“The past is fixed, and the future has not yet come but we are drawn toward it; the dark precursor of return pulls us forward. It is a singular past, the moment before diaspora transposed and dimly projected forward through time. The problem with a finite line … is that it concludes in a single point.

What sense does this single point make for a diaspora—a people scattered around the globe who gather around kitchen tables and remember in language what we’ve lost, the stories binding us to each other as much as to the land recalled by our elders?”

– Dylan Saba

This book is dedicated to members of Palestinian diaspora, however embodied, whether alive, dead, missing, or ineffable.

These words are driven by love for the community of ghosts, strangers, and friends that compose the diaspora in which I came to know myself: the Romanian diaspora, the community formed by the Romanian language and its literature.

If love drives a book, certainly this love conspires in dedication. Above all, this book is for the man behind the camera, the father who taught me to tell the stories that hurt most.