Where the Thread Begins

I grew up around thobes before I understood that they were archives.

My mother was, and still is, a collector of them. I watched her find each one as though she had discovered a pot of gold: a Majdal thobe, a Bir al-Sabi’ thobe, a dress heavy with thread and history, held up with the pride of someone who knew its worth could never be measured only in fabric. To her, each thobe carried something sacred. A village. A woman’s hand. A lost room. A surviving language.

Now I am making my own.

The Stitch Remembers begins with a Palestinian woman of diaspora trying to stitch her way back into the parts of herself that exile, migration, silence, and survival have scattered. I was born in Kuwait, grew up between Palestine and Canada, and inherited both beauty and rupture. My known ancestral records reach only as far back as my great-grandparents, who lived in Rantis, a small Palestinian village I was fortunate enough to visit. I carry deep honour that I stood there. I also carry grief, because so much of my lineage has been erased from story, memory, and certainty. I do not know if Rantis is where we truly come from, or whether it was another stop in a longer history of displacement. I feel sadness in that not-knowing, and a tenderness for everything my family carried without being able to pass fully into words.

This thobe is where I begin anyway.

Each stitch is an athar (أثر) — a trace of what remains. Through thread, memory, and return, I am making a garment, a memoir, and a map back to myself.