Palestinian zaâatar, there is an element of sensory difference that she perceives between the zaâatars, the taste is a little 66 different. As we liberally dip out bread in and out of the olive oil, then in and out of the Jordanian zaâatar, I ask her how the taste differs, âPalestinian soil is more fertile, with a unique flavour, maybe because I was born there and grew up with it. Palestinian soil is red, rich, and vibrant. I adore Palestine, itâs in my blood, my essence.â I try to recall the exact taste of the zaâatar I ate and shared in the Irish hostel to provide a reference point but can only remember the value I had assigned to it. I compare it to the current zaâatar taste on my tongue clumsily, not exactly sure of what difference I would be looking for. To me, they were reminiscent of each other in their balance of sour, salty, herbaceous, nutty profiles. But then again, it wasnât a flavour I had eaten often enough to have a repertoire with. Works such as Hill (2021), Barham (2003), and Prudham et al. explore the phenomenon of terroir, referring to how the qualities of different physical lands and agricultural processes impact the flavour profile of plants. This is why wine regions in France have socio-environmental importance, with types of wine reflecting their regionâs biophysical properties, forming a consumable manifestation of that specific region which permeates culture and identity. For Miriam, the flavour of the zaâatar is reflective of Nablusâs terroir, the specific soil composition and climate informing the taste as she narrates. Additionally, zaâatar in supermarkets is often farmed rather than foraged, unlike the wild zaâatar her family and friends pick for her in Nablus. While the emotional tether to Palestine is present in the mere fact that the zaâatar is from Nablus, the relationship to the plant can be attributed to the sensory familiarity as well. Before I leave Miriamâs home that day, I ask her the question I had initially begun our conversation with: why is this zaâatar so important to you? 67 âYou reflect on the moments with your family on your land, and those memories immediately bring you back to Palestine. Sumud is key, right? Itâs not just about zaâatar or olive trees; itâs about the spirit of the land. I love Palestineâitâs everything to me.â She packs me two small containers, one half-full of her Nablusi zaâatar and the other of olive oil, to get my modest apartment kitchen started, and tells me the name of a small bakery near her home to buy the flatbread. âEat it every morning, it will make you smarter and will awaken your brain for your research,â echoing a traditional medicinal value of zaâatar that children are told from a young age. Zaâatar, in its taste, scent, and the memories it conjures, reveals the uncanniness of displacement, how something can feel close to home yet never quite be home. Its sensory power lies not only in what it recalls, but in what it makes achingly absent: a land, a soil, a way of being that can be described, approximated, even shared, but not fully retrieved. 3.2.2 Feeling the Olive My initial proposal for my Master's thesis was designed so I could witness the olive harvesting season in Jenin, however just a couple months into my program October 7th occurred. On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched an attack on southern Israel from Gaza, killing over 1,100 people and took more than 200 hostages (Shurafa & Khaled, 2025). In response, Israel escalated existing violence against Hamas and began a massive aerial and ground assault on the Gaza Strip, resulting in widespread destruction and tens of thousands of Palestinian civilian casualties, which has been widely classified as a genocide (Albanese, 2024; Amnesty International, 2024). 68 The attack and its aftermath have sparked global protests, unraveling humanitarian crises, and renewed debate over occupation, resistance, and international law. My plan for research changed considering the safety and priorities shifts in the West Bank. Instead of Jenin, I returned to Amman, a palace where I had friends and a general familiarity. The shift felt natural, and it felt necessary to come back to the people and places that this research idea sprouted from in the first place. I broadened the scope from just olives, to discussing plants more generally, lending itself more flexibility in an urban environment. My initial timeline was to go during the olive harvesting season (September-November) to witness the everyday practices and relationships formed through harvesting. I kept to this timeline when visiting Amman. When I arrived in my little neighbourhood of LuWeibdeh I noticed several small olive trees lining the sidewalk, their green olives were almost ready for picking. I plucked one and felt its smooth hard exterior, slick with a thin sheen of oil. Over the next couple months, I would keep some of these olives in my pocket, rolling and pinching them between my fingers as I read and chatted until their shades turned to darker purples. It was calming and grounding, a physical reminder of my journey to this point, and a representation of what I initially came to graduate school to study. Just like Miriam and Shihar told me, olive trees were everywhere in Amman. I watched the olives on the trees next to my apartment complex mature and fall off the branches onto the concrete curbs of the street in late October and November, during that same dark purple they did when I held them in my hands. But instead of using these olives as fidgets as I did, Miriam, Shihar, and Balsam used them to retain knowledges passed down to them from their 69 grandparents, and maintain a closeness to the traditions with the land that have informed Palestinian identity for centuries. Shihar and I often floated between her memories and greater political and social observations of the world, with her having lived in so many places, being so well travelled. Her commitment to social justice made it easy to talk about issues such as the weaponization of starvation, food sovereignty, and environmental determinants of health, but it was my job to bring these back to her memories. Unintentionally, the olive I pinched between my fingers became my research assistant, as she glanced at it when we were talking about how Western medicine and the proliferation of it globally. Figure 11: Olives growing on my street in Amman, Jordan. Photo taken by Author. (2024) 70 âIn Palestinian culture, when the baby is born you massage them with olive oilâ¦We use olive oil for medicine, for everything, it's Palestinianâ¦We use it for so many skin issues. And it's symbolic. It's most of our power, poetry that is communicated by the olives.â She reaches for a strand of my dry hair and tells me I would benefit from soaking it in olive oil, that it would make my hair feel smooth and silky like the slick hard shell of the olive I was holding in the palm of my hand. I imagined the olive oil seeping into my skin. I imagined my brittle, frayed hair coming together again, each strand shining healthier and stronger. In a similar vein, Balsam tells me that the symbol of the olive tree brings together Palestinians, connected by the land its roots seep deeply into as well. She showed me a picture looking out from her home, in her neighbourhood of Wadi Al-Joz, zooming into a mountain covered in olive trees with the separation border in the background. Just like zaâatar, Israelâs control over how Palestinians are to engage with olive trees is a heavily documented means of inhibiting food sovereignty, the use of traditional and cultural knowledge, and physical access to a key resistance symbol. This control has manifested in two main ways, one of which requires Palestinians to receive permits to access their own farms and agricultural land annexed within Israelâs apartheid wall. Just over fifteen years ago, it was estimated that 45% of all arable land in occupied Palestine consists of olive trees, with 90% of its crop going towards olive oil (Braverman, 2009b). However, the majority of olive groves are tucked behind the apartheid wall, requiring permits for farmers to tend to their land. In 2018, over 78% of all permit applications were denied for Palestinian farmers to tend to their crops (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2019). According to OCHA, which has been monitoring these permits 71 and trans-barrier mobility, several permit applications were denied due to a lack of âconnection to the landâ or ânot having enough landâ (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2019). Depending on the settlement, the permit application process can take months with the resulting permit only lasting a couple days before requiring a new permit application. Only during olive harvesting season, 55 out of 77 border gates are open to Palestinian farmers (who have received a permit) and are open sporadically or upon coordination, with only 13 of them open daily for crossing (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 2019). Additionally, these permits are only granted to one person, oftentimes leaving farmers with only themselves to tend to their olive trees (MIFTAH, 2012). For the over 80,000-100,000 Palestinian families that rely on the olive harvest economically, this brings about several livelihood challenges (Braverman, 2009b). It also inhibits the traditional familial and community collaboration and celebration around the harvest and tending to these groves (Saleh, 2012). In these volatile circumstances, and under the watchful eye of Israeli forces, Palestinian farmers either chose to risk losing their crops, or work long hours every day to collect as many olives as possible when they could cross the border. Second, the olive grove tends to be the site of various forms of structural and settler violence. Because of its slew of symbolic, economic, political, social, and traditional significances, the trees themselves are common targets of uprooting and burning by settlers (Braverman, 2009b). In protecting their groves, the violence often extends to Palestinian farmers. In 2020 OCHA found that in just four weeks during the olive harvesting season, over 1,000 olive trees were uprooted and 25 Palestinians were injured in olive groves due to settler violence (OCHA, 2021). Structurally, olive trees are bulldozed and uprooted to make way for the 72 apartheid barrier and security infrastructure, such as watchtowers and roads according to Israelâs narrative (Braverman, 2009b). The IDF similarly uses the same justification, uprooting olive trees to enhance visibility and create checkpoints and infrastructure to enhance the security for Israeli settlements (Braverman, 2009b). Braverman links Israelâs targeting of these olive trees to symbolically targeting Palestinian national resistance, given the notorious importance placed upon them as symbols of Palestinian identity and as a means for self-determination in generating income, fostering kinships, and localized foodways. The uprooting and violence in these groves make Palestinian farmers feel unsafe on their own land, restricting mobility and agency on it, a common tactic (Amira, 2021). The fragmentation of the olive trees and farmers, and the collective practices of olive harvesting season is an attempt to split Palestinians from a very symbolic and tangible relationship with the trees. But olives are for connecting, from healing brittle hair and skin to bringing together families and communities. Which is why its existence persists in art, food, and memories. When I asked Shihar if there was any plant that brought up negative memories in our very last interview, she said: âThe sick plant, a neglected, dusty plant, makes me sad. When it's mistreated, uprooted, it breaks my heart. When an ancient olive tree is cut or burned, I cannot get over it.â I saw it in my work with APN, their Million Tree project aims to plant three trees for every one uprooted by settlers and Israel. Just between the years of 2000-2012, over 3 million olive and other fruit trees in the West Bank and Gaza were uprooted (Arab Group for the Protection of Nature, n.d.). The total number of olive trees uprooted since 1967-2013 is estimated to be roughly 800,000 (Visualizing Palestine, 2023). And in the past nearly two years 73 of genocide, 74% of cultivated olive trees in Gaza have been destroyed according to the Palestinian minister of Agriculture (Fitt, 2025). There are 194 olive presses in the occupied Palestinian territories, according to (Braverman, 2009b). One of those olive presses is seared into Miriamâs memory as a scent, âI love the smell of the olive press. The gifts from the olive trees, the pressing of olives for oil, and the smell of it. Thatâs something I truly love because itâs so rich, so full of life and history.