Migrant Odyssey

One stitch - A World of Meaning

• stephen barden • Season 1 • Episode 14

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This is the story of Hajar - a young woman with Palestinian and Lebanese parents - who understands that her people are woven together - not just by ideologies or politics or even the yearning for a safe homeland but by their  stories. The stories of their humanity, eccentricities, intimacy and tenderness. Stories that are embroidered into every part of their lives. 


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Stephen :

Welcome to another episode of Migrant Odyssey. I'm Stephen Barton. Migrants, refugees, exiles, don't just lose their homes, their loved ones, their communities and countries, their loved ones, their communities and countries. They're in danger of losing their weave Not just the food, music and language either, but the threads that braid them together to make a community. The eccentricities of the family next door, the fury of the old guy when he discovered I'd stolen his oranges or mangoes from his garden just as he was about to pick them.

Stephen :

Stories are not just about our history.

Stephen :

They're about the intimacy, the tenderness, the irritation we share with those who come from the same ground and go back into it and go back into it.

Stephen :

And those who wage war to expel others from their homes, seek not just to kill people but to unravel what I call the carpet of fine threads that gave them their belonging. And the more I do this podcast series, the more I realize that its value, if it has any at all series, the more I realize that its value, if it has any at all, is not to tell the sagas of suffering or God forbid victimhood, but to listen to the stories of the weaving of these carpets, that tenderness with which they were stitched together and to encourage them to continue to be woven. Today's story has a lot of weaving and stitching and, for me, heart-aching tenderness. My guest today is Hajar, a young woman who seeks not only the stories of her Lebanese and Palestinian people, but those of her own family and community. I was going to say she has the heart of a poet and the mind of an anthropologist, but, as you'll hear, the heart and the mind in this case are very closely stitched together.

Hajar:

Aja hi, and thank you very much for being with us. Hi, thank you so much for having me.

Stephen :

I'm very excited to speak with you, I thought everyone was Palestinian. When we did our pre-recording chat last week I think it was you said to me up until a certain age, you thought everyone was Palestinian.

Hajar:

Tell me something about that?

Hajar:

Um, so I, I was born in canada and I came to lebanon, and being in canada, I was used to everyone being half half something because of the diversity there.

Hajar:

And then, coming to lebanon, we're half palestinian and my mother, even though she's Lebanese and from the south, she's very, very into Palestine and activism and everything, and so is her family, and I just assumed that everyone around us is either half Palestinian, palestinian or just has someone in their family that's Palestinian. It just it felt so unfathomable to me that someone would just be fully from one place, their entire life in one place, fully DNA from one place. It felt impossible to to grasp until the one time in middle school someone found out I'm Palestinian, called me out in class and they're like oh, you're Palestinian. With with so much disgust and their tone, and I was so confused because it's like what do you mean, isn't everyone? Um, but then I found out that he's half Palestinian as well, which is very, very interesting, because that's also when I found out that people view being Palestinian as a bad economy, which is also unfathomably crazy to me. I couldn't understand it.

Stephen :

Yeah, interesting that that person thought being Palestinian was bad and so therefore he thought there was a sort of self-hate about him. Is that right?

Hajar:

Yeah, that's the thing self-hate about him. Is that right or so? Yeah, that's the thing, I think. I think there's a lot of told experiences in regards of um having bad experiences being palestinian, especially in lebanon, or I'm not going to speak of other places, but specifically in lebanon.

Hajar:

I think a lot of people speak about having racist encounters, but I can't say I didn't have them. I just I. All I can say is I, I never noticed um and we spoke about this earlier before is I. I live in my entire, in my own bubble, and so it did it. Whatever. That does not serve me any good purpose, I automatically dismiss it. And so people speaking badly about being Palestinian, I either just take it as a joke, because I think they're actually joking, or I just ignore it, and so I've never really had any like racist encounter here, but also never had a racist encounter in Canada. But that's also because I'm very careful with who I surround myself with and I just ignore things to an extreme so yeah, yeah, I get it interesting this thing about, about I you know that being in canada, so you were.

