2025 ICSZ Writing Fellows were invited to submit reflections on their work following the ICSZ 2025 Residential Writing Retreat. Special thanks to Ronit Lentin for copyediting these essays.
“How do you fall in love with a world that’s dying?”1 During the past year, when I felt unable to know what to say, I’ve been pondering this question, posed by Vivien Sansour in a short film titled Ahl el Thara, People of the Soil (2024). Our current moment, a particularly dark moment for Palestinians, is also a moment of significant possibilities of defining ourselves and our futurity in the face of uncertainty.
How do you make sense of bodies buried under the rubble? What forms of being can and will Palestinian life take after, and during, the ceaseless destruction? What is the role of hope? These are some of the questions I have reflected upon alongside Vivien Sansour’s question as I was reflecting on the significance of her seed-based engagements with the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. Though they remain unanswered, these questions have led me to an ongoing exploration of the role Sansour’s practice and seeds can play in the Palestinian modes of refusal, survival, and being/becoming in the face of settler colonial annihilation.
During my time in Big Bear Lake for the ICSZ 2025 Residential Writing Fellowship in September 2025, I worked on editing my research project and preparing a version of it for a conference presentation at the American Studies Association in November 2025. My project examines the aesthetics of the seed that Sansour evokes in her work, aiming to understand the various functions of the seed and arguing that it serves as a model for an anticolonial archive, a medium, and a place of refuge in its futurity.
This project aims to engage with Sansour’s artworks it discusses and be part of the meaning-making processes the artist creates. The more I engage with the artists’ land-based practices and read about theories of elemental relationalities and more-than-human ways of being in the world, the more immersed in nature I have become, and the Big Bear forest and lake has enabled me to deepen my involvement.
I spent much of my fellowship time clarifying my argument, benefitting from the valuable comments and feedback provided by the ICSZ staff and the other fellows – all thinking from within the Palestine solidarity movement – during our writing shares. This feedback led me to reorganize my paper into three distinct sections: archives, media, and refuge.It also allowed me to refocus and remove some of the secondary arguments that warrant deeper reflection and opportunity to be developed later. This includes expanding my discussion of temporality and futurity in order to further develop my argument about being/becoming. It also includes temporarily removing one of my theoretical questions about the role of hope. I have not abandoned hope and Sansour’s future-oriented hope-building practice. In fact, working on this project and engaging with Sansour’s meaning-making processes give me hope. But my definition of hope requires further shaping and complexity, which I will consider as this project evolves.
In thinking through hope, I am ending this reflection with a quote from my conclusion, in the hope that hope continues to take root in the iterative nature of these practices:
During a webinar in conversation with the Altadena Seed Library, Sansour talked about this promise [of the seed]. “When you plant a seed, you say you have a future.” When you plant a seed, you are investing in the continuance of life—even when the ground has been turned to ash and rubble.
Endnotes
- Vivien Sansour, Ahl el Thara/ People of the Soil (2024), video. ↩