Almost twenty years ago, I travelled to my father’s homeland, Palestine. It was a disjointed and confused “return” for reasons that have nothing to do with good Makluba, so I won’t go into them here.
In the West Bank town of Ramallah, I walked from taxi to taxi, asking the drivers if they knew my aunt from the nearby village of Dura al Qara. I’d been to the village once, when I was one year old, but hadn’t been back to Palestine since, and had very little real contact at all with Palestine afterward. I knew precious little Arabic, and even less about my Palestinian family outside of my aunt’s name and the name of our village. After many fruitless and [from their perspective] weird interactions with drivers, I finally found one who hailed from there and he agreed to take me to her house. My aunt, in her seventies at the time, answered the door, but had no idea who the man on her doorstep was. With furrowed brow, she peppered me with Arabic questions I couldn’t understand. “Abui Ghazi, Enna Omar” is all I could say; I am your brother’s son, my name is Omar. She spoke no English, and I little Arabic and I later learned that she was worried I was not her nephew at all, but a government agent up to no good.
She grabbed my hand and walked me over to a large picture frame. Dozens of small family snapshots lined the wedge between frame and glass and she reached over and pointed to one. It was a small, aged black and white photo of a happy couple standing on a sidewalk somewhere, definitely not Palestine. “Who is it?” she asked. I recognized the photo immediately. It was a copy of a snapshot I had often looked at growing up. My parents, the youthful couple, smartly dressed, smiling on a sidewalk, from a time when photographers made their living by shooting passers-by and selling them the photos. It was long before I was born, and they were standing on a street in Bogota, Colombia, where they met. Abui and ummi, I replied–mother and father. My aunt began to cry. Pulling my hand up to her face, she smeared her tears on my hand.
My aunt and I didn’t have a common language, and so she called her daughter, who worked as an English translator at the time. That cousin was the first to arrive. She looked like an almost exact copy of my sister, Miriam. I felt an instant bond with her and I think she with me. We laughed a lot that first day, while my aunt called her other adult children and began cooking a welcome meal. In a dizzying stream, many young men from the village came to shake my hand. My elder cousin told me they were all my distant cousins, as a large proportion of the village was related to us by blood. When we finally sat down to eat, my aunt sat next to me and served me heapings of the rice and chicken she’d been making all afternoon. My aunt reached onto my plate and shredded the first piece of chicken off the bone for me with her hands. She then put another piece on to my plate, and did the same, then another. I looked up to my cousin, with what would become a familiar quizzical gesture, and she explained my aunt was treating me in the traditional way an honored guest is treated. The dish my aunt cooked for us that homecoming day was called Makluba, the Arabic word for upside down.
Like everything Palestinian, Makluba is extremely complicated, as much a test of endurance for the cook as it is an example of cuisine. It is a dish in which every component must be individually cooked, then cooked together, with a near-gymnastic finish that would challenge even the most experienced American chef. It takes hours to cook Makluba, but not in the parameters of cooking time as described in recipe books in the West—its constant work, timed, specific, and of an exacting criteria, which can all be ruined in an instant by a flubbed finish. It’s no wonder that Makluba is the go-to dish for welcoming honored guests. Anyone who has ever experienced the cooking of Makluba and the unduplicable outcome knows there is no way you will make it unless you really care about the people you are making it for.
It’s been many years since that unforgettable day when I met my family for the first time in Dura al’ qara, and many things happened since I learned to properly pronounce that village’s name. The illusory period of the Oslo Accords came to an end a short month or so later. The second intifada began first as protest against the shooting of young men by Israeli soldiers on the holy grounds of the Haram al Sharif, and then became the prolonged protest against the fake solution propped up by a fake Palestinian government. What began as a heroic rebellion of unarmed Palestinians devolved into a confused series of traumatic years of violence and misery. My cousin and her family decided to immigrate to the Eastern US while I stayed in Palestine for a year or two longer, before returning to California.
Several years later I decided to return and re-dedicate my life to Palestine. The state of Israel arrested and deported me upon my arrival at Ben Gurion Airport. With that came the standard 10-year ban from entering again, and I was effectively banished from Palestine. As horrifying as this may sound, it’s not an uncommon experience for Palestinian Americans who’ve spent some time in the homeland. The US invaded Iraq, Sharon decimated Palestine, and my life became a confused, hazy mess in the diaspora. I lost contact with my cousin and in the ensuing years, the path of our lives took us away from who we’d been.
Over the years, I’ve tried to find my cousin again. Yes, in the pre-Google, pre-Facebook era of pre-cellphone ubiquity, people really could lose contact with one another. Later I’d try to google her, but there were too many people with the same name. After a decade, she finally found me, and invited me to visit. When she asked me what I wanted her to cook, we backed and forthed about going to the trouble, but I gave up finally, realizing I was talking to a Palestinian. I asked her to make Makluba.
I had worried that the years between us would be difficult to bridge, but that concern faded quickly. We talked for hours as she prepared the ingredients in tiers on the narrow counter in her modest kitchen—sautéing the marinated chicken, cutting the eggplant, cauliflower and carrots, then frying each one separately as the chicken cooked, parboiling it in water and reserving the broth for the rice—almost too many steps to include in an essay. As she cooked, pivoting from the counter to the stove, and then back to me at the kitchen table, we exchanged many stories of our lives from the distant past. She recounted tales of my American family’s life, seen through the prism of her youth in Palestine, and I was surprised to learn we had cast so many shadows over her Palestine-bound side of the family. I learned the hidden context of many narratives from Palestine that I often knew only fourth hand. There was more—tales of magical ancestors, and the days of the first intifada, and a shocking toll of family tragedies I could never have imagined. We updated the stories of our own lives, sadly riddled with disappointments and awful happenings, but victories too. In hearing ourselves talk about our lives and the families we’d created and re-created, we remembered that we were both happy regardless of the many truly miserable things that happened along the way.
Now at last, we had equal parts understanding of each other’s experiences. We were both American and Palestinian, though each different in unique ways. This conversation sucked us both in, naturally sidetracking the cook from her preparation. My cousin’s Makluba was not perfect in the strictest sense. While she was wrapped up in our exchanges, the rice burned a bit. Further distractions caused her to choose the wrong pot and platter combination when it was time to flip the dish to enact its eponymous Arabic naming, “upside down”. The seal between the two was loose and as she flipped the heavy pot over, the cohesive tower of rice, chicken and vegetables fell apart, and spilled a bit over the side, ruining the Mayan temple formation every Makluba yearns to have. We ate this delicious meal at the kitchen table, the cauliflower and eggplant melting into the chicken in a way that I cannot describe, even if I had the entire legacy of food journalism at my disposal. And even though my cousin didn’t ace the dismount, I wouldn’t have traded the conversation nor the meal for anything. Messy, like her near miss Makluba, but perfect, nonetheless.