â Captured in the viscous oil, the scent of the olive press, are the memories and traditional knowledge passed down and still used to heal and soothe and join across borders and generations. 74 3.2.3 Smelling the Jasmine Balsam wanted to meet with me in LuWeibdeh. When she arrived at the cafe I chose in the heart of the neighbourhood, I asked her if she lived nearby in our friendly introductory chat. To my surprise, she lived over thirty minutes away via car. I asked her why she wanted to meet me here when we could have met somewhere between us, to which she said, âthere is a charm in LuWeibdeh, that makes it similar to Al Quds,â when I asked her what reminded her of Al Quds she noted the old buildings and the lingering smell of Jasmine. We sat on a balcony overlooking the street lined with the overgrown bushels with fragrant speckles of white. Figure 12: Jasmine growing in LuWeibdeh neighbourhood. Photo taken by Author. (2024) 75 Unlike the zaâatar or olives, I was familiar with Jasmine as a plant that grew in my childhood home backyard in Portland, Oregon. Jasmine was familiar in a way that made it seem mundane to me, it couldnât be a symbol of place, because it was everywhere. There werenât necessarily any political histories of regulations related to Jasmine in Palestine that I could find or gather from my discussions with Shihar, Balsam or Miriam. But ultimately was I found was its mere presence, and how it demands attention through the strong smell, is what made it so significant. There was no effort needed except stepping outside, or into LuWeibdeh, to be brought back to memories. For Balsam, these were memories of sitting on her porch in Wadi Al-Joz, overlooking the hillsides and sunsets with her favourite grandmother, as she recounts to me, smiling and giggling over never leaving her grandmotherâs side. After hearing Balsamâs memories elicited by the jasmineâs scent, I clipped a couple sprigs from a bush in LuWeibdeh, mosquitoes swarming it and me in the process. I brought the small bouquet to Miriamâs home for lunch. Her neighbourhood near the seventh circle (about six miles away from LuWeibdeh), doesnât have much greenery beyond planted palm trees and a green almond tree in front of her apartment complex. Miriam took the bunch of jasmine and placed them in a small cup of water, inhaling their scent with closed eyes. And just as the scent brought Balsam back to memories never leaving her grandmotherâs side, Miriam recollected her mother. âJasmine flowers... Their fragrance is so beautiful. Jasmine trees were planted everywhere in our home. My mom loved jasmine so much. I remember we would pick jasmine flowers as kids and make necklaces and garlands for her. Sheâd wear them on her head, smiling, so happy. It was a beautiful, heartwarming moment. The scent of the 76 lemon blossoms too, and the orange blossoms. I remember walking to school when I was little, passing streets lined with lemon, orange, and pomelo trees. The air was filled with their sweet fragrances, mixed with jasmine. Itâs such a beautiful memory, that street I used to walk through.â Until that point, Miriam had been hesitant to talk about her motherâs personality or anything beyond the fact that she taught her how to cook. Early on, I understood that this was a boundary to respect and wouldnât be productive if I asked directly about her mother. But on her terms, facilitated through the jasmineâs scent, I caught a glimpse of her mother outside of the kitchen. The smell was a narrator, something that could remind Miriam of the happy memories of Ariha when so much of that period of her life was characterized by living under occupation. Halfway through conducting these interviews, I hosted a focus group lunch with 20â30-year-old Palestinians, all of whom had never been to Palestine before. Iâll discuss this lunch more in the next section. One of the participants, Rania, told the group that when she asks her grandfather about Palestine, he goes somewhere else, he becomes âdarkâ and quiet in his remembering, which was an experience shared by others in the focus group as well. The main source of communicating identity and memory of Palestine for them, was through their respective grandmotherâs food. They voiced pride in the dishes and fruits that originated and grew on their ancestral homelands, despite never being there. Finding memories through a source of pride, a longing for sweet scents and flavours, helps ground recollections in the more everyday negotiations with surroundings, rather than around a violent flashpoint, such as the Nakba. 77 The next section explores how these emotions and memories triggered by sensory acts of tasting, touching, and feeling constitute a sense of belonging and a wish to return intergenerationally, particularly for younger Palestinians that have never been to Palestine. I find that the multisensorial aspect of plants also serves to create an imaginative rendering of a future Palestine, rooted in the memories and comparisons of their parents and grandparents. This strengthens longing for a free Palestine, in an act of âremembering our future.â 3.3 Remembering The Future: How the Living Archive of Plants exists Intergenerationally Intergenerational agricultural knowledge, especially as held and practiced by falah (rural, farming) women, has long served as a form of subversion against the structural and economic barriers imposed by the Israeli occupation (Elkhalid et al., 2025; Morkus-Makhoul, 2024). From foraging to traditional water harvesting techniques (Tesdell et al., 2019), such knowledge systems assert continuity and community beyond formal structures of power. At the same time, they generate affective geographies of Palestine, tying memory to the land and transmitting imaginaries of return to younger generations (Elkhalid et al., 2025; Rayan, 2024). These sensory forms of storytelling, rooted in oral life histories, are not just cultural practices but enactments of resistance (Masalha, 2012; Sayigh, 1998). In several meals and conversations with the women, I watched younger relatives pause their activities and lean into conversations, sometimes interjecting with curiosity or questions of their own. Memory transmission was happening in real time, not only between me and my participants, but among family members across generations. For Palestinians in exile, this process unfolds in the liminal space between displacement and imagined homeland. How, then, do those born far from Palestinian soil come to understand a 78 place they may never have seen? In a moment of escalating archive destruction and cultural erasure, what might it mean for plants to serve as ephemeral, living archives, repositories of memory, resistance, and belonging? Rayan asserts that the Palestinian archive is living. In the absence of formal archival continuity, how does the sensory, embodied plant archive contribute to imagining futures rooted in ancestral pasts? Just like how the zaâatar on Miriamâs kitchen table, the olive in my hand, and the jasmine of LuWeibdeh evoked discussion. In preparing the focus group, I gathered some of the plants and fruits that were mentioned in my interviews as a tangible sensory launchpad for discussion. From my LuWeibdeh neighbourhood I went around collecting olives, fig branches, and small bouquets of jasmine. I plucked fresh pomegranates from a neighbouring town of Iraq Al Amir while chatting with the owner of the grove, a Jordanian with many thoughts about international politics. In a UNCHR funded womenâs artisan and cooking collective in the town, there was a small garden of fruit trees and herbs. As I was admiring it, I got invited to pick the fruit with the women who ran the collective, filling two small baskets with ripe limes. They ushered me into the shared kitchen where a few of them at a time cooked meals for tourists upon request, while the majority of them sat around a large table peeling fruits and chewing on sunflower seeds. We cut the limes into wedges and sprinkled some salt on them to suck on as a snack. I brought a couple limes from there back to Amman for the focus group. 79 Figure 13: Me (author) picking limes and figs in Iraq Al Amir, Jordan. Photo taken by friend of Author. (2024). Reproduced with permission. In the market behind the mosque in downtown Amman, I found the stalls I needed, sprigs of sage, an eggplant, a small orange. I chatted with the stall operators about the produce, all of which farmed in Jordan. I gathered all these plants into a bowl and used it as the centrepiece of the outdoor table we were to eat at. I ordered a platter of diwali (stuffed grape leaves), and stuffed zucchini which was the preferred lunch item according to the survey. In true fashion of the large lunches and breakfasts I attended, I also got some hummus, bread, mutabbal (eggplant dip), and falafel. In its own separate dish, I poured some of the zaâatar Miriam gave me. 80 Figure 14: Table spread for focus group. Photo taken by Author. (2024) 81 Figure 15: Diwali. Grape leaves stuffed with spiced rice and lamb, sometimes served with chicken, rice stuffed eggplant and zucchini on the side. Photo taken by Author. (2024) I sent out a call for participants in the form of a flyer distributed to a popular community centre in LuWeibdeh. On this flyer was a survey to register interest, and the final question asked them to identify with a plant or fruit. Some answers were short and sweet âa figâ âJasmineâ etc. all plants that came up in my discussions with Shihar, Balsam, and Miriam. Although some were just one-word answers, the plants chosen in response to this question contained multitudes with 82 regards to Palestinian identity as I understood from Shihar, Balsam, and Miriam. One participant wrote: âOranges. They represent Yafa and the proximity to the Mediterranean, which is something many Palestinians are denied from seeing or experiencing. The orange symbolizes the yearning for me.â The idea of yearning was new to me in my fieldwork. It didnât come up very much in my discussions with the women. The fruits, vegetables, flowers, and herbs that we discussed in our conversations were linked back to concrete memories and people that coloured their emotions. They longed for these as means of connection to Palestine, but not explicitly to the idea of return or a yearning for a physical return to Palestinian soil. This participantâs quote about the oranges reminded me of the novella âThe Land of Sad Orangesâ by Ghassan Kanafani. Excerpts read, When our turn came, the table was full of hand and machine guns and I watched the long line of cars enter Lebanon, leaving long behind them the land of orange. I started wailing. Your mother was still looking in silence at the oranges. In your fatherâs eyes were the reflection of all the orange trees he had left behind for the Israelis, all the clean orange trees he had planted one by one, glittered in his faceâ¦ We were heaped up there, withdrawn from our childhood, away from the land of orangesâ¦oranges that died, an old farmer once told us, if watered by strange hands. The orange was brought up in the focus group as well. Aisha, a 20 year-old from Yafa, snatched up both a sprig of jasmine and an orange from the discussion centrepiece I had made. When it came her turn to tell us why she had selected the jasmine and orange, she imparted 83 knowledge on us, Yafa oranges are âdivinely sweet and tender, that they taste the best plucked directly from the tree and peeled right then.â She started peeling the orange in her hand, âthe oranges in Yafa are very different to this orange,â she said, quieter. I asked her how she knew there was a difference, she told me it's in the very way her father talks about oranges and compares it to the ones in Jordan. Also, it would be difficult to have had a true Yafa orange represented here, given that Israeli corporations have appropriated and monopolized the orange affecting its taste. She says this knowledge of plants she has never physically engaged with is just present, âyou just feel it, you understand it.â There was a lot of this notion of knowledge of taste, what is right versus inauthentic, became a theme in the focus group. Fatima held the sprig of zaâatar and an olive, which sparked a discussion about the health benefits and ways of using olives. The conversation quickly turned into a group teaching me about these plants, Fatima instructed me to steep zaâatar as a tea to deal with a sore throat or any inflammation. Mahmoud interjected, âWith honey! That will make it extra smoothing and antibacterial.