Stephen :

You were born in canada, correct? That was that that's right, because your parents took you there when you were, when you were in mommy's tummy, sort of thing. But interesting thing about this that you assumed everybody was from different places, if you like. There wasn't this. You know, I was this nativist thing. I was born here, brought up here, lived here, et cetera, et cetera, and I had a similar sort of thing and I still get it now funny enough because you know I was, as I think we discussed, my parents were Greek, separate from Cyprus. I was born in Africa, in East Africa, moved to South Africa and then to Britain, et cetera, et cetera. So when people say to me, as they do in Europe quite a lot, so where are you from, I say you know, don't ask it's always a difficult conversation.

Stephen :

Yeah, you're going to get the full story, which goes on forever. But your parents politically active. You said to me father Palestinian, is that correct? Mother from the south of Lebanon, correct, the south, yes. Mother Palestinian, is that correct? Mother from the south of Lebanon, correct, the south, yes, and how did they? Just briefly, how did they meet? Where did they meet?

Hajar:

So they met at a pan-Arabism conference. Well, actually, their friends met through the conference and they introduced them to each other. So my mother went to the Egypt conference and my father went to the Tunis and Iraq conference and their friends just decided they had to meet. So they did meet and they got married, I think a year after, and they lived in Jordan for a bit and then went to Canada because, my father being Palestinian, he could never give us his papers. And even if he did, what would we possibly do with Palestinian identity papers? And my mother, as a Lebanese mother, never give us his papers? And even if he did, what would we possibly do with Palestinian identity papers? And my mother, as a Lebanese mother, cannot give us the Palestinian passport, the Lebanese passport, so we would just end up stateless, I guess. So the first thing they did together as a couple was to apply to Canada. Actually, my father already had his application open. So you all have.

Stephen :

Canadian citizenship. Is that right?

Hajar:

Yes, yes.

Stephen :

Oh, that's great, that's great. Canada, of course, was only part of the story. Then you moved about all over the place, didn't you?

Hajar:

Yes, so then they moved to Kuwait and then Lebanon. My father went to KSA at the time, so Saudi Arabia, and then we stayed in Lebanon. He went to KSA at the time, so Saudi Arabia, and then we stayed in Lebanon. He went to Australia, then back to the Gulf area and then we all went to Canada and then back to the Gulf area in Lebanon and then I left for university in Canada.

Stephen :

Right.

Hajar:

But I think that's just. In my opinion, that's just the diary of once you're out of the homeland. You're never going to come back fully. You're always going to be moving somehow, and I think that's just part of the story for us.

Stephen :

Yeah, Do you think that's part of the story for all displaced migrant people, whether they are? Is that the answer to your question?

Hajar:

I think so honestly, because recently I've been very interested in the idea of land, and not land in a specific idea of homeland, but rather than where you get to experience geographic land. That's where you're going to get attached to the place and so, realistically, we all belong to earth. Yes, there's the idea of nations and borders, and I belong to this specific country, but the idea is we belong more to the geographic places we're at, we go to, and I think once you're in the diaspora, once you start getting attached to other places of land and have more stories and connections to these spaces, it's a bit more difficult to get over them and stay in one place. So, for example, for me, I definitely have a lack of stability when it comes to stuff like this, but I took it from a positive angle where I just I love to travel and I love to see different places and it feels impossible to just stay in one place forever because there's so much more to see and do yeah, yeah.

Stephen :

Where is your heart? Where does your heart feel at the moment? Not tomorrow, not yesterday. Where does your heart feel?

Hajar:

uh, you can exhale so my mother used to always say um the, a mother's heart belongs to the sick child until he's better and travel the child until he's back. And um, I think right now the south is definitely the shit sick child that my heart aches for all the time, and we've been basically displaced from the south of lebanon for almost a year and a half now and it's been the longest time we have not been to the, to our village, because we used to go every single weekend. So, for for sure, my heart is there, but at the end of the day, I think, time being my ultimate compass in life, I can't also say that it's not part of my heart always.

