Everyday Orientalism Podcast
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Migration as Anchorage: A Palestinian Family in London

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ABOUT THIS EPISODE

In this episode we are joined by Michelle Obeid to discuss her book, Migration as Anchorage: Ethnography of a Palestinian Family in London, and what it was like to write about a Palestinian family seeking anchorage while abroad in London—both before and after the escalation of the Palestinian genocide in October of 2023. She shares with us more about the Gazzawi family, the role of food in cultural studies, and what the ongoing process of recreating home looks like for Palestinians. In developing an anthropology of anchorage, Michelle focuses on “everyday practices that create a sense of holding fast in otherwise fluid times and place.”

Michelle Obeid is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. Her research explores postwar sociality, livelihoods, borders, kinship, migration, and food, with a focus on how people create home, community, and belonging amid uncertainty. She is the author of Border Lives: An Ethnography of a Lebanese Town in Changing Times (Brill 2019) and Migration as Anchorage: Ethnography of a Palestinian Family in London (Berghahn 2025).

Michelle's book can be downloaded for free from Berghahn Press. 

Excerpts from Girish's students used with permission. 

Additional Resources:

Hammad, Isabella. 2024. Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. New York: Penguin Random House.

Said, Edward. 1994. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. New York: Pantheon Books.  

Aly, Ramy. 2015. Becoming Arab in London: Performativity and the Undoing of Identity. London: Pluto Press.

Mahmoud Darwish quote from 1996 interview: Darwish, Mahmoud, Liana Badr, Zakariyya Muhammad, Mundher Jaber, Amira El-Zein, Carolyn Forche. 2019. “Our Present Does Not Decide Either to Begin or to End.” The Massachusetts Review 60.3: 425–438.

Said, Edward. 1979. The Question of Palestine. New York: Times Books.

El-Haddad, Laila, and Maggie Schmitt. 2021. The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian Culinary Journey. New York: Just World Books.

Laila El-Haddad on Unforked: “Gastronationalism”

The Everyday Orientalism Podcast explores how Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives, for how we think about settler-colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize the majority of us. Defined by Palestinian American literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.” Our podcast celebrates the 10th anniversary of the platform Everyday Orientalism.

Host: Girish Daswani
Editor and producer: Taylor Stark
Research assistant: Sophie Plotkin
Intro music: Madame Salame – Decaf
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IN THIS EPISODE

