Good Mud: A Conversation with Vivien Sansour
on seeds and liberation
Vivien Sansour is a Palestinian conservationist, writer, and artist who has devoted her life to the preservation of Palestinian seeds and foodways. In 2014, Vivien founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. Based in the village of Battir, the library is a hub for research, art, and gathering, sharing the stories of ancestral Palestinian seeds and farming practices that have been endangered by Israeli occupation and corporate agribusiness. The library has led to many other projects including the interactive Traveling Kitchen, a mobile space for communal eating and education. I first learned of Vivien’s work when I began saving seeds two years ago. As I connected with local seedkeepers and contributed to seed library projects in Philadelphia, Vivien’s example guided me as I started to make connections between farming, art, and histories of anticolonial resistance.
Talking to Vivien gathered me up. Below is our conversation about mud and seeds, death and dinner and liberation.
What seeds are you carrying with you right now, either literally or metaphorically?
My belly is so full of all kinds of seeds. Some dead, some alive, some about to sprout and some seeking shelter. And some really angry and wanting to revolt. I am carrying a lot of grief, massive grief, I’m carrying a lot of weird determination, I’m carrying defeat, and a lot of strength for continuing the journey to insist and create a more tender space in this world. It seems that everything I’ve grown up with, everything I love, everything that’s under attack right now is literally everything thats worth living for. I’m seeing not just Palestine–I am part of a greater global community of Haitians, of Jamaicans, of the whole world that has been in so much pain and under so much attack. These are the seeds I’m carrying. They’re not always cataloged or in the right climate but there they are.
What does it feel like to love the land right now as a Palestinian, as someone who grew up spending time in Gaza? Where has that love led you?
It has led me to where I am with you right now. It has led me to know that we are all children of this beautiful earth, that the land and our bodies are literally inseparable. We are made of mud. In Palestine, when we want to talk about someone's intention or heart, we say they are “good mud.” So I’m going back to that place, to ask what kind of mud do we want to be in this world, even as our bodies, our mud, is being amputated and contaminated and cleft open. I am right now in diaspora but I feel in my body what’s happening in my home. Not just because people I love are suffering and I know details of daily stories. My own land is by itself and I don’t know if I’ll ever see it again. I don’t know if I’ll touch my almond trees again, I don’t know if I’ll greet the same people. And yet I have to make sense of a world that made our soil a place for so much blood but also so much gift for the world. Our struggle is inviting people from all walks of life to examine what it is to be a person of land, what it is to be a person of freedom and to live in the way of dignity.
I think dignity is something that especially in the West is so devalued, because it isn’t even understood. For example, the colonial project of the U.S. is built by settlers who did not respect the land and its people, who stole people from other places and forced them into a life of slavery. But the lie is so big that we are able to see the truth. We know that enslaved people didn't accept enslavement. We know that they’re still calling us for a higher level of liberation. We know that Haitians who revolted in 1791 are still being punished for seeking their freedom. It’s not just Palestinians being killed right now, it’s all of us.
People wonder why Palestinians say Alhamdulillah. It’s not because we think it’s okay what happened, it's because we have to believe in something bigger than this moment. Otherwise we’ll go completely insane, and that’s what they want. This is an attack on our spirit as much as it is on our bodies and land.
We can’t talk about Palestine as a unique case by itself. Palestine is just another big symptom of the violence of this empire, from its inception, and the violence of Europe. It is our time to honor all of those who have been killed throughout all the years, and who are being killed now, by standing up for our dignity, and not just bearing witness but being bravery, so that we can finally maybe see a ray of light in liberation. And maybe this liberation will come at the cost of our bodies, but we’re dead anyway.
You think people here [in the West] who are in their comfortable, fancy jobs with their suburban homes are alive? Our dead babies under the rubble are more alive. Their hearts were actually beating, they were feeling, they were tasting, they were speaking. I think people here are the dead ones and I really wish them life.
On October 25th, you made an Instagram post about a recent performance dinner you put on which focused on aquatic life and your childhood in Gaza. You wrote, “this is an invitation for people around the world to remember Gaza in your dinner tonight.” Could you talk about what it might mean to remember Gaza in our dinners? What could it look like to structure our relationships to cooking, to plants, to eating and gathering, in a way that is attentive to the realities of colonial occupation and genocide in this moment?
