In a recent interview, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian shared a haunting account of a young girl in Gaza who, after witnessing the aftermath of bombardment, begged her cat not to eat her body if she died.1 The child had seen what so many in Gaza have—dismembered bodies gathered into labeled bags, families collecting parts of their loved ones as if assembling memory itself.
The Arabic term “ashlaa” (أشلاء) describes this kind of dismemberment. The term carries more than just the fact of rupture: it holds the texture of torn flesh, the spatial scattering of bodies, and yet, remarkably, a lingering sense of wholeness. In Gaza, a father carrying the bags of his son’s remains does not see parts—he sees his son. In this act, he refuses the orphaning of memory.
This refusal is foundational to Palestinian consciousness. Despite the multiscalar dismemberment of our bodies, homes, and lands, we insist on the presence of the phantom whole.
Jasbir Puar offers “rememberment” as a term for this refusal.2 In her framework, the dismembered body is not only mourned, but also reassembled in collective memory and resistance. In the case of Gaza—and Palestine more broadly—this suggests the existence of the phantom whole, a presence that cannot be obliterated, even as it is torn apart.
Spatial Fragmentation
Ashlaa (أشلاء, meaning fragments, shattered remains) extends beyond the body. In Palestine, it also marks the dismemberment of the landscape: a terrain where history is not only archived in texts but embedded in scorched earth, bombed streets, uprooted trees, and poisoned waters. The land is a wounded body, fractured across both time and territory.
Since the Nakba of 1948, Palestine’s terrain has been torn apart through a violent choreography of erasure, with villages razed, roads rerouted, apartheid walls erected, checkpoints imposed. The West Bank is a lattice of amputated towns, each encircled by settler roads and military zones. Gaza is treated as a severed organ, isolated, bombarded, and suffocated in place. This spatial logic not only reflects bodily violence: territorial fragmentation and bodily dismemberment are directly linked; at every checkpoint, a body is delayed, detained, split from its movement, as with the bombardment of homes comes the collapse of families.
The severing of territory from the body deepens the dismemberment of space. When families are denied access to their agricultural land, the landscape suffers—the absence of their nurturing practices leaves it untended, drying, and disoriented. Bodies of water are diverted into Israeli settlements, while Palestinian freshwater springs are deliberately neglected, left to decay into sewage dumps. With this, the oral histories tied to the springs—the stories of the djinns who guard them, the folklore woven through each tree and water source—are endangered, replaced by toxicity and contamination.
Despite that forced neglect and slow disappearance, the stories themselves remain in the collective psyche; in the trunk of that tree and the particles of sand that lie on the bottom of the river beds and springs. The Belus River, which runs parallel to the coast of the eastern Mediterranean from Akka (Acre) towards the south, for instance, was mythologized by the ancient Romans as the cradle of glassmaking. This river, rich with silica sand, was a site of material life and healing due to its rich minerals. Women would cleanse their bodies in this river during their menstrual cycles, families would bathe to heal their ailments and wounds. Today, it is contaminated by nearby military-industrial runoff, its red hue a result of that toxicity. In this shift—from source of healing to site of violence—the river becomes a reflection of the Palestinian landscape itself: contaminated, but still holding traces of the labor and life it once nurtured.
The Palestinian landscape is not a backdrop; it is a body under siege, replete with bulldozed orchards, scorched wheat fields, military zones imposed onto ancient agricultural terraces. Gaza’s soil is chemically charred by white phosphorus. In the West Bank, uprooted olive trees line the sides of highways, their roots exposed like torn nerves. These acts of spatial violence are not incidental; they are choreographed dismemberments, engineered by the Israeli authorities to rupture continuity.
And yet, even now in Gaza, the fragments resist. Sand is still gathered. Stones are re-stacked. Rubble is ground into pigment, used to mark walls with memory. In Hebron, glass is remelted and blown anew. These gestures—repetitive, intimate, often domestic—are how ashlaa refuses to disappear. In the practice of reworking fragments, we encounter a different kind of archive: not a site of preservation, but of transformation and imagination.
The ghost of the whole lingers in these materials. It is not nostalgic—it does not long for an unbroken past. Rather, it insists on presence, on relation, on return. Ashlaa becomes a methodology: a way of being with what is broken, of touching what remains, and of seeing in the fragment not loss but latency.
Nimble Hands
In the sterile language of archaeological surveys, Palestinian soil is reduced to chemistry; pottery sherds become data points. But within these fragments are crumbs of another story, one that resists analysis and demands being narrated differently. These fragments—of glass, pottery, Roman jewelry, cosmetic vessels—are traces of the women whose labor shaped this land, and whose bodies remain entangled with its layers even at the smallest scale.
Many of these fragments once belonged to perfume bottles and adornments worn by ancestors—objects held close to the body. They held orange blossom, jasmine, musk, and frankincense, scents that are still used today. Cosmetic vessels contained kohl powder, made historically of ground antimony, for the protection of the eye from ailments.
A large slab of cast glass was found intact at the Sheikh Abreik excavation site in the 1960s, southeast of Haifa along the Belus River. Sheikh Abreik, an Israeli settlement in territory that has been occupied since 1948, is known as Bet She’arim in Hebrew.3 The slab—198.12 centimeters wide, 335.28 centimeters long, and 45.72 centimeters thick—would have been cut into smaller cubes as raw material. Speculation by different archaeologists suggests that the slab cutting failed due to lower than usual temperatures at the time. This slab is a ghost of a whole that was meant to be broken into parts and shared across the region, standing witness to a land now fragmented.
