Does the Land Remember Me?: A Memoir of Palestine

Arab American Writing

by Aziz Shihab

Summoned by his dying mother, Palestinian-born Aziz Shihab returns to the homeland he and his family fled as refugees decades to a Palestine reclaimed by Israelis and to a country no longer that of his youth in a nation whose estate has been challenged by history. This gripping book chronicles that month-long journey.
Part memoir, part travelogue, it reveals the complexities of leaving behind such the past and coming to grips with its abandonment. With his sharp ear for dialogue and with a journalist’s eye, Shihab records and considers, sometimes with fond humor, the Palestinian psyche. Family meetings brim with soothing time-honored ritual and cultural blindness. Pungent street anecdotes resonate with profound themes like human rights, land dislocation, and poverty. Shihab’s stories of departure and return, loss of land and reconnection provide enriching insights into the depth and intricacy of Palestinian culture and history and its legacy of displacement.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Middle East

176 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 30, 2007

Reviews

[layan ليان · Rating 5 out of 5]

My flabber was gasted.

This book broke me and tore me apart, made me grieve and mourn a life I never had but could’ve had, yet it felt like it closed a bit of the hole in my chest.

Disclaimer: this will be a looooong review because this book touched a fragment of my heart I never expected it to reach.

__

When I was a child, I remember my sido (grandpa) owning a book called, in Arabic, “So That We Don’t Forget” (the English version is called “All That Remains”) by Walid Khalidi. This book is my childhood. This book was my doing and undoing. I remember the first time my sido read to me about my village - lengthy pages, yet the information felt too little. Even as a child, I was craving more, to know about how the breeze felt in my demolished village, what did my ancestors do on a daily basis, how they lived, how the girls celebrated, how the boys and girls, hand in hand, helped the elders in harvesting olives, how the school functioned, how women twirled in their skirts during henna nights. I wanted to know everything, but the book was only about historical information and some cultural aspects, and it was strict in only talking about the history of the village’s demolishing and Zionist Jewish invasion.

I felt like it was necessary for me to mention the above. I don’t know for what reason exactly, but I always don’t shy away from getting personal when it comes to reviewing books on Palestine, as always.

I do want to begin talking about the book. I think what shocked me is that the author, Aziz, was born in 1927! That means he did witness life under British occupation as well as the Nakba. I don’t think I’ve read any book on Palestine by an author who’s seen it all! So I knew from the beginning this book was going to be unique.

This book is a semi-memoir, semi-biography, and semi-travel narrative? And it never fails to deliver in such a poetic and beautiful and painful way at the same time. The author doesn’t shy away from anything, and I’m so, so happy to finally read a piece of literature on Palestine that confronts Arab treachery towards Palestinians from 1948 up until the present day. I’m honestly shocked - yes, I’m shocked and quite literally flabbergasted - at the information that I learned from this book about the relations between a Jordanian governor and Moshe Dayan.

I really do relate to the author Aziz, strongly. Specifically rhetorical theme of the conflict of belonging. When a country takes you in - or rather, simply allows you to exist under its roof - you build a life. You form friendships, routines, familiar places. And yet, when that same country has played a role in slaughtering your people, the feeling is unbearable and confusing.

I am still living through this conflict- calling a place home while knowing it harms my people. This book explores that exact wound and just smothers salt all over it 😀.

“Unable to sleep during the flight, my mind ran through the years of my life in this world. I was temporarily leaving my new adopted country, a country that planted a dagger in my heart when it supported the Jews of the world financially and militarily to take over my home and everything I ever knew.”

Through this book, we are going through a month’s trip worth of stories and experiences and journeys, love and hate and occupation and grief - every emotion is stronger than the other. My absolute favorite part is this, perhaps it’s my favorite piece of text written on Palestine:

“After the relatives left, I told mother about the dream I had before I left Dallas to visit her. Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She wiped a few of her tears and placed them in the palm of my right hand and said, ‘Plant some of my tears with your tears on your land. They are old tears and probably will grow only into small trees, but they will always keep watch over your tear trees like I kept watch all these years over your land.’ She smiled, closed her eyes, and went to sleep.

Early the next morning, I walked to my small piece of land, sat on some of its large rocks, and picked some of its wildflowers. Tears filled my eyes. I made sure the tears fell in various places so that the tear trees would have large areas in which to grow. I told myself they would grow large and their fruits would hang on their branches down to the ground. Then I spoke to the land and said, ‘Please remember me and take care of my tear trees and remember that others may covet you and try to own you, but you will always be mine.’”

This book resonated with me on so many levels. I, as a third-generation Palestinian in exile, have immensely struggled throughout my whole life with the idea of will the land remember me? Unlike the author, my great-grandparents couldn’t go back to our village to claim our land. They couldn’t cross all those settlements in Hebron, so my land remained a no man’s land for a long time, until recently it was put on sale. The last remaining homes were turned into wineries and wedding venues where Israeli Jews are living their lives on the same stone that we bled on.