â He recalled waking up on cold mornings with his grandmother practically force feeding him zaâatar tea. Just like I was hearing it from Miriam, Fatima matter of factly told me that hand-made zaâatar helps with brain function, that if I could get it hand foraged from Palestine that would be the best. I asked the group if they were able to tell whether the zaâatar on the table was from Palestine or not. Fatima took a large scoop of the spice mix onto an olive oil saturated piece of bread. âYou donât taste the synthetic lemon-salt in this like the ones that are mass produced. I think this was hand prepared.â I asked her how she was able to tell, cheekily she echoed Aisha âYou are just born with it,â Her ancestral village was demolished in 1967, but the knowledge of what to look for in tasting hand prepared zaâatar was passed down to her from years of eating and being surrounded 84 by her grandparents comparing Ammanâs landscape and plants to Palestinian landscape and plants that they were familiar with in Al Khalil. The rest of the group nodded in agreement; this knowledge of what tastes ârightâ just comes by living in a Palestinian home. But as we continued to chat in this focus group lunch, there was something that didnât intuitively match up for me. Aisha monologued to the group about the scent of orange and lemon blossoms on the street that her father grew up in Yafa, Rania described the spiky akkoub leaves in the wild landscape surrounding Al Khalil, Khalid tells me how wheat has been around for centuries in Bilad Al-Sham8, that it calms him to imagine the wheat rustling on the farms in and around where his family is from, a rural town. While this beauty is depicted with pride, when I asked the group where they would go first if they were to be given the opportunity to go to Palestine. What began as a conversation about these visceral vignettes, from flowery scented streets to rural community gatherings celebrating the harvest, became a reminder of what has been taken from them if they returned. That the akkoub was most likely destroyed by the apartheid wall, that the land used for wheat is now arid due to the climatic impacts of war and lack of water infrastructure. âThere is nothing to return to,â Fatima says. Physically, there is no home or place that she can call hers if she were to return because of the demolition of her ancestral village in Al Khalil. Everyone else in the group struggled to think of a place they would currently go to in Palestine. These intergenerational memories, as lovely as they are, didnât obscure the reality of suffering and destruction that persists today. But this didnât impact the desire to return or the belonging that they felt, it just colours in the complexities of what it means to be displaced. 8 Region encompassing the land of modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and historic Palestine. 85 For young, displaced Palestinians, they are often contending with a ârealâ or physical home in the host country, and an âimaginedâ or cultural home of Palestine (Zaidan, 2012). Palestine is not just built on static memories, rather how they are embedded and enacted in routine life is what makes it a nationhood beyond borders, even for those who had never been there before (Pérez, 2018). But this in-between space is not the ideal for many of these youth, particularly the ones in the focus group. The everyday enactments of Palestine in the food they eat, the stories that are told, and the traditions that are kept, create a reconstruction of Palestine. Knowing what tastes or feels ârightâ in the oranges and zaâatar are just a few examples of how closely the Palestinian heritage resonates in their lives. Ultimately, instilled by these sensory vignettes communicated by plants and food, the focus group feels a sense of belonging to Palestine, and a longing for return. A refusal of an erased identity, even for those that have never set foot in Palestine. Memories and futures are intertwined. As previously stated in the methods chapter, and to foreground this chapter, maintaining cultural memory is a powerful tool for populations under settler occupation, as it allows for the continuance of knowledges, values, histories, and connection to identity amidst efforts of cultural erasure. For Indigenous communities, maintaining customs, emotions, and knowledges with the land is a means to preserve this attachment for future generations (Ortega-Villaseñor, 2022). This thesis does not delve deeply into imaginative futures, and I did not ask questions about a future Palestine beyond the issue of return. Yet memories and futures are deeply interlinked. Chahine (2022) reminds us that the future is always present in memory work: the way people imagine what is to come shapes how they narrate the past, especially under conditions of dispossession. Ortega-Villaseñor (2022), writing about the Chinantla region in 86 Oaxaca, argues that holding onto Indigenous ways of relating to nature is an act of hope in the expectation that traditional knowledge, values, and responsibilities will one day take root on the land again. Hope, as Wenzel (2024) notes, is a mission of the future: it persists even against uncertainty, because it takes only a glimmer of possibility to sustain it. And for many in displaced or settler colonial contexts, memories inform what could be possible; sustaining the conditions for hope. Indigenous and Palestinian scholars alike often contest linear distinctions between past, present, and future viewing this as a product of settler colonialism that doesnât reflect traditional values or lived experience (Shahjahan, 2025; Awâsis, 2020; Rayan, 2024). Kühn (2000) writes that âTelling and retelling memory is one of the strategies people use not just to make sense of the world, but actually to create their own world and give themselves and each other a place, a place of some dignity and worth, within it.â (p. 192) In this sense, memory is inherently a form of imaginative work, to construct belonging and place. For populations displaced or under settler colonialism, the construction of identity using memory is important for hope. In the Palestinian context, Rayan (2024) finds that memory and hope are tethered in the diasporic youthâs longing for return. In their study, several participants narrate identity through events they were not present for, such as the Nakba, but are experiences they have seemingly inherited through their grandparentsâ stories. These intergenerational stories push their provenance towards imaginative: hopes for Free Palestine and return rooted in intergenerational memories. Some participants, for instance, imagined a free Palestine in part based on being able 87 to physically go see the ocean, a form of mobility withheld from Palestinians by Israeli settler colonialism (except in Gaza). This intergenerational transmission of memory opens doors to future imaginaries sustained by hope for return and liberation. As Rayan (2024) writes, âIf the future is viewed only from the position of the present, in which Israel continues to encroach on Palestinian land, liberation seems unimaginable. Palestinian futurity rejects these present conditions, and intergenerational and collective memories show that another life is possible.â How was this conceived in the focus group, especially when memory was voiced through plants, food, and the senses? The âinheritedâ sensory memories expressed by Palestinian youth can be read not only as echoes of Palestineâs past but also as commitments to its futureâas blueprints for what returning ought to feel, taste, and sound like. Fatima expressed her gratitude for her mother and grandmotherâs cooking: âImagine being a person without a name, or without dreams or a home. Plants mean identity and belonging to me. Itâs all connected.â Aisha agreed, explaining that her ability to envision Palestine comes from her grandmotherâs kitchen, through scents and flavours she has inherited: âItâs hard to dream about something you donât know. But when the plants and smells and tastes are described to you, it makes it easier.â The way Fatima and Aisha spoke of âdreamingâ of Palestine lingered with me. Their futurism was not articulated in terms of specific places to return to, but rather in the continuation of Palestinian identity, longing, and belonging. In the taste of a dish, the scent of zaâatar or oranges, and the sensory comparisons passed down from elders, Palestine is imagined as it was 88 to themâand as it might be again. Dreaming of the past becomes a way of imagining the future: a prism where the possibility of return and of a free Palestine begins to take shape. Through plants and food, futures become tangible, carrying inherited knowledge that nurtures belonging for the youth in the focus group. Perhaps Palestinian futurity is voiced here as simply as knowing what to plant upon return: re-rooting in defiance of the ongoing Nakba. Rania is from âtwo places that donât exist,â and have never visited. Her father and mother love the smell of jasmine, and for her it represents their memories and stories of both Yafa and Damascus, Syria. The scent of jasmine acts as a form of presence with her heritage based in these places. After everyone helped me clean up the lunch table and were preparing to leave, Rania gave me a piece of pressed jasmine she kept between pages of a book. You could see other pieces pressed, poking out in roughly 10-page intervals. She took one piece of Jasmine from the book and handed it to me as we were saying our goodbyes, thanking me for the experience. Another participant, Mohammad, voiced, âShe is giving a part of herself to you.â Preserving the jasmine through pressing it in the book was not only a form of staying close to her identity and the memories and heritages that are wrapped up in it, but also a way to express gratitude and care. The symbolism of the jasmine doesnât live in a static past, but is used as a means of communication and solidarity for Rania, who told us that she gives most of the pressed jasmine away. This is emblematic of the interactions and engagements with plant memory that has been discussed in this chapter, that in a context of conflict and displacement, this access to the sensory elements that fruit, vegetables, and flowers provide act as an amalgamation of comparison, presence, and a continued longing. The memory that engages with plants in Amman is not static. Itâs compared, symbolized, creating imaginaries and longing for a Palestine to return to enact inherited knowledges. And 89 underlying this is a sense of belonging and understanding of the land. While these plants exist in the uncanny reality of Amman, where they are close but not quite the same (in many cases because it is not grown on Palestinian soil), they act as initiators of stories and comparison that paint a picture of Palestine for younger generations that havenât been, allowing them to conceptualize belonging to it. In this process there is longing, and a sense of an ongoing Nakba that demands their sumud. 3.4 Conclusion When I revisit my notes and memories of the interviews with Shihar, Miriam, and Balsam, I feel a wave of calm. The three women have taught me on a personal level, what it means to actively fight for sumud in their commitment to maintaining daily life for themselves and those around them, having the ability to not rewrite their good memories with the traumatic ones, and never forgetting either. Blachnicka-Ciacekâs (2020) work on embodied memory found that Palestinians born and raised in the West Bank and Gaza, then left, donât have the same romanticization of Palestine as those she interviewed who were born and raised in displacement. She writes that, âIt felt as if the occupation cast a shadow on all aspects of their childhood and adolescence, displacing any other type of memoriesâ¦ Their bodies seemed to carry the traces of their violent past into the present. Their voices broke, their bodies trembled, tears came to their eyes as they recalled the memories of fear and pain.