Palestinian homes in diaspora transform the archive from something passive into a living thing. A form of resistance against genocidal erasure that we continue to witness from every corner of our eyes and our minds.

As I am writing, I am watching peoples homes and fields in Lebanon, in Iran, in Gaza burned down and evacuated. Memories that live within the cracks of the floors eviscerated. All that remains from the stories and belongings that survived generations, gone.

Yet even when they try to blow up all traces of our story, it still hides in a photograph framed in the corner of someone’s home.

I came to California this week with my father to help my mom pack up her parents home for the last time. It makes sitting here with her, sorting through clothes, boxes, photographs, notes, portraits even more precious.

Making my way through my Grandparents library I came across Walid Khalidi’s comprehensive, and landmark book entitled “All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948”. I was debating how I could carry it back to New York, when I saw the news that Walid Khalidi passed away. One of the most prolific recorders of Palestinian collective memory, documenting the villages that existed prior to our Nakba in all its major and minor detail. The book’s dedication reads:

Finding the book at this particular time haunts me.

My grand father who we call Sido in Arabic, bought me my first video camera - a Sony handicam that i kept in my back pack at all times. He encouraged me to make movies but little did I know he had a mass of tapes of his own tucked away too.

In Sido’s office, he stored binders of photographs upon photographs. My last most vivid memory of him before he passed away, was when I visited in 2022. He had trouble speaking, moving, and keeping his memory, but he came over one night carrying an envelope of photographs. I helped him open each one and we began to go through the images.

Some of the photos were taken by a local photographer “S. SAHAR photographer and photo dealer Jerusalem New Gate” of his childhood home in Katamon Jerusalem. In one picture, he is standing in front of the family house with his siblings. In another photo, a different family home is in rubble. Bombed by Jewish gangs prior to 1948. He later printed photos from an Israeli website documenting the reconstruction of the bombed house into an apartment for incoming Israeli occupiers.

One thing that struck me, other than his meticulous tracking, are all the copies. He made so many copies of each photo, so I assume he was building a case. I wish I could have asked him why he made so many copies? Who were they for?

Maybe the copies were for us and that is enough.

ما كتب الشاعر نزار قباني سطور حبٍّ رقيقٍ وصريح….

There’s a book of Nizar Qabbani poetry that Sido gifted to his wife, Silvia Muna. Tucked inside is a note written on a piece of paper from Middle East Airlines. He writes: “what the poet Nizar Qabbani wrote are lines of tender and sincere love.” He misses his family, describing his long hours working in Kuwait with an oil company from 5am till 8pm. He checks in on his kids, his practical and efficient tone masks the loneliness. He ends the letter with love for Silvia—a love he hopes will endure even after he is gone.

In the morning, my dad disappears to the backyard to pick Eskidinya (Loquat) fruit. My grandfather planted six Eskidinya trees, which are thriving. My parents laugh that even the birds have had their fill and stopped eating.

Sido planted pomelo, eskidinya, jasmine, lemon, grapevines, and passionflower. They continue to live long after he passed away, carrying his memory—and his Jerusalem.

There’s a photo that sits above where Sido’s office used to be. Its one of the lasting photos commemorating the anniversary of the Intifada, a child absorbs the shock of a rubber bullet wile carrying the Palestinian flag.

The photo is a newspaper clipping, probably from the LA times. He has another clipping from Gaza - Jamal al-Durrah and his 12-year-old son, Muhammad, who was killed by an Israeli sniper while his father tried to protect him.

I see these images and wonder how this man could have existed in Thousand Oaks California. This is a place that never fails to stun me with its Americana, where life happens through cars and the only people walking the neighborhood are out with their dogs. A relatively conservative man, sometimes voted republican, loved American football, and wore baseball caps. That same man, saved newspaper clippings of Palestinian Martyrs, and never let go of his culture or his history.

As my mother and I decide what to keep and what to give away, it feels like we are working through a museum.

“Which tatreez pillow do you want in New York?”

“Will you wear this thobe?”

“Do you want these Egyptian dresses? They are good for the summer”

“Remember this album by DAM?” side note, that DAM album is iconic.

“Do you want this book with a history of Arabic phrases”

“Or this book entitled “the water resources of Transjordan and their development?”

