Seeds And Their People - EP. 38: Vivien Sansour on Palestinian Seeds, Longing, and Love

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

Vivien Sansour is an artist, storyteller, researcher and conservationist. She uses image, sketch, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations and to advocate for the protection of biodiversity as a cultural and political act. Vivien works with a global network of farmers and seed advocates to promote seed conservation and agrobiodiversity. As part of this effort, she founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, with the goals of finding and reintroducing threatened crop varieties and to collect stories to assert the ownership of seeds by communities. This episode features a conversation between Vivien and Owen in East Rock Park in New Haven, Connecticut from dusk to darkness amongst deer and woodpeckers, with mariyamiya tea and einkorn cake, and about grief and doing good things in the world with seeds.  SEED STORIES:  Qarn al-Ghazal Khobaizeh fruits / Mary's Cake Bamyeh (Palestinian Okra) Filfil Gazawi (Gazan Peppers) Olives Jarjir (Arugula) Molokhia Wild Asparagus Figs Loquat Jazar Ahmar (Palestinian Purple Carrot) Mariyamiya (Sage) LINKS: Palestine Heirloom Seed Library homepage Palestine Heirloom Seed Library newsletter 12/2/2025 Instagram: PHSL and Vivien Sansour Donate to PHSL's The Apple Path: planting another 2,000 heirloom fruit trees in Palestine THIS EPISODE SUPPORTED BY: YOU! Please become a Patron for $1 or more a month at Patreon.com/trueloveseeds Scribe Video Center and WPEB, West Philly Community Radio ABOUT: Seeds And Their People is a radio show where we feature seed stories told by the people who truly love them. Hosted by Owen Taylor of Truelove Seeds and Chris Bolden-Newsome of Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden. trueloveseeds.com/blogs/satpradio   FIND OWEN HERE: Truelove Seeds Facebook  |  Instagram  |  Twitter   FIND CHRIS HERE: Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden  

Things you loved, flavors you loved, worlds that lived in your senses are no longer there and you're constantly adjusting to their absence and longing for their presence. You're searching everywhere. And obviously one of the ways in which this has happened is systemic and intentional by making our foods and our food ways either illegal. or impossible to access, or obviously by the mere fact of just confiscating our lands and forcing us to leave our lands and murdering the very people who have been the guardians of these lands for literally thousands of years. Welcome to Seeds and their people.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Oh, my goodness. farmer and co-director of Sankofa Community Farm at Bartcham's Garden in sunny southwest Philadelphia. And I'm Owen Taylor, seed keeper and farmer at True Love Seeds. We're a seed company offering ancestral seeds grown by farmers who preserve their beloved tastes of home for their diasporas and beyond through keeping seeds and their stories and community. This podcast is supported by True Love Seeds and by our listeners.

Thank you so much to our Patreon members who support this podcast. for as little as $1 a month. You too could sign up at patreon.com slash true love seeds. This episode features our friend Vivian Sansour, and I'm going to read you a little bit about Vivian and the Palestine heirlum seed library. Vivian Sansour is an artist, storyteller, researcher, and conservationist. She uses image, sketch, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations and to, advocate for the protection of biodiversity as a cultural and political act. Vivian works with a global network of farmers and seed advocates to promote seed conservation and agribiordiversity. As part of this effort, she founded the Palestine heirloom seed library, with the goals of finding and reintroducing threatened crop varieties and to collect stories

to assert the ownership of seeds by communities. That's from her website, and here's from an email that was sent out from the Palestine heirloom seed library earlier today, actually, the newsletter. And I link to it in the show notes. Please check the show notes. I have so many links in there. As we write this, our colleagues in Palestine are wrapping up a challenging olive harvest season. The plants are sad, are the words of Hassan, who spent the majority of November trying to make sure we can salvage whatever we can from a drought impacted season combined with a politically violent reality. Though as seeds always do, they give us strength and hope for new life. And the newsletter goes on to talk about so many

awesome things that they're doing across the world in Palestine, in Italy, throughout the U.S., and I highly recommend you check it out. It's really important work. I guess I'll just add that the Palestine Arlum Seed Library was founded in 2014 in the West Bank, Village of Batyr. and you can hear more about that from our recent interview with Hassan, who was just mentioned also in the newsletter a couple episodes ago. And I like what they said here at the end. It is also a living archive of stories of people and plants, and it aims to inspire a new world using the seed as a dissident,

traveling across borders and checkpoints to defy violence and oppression while reclaiming life and presence. So that tells you a little bit about their work. And True Love Seeds has worked with the Palestine Aerlum Seed Library for the last couple years, growing several of the varieties in their collection here in the Diaspora as one of their seed protector partners. But let's talk about this episode a little to hear your reflections and thoughts before we dive in. It's a little on me. Your turn.