â While experience with occupation was an ever-present backdrop in my interviews with Shihar, Balsam, and Miriam, it didnât dominate the memories we traversed (except for initial 90 introductions, where they told me when and where they left). Iâm compelled to say it was because the memories of Palestine were framed through imagery of nature, and loved ones on the land. The grounding of the senses also appeared to have an impact in the cadence of these interviews, also in an embodied way, but different to how Blachnicka-Ciacek (2020) observed. As Shihar and I sat in her office we talked about Lebanon, where she spent the majority of her formative years. She lived just a few blocks from the beach, and to this day when she needs to sleep but her brain is keeping her up, she thinks about the soft rolling waves against the sand on that Beirut beach. She closed her eyes and I closed mine and together we both paused from talking and I tried to imagine this beach I had never been to, and felt my heart rate slow. At the end of the interview Shihar told me the process was enjoyable, and that talking to me was a nice break in her workday. Miriam and Balsam said similar things, but the exercise utilizing plants to share memory appeared to be new for them, with Balsam saying âI usually just like to listen but I feel like I talked so much with you. You made me remember many things, and I am really happy talking to you." Early on in our first interview, Miriam told me that âThe destruction they caused was immense, and it hurts to remember.â At the end of our last meeting, just a day before I boarded my flight, Miriam would thank me for our conversations, âYouâve brought me back to so many beautiful days, to my childhood. I really appreciate it. In our first meeting, I cried, right? Yes, and now I feel so much better, like my heart has been lightened. Sometimes, the feelings inside are hard to express, but youâve helped me bring them out, with both the painful and happy memories mixing together.â Using plants and food as starting points for unpacking memories of Palestine enables us to emphasize what is not lost, what is still possible, how people maintain connection to their 91 roots, to the soil of Palestine, and to one another. The living archive of plants provides a form of guidance through memories and a sensory grounding in the everyday that can help to balance the more difficult, traumatic memories that often rise to the surface more quickly. The reconstruction of Palestine through these sensory plant and landscape memories is not a passive nostalgic act, but one that persists in how future generations smell jasmine and taste zaâatar. 92 4 Consuming Presence with Palestine: The Embedded Care of Sourcing, Preparing, and Consuming Palestinian Plants and Meals The second time I visited Miriamâs home, I walked into the kitchen and was struck by the blend of smells consisting of roasting chicken, spiced rice, and fried eggplant and cauliflower. All these elements come together in maqluba, a simple comfort meal, often served and mixed in with yogurt and a salad of fresh diced tomato and cucumber. A couple days before, I told Miriam that maqluba was my favourite Palestinian dish, and that I had tried to make it myself back in Vancouver, but it never tasted right. When I told her this, she scoffed at me as if to say of course nothing compares to maqluba made in a Palestinian kitchen. âIâll guess have to wait until I go to Palestine to try itâ I told her. When I took a seat at her kitchen table after offering my help (which was rejected three times over), I noted the little ceramic of two connected bowls, one filled with olive oil and the other with zaâatar. I told her it was beautiful, which lit her up with pride, âI bought it from a Palestinian ceramicist, the olive oil in this bowl is from Nablus, do you see the colour of it?â. She then paused frying the cauliflower to show me the new batch of zaâatar she was drying on a platter above her fridge (see also page 60, Chapter 3). Miriam had received the zaâatar sprigs from a friend in Nablus, and they were just starting to curl at the edges. She took a large inhale and instructed me to do the same, wafting the scent into my nose. It seemed like the T.V. hadnât been turned off since I had been in the kitchen a couple days prior, the remote in the same place and the channel unchanged from the day prior, ongoing ground reporting of the continual assault in Gaza. There were periods of static from when the network would cut out, but Miriam never made a move to mute or change the channel. Almost 93 everything was unchanged apart from the warm spiced smells of maqluba (the other day, it was maftool, a dish with a base of small hand rolled balls of wheat). Figure 16: Maqluba being flipped over onto platter. Photo taken by Author. (2024) When the maqluba was ready, Miriam called her eldest son in the house, Khaldoon, to come over. He then flipped the pot upside-down (which is the translation of maqlubaâupside down, or flipped over) onto a large silver platter, and before lifting it up, Miriam slapped the bottom of the pot hard and blessed it with a âbismillahâ before pulling up the pot. The rice spilled out with the chicken and fried vegetables layered on top, steaming. On the table, there was the cucumber and tomato salad and yogurt that was heaped generously onto a plate for me next to the very large serving of the maqluba. She smiled and told me âsahtainâ, a Figure SEQ Figure * ARABIC 16: Flipping over the maqluba. Source: Author, 2024 94 common saying that directly translates to âdouble healthâ, but is meant to bless you with a healthy and enjoyable meal. She gestured to me that I should start eating. In response I say, ala albek muratain, which directly translates to âto your heart, doubledâ. Between spoonfuls of rice, chicken, and cauliflower, I told her was the more delicious maqluba I had ever had. She took my compliment with pride but told me that âthe best maqluba will always be made in Palestine.â The maqluba on my plate exhibited what it means to be living as a Palestinian in exile; finding representations of life in Palestine, such as food, but never being fully satiated because these representations are never quite right. They are not the real experience of eating or harvesting in Palestine. The land itself is a significant driver of culture, identity, traditions, and kinships. Being displaced severs and changes how these are experienced. In everyday life, Miriam and others are constantly finding ways to replicate and maintain the values that tie Palestinian culture and land in this context of mass displacement, to overcome and accommodate the geographic divides and lack of continuity. This chapter focuses on how this is done through plants and food. The previous chapter (Chapter 3) discussed the role of plants as a form of sensory memory. It delved into the implications for longing and return that are embedded in how plants are used as a living archive of Palestine in how they can be tasted, smelled, felt, and compared. In this chapter, I will expand more on the processes and physical relationships that help maintain these memories and access to these plants through their use as food. Using Lisa Blackmoreâs (2024) metabolic literacy approach in my methods and analysis (described further below), I delve into a discussion about how Balsamâs, Miriamâs, and Shiharâs varied processes of accessing, preparing, and consuming plants and following recipes that evoke Palestine to them, reveal the kinship values of what makes food, âPalestinian.â I also utilize the concept of wujud 95 (presence) in greater conversation about how these acts constitute sumud (steadfastness, refusal of displacement), as used by Taher (2022). I follow the forms of kinship in the flow of goodsâwhat and who is present in the zaâatar, olives, and other plants carried from Palestine to Amman, on the cutting board and in the pot, and into mouths and bodies? And what are the implications of care when I take a bite of maqluba steeped in these cultural, political, and relational meanings? In exploring these non-material, kinship centric relationships and metabolic practices, I return to Miriamâs quote I referenced in the previous chapter: âYou reflect on the moments with your family on your land, and those memories immediately bring you back to Palestine. Sumud is key, right? Itâs not just about zaâatar or olive trees; itâs about the spirit of the land. I love Palestineâitâs everything to me.â In this Chapter, I show how Balsam, Miriam, and Shihar relationships with Palestinian plants are not just passive remembrance, but cooking, eating and sharing food are practices that actively maintain Palestineâs spirit through embodied, relational practices enacted through care. I do this by first unpacking metabolic literacy as it is used by Blackmoreâs (2024) How to Eat a Polluted River?, emphasizing how where my approach draws from Blackmore. Then I turn to the definition and significance of wujud (presence) as used by Taher (2024), to help lay the foundation of understanding these practices of connection in a context of displacement. Following this brief literature review, I start my discussion where the women also enact their journey of connection with the landâby the act and process of procuring plants and ingredients grown or from Palestine, cooking and sharing those ingredients and dishes with their family and others. I emphasize the structures of care therein, particularly in how they fuel the meaning and taste of the food itself. Then I move onto how care for intergenerational and traditional 96 knowledge, and those who passed them down, is shown in the process of preparing and sharing food. I wrap up the analysis through an examination of the embodied care in the act of eating as it shows up in my interviews. The final discussion grounds this analysis in this current political moment of genocide and the weaponization of starvation. It is here that I also dive into a more reflective discussion of my own metabolic literacy through the journey of learning with and from these womenâs lives. 4.1 Background The two conceptual frameworks I use in this chapter are Blackmoresâ (2024) metabolic literacy and the idea of wujud, translated loosely to presence, as treated by Taher. Metabolic literacy serves as a methodological and analytical tool, where wujud aids in understanding the discussion of how these processes constitute an active form of resistance. Both of these concepts are helpful, particularly, in the diasporic lens, as their frameworks are about the transcendence of space, time, borders, and physicality in meaning-making. 4.1.1 Metabolism and Metabolic Literacy I draw from the concept of metabolism, which in urban political ecology is commonly used as a metaphor for how materials (water, food, energy, etc.) flow and transform between nature and cities, revealing ever-present socialâecological relations (Pincetl et al., 2012; Heynen et al., 2006). As Harvey (1993) writes, âit is, in practice, hard to see where âsocietyâ begins and ânatureâ endsâ¦â (p. 33). This quote refers to how society and nature deeply intertwined through the continual co-production of ecological and social processes. I use metabolism to theorize how a plant is intertwined with culture, identity, and power as it moves and is transformed across 97 landscapes, borders, and bodies (cf. Barua, 2024). I do this through the narratives of Balsam, Shihar, and Miriam, exploring how and why they engage with and shape these flows and transformations, specifically in the way certain plants are sourced, used, and consumed amid displacement. Through this, I show how their relationships with plants and the consumption of specific foods are entangled with care and connection amid movement barriers, land-use restrictions, and the weaponization of starvation imposed by the Israeli state on Palestinians. Because of this emphasis on the nonmaterial, including longing, memory, and care, I also engage with Blackmoreâs (2025) concept of metabolic literacy, which she employs as a reflexive, methodological, and analytical tool in her research on the Bogotá River. In that project, Blackmore and her collaborators, who included activists and artists, traveled along the polluted river, meeting with those who live with and relate to its toxic flows. Their journey culminated in a performative meal overlooking a waterfall that was visually stunning yet polluted by runoff. As Blackmore (2025) describes, eating fish and other products from the river, consuming both their healthful and polluted elements, became a form of embodied knowledge and relationship-building after their journey along the river. âThrough this meeting of worlds and mutual metabolic worlding, eating is a mode of doing and relating that also stirs bonds of kinship and companionship.