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TRANSCRIPT 🔗

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Hi, my name is Girish Daswani. Welcome to the Everyday Orientalism podcast series. We're
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here to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Everyday Orientalism, a public platform through
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which students, academics and citizens reflect on how history and power shape the ways in
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which human society define themselves. The platform foregrounds the histories and
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political struggles that those in power often seek to erase. Defined by Palestinian-American
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literary scholar Edward Said, Orientalism is a western style for dominating, restructuring,
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and having authority over the Orient. Featuring a stellar lineup of guests, we explore how
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Orientalism continues to have deep ramifications in our everyday lives for how we think about
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settler colonialism, liberation, and how empire and capitalism continue to exploit and dehumanize
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the majority of us.
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In his book, "Representations of the Intellectual," Edward Said writes, "There is a popular but
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wholly mistaken assumption that being exiled is to be totally cut off, isolated, hopelessly separated
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from your place of origin. The fact is that for most exiles, the difficulty consists not simply
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in being forced to live away from home, but rather, given today's world, in living with the many
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reminders that you are in exile, that your home is not in fact so far away, and that the normal
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traffic of everyday contemporary life keeps you in constant but tantalizing and unfulfilled touch
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with that old place. The exile therefore exists in a median state, neither completely at one
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with the new setting, nor fully disencumbered of the old."
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For Said, being Palestinian was a state of chronic exile, what Isabella Hamad in her book
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"Recognizing the Stranger: on Palestine and Narrative Calls," exile as agony but also as ethical position.
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With the destruction of 531 Arab villagers between 1947 and 1948, an estimated 750,000 Palestinians
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were forcibly displaced from their homeland by Zionist forces during the formation of Israel.
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For those expelled from Palestine like Said's family, this protracted exile has been accompanied
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by an insistence of a right to return to their lands and to their homes and of self-determination.
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Commonly described as a Nakba, often translated from Arabic as catastrophe, disaster,
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or calamity, this experience of mass displacement and dispossession has become a lived condition
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of the present. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Dawesh described 1948 as "the great tearing apart:
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and his own exile as a psychic and interior exile. He said, "I don't return, I arrive.
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No one can return to an imagined place or to a former self. For Palestinians, the Nakba is
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ongoing, Musdamirah, a process still happening rather than a discrete historical event."
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So, what does it mean for Palestinians to arrive, to recreate home, anchor in a place while being
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in exile, living as a refugee in a foreign country? In this episode, we speak to Michelle Obeid,
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an anthropologist and author of the book "Migration as Anchorage: ethnography of a Palestinian family
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in London." Michelle's book focuses on what she calls the processes of anchorage in which the
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Gazzawi family participate, a family from Gaza whose migration was not planned but accidental.
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While visiting their children in London, UK in 2007, Um and Abu Bashir discovered that
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they could not return home due to a siege of Gaza by the Israeli army. Already a diasporic family
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with one daughter living in Glasgow and two of their sons living and working in London,
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the couple applied for a five-year visa and extended their stay. Soon after, their youngest son sought
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asylum in the UK. In 2008, when Israel started a war with Gaza, Um and Abu Bashir could not return
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to their home and business. Soon after, two other daughters joined them. In recreating home in London,
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the Gazzawi started a family business, Al-Zaytuna, the Palestinian cafe that offered home-made food,
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Palestinian cuisine anchored in the home. In starting their cafe, the family were not only
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reconnecting with Palestine. They were also recreating Palestine. The exile did not prevent them from
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recreating the feeling of home and being in a community. Instead, the family business provided them
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with an anchorage. It allowed them to arrive. Their project of homemaking was not just about forced
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dispersal or about return, but also about a presentism. We are here now. It was about arrival.
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To quote from Michelle's book, "'No one knows where we will be tomorrow,' says Um Bashir, 'But now
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we are here. This is where we have anchored.'" In developing an anthropology of anchorage,
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Michelle focuses on, to quote her, "everyday practices that create a sense of holding fast in otherwise
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fluid times and place." Michelle Obeid is a senior lecturer in social anthropology at the University
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of Manchester. Her research explores post-war sociality, livelihoods, borders, kinship, migration,
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and food, with a focus on how people create home, community, and belonging amid uncertainty.
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She is the author of "Border Lives: an ethnography of a Lebanese town in changing times" from 2019,
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and "Migration as Anchorage: ethnography of a Palestinian family in London," published in 2025.
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Hi Michelle, welcome to the podcast.
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Hi Girish, thank you for this lovely introduction.
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It's a pleasure having you here and I want to tell everyone and you as well that I have
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taught your book in my class Anthropology of Transnationalism, and my students have been loving
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the book.
I'm very happy to hear that. Thank you.
So as a kind of an opening question, Michelle,
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can I ask you what brought you to this research project? What got you started and how did it actually
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begin?
So my project was a postdoctoral project. I just finished my PhD and kind of I lived in London for
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a little bit and I wanted to stay in the UK for a bit and I developed a project on diaspora initially
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with trying to understand sort of like Arab migration to London. At that time there was
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another anthropologist, Ramy Ali, who was also a PhD student. He was doing incredible work on Arab
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migration, has a wonderful book about Arabs in London. And I started thinking of issues related to
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legality and then it developed into wanting to kind of do a street ethnography, inspired by some
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migration literature that was pushing us to focus on relationships between communities and
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others outside of their ethnic or national communities. And so I thought I wanted to do a street
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ethnography and then the project kind of changed a little bit as I started working with this family.
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And what I was drawn to really was precisely what you kind of raised in the introduction, which is
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how people create home in the temporary. So if you don't know how long you're going to be in a
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place, is it possible to create home and if so, you know, what are the conditions that we can create in
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order to feel that we are living at home? So this is how the project developed.
I mean it's a very
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important and interesting question. How do you create home in the present when where you have landed
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is not where you grew up or where you were raised or where you would ordinarily call home? And I think
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that is something that lots of us think about, especially those of us who have left our homelands,
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our homes and traveled and lived like, you know, myself and you as well as also many of our students.
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And the question of migration is an important theme in your book, but I also want to ask you about
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the specificity of the Palestinian migration. This happened in 2007. Can you tell me about the
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circumstances of what was happening at the time in Palestine in Gaza that caused this particular
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movement of the Gazzawi family to London, where they were forced to stay longer than they expected?
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So I think one of the things that I feel I wanted to shed light on in the book is the experience of
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a kind of a migrant that we don't necessarily always see on television and in the news when we're
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talking about, you know, the refugee crisis since 2016, when we talk about refugees we in our mind,
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we always think of people crossing the Mediterranean, destitute refugees and, of course, this is a very
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important thing to think about and to talk about, but this particular family they're actually quite
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well off in Gaza, they had a really thriving business, you know, they could afford to send their children
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to excellent universities in London and pay for it from their own savings. So, you know, they
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represent what we normally don't think about as refugees or migrants that are not economic migrants.
