Teta’s Hair: A Palestinian Inheritance
Across generations of women, curls become threads of survival, love, and Palestine’s unyielding memory.
March 8, 2025
My grandmother’s 90-year story is one of resilience. She carried a crown of thick, dark curls that hold the legacy of land, endurance, and the continuity of generations of women before and after her.
For much of teta’s (grandmother) life, her hair was covered with a headscarf, mostly white in color but then black after the death of her husband and then son. Like other Muslim women, she preserved it underneath fabric because hair is sacred and needs to be protected.
When I was little, teta’s hair had already begun its transformation: streaked with white, though sometimes, she dyed it back to brown with henna, leaving the roots pale and the ends burning copper in the sun. Her hair was sometimes unruly and required a lot of patience.
She washed it with Nabulsi soap then, with her fingers, massaged it with warm olive oil. And despite the wildness of it, her hair was soft, almost as soft as the creases in her palms. She braided it back before heading to the land, to water the soil beneath her, to plant another pomegranate tree, or to scrub clothes clean.
She smelled of home, of earth, of olive trees and time.
Inherited Threads
My mother, aunts, and cousins inherited traces of her stubborn textured hair, but never quite the same until me. I believe I was her 18th grandchild, the first she wanted named after her. It didn’t happen. Her name, Sadika, was deemed too heavy, too old-fashioned, and was set aside.
Yet she lived on in me—in my despise of tomatoes, my grumpiness, and my curls. I carried them, untamed and bold; a crown I learned to control, but never to diminish.
The knowledge of tending to hair was passed down from my grandmother to my mother; an act of love and nourishment. My mother carried the ritual forward—scrubbing my scalp with steady firm hands, cultivating strength and growth. After washing, she massaged olive oil into my scalp. As she braided my hair each morning before school, I felt the comfort and power of womanhood through her touch.
During the autumn season, as leaves surrender to the wind, hair also falls. As a child, I noticed how much more hair I shed in fall, a reminder that I am part of nature, that the weak strands surrender to make room for stronger ones. In the spring, cutting the ends is essential, like pruning branches so they may bloom again. Every February, my mother would trim my hair, trusting that it would grow back healthier and fuller; another lesson in patience and renewal.
My mom (right) and my grandma (middle)
My great-grandmother (left), my grandma (middle), and my cousin (right)
Illness
When my teta was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018, her hair began to change. When I was diagnosed with a rare desmoid tumor in 2020, mine did too. Her curls loosened; mine abandoned me altogether. At one point, we found ourselves on the same hormonal drug—tamoxifen.
I know that cancer didn’t emerge out of nowhere. It is a byproduct of the trauma my grandmother carried, the fear she lived through, the loneliness of separation from her family, and the immense responsibility placed on her shoulders at a young age. Her grief -similar to that of other Palestinian women- shaped how she raised my mother and, eventually, how my mother raised me.
When I started chemo, my grandmother’s path and mine mirrored, even though I was a fraction of her age. She recovered, miraculously, though her hair thinned and turned completely white. I would look at her and think: at least one of us is still holding onto the curls. That, of course, until mine slowly grew back in 2021.
We were bound by more than blood. By loss. By renewal.
Living Memory
On 8 April 2024, as a great total solar eclipse darkened the sky and Ramadan neared its end, Teta, who had been bedbound for some time, took her final breath. My father’s voice on the phone delivering the news was trembling, my mother’s cries trailing behind him. I ran my fingers through my curls, tracing their shape, feeling her presence in every strand.
The texture of my hair will always connect us. A thread spun through generations, a gift from the women before me. It is wild, fearless, stubborn and beautiful, just like her.
As I write this piece, I am once again losing my hair from chemotherapy. This time, teta is not here to brush her hands over my head, to whisper prayers, to remind me that what falls will grow again. She has passed, and with her, the stories she carried, her braid falling down her head, her wrinkly hands and face, and the quiet strength of a woman who lived, endured, and gave.
Teta and I (2003)
Resistance, Return
I carry my grandma’s story now. Every curl that grows back on my head is a verse, every strand a memory woven into my being. I carry her with me, in my hair, my roots, the land that shaped us both, and in the soil in which her body currently inhabits. But my grandmother’s loss was not just personal—it is a fraction of a greater history of displacement.
Like countless Palestinian women, my grandmother carried both personal and collective trauma. She was fourteen when her family was forced to flee their home in the village of El-Mzer’a during the Nakba of 1948. They walked for days, searching for refuge after their land was taken and their village destroyed. She witnessed a world she once knew crumble before her eyes: the orange orchards, the narrow pathways of her village, and the old structures. Today, only one remains: a Roman mausoleum, later converted to a mosque dedicated to Al-Nabi Yahya (John the Baptist).
Occupation, like cancer, has robbed us of our identity, land, and parts of ourselves. Palestinian women carry disproportionate suffering under apartheid, particularly to access healthcare. According to WHO quoting the Palestinian Ministry of Health, between September 2000 and December 2004, at least 61 women gave birth at Israeli checkpoints resulting in 36 of their babies dying. Lives were lost before they were allowed to begin. Trauma forming in the womb, in the invisible weight women carry in their bodies.
Environmental and toxic exposure because of pollution, unsafe water and land seep into the Palestinian ecosystem, into our homes and our DNA. Reports from The Palestine Return Centre highlight that Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor may be responsible for various illnesses and deformities in nearby Palestinian communities such as Hebron. Certain elements found in nuclear waste could cause cancer and infertility among children and adults. Illness -including mine- is never just biological; it is political, historical, and generational.
All over, women are surrounded by toxins — environmental, emotional, systemic — that affect our hormones, reproductive systems, and mental health. Sometimes they manifest in illness, sometimes in exhaustion, sometimes in grief etched quietly into the body.
In Gaza today, grief and trauma continue to manifest in the bodies of young girls; some even losing their hair from shock and psychological devastation. It may seem small when compared to the loss of life, homes, limbs, or access to basic dignity, yet I know intimately what it means for a girl to feel a part of herself taken. When I heard the story of the eight-year-old girl, Sama, who had lost her hair, I wished I could give her one of my wigs; to offer her a fragment of comfort, to reassure her that she is still beautiful.
After losing my own thick curls, I accepted that no wig could ever recreate them. The polyester hair, however, did give me temporary relief, a small breath of ease in a harsh reality. After mourning my femininity for months, I did what all women in my lineage have done before me, persevere.
Women persevere. We persist, filled with ancestral strength. Across generations and cultures, women braid courage into hair, stitch memory into cloth, and hold tenderness in their palms. My teta held onto traditions including farming and tatreez (Palestinian embroidery), as well, even after so much devastation and loss.
I learned that womanhood in Palestine isn’t shaped only by love, but also by the ongoing violence imposed on our bodies and futures. The rituals I learned from my grandmother are not acts of passive care, they are acts of defiance, persistence, and resistance. Through them, I anchor myself to the land, to womanhood, and to the version of myself the occupation can never steal. Tending to hair is like tending to the soil. It is the refusal to be uprooted from our land.
My hair will return, stronger than ever; a symbol of recovery from illness and a promise to my grandmother, to the women before me and those yet to come.
Allah yerhamik ya Teta.
Image of Mazari Al Nubani (link to print), the village that my grandmother ended up settling in after the Nakba. It is where my mother was born and raised and where teta passed.