â In this chapter, I explore how Shihar, Balsam, and Miriam understand the processes of procuring, preparing, and consuming as acts of care and kinship. What socialâecological relationships are fostered through these processes and transformations of plants, and how are they imbued with personal, political, and cultural meaning? When I am offered a bite of Miriamâs maqluba, the warmly seasoned fried cauliflower, potatoes, rice, and chicken melding 98 together, what relationships, histories, and kinships am I consuming as well? What does this reveal about the flow of care? The âliteracyâ in metabolic literacy a journey to understand the depth of connection these women maintain to a land from which they are physically separated, through the foods, medicines, and embodied practices they share with me and with others in their families and communities through daily cooking. Just as Blackmore (2025) describes care for the Bogotá River as a product of her journey in metabolic literacy, I ask how such care manifests for me in my effort to understand the metabolism of these plants in the lives of Shihar, Balsam, and Miriam. What forms of care am I entangled with by eating this food and sharing tables with these women? Ultimately, this chapter asks how the pursuit of closeness to Palestine through its plants and foods is imbued with everyday, emotional, and embodied relations to family, friends, and knowledges, and how these relations persist. Finally, what does this intimacy with food and plants reveal about these womenâs identities, and what relations to Palestinian land and memory were summoned in me as I ate and listened with them? 4.1.2 Wujud/Presence The throughline of this chapter relates back to the concept of wujud (presence) that was developed by Taher (2024) tying together the significance of land, culture, and identity in displaced context. Wujud, as defined by Taher (2024), is the presence and existence of the Palestinian traditions, cultures, histories, and people. Wujud can be felt, embodied and practiced across borders in various forms, making it a helpful concept for discussion about diasporic experience. In this chapter, wujud (presence) with certain plants and foods from Palestine, is also wujud with the people and relationships that are required 99 in the process of procuring, preparing, and consuming said plants. Care and relationships are central results of Blackmoreâs approach to metabolic literacy, and Taher (2024) explains that: âForms and practices of Palestinian sumud (steadfastness), which focus on building meaning about material and cultural wujud (existence/presence) by centring the relationship with the land, are able to reformulate and reconfigure relationships between Palestinians.â Taher (2024) asks how Palestinian presence with the land can be practiced and embodied in contexts of displacement, where not only geography takes them away from Palestine but also a different sense of temporality based in memory. While Taher links these individual acts of presence to a collective understanding of sumud as a care-centric resistance (the web of various acts of wujud forms the greater sumud or steadfastness of Palestinians), I delve into what care relationships are that are formed in the pursuit of wujud with plants and the land, in the lives of Miriam, Balsam, and Shihar as they prepare and share food with others. As mentioned in the previous chapter, oral life histories and the maintenance of traditional Palestinian plant and food knowledge are integral in resisting cultural erasure and appropriation, and in staying committed to Palestinian identity and the notion of return. In the previous chapter, physical presence of certain plants (for the displaced women, and the young adults who have never been to Palestine alike) can act as a presence with memories, knowledge, imaginations, in ways that constitute and maintain a longing for Palestine in what these plants offer sensorily (through example or comparisons 100 of close approximations). This chapter also engages with memories, knowledge, and imaginations, through the lens of care and relationship building from Blackmoreâs metabolic literacy, which also centrally focuses on care and relationships. In examining the foodways and sharing, we can ask: What is present in the active processes of procuring, preparing, and eating acts for Shihar, Balsam, and Miriam? 4.1.3 Methods and Roadmap For this chapter I collected the oral life histories of three Palestinian women living in Amman, Jordan. During the four months of interviews, I collected observations about my surroundings, ate breakfasts and dinners with these women and others, and observed cooking and preparing various meals. Being present in the kitchen, at the table, and in cafes with participants allowed for conversations about foodways to come up naturally, as Iâd ask questions about the meal being cooked, ingredients being used, and the food eaten and shared between us. I also held interviews for this not around food but around people. Using kinship associations, âwhat plant reminds you of X person in your lifeâ and asking them to tell me about the values and memories associated with their answer also allowed me to contextualize the significance of various plants and foods. As noted in the discussion about metabolic literacy, the practice of eating and sharing meals for this chapter revealed the demand for a reflexive write up, which is seen in this chapter through vignettes but also through moments of personal reflection. The following chapter is separated into three main parts, procuring plants, preparing them as medicine and food, and finally the eating of them. In these three parts, I 101 highlight the overlapping and distinct forms of care involved that were brought up by Balsam, Shihar, and Miriam. 4.2 The Processes of Procuring, Preparing, and Consuming 4.2.1 Procuring Procuring to the ear sounds stale, like the act of simply acquiring a good, but the layers of connection, the movement of goods from one set of hands to another, can have a lot of care embedded within it. Receiving or handling plants and goods from the Palestinian land from friends and loved ones can go so far as changing the flavour of it to these women and the perceived health benefits of the good itself. While this chapter is about diasporic processes of presence with Palestinian land, Iâll start with a recollection from Balsam, who grew up in the neighbourhood of Wadi Al-Joz in East Al Quds, to frame this section about procurement process. Balsam shows me the view from her childhood homeâs balcony, looking out amidst three large mountains and groves of olive trees. In this picture, you can see the apartheid wall enclosing the occupied territories (including Wadi Al-Joz) from the rest of Palestine. That day, we ordered sambusa, a puff pastry, filled with halloumi, a type of cheese used throughout Palestine. Like many instances with Shihar and Miriam as well, she compared the taste to that of the halloumi she ate as a child, the one we were eating was less salty and not as melted as she would have liked her sambusa. I asked her, how did you get your halloumi in Wadi Al-Joz? Her grandmother and mother would receive produce and goods from the women of Al-Khadar, just outside the apartheid wall, who brought freshly foraged zaâatar, cheeses (including Figure SEQ Figure * ARABIC 17: Viewpoint from Balsam's home in Wadi Al-Joz. Source: Balsam, 2025. 102 halloumi), date molasses, sage, and prickly pears from the more agricultural and natural landscape they lived in. The trek between Al Khadar to Al Quds is long, so they would host women for the night. Balsam recalls sharing dinner, playing, and eating breakfast all together, hearing stories from these women of the fellaheen (peasants) before they would start their journey back. Balsam smiled and laughed as she recalled how she would always get piggyback rides from one of the women who would come. There is a marked distinction that Balsam makes between the madaniyeen (city people) and fellaheen (peasants) that is echoes throughout other interviews, the fellaheen is the birth-site of most Palestinian resistance to settler colonialism, due to their physical relationship with tending to the land and the plants on it. For Balsam, the delivery of these fruits, vegetables, cheeses, and other goods from the fellaheen women were her primary access point to the fellaheen. However, as more checkpoints emerged, it became more difficult for the fellaheen women to undergo the journey from Al Khadar to Al Quds, separated by the Apartheid wall and restrictions. The consequence was less frequent visits from the women of Al Khadar. âWhen we received these goods from the farmer, it was meaningful to us...And then they stopped, even the cheese. The cheese stopped coming, and it was because of the checkpoint. They wouldn't allow it because the Israelis prohibited these items. This [confiscating items] used to happen in the past, but then it became more common. They imposed barriers and didnât allow them to bring the produce. These farmers donât live in Al Quds; they live outside. So itâs difficult and dangerous to do this.â She told me that when they stopped coming, they bought the products from grocery stores, but they never tasted the same. The taste is different in the fruits, vegetables, cheeses, and 103 herbs âbecause thereâs a personal relationshipâ to the fellaheen women embedded and embodied in them. The significance of this relationship, and the care that Balsam felt for these women ultimately shaped and gave meaning to the procurement process in a way that shopping in grocery store aisles does not. Figure 17: View from Balsam's neighbourhood in Wadi Al-Joz. Photo by Balsam. (2025). Reproduced with permission 104 Today, Balsam grows her own fruits and vegetables from a hydroponic agriculture structure in her backyard. While this garden and her family are based in Amman, Jordan, she grows seeds from Beit Dajan and Al Quds that are sent to her by her sister and her sisterâs friends. She tells me the taste of the bitter melon from Al Quds is distinct, and reminds her of her grandmother, and meals with her family growing up. Knowing the hands that dealt with the seeds or plants is a value, laden with an agency over where goods are from. Early on in my interviewing Miriam had told me: âWhether itâs mallow, one olive tree, sage, or mint in a small courtyard, a Palestinian must grow something and rely on themselves.â and I had taken to mean it as an individual reliance, however what emerged in my conversations is that this quote refers to a more collective understanding of reliance, shaped by care networks and maintenance of relationships. When Miriamâs daughter returned from a recent trip to Nablus, she brought two suitcases home with her. One smaller one with her clothes and things, and one larger one. The larger one was brought to the kitchen and unzipped in front of me, to reveal bags of molokhea, zaâatar leaves, dried dates and figs, cheeses, picked olives and liters of olive oil. The excitement I read on Miriamâs face was palpable, enhanced by her ability to show off all the goods to me. I asked her where all of this was from, she seemed offended and scoffed at me, âof course from my family, cousins and aunties in Nablus and Ariha, that picked and prepared it for me.â She quickly transferred the goods to jars, airtight containers, and freezer bags for long-term storage. âMany of my family members have gardens and grow their own crops. It's better because their produce is cleaner, no chemicals, pure and natural. Commercial products often contain chemicals, but whatâs grown on personal land is pure and healthy. Every 105 Palestinian, no matter how small their house is, even if itâs just one meter of space, they will plant something.â The zaâatar and olives grown on Palestinian soil, sitting in this suitcase served as a presence with not just her family members, but the land they tended to. The suitcase of zaâatar foraged by her sister-in-law and olives plucked from her grandparents' enduring olive orchard, embodied the persistence of Palestinian presence on and with the land. This reminded me of a moment in which Shihar explained her interest in working with the land in her work, âAgriculture, you know, it's a combination of things, you know, it's the land, so the seeds, the water, the sustainability of light of life is not without agriculture. But also I felt what I now can pronounce, the sovereignty of people is through the land. And I felt that the land is very, very generous. You know, it gives, it gives. And maybe because I am a refugee and I cannot go back to my country, I felt the land is a happy medium to be around.â And in Miriamâs kitchen across the border, she was in the presence of the land and all of its meaning for Palestinian sovereignty and resistance, through these dried, pickled, foraged, and farmed goods. But just like how the apartheid wall separated Balsam and her family from the fellaheen women delivering goods, the Israeli-Jordanian border poses challenges for Miriamâs continued access to the plants and goods grown and prepared by her family in Nablus and Ariha. She tells me that âItâs difficult to bring olives and oil out of Palestine due to the challenges and restrictions.