Okay. Well, at the risk of sounding like that, Terry Gross parody from NPR, I love Vivian's story. I think that some of the things that really stood out to me that I would like folks to maybe listen for. She talks about the olive trees so much in their importance. You know, it's something I know definitely, just, of course, from history and, and, you know, and faith and all of these things, the olive tree is just this looming symbol. Though I don't know that I ever saw an olive tree for real until we went to California. You know, maybe a few years ago, I think it might have been one of the first times I actually saw it. But she describes the olive trees, you know, as having roots that stretch out through mycelia that connect to the diaspora of the Palestinian people throughout the world.

I just think that was so powerful. And, of course, I'm butchering her a beautiful way of saying, you know, of describing the olive tree as symbol of resistance and continuity and just preservation, defiant preservation of ancient heritage, defiant in the situations that we see now with Palestine, still currently at war, technically, though we have a ceasefire. So that was something that really sort of got mind. my seedy imagination going. I love it that she, Vivian, like so many other of our seakeepers and farmers that we

interview, people always love to talk about their grandmothers. And I think this connection between seakeeping, between agriculture, between land-based living, and our grandmothers particularly, grandfathers too sometimes, but generally that grandmother was just powerful to me because, of course, I have my own grandmother stories and you have your grandmother's stories on. We all have our, you know, just sort of the role of grandma in keeping us, you know, spiritually tethered to who we are was so important and it made me, you know, really sent up a prayer for all the grandmothers in the world and just for the office of grandmother, you know, that we can continue to support them. I was also

refreshingly impressed to hear Vivian talk about The indigenity of the Palestinian people. And that word indigenous or indignity is, I think, really fraught these days. But I do think that there is sort of a popular narrative nowadays, at least here in the West and where we live, in which indigenous is really described in what to me feel like very strict and boxed-in sort of categories. And, you know, she talks about the indigenity of her people. you know, to the land of Palestine, you know, in this way that I was happy to hear. And just sort of speaking of that, you know, sort of the indigenous practices,

thoughts, ideas, and wisdom practices when she goes into how many of the plants have names that reflect saints and angels, especially the Blessed Virgin Mary, I really like that, of course, because we love Mary. But, you know, it was really powerful to me as a Catholic also to hear her talk about the weaving together of an ancient Christian hagiography, of ancient Christian sort of ideas into these plants. It reminded me that, you know, Christianity there is, you know, which is not something ever talked about, I think, or thought about here, is really an indigenous religion in Palestine. you know, indeed, since Jesus and Mary come from there. And then to hear about sort of the syncretism, because, again, the land is ancient, the faith is ancient, the people are ancient. And though they've moved and been moved so many times, you know, they continue to collect and add on these ideas, grafting them onto the ancient religious practices.

So when she talks about the plants called Ba'al, you know, I shivered a little bit, you know, just remembering Old Testament stories and Big Bad Beale, you know, and Moses and all. And I was, oh, my gosh, she said that. She said his name out loud. She wasn't reading it, you know, from, you know, a book or something. But that was a shocker to me. I said shocker. It was surprising.

I'm really grateful to have learned that, that these plants that are referred to as Ba'al and indeed their connection to St. George, who I know is wildly popular in Eastern Christianity, less so here. But how those sort of, you know, the syncretism of that. and how all of that comes together in indigenous practice of agriculture. She talks about thirsty plants. You know, again, really bringing out ancient agricultural ideas and practices that we need to think about, I think, particularly with the change in climate. What does it mean to sort of prize these plants that are thirsty because they've been, you know, grown in arid places?

Yeah, there's so much I can say about it, but I really appreciate it so much. of what she said and the work that she's doing, lifting up the diasporic experience. I met Vivian on my way to see my mother, and I'm actually about to go see my mother again in Connecticut. And we went to this beautiful forest at dusk. And it was really sweet to see her and have this conversation, which is so powerful and important.

And when I started the conversation, I forgot to record, That's why you'll hear me laughing a little when I introduce this next one out of kind of embarrassment and at the absurdity of it. But anyway, I'm going to bring you here to New Haven on a chilly early November evening in the forest. Well, here we are. we're in Connecticut in the woods I'm here with Vivian Sansour of the Palestine heirloom seed library and it's so good to be with you and thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me thank you and thank you for coming all the way so we

can walk in this gorgeous mountain we just saw two deer and you would have heard our real-life reactions if I had remembered the press record. They were so beautiful. They're beautiful when they're not on my farm. You know, oh yeah, of course. Well, you're the intrusive one. But I know it's always such a challenge to think about agriculture. For me, I always think of agriculture as the beginning of human anxiety. It's so violent. Like we went from hunters and gatherers and then we decided oh fuck it we need to be hoarders and we need to make sure we never run out of food and we need extra and we stop trusting that nature will provide and I know this is like an oversimplification but I also

