Performed at Fourteen East Live 2026, "Nosalgia".
Sahar Mustafah (Palestinian Heritage)
Bio: Sahar Mustafah is an award-winning Palestinian author and educator whose work explores identity, belonging, family and the immigrant experience. She is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants and often draws on her heritage and personal history in her fiction. She has her MFA in Fiction from Columbia College Chicago. She is best known for The Beauty of Your Face (2020) and The Slightest Green (2025). Sahar is also Naimah’s aunt. This is an interview taken with my aunt and her words formed into a monologue.
When I imagine homeland, I think of the public market, the smells, the olive oil soap, homemade yogurt,
the call to prayer from the mosques. I miss that.
Animals like donkeys and mules are just part of the landscape.
And the sea, the Dead Sea.
Being there, being a part of the cultivation of the land —
like my cousin’s mom had a beautiful orchard.
We used to help her sell her grapes and we would eat fruit from the trees.
That was my first memory of Palestine.
My mother cultivated flowers more than she did anything else.
You know, planting and cultivating.
She had a beautiful garden.
I remember the sounds of our neighbors greeting each other from their balconies,
Their voices floating.
There were always cats everywhere. Lounging on doorsteps,
Weaving between peoples legs, like they belonged to everyone and no one.
Whenever we visited my aunt’s orchard, your mom climbed trees she wasn’t supposed to.
I can still hear us shouting at her to be careful and her laughing like nothing could touch her.
These are the things I remember. The things I miss.
When I was able to go there… Palestinians are sometimes only perceived as victims who are just surviving death,
but there’s just so much joy and strength and resilience.
I think what is most immediate and present with me
is the genocide and the escalation of erasure.
And I’m thinking of the fact that we might not ever be able to go back.
You know, we’ve been fighting for our homeland.
This has been our existential struggle.
But for someone like me in the diaspora, it feels very painful
to imagine our lot of land, our villa, to be stolen,
because we have always kind of existed in a bubble since we’re kids
and we’ve experienced relative safety there.
But it is becoming more and more violent in the West Bank.
And I think Al-Bireh, where our house is, is very quickly being encroached upon.
So I think my sisters and I, you know, including your mom,
we have the sense of panic that we won’t see home again.
Let alone our family members from both sides, but particularly my mom’s side,
to whom we were very close, women who basically raised us for five years,
who assimilated us to Palestinian culture in a way that I feel we didn’t receive when we were living in Chicago.
And so that inheritance felt more substantial and palpable
because we lived there and because we learned to speak Arabic.
So to us we feel a different kind of attachment than, say, you.
Yours is coming, you know, through us and is being transmitted to you all
through our stories, through memories, through food, right?
And not as strongly of language.
So it’s making me think a lot about how, when a person is physically separated from land,
how psychically it fractures us.
So I feel fortunate that we were able to live there,
but now it feels like it’s being just kind of yanked from beneath our feet.
I think I feel particularly close to language, but I would say maybe in daily life, to food.
And for me personally, embroidery.
I have been finding just an amazing community in these embroidery circles.
And so I’ve been doing that with other Palestinian women.
And it has given me a face space, a sense of belonging and a preserving culture.
And I think in some ways it also feels resistant.
I think they are, but I think it’s also how we are documenting the present.
I think any art piece that we put out in the world that centers Palestine
is going to be a record of historical fact and existence of the Palestinians.
So I feel I’m in this mode of where I was writing to humanize, I’ve abandoned that
because I feel very strongly that that is not our burden.
In fact, they have normalized our dehumanization — Zionism and American media.
So I am in this mode of trying to denormalize that dehumanization.
And I find comfort in embroidery, which feels so basic.
There’s this young woman named Leanne Faddis.
She actually started a collective called Badan,
and she basically comes to Illinois and gathers us on a regular basis.
And I feel like I found them later than people who have been in it for a while,
but I’ve always purchased her kit.
So I’ve been working on those for like the last two years.
We were at a place that basically welcomed us,
giving us a few tables where we could stitch for a few hours.
That’s therapeutic.
For me, my earliest memory or consciousness of Palestinian identity,
It was actually a little scary and volatile because it was about resistance fighters.
I remember being at my great-uncles’ bungalows outside of Chicago,
and in their basement there would just be posters of what we call the PLO,
Palestinian Liberation Organization.
And that would have images of fighters, but also images of Arab women who just look so distraught.
These were refugees, women in refugee camps in Lebanon, outside of Beirut.
And I just remember expressions of older women wearing the thobe,
and just this really solemn,
devastating expression on their faces.
And that haunted me.
My first sense of being Palestinian was that there was something in battle.
There was conflict around it, but I didn’t really know what that meant.
It would just be later that I would start to understand.
In terms of diaspora and distance, I think it has shifted since I became an adult,
but when I was younger I always kind of held my breath
in terms of what people’s response was going to be when I said I was Palestinian.
And I just remember whenever authorities asked, it was always that they were from Jordan.
That always felt easier.
There was such a horrible association of Palestinians with terrorists
and plane hijackers, especially when Palestine was invoked.
So it was easier for people to digest that I am Muslim
then it was to digest that I am Palestinian.
And I’m finding that that’s still the case.
Language can always be tricky. I really feel like I’ve lost my stronger language foundation.
Food has been pretty consistent.
And I think I’ve retained that sense of planting and cultivating,
but I do feel like actual harvesting of land, I don’t think I’ll ever have that experience.
What makes that loss more intense is when you are surrounded by people who don’t care,
their apathy or they are denying that Palestinians deserve to live and thrive.
And there’s silence. And it’s very lethal.
Do I see storytelling as a way of preserving culture? Yes.
It always felt like a way to humanize us, but to me it is like a history textbook.
Our literature is part of the human record.
Food and storytelling are the easiest ways into understanding a culture.
I worry sometimes that for your generation Palestine becomes a romantic, nostalgic experience
rather than something to fight to preserve.
Because people don’t believe Palestinians have a right to exist.
And when you say that out loud, you’re like, how is that possible?
But that has been the experience.
We just need to make sure that we are constantly talking and engaging our children in our Palestinianhood.
And talking seriously about why that’s important.
It can’t just be a place we went to as a vacation.
It is something bigger.
It is about basic rights, and fighting for others and preserving humanity.
Header Image by Naimah Arteaga
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