â And that itâs not a safe trip to make. She will at times get packages from her aunts and family through friends that make the journey, requiring detailed coordination. But for the 106 most part, she has to make do with what she currently has, not sure of when the next batch of goods from her family will come. Miriam now rations what she has, supplementing with Jordanian products. âItâs hard, it doesnât feel good. I love the olives, oil, and zaâatar from Palestine. The ones in Jordan are okay, but theyâre not the same. The taste is a little different. But at least they meet the need.â This sentiment pulls at what Palestinian land means spiritually. These exchanges, whether carried across checkpoints, borders, or through suitcases filled with olives and zaâatar, are not just about acquiring goods; they are just as much informed and supplemented by the relationships with people and land across separation. The next section details the transformation of such produce and plants into the performativityâs of foods, teas, and Medicinals. In this transformation, lies relationships with loved ones through the use and care for passed down knowledge. 4.2.2 Preparing After receiving the plants, seeds, and/or foods from Palestine comes several stepsâfor the purpose of this section I refer to these as preparation or transformation. I experienced this process in Miriamâs kitchen the most, whenever I went to her home to interview her she was making some sort of dish for lunch. And just like with the maqluba, every time I asked if I could help she would say no, or tell me to just watch. Until the very last interview I had with her, I was only allowed to make tea (from teabags). Even then, she monitored me closely as I decided whether to use sage or mint. When the weather shifted colder in October, she yelled at me to stop as I grabbed a large bunch of mint to put into the boiling kettle. âNow it is cold, we need to use sage,â she told me, explaining that mint cools you down, and sage warms you. This is one of the many knowledges she held 107 sacred in her kitchen, and why she was so guarded in her preparation of the food, only occasionally allowing her daughter to help under her very detailed guidance. But it manifests as also a care for the people drinking it, ensuring they will feel warmth from the tea rather than coolness from the mint as the temperature lowers. When I asked Miriam how she learned to cook Palestinian dishes she told me âWe all learned it from our mothers and grandmothers. Itâs our heritage... Palestinians love maqluba, musakhan, and mujadara. Olive oil and zaâatar are our staples, passed down from childhood.â And this was passed down to her daughter as well, who was busy preparing the molokhea stew for our meal as we chatted. 108 Figure 18: Musakhan. A dish comprising of layered chicken and flatbread, seasoned heavily with sumac and pine nuts. Photo taken by Author. (2024) 109 Figure 19: Molokhea. A viscous stew made from molokhea leaves, often served with chicken. Photo taken by Author. (2024) The knowledge of preparation, what to use and how to use it, was passed down intergenerationally for Shihar as well. And using and respecting her motherâs knowledge was not only a way to respect and honour her but also be present with Palestinian culture amidst a push to neglect it for Western practices of âmodernity.â When I asked Shihar what plant represents her mother, she told me 110 âThe olive, she uses olives in everything, in medicine, in skin care, in foodâ¦ When my babies were born, she taught me how to massage them with olive oil, with warm olive oil. It was so good for their skin and health.â But throughout her adulthood Shihar felt a pressure to use corn oil, she explained to me with disdain how US corporations market their corn oil in the Middle East as a healthier alternative to olive oil, and a lot of people took to that. âBut then maybe 15 years ago, I revolted, yeah. I said, no, how could it be harmful when, for 1000s of years, the Palestinians, my mother, were using only olive oil. See, because the first olive was grown in Bilad Al Sham in Syria, the first, 12,000 years ago, maybe in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan. This is the home of olives. It's a native tree, and they were using this oil all the time. So I shifted. Since then, I've never eaten any corn oil, especially corn that comes from the US.â Not only was her shift informed by the knowledge of her mother, but the traditional regional presence and use of olive oil as well. For Shihar, the presence with using olive oil is a presence with these knowledges, with her mother, and with her regional solidarity. And in this instance, this presence is made more significant due to the external, western forces attempting to replace traditional practices with commodified ones. She frames this shift from corn oil to olive oil as a ârevolt,â a political act to trust and care for intergenerational knowledge. Balsam didnât grow up learning how to cook in her household. While she had spent a lot of time with her grandmother and mother, in the kitchen and outside, this didnât necessarily entail giving her guidance or specific directions of how to make certain dishes, at least she doesnât recall that. When she moved to Jeddah with her husband for their work, she was 111 suddenly thrown into the world of cooking. The first few attempts of burnt rice and underdone chicken almost discouraged her, but she kept trying to navigate her memory of her grandmotherâs cooking as a way of knowing whether or not her cooking was good, âI knew if my food was good if it tasted like how I remembered,â and that was all that mattered. If the flavour was reminiscent of that of her grandmotherâs or motherâs cooking, then it was automatically, to Balsam, a good dish, no matter what anyone else said. The care for her grandmotherâs cooking overruled any cookbook. It came down to being able to taste the memory of the food. The next chapter details how the care is embodied and practiced in eating together, with a special emphasis on what this means amidst the weaponization of starvation in Gaza. 4.2.3 Consuming Shihar hosts a weekly Friday breakfast with her family. She graciously invited me to one of these breakfasts after we had our first chat. I arrived at her home, stepping down a stone staircase threaded with wisteria, to a sunken patio with a long table set for many people. Her daughters, who I had met briefly, toured me around and introduced me to Shiharâs brothers, nieces, nephews, and grandkids. At the breakfast, were family members who had just left Lebanonâat the time the bombing of southern Lebanon had just crept upwards to Beirut and they decided to flee to Amman pre-emptively. I sat at the end of the table with Shiharâs sister-in-law and niece, both of whom would become friends of mine. The table was filled from edge to edge with platters of hummus and falafel, zaâatar and cheese manakeesh, pomegranate molasses drizzled on fattoush, and dates. I sipped sweet black tea and saudi coffee, shared my research, and was enveloped in discussions about rampant individualism in the US and of course, the genocide in Gaza. The gathering was comfortably familiar; it felt like the loud and food-112 abundant weekly dinners I had at my Popoâs home as a child until soccer schedules and sleepovers eventually dominated the calendar. After the breakfast Shiharâs husband told me that according to Islam, sharing a meal is sacred and significant. When you share a meal, you share trust. I think back to that often, over the meals and stories shared with me, how do I show my trustworthiness. But my interpretation, over all the meals I shared and all the conversations I had, is that trust ultimately comes down to how I enact care for and with what has been offered to me. This section is about the forms of care that the three women narrate and embody in the final analysis of eating. I am instructed to say bismillah (God Bless) every time I ladle a serving of rice pudding rooz bhaleeb into their individual tupperwares. Miriam sits down with a cigarette at the kitchen table, nodding every time I whisper the bismillah, saying it herself under her breath. In the heat of Miriamâs kitchen, I ladeled over thirty individual servings and became convinced that my shirt would forever smell like the rose-water base of the pudding. We walked together to drop off two to three servings of the pudding to each neighbour, exchanging brief kisses on the cheek with every new person. In between doors, Miriam told me that the dish is very healthy because of its base ingredients consisting of rice and milk, and being naturally flavoured by rose water, lemon peels, or Arabic mastic. It can be served cold or hot, depending on the weather. In the colder winters, her mother would heat it up for breakfast to keep her and her siblings warm throughout the day. On a hot day like this one, the pudding would be chilled like a sweet and soft ice cream. 113 Figure 20: Saucers of rooz bhaleeb. Rice and milk pudding dessert flavoured with rose water. Photo taken by Author. (2024) She told me âI feed people, my friends, neighbours, loved ones, and children. I feel very happy doing this, and I donât like cooking small meals. I prefer to cook large meals so that 114 everyone can eat as much as they like. I like making big dishes like maqluba or maftoul so that many people can enjoy them.â To be able to share these meals is sharing care for the people at the table. The making, blessing, and delivering of the cold rose-water pudding enacted this care for her neighbours. Just as the care is extended to me in how she never-endingly scooped maqluba on my plate. And just like Blackmore argued, after hearing the stories about the personal memories, people, and knowledges that had informed the meals I ate, I felt immense care and respect not only for Miriam, Balsam, and Shihar, but for the enduring Palestinian traditions amidst the physical and regulatory barriers that aim to inhibit the perseverance of kinships and care in the process of food. Of course, some ingredients have to be bought in Jordanian grocery stores, some ingredients imported, others domestic. But in any Palestinian meal, there is an amalgamation of care dealt to loved ones and friends, tradition, to identity, to future generations and their ability to return. 115 Figure 21: Maqluba. A dish prepared with spiced rice, fried cauliflower, potatoes, and/or eggplant. Often with chickpeas and chicken. Photo taken by Author. (2024) When I eat the maqluba Miriam prepares, I consume not only the ingredients passed over militarized borders, but am in the presence of intergenerational knowledge and relationships. The spices toasted in her kitchen tell a story that begins in Nablus, travels through the hands of her sisters, informed by the lessons from her mother, and ends on my plate in Amman. The significance of food is embedded in the kinships formed and maintained through it. In the examples presented in this paper by Shihar, Balsam, and Miriam, procuring fruits and 116 vegetables from Palestine is facilitated through family and friends, and is emblematic of the enduring Palestinian relationship with the land and agriculture. Preparing and using food and medicines is an opportunity to care for the traditional knowledge passed down intergenerationally. And finally, eating food with is a form of relationship building and maintaining as a setting that entails engagement, nourishment, and the joy that comes from eating a delicious meal. But these processes are especially significant to the Palestinian identity because of the ways they are threatened via the Israeli settler colonial projectâs insistence on physically and symbolically uprooting and replacing Palestinian connection to the landscape. The flow of these traditional knowledges and landscapes now must navigate militarized borders and walls, and rampant appropriation that threaten erasure. This makes the connection to Palestine all the more important for self-determination. As discussed in the above sections, the food manifestations of Palestine that Miriam, Balsam, and Shihar narrate carry forms of care that are so integral in keeping this knowledge alive. As Lisa Sharif (2024) writes, âFood is a site of social, acestral, cultural, and material regeneration, endowed at different times with various meanings.