feel like I wonder if we never decided to be agriculturist like what what the world with this planet would look like and of course i love agriculture it's been my life work so it's a one of the many many contradictions that we carry yeah it's probably interesting as someone from you know the place that many believe agriculture began and with wheat 15 000 years ago is it but also someone who grew up in the wild yeah i guess my wild was wild but not overly wild because it's I grew up in a mountain that was cultivated for thousands of years so surely there's a lot of wild plants and everything but there is always a human touch the nice thing though about where I grew up when I was

growing up obviously it has sadly changed dramatically since then it was clear obviously that there's human intervention right you know we made terraces we planted trees we cultivated crops we built houses but even the houses the old Palestinian houses are so unintrusive to the landscape because they're built from the rocks that are in the mountain so you don't go and bring something from somewhere else and ship it in everything is even visually very pleasing because the Palestinian house, even the colors, it matches with everything else because it is from it. And so, yeah, I grew up just hopping around from one terrace to the next and that was, I was like those deer we saw. And munching also, munching. I did a lot of munching.

Just like them, what were you munching on? I was munching on a lot of wild plants. Some of them I probably was testing for the first time but most of them as children we knew that we could eat them one of these wild plants is called Karnal Ghazal it's called actually that's funny it's called Karnal Ghazal we just saw deer it means the the horns of the deer because it's like a little horn is tiny it's tiny really and it tastes like a pee almost so in the spring or if you find it in the summer that's nice treat because it's very juicy we went looking for them as children to eat them we had something else we like to

get called assal ajuze which means the cane of the old lady the old lady's cane several things one of them is my favorite is called caque al-a-dra which I'm sure in other places in Palestine they call it something else it literally means Mary's cake and because it it looks it's the it's basically the seed that looks a little bit like a cake of a mallow and we liked them and they were very yummy is it not kobeze it's like it's Hobezi's flour. Well, it's not the flower. It's when it becomes seed and it becomes a little round and chewy.

Yeah, we call it a cheese mallow because it's shaped like a... Oh yeah, you think, yeah, it looks like a Dutch cheese. Yeah, that's what it is. Yeah, that's my favorite. Okay, so it's called Mary's cake when it's... Yeah, the seed. That's so interesting. So Mary, the Mother of Jesus.

Yes, yes. A lot of things are named after saints or, you know. gods and stuff but our main agricultural practice which is ba'l is named after before monotheistic religion and named after ba'l the canonite deity of fertility and until today we call the seeds that we grow with no irrigation baal seeds and i've heard they taste better they taste better first of all they know the soil they grow with the soil they don't require again outside input they don't drink so much water because they're not irrigated and so their flavor is very intense and potent we call them thirsty

plant like we we like a lot Meramia which is the wild sage and you know you can tell if it was irrigated or it was from the mountain because we say the the one that's wild from the mountain, it's achane, thirsty. And it means that, oh, it has a potent, delicious flavor. Is that one named for Mary as well? Yes. We love Mary. It seems like Mary is a good one.

I mean, both in Muslim and Christian traditions, Mary is revered as a special person. But also Al-Qadr, who is St. George, also both we have villages named Al-Qadr, St. George, and we have people named Khadr in, but also it is said that some people think maybe al-Qadr is actually Ba'al, that after Christianity, people started calling Ba'al, who is the god of fertility, Al-Qadr, George, later with colonization came George,

because it is on the, day of San George in Palestine which is May 6 that we start planting the baal seeds that's the day we put them in the ground and people come from all over the country to celebrate in the village of al-Qadr in it's actually in the Bethlehem district where I grew up so there's a a lot of mythological and magical stories around agriculture also not as something wild and impossible and crazy but more in the awe of like the the beauty and the magic of an abundance that comes from a seed that you just throw in the ground and don't have to irrigate and then it feeds you and it feeds others

because there's a reverence to every time you eat the fact that you have food that it is that it is an incredible miracle and a blessing yeah amen i love that because may 6th is my mother's birthday yes just like me oh you're a tourist too most dorises are great growers too and home cooks and all my tourist friends are incredible with things with their hands from her also you know you introduced me to hasan and his family And I learned through them when they would find things like Kobese and fafahina and the wild plants growing that they, and even the jarjir, that when they're filled with water here in our ecosystem,

it's just not the same and it's not as good as much as they love having them. Right. I mean, they don't taste the same. They taste less spicy. So the jarjir, for example, the arugula, in Palestine, we grow it in the winter. and of course it rains but when you grow it in the winter you don't irrigate it you just let it live on whatever rain comes and it's extremely potent it's very spicy we know when you eat it you put it in the salad and it gives it this amazing zest so I love gerjir arugula but I go to the stores here which is sadly where I have to get my food and I don't buy it it's it's I