“How about a full poker set that weighs 10 pounds”

“DVD’s of My Big Fat Greek Wedding or Rana’s Wedding by Hany Abu Assad?”

“This alternate side parking sign that sido found at a flee market and thought was funny” I said, “he finds it funny because he never had to move his car twice a week like some of us”

“Do you want it?”

It’s heart breaking but we can’t keep everything. Our family is split up all over the world. Carrying anything from one place to another is met with a set of calculations measuring weight and “willthisfitinyoursuitcase” alongside sentimental value.

Don’t hate me, but a lot of things ended up in the bright blue bins outside the Thousand Oaks Goodwill. If you are reading this and thinking “why Hana! After you just told this whole emotional story about these precious items being all we have to hold on to after displacement” well you are welcome to come back and find it. I like to think about someone walking into the Will finding a piece of our heritage on sale for 5.99 one day.

Let’s unpack this. I mean it’s a lot of work to clean your parents house! My family are taking on a mighty task that is not for the faint of heart. الله معهم ويعطيهم صبر

All these photographs, chairs, tables, martini glasses, tatreez, dresses, and poker sets are paths. The threads that hold the fabric together unwind into a tale of their own. It’s the stories these items evoke that give them so much meaning. The stories that my grandfather illustrates with photos of his destroyed home, will continue to testify. He is not a victim of a horrific tragedy, but a witness with agency. Generations on, we will not forget, we will continue our story telling, and act.

If you doubt me, have you ever tried to say bye to an Arab at the end of the night? We won’t let you go till you have heard at least five new stories between the time you put your shoes on and grab the door knob handle to leave.

Writing quest: find an object in your family home, and write about the memory that inhabits it. I would love to hear from you!

“I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.”

Diving into the Wreck, by Adrienne Rich

What was the “story of the wreck” that sent me on this search, armed with a camera?

Ive been filming with my parents since 2017 as they tend to a garden a piece of land. In Shefa-Amr, Palestine, something Palestinian about the soil the Passiflora flower, or ساعة flower that led me to believe it can tell time.

but there’s a lot to unpack when the person behind the camera stops to ask themselves, “really, what do you actually see?” or “what are you looking for?”

There’s a neighborhood in Shefa-Amr where my aunt lives called Al-’Ayn العين or The spring. It was a famous natural source of water that nourished the vast farmlands surrounding the town prior to 1948. It was eventually closed so Israel could preserve ground water for their national project. Now, all that’s left is a sculpture by Ahmaad Canaan, and its a roundabout. Im interested in following both the photo of the spring, and the roundabout:

The idea of hauntology has been creeping into my mind recently. It started in the summer of 2025, a friend and I went to Beit Safafa in Jerusalem to visit The Fiction Council. I learned about the mythology of plants, the ghouls that inhabit mulberry trees. The idea of the ghoul has been vilified in mainstream media, as this bloody, soul-sucking, possessing spirit. But that has a lot to do with the imperialist settler society that doesn’t have an ancient past, and doesn’t know what it means to be haunted. So they invent their ghosts, just as they invent their ancient origin stories.

Really, the ghoul in the Middle East is very ordinary figure. A hidden companion أنس الخفي (for reference, read Ahmad Nabil’s Hidden Companions book) A person, part of a caravan crossing through the desert, wandered off and strayed away only to return as a spirit. In Nabil’s book, he talks about the garden courtyard and spirits that live among the everyday happenings of the household. There was once an elderly woman who had a mulberry tree in front of her home in Jerusalem. Mulberry trees have delicious fruit but are known for being messy as they shed leaves and the fruit stains the floor, yet the one in this woman’s home was always immaculate. When Nabil asked her about it, she said, matter-of-fact, the ghoul living in the tree was always cleaning under it.

In the area of hauntology, Derrida writes about how history is non-linear, our stories are shaped by this interweaving of the past and present. The presence of past people, events or places lingers, and sometimes the unresolved aspects carry across generations and reappear. Film in this way can be an arena where we dig up the past through archive, footage, film, papers and books in order to witness those loose strands of the past and begin to trace where they lead.