Stephen :

I can't ever take it out of my heart yeah, I think, different experiences, but I think, like, like you, you know, spent a lot of time traveling all over the place and really really a lot of places, and I think it wasn't the land that I felt at home with, it was the people that I felt at home with. When I felt, when there were people that I cared about and remembered, then, yes, that was my home. But I knew and I think that's what you're saying as well I knew that would be in my heart. That place, a place maybe in my heart, but it was not going to be necessarily the home. The home, the single home.

Hajar:

No, definitely, I think that's definitely part of it, but I think it's also I think it's an interesting thing. Um, having traveled so much, I don't think I've had um lifelong attachments in one place. So all the people that I've met I absolutely adore and they're people that I would definitely travel simply to see. But also, I think um me being the way I am and being so in my bubble at all times, very isolated. Um, it is genuinely the geographic places that I miss, because I get very attached to the streets and the, the scenes and the sky and the water. Um, and all these places have had some sort of moving body of water or salt water in some sort, and I've gotten incredibly attached to all of these bodies of water. Um, so I think yeah, I think honestly, I measure geographic places by the bodies of water in the places, because I'm so attached to it to the water, to the actual water yes to the actual water.

Stephen :

Yeah to the it's the flow, isn't it? It's the flow, yeah, it's the water, the soil, just yeah, absolutely everything yeah it's.

Hajar:

It's the water, the soil, just absolutely everything.

Stephen :

Yeah, it's the one place that you can actually feel at home with, because it flows. It flows everywhere.

Hajar:

Yeah.

Stephen :

Yeah.

Hajar:

Which is so interesting that people have so many different day after experiences let's say, with salt water.

Stephen :

Yeah, yeah, very much so. Yeah, yeah, very much so. So your uncles, you told me, were also very active and they were in and out of prison for a long time of Israeli prisons. Is that right?

Hajar:

Yes, yes, I have an uncle that spent 11 years in and out of Israeli prison and several others, but him being the oldest, we speak of him the most. And there's also, um, I believe, an uncle that spent seven years and actually, you know, I think a lot less. But, um, I haven't met him because when he got out of prison Israeli prison the first thing he did was get on a plane to Amsterdam and then go down to South Africa and get married, have kids and just kind of leave. And they joke that when he left, israelis had a party because he had caused them so much trouble with his activism and his constant worrying them.

Hajar:

So, yes, I think it is a bit off the tangent, but with political prisons I feel like they genuinely they're more a psychological thing like political prisons, but also they tear families apart.

Hajar:

They, they tear families apart. They actually tear families apart because when people come out of these prisons they're not the same as before um, and we've seen that happen, with my grandfather, um, and my missing uncle being in sednaya or syrian prisons and we have no idea of the abuse they endured. And when it comes to my father's brothers coming out of Israeli prisons and then leaving because I actually have no idea what they endured. I just got to meet his kids and seeing them be almost 30 and me just crossing 20 felt so crazy that I've missed out on having such a connection in my life with family, because I think also being in the diaspora or like also not being in the homeland, not being in the homeland, I've always felt like I was missing out on family connections or family experiences or anecdotes that they say because I'm just never going to be able to live in Palestine the way they were able to live in Palestine, and I think that really put everything to perspective.

Stephen :

Did you say one of the uncles had also been in a Syrian prison? Is that right or wasn't? Is in a Syrian prison?

Hajar:

So Syrian prison? My mother's side it was. It is her brother. We have no idea where he is. But also my grandfather was in Sidnaya, I think late 90s, early 2000s, I think late 90s actually. My mother was 18 years old because I remember she would tell us stories of how, at 18, she was the one that was physically able in the household because my grandmother was sick, she had cancer, and she had just finished through cancer and was pregnant and her other brothers were too young and one of them was in the army so they couldn't really do much. So, as 18, as a woman on her own, she was going to all these political prisons and looking for my grandfather and, um, I think that of itself she has so many stories of political abuse that she endured and all the stories of anyone that would ever help her. They would just suddenly disappear because they're not allowed to get anyone out of these prisons.

