“These seeds are us. We are these seeds."
Palestinians are teaching me what joyful kinship with the Land truly means.
On January 31st, the Chicago City Council narrowly passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. This is undoubtedly due to the mass mobilization of the people, especially the Chicago Public Schools students who staged a walkout the day before the vote (who are now being targeted for their participation by the Department of Education), the countless people calling representatives & sending emails, and the many many demonstrators who’ve been marching for months now shouting ‘Free, Free Palestine’ throughout the city. This is a small victory on the way to a Free Palestine, but I celebrate it nonetheless. As I sit with how stubbornly slow the U.S. war machine is bending to the people’s will, I am battling with such deep despair.
How do I hold the loss of 100 people let alone over 30,000 confirmed dead (as of 8 Mar 24), at least half of them children? How do I will my body to take action against the crushing agony of such suffering? How does one wrap the mind around the reality of ongoing daily, hourly genocidal acts? I don’t know if we can — if the mind has the capacity to hold it all, but I’m doing all I can. I listen and I learn. I cry. I talk about it. I condemn these atrocities. I dedicate myself to remaining present to what’s unfolding. I invite people to join me in boycotting. And of particular importance, I seek to understand the people who make up this obscenely large number of martyred and murdered. When I go there, to the place of nurturing kinship and connection - my spirit is always spurred to action. It is through this engagement that I have become awestruck and inspired by the values, dignity, and power of the Palestinian people and their cultures.
It is such a precious gift we have been given in generosity - that Palestinians so openly share their stories and their life-ways with us. I understand this too is an act of urgent preservation - the occupation mercilessly targets cultural institutions, libraries, schools, archives, and museums but nevertheless my gratitude is profound. What is happening now in Gaza, the West Bank, and over the last 75 years in Falastin is of incredible importance to our struggles globally for sovereignty and liberation. Falastin is home to an indigenous population that has cared for these lands for time immemorial. The people of this land are a people who adamantly assert and implore us to understand that land is us and we are the land. What happens to us is remembered by the land and what is done to the land is felt within our bodies. The separation is nonexistent. This is a truth I had forgotten until my ancestors called me back to it several years ago. It is my daily prayer that we all remember this blessing and truth in this lifetime. The people of Falastin give me hope that this mass remembering, my prayer, can be realized.
When I think of this in an embodied way, I think of the farmer defending the bulldozing of ancient olive trees. He is protecting his kin, his body, his life, their stories together, and the life of this being that has sustained him and the generations before him. The sacred bond between the people and the land in Falastin must be fought for with our whole hearts, our most cunning imaginations, and an unshakeable force of will. More than an end of the genocidal acts, we must demand a complete and total end to the occupation. What is unfolding before us is a dot in a vast landscape of global extraction and death making that will destroy us all if it continues unabated. From Cop City, Atlanta to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Sudan to Tigray to Haiti to Jackson, Mississippi - the environmental and human toll of capitalist greed and settler colonialism is mounting exponentially every day. Many people have articulated these struggles much more eloquently than I can and with deeper specificity - if you need help understanding go listen to or read their words.
I’m here to speak on my deep gratitude for the Palestinian people’s love for their land and the joy they conjure through this love - within themselves, between each other, on the land, and in the culture. This bond and belonging is not only a formidable force in their hope and persistence for liberation but is the connective tissue to the steadfast solidarity we’ve witnessed from them for Black liberation, for climate justice, and for an end to militarized colonialist rule the world over. Despite my words up til now, this is not a mournful piece. Falastin and its people do not need our pity nor our platitudes. The land and the people need our commitment and endurance. They need the best we have to offer and an unshakeable insistence on caring for the whole no matter how dire the circumstances may be. What is needed is for a love to blossom within us that transcends nation state and borders, so we understand finally and fully that nobody’s free until everybody’s free”.1 So, consider this my small contribution to showing that love. This writing is a celebration and exaltation - a prayer for a world that can transcend its human failings and as Vivien Sansour put it to “keep perspective that my spirit must be above this. That my spirit that is under attack might win by maintaining its ability to love, to be tender, to bring forth a new vision and to, hopefully, interrupt the human cycle of so much, so much bloodshed.”2
In pursuit of this celebration, I looked to the meaning of the keffiyeh, which led me to Tatreez, and then to the wonder that is Majdalawi weaving - a tradition that may be erased from the planet in the ongoing genocide (its keepers were displaced to Gaza and then displaced again after October 7th). Somewhere between tatreez, majdalawi, and a Palestinian solidarity playlist, I came across the work of Vivien Sansour and the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. If you know me, you know I love seeds and cherish seedkeeping. While listening to a conversation from One Million Experiments with Vivien Sansour about the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, I wept again and again. What is shared by Vivien in this conversation are recipes for spiritual fortitude and offerings for how to keep our hearts open while we fight fiercely for freedom. As I listened, I felt inspired to create so I began an experiment. It is a meditation, a grief practice, and a map to wrap my mind around what is happening in Gaza. A way to endure and bear witness presently alongside the ongoing calls to action like divestment, fundraising, disruption to business-as-normal, and direct actions. The spark for this began with kites, then grew in the daily greeting to a memorial installation for martyred journalists at my studio, and was birthed in gazing at a bucket of seeds while listening to Vivien’s poignant and beautiful truth about our kinship with seeds.
