On Love, Rage, and Marmalade

A video snippet of my grandmother making strawberry jam in Nablus, Palestine. February 2019.

    

There is a very intimate relationship between the food we preserve and the memories we carry. 

A relationship I am yet able to put into words adequate enough to keep up with my pacing thoughts about the world’s recurring crises. Who am I to write about radical love when there is barely anything left of it to give? We all move too quickly to care. Suffocating on crumbs of impatience as I munch on a sandwich at the bus stop on my way to work. I forgot how to chew and I never really learned how to feed myself, unlike my mother, or her mother, or her mother-in-law.

I call them to apologize for my absence and for their recipes that I attempt to replicate in the kitchen. Remembrance in its irony relies on the past to actively take presence. I rely on the faint aftertaste of my grandfather’s olives and grandmother’s marmalades in order to preserve their identities.

The bitter-oranges I foraged in Athens and made marmalade out of tasted similar to the ones in Palestine but the texture was not quite the same. The more I ate from it, the more I forgot about the one I tried to reproduce and just like me it became a mixture of different dwellings. Moving around in jars, resisting mold and decay. 

Marmalades and other types of food preserves represent a common theme of perseverance. In a lot of ways, we act as vessels for our ancestor’s anecdotes; bearers of memories that oftentimes do not belong to us but aid in coping with their losses and our own. Loss of land, of space, of belonging to place. 

We Palestinians belong nowhere but to the imagination, one of returning to a home that continues to shrink as we are canned in refugee camps and dispersed in diaspora. A reality that fills me with rage and one which I suppress by reminding myself that I am still a fragile living body that demands sustenance and care. Self-care, community-care; essentials that have been reduced to nice-sounding phrases, unattainable in our anxious societies. Slowness is not a luxury; it is a radical necessity we all fight for in our struggle for liberation. 

Allowing myself the opportunity to cook time-consuming dishes and to share them with others is something informed by my movement work, deeply embedded in it. According to an acquaintance, my art “has this beautiful cultural heritage/family / biography component, which just fits radical love”. The tiny aspects of my family life that I share online consist of a video of my grandmother making strawberry jam, just like she does every February. A screenshot of my dad texting me about last year’s olive harvest, a portrait drawing of my grandfather and a text on the za’atar from Palestine he used hide in his cupboard. 

Radical love is preservation. It is in those who bottle up their rage through making marmalades that remind them of home. My sentimental attachment to things comes from my family’s rejection of nostalgia. They move on, and in their recollections of the homeland I see a sense of denial to having completely lost any hopes for freedom. 

Bitter orange tree "Kushkash/Zifir", Athens, 2022

Another text on bitter orange marmalade... 🟠

When life presents you with an opportunity to move to a place where the sun lingers for a bit longer in the winter… to a city where bitter orange trees grow on every block as a way to cover up for its sadness and crooked pavements, your memories of a bitter sweet taste return, reminding you of a country you have left behind but promised yourself to never forget; Palestine. So you call the grandmother there, who you never really got to know, to ask her to forgive you for always being the absent one in the family and for her bitter orange marmelade recipe - one that requires 2-4 days of labour and waiting, something my generation is apparently incapable of doing because of our tendency to move too quickly, to consume, to resume, to assume too quickly. My grandmother was right, I couldn’t even wait until January for these trees to become ripe. How does one engage in the politics of care and slowness in a world that moves on without you if you don’t manage to keep up with its pace?