Stephen :

And your grandfather? Did he disappear? Did you ever get him out?

Hajar:

No, my grandfather is alive and well, he's here.

Stephen :

He's here.

Hajar:

He's also very, very active in our lives. He's currently teaching everyone driving.

Stephen :

Yeah, you're absolutely, of course. You're absolutely correct. You're a living example of families being completely disrupted, and it's not only the abuse and the torture that people endure when they go into these political prisons, but what happens to the people who are outside and are then ostracized, threatened, and just this huge gap. One of the things that people going through genocide, going through obliteration or attempted obliteration is that the obliterator tries to remove their memories and tries to remove the story of the bride, and one of the things we were talking about is you're trying to find something about your Bedouin grandmother. Is that correct? Did I got it right? Yes, yes, and you very kindly sent me. So I'm going to play a tape of a recording that you sent me. But before we do that, can you tell me something about just what you've been able to find out about your grandmother and why was it so important for you when you discovered this sound tape?

Hajar:

So I went into anthropology as a form of spite. It really bothered me how undocumented our experiences were. So as a community we focus a lot more on oral history and it irked me to know that we don't have anything documented. We don't have any history books or story books. I've been able to find a bit about family lineages and dating back family names, but the questions that genuinely interested me, I couldn't find anything about them and I've tried to go through my cousins and just ask every single one of them about these questions, and my father and my uncle and my aunts and everyone and whoever was able to help me, they could only help me just a little bit further.

Hajar:

Um, so it really bothered me and I went into anthropology, also as a political stand against Israel being the one that graduates anthropologists the most, and so I really wanted to be able to document these stories. I really wanted to document the oral history. I had a lot of questions about her tribal tattoos and I couldn't find absolutely anything about the specific symbols that she had on, and everyone in the family was was also not aware of these details and I was very confused. So I really wanted to look into it a bit further, but due to the situation, I have not been able to yet.

Stephen :

Uh, so that's part of it and also, I really had not met her so she was your mother's, your mother's mother.

Hajar:

My father's mother, so in Palestine. So there's also that issue. Yes, so, yeah. So there's an issue of getting in contact with people for details and I just barely met her, maybe twice because of the limitations of entering and all that comes with it. So I was able to find this voice message from my cousin and she had recorded it on WhatsApp and just kept forwarding it to people in the family. And my grandmother has passed away, when I was, I think, 12 or 11. So I don't really recall her much. So the voice message actually there's a funny story to it I sent it to you thinking it's poaching, because it sounded like poaching.

Hajar:

So I continued asking because I really I didn't want to just put it in without really explaining it. So I kept looking around for what it could possibly mean and they told me it was a joke. My grandma used to say and it's not at all poaching, but she says it in a way that's like poetic um. So I asked a bit further and it turns out she's telling a story. So the story is supposed to be uh, she says it in a funny way, apparently, like she says it as a joke. But it's not supposed to be a joke, it's just that. Um, if you want after, I'll it, and then you see what I mean.

Stephen :

All right, what I'm going to do is I'm going to play it. Then I'll sort of dip it down a bit, play it for a few seconds, then I'll dip it down a bit, and then you can tell me Okay, here we go, let's see what's.

Hajar:

Let me get the translation out.

Stephen :

All right, here we go. So what is she saying there?

Hajar:

So she is. Basically I couldn't understand what she was saying, so I really had to ask my dad and ask everyone. And turns out she's telling a story of someone, um, his, his friend came up to him and said um, I want sorry. His friend went to a woman and was like my friend really would like to marry you and I'm I'm kind of in between. Um, so what do you think? And she said I'll take him, but only if he kicks his mother out. So his mother is not living with us.

