Dear Khourieh,

It took me a while to realize that you were speaking to me. It actually took me many months now of hearing your name, your stories, and your remedies. At some point, it dawned on me. My love for plants. My desire to learn from my ancestors. The datura plant that flowered out of nowhere in my garden when the genocide was Gaza accelerating. You have been speaking to me – and now I am listening.

I think it took me a while to understand this because when you carry the identity of a people whose homeland was stolen, you live your life in a constant state of disconnect, of never enough, of in-between. But this is not a story about that. This is a story about the natural reconnect, or desire to do so, that happens and can be born out of this pain. 

Even though this exploration is about you, dear Khourieh – my great-grandmother on my mother’s side, who is from Salt, Jordan – the same experience applies. Bilad Al-Sham, or the Levant, is all one land. We didn’t draw the colonial borders, but you knew that already. 

Despite this inherent contiguity, in the past, this would have been a part of my disconnect: Jordan is not Palestine, and Jordan wasn’t stolen. Yet when the colonial borders were first drawn, Salt was on the Palestine side of the map, dear Khourieh. Then the map was redrawn, and it became Salt, Jordan. 

In a way, all nation-states steal land. Our constant need to claim something as ours, to separate and nationalize, when in reality, peoples and lands belong to each other, the relationship is never one-sided. Like my relationship with you.

My mother and aunts call you Fadhiya, but according to our family tree, your name is Fiddha, which also means silver. As a healer and a medicine woman, you had a plethora of remedies I may never know the full extent of. You, the daughter of a Priest, the khoury as we call it in Arabic, took the nickname Al-Khourieh, or the Priestess – a name usually reserved for the wife of the priest. My yearning to learn more about you grows by the day.

When you come from a people who are being genocided, you carry with you an insatiable desire to connect with and learn about your history, your traditions, foods, plants, your ancestors, and your lands. That desire came through me with ferocity after starting to face the immense trauma of being uprooted.                                                                                      

Whenever my aunt tells me about you, she tells me that you would drink olive oil on an empty stomach every morning. She tells me this as if she is telling me some kind of secret. There’s something about the way she tells me this that makes my body come alive. Now I recognize that feeling, it is your voice coming through, giving me a message. With so much death happening nearby, just over the fabricated border(s), the ancestors’ voices are becoming louder. More repetitive. 

Drinking olive oil on an empty stomach is not uncommon among the elderly and is often passed down through generations. It has many benefits, such as stimulating digestion, promoting nutrient absorption, and reducing gastric acidity by coating the digestive tract.

Practicing this ritual every morning over the last few weeks has given my body a sense of calm, dear Khourieh. The feeling evokes a memory of being buried in the sands of Wadi Rum. Which the Bedouins of the deserts in Jordan call the Nabatean spa. Feeling the soft grains of sand against my body, a gentle weight that comforts the haphazardly braided knots in my belly. 

When I first moved to Jordan from the US, I became obsessed with the story of Zamzam, water miraculously springing up in the desert in Mecca. When we visited Jordan in the summers growing up, we often visited the city of Fuhais, carrying empty water bottles and jugs to fill from the natural springs in that area. It always felt like we were doing something holy. The water also tasted better, despite its, at times, metallic taste from all the ground minerals it contained. Our elders always told us that water from these springs was healthier. The feeling I also received from them was that it is sacred. 

Dear Khourieh, my yearning to learn more about your remedies grows by the day. It seems to grow stronger alongside the death count in Gaza, with the unknown numbers of people still stuck beneath the concrete. It’s like a tangle of vines choking my insides, an electrical storm surging, an ember of turmoil smoldering in my belly. 

It’s a longing I am pregnant with, growing like a new life inside of me while also destroying something I wasn’t aware was there. I am sure you already know, dear Khourieh that they are bombing hospital after hospital in Gaza. It is a battle against the very notion of healing; if the wound continues to fester and the war never dies, then the hole in my belly doesn’t need tending. A constant distraction I find myself fighting against. 

The second story my aunt always repeats when she speaks of you is your remedy for an ulcer. She learned this recipe from her mother, Teta Jaleeleh, who learned it from you, Khourieh. The recipe itself is simple, three-quarters fenugreek seeds, combined with a quarter of sesame seeds, roasted, ground up, and mixed with honey. My aunt swears this is what healed her own ulcer.