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So in 2007 Israel imposed a blockade where it kind of shot all the borders and it prohibited the
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movement of people in and out of Gaza and things in and out of Gaza and so many businesses had to
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shut down because they just couldn't operate. So what was happening with this family is that they
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would go and check on their children who were studying in universities in London and on one of such
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trips everything shut down, the borders shut, and they just couldn't fly back. So the question of the
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temporary here becomes all the more relevant because for the parents who were visiting their children
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they were like, well, we're here for a little while and that little while became longer and longer
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and then they were confronted with the reality that this little while might be a longer while,
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but yet they did not have the intention to actually relocate fully and that's where for me it was
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very interesting. So it's not just maybe you and I are also migrants, but we had kind of like, you know,
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we're going to study the degree with five years. With this particular set of parents, they were
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really unsure of, you know, they were just waiting to go back and that didn't happen because in 2008
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Israel launched yet another war on on Gaza and as we know Gaza became one of the biggest open-air
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prisons in the world and so it became increasingly difficult for them to go back until their children
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who are living there kind of begged them to, you know, to do something and stay legally in the country
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and to kind of find a way to just stay with them for a while. It was accidental and because their
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children were living there eventually other family members joined and then there was more reason,
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you know, the wider sense to kind of feel at home or try to make home in their new city which
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became London.
Yeah. I mean, what's interesting is that you were not necessarily looking to research
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a Palestinian family in London. You were looking to study street culture linked to the Arab diasporic
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community in London. How did you come across this family? I know you talk about it in your book,
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but I like for us to get a little bit more of how you came across them, this family.
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So I came across this family with just my networks in London like when I was doing a PhD I had a
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a lot of friends in the university where I studied, the London School of Economics, but so where
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actually a lot of Arabs were known to study and then what was very interesting for me as a Lebanese
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back then is even though, you know, we kind of share a border, it's very difficult for the Lebanese to
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meet Palestinians who are not, you know, who did not relocate or were displaced to Lebanon from
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greater Palestine. So London in a way acted as such a nice place for me to meet, you know, fellow
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Palestinians, whether they're from Gaza, West Bank or what is known as a 1948, so Palestinians who
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who stayed after the creation of the state of Israel. And then we created a big Arab community with
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all sorts of postgraduate students from everywhere and then it was very exciting that we learned about
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this cafe and then we kind of went to sample the food because everybody was homesick and although
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now London, you know, you can consider it like the capital- the culinary capital of the world because
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it has amazing multicultural cuisines. When I started doing my PhD, the Arabic restaurants, a lot of
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them were Lebanese restaurants were concentrated in one area which was Edgware Road and this cafe opened
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somewhere else and so we went to sample it and through these connections we met one of the brothers
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who was running it and then we kind of became friendly with them and that's that's how my relationship
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developed with the family.
It's amazing. In fact, for those of you who are listening, I wanted to
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tell everyone that we went to graduate school together. So we were both studying in London
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around the same time in anthropology, doing a PhD there. And that was also the first time that I met
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so many people from the Arab diaspora, the Arab community and also through the Palestinians.
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So in a way, London did actually bring me also in contact with people that I would never have met
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before especially from West Asia. So my next question, the Palestinian
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poet Mahmoud Darwish said in an interview in 1996 and, I quote him, "to choose a place does not put
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an end to exile." So your book beautifully describes the existential condition of being a refugee
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while trying to recreate home in a new place. Can you speak to this tension of anchoring and yet
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still being in exile?
So as we know, refugee is actually a legal category but as social scientists
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and particularly anthropologists, we're really interested in the phenomenological or the experiential
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aspect of some of these categories. So in my book, I'm interested in this existential experience of
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being a refugee and I think it's fair to say that across the world you have so many generations of
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Palestinians, in Canada as well where you are, where having legal documents or being a citizen of
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another country does not remove the sense that Palestinians are still refugees in the world.
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And this is something that was very much expressed by the people that I worked with but it's also
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expressed in literature on diasporic Palestinians, in historical literature of Palestine. And the
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reason being that the Palestinians still believe in their right of return, we have still the iconic
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image of Palestinians from all the way from 1948 who still ruled the key to their houses that have been
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taken by settler colonial project of the state of Israel. And so one could be very happy over two
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generations with excellent jobs with very good life in the West or in other parts of the Arab world
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or wherever Palestinians ended up landing in their exile but they could still feel that there is
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something where they still feel that existentially they will never be settled because of this kind of
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pull and desire and the feeling that they have a right to return home. So this is how I kind of deal
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with the issue of refugees and the book rather than as a legal category. And yeah, I try to really
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kind of explore what what that means. And essentially you could have both where you kind of find happiness
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in a city like London because this family indeed did, you know. It's- they're, they're a very joyful family,
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they're very self-sustained, and they make friends very easily. They're so charming, you know, in the
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cafe people are given free food all the time, and they're kind of drawn, like people are drawn into
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their orbit very easily, and they they really felt a very strong belonging in London and a very
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strong ownership in London and they wanted- so like one of the idioms that I use a lot in the book is
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"bringing Palestine to London," there are so many ways in which they wanted people to learn about
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Palestine, and yet there was always that yearning, there was always that feeling that you know you're
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kind of somewhere else, you're you're you're back home as much as you were in your new home and so you
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could have that tension very much without it being necessarily a destructive force but I do think
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it's important to pay attention to where and how it plays out in in everyday life.
I think your book
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does a wonderful job of showing both the joy of family bonds and connections of kinship but also
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sometimes the tensions that come out of these same relationships. I mean, you know, in every family
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there are always going to be tensions and I think you you really bring out both the the ways in which
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they come together to recreate family but also Palestine in London at the same time, what this means
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for different members of the family, and how it has a very different impact on them. So I want to come
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back to the point that you made about how you don't necessarily just stick to the legal term of refugees
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but you try to explore what it means specifically for Palestinians with their right to return and
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the demand for self determination. In "The Question of Palestine," all right, the book, Edward Said
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writes, and I'll quote him again, "despite that we are geographically dispersed and fragmented, we
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have been united as a people largely because the Palestinian idea has a coherence to which we
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have all responded with positive enthusiasm," he writes. And your book speaks to how despite this
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dispersal and fragmentation Palestinians do feel united to a sense of belonging to a Palestinian
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community, and a shared cause ,and for the family that you're speaking about Gaza becomes
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that anchorage. Can you speak a little bit more about what this Palestinian identity is and how they