I am the first child, the eldest daughter, the older sister, Arab woman descendant. Born to a Palestinian family in New York City, I inherit my mother’s continued search for the right to return home, and my father’s frustration with returning to a place that is at once the source of all his love and all his anxiety.

I’ve sometimes felt like It’s a burden, always seen as the responsible one, practical, good listener, can defuse conflict. Why do I have to carry this, I complain? I still need to find the balance - knowing when it feels too heavy and how I can lighten up is something I am working on. Maybe I’ll take salsa class, I don’t know.

Anyways, being the big sister is also the kindling behind my creative work. It fuels me with this drive to sit in the ruins, to trace the places that exists in my family’s lore and investigate the wreckage even if I’m doing it alone. Even if I face an institution that is actively writing me out of the history. As Adrienne Rich says, the ladder has always been there.

The town of Shefa-Amr and its surrounding valley and fields has imprinted in my memory in a way I can’t describe. As Mahmoud Darwish calls it, looking out the window from the back seat of a car “land of myths.” It’s a place that has been traced repeatedly by colonial forces, pressing our flowers into a book about following Jesus’s footsteps in the holy land.

But, I’m more interested in the peasants and farmers who wore down the top soil so much that limestone started to poke through. Their traces in the landscape draw me in. The wheat mill once run by orthodox monks in Ras Ali, hugging the side of a hill. Every morning I look at the ruins of the fortress run by Daher Al Omar Al Zaydani. Sheikh, ruler or “the strong man of northern Palestine” known for securing the economic future of the Galilee and the cotton trade. He built this fortress on the ruins of a crusader one, some sources call it “the gate of the Galilee”. The memory of this economic hub is now overpowered by the sounds of kids on four wheeler motor bikes.

My parents and grandparents gifted me with an extensive visual archive of their past. One I am still watching and rewatching. Recently I have been woken up to a new reality - to also look outside the frame. If we only appreciate a picture for what it shows, we risk losing it’s poetry. This a book of myths in it’s own right. What my parents and their parents chose to film through the 70s and 80s is only a portion of their experience, it’s crafted a beautiful image, a story of loss and return. Yet, I am also interested in what they did not memorialize in the image.

Now, I take to task this book of myths. On two fronts: one is the myths of Palestine I grew up hearing from my family, that mystified me for so long and brought me back here. The other is the official narrative, the western imperial one that we are socialized and made faceless with.

I wrote a poem after I got pancakes with my friend on Sunday:

There's a melancholic feeling that will follow you wherever you go 
yearning that haunts for generations
No, عشق
a word that echoes down the throat
we somehow grieve places
we can only return to in memory
homes, fields 
covered in weeds that dont think twice about us 
trees that will bear fruit and betray us
these same trees that raised us
my eyelids are always slightly heavy
with the weight of this 
your love
for the place I found in a photograph 

I’ll conclude by setting the scene, I am back in Brooklyn, I just came back from Bethlehem, where I made a short film meditating on a lot of these thoughts called Adrift or على غير هدا, this is a little teaser to it:

More readings:

Diving into the WreckBy Adrienne Rich <https://www.brinkerhoffpoetry.org/poems/diving-into-the-wreck>

HIDDEN COMPANIONS (Arabic Edition) by Ahmad Nabil -https://radix.coop/product/hidden-companions-arabic-edition-by-ahmad-nabil/

The Lanterns of the King of Galilee: A Novel of 18th-Century Palestine by Ibrahim Nasrallah

A really extensive Wikipedia on Daher Al Umar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daher_al-Umar

The hauntological essay film: navigating historical memory and collective trauma in The Image You Missed <https://academic.oup.com/screen/article/66/3/324/8294366 >

The Natural History of Rape by Ariella Azoulay <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1470412918782340>

Write Down, I Am an Arab, 2014, film on Mahmoud Darwish

Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative Book by Isabella Hammad

Yesterday during a group session, I thought about this footage of my mother in Jerusalem in 1986 with her father. He points out a flower to her that he can’t remember. Several decades later, long after he passed away, I film her planting this flower in our garden in Shefa-Amr. I always felt a mix of grief for the loss for her Jerusalem home and joy that she was still planting this flower and kept her father’s memory alive.