Hajar:

So he responds with this um poetry house, basically how, how am I going to um kick my mother out, when she's the one that cared for me the most and she's the one that breastfed me until I was too old and she helped me be the person I wanted to be. She's like I would never take you. Just because you said this, actually, like, just because you said you don't want my mother here, then I'm not gonna marry you and I take back my proposal. And then she apparently replied my father continued the story that apparently she replied with um I would only marry this guy because the the love and care he has for his mother is hopefully the same love and care my son would have for me, and so I would only take someone with the same belief system as him, or her heart is him.

Stephen :

So that was very interesting yeah, I was wondering because there was a lot of for me and so I would only take someone with the same belief system as him or or heart as him. So that was very interesting. Yeah, I was wondering, cause there was a lot of the repetition of the, the, almost the same words. Yeah, I saw that. That's wonderful, but there's also the color, there's the, there's the food, there's the, there's the memories, there's the memories. There's the rogues, the good people, the bad people, there's all of that which Palestinians are very rich in, but I don't see possibly my own in fact very much my own ignorance. I don't see those transmitted into the general public, if you like, outside them.

Hajar:

So I think it's definitely becoming more common now and I think it's because my generation is so understanding of how important culture is and narratives are in regards of resistance. But that's not to blame the previous generations because generally, seeing it from their perspective, what they did is what they thought they needed to do for survival, and that is very fair and that's very understandable, because the idea of of resisting and further than just weapons, is um now taking on a different definition, I think. But they've always had the idea of the sword and the pen, and so we've always had poets and we've always had writers, but these writers and these poets were using art as resistance, which has always been around um. What I would hope to see more of is seeing us in academic spaces with the same um techniques or the same ways they use to write about us and change our narrative. I would hope to see us reclaim our narrative in these specific places, and by reclaiming that narrative, I don't think we should only do what they do and kind of like match them at that level, but also exceed at what we do, and that's why, uh, we were talking about my research in Athens and how I did not write in an academic way at all, because it felt very dismissive of the previous generations and I speak of of the latter, the generation latter, of what gets us to this point in the paper.

Hajar:

They put in a lot of work and they really used the pen and the sword to all the extremes before and they needed that for survival and they needed that for conveying what they wanted to convey. And so I couldn't take art and poetry out of my research, because that's not what I'm here to do. I'm here to weave a story between everyone. We're all stitches in our own way to make the final qatari's embodiment. It doesn't make sense to come in and only make it academic, because we're not a still community, we're a very vibrant community and we like to speak with poetry, we like to explain our feelings, which a lot of these poets were men, which I also would like to say on a tangent is our men are full of emotions and they're so vivid and they've been portrayed as very still terrorists that have no feelings. But our men, especially our muslim men, they're full of love and they're full of um, gratitude.

Hajar:

Allahu akbar, adhan just started playing, but um, they're full of love and they're full of gratitude, and it would be very dismissive to look at these histories without understanding that these poets put part of their heart on their sleeve and they showed it to us to explain what they're they're experiencing in regards of war and displacement and in heartache for the homeland. So that's what I wanted to do with my research. I didn't want to take it from an academic perspective that is so still and stagnant, because our strengths are not only words, like our or in history should be conveyed in different points and styles as well yeah, I, I, yeah, I completely agree with you.

Stephen :

I mean, I don't think there is one way anyway of doing, of telling the story. It is a weave and interesting that you used this weaving, if you like, which we'll talk about a little later, but it's a weave, isn't it? You have to have the academic, you have to have the telling the story, you have to have the scientific, you have to have the telling the story, you have to have the scientific, you have to have the memories, the human, the poetry, everything together, and woven ropes are the strongest. It is not the single strand that is the strongest.