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recreated it in London?
Yeah, I mean that's a wonderful quote from from Said, I think in the book I'm
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really keen on not necessarily romanticizing this idea of Palestine or community or family as you
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rightfully pointed out, and to really show that you know like on an everyday you can have tensions, you
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can have disagreements in what it needs to be Palestinian or what how how one should you present
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Palestine, but at the same time, and here I'm echoing Palestinian scholarship where you know in spite
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of all the divisions there's a very, very strong sense across different divides even today that
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there is some kind of a cause and this cause is the Palestinian cause. And people are united because
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of a sense of commonality, a sense of sameness, and this kind of sameness translates into a national
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feeling. Now politically, logistically, ideologically this might be very different so the ideology of
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Hamas is very different to the ideology of Fatah and what have you, so when I'm trying to say
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is that I'm not representing one Palestinian voice is but I think there's acknowledgement across
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the spectrum of how Palestinians think politically and ideologically and what have you, that there is
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a cause which is Palestine and that people feel united in their sense of this this nation and the fact
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that they have the right to this nation and that they they have suffered from the settler colonial
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project of the Zionist state. So in the book I address this in different ways and at different scales
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so on one hand I address this through what it means to internally for the family itself what does
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it mean to have Palestinian practices so what does it mean to eat, how do you treat your family, how
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do you treat your neighbors, how are you defined by certain values like hospitality or conviviality,
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and then I move to kind of show well what does this also mean in terms of the Palestinian community.
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There's a chapter in the book where I really kind of dig a little bit deeper into the tensions that
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are created when there is pressure on how to represent Palestine in a place like London, you know,
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a mega city where people imagine big political decisions are made and so in that chapter I kind
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of show how through artistic production, like through a very nice a neighborhood street festival,
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the kind of tensions that emerge of what's the program in just a 30 minute program, you know: should we
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do folklore, should we be showing that the Palestinians can do jazz fusion, should we kind of
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focus on singing sad songs about the martyrdom and the victims of innocent children, and that created a
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huge you know discussion within the Palestinian community and the point here being that there is
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pressure on negotiating how Palestinians represent themselves to themselves and to the outside world
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at the same time.
I mean I love that chapter as well and also I remember earlier on in the book there's
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a scene where the cafe is hosting a dinner and Um Bashir is inviting Palestinians from different
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sides or different places in the political spectrum, right, from Fatah and from Hamas, who have different
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political positions on what Palestine is and what it could be, but she's inviting all of them to
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the table to have dinner with them and how that becomes a way of bonding and uniting especially
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since there is the shared sense of what it means for them at that point of being Palestinian.
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I think this is something particularly diasporic, I also see it with Lebanese diaspora, for example,
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where back home people might have really really opposing views, they might have you know fault against
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each other in the war, and then in London within a restaurant there is there's something that pushes
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people to kind of like identify in the diaspora as Lebanese rather than as Christians or Phalange
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or Shiias or or what have you. And the scene that I describe, it's actually an iftar so it's
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in the month of Ramadan, where it's really important to kind of, you know, like there's a virtuous element
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here in in this month, and like Muslims across the world are aware of how important it is to be
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you know- the like morality, ethics, virtue, virtue are really important in this month and so, yeah,
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there's a scene where they're all sitting together and and Um Bashir makes a point, even though she has
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her own political views and she's quite a critical woman, she kind of says well here this is where
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we're together, we're sharing food and in this act of commensality, you know we are kind of united.
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We are united by this food because we all eat it, we all consider it Palestinian, and in a place like
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London, you know you can't afford to be divided because this is the place where you need to, as I
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mentioned earlier, you are performing your Palestinian as you're being kind of observed by others,
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and in a way she and members of her family felt obliged to, in different ways, educate people about
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Palestine, and the history of Palestine, and the culture of Palestine and they often did it through
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this cafe, whether it's through food or music or activities that they took part like, you know,
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street festivals or food festivals and things like that.
I'm gonna read you a quote from one of the
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discussion responses from my student and they write: "Al-Zaytuna becomes an anchor because it brings
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together home, nation, and belonging in one place. It is not simply that the family is working together
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but that the cafe becomes a shared environment where Palestinian identity is lived and recognized,
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both by the family and by the wider community around them." I mean it's a short part of a longer
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comment that she made, but I thought that perfectly describes what you just said.
I think your
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student put it better than I would have said, that's a lovely way of expressing it, yeah-
and
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another student, this is a quote as well: "by blurring the boundaries between home and work, the cafe
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becomes a space where economic survival and family hierarchies are negotiated daily. Reframing
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transnational family life is less about cultural continuity and more about collectively managing
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uncertainty through labor," and I thought that too. I mean you have a whole chapter on family business,
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and the business of family. Can you speak a little bit about what you mean by family business and
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the business of family?
Yes, so the second quote is also really very interestingly worded by and
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articulated by your student. So I think in this chapter what I was trying to do is to again show
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these tensions between what Um Bbashir always sort of as containing the family or bringing or
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uniting the family together through a project, but at the same time for her and for different family
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members, you know, there's London in the background and London as a place of aspiration. It's a place where
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there are so many potentialities and so, yeah, what this chapter does is kind of shows the tensions
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between trying to maintain a small family business that, actually, like other family businesses around
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the world, is based on the labor of the family, on one hand, and on the other hand, you have this
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prospect of doing a master's, of finding these amazing jobs, of, you know, finding a partner and moving
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on, as if something is pulling inward and something is pulling outward. And the chapter tries to capture
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that, that the cafe business requires a lot of labor from the family, but the family itself also
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requires a kind of labor to, you know, to keep the peace going, so to speak, and to keep everybody happy
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and to acknowledge that, you know, the the whole point of of this diasporic existence is to move
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forward. As Hassan [unintellible] has always talked about. Migration, it's about possibilities, about moving forward,
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and so this- the the project of the cafe kind of captures that in terms of, you know, you're trying to
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hold on to this project, that is really meaningful symbolically, economically too to an extent,
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but politically as well because it's sort of anchors both the family, the the community, and the nation
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together, and these individual prospects of moving on and moving forward.
You write as well about the
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different kind of intersections of temporality that your book is able to actually discuss because
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it's not just about the past, it's also about how the present is really important in negotiating
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both the past and the future, and the fact that the future is something that they are working
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towards and making possible and what that means also differently for different members of the family.
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Your book really does a good job, and I've told this to many of my students about the
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futility of labels like voluntary migration, forced migration, involuntary migration,