almost like just now you brought me thank you very much a bundle from your farm and I took a bite and I remember when I was chewing on it just now I was thinking it's so sad that I actually don't eat jarjeer anymore which was something that I eat all the time regularly every winter but it's just because it's the same for me with apples except when I'm upstate New and it's some wild apples, I find the apples in the store disgusting. Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, I talked to a lot of people who are in diaspora and had to leave for various reasons or chose to leave for various reasons, depending. And when we talk about the difference between wild and cultivated plants in Palestine,

you know, it gets to also just thinking of the experience back there is even, you know, know, constrained in a very violent way now. So how people aren't even able to access the wild plants anymore? Right. So the Palestine I talked to you about is a Palestine that is dying. And it's a Palestine in many places doesn't exist anymore or it exists in remnants. So the way I experience this constant loss, which for me and people, in my generation we've been experiencing it since the day we were born and I'm approaching my 50s so it's a constant exercise of grief because things you loved flavors you loved worlds that lived in your senses are no longer there and

you're constantly adjusting to their absence and longing for their present You're searching everywhere. And obviously one of the ways in which this has happened is systemic and intentional by making our foods and our food ways either illegal or impossible to access or obviously by the mere fact of just confiscating our lands and forcing us to leave our lands and murdering the very people who have been the guardians of these lands for literally thousands of years. So you're talking about farmers who I just told you been growing

ba'l forever. They've been growing ba'le because their grand grand grand grand grand grandparents did. And today they don't either have the seed anymore or they don't have access to land anymore. Actually one of the one of the people that have been quite inspirational in my work. his name oh look there's a deer I can't see it yet oh yeah yeah it's a fawn I think this is so pretty well yeah his name is also George funny enough he also is quite the guy when it comes to Ba'a al agriculture. Khadr taught me a lot about Ba'a al agriculture.

His name is Abu Gattas. He goes by Abu Gattas. And he grew a lot of tomatoes, a lot of the Ba'a al-Kusa, fakus, all kinds of ba'al crop that's very culturally significant for us. And as of the last four years, first of the last four years, first of all a settler came and took over a land next to his they actually demolished the home of the people who were living there and then they made it impossible for you know the farmers to to be there we're telling the story and we're distracted by a very beautiful woodpecker

But yes, you know, this is the life. Like you tell a sad story, but it lives with this beautiful existence of the wood. I don't know. It's a crazy making world. But Khadr, Abu Ghattaz, two years ago, called me and said, two or three years ago, and said, come and pick up all my seeds. I have nowhere to grow them, and I can't afford to do it anymore. And it was one of the saddest days, literally of my life.

and I'm sure of his, where literally the back of my car, the whole trunk and the front seat was filled with beautiful seeds. I mean, these seeds carry the DNA of thousands and thousands of years and thousands of hands that passed them down and loved them and took care of them. And literally they were given to me as a goodbye, like a burial. And that's part of why whenever I feel disheartened, I want to continue because it's so important to keep these children alive. And when I say children, literally, because we are the children of these plant beings. And in Arabic, the word for children and the word for plant is the same.

We say zari'a, which means plant, and it also means your children. Oh, this is your zari'a, these are your children. And, yeah, and Abhattas is considered a lucky farmer in relation to thousands of farmers across Palestine who have been forced to leave their land as we speak right now. It's olive harvest season. For many years, I worked with farmers who grew olives, and, I mean, It's kind of weird to even say farmers who grew olives. There is no family in Palestine that doesn't grow olives or have family that grow olives.

When I was a kid in school, we had three days off school. All schools shut down in the olive harvest season because that's when you're supposed to go and help with the harvest. And when one family finishes their tree, we do aone. Oane means it's an expression of assistance, if you were. will, like, that's for a lack of a more poetic word in English, but where you go and you assist your neighbor in their harvest, and it's nothing paid or anything, it's just what people did. But today, as we speak, like, there are people who have lost their lives already, they've been killed for the mere fact of just going to their trees, a whole olive grove,

have been burnt and if you have ever seen an olive tree like the leaves are extremely full of oil and when you when you set fire the settlers come and set fire to the olive trees they really burn like they becomes a big massive fire in one village in the north where I worked for a while the settlers waited till the people of the village harvested the olives, pressed the olives, stored their olive oil, and then they went and torched the whole olive oil storage. Many of the people who have wells, they're pouring cement in farmers' wells, they're putting poison in some water cisterns. So it is a systemic and violent, very violent, and deranged really behavior that is so anti-life like it's very anti like forget i don't really