Hajar:

No, I think also. Currently, every single thing ever is political and, knowing that everything is political, we need to be political on every single front. Every single aspect of life is a place where you can fight. If you're not fighting for palestine, you're fighting capitalism, you're fighting imperialism, you're fighting colonialism, you're fighting these things that are. They're genuinely terrible for the human race. I mean, how embarrassing is it that we've had earth for this long and we've ruined it this much? So everything is political and we need to be active on every single front. And we also need to realize that all of these aspects or all of these angles, are part of a whole, and you can't really take politics without the environment, and you can't really take art without taking institutional politics. You can't really look at one thing without looking at everything. Even food has become political, so I mean, collecting rainwater is illegal in Gaza, so you can't really talk about anything without mentioning such core parts to any movement.

Stephen :

Did you say collecting rainwater is illegal in Gaza? Did you say that yes?

Hajar:

Why is it illegal?

Stephen :

Collecting rainwater is illegal. Yes, why, yes, why?

Hajar:

yes, israel has made collecting rainwater illegal for people in Gaza, which I think is not even one of the craziest things Israel has done. And actually I found out the other day about something, and it's not specifically in Palestine and not to take the attention away from Palestine, but I just want to expand the overview on how crazy the world we live in is. I found out that in America, people are not like farmers. They're not allowed to use the crop seeds to plant them again because they're patent, and so it's illegal to recycle the seeds from the same plants, which is essentially what the core being of a farmer is, and so they're supposed to keep buying seeds and throw these away. They're only supposed to use them for like house use. And that is so crazy to me, because the whole idea of God giving us soil and seeds is for us to keep growing our same foods from the same foods. Yeah, and that was crazy to me.

Stephen :

Yeah, as you said earlier on, which I loved. Which is it? How embarrassing is it that we've been on this planet for this period of time and we've screwed it up so bad?

Hajar:

It's unfathomable to me. It's so unfathomable to me that people would dismiss parts of these. They're all connected at core. We have no access to things God gives us for free. This is so crazy yeah, okay.

Stephen :

so you, you also decided to go and, as we we've referenced, we you went to to Athens, to Exarchia, which is very close to the centre of Athens, where there is a large Palestinian community right, both refugees and diaspora, as well as others. Exarchia, by the way, just for the information of listeners, is a particularly vibrant place. It's very close to the Polytechnic which, in 1973, was the center of a huge student uprising against the colonels, the military dictatorship which had happened in Greece. The colonels then decided that they needed to break this up and they drove tanks through the gates of the Polytechnic and, although it was claimed that no students were killed, there were students killed, quite a number of students killed, and a lot of civilians were killed as a result of this.

Stephen :

Exarchia is a place of great activism. It's a place of great food, great color, et cetera, et cetera, and it's interesting because you were talking earlier on about, you know, that we need to make everything political in the sense that it is very political. You've got, you know, you've got people of all political persuasions and activism there. So why did you go there? Very briefly, and what did you find, particularly about the Palestinians, those Palestinians living in a very active activist part of Greece and how they dealt with being out there.

Hajar:

So I went in for research, and my research was about Palestinian identity in Athens and how it is formed, basically, how geographic attachment to land can be imitated in a place that's similar to a place you were in before, and so a lot of the refugees that I talk to are mostly Palestinian refugees that have crossed through Lebanon, turkey or Syria and have stopped in these places for a while as well, so it wasn't just a path. So they had a lot of stories from all of these different places and a lot of experiences that, uh, collected together were very unique. Um, yet, however, despite everyone's unique story, I felt like every single person had a similar story, in a sense, of leaving the homeland and the experiences that come with it.

Hajar:

So obviously every single experience is very different, but the more I was researching and the more I wanted to protect their identity, obviously because a lot of them were undocumented and just for the sake of the project, they had to be anonymous, and so I switched everyone's names into one character and I made it into a singular character that has all of these experiences, and as I was writing I noticed I related to it a lot as well, and this was the character.

Stephen :

Was this the character arabella? Is this what you were talking about?

Hajar:

yes, that was arabella everyone became arabella correct.