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and how the word diaspora doesn't apply in the same way to every group of people who leave their
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homeland and are nostalgic for their homeland. And you don't use diaspora easily to describe
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the Gazzawi family. So i can ask you, why? Like, what were you thinking when you were, let's say hesitant
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to apply diaspora to this particular case or why are labels not helpful here?
I think this takes us
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back to the question of existential refugeehood among Palestinians. Again this is something that
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scholars of Palestine write about quite a bit, which is generally speaking, of course as you know, the
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writing on diaspora is very complex and I wouldn't want to kind of reduce it into one thing or another,
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but the general sense from the use of diaspora is that people go and create a new home and settle
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down. In the Palestinian context, the diasporic Palestinians worry that that the use of diaspora in
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this way undermines the particular plight of Palestinians that were plucked out of their land and
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dispossessed and the fact that they're deprived of their right to return. So the term diaspora for me,
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I still use it in the book, but I kind of have a discussion of why we should really kind of complicate
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these terms and interrogate them rather than trying to apply them without much critique. And in a
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similar way, if we take this one family, which has more than one household obviously, but if we look
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at the journeys of this one family, you will find that they had so many different legal
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statuses in this family. So some of them had student visa, two of them were asylum seekers,
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one of them was already a British citizen and then so what sort of category could you apply
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to this family that can really capture the very different experiences of different family members.
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So in a way, of course, I'm not calling for, you know, throwing away the bath water with the baby and
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dropping categories. But I do think that it's really important to interrogate what these categories
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are doing for us, and one of the things that i advocate for in the book is to understand these categories
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better and critically. We could you know use the anthropological mantra of paying attention to
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ethnographic terms because these can really enrich our understanding, and for me this is where the term
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anchorage comes from. I'm very grateful to a PhD conference that I went to in Denmark, where we
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explored this notion of anchorage but it got me to kind of really pay attention to the fact that within
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this family, this is how they described their migration that they have anchored, and the use of this
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metaphor of anchorage for me was very apt to describe the experience of this family because it's meant,
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as you introduced earlier, we are here now. However this doesn't really mean anything for the future.
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It means we could stay here, some of us might move to the Gulf some of us might return, go to the
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West Bank, or Gaza if we could, and indeed, the privilege of writing a book after 12 years of occurrences is
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that you can kind of like look back and really show how the concept really worked because a lot of
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people moved back and forth, some stayed some left. And so yes to interrogate these categories, yeah, in
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an in a critical way, I think can be very generative and productive.
Yeah, absolutely. I think it was also
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very helpful for me when I teach the courses I teach around migration and diaspora,
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that the students are also thinking about this specificity of what they mean when they speak about
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diaspora. And also like these specificity of the Palestinian experience- like you know when Mahmoud
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Darwish says "I don't return, I arrive," in that context he was talking about moving from France to Jordan,
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and he says like I don't have the right to return to my homeland, and even if I were to return, I'm
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not the same, and my homeland is not the same. So this question of what do you do when you arrive at a
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place because you're always also trying to reconnect but renegotiate your identity in the process.
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And a part of the process for Palestinians, and this comes to my next question, is about the erasure
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of their culture, their relationship to the land, also the side lining of Palestinian culture. So I
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guess, you do use that word in your book, Palestinian culture, that phrase, and a big part of your book is
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about food, which is what my students and I also love, the fact that we can get to know more about
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Palestinian food, Arab food in your book, and what the recipes are sometimes and how they're being
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made and what is it doing for the family and for the customers but it's also more than that. You say,
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and you quote Shelly Angelie Sagaar, "cookbooks are also recipes for resistance" and cultural appropriation
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as we know is frequent, especially the claim, for example, by Israel that the hummus is a national dish.
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How does the Gazzawi family push back against such erasure?
Yes, I do kind of mention in the book,
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this awareness of erasure and I just -- between brackets before going back to food -- like as we speak
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now the British Museum, under pressure from the Zionist lobbies, is actually removing the word Palestine
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from documents in the museum. I mean there is no more erasure than this. So in the book I deal with this
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through the issue of food. I mean one of the things that is very interesting but also like very
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frustrating is that with settler colonialism across the board one of the ways of erasure happens
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through the claim of indigeneity. So now, for example, the Israelis claim indigeneity to Palestinian land,
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just like other settler colonial powers claim erasure to you know to New Zealand, USA, Australia, like there's
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there's a lot of labor that is exerted in indigeneizing, right? And so food is one of the areas where
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these so-called wars are kind of being played out because there's the rise of what is called
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Israeli cuisine, whereas, of course, Israel is a very new nation state, and although we should be very
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aware that, you know, food moves around, it flows across borders. If you look at historians of food,
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food is not subject to nation states, right? I mean even Lebanese food is kind of like completely
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blurs into Syrian, Palestinian, etc, and then within the same country, you might have different
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versions of a recipe for the same kind of food so of course we are aware of the fact that food is not
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unchangeable. But the problem is that when the origin or the influence is not acknowledged then
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that becomes appropriation, and there's a thin line between celebrating the other and appropriating
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the other and I think the problem with so-called Israeli cuisine is that there's an appropriation
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of food that is very much indigenous, and this is part of like a larger process of appropriation
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not just food but other things as well: names, trees, what have you etc. So, for the Gazzawi family they
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often spoke about this in terms of authenticity, and again here, for the listeners, I'm careful
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about how we talk about authenticity. I don't mean here that something is either authentic or not,
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but it's the way that people themselves understand what is it that makes something authentic.
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So in terms of you know the hummus war or the falafel war, this is where these things are played out
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a lot of Arabs and Palestinians and the Gazzawi family as well would kind of say well this is just not
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authentic, and this is done through a temporality of kind of saying, you know, they've been doing this
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for, well, at least, you know, the the European settlers have been doing this since what,
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1948 or whatever, or in the last 10, or last 15 years. We have done this for generations and
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generations, and i think cookbooks do something similar, especially Palestinian cookbooks, they
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invoke that, you know, trajectory or genealogy, the mother, the grandmother, the ancestry and even when
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some of this work is as romantic and it romanticizes, of course, the mother and the grandmother and all of
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that, but I think it is doing a kind of work to establish a kind of a pushing back against erasure,
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and the idea of erasure, that this food doesn't exist or that it's not complicated or
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that it's not sophisticated.
The erasure, the cultural erasure, the renaming of
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villages and towns and street names and cities, just to remove all recognition and history of
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Palestinians who have been there for generations and generations, for thousands of years, it speaks
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really strongly through these food wars that people call them, right? It comes out really strongly in
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those particular avenues, and your book wonderfully describes how cooking brings family together,
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and also different generations together. There's one scene where you talk about Widad, the daughter of
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Um Bashir, making makluba, and how Um Bashir explains to you how the cooking of hot food