You know, the first time I ever had shrimp was in Gaza. My father used to take us every Sunday to Gaza. He would put us in the car with my siblings and my mom and we would drive there. It was also the first place I had sugarcane. I remember the market and the sea and the crabs biting my toes. I was a little girl. And then when I turned thirteen, we could no longer go to Gaza and it was a big severing of a whole everyday life that just became inaccessible. And of course it’s worse for people in Gaza, a lot of them are refugees already from the villages in the Gaza district, forced to be refugees in ‘48 and ‘67 when Israel was established.
You asked me earlier about land. What is cuisine, what is our kitchen? Our kitchen is a reflection of our environment, how we interact with the abundance and gifts the elements give us. Not to idealize Gaza but like many places in the world, it has a beautiful and very unique cuisine. Nobody in Palestine eats the way Gazans do. For example, Gaza’s food is massively spicy. We don’t eat spicy in the rest of Palestine so much. They eat chili paste on their sandwiches, they have unique seed varieties of peppers and sugarcane. They have very small-scale fishing practices, and even before all this, Gazan cuisine had been significantly changing. They could no longer fish or farm the way they used to. You have people living on the coast and eating canned fish from I don’t know where. Our world itself is in hospice. A lot of the food we eat, the birds we love, the trees we revere–this is what the war is about, finalizing the murder of so much life.
So my invitation was an invitation to keep these things that are dying, alive. And even as they are dying, to be willing to fall in love with them. To be willing to fall in love with them by allowing yourself to learn about them, to make them part of your body so they will always be remembered. There is eternity in this energy that is food. The lettuce we eat is a product of the inhalation of sun rays that then becomes part of us.
I wanted to invite people to this funeral/return to life at the dinner table. Luckily Leila Haddad wrote The Gazan Kitchen [with Maggie Schmitt], it’s such a significant piece of work right now because she documented a world that is disappearing.
We [the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library] had just acquired land and were getting ready to start our farm school when all of this happened. Now we don’t know if we’ll ever reach our seeds again.
I wanted to invite people to know Gaza and fall in love with Gaza, to reveal its sacredness as not just a place to bomb and eradicate, but as a place worthy of fighting for, living for, and saving. Because Gaza right now is saving all of us. It’s really calling us on the mediocre ways in which we’ve accepted the unacceptable. Gaza is calling us to clean up our system even as it’s dying.
Can you say more about the loss of traditional fishing and farming ways in Gaza?
Gaza’s been under a complete blockade, meaning air, waterways, land—there is no way anyone can go in or out of Gaza without the permission of Israel. In order to suffocate this population, Israel made it so the fishermen couldn't go but so many miles into the water. Many of the small boats, they go out to fish and [Israel] bombs them or threatens to kill them. This morning, I learned that because they cut off the water in Gaza, people who go to the sea to get saltwater to drink are being shot right now.
When you don’t access fish, what are you going to do? So the cuisine changed—things they used to cook with shrimp or fish changed to something else. People in Gaza, like people all over the West Bank, are no longer able to access land. They were forced by do-gooder development NGOs to engage in commercial agriculture that Israel dictated. You have a whole world of crop diversity that disappeared because people are no longer growing the traditional crops, they’ve moved to conventional agriculture in order to survive. And as you know, conventional agriculture focuses on monocrops, it’s not for feeding the people in Gaza. It’s heavy on chemical input. The chemicals illegal to use in Israel are allowed for [Palestinian] agriculture. There’s a black market for Israeli agribusiness products. In the West Bank, we are the lab rats for agricultural experiments and agribusiness. So much death and cancer cases, so many cases of water contamination of whole villages.
But all this comes in the name of “help” for Palestinians. It’s important to be aware when someone says they want to help you, because we never asked for help. We know how to farm. The Zionists who came from Europe before Israel was created, we welcomed them because they were running away from Europe. We taught them how to eat, they learned from us how to farm. Israel has this lie that they made the desert bloom. We were farming long before these Europeans came to us. There’s still a very deliberate attempt to destroy Palestinian farmers the way the colonial project in the so-called U.S. destroyed the livelihood of Native Americans, the way they destroyed the prairies and severed Native Americans from their food sources, from their water and land.
I live here in the Hudson Valley, and this is a land where many Native American people lived, including the Mohawks, Lenape, and others. They took care of this lush and beautiful valley, they had their corn here, and now most of them are refugees in other places. They’re talked about as if they don’t exist. Like my friend Rowen White always says, they only love a dead Indian.
I feel massively betrayed by the majority of people in the seed world, people I’ve shared meals and conferences with, who claim to care about life, about seeds and ecology. A few have spoken out bravely, but most of them have been silent and nowhere to be found. What does it mean when you say you care about seeds, but you don’t care about the people who actually developed these seeds? How ungrateful, how violent and disturbing it is to hear the people who claim to call for an ecologically sound world, but they are actually complicit in the genocide of people who have been guardians of a lot of this diversity they say they care about.
