On Solidarity and Being Palestinian
Lorain Khalil Rihan on family, food, and collective liberation in the face of the US-backed genocide in Gaza
We first learned about Lorain and her project, Lulu’s Kitchen, in September 2023. She spontaneously reached out through our website’s contact form with an offer to donate a portion of the proceeds from one of her events to Minnow. Lorain’s gesture moved us, and once we learned more about Lulu’s Kitchen, we immediately saw how it was consistent with the aims of her project.
Based on unceded Kumeyaay land, Lulu’s Kitchen is both a celebration and preservation of her family’s Palestinian story and heritage through the shared joy of food. Lulu’s Kitchen events are organized as intimate gatherings or haflat, which Lorain describes as a common cultural sharing among Palestinians. October 7, 2023, happened shortly after her event. Now, in turn, with nearly 30,000 Palestinians having been killed by Israel’s onslaught at the time of writing, we wanted to highlight her voice and thoughts on what solidarity means to her and on being a Palestinian in the United States of America at a time like this.
JRN Lorain, I’d like us to start with what could seem like a simple question, but one that can also be tricky in this country for people of color like ourselves, particularly given this historical moment. How do you identify yourself? And, could you tell us how Lulu’s Kitchen came about, where it is right now, what is next for it, and how it pairs with your artistic practice?
LKR I am a Palestinian visual artist, storyteller, and educator born in forced exile outside of historic Palestine. I was born and raised on unceded Kumeyaay land in Escondido, California. I create work devoted to the remembrance of Palestine, exploring intergenerational lived experiences of my family in the motherland and exile situated within the collective memory of Palestine.
Lulu’s Kitchen is an extension of my creative practice, but it approaches the act of remembrance in a way that differs from my other work. This project celebrates the regality of Palestinian hospitality, the sacredness of mundanity, and is an homage to my family’s history, my personal childhood memories, and the precious time spent in our kitchens and at our tables exchanging stories through the act of preparing food and eating. For me, practicing our food and storytelling traditions offers us a portal across time and space. My intentions for Lulu’s Kitchen are to honor my ancestral connection to Palestine and my family’s nuanced experiences, to create space for community joy, and to work in service of the transformative dream of a world free of colonial domination.
How has day-to-day life transpired for you since this dystopian nightmare began?
Teaching, creating artwork, cooking, joining actions, holding space with community, and bearing witness. For me, resisting settler colonial erasure has been a daily practice before October 2023, but at the moment, it is with an intensified urgency.
The US-backed Israeli offensive and its ensuing humanitarian catastrophe have been condemned around the world as genocidal, with the International Court of Justice finding that Israel must take action to prevent genocidal violence by its military, to “prevent and punish” its incitement, and to ensure humanitarian aid to Gaza is increased. Witnessing this state of affairs prompted us to reciprocate your support by amplifying your voice and Palestinian self-determination. It’s a notion of solidarity that we strive to practice in our work because it speaks directly to the reality of the interconnectedness of our movements. What made you want to donate to Minnow, and is there anything you would like to share about solidarity at this moment?
From an ingenious place as a kid, I wanted for others what I wanted for myself and my own family. Through student and community organizing work that I was involved in, I developed a consciousness that our communities are materially connected within oppressive systems, but also through our creative forms of navigating and resisting those systems. Lilla Watson’s wisdom comes to mind — “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” Solidarity building across our communities has mostly been my focus in the classroom and the community spaces I am in because our collective survival and liberation require it. At this moment, we are witnessing a magnification of this calling.
I do try to reckon with the contradictions that emerge in my work and existence and try to make sure that my practices reflect my values as closely as possible. One of those contradictions is being denied my Right of Return to historic Palestine while living on stolen Indigenous land. So, designating a portion of the proceeds to Minnow was very intentional. Minnow’s framework of cultivating relationships with land that refuses to be extractive, with the intention of Indigenous land rematriation resonates with me.