My auntie also told me the story of how you struggled to have a child with nine miscarriages. They told me how you prayed and prayed to God that if you could have a child, you would promise something in return: you would deny this child of their inheritance. I never understood why you would pray such a thing, but that is exactly what happened. Through your only son, my grandfather, Ta3aimeh, my family no longer owns land. It seems, dear Khourieh, that your prayers are strong.

In my belly also grows the desire for land, for a piece of this earth to tend, to protect. A desire to inherit what my ancestors always gave to future generations. My inner core twists and writhes as I walk the urban labyrinth, searching for the plants that grow through the concrete. Navigating the inherited wounds of a world that allows mass murder and genocide to no consequence. I long for a fleeting glimpse, a tantalizing whiff of a world where inheritance flows in abundance, life bursts forth in lush greenery, and nourishment abounds at every turn.

When my mother was around six years old, she was very ill and had my Teta running around to doctors and healers, trying to understand what was happening. She was pale and thin; no matter how much she ate, she didn’t gain weight. One day, while my Teta was sitting with other women from her village, they said to her, “Maybe it’s a tapeworm?” 

This is when my Teta remembered Khourieh’s remedy for tapeworms: raw pumpkin seeds. She then forced my mother to eat until she vomited. When she vomited, pieces of the tapeworm would come out. When my mother recalls this story, she seems embarrassed but also disgusted. 

The forced eating of excessive amounts of raw pumpkin seeds happened a number of times.  The last time the tapeworm’s head came out, and that’s when my grandmother knew that the illness was gone.

I only recently learned, dear Khourieh, that you also practiced kassat hawa’ (dry cupping) and 7ujammah (wet or bleeding cupping). A practice that Teta Jaleelah also learned from you. 

My Teta practiced this method on my mother for nose bleeds and chest infections until she was about 10 years old. After that, my mother absolutely refused to have these done as they were painful and scary. And so the practice stopped with Teta Jaleelah. I myself have no knowledge of these healing modalities or how they are done. 

This is not something I blame my mother’s generation for. They grew up somewhere in between the old ways and the new, uprooted ways. In a time when your remedies were deemed backward by modern medicine. Now, we live between the uprooted and re-rooting ways, and your medicines are returning to us.  

The more I learn about you, dear Khourieh, the more I feel you want me to share these learnings with others. That is how knowledge was often passed down in your time. Parent to child, sibling to sibling, from one community member to another.

I have heard, dear Khourieh, that you were also a midwife. While I don’t know much about your birthing practices, I do know that Teta Jaleelah, who seemed to have learned so much from you, had a few nourishing remedies for my mother and aunties post-childbirth. 

Anar, kibdeh, and shorbat freekah are a few of these. Anar is a hot drink made of cinnamon and walnuts. Cinnamon cleanses the womb post-childbirth, and walnuts give strength. Kibdeh, or lamb liver, is full of iron and can help the new mother’s body rebuild strength. Shorbat freakeh is cracked/roasted green wheat with chicken cooked as a soup to support the rebuilding and regaining of her strength post-childbirth.

Dear Khourieh, could these recipes also help us as we move through the symbolic childbirth that the new world demands from us right now? Are your recipes re-emerging at this time as a message for us to understand and integrate? The dying world is exhausting and pulls down anyone it can with it. Can these remedies and foods give us hope and strength in this time? 

My giddo, grandfather, T3aimeh, was a field technician who worked with geologists to find and establish water harvesting projects throughout Jordan. My mother describes how he would often be gone for weeks at a time. She also describes him as the gentlest man she has ever met, far gentler than my grandmother, Teta Jaleelah, who was definitely the disciplinarian in the home. 

Dear Khourieh, as a healer, did you somehow know that your only son would grow up to seek water on an arid land that was once and still can be a fertile crescent? My whole life, I knew this about your son, my giddo, but when I learned about you, somehow his work, and my desire to bring back the waters of these lands, made sense. 

Dear Khourieh, I have a garden for the first time in my life. I have many of the staples there, olive, lemon, fig, grape, zaatar, sage, rose geranium, and rosemary. Yet when the genocide in Gaza accelerated in October 2023, something new came through the soil: Datura. When I first saw the bell-shaped white flower that seemed to be slightly twisted at an angle on its petal ends, I knew this plant was poisonous. 

Yet even this poisonous plant brings healing to the soil by sucking up toxins in the earth. I wonder if this plant brings a message from you, Sittna Khourieh. In this time when the earth and those who claim power are filled with immense toxicity, how can we be more like Datura? How can we remove the toxins from the land and from our hearts? How can we make this a safe place for all people, plants, trees, animals, and elements?

I ask you, dear Khourieh, and I await your response.