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requires breath or soul, and only then you can actually consider it home cooking. And I believe,
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for me that spoke really about how the connection to the family, to the soul, to the breath, to the land,
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was all being made in in that scene, in that the setting, and those statements. And at the same time
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there are also other people making claims to that food, to that land and in your book you cite
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Laila El-Haddad, a Palestinian co-author of the cookbook "The Gaza Kitchen: a Palestinian culinary
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journey," as a good example of how cookbooks do actually create a way of a resisting these kind of
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narratives of, let's say, Israeli indigenity to Palestine. But I wanted to just point out this is
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an interesting conversation for us here on our podcast because we just interviewed a journalist who
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was working for the CBC, and now is an independent journalist, Samira Mohyeddin, and when she was
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working for the CBC in 2021 for a podcast on food, she actually interviewed Laila about cultural
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appropriation of food and the other co-panelist was a sociologist, and when the sociologist was
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talking about multiculturalism in Israel, and how that was a way of, let's say, claiming other cultural
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dishes as a part of this multicultural environment in Israel. It hit Laila El-Haddad, she had to
366
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stop and say, well we need to put things into context, and she mentioned the Nakba.
367
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and Samira then had to do a separate recording to explain what the Nakba was, which, for all our
368
00:37:59,040 --> 00:38:03,520
listeners, if you go to the episode, you will hear how she spent eight months having to report to her
369
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manager because of all the complaints by people, especially this group called Honest Reporting
370
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Canada, about why that denied Israelis their own indigenous claims to land that was the claim.
371
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But my point in saying all this is that what Laila called a slap in the face because of the context
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that was not being considered where early Jewish settlers and Zionists want to put roots in
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the ground but they reject the people behind the culture, in her words, "settler colonials' wanting
374
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to rebrand and appropriate these dishes into national culture and psyche while rejecting the original
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inhabitants of the land and the consumers of the dish." So theser are her words and so what was
376
00:38:46,720 --> 00:38:52,960
very triggering for Laila was how she was thinking about the survivors of the Nakba, and her book
377
00:38:52,960 --> 00:38:58,480
as well is very much based upon speaking to survivors of the Nakba, and in your book you speak about
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00:38:58,480 --> 00:39:06,320
the Nakba being ongoing, and you mention how it has a huge impact on how Um Bashir also
379
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thinks about being a refugee. Can you expand on how you draw on that experience of the family?
380
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How the Nakba, and how cultural erasure of, let's say, Israeli cuisine in London are somehow connected?
381
00:39:20,320 --> 00:39:28,000
Yeah, I mean, it's really sad to to hear the frustration of Laila Haddad
382
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but I completely hear her, and i and i identify with with that frustration because, again, it's another
383
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form of silencing, where in today's climate you are censored from using keywords that have always
384
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defined the way we understand what was going on in the region. So for example, Nakba, if you say
385
00:39:46,480 --> 00:39:52,240
that that seems to trigger the wrong people. Now you can't even say Palestine in the UK, like there
386
00:39:52,240 --> 00:39:58,080
are some- there's movement to to even, you know, silence the word itself, we mentioned the British Museum
387
00:39:58,080 --> 00:40:04,240
but you know in a protest or on television, Zionist lobbies are arguing that these terms are actually
388
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offending them, which is also a little bit ridiculous. Well, very ridiculous really. But i wanted to make
389
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one point that what is interesting about the silencing about food, that there's there are two scales of
390
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the silencing. One is Israelis appropriating the food of the region, of the Palestinians, but also
391
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silencing the Palestinian Jews and the Arab Jews who lived in the region, because the claim is being
392
00:40:28,400 --> 00:40:36,800
made by European settler colonists, who are also kind of like dismissing or neglecting deliberately
393
00:40:36,800 --> 00:40:42,800
the fact that, you know, there were Jews in the region, from the region, who also made this food and
394
00:40:42,800 --> 00:40:51,040
to whom the food meant something as well. In terms of the Nakba, I mean the Nakba is ongoing. In fact,
395
00:40:51,040 --> 00:40:59,360
since genocide, since 2023, a lot of Palestinians have been expressing what's been going on as you know
396
00:40:59,360 --> 00:41:04,320
a second Nakba, but in fact, historians of the region would say that it is an ongoing Nakba,
397
00:41:04,320 --> 00:41:11,440
in the sense that it wasn't an event that began and ended. It was an event that gave birth to
398
00:41:12,240 --> 00:41:20,240
more rightlessness, to more dispossession, to more shrinking of land, to, you know, more suffering, to more
399
00:41:20,240 --> 00:41:25,280
exclusions and what have you. And we are seeing it today on an everyday level. In fact, it's televised,
400
00:41:25,280 --> 00:41:32,480
we're seeing it live, happening in front of our eyes, where the official estimates of the death toll
401
00:41:32,480 --> 00:41:38,720
in Gaza is now over 600,000. Half of them are children between the age of, you know, zero and nine, and
402
00:41:38,720 --> 00:41:44,720
that's really, really serious in terms of deliberate erasure, and since the, you know, the so-called fake
403
00:41:44,720 --> 00:41:51,200
ceasefire, the the genocide continues at a slower rate. And now, of course, the colonial project has
404
00:41:51,200 --> 00:41:58,320
expanded to Lebanon, and, you know, in Syria, Yemen, and other countries. I think it's quite safe to say that,
405
00:41:58,320 --> 00:42:05,360
you know, the Nakba is a historical event, but also as a term, a calamity, disaster, that describes our
406
00:42:05,360 --> 00:42:11,840
times, is is very relevant and very apt.
Thank you, yes, I completely agree. I want to say that talking
407
00:42:11,840 --> 00:42:18,320
about all these very difficult questions through food is really a fantastic way to bring people
408
00:42:18,320 --> 00:42:24,000
into the conversation as well, and also the fact that it is a cafe and you write about food really
409
00:42:24,000 --> 00:42:26,800
helps. I just want to quote you here
410
00:42:31,360 --> 00:42:38,960
and the word that you use is re-Palestinization, right, and you say "re-Palestinization, a politics of
411
00:42:38,960 --> 00:42:46,000
the presence that involves narrating, imagining, and constructing a past that has relevance in the
412
00:42:46,000 --> 00:42:54,960
present against a fear of cultural erasure." And i think this word re-Palestinization evokes so much
413
00:42:54,960 --> 00:43:01,680
of what you just said. Is this a term that you came up with?
So basically yes. So i was kind of responding
414
00:43:01,680 --> 00:43:09,680
so in the chapter about food, I was engaging with literature on how Israeli national cuisine
415
00:43:09,680 --> 00:43:16,320
obviously appropriated Palestinian food, and then created what some scholars called a
416
00:43:16,320 --> 00:43:22,560
de-arabization of food and culture. And so here my response is that it's not just de-arabization
417
00:43:22,560 --> 00:43:28,320
is also de-Palestinization because de-arabization kind of flattens, i think, the specificity of the
418
00:43:28,320 --> 00:43:34,560
Palestinian experience with the Zionist project. But at the same time i use re-Palestinization in the
419
00:43:34,560 --> 00:43:42,000
diasporic context to really engage with how people bring practices from home or from the past but they
420
00:43:42,000 --> 00:43:46,320
are renegotiated, and they're like they're given a kind of slightly different meaning in the diasporic
421
00:43:46,320 --> 00:43:52,160
context. And this has to do with you know the details of how you cook, or how you substitute with
422
00:43:52,160 --> 00:43:57,920
ingredients, or stuff like that ,or you know all the practices that go around it. So how you have
423
00:43:57,920 --> 00:44:04,240
Ramadan, or how you have your feast, how you have your meals. But yes for me like you can see this term
424
00:44:04,240 --> 00:44:10,400
in more than one space in the book; so in the family itself, and the cafe menus, but also in
425
00:44:10,400 --> 00:44:16,880
in the cultural festival, where you know you're kind of drawing on a past but you are doing this in a
426
00:44:16,880 --> 00:44:23,680
particular moment in the present for the purpose of making certain claims or certain projections into
427
00:44:23,680 --> 00:44:29,280
what a future is gonna look like.
i mean i really love the fact that you use that term i'm going to
428
00:44:29,280 --> 00:44:34,160
read one of my student's discussion comments around that. "Obeid's work on the Palestinian cafe
429
00:44:34,160 --> 00:44:39,120
al-Zaytuna in London demonstrates how cooking functions as a form of anchorage that bridges
430
00:44:39,120 --> 00:44:44,080
the distance that is created between the here and there. The preparation and circulation of Palestinian
431
00:44:44,080 --> 00:44:50,640
dishes here do not merely recall Palestine as a lost past but rather it actively materializes the
432
00:44:50,640 --> 00:44:56,960
nation in the present through taste, smell, hospitality, and the commensality. Importantly this
433
00:44:56,960 --> 00:45:02,720
form of anchoring is explicitly political in that the construction of a Palestinian national cuisine
434
00:45:02,720 --> 00:45:09,200
operates as a strategy of re-palestinization in response to the ongoing cultural erasure and
435
00:45:09,200 --> 00:45:15,760
appropriation. In this context, food becomes a means of asserting presence against settler colonial
436
00:45:15,760 --> 00:45:22,480
narratives that often deny Palestinian rootedness, which transforms the cafe into a space where
437
00:45:22,480 --> 00:45:29,200
home and nation are continually being remade, rather than a simple remembrance of its static
438
00:45:29,200 --> 00:45:35,520
origins. Diaspora food practices are best understood as contested sites where memory, belonging,
439
00:45:35,520 --> 00:45:41,600
and power intersect." i thought i was a pretty good-
I'm loving your students here that's really,
440
00:45:41,600 --> 00:45:50,160
yes, that's an amazing way to articulate something that i worked on uh on conveying.
I mean, you know,
441
00:45:50,160 --> 00:45:56,480
the fact that my students get it, and can express it in these words, it means that you have been
442
00:45:56,480 --> 00:46:01,840
very good at effectively communicating your ideas in your book, which is why you know we are here
443
00:46:01,840 --> 00:46:07,760
talking about it.
Thank you!
Absolutely. I want to shift a little bit to the experience of being in
444
00:46:07,760 --> 00:46:15,680
London as a refugee, as a Palestinian refugee. Edward Said wrote that, to quote him, "Palestinians have
445
00:46:15,680 --> 00:46:23,520
been known only as refugees or as extremists or as terrorists" close quotes. i mean you do mention
446
00:46:23,520 --> 00:46:31,120
that like there is this label this associated set of stereotypes and assumptions how does this,
447
00:46:31,120 --> 00:46:39,440
if at all, impact members of the Gazzawi family because i mean it's not just that they are arab, brown,
