LAYLA K. FEGHALI on The Land in Our Bones /361
Artwork by mirella salamé (@fertilepalms) titled, “Inner spring does come even when it is not spring”
(earth and plant pigment, watercolor, on reclaimed wood)
In a timely and heart-wrenching episode, returning guest Layla K. Feghali shares the power and perseverance of homeland, even in the face of colonial violence. As the genocide in Palestine continues and worsens, Layla offers a powerful call to listen to our rage and take real action against empire.
Layla reminds us that in urgent times, action must come before grief and before healing. You cannot heal a wound that is still actively bleeding. There is no comfort or remedy for what is happening now. To heal, the siege must stop, colonialism must be uprooted.
This time may be a portal for deep transformation, but only if we steward it with care and remembrance. As empire inevitably crumbles, those of us in the heart of it must actively work to dismantle capitalism and colonialism. Layla turns to her experience within the Lebanese diaspora to share the power of connecting back to homeland to the plants and landscapes that are intertwined with culture. Remembrance is a key part of liberation from the systems that tried to force disconnection from the land. As Layla shares throughout the episode “the land is in our bones.”
“The land is the origin of our culture and this is proof of our indigeneity. Our culture....there is no song, there is no dance, there is no expression or form from our region that does not mention or emerge explicitly from our relationship to land.”
Photo of Layla K. Feghali
Layla Feghali lives between her ancestral village in coastal Lebanon and her diasporic home in California, where she was born and raised by her immigrant family. She is an author, cultural worker, and plantcestral medicine practitioner focused on the re-membrance of baladi (land-based/folk/indigenous) lifeways and ancestral wisdoms from SWANA*. Her dedication is to stewardship of our earth's eco-cultural integrity, sovereignty, and the many layers of relational restoration and transformation that entails. Feghali's upcoming book The Land in Our Bones, documents ethnobotanical and cultural healing knowledge from Syria to the Sinai, while interrogating colonialism and its lingering wounds on the culture of our displaced world. The book re-maps Canaan (the Levant) and the Crossroads (the "Middle East"), while engaging nuanced conversations about identity, loss, belonging, trauma, and rematriation. It features her Plantcestral Re-Membrance methodology as an emergent pathway towards cultural repair for diasporic and colonized communities, and highlights the critical importance of tending the land and life where we are to restore the fundamental integrity, dignity, and regeneration of our earth's multispecies communities.
You can learn more about Feghali's work and visit the community archival project she hosts at RiverRoseRemembrance.com or River Rose Remembrance on IG + FB.
*SWANA stands for SouthWest Asia and North Africa, a less euro-centric way to describe the region commonly referred to as the Middle East and N. Africa.
♫ The music in this episode is “Ocean in your Eyes” and “Comfort is Never Constant” by Lionmilk.
Episode References
Li Beirut | herbal + healing support guide {bilingual arabic + english}
The Land in Our Bones by Layla K. Feghali
Orientalism by Edward W. Said
GUest Recommendations
- Join Layla and allies to raise mutual aid that directly benefits familial networks in Gaza. Make your donation at https://givebutter.com/c/river2sea.
- Join a local organization to support direct actions in your community, block weapons labs and ports transporting them, create legislative pressure towards ceasefire, etc.
- Support Arab and impacted communities facing legal discrimination and hate violence across the US and beyond.
- Find your local Arab community organizers and support their material and daily nourishment and needs. Feed them meals, provide childcare, and generally help make their lives easier.
- Get creative about strategic and personal ways to be involved, and how to leverage your personal privileges and skills towards a Free Palestine.
- Keep talking, educating, sharing in your communities and disrupting business as usual until the goals of Palestinians on the ground are met.
- Highlight, trust, and center the voices and lived experiences of Palestinian and Arab people whose knowledge is anchored in a lifetime of lived experience.
- Educate yourself on the ways the struggle against Settler Colonialism relates to your own lineages, homes, and communities to fortify your solidarity from a more anchored place inside your own being.
- Support Indigenous communities in your own cities and across the earth fighting for Landback.
- Do whatever you can to support the sacred effort to help Empire crumble, for the good of our earth and communities across the board.
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For The Wild Podcast is an anthology of the Anthropocene; focused on land-based protection, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth and consumerism.