The Land in Our Bones: Plantcestral Herbalism and Healing Cultures from Syria to the Sinai - Earth-Based Pathways to Ancestral Stewardship and Belonging in Diaspora by Layla K. Feghali

A profound and searching exploration of the herbs and land-based medicines of Lebanon and Cana'an--a vital invitation to re-member our roots and deepen relationship with the lands where we live in diaspora

Tying cultural survival to earth-based knowledge, Lebanese ethnobotanist, sovereignty steward, and cultural worker Layla K. Feghali offers a layered history of the healing plants of Cana'an (the Levant) and the Crossroads ("Middle East") and asks into the ways we become free from the wounds of colonization and displacement.

Feghali remaps Cana'an and its crossroads, exploring the complexities, systemic impacts, and yearnings of diaspora. She shows how ancestral healing practices connect land and kin--calling back and forth across geographies and generations and providing an embodied lifeline for regenerative healing and repair.

Anchored in a praxis she calls Plantcestral Re-Membrance, Feghali asks how we find our way home amid displacement: How do we embody what binds us together while holding the ways we've been wrested apart? What does it mean to be of a place when extraction and empire destroy its geographies? What can we restore when we reach beyond what'sbeen lost and tend to what remains? How do we cultivate kinship with the lands where we live, especially when migration has led us to other colonized territories?

Recounting vivid stories of people and places across Cana'an, Feghali shares lineages of folk healing and eco-cultural stewardship: those passed down by matriarchs; plants and practices of prenatal and postpartum care; mystical traditions for spiritual healing; earth-based practices for emotional wellness; plant tending for bioregional regeneration; medicinal plants and herbal protocols; cultural remedies and recipes; and more.

The Land in Our Bones asks us to reclaim the integrity of our worlds, interrogating colonization and defying its "cultures of severance" through the guidance of land, lineage, and love. It is an urgent companion for our times, a beckoning call towards belonging, healing, and freedom through tending the land in your own bones.

Layla K. Feghali is a cultural worker and folk herbalist who lives between her ancestral village in Lebanon, and California, where she was raised. Feghali's work is about restoring relationships to earth-based ancestral wisdom as an avenue towards eco-cultural stewardship, healing, and liberation. Feghali's methods emphasize plants of place and lineage. Her company, River Rose Re-membrance, features a line of plantcestral medicine, education, and other culturally-rooted offerings. It also hosts the Ancestral HUB, an online space for the cross-pollination of ancestral knowledge across diasporic and home communities from Southwest Asia and North Africa.

Feghali has formal certifications and colloquial training in numerous herbal, therapeutic, cultural, and traditional practices for over a decade. Amongst which, she also supports birth-tending processes, and is a certified teacher of EmbodyBirth(TM)/BellydanceBirth(R). Feghali builds on a background in movement building, and a MSW, in which she specialized in cultural interventions for addressing trauma and grief.

Year: 2024

Paperback

Read the review in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs here!