448
00:46:39,440 --> 00:46:45,200
but specifically was it a context in which being Palestinian worked either in their favor or
449
00:46:45,200 --> 00:46:52,400
against them when they were in London?
i think i wanted to mention that i'm hoping that one of the
450
00:46:52,400 --> 00:46:58,480
reverberations or consequences of the book is that people rethink these stereotypes, but i also
451
00:46:58,480 --> 00:47:06,240
want to say that this was not the objective of the book. i think we have to be critical of this
452
00:47:06,240 --> 00:47:12,480
defensive mode where we you know have to spend so much labor and effort to prove that brown people
453
00:47:12,480 --> 00:47:17,360
or Palestinian people or Muslim people or black people are human too and they're not dangerous, i
454
00:47:17,360 --> 00:47:23,120
find that very frustrating and it's not something that i wanted to do as a scholar. but what i did want
455
00:47:23,120 --> 00:47:30,480
to show is that this family of Palestinian migrants like many, many, many other migrants in London and elsewhere,
456
00:47:30,480 --> 00:47:35,520
you know, they go to these places, whether they're a refugee, or an economic migrant, or like whatever
457
00:47:35,520 --> 00:47:40,720
they are, they want to have a good life. everybody wants to have a good life and people might do it in
458
00:47:40,720 --> 00:47:47,280
very different ways, and in the book i try to pursue, you know, how do these people make life in a very
459
00:47:47,280 --> 00:47:54,400
joyful way and in a way that enhances their quality of life, their vitality, their viability in this new
460
00:47:54,400 --> 00:48:01,040
place. And so that means that, of course, there are instances where there were like kind of microaggressions.
461
00:48:01,040 --> 00:48:07,280
the book doesn't deal necessarily directly with that and i think partially because my aim wasn't to
462
00:48:07,280 --> 00:48:13,600
kind of show that, yes, there's racism, but this is not the story. the story is about these people coming
463
00:48:13,600 --> 00:48:19,840
to a new place, bringing with them a whole baggage and wanting to share it in an exchange because
464
00:48:19,840 --> 00:48:24,640
it's not that this family like other migrants necessarily rejected British culture. on the contrary,
465
00:48:24,640 --> 00:48:30,480
in the book i show wonder and i show enchantment with things which were which they saw
466
00:48:30,480 --> 00:48:36,960
as amazing like you know this idea of a functional bureaucracy, or this idea of equality, or ideas
467
00:48:36,960 --> 00:48:42,240
of a street festival where you know you can kind of like share your cultural production with with
468
00:48:42,240 --> 00:48:47,680
you know people from other countries and what have you. but i also show how there is this enchantment
469
00:48:47,680 --> 00:48:53,120
with this as well-
no absolutely, i think you actually say that very clearly in your book, and you
470
00:48:53,120 --> 00:48:58,160
say that you're pushing back against, you know, what Eve Tuck calls like a damaged centered narrative,
471
00:48:58,160 --> 00:49:05,360
or story where the intention through this form of ethnographic refusal, to cite
472
00:49:05,360 --> 00:49:12,080
Audra Simpson, is that you do not want to recreate forms of stereotypes and structural
473
00:49:12,080 --> 00:49:18,800
violences that people are already exposed to right, and what you did in the book, which was
474
00:49:18,800 --> 00:49:26,240
the great part of it, is that you were focusing on also the the happy moments, the joyous
475
00:49:26,240 --> 00:49:33,120
moments, the moments of laughter and just making fun of each other, how they were creating life
476
00:49:33,680 --> 00:49:40,000
amidst everything else, not everything else being foregrounded as being uncertain and life coming after
477
00:49:40,000 --> 00:49:46,240
but life was always put up front a community conviviality. And my students loved the fact that the
478
00:49:46,240 --> 00:49:52,160
cafe was the same place that they lived above or below, i can't remember the cafe, and it was an
479
00:49:52,160 --> 00:49:56,640
extension of their home, so it literally you know the children would be doing their homework, or
480
00:49:56,640 --> 00:50:02,800
making their breakfast. They would be eating with the customers and that sense of a family business
481
00:50:02,800 --> 00:50:09,760
but also where family dynamics of caring and sharing, and just being together really comes through
482
00:50:09,760 --> 00:50:15,680
in your work and which is something that they love-
That's really great. i wanted to add something
483
00:50:15,680 --> 00:50:22,720
about joy in terms of like Palestinian representations. So i mean this was a very joyful family as we
484
00:50:22,720 --> 00:50:29,360
as we mentioned, but i think when it came to the representation of Palestine, to what they imagined as,
485
00:50:29,360 --> 00:50:34,000
you know, this international audience -- because London is a mega international city -- they really
486
00:50:34,000 --> 00:50:40,480
wanted to center joy. And i wanted to convey that as well in dialogue with some critique within
487
00:50:40,480 --> 00:50:47,280
a Palestinian scholarship of the human rights kind of literature in which some scholarly work, but
488
00:50:47,280 --> 00:50:54,400
also activists in general and NGO work, seems to have reduced the politics of the Palestinian cause
489
00:50:54,400 --> 00:50:59,120
to an effort to prove to the world that you know Palestinians are human too.
490
00:50:59,120 --> 00:51:06,320
So this humanity game, as some scholars call, it is very deep politicizing because it makes us
491
00:51:06,320 --> 00:51:11,280
reduce everything that's happening into just proving that you know they are human like us, and now
492
00:51:11,280 --> 00:51:17,120
in the genocide, i see that quite a lot and i find it really frustrating because even though it's
493
00:51:17,120 --> 00:51:22,640
well meaning, the reduction of Palestinian life, or any other life to the fact that look, you know,
494
00:51:22,640 --> 00:51:27,680
they sing or they feed their pets. i mean, i find that very very de-politicizing because it takes us
495
00:51:27,680 --> 00:51:35,120
away from the from the core issue. so yeah for me steering away from the narrative of victimhood
496
00:51:35,120 --> 00:51:40,720
because this family did not see themselves as victims necessarily, and this is, of course, without
497
00:51:40,720 --> 00:51:47,360
undermining what is going on in the injustices and the savagery that is being inflicted on the
498
00:51:47,360 --> 00:51:54,720
Palestinian people and beyond. But, yeah, centering joy was really key to how the this family saw
499
00:51:54,720 --> 00:52:00,480
themselves as Palestinians, so they saw joy as something that defines Palestinians and i wanted to
500
00:52:00,480 --> 00:52:05,680
convey that in the book.
That was definitely very well conveyed and i think that's an important point
501
00:52:05,680 --> 00:52:11,920
that you just made especially since there are already very many narratives that either choose to
502
00:52:11,920 --> 00:52:19,600
erase that aspect of being Palestinian, or that deny it altogether. So yes, i completely agree.
503
00:52:19,600 --> 00:52:26,480
i had a question about lakhbata. can you tell me more about what discombobulated means,
504
00:52:26,480 --> 00:52:32,400
what is it doing for you? Before you respond, let me just read to you what one of my my students wrote
505
00:52:32,400 --> 00:52:39,600
"Obeid's discussion of lakhbata helps show how this temporal suspension is experienced at
506
00:52:39,600 --> 00:52:45,200
the level of everyday life and identity. Through the experiences of the Gazzawi family, migration is
507
00:52:45,200 --> 00:52:51,360
portrayed not only as spatial movement but also as a disruption of one's temporal orientation.
508
00:52:51,360 --> 00:52:58,800
the children's anxieties in school and Widad losing the social recognition she once had
509
00:52:58,800 --> 00:53:05,840
in Gaza reflect a deeper feeling of instability. Being caught between a past that no longer structures
510
00:53:05,840 --> 00:53:11,760
everyday life and a future that has not yet become secure, lakhbata in this sense captures
511
00:53:12,320 --> 00:53:18,560
the emotional and social consequences of being unable to fully anchor oneself within the temporal
512
00:53:18,560 --> 00:53:27,200
expectations of a new society." Can you speak a bit more of about lakhbata or mitlakhbata and how
513
00:53:27,200 --> 00:53:34,320
you came up with the translation, which is for you discombobulated and what it means?
so lakhbata is
514
00:53:34,320 --> 00:53:41,760
just a colloquial term in Arabic, in general, and it really means i'm confused or disoriented. people
515
00:53:41,760 --> 00:53:47,760
use it, mitlakhbata, or i am i am confused, or i am disoriented when things aren't going your way, when
516
00:53:47,760 --> 00:53:54,640
there's chaos, when you're not sure where you are. for example, when the husband arrives after
517
00:53:54,640 --> 00:54:00,560
everybody had already settled, he describes himself as being mitlakhbata, and he would say "i don't know,
518
00:54:00,560 --> 00:54:05,200
i don't know, if i'm going, or i'm coming." i had quite a bit of conversation with- we have a buddy
519
00:54:05,200 --> 00:54:11,280
group in my department about my translation of discombobulation because it's quite wordy, it's a big word.
520
00:54:11,280 --> 00:54:18,080
but i thought it's very appropriate because it's for me like lakhbata is also onomatopoeic word.
521
00:54:18,080 --> 00:54:24,080
it's like shahshah, like that, and i felt the english term is faithful to that. but in terms of how i'm
522
00:54:24,080 --> 00:54:29,600
using this, or what it's doing for me, in different chapters of the book, i try to show that some of
523
00:54:29,600 --> 00:54:35,760
the family members, as migrants do in general, they describe themselves as novices, you know: we're
524
00:54:35,760 --> 00:54:39,920
here, we're new, we don't know anything, we're learning everything. but of course none of us are novices,
525
00:54:39,920 --> 00:54:45,200
you know, we bring with us our experiences, our embodied knowledge of the world, and in different
526
00:54:45,200 --> 00:54:50,160
spaces in the book i show like a little bit of a clash of your, you know, the baggage that you bring
527
00:54:50,160 --> 00:54:55,200
in and an encounter where you're unsure what you should be doing. and sometimes it's funny, sometimes
528
00:54:55,200 --> 00:55:01,040
it's embarrassing, sometimes it's jarring, but this lakhbata, or this confusion, what it does is it's a
529
00:55:01,040 --> 00:55:07,120
form of situated learning because it allows you to self-reflect and to assess your relationship with
530
00:55:07,120 --> 00:55:12,320
yourself or with your others or with the with the community, and it sort of realigns how you're
531
00:55:12,320 --> 00:55:19,360
meant to be behaving in this new kind of diasporic context. so, for example, there are some funny occurrences
532
00:55:19,360 --> 00:55:26,640
in the book where the dad, who's not a drinker, is trying to serve wine in the cafe, and then he gets confused
533
00:55:26,640 --> 00:55:32,000
and then he brings a bottle of balsamic vinegar instead of a wine, and that creates like a funny
534
00:55:32,000 --> 00:55:37,120
moment. there's another situation where there's an inspection by these technical people in a
535
00:55:37,120 --> 00:55:43,680
in a flat of Widad and then she thinks she's the landlady so she, you know, opens her arms and
536
00:55:43,680 --> 00:55:49,600
gives her a kiss and that, you know, like the rich British bureaucrat is absolutely awkwardly appalled
537
00:55:49,600 --> 00:55:54,800
kind of thinking, you know, like, what is what is going on? but then this sort of blunder helps with
538
00:55:54,800 --> 00:56:00,800
that, establish how you interact with, you know, officials. and there's a whole chapter on the children,
539
00:56:00,800 --> 00:56:06,400
as your student pointed out, where the kids also feel like everything is changing for them,
540
00:56:06,400 --> 00:56:11,600
it's not what they expected: they don't speak the language in the schools, they they're removed from-
541
00:56:11,600 --> 00:56:16,320
they're given a house far away from their grandparents in an area where nobody speaks Arabic,
542
00:56:16,320 --> 00:56:21,200
and they're trying to kind, of again, assess their relationships. there's a scene and a playground where
543
00:56:21,200 --> 00:56:27,280
the kids fight and the police comes, and the dad is totally bewildered by the fact that the police
544
00:56:27,280 --> 00:56:34,720
would come to resolve a fight between two kids. so I use lakhbata to show this kind of disorientation
545
00:56:34,720 --> 00:56:41,040
for people who consider themselves novel, or they're like novices in a new place, but then they have
546
00:56:41,040 --> 00:56:46,800
their own knowledge of the world and that creates friction but it's generative because it helps you
547
00:56:46,800 --> 00:56:52,800
understand the way you should inhabit this new world.
