Za’atar

I absolutely hate being asked where I’m from.

If a complete stranger asks, I usually say, “Jordan, but I was born and raised in Abu Dhabi.” If I’m somewhere like Aarhus, Denmark, this is almost always followed by a strained geography lesson and a quiet mutual surrender. “Abu Dhabi,” I say, “you know, near Dubai,” I’ve said a million times. If I’m a little drunk and unguarded, I might say Palestine. If the person I’m talking to is drunk and a stranger, I say Dubai and let the conversation end there.

My friends talk proudly about the things they bring from home — British teas, American snacks, German this or that. They tell me what things cost in pounds or in euros. “What if I told you the price in United Arab Emirates dirhams?” I once said, half joking, half annoyed. I don’t like that they assume I know everything about their homeland. But is that what bothers me? Or is it the having a homeland that they speak so easily about, the real reason I get a bit agitated? Perhaps both. I let them talk about flavors, rituals, mothers’ kitchens, while quietly deciding which parts of myself are worth explaining.

I don’t tell them that I love Za’atar. They don’t know that I put it on anything and everything I eat. That I season my chicken with it, have it with yogurt and sprinkle it over my salads. There isn’t a letter in English for the second letter in Za’atar. So the first jarring thing would be having to pronounce it. Then would come explaining what it is, only to be met with reactions of people that couldn’t possibly feel further away from my world. So I just don’t say it. It makes me feel even more alienated from those around me and how self assured they all are in where they belong. “‘We’ do this back home.” “‘We’ have this special food.” I wouldn’t say “we” when referring to Za’atar as a food that Palestinians love. I have never even been to Palestine, afterall. But yet I love Za’atar and take my grandma’s homemade Za’atar with me everywhere I go, just like my brother has my grandma’s Za’atar in New York City right now, my uncle in Dubai, my aunt in Doha have it in their pantries, as well as everyone else even remotely connected to our family.

My life has been a series of feeling stuck in Abu Dhabi, compiling a million documents for visas, nervously waiting for the results, and trying to find somewhere I fit in the world. I always say I hate Abu Dhabi. I have always felt rejected by the city, and in turn reject so much of what it stands for. Having been born in the UAE without citizenship, I internalized the idea that belonging depended on where your family came from. This led me to question where people were really from when, for example, they did not look white but identified as American. Because I really had no idea that in most parts of the world, being born and living your whole life in a country makes you from said country. Because that was never my experience. My family and I clung to Abu Dhabi as our temporary/permenent home because being in Jordan would have been worse and Palestine was never a choice.

I am quick to correct strangers when they assume I’m from Abu Dhabi. But when I’m in Jordan and someone pokes fun at my poor Arabic or inability to understand Jordanian slang, I am quick to defend myself by clarifying my association with Abu Dhabi: “Oh, I’ve lived in Abu Dhabi my whole life. I was born there.” If someone assumes I’m fully Jordanian (or when I lie and only say

Jordan because I’m not sure how the person I’m talking to will react), I feel a jab of guilt for not mentioning Palestine. Like I owe it to myself and Palestinians to proudly say I’m Palestininian.

There are very few things that make me feel Palestinian. One of those things is Za’atar. For an audience that almost certainly has no idea what Za’atar is: it is a herb blend and cultural staple, made from wild thyme, toasted sesame seeds, sumac, and salt. But defining it doesn’t really give its value justice. A phrase you’ll hear if you talk to someone Arab about Za’atar is “it’s holy.” What that means is that it’s sacred, untouchable—a staple that transcends recipe or routine. The only Za’atar I eat, the only Za’atar my siblings, aunts, and uncles eat, is the Za’atar made entirely from scratch by my grandma, grown in her own backyard. She is the closest connection I have to Palestine. In June of 1967, during the Six-Day War that led to Israel’s occupation of territories in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, she fled Palestine at the age of seven. Alongside her sister, aunt, and brothers, they walked long distances and rode cramped buses across the border into Jordan. What she carried with her then, I don’t know. But what she’s carried forward—what she's ground with her own hands and passed down through our family—is Za’atar. And in every pinch I sprinkle over my food, I taste something she refuses to let us forget.

