cultural authenticity in the diaspora

last week, after about a month of work, i finally finished embroidering my first tatreez sampler. for weeks, i spent several hours a day stitching, picking out incorrect stitches, restitching the right ones, and working my way through the pattern i had so carefully constructed. and as i stitched i spent a lot of time thinking- about my friends, about what book i was going to read next, about the ever-terrifying state of the world. all the classics! but one thing i returned to again and again was palestine and the women who have helped preserve her history through tatreez. this ultimately led to thinking about the amount of pressure on people in the diaspora to recreate aspects of our culture “accurately” and authentically. but what does authentic cultural engagement look like? who decides what is or isn’t authentic? how do we even define the concept of authenticity?

my sampler incorporates 24 different motifs, most of which are traditional but some that i either adapted or created to fit into a composition that i liked. when i first began stitching, i had a lot of feelings about the decision to use “non-traditional” motifs and to construct the pattern in a way that is not necessarily aligned with traditional tatreez work. i felt like it made my work weak because it wasn’t authentic. i kind of accepted this as i stitched, because i decided that the fact that it wasn’t authentic didn’t mean that it wasn’t worth making. but as weeks of work passed i kept thinking about what an authentic tatreez piece looked like in my mind. i had this image of a girl my age stitching a thobe in some village 100 years ago in the mythical pre-israel palestine that seems to exist in the collective palestinian diaspora conscience. my work, planned on a computer and stitched using bright purple thread from the craft store, was just a substandard version of the kind of embroidery that has existed in palestine for thousands of years.

but is it? there are millions of tatreez stitches between this imaginary girl in palestine a century ago and the things i stitch in california today. so then at which tiny embroidered x did the work no longer become authentic? this is obviously a sort of ridiculous question, but the fact that i was engaging with this kind of thought process is reflective of the extremely protective attitude with which people in the diaspora tend to approach our cultural representation. i sometimes feel like i need to preemptively disparage my own work so i can protect it from criticism. and this isn’t specific to just tatreez, but it’s prevalent whenever people engage with pretty much every aspect of our culture that take place outside of palestine. people fight over the right way to wear a keffiyeh, or over which colors it must be woven in to be considered real. someone posts a video of their recipe for maqluba and the comments are flooded with critiques over every part of the dish, because this certainly isn’t how my grandmother makes it! the za’atar isn’t prepped correctly, the dabke step is never quite right, and that’s not the way that palestinians sing that song. the cultural authenticity battles are incessant and led by people who insist that they are more correct, that their way is more palestinian than someone else’s. the point of these arguments is, allegedly, about the importance of accurately preserving our culture and ensuring that it is not erased in a world that is often so desperate to eliminate palestinian identity. but really the main thing that this discord preserves is the national palestinian tradition of frequent and impassioned disagreement.

i don’t mean to say that cultural preservation isn’t important, or that we shouldn’t strive for a certain level of alignment with traditional ways of being. in fact, heritage conservation is one of the critical roles of the diaspora, especially during a time when our people are in the midst of a several years long genocide. i understand why people are so protective of our food and art and dress and music particularly as israelis are so eager to appropriate it as their own, but at a certain point intense cultural safeguarding becomes a kind of gatekeeping. culture changes over time, moving around the world with us and adapting as we do. in a way, i think that being adaptable and resourceful is a more central component of being palestinian than highly specific recipes or clothes. you aren’t doing a great disservice to the people of palestine by using slivered almonds instead of pine nuts because it’s what you had in your pantry. 

i want to challenge the basic assumption of this gatekeeping, which conceives of culture as a fixed thing. the attitude tends to be that we do things this specific way and any deviation means that we are no longer authentically representing palestine. and yet i’m not convinced. culture is not stagnant, but it naturally shifts and changes as our people do. we live in different parts of the world and interact with new people and all of that influences how we engage with our own culture. trying to desperately cling to every detail of our heritage is limiting, and prevents the kind of normal evolution that results from immigration and exposure to other ways of being. the stagnancy created by preventing any alteration is not only restrictive, but can actually be dangerous to the long term existence of our culture. when it is not allowed to develop, it languishes instead. in attempting to preserve the most pure representation of palestine, we instead risk impeding her continuation. 

we can’t hold on to every aspect of the old ways forever, and we aren’t meant to. the way that our grandparents lived was in so many ways different from their grandparents, and this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. change isn’t always a loss, but often part of the existence of a healthy culture. and let’s face it, things are changing anyways. with israel hell bent on exterminating every aspect of palestinian being, we can’t afford to live in the stories we’ve been told of an idyllic palestine from 80 years ago. we have to learn how to take our resilience and infuse it into various parts of our heritage. if our existence is resistance, then we have to allow for a level of cultural proliferation and fluctuation.

there is a time and place for focus on the minute details of palestinian heritage, and it’s not in our day to day lives. i think about the fictional (although also very real) 20th century girl in the village working on her tatreez. one of the most important parts of tatreez is the way that it depicts the life of the person who stitched it and communicates their history. and in that way, my work is just as authentic as hers. both pieces represent our interests, our preferences, where and how we lived. it tells you about my life, as a half palestinian girl growing up in the west, in the same way that the work of the girl from all those decades ago tells you about hers.