â And so it would be remiss to not to highlight the mass weaponization of starvation happening as a tool of genocide in Gaza, contributing to deaths, widespread famine, and severing people from the connections and identity that is so central to sumud. The following section is dedicated to the implications of starvation, and the lack of agency over foodways, in Gaza. 4.2.4 The Depth of the Weaponization of Starvation âPalestinian food is deeply significant, itâs not just sustenance but a connection to our roots and our survival,â Miriam tells me as we talk about the forced famine in Gaza, tears 117 welling in her eyes. Maftool (see figure 22) and maqluba, cannot be made with the limited aid provided to them, she tells me with deep pain across her face. I read her expression knowing the importance of Palestinian cooking in her life, staying connected to the sweet memories of her mother and grandmothers, Nablus, and Ariha. Figure 22: Maftool. a traditional Palestinian dish centred around maftoul, or little beads of grain. Usually served with meat and chicken. Photo taken by Author. (2024) Today, I opened my Instagram up to its usual slew of news and infographic posts about the Gazan genocide. Today on my feed, is a video from Bisan Owda, a Gazan woman who has been attentively translating the genocide to Western viewership over social media (Al Jazeera, 118 2024; Owda, 2025). In her videos, she regularly references starvation as the ulti mate tool of the genocide, not just from interviews or observation, but informed by her own experience living off less than one meal a day (Owda, 2025). The usually positive Gazan child that grows vegetables from a rooftop garden tells me heâs hungry through my phone screen (@tasnemaaed), pleading for help to break the Israeli imposed blockade (Abusweilem, n.d.). I realized I hadnât seen the girl, Renad, who transforms the meager and basic food aid into traditional Palestinian dishes on my Instagram feed in a few months (Attallah, n.d.). I head to her page (@renadfromgaza) to see that instead of making maqluba or musakhan âThe Gazan wayâ, her last cooking post was about making bread from packets of dried macaroni. She tells us in a recent post that there is nothing edible to eat, that she is starving. Sharif (2024) uses Renad as an example of how âcooking food in the context of its scarcity is work for survival against genocide that conjures an Indigenous ethos of presence, longevity, and durability.â The grocery shops are empty and essential food item prices have skyrocketed. One year after October 7th, 25kg of flour costs up to $1,000 USD in the north of Gaza, and $150 in the south, prices for vegetables, eggs, and sugar and also extremely and disproportionately high given the majority of refugees that are starving are not able to work or earn stable wages during the genocide (Chughtai & Humaid, 2024). According to UN estimates, over 875 Palestinians have died trying to access food, the majority dying in and around the limited aid hubs backed by Israel and the US in the past couple months, from gunshots, as well as from other injuries (UN News, 2025). In Bisanâs video that I see on my Instagram feed, she holds an apple while telling us her dreams of the blockade ending and Gazans getting access to food once more. The apple in her hand was ânot even from Gaza or Palestineâ but came from international doctors who brought it 119 along with them across the blockade. As she takes a bite into that apple, itâs not just the words and the statistics and figures she gives us day in and day out, she is communicating to us through her whole body. I see her eyes dewy and the smile on her face as she takes that first bite from the apple, âwallah (God), I almost forgot the taste,â she says to us, a visual relief takes over her body and she lets her shoulders drop and closes her eyes (Owda, 2025). During days spent at the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN) office, I would review impact reports about starvation in Gazaâthe public health implications, the children it has impacted, how food prices have been raised, and try to use that to aid grant applications to provide basic household subsistence farming materials to allow for some semblance of food sovereignty in a context where that is almost impossible. But during my work with APN, I grew to understand that the provision of food is not the sole aim, but instead the provision of agency over food is the ultimate goal. I observed that it was important that what was planted was relevant to the needs and contexts of the specific homes and farms they worked with. In APNâs initiative Revive Gazaâs Farmland they have planted various fruit trees, olive trees, sweet and spicy varieties of peppers, cucumbers, eggplants, and more (The Arab Group for the Protection of Nature, n.d.). The UN Environment Programme (2025) reported that between October 7th, 2023, and September 2025, Israel destroyed 97% of Gazaâs tree crops, 95% of shrubland, and 82% of its annual crop yields, offences that specifically targeted Gazaâs most fertile and productive farmlands, greenhouses, and orchards (Lakhani, 2025). While preparing a grant application related to the initiative, I remember asking why they continue to provide infrastructure and seeds to these farmers whose farms will inevitably be destroyed or forcibly displaced. My supervisor told me that it is a matter of dignity. Itâs worth it for them to grow the produce they choose and 120 maintain the communities facilitated through local food systems for as long as they can, even with the knowledge that it could be destroyed in a matter of weeks or days. Growing locally significant foods amidst the ecocide and famine in Gaza brings the words âwe will stay on this land as long as olives and zaâatar remain,â into practice, actively fighting for Palestinian sumud through maintaining a connection to the land. 4.3 Unpacking My Metabolic Literacy It all comes back to the land. The blessings and shared meals, the traditional knowledge of making zaâatar and cooking with olives, and the seeds arriving in small packages to be planted in Balsamâs Garden. Blackmore suggests that eating from the land (and waterways) is a way to be connected to it, to care for the environment, and that rings true in the instance of these women, who clearly understand Palestinian land as a present way of life, a history, and a future so much it is embodied, emotional, and every day for them to exercise this care. Shihar told me (also quoted in Chapter 3): âThe sick plant, a neglected, dusty plant, makes me sad. When itâs mistreated, uprooted, it breaks my heart. When an ancient olive tree is cut or burned, I cannot get over it.â For Miriam, the olive tree lives within her, her identity resonating in its resilience: âThe olive tree, always resilient and evergreen. I feel my spirit and personality align with the olive tree. The older it gets, the more it gives.â There is a deep care for the land, a persistence and longing for olive trees, zaâatar, pomegranates, and oranges reflected in these processes. In the way Balsam allows some 121 eggplants and bitter melons from Al Quds and Deir Bezuit to overripen on the vine so she can save the seeds for another season of the vegetables. But as this chapter traces, care more saliently comes through in the memories, in the love for people and Palestine. The processes I traced in this chapter are more so manifestations of care, different from Blackmoreâs interrogation of metabolic literacy as something that cultivates care through a more reflexive exercise. For these women, care began decades, even centuries ago, and has been passed down through traditions of food and medicine. This is maintenance of care across borders. This became clear to me by seeing the values and actions at the steps of sourcing, preparing, and consuming the plants and their food and medicinal manifestations. So maybe unpacking the metabolic literacy of care relates more to me, someone just learning these processes, without a preexisting connection to Palestinian landscapes or traditions? As I learn how food and plants maintain ties to Palestine, it seems more apt to ask how this has shaped my own sense of care in this context, and what that means. I was offered and ate the maqluba Renad could not, amidst 24/7 news of Gaza, in Miriamâs kitchen. It was a dissonant momentâeating and hearing the story of Miriam learning maqluba while people in Gaza starved, forced to eat unfamiliar foods out of necessity. Iâll never know the full story, but in learning the care put into sourcing, cooking, and eating Palestinian food, I began to understand the depth of starvation. I understand that weaponized starvation will persist intergenerationally, in physical bodies, memory, and trauma. I understand the emotional toll of waiting decades for new olive trees to mature, to gather new stories and memories. I understand that rebuilding and return require patience and imagination. Before, I entered this fieldwork with rage, with statistics, numbers of people killed, injured, starved, land occupied, trees burnt. I still feel rage, but it feels rooted in an initial 122 understanding of care. It is fig season in Vancouver. Overripe figs are pressed into the sidewalks by heavy footsteps, swarmed by bees and flies. I think of Miriam, whose grandfatherâs land was mostly figs. I remember the way she smiled into the pot of molokhea she was making, as she told me her grandfatherâs house was famous for its fig trees, which she played amongst as a child. âThose were such beautiful days on the farm, truly wonderful.â She reached for dried figs to share with me as she spoke. As we sat chewing, I ingested both the fig and with it, her stories and tether to the fruit. Now, standing before the fig tree on my street, Iâm transported back to her kitchen, imagining her grandfatherâs grove. Feelings bubble up: the anger I feel that she canât drive to her grandfatherâs home and pluck figs, the wasted fruit taunting my persisting unease about the starvation in Gaza as I write about Palestinian food. Yet there is also happiness in remembering my time with Miriam abetted by a curiosity and a perhaps overeager romanticization of her grandfatherâs farm. This fig tree holds so much, not only as my own living archive, but as testimony to the power of storytelling in cultivating care. This fig makes me care for Miriam, for the figs in Palestine, for her grandfatherâs farm. The stories in this chapter reveal how difficult it is to access Palestinian land and plants, and the importance of trying to access them anyway. Metabolic literacy, here, was for me. I do think the way I understand the conflict is rooted in a personal tether to Miriam, Shihar, and Balsam. But how can that care manifest? Maybe this work is the care I can offer for now. Maybe itâs bringing friends in the U.S. a taste of meals and stories given to me first by these women, carrying my memories into practices of connection across borders. Maybe itâs sharing an understanding of these meals as acts of resistance, joy, and griefârefusing to let them, or the people who make them, be reduced to 123 statistics or forgotten under siege. Maybe itâs insisting that food, like land and tradition, belongs to those who tend it with love. And maybe, even across distance and loss, care can still be shared through food. Maybe itâs just sitting and listening to the soft bubbling of molokhea as we talk about our day. 124 5 Conclusion Writing this thesis from my home has been an odd exercise in memory. I have the moments, the looks, the quotes written in my notebook and echoed in audio recordings, but I am missing the core ingredient of this thesisâthe sensory encounters. I couldnât revisit the tastes and scents of certain dishes, fruits, and flowers. I couldnât remember or do it the same justice as how I remembered feeling in that moment. And as I wrote, I realized that even as a foreigner, I took so many parts of the fieldwork experience for granted. I thought to myself, I should have taken more pictures, tried more food, sat down and really wrote about the smells, tastes, and especially the sounds. But it seems so trivial that this is my main concern, because I know Iâll be back. I missed the persimmon season in my po po and gong gongâs backyard last year because I was in Amman. While the pictures of the hundreds of ripened fresh persimmons taunted me, I knew it would be there next year for me to enjoy. For so many Palestinians, returning to the scents, tastes, sights of Palestine are not the same given or natural expectation. Those that have never been to Palestine might not get the chance to feel the coarse bark on ancestrally cultivated olive trees. They have been robbed of their right of return, the right to live safely on the land, and even it seems, the right to be outraged. This thesis was meant to show what lies at the intersection between plants, identity, and displacement for Miriam, Balsam, and Shihar, and explore some of the intergenerational considerations considering these findings. What I found is that the memories of plants, the physical engagement with them and their related knowledges, keeps them emotionally tethered to the landscape and the people on it with them. In Chapter 3. The sensory elements of herbs, 125 fruit, vegetables, and flowers constituted comparisons and pathways of remembering and imagining the landscapes of Palestine. This is framed as a political act, in a moment where the separation from tasting, feeling, smelling these plants are not just a product of settler colonialism, but an active tactic in attempting to erase the Palestinian footprint and tethers to the land. For the younger focus group that had never been to Palestine, plants constitute a sense of belonging, crucial to their desire for return and more overt politicization of these plants. These plants also help to forge a sense of possibility and imagined futures. In Chapter 4. The processes in which women enact with plants reveals itself as processes to maintain active connection with people, knowledges, and the current political moment of the weaponization of starvation and genocide in Gaza. Their choices with regards to where they source their ingredients, how they prepare foods, and the process of consuming and sharing is coloured with forms of care that extend across militarized borders and decades of memory. And for myself, eating the product of months of planning, sourcing, and prepping provided me with an emotional connection to my surroundings in how they remind me of these women. 