Palestinian farmers harvesting olives in the Jenin area, November 2015. Photo by TrickyH on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
By Thin Ink
This is an excerpt of a longer interview on Thin Ink, a weekly publication on food, climate, and where they meet. Read the full interview here.
Vivien Sansour is the founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library and a tireless advocate for food sovereignty, not just for her home country but also for the world. For years, she’s worked to preserve the seeds, crops, and stories that root Palestinians to their land.
In this interview with Thin Ink, Sansour talks about the past, present, and future of Palestinian food systems and about whether, and how, they might be revived.
Thin Ink (TI): Perhaps we can start by having you tell readers a bit more about the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library you set up. What was the idea behind it? What prompted you to do this, and you know, what was the motivation?
Vivien Sansour (VS): So the Seed Library came out of a lot of grief, really, and the idea that as a young person growing up in Palestine, I was born knowing that everything I love was under threat. So there was never a time in my life where I felt like I could take anything for granted.
I was born in the late ’70s, and obviously, we were well into the Israeli occupation. So the idea that there is someone who is in control of your life was always present. I’m sure you may be familiar with that coming from where you come from.
But when I was a child, the world was very tangible and real, like my grandmother’s rabbits, my family’s apricot trees, and the almond trees where I spent a lot of my time, not just as a child, but also as a grown person. The shade of those ancient, old almond trees … it’s a relationship that continues to be very much in my pores. They’re like an extension of my body, my family, my life.
These are not just romantic words. This is how I grew up. I am in love with where I come from, and the Seed Library for me was a way to basically put that love in some form of … I don’t know … contemporary story and structure people relate to and understand.
After I tried to pursue a PhD in Agriculture and Life Science, I realized I wanted to go talk to the people I grew up with and the people I had forgotten to meet. I didn’t want to waste eight years of my life in the halls of universities when I could be spending eight years of my life with elders who will not be there tomorrow, and the knowledge they have. I quit the program, went home, and just allowed myself to visit people I don’t know, go to villages, talk to random people in the street, and just share myself as much as I also received from others.
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It’s very ironic, actually. After being a proud PhD dropout, I ended up being invited to the halls of academia to speak about exactly what I did.
It all makes sense to me now, because I was doing the real field work. I didn’t call it that; it was more like grief and work to preserve, honour, and keep alive the culture and the bio culture of a place and a people I belong to, but also a people who have been teachers to me.
I was looking for, literally, the taste of my childhood. So every inquiry I made was more of an inquiry into something I was longing for. I was like someone who lost their lover and is trying to rebuild them through the remnants of them, right? That’s how I started collecting different seeds, like carrot or beans or arugula or spinach. And then I started sharing this with the world, and it turned out I wasn’t the only heartbroken lover.
A lot of people walk around with broken hearts about their world that has been destroyed and is being destroyed. The Library now extends beyond Palestine, and we run, pretty much, a global grassroots initiative. I think it’s because people, especially Indigenous people and people who know pain and oppression, understand that we are living in a time of hospice, where a lot of what we love is dying and is being intentionally destroyed and replaced.
TI: That’s both lovely and sad, and there are so many strands I want to follow up on. So you started out working to protect these seeds, as well as the stories, culture, and memories around them. And unfortunately, I’m going to have to drag you back to Palestine. The latest UN statistics show that the vast majority of farmland in Gaza has been destroyed, and those that are not destroyed are largely inaccessible. Beyond food production, what does that loss of farmland mean in terms of loss of history and culture and knowledge of your food systems?
VS: First thing: I am not in the business of protecting anything. I think people keep talking about that, and I find it fascinating, because in reality, these seeds are protecting us. I mean, we are the ones who need to eat. We are the ones who need to breathe the clean oxygen. And in a lot of ways, in these times of massive grief, these seeds are keeping us alive, giving us some hope and holding within them our history. This is why we are trying to propagate them and give them space to grow wherever we can, because they are the holders of our story.
Secondly, I don’t care about the UN. Fuck the UN, and fuck their reports. Also, the international organisations that claim to care about human rights and ecology. As someone often referred to as an ecologist, I feel massively betrayed by these organisations. For example, our Seed Library is in Battir, a village that’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And I don’t see UNESCO trying to do anything to protect this site. In fact, every day we have a new settler incursion.
So please register my anger, because the world is dead silent, except for people in the grassroots who are like seeds trying to survive in environments that are completely volatile, from New York City to Burma to wherever. They’re raising their voices, whereas all those institutions were designed to keep us silent.
I’ll get to your question on land, but it’s important for me to highlight that we want the Seed Library to be a place of freedom, an initiative for us to have autonomy over our food, but also over our spirit, our minds, our words. That’s why I’ve always rejected any support from governmental institutions.
And when you talk about land and the mass destruction of land, well, how can these seeds live? These seeds, especially the crop varieties that we eat, like zucchini, tomatoes, etc, are varieties developed through an incredibly imaginative, creative and scientific manner, co-creating with soil, land, water, and air. They are thousands of years old.
Okra isn’t from Palestine, but travelled there, was domesticated there, and throughout years of domestication, became a very nice guest (in our cuisine), to the point where we have what we call a “ba’al okra,” where “ba’al” refers to the Canaanite deity of fertility.
Until today, we call these varieties that grow with no irrigation “ba’al.” These varieties learned and entered into relationships with the soil and the hands of people. Everything we eat today, if we’re lucky to have food on our plate, is a product of a relationship between land, soil, human and non-human elements. And so when you take away and destroy the land and the soil, you are destroying the ability to have these relations that allow continuity.
It is obviously by design that this destruction of our farmland has happened. It’s been ongoing, by the way.
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TI: But we gotta start somewhere, right? You’ve been doing this for a much longer time than I have been doing my journalistic work, but my thinking is that if I give up what I’m doing, I let them win, them being either the military dictators in Burma/Myanmar or the people who put private profits above public goods in terms of food and climate. But I definitely feel what I’m doing is totally inadequate.
VS: You know, I don’t see Palestine as an isolated story. This is not the core of why I live or why I do what I do. We live in a scorching hot world, not only as in rising temperatures, although that is, of course, part of it, but a scorching hot world of violence and of unprecedented measures. The introduction of AI, the advancement of military technology and surveillance, and the hyper capitalism we’re living in have made this planet almost uninhabitable, right?
So I don’t see what’s happening to us in isolation from that. I see it as a microcosm.
In fact, I was talking to a friend in Palestine the other day, and he said, “Maybe we are the lucky ones in the sense that the way we’re heading in terms of AI and climate change taking over, the hell we are living may look tender in the face of the hell the world might see.”
The President of Colombia, very intelligently, has said many times that Palestine is a test run. So watch out and wake up, world. For me and for us at the Seed Library, the vision has always been that I may not be able to change the world in my lifetime, but what I can do, as much as I can do, is create more tender spaces in the world, and expand those tender spaces as much as possible so that they can connect, but also that the next generation will have something. It was not about, “Oh, I’m going to liberate Palestine.”
Our work is about reminding people that there is still life worth fighting for. What is the saying where you plant a seed for others to live in its shade? That’s it.