“These seeds are us. We are these seeds.. I knew that these seeds had been loved and cared for and passed down over thousands of years by my grandparents and great grandparents. [W]ho understood this concept that this little seed could be so generous that it actually gives its life to become one big gourd that then feeds a family and then [it] gives birth to more seeds that feed hundreds more.”3
Our seeds are an extension of us, a part of the body that lives beyond us. Every life taken in Gaza is a seed that does not get to go on to love and be loved, to care and be cared for, or to birth a new life that can sustain hundreds more. I need to understand what that means in my body. Not over a screen, not translated into digits and figures — a visual, tactile recording in real time of the tragedies unfolding. So I am laying seeds every day in a furious attempt to fathom what 30,000 and counting dead really feels and looks like — I lay each seed out, side-by-side, preserved in wax like a burial shroud and pray for the person that it represents, for their kin still living, and the land that is mourning their spirit’s departure. I pray that soon, soon I’ll have reason to peel these from their encasement and plant them to honor the martyrs and murdered.
But I refuse to do that until we know the killing has ceased. Until we know that aid is available to all, until it is known that the people can return to their lands. These seeds are being laid to affirm and remind me of this truth: Palestine is still here, the people are alive & the land can heal. Miraculously, we still have the opportunity to see a liberated Palestine in our lifetimes. Each one is a prayer to affirm and remember “that even though the intention of the political system is to kill us, death does not exist. We continue to be here. We continue to exist. We continue to love and we continue, most importantly, to be generous even when it doesn’t feel good… because you hope the seed next to you even if it’s a stranger’s seed would also be inspired by that generosity to give back, to be alive — it’s how you give life.”4
This action will not liberate Falastin or its people but it does keep me awake to their humanity, their dignity, and the wisdom they share with us through their stories, their seeds, their love for the land. It allows me to take on the opportunity we all have: to remain alive in a world so keen on killing our spirits while we yet live. I refuse to deaden my heart to such suffering and call it life. I refuse to turn away when my neighbor is being massacred to extract from the land. I must remain diligent in the pursuit of freedom and liberation for all because if I do nothing or fall to silence or turn away — they have won the battle for my heart & my mind. So as fuel for us all, I am sharing a few moments of joy, a few sources of awe, and a few threads to follow to see Palestinians as they are — intricate, complex peoples who somehow hold steadfast to love, kinship, land, and culture because they know - where so many of us have forgotten - that these are the riches of life. We must thank the people of Falastin with our actions for these reminders — that to remain alive in suffering and at the threat of extermination, requires a tender care and deep remembering of who we are to each other and how we are never separate from the land.
Keep looking, keep fighting, stay present with me. Each person calling for ceasefire, for an end to the occupation brings us closer to a Free Palestine in our lifetimes. I hope these offerings bring you joy that fuels your actions.
Palestinian Solidarity Playlist
Palestinian Poster Project Archives
Palestine Heirloom Seed Library
The Black-Palestinian dabke that changed my life in 2014
Fannie Lou Hamer “Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free,”: Speech Delivered at the Founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus, Washington, D.C., July 10, 1971
Vivien Sansour in conversation with AirGo & Interrupting Criminalization on “One Million Experiments Part 18: Palestine Heirloom Seed Library with Vivien Sansour” November 2023
Vivien Sansour in conversation with AirGo & Interrupting Criminalization on “One Million Experiments Part 18: Palestine Heirloom Seed Library with Vivien Sansour” November 2023
Vivien Sansour in conversation with AirGo & Interrupting Criminalization on “One Million Experiments Part 18: Palestine Heirloom Seed Library with Vivien Sansour” November 2023
Your words are Powerful. Visceral. Electric and alive. Thank you.
“I must remain diligent in the pursuit of freedom and liberation for all because if I do nothing or fall to silence or turn away — they have won the battle for my heart & my mind.” — one of my favorite lines