On Nakba Day … the first athar (أثر)

Today is Nakba Day.

And today, I begin The Thobe Project.

I do not know how to hold the weight of that without feeling something move through me.

For many years, I carried Palestine quietly. Sometimes proudly. Sometimes painfully. Sometimes with a shame I did not know how to name. Like many Palestinians living away from home, I learned how to tuck parts of myself away. I learned when to explain, when to soften, when to hide, when to become easier for others to understand.

It is only recently that I have truly learned and understood the word diaspora.

Before that, I did not think of myself as diaspora. I thought I was simply Palestinian. From Palestine. Of Palestine. I had spent every summer there. I knew its hills, its evenings, its family gatherings, its food, its voices, its beauty. Palestine was not theoretical to me. It was not an idea. It was not only something I inherited through stories.

It was a place I had touched.

A place I had played in.

A place that had held me.

As a child, I carried the beauty more easily than the pain. Maybe children do that to survive. Maybe families do that too. Maybe we learn to remember the jasmine before the soldier, the breeze before the border, the laughter before the humiliation. I remembered playing outside my Teta’s yard. I remembered the warmth of Ramallah summer evenings. I remembered the closeness of family, the food, the sounds, the feeling of belonging to something larger than myself.

But now, in adulthood, other memories have returned with sharper edges.

I remember soldiers keeping watch over us from an abandoned building while we played outside. I remember being separated from my mother while crossing the border. I remember being strip-searched as young as eight years old. I remember my mother training me, gently but urgently, to do exactly as they asked. To stay calm. To obey. To not give them a reason. I remember the contents of our bags being thrown out, our belongings handled as though they meant nothing, as though we meant nothing.

At the time, I did not fully understand what was happening.

I knew it felt wrong.
I knew it felt frightening.
I knew it made my mother tense.
I knew it made me small.

But I did not yet have the language for dehumanization. I did not yet understand the machinery of humiliation. I did not understand that so much of what we were made to endure was designed to make us feel lesser than. To make us shrink. To make us question our own right to move, to visit, to return, to belong.

And still, somehow, I remembered Palestine as beautiful.

That is the miracle and the wound.

Because Palestine was beautiful.

It still is.

And it was also painful. Complicated. Occupied. Watched. Interrupted. Made difficult on purpose. As a child, I could not hold all of that at once. As an adult, I am beginning to.

But something in me has changed.

I am no longer willing to carry Palestine only as grief, or only as politics, or only as something I must defend. I am no longer willing to hide the parts of myself that once felt too heavy, too foreign, too difficult to explain. I want to carry Palestine as inheritance. As beauty. As memory. As food laid out on a table. As embroidery. As story. As language. As the hands of women who stitched entire villages into cloth.

I think of my ancestors today.

The image I am sharing is a Palestine passport my mother has kept from her grandfather, my great grandfather. I look at it and feel something I cannot fully explain. It is a document, yes. But it is also a witness. A trace. An athar (أثر).

It reminds me that my people were not abstract. They were not only refugees, headlines, numbers, or arguments. They were people with names, papers, villages, homes, routes, responsibilities, families, and futures they believed would continue. They belonged to a land before the world learned how to question that belonging.

My known family story reaches back to Rantis, the village I have always known us to come from, not far from what is today Tel Aviv. I have stood there. I have felt the honour of that. I have also felt the ache of all I do not know. Was Rantis the beginning of our story, or another stop in a longer history of movement and displacement? What was remembered? What was lost? What was too painful to pass down?

There is sadness in that not-knowing. There is tenderness too.

Now I am raising children who were born in Canada.

They are growing up as true diaspora. They did not spend their summers in Palestine the way I did. They will not automatically know the breeze of a Ramallah evening, the feeling of playing outside their great-grandmother’s home, or the complicated ache of loving a place that could hold you and wound you at the same time.

For them, Palestine first arrives through us.

Through our gatherings.
Through our food.
Through our music.
Through our stories.
Through our grief.
Through our joy.
Through our insistence.
Through the way we refuse to let them inherit shame.

More recently, I have felt a responsibility to teach them with more intention.

To show them the thobe and say: this is not only a dress.

This is history.
This is village.
This is womanhood.
This is survival.
This is how memory keeps its shape.

Last year, I had women in a refugee camp in the West Bank stitch me a Beit Dajan thobe. It was my way of honouring our heritage while also supporting the women whose hands continue to keep it alive. When I look at that thobe, I see more than thread. I see dignity. I see income. I see artistry. I see Palestine continuing.

Today, as I begin making my own thobe, I feel that same thread pulling me forward.

The Nakba displaced us, but it did not empty us.

We are still here.

In passports kept safe across generations.
In children born far from home.
In recipes.
In names.
In villages remembered.
In thobes preserved.
In stitches taught by grandmothers.
In the ache of not knowing everything.
In the courage to begin anyway.

And here I am, on Nakba Day, reclaiming pride.

Not a simple pride. Not a pride that denies grief. Not a pride that forgets what was done to us, or what was taken, or what was made difficult for us to remember.

A deeper pride.

The kind that says: I know now what they tried to make us feel, and I refuse to pass that feeling on.

The kind that says: my children will know they come from beauty, not only pain.

The kind that says: I may be diaspora, but I am not detached. I may live far from Palestine, but Palestine has never lived far from me.

This project is my way of returning to what I once hid.

I am making a thobe as a memoir. A garment that will hold memory in its seams. A story written through fabric. A record of what returns when the hands begin to remember.

Every stitch leaves athar — a trace of what remains.

And today, on Nakba Day, I begin with remembrance.

With pride.

With my children watching.

With my ancestors near.

With Palestine still stitched into me.