When I spoke to her with writing this in mind, I asked about her earliest memories of Za’atar. She told me that back in Palestine, wild thyme, the staple that makes Za’atar, grew wild all over the mountains. In December, the season for wild thyme, women and girls would set off into the mountains with buckets and knives to harvest the free wild thyme. Then came the three-day fiasco of making it. First, dehydrating it: the thyme was laid out flat in trays in the sun for two days or more, depending on how much sun there was. Once it was dry enough, they would use a strainer bowl or colander to grind it down. Then you toast sesame seeds, which they had shared gardens for in Palestine. You mix the roasted sesame seeds with the ground thyme, salt, and sumac. My grandma adds lemon salt and olive oil to hers. The ratios and quality of each ingredient, she says, is what makes Za’atar good or bad. In fact, my grandma still refuses to ever buy store-bought thyme. It was tradition. She said that every single family in Palestine would have a bowl of Za’atar on their breakfast table. “It was God’s gift to us,” she told me. “It grew in our mountains.”

They settled in Irbid, in northern Jordan. When I ask my grandma about the day they were forced out, I brace myself for trauma. But instead, she laughs a little before she starts her answer. The thing she remembers most vividly, she tells me, is everyone being ordered off the bus to lay flat on the ground, arms wide—a security check, she thinks. What she remembers most is her younger sister throwing an endless tantrum because laying on the ground got her dress dirty. They didn’t think they were leaving for good. She has now spent 58 years making Jordan her home, and 40 of those years making Za’atar. Honing her skill. Like her own grandmother, who made Za’atar in bulk and gave it to everyone she loved, Za’atar has become my grandma’s love language.

Americans have peanut butter and jelly as their go-to staple. For us, it’s a Za’atar and olive oil sandwich. My mother, who grew up in Jordan, told me that as kids they were told Za’atar made you grow big and strong. That the reason Palestinians have persevered through everything is because they ate Za’atar. Like spinach to Popeye. My mother and her five siblings all went to UNRWA schools—the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, a UN agency established in 1949 to provide relief, education, health, and social

services to Palestinian refugees. She said all the children there brought Za’atar and olive oil sandwiches to school for lunch, wrapped in plastic so the oil wouldn’t go everywhere. It always went everywhere anyway, she said.

For my mother, Za’atar meant survival in ways beyond the metaphorical. When she was a teenager, she developed a severe eating disorder. Food became the enemy, to her, it was contaminated, unsafe, something that made her stomach turn. She couldn’t eat anything without her mind screaming at her about germs, about what it would do to her body. Except for Za’atar on bread. That was the one thing she could stomach, the one thing that felt clean and safe and hers. She knew exactly how it was made because she’d helped make it herself. She’d watched her mother’s hands work the thyme, toast the sesame seeds, mix it all together. In a world where everything felt dangerous and out of control, Za’atar was the thing she could trust.

She grew up surrounded entirely by Palestinians. A refugee school for Palestinian children. A refugee neighborhood for Palestinian families, where people hang framed keys to homes in Palestine on their walls, a promise that one day they’ll return home. “We will be back.” My mother says it. My grandma says it. Every Palestinian says it. But me and my Palestinian friends who were born elsewhere, scattered across the Middle East, we don’t talk about returning. We just want to visit one day.

My mom and grandma both tell me the same thing: Jordan has become their home. They’re surrounded by Jordanian Palestinians who carry the same story, the same displacement—most of Jordan, in fact, is Palestinian. They’ve built lives there, raised families there, buried loved ones there. But if you ask either of them where they’re from, they will never, ever say Jordan without at least mentioning Palestine.