As I slowly pronounced the words ألم و أمل (hope and pain) during class, not only did i realize that they look and sound the same, but that it’s the duality of the same image.

What class is she talking about you might ask? so, I recently was selected to participate with 12 other artists between Jordan and Palestine in a three month program in Bethlehem that collectively reimagines art and narrative in these times. We also make food and cocktails and DJ with Radio Al Hara.

Last week, Aboud Rawajbeh led us through a series of films, articles, and alternative engagements in Palestinian archive to figure out what sort of relationships are entwined in this: official narratives, institutional cataloguing, colonial tools, tools for oppression.

We also asked the question, how do we imagine the loss and absense in our collective history? We started with Azza Hasan’s “Kings and Extras” 2004

As Azza searches for the remains of the footage collected by the Palestine Film Unit traveling between Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Syria she eventually comes up with… well not a lot of footage. But when I watched this film I realized that what she documented, is the archive. The interviews with key members of the film unit, returning to the building in Lebanon where the films were stored, finding the exact apartment. She documents people and places that may not exist today, and adds to the legacy in the making of her film.

It made me think about a conversation I had with an editor recently on my film, she told me that the ongoing documentation of my town, my family, our daily practices becomes eventually an archive of its own.

In this way, we can approach the absense of archival footage as a way to imagine something new. To imagine alternative history. The last line of the 1996 film The Watermelon Woman, directed by and starring Cheryl Dunye “Sometimes you have to create your own history.” I havent seen the full film yet, but it was mentioned to us in the context of Queer film and recreating an archive anew to fill in for the absence.

Archive at the same time is a source of pain. What we do with the images we cant reclaim? The stories we were told that we can’t put pictures to? Sometimes stories that give us more dignity and heroism than what the news actually captures in our collective experience as Palestinians. I think that in the act of watching, we can take on a more active roll.

Tatreez for example, in my mind is a living archive. It’s kept alive by the millions of fingers that continously embroider and develop new motifs on the fabric. The garden too, it goes beyond planting for nostalgia, but its bringing life to these memories through the growth and the survival of our seeds.

Inspirational references from this week:

• Notre Music, John Luc Goddard, 2004 (feature film)

• Julian Brave Noisecat on Democracy Now , on the release of his book“We Survived the Night” October 14 2025

• A Portrait of Ga, Margaret Tait, 1952, (short film)

• Venus In Two Acts by Sadiyah Hartman (text)

• Working with Visual Remains by Azza Al Hassan (text)

• The Void Project by Azza Al Hassan

• Khalil Raad Exhibit at the Palestine Museum at Birzeit

  Subscribe now

Ursula K. Le Guin talks about narrative and story telling as being hyper focused on the actions of the hunter, and the flashy stuff that catches the eye, but nobody looks at how we carry these stories from one generation to the next. The basket that carries the grains on the journey from the field to the kitchen table. The embryo that carries life into existence. Here in Kufr Bira’am كفر برعم, there is a presence I can’t name. A tragic rupture and displacement, but the stories are preserved and maintained through time.

The stones that make up the magnificent mountain homes of Kufr Bira’am كفر برعم are a container that holds the spirit of the people who lived there. The stories that it evokes are taken out and shared from one generation to the next. The coffee pot that is also a case to bring people together to sit down, light a cigarette and start recalling memories, and asking questions. Ancestral recall. These stories keep the village alive, and the act of return ongoing.

Kufr Bira’am كفر برعم doesn’t feel haunted, it feels very much alive.

This week, I packed a backpack and met Riyad Ghantous on the side of a highway outside of Shefa-Amr. From there we went to Jish, and ate a lot of figs. Bright green on the outside and ruby red on the inside.

We arrived in Bira-am كفر برعم to meet organizers from Shabiba Bira’am, a youth movement part of a wider effort that was launched by activists in 1982 to organize the rights of return for Palestinians to their villages - part of that is the summer camps of return العودة. The people of Kufr Bira’am achieved the right to return to the remains of their village after they were forcibly expelled in the Nakba. The land was overtaken by the Israeli Nature and Parks authority, like in many Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed in 1948. They put picnic benches and let the weeds slowly grow over the remains of homes.