I am not a diaspora scholar, yet diaspora has been a component of my identity since I moved to the US mainland. As part of this experience and from what I have observed and discussed with other diasporic folks, I’ve noticed having to continuously tell myself and others a story of why I am here, what I am doing with my life, and at the service of what. This story changes as a function of what I live through, what I share with others, and the many negotiations I have to engage unilaterally to stay alive and sane in diaspora. Does any of this resonate with you, and if it does, what is that story now for you, and how has it changed in time?
White supremacy forces many of us to “negotiate” which parts of ourselves can be revealed and which parts need to be concealed, especially when safety is a concern. I did experience a pronounced politicization of my identities as an Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim overnight after 9/11–which was not just my own unique experience. I navigated a paradoxical hyper-visibility as an Arab and Muslim post 9/11 with the US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the same time, experienced a persistent erasure of Palestinian existence. In my world history class, I remember learning about World War II, the Holocaust, and the creation of the state of Israel with no mention of Palestine or Palestinians.
That same year, a teammate’s father admonished me to look at a map and see that there is no Palestine, after asking me “where” I was from. Later, I learned that settler colonial projects require erasure as a strategy to be successful, which was why Palestine could be excluded from my history class and why my teammate’s dad could deny my existence. I also began to understand why some Palestinians chose to say they were from Jordan or Lebanon, because naming Palestine caused tension and could potentially be unsafe. At this moment, we are bearing witness to Palestinians in the diaspora being doxxed, harassed, threatened, physically harmed and murdered, so I think many people will continue to negotiate what can and can’t be shared based on their own positionalities. The majority of the spaces that I am in now don’t require me to negotiate in the same way, but I am very aware that is not the reality for everyone.
In the logic of settler-colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land, there is always a push to sever relationships with people’s food and to police or control its enjoyment. I often think of Thanksgiving that way–why should we feast, share, and be thankful for just one day of the year and on this particular day with its dark history? Could you share any thoughts or views on how land and food–its production, distribution, and consumption–are wrapped up in the struggle for liberation and how these interact with settler colonialism?
It is impossible to talk about the liberation of Palestine from Zionist settler colonialism without centering land and the fragmentation of Palestinian peoples’ relationship to their land. The weaponization of food and land against Palestinians for the past century has been practiced differently across historic Palestine. We are witnessing the active genocide in Gaza that is now four months deep. Gaza is intentionally being starved as inadequate quantities of food, water, and fuel have been permitted to enter. Aid trucks have been stuck at the Rafah crossing for several days. Palestinians have been filmed getting shot at by Israeli occupation soldiers while receiving aid. Aid is not reaching all of Gaza, and we have learned that Palestinians in northern Gaza are grinding up animal feed to use as flour. The UN distributed food like toys to starving Palestinian children rather than actually providing food. Three weeks into the genocide, the United Nations Relief Works Agency told Palestinians in Gaza that they ran out of aid, but Palestinians found aid stored in a warehouse.
And before this current genocide, Gaza has been under a land, air, and sea “blockade” for 17 years. The Israeli government mandated the Red Lines Policy restricting the amount of food permitted into Gaza through a caloric minimum calculation. An ever-changing list of food items has been frequently banned, and to name some–chocolate, coriander, sage, pasta, meat, and dried fruit. Settler colonialism created the conditions for aid to be necessary in the first place.
Palestinians in the West Bank are divided up into Areas “A,” “B,” and “C,” causing further isolation while more Palestinian land is colonized through what is euphemistically referred to as “settlements.” Palestinians in historic Palestine are prohibited and criminalized for foraging herbs like sage, ‘akkoub and za’atar under the Israeli pretext of nature protection laws, even though Palestinians have always foraged these herbs while protecting their land. These laws further sever Palestinians of their ancestral land and food-based traditions. Palestinian water wells have been filled with concrete, and aquifers have been damaged. After all of that, Palestinian food is appropriated, rebranded, and commodified as Israeli cuisine. The egregiousness of Zionist settler colonial violence is endless. So practicing our food-based traditions is an act of resistance, even though these traditions predate resistance to settler colonialism.