Hajar:

That's what everyone became arabella. So, basically, arabella was named after um, arabella, the song by um. I forgot the band, oh my god. Oh, arctic Monkeys, oh my god, how could I forget? I had posters all over my room, um, so it was named after that song because of the western aspect, but at the same time it's uh.

Hajar:

Arabella is a reference to irbid in jordan, which, ironically, is where my family last name, uh is very present in, and I've never been. Apparently they're a different side of the family, I just never met them, but they're from irbid, um, and so I really wanted to mix between the west and the east in the name itself. And so everyone became Arabella. In a sense, in the story and or technically it's an article, it's a research paper, but I wrote it in a poetry way because I could not take apart the art and the academics, um, so I instilled a lot of myself in it as well, because it was such a shared story and when you read it, even even if you're not aware of arabella being such a mosaic of everyone's stories, it could still stand on her own as a story, because these experiences are so shared and they're so common and they're so felt through the international Palestinian community, and so, even though it had so many of our stories, it just stood on her own as one story.

Stephen :

Interesting because you talk in that paper, about which thank you for sending it to me. You talk about a lack of a collective political community amongst Palestinians in Athens due to sex and subsex always forming middle class, diaspora class, refugee class, et cetera. Yes, I think, my question there to you is does it actually matter?

Hajar:

I don't think it does matter. Actually, I really do not think it matters, because the lack of something is still a presence of it in a way, and the lack of an international community is still a presence of an international community, just not in the ideal way. And I think it would be detached from reality to assume any political or community in general would not have subsects, because even in the homeland we have so many subsects, like the only thing uniting us right now is the common hatred for zero, the. The idea of subsects, think, exists everywhere and all the time that it just gets to a point where it doesn't matter Because we are existing together, no matter all that is happening when need be. Everyone is connected and everyone is one community and I don't think the fragmentation of it matters.

Stephen :

At the end of the day, yeah, I was thinking as well when you were, when, when, uh, when, reading your, your stuff, that that in in all the uh, displaced or exiled communities I've seen, there's always been um, and I've come across a number of them there's, there's always been this clearly there's going to be class sex. People are going to be coming out there, you know, who are middle class and fairly affluent. Others are going to be forced out, you know, on rubber boats if you like. So there's that, but there's also this. There was also this thing of those people who had the chance to experience what was going on back in the homeland fully and those who didn't, because they were children of exiles.

Stephen :

And it became in certain countries, for example South Africa, which I know quite well, and certainly places like Angola, where you had this feeling almost of I was in there and you were not. You were in exile, comfortably in exile, quote unquote. Of course, nobody's comfortably in exile, but you know. So there's that superiority of the locals versus the ones who went out, but actually, at the end of the day, when it comes to the nitty-gritty, they all join together.

Hajar:

Zoya, that was on your podcast. I remember we spoke about how Okay. So for everyone listening, zoya Mahadi is. She is currently a UN ambassador of peace and she is A double refugee In a sense Of her being a Palestinian refugee In Lebanon and also she's half Ukrainian and she left during the Ukrainian war to Switzerland. So she was a refugee twice and when she started speaking of her story, everyone like she.

Hajar:

She felt like she couldn't share a story because I never experienced things properly the way people that were there did, because I was never in Palestine. And people from Palestine were like, actually, no, you, you lived in the refugee camps. That's a lot worse than what we endured. That's not, it's not fine. Um, so, no, you get to share your story, just like us, and more um, and I think, even with me, I think with with being in the diaspora.

Hajar:

When I tell my cousins back in the homeland, they're like, oh my god, that's so difficult, like we could never. I'm like, guys, you're enduring a lot worse than me. What are you talking about? So, um, I think, I think there's always this duality to what we're doing. I think's also, I think, also because we see, as Arabs, we see a lot of violence towards us at all times. And so when you're comparing racism to like stories of prison and war and displacement and exile and all these things that they endure on the daily because for us we think, okay, we can turn off the screen, we can ignore what's happening we're always kind of comparing like, no, their struggle is a lot worse. They get to share their story a lot more, they get to do things differently than us. So I think that's definitely part of it.