Bira’am is one of the few places where the ancestors of the village continue to tend to their homes, pray in their churches, and be buried in their cemetery. Though they can’t live there, they can be buried there.

In the morning, the organizers blasted Fairuz into the town square to wake up the rest of the kids.

I listened to the younger generation recall the names of the owners of the homes in Kufr Bira’am. The camaraderie they built after spending years and years returning together to camp in the town center, even though they are scattered now around cities like Akka and Haifa.

I think about how rare it is that we get to be surounded by people who lived through many decades before us, often in spaces in nyc ,I am around those my age or younger, we’re all dreaming of something better but rarely do we get to sit and talk about the past.

I thought of this phrase “If these stones could talk” what would they say? here, the stones are singing, louder than most places I’ve been. With the generations that persist and resist any efforts to erase their history and their names from these stones.

More:

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1986: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/mirror/u/uk/ursula-k-le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction.pdf

Welcome To Kafr Bir’im: https://www.palestineremembered.com/Safad/Kafr-Bir’im/

The video is produced, edited and filmed by me

The Song is “lullaby for nature” by Firas Zreik

I am a story weaver: I weave together the threads of archive, memory, film, language into a narrative that can reflect our lives and imagine alternative futures. It takes a long time to make a film, so I will share my thoughts along the way and all the minor and major deviations…

My name is Hana Elias, and I was raised in New York City, and the rest of the world. My father grew up in Shefa-Amr شفاعمرو and this town has always been a mystery for me. I started making a film called “If These Stones Could Talk” once my parents built a home here and began tending to a garden that has become the 5th member of our family.

I am writing to you now from شفاعمرو and can report that the more time I spend here, the more questions I have and the more I discover that I dont know. About the town, my family, about this region of Palestine, the vague ‘north’ or Galilee or داخل or 48. So this whole “what is your film about” question is just throwing me off…

There is a history here that I never lived, and it haunts me. My mothers family were refugees from Jerusalem in the Nakba, and there is a history that she lost as she tries to replant and search. For my father, he is making up for lost time, his time in the wilderness of NYC. My brother is currently in NYC and I havent talked to him about it, but to be continued.

I’d like to share this quote from the writer Anthony Shadid on finding home, “it is the curse of a generation always looking for something more, something better. Yet we search, sometimes without realizing it. I knew I wanted my own sense of bayt (home) and that is what has drawn me here”

I found a bag of photographs that my dad left for me in my room. I can’t recognize the faces of the people in these photos, but they are full of life - sharing a sequence below

As I visit places, im taking note:

دير المحرقه Muhraqa Monastery, watermelons, and pagan saints

Located outside of Haifa, on mount Carmel. I was not raised on biblical stories but this one is interesting. St.Elias came to mount Carmel, inhabited by worshipers of Ba’al. Ba’al was a Canaanite god that brought life and fertility, and plenty of crops rain and all the goodness. Elias challenged the priests of Ba’al to prove who the true god was, so they each set up their own sacrificial altar and each asked god to set it on fire - only Elias’s alter went up in flames proving there was one god. He then slaughtered all the pagan priests. There is a big statue in the monestary of St.Elias slaughtering the Ba’alite pagans. Yet despite this act of mass killiling, decimation, erasure, the term Ba’al / بعل lives in our culture in a very ordinary way. I’ve heard the word Ba’al used when people describe the process of tending to rainfed crops, melons that survive off of rain and ground water with no irrigation. بعل بتيخة - It is an ancient tradition and method of planting in harmony with nature that makes the fruit tastier and sweeter. So, Baal still lives and is loved in the language, and our traditions.

so that is a thought. I might post a lot of thoughts here but hopefully a thread will emerge.

The title of this substack is inspired by Tawfiq Ziyad, Palestinian politician, activist, poet from Nazareth, this is the whole poem

“I shall carve the name of every stolen plot
And where the village boundaries lay;
What homes exploded,
What trees uprooted, what tiny wildflowers crushed.
All this to remember. And I’ll keep on carving
Each act of this my tragedy, each phase of the catastrophe,
All things, minor and major,
On an olive tree in the courtyard of my home.”

Cover image comes from A Plate of Sardines طبق السردين، (documentary, Omar Amiralay, 1997)

Subscribe now