Dieses Semester habe ich mein Forschungsprojekt über Abschiedsrituale geschrieben.
Das sind einige Gedanken und Erkenntnisse, die ich dabei gesammelt habe:
English translation:
This semester, I wrote my research project about mourning rituals.
Here are some of the thoughts and insights I gathered: 1. Grief is political. 2. Who is allowed to grieve, who is seen, who must stay silent – it reveals much about power, belonging, and humanity. 3. Rituals are not just tradition.
They are a form of resistance –
against forgetting,
against silence,
against systems that make pain invisible. 4. Migration also changes death.
When people die far from home, new ways of mourning emerge –
digital, creative, collective.
These new forms prove that even without physical closeness, we can create community. 5. In our homeland, we experience rituals of farewell – like weddings or births – always with traces of grief.
We have learned to carry joy and pain together, not apart.
We have learned to hold death within life, not to fear it. 6. It is the West that has made death a taboo and pushed it out of everyday life.
We know death.
We remember – because we must.
Grief is not weakness.
It is memory, language, and resistance.
What keeps us warm in a cold country, far from our warm people, far from the love we deserve?
Those thick, velvety blankets—the ones with tigers, roses, peacocks, or floral patterns. The ones you’ll find in every immigrant household.
They are what keep our families warm.
They are how we escape the cold of the West.
They are how we find each other.
They are childhood—naps at your grandmother’s house, buried under their weight.
They are a couple’s bedroom, a newlywed’s first winter together.
They are all your siblings and cousins, packed into one room, sleeping on the floor, sharing their warmth.
They are homesickness and home, all at once.
A tradition carried across continents. A quiet resistance against the cold.
They are what keep us warm.
لهلا يطيح حبنا على حجر
May our love never fall on stone.
A sentence
from my grandmother’s
and my mother’s tongue.
As a child, I didn’t understand it.
But I kept hearing it as I grew older.
The more I healed,
the more I understood its meaning.
From my grandmother—
Allah yerhamha—
to you:
Love is mutual.
Never one-sided.
Love should fall
warm,
soft,
on you.
And I pray
that love never falls
cold,
hard,
unreturned—
on you.
وإلى طاح حبنا على حجر
And even if our love falls on stone,
we never forget
to stay
warm.
the spaces in between
It is not only about the memories I can’t clearly recall.
It is about those who have left the frame forever —
as we all will someday.
What we all share, the one thing that connects us, is life and death:
where we live it, how we inhabit the spaces around us
and what we will leave behind.
The small and the big moments.
The people we get to meet and the people we will never meet.
Each photograph carries a fragment of this shared existence:
a bedroom that held an Eid photoshoot, welcomed family after a birth
and offered rest at the end of the day;
living rooms that echoed with laughter, singing, screaming and silence.
These are the spaces we inhabit as our loved ones did.
the spaces in between
My mama used to brag about the olive trees and the olives she picked.
The zit zaytoun she made during baysara season.
The joy she felt bringing home liters of olive oil.
And allaaaaaah — the olives she prepared with Jedati الله يرحمه.
I know olive oil runs in my blood —
because my mama trusted me, at the age of 8, to taste the olive oil we’d be using for the whole year.
“Ah mama, machi mar. had l’3am khrej mzian.”
20 years later
Standing in the Arab supermarket.
my eyes land on a glass jar “Basra date syrup”
Basra — my other half
Would that date syrup run in my blood the way olive oil does?
if I had known how much you loved it?
If l had heard the stories you would have told me about it?
A side of me I didn’t get to know as well as my jeblia side.
A city in the south of Iraq — not only famous for connecting two great rivers.
but also known for its dates.
Mama once told me:
Baba الله يرحمه used to brag about them.
Or what is left of them...
Like the dates of Basra — that Baba not only praised. but mourned.
A loss too big to name.
Like the dates of Basra - a part of me l yearn for
A part of me I never got to meet.
but endlessly — and painfully - miss.
Oh, to taste the dates of Basra that you once talked about with my olive oil side.
The olive oil that runs in my blood
mixed with the date syrup I ache to remember.
“Raf” (رف) means shelf in Arabic –
a simple word for a familiar object,
often found in everyday spaces, holding books, tools, or memories.
In this piece, the word becomes the object.
It’s a play with language, form, and material –
bringing Arabic calligraphy into physical space.
Inspired by traditions often pushed aside,
the work connects the rhythm of script
with the clarity of handcrafted design.
Fonts used:
Arabic: KO Rubbama
English: BN Catalina
