In a timely and heart-wrenching episode, returning guest Layla K. Feghali shares the power and perseverance of homeland, even in the face of colonial violence. As the genocide in Palestine continues and worsens, Layla offers a powerful call to listen to our rage and take real action against empire.
Layla reminds us that in urgent times, action must come before grief and before healing. You cannot heal a wound that is still actively bleeding. Remembrance is a key part of liberation from the systems that tried to force disconnection from the land. As Layla shares throughout the episode “the land is in our bones.”
You can find a full list of recommendations for action from Layla on our website (forthewild.world).
Layla Feghali lives between her ancestral village in coastal Lebanon and her diasporic home in California, where she was born and raised by her immigrant family. She is an author, cultural worker, and plantcestral medicine practitioner focused on the re-membrance of baladi (land-based/folk/indigenous) lifeways and ancestral wisdoms from SWANA (SouthWest Asia and North Africa). Her dedication is to stewardship of our earth's eco-cultural integrity, sovereignty, and the many layers of relational restoration and transformation that entails. Feghali's upcoming book The Land in Our Bones, documents ethnobotanical and cultural healing knowledge from Syria to the Sinai, while interrogating colonialism and its lingering wounds on the culture of our displaced world. The book re-maps Canaan (the Levant) and the Crossroads (the "Middle East"), while engaging nuanced conversations about identity, loss, belonging, trauma, and rematriation. It features her Plantcestral Re-Membrance methodology as an emergent pathway towards cultural repair for diasporic and colonized communities, and highlights the critical importance of tending the land and life where we are to restore the fundamental integrity, dignity, and regeneration of our earth's multispecies communities.
Music by Lionmilk. Episode art by mirella salamé. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.