care about national identity but as a as a human being as a living being it's something we should care about if you say you care about the planet if you say you care about the environment if you say you love this woodpecker or these trees how can you live in a world and think that this forest with these magical roots that extend kilometers and kilometers across the world and communicate in a network of mycelium and and a whole planet that's connected you think that these trees are not equally crying i mean these trees that have already experienced their own grief obviously being where we are in on native land there's already you know the control over travel that's been going on before this time you know with the zones in in the

west bank and and and also the control over the water and then this is just being piled on top of an already impossible situation and so i'm wondering it's interesting sorry to cut you off but it's interesting when you know you just mentioned movement because i've been thinking a lot about and movement because you know the only way plants travel is a seed and but also how we are forced constantly to move not because of necessarily desire for exploration but because the places where we belong are being torched are being destroyed or we're being restricted in our movement and obviously this is also relevant where we are today in in this country where people who have traversed unfathomable terrains to make it

to mow your lawn in america like they come every time like they come from beautiful villages a beautiful agricultural areas some of them who love their land obviously and know more than anybody about whatever it is corn or and when you talk to them and you get to talk to some people they also have this longing for their land and their home and their way of life and yet you know they are criminalized people they're criminalized seeds we are criminalized humanized humans we are criminalized there's now this sense that plants are invasive and humans are invasive and I think our language is is very unnatural actually a lot lots of so-called intellectual imposition on on nature and so I'm constantly like thinking about yeah we're

being restricted like a lot of farmers not just being restricted on movement they're being actually imprisoned and tortured in Palestine, literally. They round people up randomly and put them in torture camps. We have tortured camps and now they're passing a law that it is okay to just execute Palestinian prisoners. I mean, they're political prisoners, but some of them are just young children who were picked up from their village just because, or a way of punishing their parents or just because, We have a very deranged group of people who are destroying our world,

and we're just behaving like business as usual because our little area where we're moving is not impacted, but it's coming to all of us, and we need to really wake up. You've spent a lot of time in different parts of Palestine, learning from different people. And, you know, given that we're losing so much, especially in Palestine and all over the world all these beautiful villages all these beautiful traditions and I'm wondering if you could share a couple moments with us of you know

people and places that you want to remember if I want to remember that you want to remember that you want to share with other people like these moments that really shaped you or that you think shaped Palestine or well it's hard for me to forget and I think sometimes I want to forget it's it's hard for me sometimes to consolidate you know my life here with a very beautiful life that I lived with people who are just extremely generous. I'm not idealizing my people, all people have the good and the bad, but I really miss the tenderness of my culture and the tenderness of the many people.

I just finished telling you about the olive harvest and, as you know, many of my friends particularly in the north have not been able to harvest their olive trees or if they were they were able to harvest only the trees around their house for example my friend muhanad who's from the village of berquin he it's in the jane area uh he just called me and said that he just shipped uh 16 liters of olive oil to me to america i'm like what what are you doing like you You hardly had oil this year. You can't find work because everything is basically shut down. And you're sending me 16 liters of olive oil.

And of course, like he takes offense at me saying that. He's so happy to offer me this gift. and that's because he honors what we call al-aishu-al-malah which means it literally means the bread and salt we share together and this is something that most people in Palestine really value

like when you have shared time and shared food with someone it means that you now have your family, you take care of each other so one of the many stories I love I mean I don't know where to begin I have so many but one memory I have that I always cherish and go back to is when I first moved to Janine which is a village in the north a town in the

north I did not know because I come from the south and it's much drier I did not know that we had wild asparagus in Palestine and the guys that I worked with we were working in an olive oil company in Canaan Fair Trade and it was past hours in the village and the facility was closed we were hungry where we didn't have a car what are we going to do they're like oh don't worry and we just walked in the hills foraged wild asparagus and I was like wow what and then they found also some wild onion and somebody brought some olive oil they had stashed somewhere or whatever and we just made a fire and cooked the asparagus and literally we had rocks and and random wood and we just made ourselves a

little olive oil and asparagus delicacy and we just spend the whole the rest of the evening waiting for someone to come pick us up by the fire in the mountain and that for me is the Palestine I love just that camaraderie the abundance that you know you're in the mountain you can never go hungry and that even young people know how to find the wild food because you know the land, you spend time with the land, you know when it's asparagus season, you know when it's season for the wild dandelion, you just know, and it's very comforting to know that

this relationship you have with land, not it's not that you love the land but the land also loves you back thank you should we drink some tea I put some of the sage from Abdel Mojson Floristina he's the guy that you met today my friend he makes essential oils and I know he said that I drink too much of the sage and you shouldn't drink that much

but I love it so much so here you go cheers it's delicious it's shai miramilla which means shai with sage yeah right it's black tea and

sage it's from Palestine thank you it's delicious I feel like you're like the friend who sent the olive whale with seeds for so many people you know