Speaking to my mom about all of this made me feel closer to her in ways that surprised me. She had her own identity crisis growing up in Jordan, just like I did in Abu Dhabi. She feels the same strange sense of peace every time she goes back, the way I do when I land in Abu Dhabi. This inexplicable relief at being somewhere familiar, even if it doesn’t feel entirely mine. She remembers everyone gathering to crush the Za’atar after it dried, the scratchy feeling on her hands. We both get excited realizing we share the same vivid memory: those overwhelmingly colorful rags my grandma laid across her roof to dehydrate the Za’atar in the sun. We’re both in awe of how far my grandma’s Za’atar travels, not just to every family member, but to every remotely close friend of every family member. We both love that she wants everyone who eats it to think of home. To think of Palestine.

My brother tells me he needs to constantly clarify whatever country he mentions to people because he doesn’t feel a complete sense of belonging to any of them. Home, for him, just means familiarity. I hear it in myself too—the overcorrecting, the over-clarifying where I’m from, as if I owe everyone an explanation. My thirteen-year-old sister says she converts any currency she comes across back to United Arab Emirates dirhams, so Abu Dhabi is certainly her home. I convert currencies back to dirhams too, but I’m not sure that means Abu Dhabi is my home. Why am I so reluctant to call Abu Dhabi home?

My reluctance to call Abu Dhabi home probably boils down to many reasons. I don’t have any of the privileges that someone actually from Abu Dhabi has. Not the passport privileges (the

weakness of my Jordanian passport is the bane of my existence), not the government support or the money or the security. And definitely not the ability to say “I am from Abu Dhabi” without someone questioning it.

But there’s one place where I don’t hate being asked where I’m from, and that’s in Abu Dhabi itself. All I have to say is “Palestinian-Jordanian” and people immediately understand— originally Palestinian, Jordanian passport, living in Abu Dhabi. Because there are so many just like me there. Everyone gets it. No one asks follow-up questions. No one makes me explain myself. For once, my answer is enough.

Za’atar is the only thing I don’t second-guess. I’ve eaten it my whole life. I know how it’s made. I know who made it. I know where it comes from. I don’t feel like an imposter when I reach for it. There are no rules, no borders, no documents required. Just bread, oil, and a bowl on the table. That feels like a kind of home.

Maybe home isn’t a passport or a place you’re allowed to claim without explanation. Maybe it’s something smaller and more stubborn. Something that survives displacement, that shows up again and again in kitchens across Amman and Abu Dhabi and New York and Doha and Aarhus. Something that tastes the same no matter where you are.

Wild thyme, surprisingly, grows in harsh places. In rocky soil, in unforgiving heat and cold. It grows where it’s not supposed to. And somehow, that makes sense to me. If thyme can take root anywhere, then maybe so can I. And as long as Za’atar exists, crushed by hand and passed between people who love each other, then neither Palestine nor home is entirely out of reach.

Maybe one day I’ll live somewhere where I can grow wild thyme myself. Somewhere I can answer the question without rehearsing it in my head first. But I don’t need to wait for that place to exist to know what’s already mine. A friend once told me that my lack of belonging is what makes me so Palestinian. At first, I didn’t want to believe him. It felt like admitting defeat, like accepting that I’d never have what everyone else seemed to have so easily—a clear answer, a single place, a home that didn’t require footnotes. But he was right. Displacement isn’t a gap in my identity. It is my identity. It’s in my grandma’s hands crushing thyme that grew in mountains she can’t return to. It’s in my mother surviving on the one food that connected her to a place she’d never seen. It’s in me, standing in Aarhus, trying to explain where I’m from and knowing there’s no answer that will ever be simple or complete. And maybe that’s not something to overcome. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe being Palestinian means carrying home with you because you have to. Because it was never guaranteed. Because it could be taken away. And so you hold on tighter—to the taste of Za’atar, to your grandmother’s recipe, to the memory of a place that exists more in ritual than in territory. That’s what survives. That’s what I have. And maybe that’s enough.