I would love to hear more about your Traveling Kitchen project and the events that take place in the West Bank. Could you talk about a memorable event or meal that came out of the project? I’m curious to hear how the kitchen engages with the specifics of resource access, shepherding and farming histories that are unique to the West Bank and the Jordan Valley region.
Traveling Kitchen started as a way to expand the conversation about seed diversity, and how it’s not separate from the ways we live and eat. [I wanted] to make the connection between what happens on the farm and what happens in the kitchen. It was also a way to revive certain crops by reintroducing them to our community. Many of the varieties we work with were being forgotten by the new generation because we were being drenched with commercial foods from Israeli settlements.
We would go to different communities and just start cooking with folks and having conversations. The kitchen is a way to learn about new crops as much as talking about old crops. Sometimes there would be an elderly person who’s like, “do you know about this parsley?”
It was also a way to organize. When people eat together they start to think together, you don’t have to force it. Sometimes after conversations, people would say, “We need to eat better, we need to buy from local farmers,” and they would start to organize.
The kitchen itself is like a seed that developed wings and it even flew outside of Palestine. It became this seed that traveled and told other stories. For example, in the South Side of Chicago at the Sweetwater Foundation in November 2019, it was one of my most loved experiences. We cooked together and I brought some sumac from a village that was destroyed in Palestine. I cooked and shared food with folks in the South Side who know a thing or two about the relationship between food and liberation. The kitchen was a bridge for us to know each other. We have to know each other in order to learn from each other’s ways of survival and liberation.
The same thing, when I worked with folks in London. Mostly immigrants from the Caribbean who were put on ships to build England after the Windrush, and who are also being kicked out of England now. To cook with folks whose worlds are under attack, who are trying to [stay] alive in a world that’s trying to kill them. My friend Esiah Levy was a Jamaican seedkeeper—we have a shared pain caused by similar powers. How do we learn from each other so that we can be stronger? What’s happening in Jamaica is not separate from what’s happening in Palestine. So the kitchen becomes a way to highlight this.
Could you share more thoughts about the relationship between seedkeeping and international solidarity? Are there any projects you admire or have been inspired by lately?
Well, I’m not so keen on the word solidarity. I feel that what we need is more partnership, meaning we need to be aware that what we do here is related to and has consequences for your life there. With that in mind, I think seed partnerships are important because they allow us to engage each other in real work, and to navigate a very harsh world. I’m very inspired by the Experimental Farm Network, based in South Jersey and Philly. I love the beautiful work of the Ujamaa Cooperative, that’s been such a safe haven for me especially [right now]. Bonita [Adeeb] and also Ira [Wallace] have been incredible in this moment. In our love for seeds, our commitment to the land and living beings, we are creating another world. This is the beauty and power of it, and it’s important that we keep pushing in this work because we’re creating a model—big or small—for an alternative. That’s why it’s so sad to see all the people in the seed world who have been silent. Their silence says to me that for them, our seeds are a commodity.
It’s important for us to remember that seeds are not a commodity. The seeds are our families, they are our kin. That’s why these partnerships are important, because they remind us every day that we are not crazy, that we would rather live in freedom, in dignity, and love, than to live in this zombie-like existence that is obsessed with ownership. These are the reasons that I continue to do this work. Every day, every relationship is [clarified] by people’s positions. There are people who will never have my audience again, because they have royally failed. And there are people who will have my utmost loyalty for eternity, because when push came to shove, they showed me they were real about what they were saying. And those are the people who are good mud, and good seeds.
Who have you been thinking with?
The eagles and the hawks and the owls. And most importantly, the trees. And right here where I’m at, the river has been so informative.
What’s your relationship with the river like? Is that the Hudson River?
It’s called the Mahicantuck. They call it the Hudson, but it’s not. And it runs both ways. In my desperation, I go to the river because I know this river has carried so much blood. Some days it helps me understand how to survive, some days it helps me to just breathe, and some days it just lets me drown. And in all those days, the river keeps flowing.
Additional Resources:
“Gaza fisherfolk can ‘only dream of fishing freely’ under Israel’s blockade”
“Gaza’s farmers and clothing workers sectors struggle under Israeli blockade”
“They ransack our village for sport: one Palestinian farmer’s story of Israeli settler violence”
Love dignifies: "...I really wish them life."