the work that you're doing with seeds brings that taste of Palestine but also the meaning of the land the work all the hands all that comes with growing and eating those plants I mean I can't speak for other people but I imagine people have a similar gratitude and awe to receive these seeds that you know had those thousands of hands

you know and had those thousands of years i've listened a lot these week this week i kind of crammed interviews i know embarrassed i know i'm actually just thinking i just talk talk as like i can't stop when people ask me a question i go in tangents and i'm surprised people hear my podcast i can't hear them but but people tell me they listen to them i'm like what you must have been folding laundry or something well two of my faith i was going to jump to the the care the red carrot plant story to ask you to share that because i think it really illustrates something but i don't want to jump forward in time too far because i loved your story about your grandmother and the cumcat tree and her storytelling um oh wow i don't remember what did i say well we can skip it if it's not relevant but

i know what you're referring to if i'm correct i talked about that in a podcast you did Yeah, you talked about bringing her water. And was this your grandmother? Bringing her water. Well, I was looking for plant stories. And the only thing that really, I loved it because just thinking of her as a storyteller, but the Loquot made an appearance, which kind of sort of made it a plant story. Well, yeah, my grandmother, Jalee, she's my paternal grandmother.

She had diabetes and she had her leg amputate. and she I grew up with with her in the house she she she stayed with us until she passed and so as a little girl I would jump up and down her bed all the time annoying her I'm sure although she was very gracious about not telling me I was annoying but I probably entertained her because she was red bed ridden all the time and she wasn't supposed to eat any sugar because she had diabetes but I would come down I'd always fill her bottle of water and she always told me these fantastical stories about women cooking in a pot of you know the yeah the cauldron and all it had was rocks and the children were

waiting and about a child that went in a tunnel and then found this old lady one of my favorite stories she used to tell was the hudududdin and armedoon which is a it's like a folk story all grandmothers told it to their grandchildren and it took different versions but my grandmother she had a version where these two kids are pranking an old lady and they climb up the fig tree and they start pooping in the and putting their poop in the figs and dropping the figs down on the old lady and the old lady was eating the figs and loving them. I don't know. She used to tell me some wild stories. So if I'm messed out, what was the moral of that one? I don't remember, but it was about these mischievous kids.

See, I actually wish I could remember her stories, particularly the story about this child who goes down a tunnel and then finds a whole world because that used to fascinate me but I can't recall them in detail so I have to reconstruct them in my head all the time but I remember bits and pieces our loco tree which is very very sweet and delicious was straight on her window so with her amputated leg and you know at that time she didn't have more than a cane or a walker and she would you know spend you know a good 10 minutes getting herself up secretly of course because if my mother heard she would know that she's going to get the loquads and my mom would take her back to bed she would get up and go to the window and her cane had a hook and she would

open the window put her cane out from the hook side hook a branch bring the branch forward and just shove her face in the loquot tree and she would eat all the loquets of course because she had to bury all the

evidence they had to be thrown out back in the garden but I watched her and I never stopped her and I probably joined so I remember yeah my my grandmother with the story a lot because the loquat is so full of sweetness and my grandmother was so full of sorrow and it was like this sorrow and sweetness at the same time that's a

beautiful story thank you this might be a weird transition let's imagine you're the grown-up child going into the cave to find the big world in the magical world and I'm wondering if you're still there. Here we are right now. Yeah, we're in the cave. And I wonder what point in that journey was these red carrots and how did they kind of shape your work? Purple carrots. Yeah, well the purple carrots were the time when I decided that I wanted to go back home

I was doing a PhD program in North Carolina and I decided that this wasn't for me and I really didn't want to spend my time in the hallways of universities and I just wanted to go and talk to my people, you know. I was also feeling the urgency that a lot of our bio-referred. culture was disappearing very rapidly and so I went back to Palestine and I was craving my mother's purple carrots we have a dish we make in Palestine it's a Jerusalemite recipe but these purple carrots come from both southern Palestine and the Gaza area also and Hebron area and they the ladies that

the elders would bring it and the farmers would bring it to Jerusalem and they would often sell it on tarps in on the street in Jerusalem and that's why it became a Jerusalemite recipe what I'm gonna describe to you which is core the core these purple carrots they are not exactly carrots they're like carrots they taste like a carrot but they're more like parsnip and they're fat and short and we core them and we keep the core the inside and we stuff them with rice and lamb and then we cook the what do you call the coring the core and the the carrots in in tamarin sauce and it's so delicious and I was craving it and I wanted to eat it and I knew it was the purple

carrot season but everywhere I went they said they didn't have purple carrots and I really wanted to have some so I started asking different people everybody said no it's hard to find these days and so finally somebody directed me to a guy in the central market and I went to the central market which is usually where you know the people buy wholesale and I was like I got to find this guy anyway long story short is I finally found this guy and I was like hey somebody sent me here They said you would have purple carrots, but I don't see any purple carrots. Do you have any? And he was like, um, uh, yes, uh, no.