yeah, that's a fantastic explanation, I love the
548
00:56:52,800 --> 00:56:58,400
fact that you use so many words that we've never come across, you know, usually in everyday conversations
549
00:56:58,400 --> 00:57:03,440
and I just, you know, like I think it's going to be a word that I'm going to start to use more often.
550
00:57:03,440 --> 00:57:09,360
I'm also going to start to perhaps give the university senior administrators at University of Toronto
551
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a kiss every time I see them. maybe they might start, you know, treating us better because just by, you
552
00:57:15,360 --> 00:57:22,480
know, them being discombobulated. I'm going to come to my last question, actually, I think this has been
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00:57:22,480 --> 00:57:28,400
a fantastic conversation but sadly we have to close the conversation soon. I want to ask about your
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00:57:28,400 --> 00:57:33,840
conclusion because the conclusion reads very differently from the rest of the book. I mean, obviously
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00:57:33,840 --> 00:57:39,520
that is by default of being a conclusion you may have obviously written it at the end, but it does bring
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00:57:39,520 --> 00:57:48,880
us to the present, it brings us to the genocide since 2023, 2024 and where we are now. at least it
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00:57:48,880 --> 00:57:57,040
does speak to how the children have grown up how their sense of being anchored in England, in London, is
558
00:57:57,040 --> 00:58:03,280
once again being redefined by the politics of Palestinian activism but also how the British government
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00:58:03,280 --> 00:58:12,080
has not generally supported Palestinian activism. so my question is this idea that somehow now
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00:58:12,080 --> 00:58:18,080
perhaps this is no longer home. can you speak to what has changed in the family but also how your
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00:58:18,080 --> 00:58:24,400
writing changed in the conclusion?
when I was writing the book I thought it would be unacceptable
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00:58:24,400 --> 00:58:30,000
not to mention the genocide. I mean I was writing, actually, I began finalizing the introduction
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00:58:30,000 --> 00:58:34,880
like a couple of months after the genocide, and already in the introduction, I froze a little bit,
564
00:58:34,880 --> 00:58:39,760
because I was writing this historical section about what we were discussing earlier, about,
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00:58:39,760 --> 00:58:44,800
you know, the existential refugee would and ongoing Nakba, and I froze because I thought I had to
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00:58:44,800 --> 00:58:51,200
reread all this sources on Palestinian history and I froze precisely because I thought "I cannot
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00:58:51,200 --> 00:58:58,000
believe the introduction was meant to contextualize the 2008 Gaza war, and here we are once again
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00:58:58,000 --> 00:59:05,280
going exactly through something" which turned out to be much, much worse than 2008 war on Gaza
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so by the time I got to the conclusion, I think what had happened is already like we were a few
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00:59:10,320 --> 00:59:16,560
months into the genocide, and I'd been thinking of this concept of anchorage and the whole point of
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00:59:16,560 --> 00:59:21,360
anchorage is that, you know, if you think of the water metaphor, is that sometimes there are storms,
572
00:59:21,360 --> 00:59:25,760
and sometimes the water is still, and you feel wonderful, and then you stop and you you know you
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00:59:25,760 --> 00:59:30,720
get off the ship and you sort of do your stuff, and then there's a storm and that completely
574
00:59:30,720 --> 00:59:36,320
discombobulates you, or like deepens your world. and so I'd been kind of checking on this family
575
00:59:36,320 --> 00:59:42,640
and it was really harrowing because, you know, this is a family from Gaza. the amount of people who died
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00:59:42,640 --> 00:59:49,280
their relatives, their homes, their extended families, that'd be you know a strike one day on one
577
00:59:49,280 --> 00:59:54,320
building which would have like 20 or 30 people from one family, and so the the phone calls with the
578
00:59:54,320 --> 01:00:01,360
family were were absolutely harrowing in some sense. so there was that where, you know, that had to be
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01:00:01,360 --> 01:00:06,960
brought in because this is where the family was at in a moment of genocide. and the other issue is
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01:00:06,960 --> 01:00:13,120
that I was thinking of this notion of the "new migrant," and enchantment, so in the whole book
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01:00:13,120 --> 01:00:18,160
one of the women, Wadid, who I write about, she was always enchanted, she always thought, you know, this
582
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was at least of equality, of order, of education, of advancement, and this is something that her children
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took from her, so in the chapter on the children, they echo this. they're like "we're here because we
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01:00:28,560 --> 01:00:33,120
want a better future, we want, you know, everything is order, they have news on, they have order, they have
585
01:00:33,120 --> 01:00:38,880
all of that," and I think the genocide really challenged that because it created disenchantment,
586
01:00:38,880 --> 01:00:45,440
because they realized that all of this is not for everyone and so here, for me, where I thought well,
587
01:00:45,440 --> 01:00:51,200
yes, I'm still thinking through anchorage because this storm of the genocide really kind of shook
588
01:00:51,200 --> 01:00:56,720
the sense of home for these people, because home, as the book and as all this scholarship on home,
589
01:00:56,720 --> 01:01:02,240
tells us home is an affective issue; it's about feeling at home, it's about feeling safe, it's about
590
01:01:02,240 --> 01:01:07,280
knowing what your future is going to be. so all of that changed a little bit, so by the time I got to
591
01:01:07,280 --> 01:01:13,280
the conclusion I felt this had to be brought in, and in a way like I was writing with the voice that
592
01:01:13,280 --> 01:01:19,520
I was feeling at that moment, which is a little bit less joyful than than the rest of the book because
593
01:01:19,520 --> 01:01:25,840
it was quite shocking, the the reaction of the British government. at that moment in time they had
594
01:01:25,840 --> 01:01:30,880
only just refused ceasefire, which is already quite a big thing for the family, they're like "how can
595
01:01:30,880 --> 01:01:36,240
you encourage the refusal of a ceasefire?" and of course by now the disenchantment has gone to
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01:01:36,240 --> 01:01:43,120
totally different levels, but the the very end of the book doesn't end with defeat, I hope, because
597
01:01:43,120 --> 01:01:48,640
it ends with Um Bashir, like the beginning, kind of saying "we're still here," and for me that sort of-
598
01:01:48,640 --> 01:01:53,840
I mean, I don't say more than that, but it kind of opens up what this means, which I had covered in
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01:01:53,840 --> 01:01:58,960
the book about creating life no matter what. and you know since then there's been a wedding, there's been a
600
01:01:58,960 --> 01:02:05,120
big graduation and, you know, life goes on, it's quite [unintelligble]
I'm gonna read that last sentence of your
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01:02:05,120 --> 01:02:11,200
book to close this conversation: "on a video call with Um Bashir I asked how she was doing. with her
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01:02:11,200 --> 01:02:17,440
natural smile, she replied 'for now we are still here. who knows what will happen tomorrow." still at
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01:02:17,440 --> 01:02:24,400
anchor and never losing hope, Um Bashir and her family's future remain full of possibility," and I like
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01:02:24,400 --> 01:02:31,600
how you end, that we need to hold on to that-
Absolutely.
-to possibility and to hope. this has been a wonderful
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01:02:31,600 --> 01:02:37,040
conversation, everyone should read your book, and I will especially make sure that my students
606
01:02:37,040 --> 01:02:44,480
read your book every single year. before we say goodbye, we have a question that we ask all our guests,
607
01:02:44,480 --> 01:02:51,680
because we think that you are someone who kicks ass, someone who writes an amazing book and who tells
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01:02:51,680 --> 01:03:00,720
stories in ways that inspire people, so can you tell us what songs do you go to that, do you listen to
609
01:03:00,720 --> 01:03:07,440
that allow you to feel inspired, that allow you to kick ass?
first of all, thank you very much for your
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01:03:07,440 --> 01:03:14,800
kind words, and I hope everybody who reads the book finds it helpful, and relates to it, whether or not
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01:03:14,800 --> 01:03:22,960
they're Palestinian or Arab or migrants. what inspires me? I listen to a whole range of different
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01:03:22,960 --> 01:03:30,640
songs, pop Arabic music, to jazz, to classical music. I don't think necessarily- I don't always go to one
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01:03:30,640 --> 01:03:36,080
song, and I'm always listening to new music, but I've come across a new album with a really, really
614
01:03:36,080 --> 01:03:44,560
beautiful song, the album is called momoko, and the artist is called momoko gill, and it's kind of jazz
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01:03:44,560 --> 01:03:51,440
music, but her song "When Palestine is Free," it's just the lyrics are amazing, and I think the musical
616
01:03:51,440 --> 01:03:57,120
composition is amazing. so I've come across this very recently and I've been quite enthralled by it.
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01:03:57,120 --> 01:04:01,840
thank you for sharing that song with us, Michelle, and thank you for being on our podcast. you've been
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01:04:01,840 --> 01:04:07,760
an amazing guest, and I hope everyone gets to read your book. thank you again.
it's such a pleasure, thank
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you so much. I'm honored to be on your podcast!
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this podcast series was created for the 10th anniversary of the platform
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01:04:24,400 --> 01:04:29,920
Everyday Orientalism and in conversation with its editors Katherine Blouin and Usama Gad.
622
01:04:29,920 --> 01:04:36,400
to find more content and to subscribe, you can visit everydayorieantilism.wordpress.com.
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this podcast was recorded at the University of Toronto. the land that the University of Toronto is on
624
01:04:42,400 --> 01:04:49,440
has always been indigenous land. in 1827, the British King gave over 200,000 acres of indigenous land
625
01:04:49,440 --> 01:04:55,120
appropriated by the crown to the Anglican Bishop to establish King's College. we wish to acknowledge
626
01:04:55,120 --> 01:05:00,160
that despite this history of settler colonialism, for thousands of years this has always been the
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traditional land of the Huron, the Seneca and the Mississaugas of the Credit. today, this meeting
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place is still home to many indigenous peoples from across Turtle Island, and we are grateful
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to have the opportunity to work on this land. I would like to thank our research assistant Sophie
630
01:05:16,160 --> 01:05:22,400
Plotkin, and our editor and producer Taylor Stark for helping make this podcast possible, and thank you
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for listening.

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