5.1 Limitations and Future Research Avenues This thesis has several limitations and opportunities for future research to build on it. Therefore, I cannot make any novel or overarching conclusions as to the nature of Palestinian womenâs relationships with plants and foods. What I was able to do, was observe my participants individual relationships in conversation with current literatures that I highlighted. But even then, the literatures are specific, and there are several angles that remain open and are imperative in exploring this broad topic. I also only interviewed three women and held one focus group. Future 126 research could be done with more participants and be more intentional with the role of gender in food and plant relationships. Additionally, there were social differences between the participants that could have been given more attention. The three women came from different regions of Palestine and arrived in Amman at different stages of their lives which are factors that likely shaped both their relationships to Palestinian identity and their experiences with the Israeli state. My own relationships with each woman also varied: I shared several meals at Miriamâs home, only once at Shiharâs, and with Balsam only in a café. Initially, I worried that this unevenness might compromise the interviews and findings. Yet, the life history approach, framed through food and plants, fostered intimacy, vulnerability, and laughter across all encounters. At the same time, their narratives were inevitably shaped by their different social positions, revealing class dimensions that I did not explore in depth here. I did, however, observe class dynamics in my engagements and interviews with these women, particularly in terms of how significant produce was available to them. One participant who was from a lower socio-economic position relied heavily on family members providing gifts of goods from Palestine and bought from big box grocery stores with lower prices. Another participant of a higher socio-economic position had recently aquired a swath of land to grow fruits and vegetables of their own. These class differences were also apparent in the settings of the various interviews, the narration of fellaheen versus madaniyeen, what was eaten, how it was prepared (homecooked versus restaurant ordered). The influence of class on food practices and the formation of diasporic identity would be an important avenue for future research. Especially, as it pertains to understanding impactful food aid initiatives for diasporic Palestinians of lower socio-economic positions. Another consideration and future avenue of research is regarding the intergenerational 127 narration of identity. While the focus group highlighted how themes from the womenâs stories resonated with younger generations, I did not examine these dynamics within the family unit itself. Family members were present in peripheral ways through interjections, translating when needed, and sharing meals. However, they were not explicitly interviewed. Future research might explore how Palestinian identity is more directly narrated and transmitted through food and plants across generations within the household. 5.2 Zeit wa Zaâatar (Olive Oil and Zaâatar) I will return to a story Shihar shared with me when we began our first interview to conclude this thesis. As I mentioned, Shihar was 10 years old when she left Nablus for the last time, moving to live in Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, before settling down in Jordan with her husband to focus on her career. When I asked her how she feels close to her Palestinian identity, she impassionedly remarks, âI'm Palestinian because there's injustice, and I want to bring out the word Palestine all the time. But deep inside me, as I told you, I am also in love with Lebanon, with Syria, with Iran.â Like her father, Shihar is a strong believer in the Pan-Arab cause, and that manifests in her sense of belonging to the region, telling me âI find myself at home wherever I go, in an Arab speaking country, really, Tunis, Iraq, wherever.â Having left Palestine from such a young age and spending time in these countries during formative years would of course permeate oneâs identity, I thought to myself. But I kept coming back to the quote âI am Palestinian because thereâs injustice.â One day, early on in our conversations, we sat across her desk from each other. The mood was a little stale, she was very busy, evident by me entering her office to her finishing up a phone call and writing up notes, she had scheduled me into her workday. I started our chat by calling back to 128 our previous one the week before, âItâs so amazing you have these emotions and memories of Nablus, thatâs powerful, I canât remember my life in much detail before I was ten, yet you have all these vivid stories,â I exclaimed to her, looking over the notes and drawings I had jotted in our last meeting. She smiled and leaned towards me, her hands clasped together, âdo you remember when I told you I went back to Nablus 30 years after I left? With a UN program?â I nodded, recalling the brief moment in our last meeting. âI went back to see the herbal shops with an adult eye, and I was drawn into the old market,â she paused and inhaled deeply âYou know, itâs full of these beautiful old tables and stalls, and I stop into one of them. This old man, the shopkeeper, asked for my family name, and I told him. He told me âI know your familyââ She paused, glanced away from our sustained eye contact with a big smile on her face then leaned forward on the table to continue, âI thought to myself, Oh my God, this is home. He continued to name my father and uncle that I used to buy from him, I kept thinking to myself, Oh my godâ I shared in her surprise, I felt my mouth hanging a little open. I felt a lump in my throat, my nose tingling at the thought of this unexpected reunion. A connection made with this vendor by her father, now passed down to her. âThis is proof that this is ours. The memories, and people remembering your family, in that moment, I was in love. I said Palestine was always in my mind, in my heart, but now it's in my eyes. And I think this was the biggest gift God gave me.â I reached out my hands and she took them, and we sat there for a couple seconds as I took in the emotional weight of what return meant for Shihar, 30 years after leaving. 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In this session, Iâd love to hear about the places you've lived in and some memories of stories you have of these places. 1. Can you tell me a little bit about where you and your family are from? a. Where are your parents from? Have you visited where they are from? Can you describe these places to me? What are these places known for? 2. Can you draw me a family tree? What are your earliest memories with each person? a. If you had to assign a plant to each person, what would you assign and why? 3. Letâs think back to your childhood, what are some of the earliest memories you have? a. What plants do you associate with your childhood/earliest memories/growing up? b. Can you tell me a memory from your childhood that features plants? c. What was a typical day in your childhood? i. When did that routine change? What was it replaced by? 4. How do you feel when you think about the landscape you grew up on? a. Have you always felt that way? 5. How do you remember the different landscapes you grew up on? Can you describe them to me? a. Can you draw them for me? Letâs start with the one from your childhood we were talking about earlier. b. What do you miss the most from these landscapes? c. How have you noticed any of them change over the years? i. Why, what has this caused in your observations? Part II- Displacement For this interview, we will be discussing your memories of settling in Amman. 1. What is the story of your relocation? a. Kept broad to allow for participant to be as specific as they want to i. Key points- when, with whom, and how? 2. Before moving, what was your perception of Jordan and Amman? 143 3. What were your first impressions of Jordan? Of Amman? a. Population, surroundings, aid, food, etc. 4. What are some of the first memories you have in Amman? a. How do these memories make you feel? 5. When my grandmother fled to Portland from Vietnam after the Vietnam war, she planted a persimmon tree in her backyard because they grew everywhere in Vietnam and made her feel like home. What made you feel most at home/comfortable when you first moved to Amman? 6. Can you describe your daily routine in the early days of living in Amman? 7. What was your community in Amman like? Do you have any stories of how family or community supported you in settling in Amman? Part III- Present day experiences In this interview, we will be discussing your present day experiences, routines, and engagement with plants. 1. What are your favorite parts of your current home? Of Amman? a. What do you do at this spot? Do you have any stories associated with it? b. Could you draw it for me? 2. What is your current daily routine like? 3. What plants do you associate with Palestine these days? a. Make a chart perhaps? Do some drawings of said plants? b. Do you use these plants at all in the current day? How do you use/get them? 4. What plants do you associate with Jordan specifically? a. Why do you associate these plants with Jordan? Where can you find them? 5. What things or activities remind you of Palestine? a. What makes you feel close to your identity i. Who do you engage in this activity with? 6. What are three words you would use to describe yourself? Or what three traits do you desire to be? a. Why? Is there a story or examples of you inhabiting these traits? 7. What things frighten you right now? And what things give you hope in light of this fear? Part IV- Reflection 1. Can you tell me about the women in your family? Who are they? What are they like? a. What are some teachings that you remember getting from the women in your family? i. Any teaching specific to gardening, cooking, or plants in general? ii. How have you incorporated it in your life? iii. Who do you intend to pass your knowledge to? iv. Why will you pass it on? 144 b. What is the most important/used teaching youâve received? 2. Can you teach me something? 3. What is a plant that gives you happy memories? Your favorite plant? 4. What is a plant that reminds you of sad times? Why? 5. If you were to choose a plant to symbolize yourself, what would it be and why? 6. If you were to choose a plant that symbolizes Palestine, what would it be, and why? **Cooking interview session In this interview session where I would be supervising and learning to cook a dish with my participant, I would mainly ask questions about the specific ingredients/plants she uses in the process, what memories she has with them, how to use them, who taught her to use them etc.
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Resources, Environment and Sustainability
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Harris, Leila
In the scent of jasmine and flavours of maqluba : plants, foods, and connection among diasporic Palestinian women and youth in Amman, Jordan
Text