Notes on Aisha’s Story

By Director Elizabeth Vibert

I met Aisha Azzam in early 2018, when I was in Amman, Jordan, to screen The Thinking Garden at the UN Women Film Festival. The Thinking Garden tells the story of South African women farmers fighting poverty and marginalization through a community garden. A member of the audience at the Amman screening asked, “When are you going to make a film about Palestinian women?” A seed was planted.

Aisha and I had our first conversation in the mill she and her late husband, Hassan, set up thirty-five years ago in Baqa’a refugee camp. Aisha, now working with her son, stone-mills grains in the traditional forms used in Palestinian cuisine. I was captivated by Aisha – her wry humour and warmth, her intelligence, and her firm attachment to Palestine, the ancestral homeland she has not been permitted to enter since she was a small child. During that first visit I interrupted her at one point to say “Aisha, it sounds like you’re holding up Palestinian food culture in the camp.” She responded, a twinkle in her eye, “I am single-handedly holding up Palestinian food culture in the camp.” She laughed and drew me into the laughter. A friendship blossomed, across a linguistic and cultural gap.

Aisha’s Story draws on the life experience and expertise of many Palestinians in Baqa’a camp and beyond. We trained young people in the community to serve on our crew as camera operators, sound technicians, and in other crucial roles. Salam Barakat Guenette, who grew up in exile in Amman, joined us as interpreter and quickly became co-producer. Salam’s mother taught in the camp in the wake of the 1967 war, when homes and schoolrooms were canvas tents. Aisha and her adult children, neighbours, and others in the camp offer insights from one major strand of Palestinian society, those living in refugee camps.

When we were making The Thinking Garden together, director Christine Welsh talked about telling the stories of “ordinary women doing extraordinary things.” These are the stories I am most attached to, in my writing and as a filmmaker. I was guided to film by the South African farmers. My articles and planned book would be of little use to them, they pointed out: “When are you going to make a film about us?” A film could be shared with their families and community, could speak to other farmers, and perhaps even reach government. How right they were. The Thinking Garden premiered at the 2017 International Women in Film Festival in Vancouver and, over the next year, travelled to festivals and communities on four continents. It screened in Xitsonga with English, Arabic, French, or German subtitles. Audiences cheered the story of older women – the “poorest of the poor” by many global metrics – crafting dignified lives through collaborative farming activities that resisted the pressures of international capital and national-level neglect.

At a tragic time in the history of the region and its peoples, Aisha’s Story will have audiences cheering again. Aisha treasures her role in safeguarding culture through her activities as a miller. Through food, she traces the story of Palestinian displacement and rebuilding family and community in a refugee camp. Harvesting, milling, cooking, and feasts ground the film’s arc of displacement, longing, and resistance. Aisha teaches her grandchildren to use the grinding stone her grandmother carried with her when the older generations were forced to flee in 1948. She cooks with her daughters “hand by hand,” although several are blind. Aisha’s challenges are many. She meets them with humour, sumud (steadfastness), and food: “Food is what keeps us together as Palestinians.”

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