On the road leading to this archaeological site, the soil ridges on either side are peppered with small glass fragments and punctures. Each puncture allows hundreds of ants to crawl in and out of these small voids, leading to the subterranean world they have carved for themselves.
Photographs of archaeological excavations, now housed in the archives of the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF)—the world’s oldest archaeological society founded in 1865 to study the cultural, natural, and historical heritage of the Levant—reveal both the ambitions and the violence of colonial archaeology. The PEF is most remembered for its Survey of Western Palestine, carried out by the Royal Engineers as a tool of imperial intelligence. In these photographs, the excavated landscapes resemble ant farms carved into the earth. During the British Mandate, Palestinian women labored as excavators, known as “basket girls,” carrying soil from the trenches in their skirts and baskets. Their bodies shaped the ground upon which archaeological knowledge was constructed, yet they remain largely invisible: anonymous laborers relegated to the periphery of documentation, if recorded at all.
These women are ashlaa within the archive, disremembered through omission. Their presence haunts the edges of colonial photographs. But their erasure is not complete. The folds of their garments, the angle of their spines, the tension in their hands—these details endure. Their labor nurtured the ground of Palestine for generations. Bringing their images back into visibility and allowing their fragmented presences to speak again as figures of care, labor, and spatial continuity does not restore a whole history but is instead a form of rememberment. Like the djinns at the springs, these women tended to the terrain. Their memory exists not in full names or institutional records, but in the soil itself, in the touch of clay and the imprint of their hands upon the earth.
Some of these women, Bedouins from the nearby valley of Ibn Amer, not only worked on the Sheikh Abreik excavation site but also performed rituals of bathing and cleansing in the nearby rivers and offered votives—specifically for fertility—to the maqam, or shrine, in the village. Instead of soaking in the water and merging their bodies with the land, they were forced to remove value and nutrients from it.
In the ants’ world, the labor of providing shelter, safety, and food security for the community at large is shared. But in Palestine, community, safety, or food security is forbidden by the Israeli regime. Genocide is a reversal of the indigenous system that was in place. Agricultural fields which once provided security are now scorched and looted. Women used to sew, harvest the fields, and build cabinets in their homes known as khawabi, plastered silos that fit perfectly in the poche of a home. Dried grain, fruit, and olive oil were contained in these vessels, infusing the air with a scent that slowly disappeared as excavations began to erase the agricultural landscape. Now harvesting is almost impossible.
The hands and feet of Palestinian grandmothers, like the khawabi, are vaults—phantom wholes—to the maternal generosity of the body and the land. Their foraging practices have for generations fed their families despite Israeli legal limitations on what Palestinians could, or could not, forage.
Rememberment as Method
On April 15, 2022, during an incursion into Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem—one of the holiest sites in Islam—Israeli forces destroyed thirty qamariyas, the colored-glass windows of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque. Each window, formed of hand-carved plaster inlaid with individual shards of colored glass, requires six months to complete. The technique is now a dying craft, sustained only by a handful of artisans: a few in Yemen, one in Cairo, and another in Jerusalem. Even if reconstruction were permitted—which it is not under current Israeli restrictions—it would take fifteen years to restore what was lost.
Haram al-Sharif remains more than a sacred site. It is also a living symbol of Palestinian presence in Jerusalem. Its courtyards resound with children playing football, families sharing picnics, and men praying in congregation. In defiance of destruction and in honor of the fragile history of craft, worshippers spend hours in its gardens, guardians of one of the last public Palestinian spaces in the city.
The landscapes, objects, and images that persist in Palestinian life do not survive by accident. They survive because they are held—repeatedly, deliberately, and often quietly. The act of preservation here is not passive. It is a practice that carries fragments into new configurations without asking them to become whole. It does not repair what has been broken, but stays with it, attends to it, and builds through it.
Ashlaa, in this sense, is a methodology: an embodied, material way of working with what remains. It resists the logic of linear time or linear recovery. Instead, it gathers broken parts into relation. Through repetition, care, and reassembly, the fragment becomes a form of structure—not a restoration, but a holding.
These practices—mapping, carving, reimagining—become ways to insist on presence through dislocation. Where settler colonial infrastructure enforces separation, architecture and repair make space for return; not a temporal return, but through persistence on the present and futures.
The ghost of liberation is not abstract. It moves through hands, through glass, through soil that remembers how it was held. It appears in the labor of women sifting through earth, in the perfume vessels and cosmetic jars buried with care, in the shattered windows of the Haram and the thresholds of villages no longer named. These fragments do not ask to be completed. They carry what they need.
To work with ashlaa is to remain inside the rupture without being consumed by it. The fragment resists resolution. It teaches relation. It holds the possibility of return—not to what was, but to what persists.
Saree Makdisi et al., hosts, Makdisi Street, podcast, “‘There is So Much Love in Palestine’ w/ Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian,” March 8, 2024, ➝.
Jasbir K. Puar, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).
The village was depopulated in the 1920s after the Lebanese Sursuk family, who bought it from the Ottomans in the late 1800s, sold it to the Jewish National Fund.
