"This past July, I bought eggplants at the farmers' market, intending to make my grandmother's signature maqlubeh: the cinnamon-and-allspice-scented rice dish layered with fried eggplants and chicken, cooked in a pot, then flipped onto a serving platter, forming a golden dome. Before I had the chance to peel the eggplants, stripe by stripe, and drop them into hot oil, a WhatsApp message came in from my mother-a single, waving-hand emoji at an unusual hour."
"I found myself instead in my Pennsylvania kitchen, 5,000 miles away, doing math: one peaceful death compared with the thousands of violent deaths happening in Gaza; a woman who lived nearly nine decades compared with the children suffering from malnutrition and starvation who might not live nine years; a death witnessed by family compared with entire families erased, no one left to carry their names."
She bought eggplants intending to make her grandmother's maqlubeh, but a WhatsApp waving-hand emoji signaled her grandmother Teta Fatmeh's death. She felt hollow stillness and guilt rather than overt grief. The eggplants sat unused as soft spots spread. Flights to Jaljulia, her grandmother's lifelong Palestinian town, were canceled amid rocket fire and regional escalation tied to Israel's offensive in Gaza and war with Iran, leaving her in Pennsylvania. She compared one peaceful, witnessed death to the thousands of violent, often unacknowledged deaths and erased families in Gaza. Teta Fatmeh was born in the late 1930s before the green line split her family.
Read at The Atlantic
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]