I'm like, which one is it? Like, do you or do you not have them? And, uh, finally he just lifted, uh, the tablecloth. Uh, and under the table where he had his other produce was a whole crate of them. And I was like, what that, like, you, why are you not? telling me I would buy the whole crate and he said no no no I cannot sell you any of them because this somebody paid me to grow it for them since last year I cannot give you this long story short my attempt to buy purple carrots ended up being like a drug deal

negotiation please give me some I'll give you some and he didn't want other people to see also the crate and so he would cover it as we're speaking And finally he agreed to give me, I think it was two or three, and I said, okay, I'll take them. And I went home and a farmer friend of mine was like, you know, you don't have to suffer like this again. Just plan them and wait till they flower and you'll get the seed. And I was very fascinated like, yeah, sure, let's do that. And that's kind of one of the many stories how this whole seed library business started. I wanted to have the seed so that I can spread the seed

and make sure that we don't have to long for the purple carrot anymore. So that's the purple carrot story. Thank you for indulging me. Should we walk back? It's getting dark and cold. Do you want to try my only edible cake? I was on the Zoom and I forgot it in the oven so it's a little dry and not.

too sweet but what did you make it is made from iron corn flour and a lot of pumpkin seeds and nutmeg and walnut thank you should I just dig in yeah and olive oil actually hmm but maybe try this this side this side is so dry okay well I don't know you know my husband likes the dry part I don't understand No, it's very good. I'm glad. Well, let's have one more cup of tea. I'll have a piece of cake and then we should start walking because it's getting dark.

It gets dark so early here. It's so depressing. I know. I had a dream last night. Is this for everybody? What? Is this dream for everybody? But you know, I dream a lot about going home.

going home and recently every time I talked to someone they tell me it hasn't rained it hasn't rained usually we don't harvest the olives until the first rain and it hasn't rained but last night I dreamed that I was with Hassan actually and that we went to a field and it's it was an olive field and it started raining and the olives were so happy they were just so beautiful it was a good dream it's a beautiful dream

bringing back to the olives it reminds me of your story of people helping each other and I hear that a lot from different people from different parts of the world in agricultural communities and I know also like we've done we did that event around Malachia which is very communal

and I'm wondering if you would share any other ways you've found to not just grow the seeds in diaspora but have that kind of experience in diaspora it's people coming together rather than kind of an individual experience with an ancestral food you mean different events and whatever form you've felt a semblance of that kind of communal energy or spirit work with food and culture yeah I have a dear friend named Riyadh in California

he's living obviously in the aspera he's from a village outside of Ramallah and he and I we gather often around food and and it's a way I guess we connect to each other and to who we are and recently his grandmother passed and his grandmother was quite the farmer. She was the real falaha we call in Arabic which is it's not farmer. It's a person whose way of life is with the land basically. And when she passed

he couldn't talk on the phone. He was in California I was here in Connecticut and he really didn't want to talk on the phone but instead he spent the whole day making raisins the way his grandmother did and that's what helped him process his his grief and when he we finally talked he said I just needed time to to to be it's not really by himself because he was communing with her spirit too and the spirit of all of our ancestors who have done this and I thought it was such a beautiful way to honor her and to grieve I don't know why I told you the story it's not exactly what

you were but but all I'm saying is on the other side I also wanted to make something even though I didn't know her but she she made an impact on me because of all the things she taught him and he taught me in return but in many situations with the traveling kitchen which we started as a way to engage folks around eating together because when we eat together we have is bread and salt together we become family and it's a way for us to process a lot of our stories and I love when we were at your farm actually it was one of the most profound moments for me when we were cooking

the malo and there was a Haitian family who were very touched to have to have it obviously we were cooking it differently than they would do in Haiti but to know that our medicine our food is not just medicine for our hearts but as we commune with each other as people who were forced out of our homes we can share this medicine and this love with other people like people from Haiti who are experiencing also a horrible violence inflicted by the same empire actually one of the most recent stories and most powerful was the making of shatta which is a chili paste this is a typical

thing from Gaza. Gaza is famous in Palestine for having very spicy food and a year ago I was talking to Lail al-Haddad who's the chef and cook an author of the cookbook the Gaza kitchen which I recommend people check it out and cook from it also to keep Gaza alive because that whole cuisine is going to disappear the way we know it if we don't do something about it and I told her because my father always loved chili from Gaza I said is there a way we can get chili peppers from Gaza and somehow this guy from Gaza managed to give it to somebody in Jordan and somebody in Jordan brought it to the US I don't know we actually can't trace exactly how but