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I’m just in awe at how author is just so, so articulate - so many beautifully written passages where it genuinely feels like you’re right by his side when he’s traveling through different cities of Palestine. Frankly, a part of me is jealous that I never saw my home city, Hebron, in the spring, or Ramallah and Jerusalem in winter, that I never got to taste Jaffa’s oranges, or Hebron’s grapes, or the figs of Nablus. But this book genuinely patched me up, because for once, I felt like there was hope in simply following Aziz’s trips. Below are some of my absolute banger moments that did something to my brain chemistry.

”When the events of history tear through people’s lives and leave them uprooted, homeless, without their familiar surroundings, their community, their people, and their land, it is the stories that help them to survive.”

“Unable to sleep during the flight, my mind ran through the years of my life in this world. I was temporarily leaving my new adopted country, a country that planted a dagger in my heart when it supported the Jews of the world financially and militarily to take over my home and everything I ever knew.”

“They told me he died of a broken heart when I asked why he died at the young age of sixty. They said he used to go to Jerusalem, to Jaffa Gate, to climb the ancient wall around the Old City and gaze at his house, which he had lost to Israel. He could not get any closer to the house through what Israel declared a no-man’s land. Every time he returned to the village, I learned, he went to bed and grieved.”

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I cannot recommend this book enough. I found it randomly somewhere, and I was cherishing it and holding it close until I had a break to read it. I know I said it gave me hope, but it also made me cry ugly during my flight. To imagine that this was the life my jeddi (grandpa), who I never saw and who died from grief on his bed in a refugee camp - to imagine that my jeddi once traveled through all of Palestine, my jeddi, who I have never heard his voice or seen much of his face except the photo that my sitto (grandma) had hung up in her home, to imagine that he had visited our village, that the land knows him, that he walked on its soil, and that one day I might walk there too - it’s all overwhelming. I know this might come off as dramatic. I’m never shy to be vulnerable, but it pains me to know that my jeddi had lost his home and poured his hope and soul into freedom fighting, only to end up passing away in a refugee camp away from home.

Despite all the sadness and thoughts and emotions this book brought up upon me, I will forever cherish this experience. The author, Aziz, is one of a kind, and we should carry his name as we carry the names of our ancestors and martyrs. May his soul rest in peace, ameen.

[Noor · Rating 5 out of 5]

a beautiful memoir by Aziz Shihab, a renowned Arab American (Palestinian) journalist. born in jerusalem in 1927, moving to america in 1949/50 at the age of 21, this memoir details his journey back to palestine in the late 1990s to visit his dying mother. this month-long visit is a journey of highs and lows, of belonging and discovery, of survivor's guilt and internalized hatred. his writing is candid, almost too candid at times - but he does a great job at expressing his thought process related to his return home. i found this book through my friend jenin (from PW!!!)'s tiktok, and in the first chapter i realized he is the father of poett Naomi Shihab Nye - whose work rosaleen has recommended. excited to look into her writing next!

"Of course, I was thinking how lucky I was compared to them. I was a refugee also, but in a country where i had more freedom and more opportunities." (page 25)

[Lauren 罗云 · Rating 4 out of 5]

That night I had a dream that mother had died and said to me from inside the small wooden box wrapped in a white shroud, "Son, do not sell your piece of land. Come home and walk over the earth, sit on its rocks and plant some of your tears there. Your tears will grow into tall trees and will bear tear fruits and on the branches your name will be recorded for eternity. Even when you are no longer in this world, your land will remember you."

Join beloved Palestinian American journalist, Aziz Shihab, has he returns home to Falastin for a month to visit his more-than-one-hundred-years-old mother and the small land of his she cared for in his absence. This memoir, though short, beholds the reader to a massively poignant internal wrestling of a man in exile, living between borders, cultures, ideologies. The book is presented in the style of a travelogue -- you are whisked in the winds of encounter to encounter, thought to thought. Written in the author's last years of his life, the words are breeze to get through, but heavy in the heart; you cannot help but feel for Aziz as he struggles through his memories to find his place in his dichotomous world, a perpetual visitor both in the US, inside "the large belly of the bottle with the narrow neck," and in his motherland, a passionate vestige fraught in the hungry shadows of enormous conflict (made so at the hands of his American identity). His passages invite you to cling with him to this land, to its people and, in many ways, educate those who may or may not know of the weary plight of the Falastinian diaspora.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Shihab’s writing is a tad elementary, sometimes repetitive and in need of a solid editor to help ideas flow a little better. I always felt like Shihab was about to break the surface into something more insightful, but the retellings remain pretty superficial. Some stylistic devices were made me suspect they were derived from Arabic storytelling techniques, but they didnt succeed here. Shihab was a reporter for the Dallas News and a journalist all his life, so I was a bit surprised that his career did little to strengthen this memoir.

Still, the poignant elements of this memoir made it a worthy read. I was so glad to read an account of a Palestinian who emigrated to my hometown. This is an easy read with a potentially powerful take on Israeli occupation that I wish had gone farther, grappled more, and delved deeper. 3 stars.

[Rawan Zayyat · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Joan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A personal account of Aziz Shihab's return to Palestine to visit his family; both moving and very revealing of politics from the Palestinian point of view. Published in 2007.