For Palestinians born into the diaspora, the concept of our homeland forms from the stories passed down to us from our elders. They tell us that home is somewhere we are not allowed – a faraway place, full of orange, fig, and olive trees that are ours but not ours. We’re told that's where Amo (uncle) was martyred, or that's the year that Tata (grandma) never saw her house again. What Palestine is comes from Gido’s (grandpa’s) deep sigh after staring, past us, into space for a little too long — or at the family azooma (gathering) when the hurricane of political commentary comes to a sudden halt and the room is frozen until Mama returns from the kitchen with kahwa and tamar (coffee and dates).

In ذكريات من بلدي (Thikrayat Min Baladi), Translating to Memories From My Homeland, Layla Ali Amar and Sophia MacMaster explore their experiences with Postmemory. Coined by literary scholar and anthropologist Marianne Hirsch, Postmemory is the relationship the generation-after has to the traumatic experiences that preceded their births, but still transmitted to them through silence, storytelling, and images–so deeply that the memories seem to be their own. In other words, Palestinians in diaspora are consumed by the traumatic events of Palestinian exile as if they were their own.