How to Take Refuge in a Seed: Metaphors of Survival and Becoming in Palestinian Seed Work

• In Event: Palestine Solidarity and Resistances to Empire: Diasporic Cultural Production as Decolonial Praxis

Abstract

How do you make sense of bodies buried beneath the rubble? How do you (re)take
refuge in land that appears unlivable? What forms of being can and will Palestinian life take after
the ceaseless destruction of the present moment? This project reflects on the persisting violence
of Zionist settler colonialism and considerations of hope and resistance amidst genocidal
conditions. I attempt to open up the seed, materially and metaphorically, exploring how it
functions as a portal to anti-colonial understandings of ecology, land relations, and
survival—simultaneously seeing the seed as a model for an anticolonial archive, a form of
survival media, and a mode of elemental resistance.

My research examines visual and textual material from Vivien Sansour’s Palestine Heirloom
Seed Library (PHSL), including language on Sansour’s website, her film Ahl el Thara, People of
the Soil, and postcards I received while participating in a series of PHSL events. I place these
materials in conversation with future-oriented artistic works, specifically Larissa Sansour’s In
Vitro, to deepen my study of seeds as a mode of preserving cultural heritage and as an indication
of futurity and becoming against Zionist erasure.

Building upon the PHSL’s conception of seeds as analogous to Palestinians and their potential as
a “subversive rebel,” I utilize scholarship on more-than-human frameworks to contextualize the
seed in a Palestinian more-than-human relation of life and resistance. I draw on Sherena Razek’s
theorization of ‘Nakba ecologies’ and ‘elemental intifada,’ alongside literature on seed-keeping
practices and the functions of seeds in archives and media forms, to analyze the aesthetics and
poetics of the seed in this context. I argue that the seed can function as a model for alternative
relationalities and modes of being, operating as a future-oriented metaphor and a place of refuge
for Palestinians, and life in general, amidst annihilation.

Author

• Jacob Sirhan, University of California-Santa Cruz