finally the seeds came and we planted them and They did so well in the Hudson Valley. And we invited Leila, because she is from Gaza, and we invited, you know, different Palestinians in diaspora and other folks and friends. And we spent the day just harvesting these chilies that made so much life, and they just survived a genocide. and they were tended and given to us by a man named Abd al-Hakim who actually was killed in the genocide and so as we were harvesting them obviously there was a lot of grief and then as we chopped them we spent the whole day you know chopping them and adding oil and you know just the whole week also fermenting them was very powerful for our community because it was a gathering where

yes we were grieving but we also were affirming life by saying you know they can't kill all of us here we are planting these beautiful peppers and they actually lived and they're now feeding us and as leila said who lost many members of her family that this was one of the most healing moments for her since the genocide started and for me that means everything if the work we do as humble as it is can help us and someone else get through this really horrible moment or any moment then we've done something good that's everything i mean that's beautiful Yeah, I think people don't know, you know, what to do in this time, and it's very clear when you see that kind of healing, that kind of joy in the face of grief, in the face of all the violence. It's like there's something, something there.

And it makes me think, again, of things I've heard you say and things I believe about seeds, about the life and death, like how they hold both. I think a podcast focused on plant stories can be very like hunky-dory happy if we wanted to go that direction and that's just not the reality of the world not the reality of people and the movement of people I think that's what's so beautiful about your work and the constellation of growers

the constellation of growers that you work with back in Palestine and elsewhere how would you describe your hopes for your work here with seed protectors you know many of us including true love and a lot of our friends and are you know working with you to regenerate seeds from your seed library here and um yeah it'd be interesting to hear what you hope for the future with that well i have been so deeply touched like overwhelmed with gratitude for folks who have like you chosen to

take care of our seeds with us so that they can go home one day but also so they can have a place to hide and to survive and to be loved these seeds have been our only source of hope at least for me like in a moment of darkness I I feel very depressed and then someone calls me or you call me and say, wow, your, I don't know, your yactin is doing really well or your okra, one of them is doing this and that, what do you think? And it makes me feel like, oh, wait, there's still life and there's still life worth living for. And we need each other as human beings and as plant beings to remind each other that, you know, we're here for each other, which is in itself, sadly,

these days revolutionary in the face of this very uncivilized world that tells us that you shouldn't talk to strangers, you shouldn't like say hello, you, you know, you walk like a zombie most of the time. And so when I thought of the idea of the seat protectors, I did not think it would go so big so quickly, like people ride us from all over wanting to grow. our seeds and in that way whether it's somebody growing our watermelons in Kentucky or our eggplants in California or Mluchia in Pennsylvania I'm just overwhelmed with joy that basically the story of my people is still being told through every seed through every dish that we eat and we sit down and we

gather and as we eat these crops and as we save the seeds we're also eating this the story and carrying this together as a as a human community and and for me that is hopeful in the sense that I know now that first of all my story is not unique it's the story of many people and that I'm not alone and that we can carry together and we can also whatever whatever survives of us

at least in this moment we couldn't maybe save the whole world but we saved this little gentle space for us to have shade and shelter and love and as cheesy as it's sounds I do think that love is the only thing that can get us through because what else are you going to do when you're beat and you're wounded and you're on the floor you just need some tenderness and love to heal you and to pick you up and to help you so you can fight another

day. Wow. I love you and I love working with you and I love your seeds. Thank you. It's been one of the most beautiful parts of our work for the last few years is working with you. So thank you for sharing the love with us. Thank you true love seeds. I love that you call true love seeds. Thank you. Yeah, it's been really wonderful. Also when we had them at yours it was so amazing there was no kitchen no nothing like it was truly the work of community that came together bring the pot bring the whatever and we made it happen maybe it was like the rocks and the wild asparagus or maybe it was like the cauldron and the rocks of your grandmother's stories but it was

beautiful so wherever we are they're all always there we're never who is with us here this evening. I just saw a hawk when we were speaking, actually, and it was really beautiful. You have good eyes. It's so dark right now. Yeah. Well, we should walk. Let's go back. Thank you. Thank you so much to Vivian Sensor of the Palestine Airlim Seed Library. And thank you for listening and sharing this episode of Seas and their people with your loved ones. Please share this episode with someone else you know. to our show in your favorite podcast app.

Thank you also for helping our seedkeeping and storytelling work by leaving us a review and also ordering seeds, t-shirts, and more from our website. Trueloveseeds.com. And again, if you'd like to support our podcast for $1 or more monthly, please join our Patreon at patreon.com slash true love seeds. And remember, keeping seeds is an act of true love for our ancestors and our collective future. God bless. Poh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.