Stephen :

Okay, A couple more short questions, if you like. Then we need to close off. Tell me about embroidery.

Hajar:

Oh, it's such a beautiful part of the culture in my opinion. Embroidery Palestinian embroidery is called tatris, and so tatris is cross-stitching, and the cross-stitching makes a design at the end and we use them for taubes, which at the time they used to wear on a daily basis, but for some reason now we've kind of excluded wearing them to only events. They had different taupes for different things, different colors of the stitches for different life events. So there's a morning taupe, there's a wedding taupe, there's the taupes that you would use when they're farming.

Hajar:

So embroidery, I think, is so important to our culture and it's also so important in a spiritual way where it is so easy to forget our belonging to a community when, when we're outside, um, when outside places. But I think, when you think of it as as we're all part of different stitches and we're all different communities and we're all different people coming together to make the whole idea of a taupe, um, it's a lot easier to kind of keep that in mind and it's a lot easier to feel connected to these things. And it's just you can't, you can't have a full embroidered taupe without the signature stitch of every single person and their story and their community and their memories and their attachment to the place, because that's how you get the full picture at the end.

Stephen :

And you learned how to embroider correct.

Hajar:

Yes, I felt very disconnected from community when I was in university because I was in Canada alone, without my family, and I took it upon myself to learn how to embroider because I was so stressed out that my aunt that knows how to embroider is getting sick and that community is fading.

Hajar:

The elders are fading and they're tired and the stories are are less vibrant and they're stitching. They can't stitch anymore because their hands are tired and I just felt the need to learn it. So I immediately ordered a kit and I started embroidering and right now I'm working on making my first tobe, which, um, I think we joked about before that, um, I I started it with the intention of when I'm done with my tobe, I'll get married, because I want to make a, an engagement tobe that it has specific stitches and colors and everything and for. For everything that happened, I think I shifted along making an antifada top, which Palestinians have made during the antifada, when they were not allowed to put Palestinian flags, and so a lot of the tops included the flags and the colours and just a lot of revolutionary embroidery.

Stephen :

So can I ask you a stupid question what is a Taub?

Hajar:

Oh, so a Taub is a Palestinian dress. It's a dress that is, I think, three quarters to your arm and up to your ankles and it has Palestinianestinian embroidery on it, on the chest piece and then on the legs and then the arms, and the placement and the colors and the stitches and motifs on it change and differ based on the story that the person is trying to tell. On the dress itself would you send me?

Stephen :

would you send me a picture of one, and may I use that on the dress itself? Will?

Hajar:

you send me? Will you send me a?

Stephen :

picture of one, and may I use that on the promotional yes of course I'll send you.

Hajar:

I'll send you the one I have of my grandma. They they gave me a, a taupe of my grandma. They gave me two. Actually one of them they put on jeans for me so that it would match my Western identity, and one they gave me the, the other taupe that my grandma used to wear um at home, which is very interesting because it has little um stitches on it that are separate to the actual embroidery, because it's ripped on the side or she's dropped her cigarettes on a part and they're trying to stitch it, so it doesn't like appear.

Hajar:

So I'll send you a picture of that and there's a picture of me wearing it, so I'll send that too yes actually I have a picture with um iranian motor took it she's a photographer she's a well-known photographer and um, it's me wearing it with a coffee, um on the salt water in lebanon, so inside them. So it connects a lot of my identities together and I will send it to you okay, thank you so much.

Stephen :

That's been. It's been a joy and I'd love, I'd love talking to you and, um, what's next? Just one, one question what's next for you?

Hajar:

um, what's next for me is, as I said, to focus on the child that's sick until they're better, and so I will be working on documenting our village story, um, throughout the war and throughout the people that have martyred in the area, to kind of have an archive for the village and just kind of rebuilding the village physically, spiritually, uh, just absolutely in any possible way. So for now I think that's the first big step.

Stephen :

Thank you, thank you.